I like your ideas, Nyxheart. Theme park or not, fact is if you don't accurate follow the correct formula (ie responding correctly to specific mechanics or unexpected situations like pulling pats etc) you should get punished. There should be consequences for not being careful. Unfortunately, that idea seems to have been abandoned across the board in all the biggest MMORPGs... If you could name one that was still punishing, had a decent story & world building I'd be on it in a hot minute. This is more of a short rant but feels to me like mmorpgs have turned into online single-player focused experiences that friends can enjoy together and people can power trip on with no effort. "Play it your way" is good and all, but if your way is to try to speed run everything, spam click through dialogue and afk during mandatory cutscenes you're just playing the wrong genre, there are no two ways about it.

Not every game is meant for everyone, and that's fine. The sad thing is though, it feels like this entire genre has slid from its original idea of socially focused role playing experiences that felt rewarding both through the connections you made with other people and the struggles you overcame in PvE (be it dungeons, just normal quests or end game content - it all used to be challenging in the early days. Think of vanilla WoW before the Pre-BC nerf patch or Everquest).

Now, I don't even know what I'd call it but absolutely none of that remains. Social aspects? Fuck social elements when you can just click a button and have 4 people magically appear like AI would. Why would you even talk to them? You can just do the same thing for your next run. No need to get along and run more dungeons together, fuck these guys and just get new ones. Challenge? Like many of you have pointed out, if there's any challenge at all now it's stacked at the endgame with a seeming disregard for the fact that endgame will always only be a FRACTION of the available content, every expansion further increasing the problem of a game full of completely pointless content if you the systems in place don't allow for a level 30 (for example) dungeon to feel how it SHOULD feel for level 30 players even if a SINGLE group member is downscaled.

It's just sad to see what was such an awesome genre from which I have so many amazing memories has gone so far in a different, completely unnecessary direction, to chase the money. Yeah, they're all businesses and businesses aim for the fattest bottom line, but I miss the days when games were made with passion, for people who were passionate about games. Now it's just such a bland commercialized experience, it's unrecognizable. Only reason I find myself playing mmos at all anymore is every couple years I'll give it another go in hopes that there have been enough tweaks to provide a passable experience, but I feel like what old school mmo players learned an mmo was is just dead.