The MMO Genre is Dying

Raffir wrote:

So if my car is not running right ... I should just shut up about it and become a mechanic? or if my sofware has too many bugs and should shut up and become a programmer?

Raf ....I can't believe you are actually saying these things.

Raffir wrote:

I actually stated that I wish I had my degree in one post lol. Just not in the cards right now with my disability I don't even think I could hear a teacher anymore lol. But w/e, I'm trying to help with my ideas on here.
I'm also trying to be constructive with my criticism and ideas and not condescending. Fact of the matter is the game that I describe wouldn't hurt anyone? In fact it would only strengthen the community and make a better game for all. A good crafting system, tons of endgame, longevity of the path to get to endgame, balanced and meaningful pvp (open world as well as bgs), instant access to cross server or one big server to all content. Where is the bad in it? Some of you guys act as if I'm after or attacking the current MMO to the point that I want to destroy it when I'm only trying to make it better for everyone and not just one classification of player.

Freejazzlive wrote:

Free normally I don't agree with you and you had me starting to in your post there but....
Come on man lol.

agnott wrote:

You really think they didnt spend tons in Market analysis when they made the game? They check everything Costumers of MMORPGs like and do. Well and thats the result.
The problem wasnt the Voice over. If you really think they spend all money in Voice over and when its done they did say "Holy cow the money is gone and we only have the Voice! Well then we have to release like it is.." you are really strange

salty21db wrote:

They don't have the amount or depth of content that WoW has, & that's all there is to it.
Argue all you want, but you'd be wrong to do so, LOLs aside.

Freejazzlive wrote:

Could you please explain what you mean by "depth of content" before I elaborate why I "lol'ed."

Shandor wrote:

It was the largest voice over project in history, and then the players proceeded to wade throuh all of the content in the blink of an eye ....and thus the exdous began.
But hey ...as long as you do martket analysis ..nobody should get the blame for losing millions.

I dont think genre is dying but it is in trouble,far too many games chasing ever fewer people with money to pay for them something has to give.
Another problem is the staggering stagnation in the design,every new game promises "the next new and big thing" and all pretty much fail,SJ will be proclaiming the same thing about EQ3 very soon like the emproer in his new clothes,those clothes are currently in use at GW2's dev's as they too try to convince to try their game,i'm just glad the devs at Bioware had them cleaned.

Thats not to have a pop at SJ,far from it hes doing his job and pretty soon he'll be bigging the game up as he should do but cmon we all pretty much expect the same or at least a variation of whats on offer now,these are difficult times,Sony has money issues it cant afford a failure so the suits will want costs down to the bare minimum,so that will keep inovation down too it will become a dirty word keep them simple and keep them playing ive no doubt the flow charts are riveting.

I dont see anything new on the horizon at all,micro transaction isnt my thing and i'll scream if its just another variation of kill a few rats type game comes along.

SmokeJumper wrote:

So, after all this F2P transitioning, all the failed "features" no one asked for and no one used (or they were broken and abandoned), all the constructive feedback for the last 2 years to point out areas that needed improvement (itemization, balancing, gameplay, real content..) that was ignored, you are saying that we were right? Am I reading that correctly? That's rich.
That's right. We fell in love with the original game. That's why the community has been so passionate about trying to communicate, "Heyyyy! Whoahh! S.T.O.P. What are you doing to our game??". We've been staunchly ignored and you've made it a personal mission to turn this into a FreeRealms spin off. Are you really saying that you were wrong, that you get it now, and that you find merit not only in this community, but in why we've been so loyal to this virtual world for years?
I'm honestly jaw-dropping speechless.
*rubs eyes*

SmokeJumper wrote:

Smokejumper. You know I respect and like you a great deal, but I have to disagree. GW2 (for me at least) has completely knocked it out of the park. Everything about it is instantly familiar yet entirely innovative and new. They've managed the perfect balance of old with new. It's the most engrossing game for me since, well .. the launch of EQ2 -- and I had an 8 year love affair with EQ2. I play the game far too much each day -- something I haven't done with any MMO since the early days of EQ2.
Don't get me wrong, EQ2 has a long and rich storyline and lore that's hard to compete with, but what was getting tiring with EQ2 was the constant need to upgrade gear, sink ridiculous amounts of money on those upgrades, only to have them obsolete in a couple of months, or worse yet -- tokens. Making me grind the same dungeons or quests over and over to get my gear is mind-numbing and honestly is a great disservice to your playerbase. Whoever thought of tokens or shards for gear should be spanked. Honestly.
Couple that with game dynamics that allow kill steals, "you can't come to this dungeon because you don't have X-piece of gear," and other interactions that allow for boorish behaviour (like node jumping, and volatile general chat that nobody at SOE seems to want to do anything about) ... well that last part is the worst. You cannot control how players interact, it's the nature of an MMO .. but I watched the Freeport server go from incredibly helpful and nice place, to a pretty dismal community because of three or four individuals who constantly trolled the channels and made players react with hostility. That was the reaction the trolls were looking for, and they managed, over time, to make it the norm. There were a number of posts on this very forum about them, but nobody did anything. So the server went from a welcoming place for new players, to one that abused them for asking questions in general chat. This isn't unique to the Freeport server either. While I agree that it's not your job to police the game, and I'm not sure you should, this was the nail in the coffin for me that sent me looking for other games.

SmokeJumper wrote:

Kind of.
EQ2 changed when features and gimmicks (Battlegrounds, F2P + SC marketplace, Dungeon Finder, Dungeon Maker, SoEmote, etc.) took center stage in producer/developer attention and the actual GAME started to fall apart.
If there is one thing that we have learned in the past 12-16 months, it is that the station cash marketplace will put out three new and fresh somethings every week without fail; however, the game play, mechanics, itemisation, and much of the meat of the actual game will continue on broken, over-powered, out of balance, off kilter, and any other term you can use to describe "not right" under the sun.
When it comes down to brass tacks, we don't recognize this game anymore because the focus is NOT on the game at all. Content and items are pushed out too quickly, done sloppily, and things that are broken or just not useful remain that way...sometimes for months....sometimes indefinitely. Its the actual GAME that brings people to play the GAME and without the GAME, no one is going to stick around.
If you really want to hit that third, intangible thing on the head, put the focus back on telling a good story, put the focus on correcting items and issues-- and not so far away in the future that it doesn't freaking matter anymore-- put the focus back on the quality of EQ2, on the GAME itself, and take it away from the cash shop.

Like James Cameron proved with the Avatar movie: You don't have to tell a new and unique story every time you open your mouth so long as you can tell an old story well.

Jayne@Kithicor wrote:

It's been out a week...

Laenai@Oasis wrote:

Most of my commentary is about the notion that having a good single plot storyline is important in an MMO. We all know very well that a combination of development staff reductions and an attempt to push out the same or more features and content has led to a less smooth gameplay experience.
I think you have the story thing completely wrong. RPGs aren't about a story that someone wrote for us and we play the parts they write out. They are about the players making the story. The best way to do that is for developers to create an environment we interact with. The limits in programming skill and computational capacity have made the situation far less than ideal in the past and have led us to the very thin and unsatisfying situation we are currently in with MMOs. There have been attempts at making game worlds genuinely interactive in a way that works with many players. Giving each player the same or a very similar script to play is not the answer as it has been in the past. We need to be able to see not only how we personally have changed the world, but how all of the other players have changed it as well. Only then will MMOs be truly competitive with regular RPGs. Right now, they are just the easy option instead of the better one.

Malleria wrote:

And your point is? Its 80 levels of completely new gameplay with outstanding graphics. Something EQ2 is not any longer. Once you hit cap on multiple toons here, it all be comes the the same game. And that why we get bored at endgame. We've just run out of content that interesting to us.
If EQ2 ever rolls out more open world pve to explore, then I'll come back. But interminably repeatable instances for gear isn't what I look for in a game.
But that just my preferences. Its not the same for everyone.
Raf

salty21db wrote:

There is not a single instance in Rift or SWTOR that comes even close to Black Rock Depths, or Deadmines, or Dire Maul. That's just a few examples. More game play -- even at release -- with better instances, more interesting boss fights, & better loots.
If you want to compare Rift or SWTOR to WotLK content, you'd have a better case; WotLK was not a good expansion. But even that content alone had almost as much going on as any area of Rift or SWTOR.
Rift & SWTOR are nothing but weak clones of WoW.

Freejazzlive wrote:

Misunderstanding then because I thought we were talking about current development.
All MMOs are currently copying the current content of WoW. I WISH they would copy the old format of WoW and how it was lol. I'll gladly agree that the old WoW content was more in depth than current but I thought you meant that the CURRENT WoW was more in depth than Rift, etc lol.

Raffir wrote:

Just proves my point more. That game probably is fun and great, I will never deny a new game being that. But will it be in 1 month? A few months? Probably not just based on the track record of all other current MMOs. Most will cap level within a few weeks or a month and with minimal endgame (3 instances and no raids) people will get bored and move onto the next best thing.
My entire point, again, about it being about getting to endgame and not the ride. Now it's even getting to the point that the games lack "the ride" AND the endgame lol.

Shandor wrote:

Got to say I agree completely with everything you wrote in your post, and regarding classes I definitely see the same problem.
For me picking a class is as much about what the class is good at as what the class is bad at, when someone can do everything with the same character then that character feels bland to me.
I guess its hard to balance things better, but a chain armoured scout doesn't feel any more squishy then a cloth wearing caster in EQ2 for example in a raid (especially for resists which are all inevitably capped).
Shandor wrote:

One of the most tense sessions in EQ2 I have had was just journeying through Solek's eye simply for the fact that one mistake resulting in me falling off and 20 minutes of a run was wasted and I'd be back at the start (I was sheperding a lower level down there). But pretty much throughout the game now no one has to worry about drowning in water, falling from too great a height etc, those sort of things are simple but they should add a little danger to the game.
Crafting an item and worrying that your 40 shards and rare are going to be wasted definitely adds spice to the crafting process, and it does justify putting in extra effort to get the best tradeskill gear to try and avoid that failure too.
One of the biggest problems I have now with the lower levels is just how easy they are, there is no incentive to play extra skillfully since people level at more or less the same speed whether its the gear that drops from quests and easy mobs, or from dungeons or low level raids.
On the plus side I do actually like the current end game expansion, at least for me I've had plenty to do (and I have played most of the non-raid content and quite a large portion of the raid content), although I can see how better raid guilds (we are just three groups at best in our raid alliance) run out of things to do.
Getting some danger (and reward for better play) into the lower levels would be good, at the top end I'd like to see more interactive zones, its going to be interesting to see if someone can really spice up the old MMO formulae.

Laenai@Oasis wrote:

I don't think the current state of the game mechanics is bad, at least for EQ2's standards since its always had problems which were much worse then they are currently, such as RoK where the only non blue stats that mattered were health and power, the rest were irrelevant.
Or SF where people were capped on crit quite early on.
But comparing EQ2's itemisation to WoW I think WoW has always been streets ahead in class balance/mechanics (well they do have the odd OP class still though). The one thing that puzzles me about EQ2's itemisation is how a percentage stat that will cap is always increased until it does cap and becomes irrelevant.
E.g. take a item with 50 STA, 50 STR and 5% hate gain.

Now drop in a new item with 100 STA and 100 STR and 5% hate gain for the next expansion, that's a clear upgrade, but we never see an item like that, instead the hate gain is always ramped up to something like 10% in the next expansion...

Things change. Life changes. We get married. We get mortgages. We become scout masters, den leaders, or little league coaches. We put more emphasis on our IRL family than our gaming one because at the end of the day RL always comes first. We don't have time to raid the planes for hours. We have more important things to do.
Much of what EQ2 accomplised was a large improvement over EQ1 in this respect. Raids don't generally require countless hours. There are of course other issues with the current state of raiding covered well in some other posts. The destruction and de-emphasis of overland/open world content, epsecially overland/deep open world dungeon raiding content in EQ2 over the last few expansions has been disheartening. Had KD, with its scope and size, been as important as SS it would have been a home run, especially on Nagafen. The KD developer was on to something but the "risk assessment team" deflated its potential and lost themselves a good man.
Give me $100 million dollars Mr. Smedley and I will build it. Heck, I could do it for a fraction of that. Most of your long time players could too. We know what we pay for, or were paying you for all these years. We won't be paying your micro-transactions though. We will just go away. If you build it though we will come.

I am having a blast atm just kiting away on my old EQ1 necro. Not grouping with anyone (at the op - some of us ahve been here from day1 too, even before your 12 years we were soloers) and having a blast in between my busy schedule trying to snare kite as many things as I can for no other reason than becuase I can.