f13.net

I thought about it before but recent experience with WoT beta just sparkled it again. What is it with this trend to call any multiplayer game of any kind a  MMORPG? - if it has lobby , some sort of stat progression and ability to pay online fee - it seems to count as MMO! - you probably saw ads of Combat Arms - which is nothing but straight up run of the mill fps with ability to get gun skins  with micro transactions

Another thing is WoT- it gets advertised as MMO, you all probably  saw trailers when it picks on WoW and EvE, and honestly I had impression it would  be some kind of MMO. But its not - its you run of the mill action shooter. It supposed to have some risk like map dynamics - it wont make it an MMO, global agenda isnt one either.

This is imho  what separates MMO  from anything else - one persistent world where all players can potentially interact with each other without instancing . Now most MMOs have a thing called "content " -  story line ,quests , stuff to do. Those are 2  the hard part of MMOs to make and hence why they separate itself from the rest of the games. Making  a multiplayer game (even a good one) and attaching micro transaction model to it does not an MMO make. It  could be great game all on its own but wont be mmo.   It is not about whether game has grind or not  ,whether it has fairies ,dragons and kill 10 foozles quests -all those are secondary, but the "massive" and persistent part in one world are primary. 

It seems like instancing (worst MMO idea ever BTW) made everyone really forget whats MMO are about, From what I hear WoW  doesnt play as an mmo anymore nowdays  - people  go into glorified lobby and queue up in " join game"  (dungeon  finder / BGs/arenas). You get a map (dungeon) and play it with preset (and vary limited amount- only up to 80 best case, usually just 5-10) amount of people.
They really nerfed and dumbed down the very core of what MMO is .

I am really starting to looking into  MMOs from the point of and majorly defining feature -NO INSTANCING. Hence why JG:Evolution  is probably only game I am cautiosly optimistic about


Cliffs: Can you guys  stop calling WoT an MMO and maybe even kick the threads about it out  of mmo section

I personally do not feel that the use of instancing invalidates the MMO part. But it does depend on how its used. If its pure instances, I may not call it a MMO, if there is a larger "hub" world, and not simply a lobby list of servers, I would call it one if the max player count is high for the "shard/world/realm" capacity.Persistent world with a large number of players, instance copies or not, and the ability to advance or customize your player are the things that mean MMO to me.

I do think that the definition is expanding more and more titles are riding the edge of what was once considered the only definition. I just don't agree that seamless giant worlds are the only definition anymore, I don't think there are many of those left anymore anyway. I have always seen instances as a tool to add in a more controlled experiences, its a complement to the larger usually seamless world, not a detractor.

There are some titles though, that do not really need or deserve the title MMO though, I agree with that.

Just a note, JE:Evolution recently removed instancing, but that will likely impact the size of one single encounter (was something like 50 x 50 I think), where as before, the amount could be higher. Its all give and take.

In most traditionally defined MMO spaces, especially RPG with a seamless world, the chances of seeing more than 64 players in one area is small anyway, start getting around 100 or so, and the server gets testy. The massively part is about the potential to interact with millions of players, not the guarantee that you will. Instances don't change that.

Yeah, pretty much.  Nothing you can do about it though, the games you call an MMO are going the way of the dodo and/or becoming exceedingly rare, there just isn't much of a market for it.

All I got from this is that instancing, that thing that made MMOs able to not totally suck if you don't poopsock for rare mob spawns, makes something not an MMO.

I agree that the term is thrown around too much and that Global Agenda is only slightly more persistent than BF:BC2, but the core of this rant seems to be "fuck instancing, if I can't see every other player doing everything it's just a lobby!"

I mean really, you're trying to paint WoW as not an MMO. Which is.. hilariously trying to define an MMO as "everquest, and DAMN YOU IF YOU REMOVE ANY OF THE SUCK PARTS"

A mmo doesn't have to be a mmorpg.  What's WoT anyway?, edit, oh world of tanks.

I will agree that if your game is a lobby with no character interaction + instance queues, it's probably not very MMO. But that's also promptly kicking Guildwars out of being an MMO, which seems unfair.

Really, the only definition that seems fair (and lets a lot of grey area games in) is if the 'lobby' or general social area allows your character to interact with other characters, regardless of how the game world is integrated (instancing, LFG queues, whatever)

Can any of us imagine how much WoW would suck without instanced dungeons? Nobody would ever have done any of the dungeons with that level of population. Everything worth killing would be dead with a 48 hour waiting list.

Well, GW is not considered a MMO by its creators, but I disagree with them about that. We all know it is, because we have the potential to interact with a huge number of players, just not all at once, like any MMO definition.

Persistence is overrated check please.

World Of Tanks, pretty fun actually(after 3 days).

Then so is TF2.

No fair, if most people compared mmo's to tf2 there wouldn't be an mmo with a playerbase higher than 100k :ye_gods:.Wait that's a good thing  :drill:

No hub world. Its an experience thing I think, lobbies and server lists break you out of a "world". On this aspect, it is somewhat required that from the moment you log in, you are running around as your avatar in something.

Hmm, never any tanks, no healers, everyone plays some form of dps class and screams at other people to play the support, about 80% of your group will be complete idiots at any given time..

I'll give TF2 the label for that alone! ;)

The concept of MMO was coined back when having 64 people online was considered MASSIVE, and not for RPGs.  It may not be massive to your way of thinking, but the origin of the term predates what is fairly common nowadays.

The concept didn't even require a dedicated server or persistence! <gasp>

Camp check in LGuk was so much fun. People really have forgotten that mmo is all about making sure thousands of people all need to compete over a single mob for their quest, not making sure people have fun playing a game together. Really need to bring back placeholder mobs and rare quest drops, too. And corpse runs and level loss due to experience, people have totally forgotten what makes mmo fun.
Hah, good one. Where is the town in TF2? That broker/auction house? The global chat channel and matchmaking tools? You might get guildchat if you meta the game enough to get into a clan, but you have to spend time out of the game to do so. One of the things I dislike most about shooters is dicking around with the server browser. One of the things I like about mmo is that I just hit login and can do other things if person-dependent activities are limited.

Heh.  All I got out of this is that the OP has a bone to pick with instancing.  "MMO" right now merely concides with persitent character progression in a multiplayer online space.  It's a catch all phrase that like most, means almost nothing without other identifiers attached.

Aside: COMMA SPACE

[/quote]

I will agree with Sky, and go one step further. I would say instancing is what "saved" MMOs. Or maybe more accurately is what boosted it from niche to mainstream. Joe public doesnt want to camp a spawn for hours and hours and hour. They want their fun to be handed them on a plate, and who cane blame them.

*Edit*


I would amend that to say you also never have to "leave" your character. IE TF2 vs Global Agenda. I would put GA right on the edge of what could be considered a MMO.

Thats a fairly meaningless distinction to me to be honest. Whether my lobby is a 3d environment or a server list doesn't really make much of a difference to me to be honest.  Frankly, I've realized that the kinds of games I actually want have nothing to do with the label MMO anyway though.   Instead of complaining about the term MMO, I think we should just think of a new name to call games like EVE Online, let all these crap games coming out have the MMO title for all I care.

I suggest "LCF", which stands for lagtastic cluster fuck.

*golf clap*

MMO vs MM&O?

I saw WoT beta and was wondering how a Wheel of Time game got to beta without a 50 page thread here. My mistake.

I do think that the definition is expanding more and more titles are riding the edge of what was once considered the only definition. I just don't agree that seamless giant worlds are the only definition anymore, I don't think there are many of those left anymore anyway. I have always seen instances as a tool to add in a more controlled experiences, its a complement to the larger usually seamless world, not a detractor.

There are some titles though, that do not really need or deserve the title MMO though, I agree with that.

Just a note, JE:Evolution recently removed instancing, but that will likely impact the size of one single encounter (was something like 50 x 50 I think), where as before, the amount could be higher. Its all give and take.

In most traditionally defined MMO spaces, especially RPG with a seamless world, the chances of seeing more than 64 players in one area is small anyway, start getting around 100 or so, and the server gets testy. The massively part is about the potential to interact with millions of players, not the guarantee that you will. Instances don't change that.


Well I threw in  massive "seamless non-instanced world" because its imho shortest definition  of necessary (but not sufficient) design for enabling game play I want from mmo. There are of course finer points of technical aspects and game mechanics which would not technically allow all people interact at same time  (AC for example had pretty elegant solution of  "portal storms" - when too many players gathered in the area than the servers could handle they would be teleported out , it had nice lore and fit the world)

There are many elements needed to also ("content") but if you dont have at leas that very basic thing its just lobby multiplayer game. No matter if its 3d lobby or simple text chat. And btw GW is not an MMO. It multiplayer questing game (not a bad one for those who liked pve) with arena (not a bad one too )

Camp check in LGuk was so much fun. People really have forgotten that mmo is all about making sure thousands of people all need to compete over a single mob for their quest, not making sure people have fun playing a game together. Really need to bring back placeholder mobs and rare quest drops, too. And corpse runs and level loss due to experience, people have totally forgotten what makes mmo fun.


Those mechanics have absolutely nothing to do with instances.Those are deliberately designed time sinks in order to make people "work" -yeah thats the catass-design philosophy -you have to grind for everything for it to be worth anything .the sad part that broken design is persisting in "pvp" mmos (shadowbane, darkfall) .DF is probably one of the most catass games there is (save the asian ones). The fact that wow has less boring and less explicit timesinks is not because it has instances and those two are intrinsically linked together like conjoined twins.

 In fact I really could care less for pve parts of the game if it doesn't interact with pvp side . I do think in PvP world static shared mob spawns server as great point of conflict- something pve players dont like , I am pvp player I like conflict, but I am not gonna argue pvp vs pve design here.

I don't like having "to camp" - predefined world announced timers (or published times , which could be wrapped in lore)  solve that. Instancing solves nothing - it removes elements of gameplay I like ( which is interaction with non static, non predefined situation)





I will agree with Sky, and go one step further. I would say instancing is what "saved" MMOs. Or maybe more accurately is what boosted it from niche to mainstream. Joe public doesnt want to camp a spawn for hours and hours and hour. They want their fun to be handed them on a plate, and who cane blame them.


Wow so the whole genre which started so gloriously is "progressed" to 3d lobbies and monthly fees microtransation for almost 15 years old concept of multiplayer game! Multiplayer games always existed , some of them were good, some bad. Match on fixed map with predefined conditions and predfined  fixed set of players is not what I am looking for in a mmo. You want that? "Majority" want that? -well you have it , and had it for long time. I in fact like multiplayer games, I just like them without grind and monthly fee element. Majority seems to want grind attached to it and more simple game play than their non existent brains and reflexes can handles (apparently run of the mill fps and rts  are too complex for  "majority")


I am looking for "emergent" gameplay ( I hate that it became buzzword- but its very precise one). Let me give you short example  -  in old  vanilla wow, pre bg ,pre honor there was some ogre fortress. There was a quest chain both for alliance and horde there. Doing quests there naturally lead to  small scale pvp conflict between players. We didn't queue up for "5 vs 5" combat, we simply went on doing quests, found other faction their , grouped up and started fightihng them (and ogres  too) for spawn. It was great fun .And there were many spots like that where pvp naturally happened. I did not know I would have to fight there (sometimes I wouldnt) , there was no capture the flag, no timer , it felt as a natural unconstrained fight.-something which happens in worlds, not arenas.

I had more fun fighting at molten core entrance than I ever had inside the instance. We raided that dwarf city  and human capital cities (whatever their names) just for fun . it was radically different from " here is team 1 they are red, we are team 2, we are blue. FIIIIGHT ! and it goes on till blues are red and red are blues!" . Most of examples I would remember would be pvp ones- simply as that what  I like , but they are examples from older games(like UO,AC,EQ) I am sure many pve players could state for you of how different interaction in the world is from their point of view.

 Now the was WoW -it was not really designed to be pvp game, but it still had fun world pvp simply because of no instances. It could be made into tons more , but they instead went with instancing everything , and nowdays world pvp is mostly relic of the past.

It was a term that at the time made sense and had value but over time its been stretched thin and means little.  Online games now need new broader categories, in essence sub categories to systematize them more to modern times.  

The issue with your anecdote is that what you consider fun is considered an annoyance to most current gamers.  They want to pull the cord and be handed a prize.  MMO's that we played 6+ years ago have been turned into amusement park rides that end with a slot machine pull.  That or a sort of Chuck E Cheese experience where you collect tickets to buy your in game achievements.  In today's MMO, the fun is in the reward to a far greater degree than in the game itself.  I consider this to be the crux of the problem in the direction that MMO's are moving.   I want a game that is fun in and of itself.  If I get a reward while enjoying gameplay, that should be a bonus rather than the motivation for my gaming session.

Yeah the reward over game itself is  a core problem -you are right. I was thinking a lot over the issues and came to conclusions that its inevitable to have that "reward" design element. Its human brains, we wired for that. Fighting nature  is pointless. I myself find rewards gratifying (e.g. world of tanks with  progression trees is more fun to me than same thing but instead everything given at match start as long as there is no excessive grind).

I highly suspect the "majority" is happy with just reward ,hence the mainstream games are  going this way as there no requirement of actually designing things which are hard to design . I mean look at immense popularity of that facebook abomination. Humans mostly are simply creatures.  catering to lowest common denominator works . I just hope there will be niche products,  for the others

Well, that's a whole different situation you didn't mention in your original post.

Also, please learn how to use the quote function rather than make up your own way with italics. You don't visit someone's house and piss in the sink. It might serve the purpose, but there's really a better way.

Support indy developers.  They may be our only hope.  I'm about finished with mainstream MMO releases until the design model changes. 

Ahh, you got to him before I could use my new paint masterpiece.

(http://dl.dropbox.com/u/82533/quote.JPG)

This thread is totally semantic.  Who cares?  When you compare modern multi player internet games to a twin paddle pong console, then all of them are massively multi player.

 :popcorn:

Sorry guys that is side effect  of  posting too much on blogs. And of course when I post on blogs i screw up and use tags!

Just use the quote button to the right of a post. That way it displays the person's name.

If you include "seamless world" in what makes an MMO, Everquest stops being an MMO. Woo zoning!

I think what pushes GA over TF2 in the MMO space isn't the player lobby, it's the persistent character. While in a TF2 or most class/persistent unlock FPS games I can switch classes mid match, in what I mentally consider MMO-like is that in GA, my character is mine, and while I can have another, I'd need to log out to switch.

Even that I will admit is a very arbitrary and stupid mental line to draw, given that in WoW I can switch roles (though on the same character) during a raid/instance as well.

But that's mentally where I draw the "I'm trying to be an MMO" versus "I'm a multiplayer game with a lobby" line.

Question, GA got a lot of flack about "Not being an MMO", they are soon to add a large open area outside of the "dome". Someone said GA is at the edge of the MMO line. Will this addition push it over?

Maybe?

Anyway, I'm going to try a different angle on this:

To me, an MMO should include INVOLUNTARY player interaction.  Yeah, I said it.  Now read the rest before you reply in a fit and say you don't want to have to group up with Dr. D-bag to level please.   Its not about GROUPING, thats incidental.  What it is about is that other players should play a prominent role in your experience.  If two people meet out in the game world it should matter, there should be a reason for them to talk to each other, or trade with each other, or fight together or maybe even fight each other.

There is an obvious market for the "Play solo but be able to easily play with other people if and when I want to game," but frankly it doesn't get at the core of what the MMOG genre is to me.  The open world alone isn't it, the persistent character progression isn't it, the auction house isn't it.   Its an acknowledgement by the developers and playerbase that the other players besides your own matter to your play session.  Maybe that means instead of being able to hit repair at any old vendor, thats a player trade skill, maybe it means loot should primarily be crafted, I don't know the specifics of what game mechanics need to or should be implemented to reach that goal, but thats the core of it to me.

Its for this reason I say a game like NWN PW servers is more of an MMO than most of the stuff on the market.  Yeah leveling was slow, often there weren't ANY max level player son a server, most of the time you had to work together to accomplish any god damn thing.  But you know what, it was fucking AWESOME.  

You can all puff out your chests and say "well now I'm old and have a family and don't have time to fuck around for 10 hours" FINE, but then stop saying you want an MMO.

Edit: So, to sum up basically, when you see another player in the game world, you should care who they are, why there are there, what their character does, and so forth.  The more "strangers passing in the night" a MMOG gets, the farther it gets from what I'm looking for.


Man, that rant felt good.  Now, please pick it apart.

It's diluted beyond repair. An MMO is a game that charges for access. That's all it really means anymore.

Even the industry leader: WoW is 80 levels of solo quest grinding followed by dungeon instances with random strangers who never talk (unless you fail the dungeon when they insult you while ragequitting).

Dalaran/random dungeons are arguably less massive than Guild Wars.

Being forced to hunt down a random jackass in order to get my sword repaired sounds.. like the opposite of fun. It's a sim at that point more than an MMO in what I consider them to be.

I'd be with you in the involuntary interaction bit if you meant "they're around, you see them doing shit, but you don't have to go beg them for something" sense.

It's less the I don't have 10 hours thing, it's more the "people are fucking jackasses" thing. I have my chosen friends to play with, and sometimes I'll feel like playing with Other People. But a game is doing it wrong when it tells me "hey, not in the mood to deal with some random asshole's personality problems tonight? Well then, buy someone ELSE'S product!"

That is why Instancing and being somewhat solo or small group friendly saved MMOs.

I think that PQ's in WAR were a start in this direction, but the flaws in that type of organic player congregation did suffer its own set of problems.  I can think of a few ways to organize players toward a common goal (NPC attacks on player held towns, random conflict areas in the gaming world leading to temporary resource/price changes for one side, etc.) but all would suffer as the game matured and the player focus changes.    

Why can't we use Rasix's first definition and be done with this silly argument.

This is probably true.  What I want my MMORPG to be is a fantasy setting simulator, or in the case of EVE a sci-fi simulator.  Hell, even WW2O is a world war 2 simulator.

People aren't done hanging their hopes and dreams on a silly acronym.

I grew up military, acronyms are all I have! *sniffle*

There's plenty of room for both, just preferably not in the same game. Try to please every one and you please no one.

Seems that Blizzard managed to please 11 million by trying to be everything to everyone.  It's certainly possible... it's just HARD.

Hmm, I think I would argue that they just managed to figure out what things would please the largest number of people and ignored the groups and playstyles that were obviously always going to be niche. And even they didn't figure it out right away (see: vanilla raid game, original PVP title grind).

The key seems to be offering your content in as many grouping options as possible while also offering viable if not the same rewards on a sliding scale. Letting people decide to what size of group they feel comfortable playing with rather than forcing a number down the throats of the consumer is always going to be more successful.

I would like games to take it even further with instances that are adjusted on an incremental basis from 5 people all the way up to 25. Only got 18? That's fine, the dungeon will appropriately scale to that amount. You don't need to worry about finding 7 more idiots.

WoW was a decent couple months of solo play, some of the quests were actually entertaining (the guy in the outhouse is the only one I really remember). I had a little life left in it when I quit at 58 about three months in. Definitely the fastest I've leveled and the closest I've come to a level cap since UO (my highest in EQ2 is 74 or 75). If it weren't for the mounting cost of re-entry, I'd have gone back a while ago (EQ2 expansions include the entire game $20 +tax/ship, getting back into WoW would run me $67 + tax/ship + Cataclysm at that point).

I'll once again trot out my old trope of instancing: four levels. You have the open dungeon that the OP wants, public and open to groups, raids whatever. Anything goes. Option two is the raid dungeon instance, for raid members only. Option three is the group dungeon instance. Option four is a solo instance. All content scaled to the instance, ideally scaled to group and raid makeup, too. Choose your instance on zone in. Solo players can enter the open dungeon and LFG or just meet people (or fight, I guess) if they're feeling social or just hit the solo instance to chill out.

Just to reiterate.  It's a blanket term and nothing more.

Also, didn't we have this discussion a week ago?  With the same results?

I meet a player online, i shoot him in the head, he logs off. Interaction is  :awesome_for_real:. In all seriousness the last time I had fun in a persistent world was killing zombie mobs in a korean mmo(priston tale), having to make impromptu parties because of the spawn rate was high and the difficult (lots of health they had, little damage you did). was high. Too bad the game was a grindy piece of shit, got bored around level 20-something. Its been maybe 6 years and I haven't played anything that made me like the people around me since.

Yeah in the 40k thread.  It seems like a silly conversation to me, if there was a proper mmorpg forum it would be very quiet considering nobody makes those games anymore.

I agree that these sorts of mechanics have traditionally only existed in games that have elements like free for all PvP, full loot, and harsh group required grinds, which make them not too appealing, but I don't think they REQUIRE such mechanics by any stretch.  Again I will mention NWN PW servers, generally very player driven, soloing was mostly not viable past the opening few levels to acquaint you with the particular PW server and its ruleset.  PvP was by consent only (had to mark each other as aggressive or whatever).  Loot was "full" but you dropped all your loot whenever you died anyway. 

 Of course, it was a small self selecting playerbase that 1) Owned a game based on 3rd edition dungeons and dragons to begin with 2) went looking for PW story servers (read: RP required and enforced)to begin with, and 3) was policed for douchebags by DMs that were on almost any time of day between the entire DM team.  There was TONs of just hanging around the inn or marketplace chatting.  Planning adventures and getting groups together was fun in itself because most of the playerbase knew the rest of the playerbase so a "pug" was basically a meaningless term.  And so on and so forth. 

The question is, can you replicate that in a larger MMOG environment.  I'd say something like EVE comes closest for a variety of reasons, some of which I mentioned in the "RP nerd" thread.

But EvE is boring. Here is the problem, i can respect EvE for being EvE, but its not $15 a month. Plain and simple. I play games for the merit of playing games, and there isn't much personal merit to a game like EvE other than it being A. niche and B. you can be important...oh wait fat chance. Now I'm just waiting for GW2 to come out and see if they managed to have "interacting with people in a nonfucktard way" right.

EVE is boring, yeah, but most of the time I'm ok with that.  Like I said earlier in the thread, EVE is more a sci-fi simulator, and I'm ok with that.  If I want whiz-bang action I'll play TF2, or Bad Company 2, or even Torchlight, but if I want to sit down and pretend I'm living in a science fiction world for a little while, EVE can't be beat.

Geez do I really have to be that nerdy to want to play a mmo done right lolz.

MMOs are whatever people say they are. If you want what the letters stand for to actually be relevant, then you have to come up with a new term for 95% of RPGs because they have no RP.

Woo descriptivism.

You already spend a considerably amount of your day posting on a video games related forum, I don't think you have much recourse from being "that nerdy."

Plus he might need a little work on "interacting with people in a nonfucktard way".

I'm vaguely aware that the real old timers remember MMO and MMORPG as meaning something different to what those of us who jumped on the bandwagon in the late 90s, early 00s, think it means. To me it has always seemed essentially a marketing term. UO and EQ justified monthly fees in the days when most games offered online multiplayer for free by using the magic phrase. Even the massive aspect was debatable. In the course of leveling a Diablo 2 character I probably grouped with hundreds of different players. And my character was persistent which quite frankly mattered a lot more than the world being persistent. Who cares if the world ticks on when you're not playing because at those times you're not playing.

Following on from UO and EQ the definition has broadened because of marketing. The association of the term with better quality games, games that are worth a monthly fee when normal games aren't, has attracted people into this part of the market.

And there's been some people who decided not to market themselves as a MMO. GW decided not to call itself a MMO for marketing reasons, because they didn't want to scare people off by implying that there was a monthly fee (which the term generally implied back then).

With the rise of free to play and cross-pollination from Asia the term is really wide. I think it can be defined by its minimums: it can't not be multiplayer and it needs a number of concurrent players that could be argued as massive (ie 64-256 players). If it meets those two standards and wants to call itself a MMO arguing the point is rather meaningless semantics.

It's a MMO because it says it's a MMO on the box, okay?

Of course that is the practical answer, but we are having a sort of hypothetical/theoretical discussion here.

I don't even LIKE Wheel of Time and I wondered the same thing.  :grin:

If I inform two independent players who belong to the same game world server, with no prior knowledge of each other (not grouped together, not in the same guild or raid, not on a particular "side", etc) to go to a destination in their game world, then they are 100% likely to interact with each other when both arrive at that location regardless of the manner or route each may have taken to get there.

That is my definition of the original true MMO, with global persistance and shared presence. You know, like a ... world ... has.

EQ and DAoC are examples of game worlds that are 100% that way (maybe due to the technology of the time, maybe on purpose, but it was damn fun to have the above rule never violated if you care about that sort of immersion). Name *any* location in their server world that violates my first sentence.

WoW, EQ2, CoH, WAR, AoC, Aion, LOTRO are partially that way in most of their core areas, with satellite instancing seen largely as a way to alleviate resource bottlenecks or performance issues. And over time each either has stayed as-is or gotten more instanced (I give you WoW "world PvP" as an example).

I understand, and even like some instancing in that sense, to help more people experience something normally bottlenecked, like a sideshow. But when the entire main point of a game turns the corner into instance-land (i.e. WAR cities), I get completely turned off to caring to spend time in that "world".

Oh, and GW is a fucking lobby with wings, and so is DDO. They are not MMOs any more than Diablo II is (now watch someone say Diablo II is a MMO...). They are all very well done games, but they are *not* MMOs.


Yes, I am a bitter person because no one bothers to build the first kind any more.

DAOC has rather a lot of instances now, fwiw.

When Vanguard first came out, I would get in to a group to go do some dungeon or other.  Invariably, there was a group just ahead of us, and another just behind us.  Most of the mobs are already dead as you progress through the dungeon, and if you don't kill them fast enough, the group behind you just leapfrogs over you, and then you might as well just leave.  Shitty memories of EQ came flooding right back.

Or, if you get lucky, there's no one in front of you, but then group behind just follows along, and then leapfrogs the boss.  Or you get respawned on three levels down, die, and then spend the rest of your night trying to get your shit back.

I just don't see how that is at all fun.  Unless you're into frustration.  I do miss the EC tunnel in EQ before they implemented the bazaar in Luclin.  Sitting around dueling with people, or shooting the shit, saving newbs from ghouls, or the FP guard.  It still exists in WoW in the main cities, and Dalaran, but it's different somehow.  Probably just a function of my getting older, and the playerbase expanding out of the old MUD crowd into the mainstream. 

<Insert snarky "get off my lawn" comments about console kiddies here.>

Maybe it is fun for the dickbags who stole the boss from you?  :oh_i_see:

Both instancing and open world styles have their advantages and drawbacks. Not making it easy for someone ruin your gaming experience for kicks (i.e. instancing) has proven a bit more popular than the freedom of open world.

Everything is a MMO now because 1) the term pisses Stormwaltz off and 2) it implies more content is coming out, so players should keep their wallets open in whatever format. The term MMO has become tightly linked to payment options, so that's why it is often used.

There's that whole thing about real world combat is 99% boredom and 1% sheer terror. And I think Eve's like that really. Mostly it's humdrum. Station spinning. OMG POS shooting.

But you get that one day every month or two when something really incredible happens and just somehow that makes it something better than anything else out there.

I'm not sure WoW is even an MMO anymore and maybe that just proves what we all thought before WoW: that MMOs really aren't mass market games.

Are you saying that EvE is the golf equivalent in the MMO world?  Mostly boring, but one good shot a round keeps you coming back for more. 

Its actually probably a pretty good analogy.  The important thing to realize though, is that golf isn't so much BORING as it is RELAXING most of the time, with punctuated bits of excitement.     

I haven't gotten much feedback on this concept when I've said similar things before though.  I don't mind if EVE is a bad game, or if EVE is boring, because its an enjoyable experience. 

No no, golf is really boring, its relaxing because you can shoot the shit with people just as bored as you are and won't go full asshole on you for being bad at the game.


My forum posting habits hearken back to my days of getting super hardcore about Guild Wars and in the process actually posting on the forums. Beyond that no desire to RP, haven't played a mud, and no table top neck beard experience. I'm pretty much a gamer.

No no, you just suck at golf.

Most people suck at golf, point stands.

That's an opinion, not a point.

True.

Just because Everquest sucked balls doesn't mean that non-instanced game worlds are a bad idea. People just need to think outside of an 11 year old game that was made so grubby gamers could jerk off to female dark elves and pretend that Ed Greenwood is the greatest writer of fantasy of all time, while collecting belts and training mobs to the zone line.

Heh. Slyfeind is playing old school EQ on a player server right now. People are broken.  :why_so_serious:

I live in the real world. With global persistance and shared prescence. When I catch a bus or an elevator, or go to a shop, I generally don't intereact with the other players. I might interact with the NPC vendor or driver, but not the other players really.

You just listed EQ's best points!  :awesome_for_real:

Well, except I have no idea who Ed Greenwood is.  :grin:

He's the Dungeons and Dragons GM who invented Forgotten Realms. He wrote a few awful novels like Spellfire the main purpose of which seemed to be bragging about how cool his character was.

I suspect that Ratman meant Bob Salvatore rather than Greenwood. The Drizz'tt guy. Not even D&D nerds rate Greenwood as an author.

I Actually read one or two of the drizzle books close to 10 years ago (one and a half books? two and a half?). I bought them as travel fodder while going overseas for a bit. They were okay as far as that sort of thing goes, but I didn't feel a need to read through the entire series or buy any more or anything.

In the small sub-genre of fantasy fiction that is made up of Dungeonmasters Who Believe They are Authors Salvatore is Shakespeare. That is because he is quite good and became a lot better with practice and actually tries to write about complex emotions such as bereavement where most of them are 250 pages of "wee, my character is sooo cooool".

My fiance, for some reason, bought me The Cleric Quintet at a some book swap for a few bucks.  I'm reading book one, Canticle, and Salvatore's writing is a bit... simple.  Reads like a comic book/dungeon crawl.  It's mildly entertaining.

There are times lately when I miss sitting around camping spawns- it allowed time for chatting, and it didn't require running all over hell's half acre on horrible fetch it quests (LOTRO is positively punitive with the back and forth bullshit over great distances for some quests). It sucked when there wasn't a PUG available, though. I will always miss trains...some of the funniest moments I have had in gaming were due to some epic EQ1 trains.

That's one thing which turns me off Lord of the Fucking Runs for weeks at a time.

There's a whole series of levels (45-50?) where All Quests Lead To Elrond from Trollshaws and Misty Mountains with occasional guest moments from All The Other Quests Lead To Glorfindel.

Elrond tells you:
Go see Gloin.

(10 minutes later)

Gloin Tells you:
ok cool. Go see Elrond again.

It's immersive.  :uhrr:

I don't agree with DLRiley often, but statistically, most people do suck at golf.  It is a fact. 


The thing that I get most nostalgic about with regard to EQ was the fact that the early dungeon runs required you to be constantly aware.  You had to be mindful getting into a spawn camp.  Once there, you had to be careful not to screw up for fear of losing everything. 

I don't want games to bring back the long camping mechanic.  I would like for games to bring back a sense of risk vs reward.  If I'm going to go deep into a dungeon to retrieve some rare item, I'd like to know that I have to risk something to obtain it beyond just my time.  I'm not sure how risk/reward could be implemented without being a punch to the groin, but would really enjoy having some sense of risk when entering an area that houses useful/rare items.  It really gave value to those things knowing that few people were willing to take the risk to go after items deeply embedded in a dangerous place.  Perhaps item decay, Item loss, or something of the like.

Very much agree. Gloin needs a dam swift travel horse point.

The issue of instancing is a really problematic one for me.

On the technical side, I absolutely understand why it has become the dominant method for dealing with large player populations - it vastly simplifies population distribution, sometimes without even having to artificially split your playerbase up between servers.

However, when I am honest with myself, I have to admit that MMORPGs just don't feel the same as when the world is completely persistent (I still am hopelessly nostalgic about Shadowbane).

I suspect if one were willing to upend a lot of MMORPG tropes and conventions one could bring back a persistent, non-instanced world (though that would have to be split between servers, which would require its own solution other than charging players to jump between them), but I expect it would only look somewhat like what we think of when we think of an MMORPG - and that wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing at all.

I dunno, I don't find much appealing about sitting in line at the bottom of a dungeon that I just walked all they way down into because there are 8 groups already there.

This is why I don't understand the epic amounts of Darkfall hate on this forum.  The game has its issues (I stopped playing it, I can't really talk), but it has lots of these "old school" feeling mechanics.   It has most of the features people always say that they want, yet almost no one was even willing to try the game.  Is in the full loot/ open PvP mechanic that people don't like?  I know the PvP stuff is what people always focus on, but it has a deep crafting game, a more old school/quest light PvE game, and the spawn camping isn't nearly so bad as something like EQ.

I fondly remember Blackburrow and Hill/Sand Giant trains… …and still wane nostalgic for the early Rallos Zek days… 

/goodtimes, even with all the hideous bugs, exploits and glitches…

Why play a game for crafting? I don't want to play runescape again.

I still fondly remember growing up in El Paso, TX. Doesn't mean it's not a shitty city that I want to go back to.

edit: this thread is pretty much showing off why instancing and segmenting your population and reducing reliance on other players has become popular: everyone has their own idea of what should be an MMO, and what shouldn't be. Crafting, PVP, Raiding, Camp Checks, Soloing, Fast Travel versus Walk Realistically Everywhere, I'm sure we could go on.

The reality of the situation is that WoW IS an MMORPG, even if it's not everyone's idea of what an MMO should be. And the problem is the nostalgic MMO people want wouldn't break 100k subscribers, and would still be held up against WoW for polish and amount of content expected.

Will someone ban this cocksucker for posting useless shit.

The whole 'go all the way across the map, back to the starter area' to turn in one quest thing is really annoying.  It wouldn't be so bad if there was some way to get there quickly, like portals, or something, but that's not gonna happen.  At least I have plenty of time to do homework while I wait for the horse/boat/griffon/whatever to arrive.

Years of vaporware hype? Douchebag "WILL MAKE YOU ITS BITCH" devs? Bugs so bad on release it would make one long for the salad days of Shadowbane?

LOTRO has been removing such things already.  :oh_i_see:  Hes talking about a zone and level band that hasn't had its revamp yet.

I've been playing golf since I was old enough to swing a club. Turns out most people don't just suck at golf, they don't even know how to play. I can't keep a golf partner to save my life. They're all so uptight.

For instance, my grandfather watching me play at the 9 hole we had our camp at, trying to give me pointers on my (Slice? Hook? Goes to the left when I'm in a regular stance) swing. All of these complex ideas about how to swing, all the articulation and visualization tricks. I shrug and just aim to the right a bit.

For me, golf is about spending time in a nice groomed park with a silly game to guide you around. Walk or cart, both are fun. Need the cart for beer, though.

Darkfall has all the fail-catass mechanics. Its huge grind to lvl, huge grind to gather resource.s Eveyrthing is catass grind there. there is no fun there. I never advocated long grinds - i think they are what was killing  old school MMOs .

There are bad old school mechanics and they are good ones. Darkfail has all of the bad ones exaggerated ten fold. It also failed on  sandbox concept. -It just 3d world. with absolutely nothing in there to do but very  simplistic and mind killing grind (hence why I mentioned one non instanced world is necessary prerequisite but not nearly sufficient one)

So basically what I'm getting from this thread is:


I want that old school feeling, without having to actually play an old school game.  Maybe someone will invent a matrix style plug in that can tickle all your perfect MMO neurons without any of the parts you don't like.  Other than that, I don't think people will ever get what they want.  Too much people wanting to replicate a "feeling" and not enough people saying what they actually want from mechanics that would accomplish that feeling.  Until we can hash something useful out, all anyone here wants is to be transported back in time to when they had never played an MMO before to replicate that magic of the early ones.

Quite simply all of those mechanics you identify in Darkfall are exactly the ones that I was thinking of when I replied to Nebu about the will-always-be-niche stuff that WoW cut entirely. Despite our 80 page threads wailing about why can't we have something different, our tastes here are really pretty mainstream on average. Complicated crafting-is-required economies, getting your gear stolen by some dude who killed you, outdoor spawn camping - very few people actually want these things. Over and over again, games that do these things fail. At some point we'll stop saying "it is because none of them executed well" and will eventually realize that the market for this stuff is just really quite small compared to the overall market.

Eve is the one successful game in that zone, and is last I checked sitting somewhere in the mid 300,000s subscriber-wise. I'm thinking that's about the maximum upside for things like that.

I want stats assigned to gathered materials that give better modifiers to player crafted items. Not all thorium veins are created equal.

I think I'm finally ready to admit it. Fuck MMOs. I'm too old for the bullshit. I'm tired of the same shit.

I'll still play Eve because it still feels the most like UO, and because offline training is cool.

Ohh I personally know what exactly I d like to play. Heck I even have 100 page design document for it with all the details about specific game mechanics to make it work (now gimme  20 mill  so I can hire devs and artists to make it :) ) . Thread was not about this though originally lol.

It was about how everything calls itself MMO. and then basically about how MMO just degraded to being multiplayer games with 3d lobbies, losing the mmo part

:why_so_serious:

Cuz I thought I would write it down for once instead or regurgitating same points over and over again on some pointless forums :) -see my post count! lurking ftw

Post page 67 please.

To re-iterate what others are saying, I'm still not clear on the "what makes a non-instanced game great".  Are people pining for the competition for resources (mobs)?  Was there spontaneous cooperation that made things fun?  Or is it just really a feeling that you exist in another world because everyone's character is there at all times?

I don't get it.  I found the mob-competition tedious and annoying.  I found the inevitable lag when there was an interesting game-world event very annoying.  Spontaneous cooperation was vanishingly rare because the game systems were set up to encourage selfish behavior.  "Getting to know" people in your game world is a lot like getting to know people in the real world, some you like, so you don't.  It never made the game more immersive for me.

I think you need to concisely define what it is you are looking for before you try to put a name (acronym) to it.  Four or five bullets-level concise.  And get a couple of people to agree on 60% of those bullets.

I tried it.  It sucks all over.  I believe that my computer will hate me forever for installing it. 

I love the idea behind Darkfall, but by all accounts the actual deployment of said concepts is wrapped up grindtastic and buggy gameplay. Shadowbane had the grind part close to right- took a week or two of reasonably casual play to get to real PvP levels, and some maintenance PvE farming for city upkeep. The fail part was the end game that didn't allow a smaller guild/alliance to come back from a Tree loss, and of course, the hideous crash bugs (sb.exe .!. ). I would play an unfucked update of it in a heartbeat. Some of my best gaming memories are from the brief House Daenyr salad days.

A little of this, a little of that.
Competition is fun when it's opt-in. Say you have a PvEvP system, or hell a straight up PvP system that's voluntary. Competing for mobs like in Everquest was crap, but Everquest was a crap game.
Spontaneous cooperation, when it happens is fun, and I was skeptical of the PQ idea, but having done it a couple of times in ChampO, I'm warming up to the idea.
And yes, when I'm in an instance, I'm locked away from the world, safe in a cocoon, and wondering why I'm not playing a single player game instead.


Most of these games are designed from the ground up to encourage selfish, dickish behavior, and then "fix" it by instancing stuff. Why not try to remove or change the parts of the game that encourage dickish behavior instead?

And I'm not even saying that instancing is itself evil and should be scrapped, I'm just frustrated that it's become a crutch to prop up dumb game ideas.

/bingo

Remove grind, remove loot incentives, allow for painless customization(no reason for me to pay or wait for a reset to be available), greatly reduce travel time, focus on repeatable content... just to name a few.

So fast leveling, easily obtained gear, quick respecs (or do you mean entire class changes?), rapid travel, and repeatable content.

Sounds like you want WoW. :P

This is the inherent danger in philosophising about an ideal MMO. You end up rather frustratingly concluding that the game you're sick of, the game that prompted you to start philosophising, is in fact the answer.

It sounds even more like Guild Wars (which of course is what he's going for.)

Sounds like you guys want something like Planetside.  All those things you want are common in PvP games, not PvE.  Though I'm not sure about travel time.  Travel time is necessary in a large scale PvP game to reward a side that is sly enough to mount a big enough attack on a position that isn't well defended.  That doesn't mean it should take you an hour to get there (5 minutes is probably plenty, but it does mean that smart tactics/strategy should be rewarded.

Then again, this probably goes back what I was saying about liking MMOs to be simulations, or at least sim-like. 

That's not what WoW is lolz. Ingmar got it right I was describing Guild Wars.

Yeah. I agree. I mean, there could be fun meeting new people and all of that in a PUG-camp, and interaction between people in a dungeon could be fun, but aside from Bloodworth's point here - which I completely agree with - is that non-instanced dungeons feel nothing at all like what they are supposed to be.

My gamer background comes from PNP games before EQ, And in those, when you go into a dungeon, you don't have repops behind you, nor do you find a cozy spot to camp and whack orcs as they spawn. You DO the dungeon. You start at the start, and you kill your way through the encounters until you get to the end. You don't go into the domain of the Goblin Prince in order to walk to the throne room in order to take a number from the ticket machine while 2 groups of 4 other people sit around in front of you. The non-instance scenario is more like going into a store and patiently waiting in line for your pizza order. How that's more "immersive" or "realistic" I don't know...

Its just the nature of PNP v. CRPGs sadly.  In pencil and paper you could think of it as having your own "instance" of the entire Forgotten Realms, complete with a DM that can tailor things to make the experience the best for your particular party.    However, that doesn't translate to MMOGs very well for obvious reasons.  I think in the end though its repeatable content thats the issue at hand for me.  Whether you are farming a goblin king in a non instanced dungeon, or "doing" Halls of Reflection for the 100th time, the only difference is presentation.

In pencil and paper you don't redo content, and when the campaign is over its over, or the DM just keeps inventing new adventures for you to do until everyone wants to try something new.  The instanced dungeons in an MMO give a more similar feeling, at least hypothetically, to dungeon crawling in pencil and paper, but the open world dungeons give more of a feeling of a big coherent world that isn't segmented off in pencil and paper.  Ideally, there would a truly huge amount of "dungeons" in the open world, with similar loot tables, such that you wouldn't all want to be farming the same guy.   Of course, MMOG players are known to over analyze, and I'm sure people would find the one that is of the closest walking distance from a town, least dangerous things on the way to it and declare it "optimal" causing the same backup and line waiting you see now, even if you could spend LESS time going to the "non optimal" dungeons.

I kind of think of it like if all those cave systems and little random dungeons in WoW that are mostly just solo quests were viable "dungeons."  There are a dozen or more per zone and there would be plenty throughout the game world for people that wanted to "do" a dungeon, if they were structured as such, but the logistics of getting to one, finding one that wasn't already being  "done" and so forth would probably be seen as too much of a time wasting affair, and I'm absolutely certain the current "press a button and afk sammich while waiting for dungeon to pop" method is 100% more popular than the other way would be.

Stop defending everything?

Seriously. they did a good job in Lone-Lands, but zone revamps have been put back on the shelf. They started talking about plans to revamp North Downs, and those plans have been officially shelved indefinately. And it's not like Rivendell and Trollshaws (and Misty Mountains) are all that optional. The way you're talking is like it's happening fast and furiously. Not sure about your use of the word "already" there either.

Sure, I get the difference between PNP and PC roleplaying (there's no actual roleplaying in CRPGs, for starters  :awesome_for_real:) but we'll have to agree to disagree on the instanced dungeon issue - I find it more coherent with instances fenced off instead of "camp check?" To coin a phrase, this makes instances seem more worldly to me.

At the same time, I do like the cave systems with small quest boss mobs and such in them that WoW has. Not to mention forts and keeps and so forth. The stuff that you encounter while levelling. That and the fact that regular zones aren't instanced leave enough non-instanced world to me, since you can still interact with other people in most of the content - but when it's time for you to go kill the leader of the Defias, you fight through his domain and all his minions, rather than breezing through the already killed mobs to his doorstep and taking a number.

I haven't played WoW since awhile before the new dungeon and instance queueing changes, but I'm older and have less time than I used to have when I played EQ, so I can appreciate the ability to get on and accomplish something in a short time. Whoever it was earlier int his thread that basically said that "you're older have kids and less time because you have a job - MMOGS aren't for you" appears to be wrong, since they've moved in the direction of being more flexible for those of us who can't and would not camp Iceclad Ocean for Stormfeather anymore.

It's what people remember from their first MMO so it becomes "the way it should be".  I'm with you on this.  Taking a number doesn't work for me at all.

Instances are mandatory.  Vanguard showed me this immediately.  They minimize queues, griefing, and other issues.  I have no nostalgia toward shared dungeons at all.

I'm not sure why instances are considered taboo to good design.  I find instanced PvP to be generally much preferable to open world PvP.  Instanced PvP has clear objectives, usually somewhat equal sides (yes, Pugs versus premades, I know....) and doesn't take all goddamn night to play.  I like that.  Many more problems are caused by other issues, such as crappy class balance, the holy triad, CC mechanics, etc. 

Its not a question as to whether or not its good design, its a question as to whether or not it makes sense to even bother making a game an MMO if you are going to stick everything there is to do inside an instance.  If you are going to do that, there really isn't any advantage to just making a good old fashioned server based multiplayer game (ala TF2), which is FINE, but no one is going to do that because most MMO game play sucks an no one would play that shit unless there was some sort of showing of your gear, or chat box to talk to people with. 

If Steam would get its chat windows to be transparent and pop up in some certain condition without forcing you to shift tab to bring up the entire interface,  you could argue TF2 literally has everything WoW does if you like instanced PvP.

Its not that you can't have good GAMES with tons of instanced content, thats obviously true.  I guess the big problem is that anything and everything is calling itself an MMOG these days so they can keep charging you for shit.

That's the fucking truth, isn't it?  Damned leeches might as well have a direct siphon to my wallet.


However, not all instancing is the same.  For instance :why_so_serious:, EVE is heavily instanced but manages to do a good job at remaining an MMO.  Actually, EVE may be the perfect MMO, I just wish I found it a little more interesting.  I guess I need to get into their PvP.

Fastest way to fall asleep.

Heavily instanced? No.  Loading screens and instances aren't the same thing.

:oh_i_see:

Not sure why the comment.  It's probably the most recent, big budget MMO to employ the open dungeon concept.  While the game was an overall failure, there were enough people at release to readily recognize that open dungeons were an artifact of the past that needed to be done away with.

Really, the more I think about the Massively part of the MMO, I only think we need it for the showing off / social / economic aspects of the game at all anymore. I mean if every game just had a series of towns or cities where the people could socialize, interact, show-off, have housing, trade, or cyber-hump that would solve about 90% of what people need from the Massively part of an MMOG. I believe all combat should be instanced, pvp or otherwise. It makes for better quality control, environment-changing, story-telling, etc.

The idea of a "world" is over-rated, because most of the time that world is barren and void.

Guild Wars with Housing and an Auction House?  Yes please.

I really don't care if other people are in the open world or not.  Passing by another individual can be interesting, but generally it only affects me negatively to not at all.  (I'm really curious if GW2 changes this to where it can be a positive.)  I'm fine with only seeing people in social hubs.

That said, I'm aware it's a playstyle choice.

Not exactly, but its very, very close when you look at the way it plays.  I would consider them basically the same. 

I dunno, I'm at 48 and didn't do even half of what was available in Trollshaws/Misty Mountains. I keep outleveling areas before I get very far into them.

Re: Eve, a lot of those PVE mission areas are essentially instances, or at least that is how it seemed to me.

I have to disagree.  If I zone into a zone and I might go into ThatZone 43, or my own version of that zone, its instanced.   If I go through a loading screen to get to ThatZone, and everyone that goes there is in the same place, thats pretty different to me.  (Example: Lord of the Rings has lots of loading screens, especially in a place like Bree in which going into almost any building is a load, but its not instanced versions of those buildings).

Social is a big reason. Ask yourself why you don't just buy single-player games. Because you want to interact with a number of other real players.

Maybe we have different ideas of "interact" and "a number of".

I want to "interact" not in a chat lobby but in the game world itself, seeing other players in 3D and in the same landscape (if we are both supposed to be in the same world spot).

I want "a number of" to be as many players as possible who think they are also in the same world copy I am. I like bustling cities, and seeing people indoors and outdoors.

I want limitations to "a number of", ala instancing, only where there is a game reason or technically-unavoidable limitation that necessiates it, and not have gratuitous "5 at a time" or "10v10 BG" enforced on me.

PvP does seem better at justifying the open-world side of things these days, and I still think early DAoC was unbeatable for MMO battles in the Frontiers and Darness Falls (for whoever said dungeons should never be instanced, I find it hard to believe you played early DAoC and DF - unless you meant PvE which I can understand).

I like to play this with friends. I don't want to interact with people. General misunderstanding. People like the multi-player aspect of mmog, no one plays an mmo to play with 200 hundred strangers at once cooperatively. Hell the 40 man raids amongst guild members was a flaw of epic portions acknowledge by blizzard.

DF (and to a lesser degree Dodens Gruda and the other frontier dungeons) was a special case. If you ever had to fight with 234 necromancers for a place to kill stuff in Stonehenge Barrows then you know why most DAOC players will not look back on non-instanced dungeons fondly. But actually even the DF thing wasn't much fun if you were on something sub-level-50.

I mean yes I occasionally had a good time sneaking over to Hib side and dropping AE hammers on a group of mid-30s pulling the chef room, but I suspect it wasn't the most fun THEY ever had in an MMO.

DLRiley good point about friends vs. strangers. The more I think on it a really good point.

The nature of online player bases and our communications options in and out of game have changed a lot over the years. Years ago, I don't remember anything like the stupid chat channel 5-year old drivel that gets spouted on a continuous basis in any current game. The invasion of imbecilic unwashed masses behavior has led to a natural insulation desire in MMOs that once embraced shared online experiences as a cool novelty to be sought out.

Way back when, it didn't seem odd at all to make virtual friends with RL strangers as the norm, when that was the majority position. Some can gripe all they want about EQ1, but it was a giant game in its time and it was a time when strangers were "all in it together" and helpful. The difficulty of the game was meant to be conquered by groups and strangers, and interacting was itself one goal. Sure, applying today's insulation standards to EQ1 in 1999, it makes it seem way too hard, too demanding, too penalizing - EQ1 was good at necessitating cooperation.

I was in a guild with no RL friends on my server for a couple of years non-stop, but they became my friends even though it never went outside the game. Same with early DAoC through ToA. As games came and went, that ability to play and socialize purely through the simulation lens of the game suffered and "breaking the veil" became commonplace.

Maybe what drives people to think they need to play with friends now, is that it is all too painfully obvious that you are playing with strangers when you try to place them in a friendly in-game role. The increasingly fleeting time spent isn't enough to elevate them much - a group in EQ1 or DAoC never just "ended after a quest boss"; everyone often found something more to do together, even if they had not played together before.

I wonder how much of that is due to the games encouraging such behavior, or just the games trying to take in the ever growing social network crowd.  Say what you want about WoW, it came out AFTER facebook, even if facebook was a lot different back then.  People were really starting to ramp up using the internet as a social networking platform with people they already knew.

When I was "social networking" with people on the internet years ago, it was with people I didn't know and never planned to meet in real life, just random strangers who by virture of being online too shared a hobby.


Edit: Incidentally, I wonder if this is why I tend to be drawn to more niche games, regardless of their mechanics?

The book quests alone involve a fucking stupid amount of running all over the zone (then back to elrond) then across the universe (then back to elrond) then over the hills and far away (then back to elrond). This is more what I meant. Though it's also present in a number of the regular quest hub quests. iIn my group we started calling it "All quests lead to Elrond".

I agree with pretty much all of your post. But at the same time, things have moved on, and they have done so for a reason. A lot of us here on f13, and the old EQ1 players in general have gotten that much older, and (most of us) no longer have the time to sink into a game in the way we did with EQ. At the same time, most/the majority of the newer WoW players have never played a game like that before, and honestly, they would never stand for it. They just wouldn't play if it required the time investment of EQ.

Nowadays, I just want to play with my friends, and I'm someone who occasionally had a leadership role in raids back in EQ1 for my guild, leading 72 of my closest friends in the PoP era etc etc. I just don't give a shit about any of that anymore. When I started playing WoW, on release and for the year or so after. I saw people get jacking-off-excited about going to Molten Core, and I could have been amongst them, but I no longer gave a shit. A couple of RL friends played that way for awhile and encouraged me to join them, but eventually they lost interest in the raid game before I got excited. One other former RL friend became a major raid guild catass in EQ did the same in WoW, and he's still out there, somewhere, catassing his entire life away nearly 10 years later now.

These days, I'm more interested in the "Game" part of "MMOG", and now the "World" part. People like my wife would never have played EQ1, due to both the time investment and the constant cockstabbing of the game, but WoW and LotRO are doable. This perhaps makes her "not hardcore" or whateverthefuck, but her money works just like everyone else's.

Hell, even for all my bitching, I still think games like Divine Souls and Torchlight MMO can be good.  Granted, the only MMO I am paying for at the moment in World War 2 Online, so that buys me a LITTLE bit of leeway maybe.  Point being, just because something isn't a good "MMO" in my opinion doesn't mean its a bad game, or that it isn't worth paying money for.

The real problem is the utter ubiquity of games that are shit, and call themselves MMOs because the publisher thinks its the way to money hats.

Well, yes, but that's neither here nor there. But really, who bothers with the majority of these games, unless they have a ton of game ADHD or are questing for their "perfect" MMO? - which will never happen.

To put it another way, there are a lot of FPS games being released these days - and it's been so for the past 5 years. Pretty much all of them also have some knd of Multiplayer deathmathch/TDM tacked on as well. Who gives a shit about most the overwhelming majority of them?  

Seriously - just look down the thread titles on this page and the preceding pages. Who really cares about many of them? Most of them are going to (probably) make it to release, then muddle around for a bit, amazingly not becoming WoW-beaters, then die quietly.

THOR HATE MID-THIRTIES HIBERNIANS

Nope. Poplock, not an MMO.  :oh_i_see: