f13.net

http://www.mmorpg.com/showFeature.cfm/feature/7540/Mark-Kern-Have-MMOs-Become-Too-Easy.html

Probably should be in a useless news thread, but that's in PC games not MMOs. Plus we needed a new thread here, it's getting boring. :P

Of course all the catasses everywhere are relinking/ reblogging this agreeing with the lament. "Wah, games got too casual. Nothing "matters" anymore. Things are too simple." Same old tired arguments as when the switch from EQ to WoW happened. "All these damn casuals are fucking up MY GAME where I make a difference."

I find it amusing and a bit disheartening that it's being twisted as a WoW dev posting it and saying he dun goofed. It's a misrepresentation of the whole article as he's really stating something different; that the journey matters more than 'reaching the endgame.' No surprise that particular message is being missed by the type of gamer who cares only about endgaming and raiding and keeping things inaccessable.

Of course he spends the last 1/3 of the article hyping his new game, Firefall. No idea how that plays, I hadn't even known it was a new game out there. Did he live up to his own goals here? I'm not curious enough to find out.

Still, I agree with the sentiment he's expressed but it ignores the real problem. That no game can satisfy people for the THOUSANDS of hours MMOs encourage. Perhaps if they eliminated grinds the fun would be found again. TOR was much more fun with 12x experience rather than the 60/90-day grind through the story and planets it had at launch. It certainly wasn't a change in difficulty but a change in pacing that kept me entertained on my recent go-back.

The combat was just as challenging as it was previously. Some of the elites and champion spawns and definitely the bosses required me to think-through some of the combats. The fight against one of the Sith masters on my Inquisitor wasn't handed to me on a platter the way he assumes is being done in all games. I think a mix of his approach AND a faster run through real content is what's needed.

We love single player games because they don't demand our lives be traded-over whole hog to complete them. We love MMOs because they are ongoing experiences we can (or in some cases are required to) share with other people. Focus on those aspects and you'll find success again, even if it's not to the tune of 12million players. That's a pipe dream, anyway.

Disclaimer: In no way am I attacking you or calling you out.

Have you really never heard of or read anything about Firefall?

Yep.

But then I don't follow new games much anymore. I'm officially old.

I've heard that it is a thing that exists, i know absolutely nothing about it either.

Nothing has changed in 15 years of MMOs.

Mark Kern is a moron.

His take away from being a team lead on a game that made a gajillion dollars and is pretty much the only MMO that hasn't closed or gone free-to-play after three years, is that players secretly want to be kicked in the nuts more.

Also, that devblog is from 2 years ago. Since that time, he's been fired for being utterly terrible in every way (https://www.techinasia.com/firefall-mark-kern-sacked-the9-story/).

I didn't even have to finish the article to get the impression as well. The thing that happened with MMOG's is when we removed some of the arcane shit that was contributing to the difficulty, we discovered that the gameplay was pretty goddamn weak at heart. And no one has really found a way to make that gameplay not suck for the long haul, or really change it much in any meaningful way. I mean, WOW is nothing more than EQ at its gameplay heart, it just has QOL things like mini maps, quest markers, chat channels, macros and such built in. Lo and behold, the gameplay of DIKUMUD based games just aren't that fucking difficult.

Well, it shouldn't be surprising that in a genre that is, ostensibly, about a persistent "always on" game world, that time ends up being the most important factor in the genre.  So you can either embrace that and then limit your playerbase to people who want to spend a ton of hours on your game, or try to mitigate it and end up with a game like Haemish describes - boring gameplay that is accessible to people, but doesn't really capitalize on the ONE thing the genre potentially has going for it in the first place.

The problem with MMOs is always going to be the vast gap between the speed in content development and consumption.  That's why it took years to level in Everquest, why you have to farm the same dungeon for months in every game ever, why we have words like "grind" and "dailies" and "rep farming".  You have to repeat the content hundreds of times because it takes hundreds of times more to make it than to consume it.  The industry is stuck until someone comes up with an MMO random dungeon generator that actually makes fun content, a real sandbox game or a pvp game that doesn't blow.

The problem isn't the games getting casual, it isn't the games getting hardcore. It isn't even grindiness or levels or classes.

It's that the magic is kinda gone. People know what they are getting, MMOs just don't surprise you anymore. A pattern has been set, and people can forecast out what their experience will be, and usually it's one they have seen before.

People are excited about No Man's Sky, or indie titles, or whatever, because they go "whoa." That's what's missing. The whoa.

Page Keanu Reeves, stat

This is true, but mainly for DIKU MMOs.   I think a lot of people still go "woah" when they see a big battle in EVE, or even a tank column in Planetside 2.  They key is that the moments that make you go "woah" in an MMO basically have to be tied to the .. MM.. .part of the title.  They are also, inherently I think, the very same things that push the genre towards being inaccessible/too time consuming, etc.

Mark Kern is an utter tosspot and Raph is right about the Magic, IMO.

The magic is gone because the minute-to-minute gameplay really hasn't changed one iota from the release of Everquest til now.

Surprise! A WoW dev thinks they game needed to be harder. They all thought that way. That's what led us to them fucking their game over with Cataclysm. Because they got butthut. Just like the D3 devs, because they were giant man-babies who couldn't understand that they were making mass appeal games for giant amounts of successful cash. The fucking knobs.

You want to make shitty kick you in the nuts art? Fine, do it on your own dime. Because nobody will buy enough of it for you to finish.

The reason MMOs still suck today is because of three things in my mind: 1 - Most of the combat never escalated past EQ with some tweaks, 2 - The concept of a living economy only works if the goods are unique, meaning you can't have inputs all be standard copper ore makes exactly the same fucking sword as everyone else, and 3 - Players are asshats and nobody has come up with a good solution on how to stop players from being asshats.

See: Wildstar

Because targeting the hardcore and ignoring casuals was a great marketing move for Wildstar.

 :awesome_for_real:

Edit: Beat me to it by a few seconds ;)

You guys just don't get it because you aren't hardcore enough.  :why_so_serious:



Also agree with Raph.  I've lost that loving feeling.  :heartbreak:

Well, yeah, but we're old.

It's the youngers that have lost it that are the main problem.

But WoW has always sucked... It was a calculated effort like everything Blizzard makes, to take an established formula and make it accessible to the masses.

And while filthy casuals have ruined the hardcore MMO experience, that experience needed to be ruined anyway because hardcore MMO players need to be paying dominatrixes a lot more money than 15 bucks a month to step on their tiny little dicks.

For me, "MMO" as a descriptive term in and of itself doesn't really matter anymore. I think the core concepts of what made an MMO are already being applied to many other games. One of my favorite games in recent memory is Destiny, where they basically just took a shooter and squirted some MMO onto it.

I think MMO as a standalone genre is just not as relevant or exciting anymore, it's a thing to squirt onto other genres to mix them up.

My sentiments on MMOs exactly. That's one of the reasons I dig Destiny too.

I think that MMO's mostly dropped any pretense of persistence in anything but the characters, and to a great extent made themselves very large and pretty lobbies for raid-oriented gameplay.

There are a few exception (Eve most particularly), but for the most part world persistence was abandoned (and eventually picked up by the Survival genre, which didn't really exist back in the day). If all that persists is the character, there are only so many ways you can change up the core gameplay, and even fewer that you can change the social dynamic. And frankly, what the OLRPG does, most of it is done better by MOBA's (another genre that didn't exist when WoW was launched). When somebody gets tired of WoW, they don't go looking for "WoW with/without BLANK". New Diku-derivatives simply can't offer enough content at launch to compete with WoW for anything but the tourist population.

--Dave

MMORPGs are like colouring-in books. Sandbox games are like blank sketch books. I want my achievements in a game to be things I've created, not just lines I've filled in.

That's the potential 1000s of hours of game play that MMOs have lost for me.

I think games like Arche Age for instance show there's still a very sizable interest for MMOs that want to expand on persistence, cooperation, large battles; things only an MMO can really offer.
Part of the problem seems to be the West still can't get past trying to out-blizzard blizzard or have just given up since it's never going to happen, and Korea can't resist throwing in soul-crushing grind and client-side hackery shenanigans.

Give me the equivalent to Arche Age of what WoW was to EQ and I'd be playing that, not like when I was a twenty-something, but I'd be playing it for years to come.

All I want in life is a (new) pseudo-medieval (persistent) open-world sandbox MMORPG where not every feature is built around combat, or PvP. I want to bake bread (AND crush - occasionally). Also, journey, not destination. Also, interact with other players as much as with the environment. Also, no endless level treadmill. Also, casual roleplaying. Also, should be a mix of UO, SWG, ATITD and Daggerfall/Morrowind/Skyrim. Is that so much to ask for?  :heartbreak:

So basically larger scale PW Story servers from Neverwinter Nights circa 2001.

See I'm the exact opposite. I want an entertainment experience. If I want efforts and creativity that "matters" I do shit in real life.

I've always been intrigued by the world actively working against the players. Which MMOs have tried before but never really done well.

The idea behind Rift was sort of like this, but instead it became instances happening in the world. No real consequence of you ignoring it, therefore no change on the world.

The one facet MMOs never got right was a changing world. Ever. To me a fun PvE MMO wouldn't be instanced dungeons, it would be your people holding back the hordes of evil trying to sweep down on your lands, and then driving them back to open up new lands. And then when the battle was won, one way or the other, the server would end and you would begin again. This is one reason Crowfall amused me because it's taking that idea on a pvp basis and making it about short term randomly generated servers.

I had thought I read this before, then I realized it was 2 years old. I still love this quote:


As long as you have devs saying this, you'll have shit games being made. Also any dev that thinks this should get fired.

The problem with MMOG's has always been that rather than becoming an actual medium onto which multiple gameplay templates could be mixed, matched and melded, the developers and publishers could only ever envision/execute a genre with its legacy gameplay systems that iterate on an increasingly familiar experience but with more/less X, and requiring increasingly unrealistic revenue streams to make up for unnecessarily inflationary budgets.

I agree for the most part, though I'm not sure about the requiring increasingly unrealistic revenue streams. Maybe hoping for unrealistic rev streams, but not requiring.

The major issue, for the most part, is that DIKU MMOs are fucking not fun to play mechanically. If we can ever get a decent action based MMO that's actually fun to play in of itself you'll see an advancement in MMOs (TERA has great combat but no real game surrounding it). Or if we ever get some kind of dynamic living world but the closest I've seen is a game like No Man's Sky.

We still haven't seen real AAA stab in an online persistent world where it's all about building/trading/social that isn't 2nd Life. We've got a ton of instanced or smaller scale games (minecraft etc), but nothing in any kind of scale. I don't know if the tech is there for it yet or we have a solution to the DICKS EVERYWHERE problem.

By requiring, I mean their budget is so unrealistic or uncontrollable that they end up requiring more revenue than they can possibly make in a market consumed by the 300-lb gorilla of World of Warcraft.

Also, DICKS EVERYWHERE would be a great title for a book on the history of MMOG's.

Big ole Minecraft dong on the cover.

This was the Big Thing I had planned for Wish: Evil/Chaos would be represented by an energy field (tracked with diffusion maps), the more that the players pushed back the NPC forces (took over more towns), the stronger the opposition they would get (and the more powerful the NPC counter-attacks to take towns back from the players). Eventually you would reach an equilibrium where the players simply couldn't push any harder without effectively crowding out another group of players somewhere else. Logarithmic scale, in the early days (when characters were weak and players didn't know what they were doing) it would be easy to roll up the 'dark energy', as they took more territory it would get tougher at an ever increasing rate until, if the players somehow managed to concentrate all the evil of the world into a small area, that small area would be shoulder-to-shoulder with constantly spawning uber-mobs (dimensional portals would be a random occurrence, dialing up in both frequency and strength of their outputs).

There were a lot of elements to that, I wanted to do a lot of herd-level A-Life stuff under the hood (at a very high level of abstraction), economic pressures and resource distribution would shape where the players would want to push forward and there was a whole range of 'self-assembling Evil horde' emergent AI stuff I never got a chance to even prototype. I had only vague notions of how to reconcile scripted content with these zones of control (what if your quest target was in the middle of the emergently-generated Mount Doom?). But the essential gist was that although it was a world that would respond to the players, there were carefully hidden rails with elastic boundaries ensuring that they wouldn't break it. The diffusion maps opened up a lot of interesting possibilities, I had what seemed like a really cool idea for a 'Soul Reapers' NPC faction that would generate outposts at locations where lots of players had died in PvP combat (every time players killed each other, it would feed into a 'soul energy' diffusion map, when enough had accumulated in a single place the Soul Reapers came to feed).

Ahh, well, roads not taken and all that.

--Dave

This right here. AA was great until you hit the lolkorea RNG grind.

There really hasn't been many MMOs that have shut down. They've all made money over the long term. So I'm not sure who you're talking about specifically unless you're talking about some indie kind of studio.

WAR shut down as the result of just being an epic fail (although I miss my ironbreaker)

The first MMO magic I felt came with UO and EQ.

UO (ex the PKing) had magic because 1) it was new, 2) with a short power curve, living in the world was all the game was about and 3) a 7xGM character gave one power and flexibility in how to play and where to play.  If a dev tried UO today, he would get crucified for not having an endgame but the fact the UO was not meant to "end" was part of its beauty.

EQ's magic came from 1) casino loot drops, 2) shared misery and 3) it was the first "social network" of the internet when one combined all the various EQ-related message boards. None of those things are "magic" any more.

Mass market MMOGs are done.  The technology is there to build micro-MMOGs targeted at specific interests but no developer has decided to really try and make it work because none of them have given anyone with actual money any confidence a MMOG developer can actually make a fun game. 

Really? This page has dozens.. Just the ones I recognize:

Auto Assault
City of Heroes/Villains
Darkfall
Earth and Beyond
Free Realms
Gods and Heroes: Rome Rising (Slight caveat: there is apparently an unsupported server still up)
Hellgate
Lego Universe
Pirates of the Caribbean Online
Roma Victor
Shadowbane
Star Wars Galaxies
Tabula Rasa
The Matrix Online
ToonTown
Vanguard

On the subject of Darkfall (and games that kick you in the balls repeatedly in general), a bunch of guys want to licence Darkfall (http://darkfallnewdawn.com/) and run it without all the ridiculous carebear stuff that was added after the original game crashed hard on release. Apparently the lesson that they took away was the same as Mark Kern's - if you kick hard enough and aim for the taint, they will come.


I'm sure that the draw of being chainganked the minute you spawn your freshly created character into the world will be a winner.

The hardcore weren't held enough as children. I'm convinced of it.

I imagine it's roughly the same audience that secretly hopes for the apocalypse because in the post apocalypse surely they would be king and the only reason they are living unfulfilled lives is because society has imposed upon them mediocrity.

Nice to see a return of the monthly subscription model. And the escalating box cost is a great twist on an old favorite.

I agree with this, for me it's Marvel Heroes.

I didn't realize you were on the Wish team.  When they closed down in beta that made me so sad.  It really was closing in on my ideal game at the time.

RIP Feathers, my chicken friend (and I'm sorry for scaring the eggs out of you with a hand scythe).

The first Wish alpha was fun. The second Wish alpha (aka Goat Fucking for Profit) leaned a little too hard on goat taming.

I enjoyed Wish.  A friend and I took over towns and exploited the hell out of the combat mechanics and the economy to our delight.  I even remember chatting with Dave during a couple of the events they had in alpha.  Shame the game didn't get to be produced.

Reminds me of economically ignorant noobs selling junk epics on trade chat. "Buy it now before I raise the price!".

Dave was gone before the second alpha.

Wish was really fun to work on for the short time I got to. We had so *much* hardware to run it on that a lot of things that had been completely out of the question were within reach (our server setup actually rated a spot on the top 100 supercomputer list). It was a *huge* world, but using the diffusion map approach I was able to define the resource distribution for about 40 different resources in a single day (greyscale bitmaps, about 30 meters in-world to a cell). When you mined for ore and succeeded, the appropriate resource availability map got slightly depleted (it would regenerate, how quickly depended on how rich that cell was supposed to be). Some things spawned on the surface (plants, pearls, a few others), with generally the same rules (a successful spawn in a cell 'blacked out' that cell in the availability map, then it regenerated according to the strength of the resource map, the higher the availability in a cell the higher the chance of a spawn).

NPC's were going to work by similar rules, but would also have an additional set of 'affinity' maps that would control how they wandered across the world. Affinity maps were essentially a sort of pathing system, things that kind of NPC was attracted to would draw them to wander in that direction. Being in a cell would tend to slowly lower the local affinity (so things would tend to keep moving), resources that they liked would tend to raise it, and the various maps of climate types would feed into them too. I had even worked out how to make it respond to weather events, and just about *any* type of event that we could test for could be used (for example, we could have had NPC's that were drawn to mining activity, and even that were drawn to the success of particular *kinds* of resource gathering (plucking pearls by the seashore? The Mermen would like to have a word....).

I could have done a 'Dark Lord calling the evil horde' type of event with *zero* code. Just make the Dark Lord a max-level attractor on the  relevant affinity maps, and they would all come to Barad-dûr, drawn by a longing they did not understand but must obey.

Between the efficiency of the system and the raw power of the hardware, I could play around with this in real time, modify the source maps, upload them, and force a total recalculation (weeks worth of normal operation) in 20 seconds or so.

--Dave

I think Fury still beats them all for the fastest to shutter  :grin:


That system sounds awesome and I really wonder what would have happened if Wish hadn't beta'ed so early.  I know people hated the click to move system but it's hard to tell if the negativity was over game mechanics as a whole or the terrible time people had during the staggered beta phase that had a lot of technical isssues.

I'm telling you, it was the goddamn goats.

Click-to-move wasn't great, but the way the underlying system worked it was pretty much unavoidable (decisions made before I was around). A big part of the problem was that I just couldn't articulate The Vision in a way that the server team could relate to (them being in Canada and the rest of us in Alabama didn't help). There were all these disparate parts I was having them build, and they couldn't see how they were the base level of something much more elegant and powerful.

I think there were some unrealistic expectations based on their inexperience with MMO's, as well. A month or so before the beta there was *zero* content, just a handful of spawn points set manually for in-house testing, a vendor system with no economic tracking behind it, resource gathering that always succeeded because there was no underlying resource pool, etc. In about a month the system went from 'technical demo' to 'early beta', and all the bits I had them put in just *worked*. I had deliberately reduced the complexity so that we'd have a stable base to work from (for example, all of the economic parameters for the towns were set identically, except for size and the core value of one resource in two towns). In all truth, that first beta was about 90% of the way to what AC or Horizons had at launch. But it felt awfully inadequate if you didn't realize how hard it was to reach that 'working and fun' baseline.

Goats.... Literally two days before the beta, the server guys tell me that the 'pet' code is ready, and the only NPC model we had available that seemed appropriate to using for a test case was goats (there were sheep, but I was using them for testing the herd AI stuff and didn't want them in the world). So you wound up with pet goats.

--Dave

I miss my CoX, ToonTown, and Hellgate. Then again, those were the games my son and I would play that we enjoyed playing together.

What was the comic that had the fly representing Shadowbane and one other MMORPG?

I thought the grind is what killed DAoC and Warhammer, then again I would have liked those to be more like PlanetSide 1 or 2.

This one?
(http://i.imgur.com/vvcZpfz.jpg)

Doesn't seem like they want to make it more hardcore, just a better game.
"Power gap reduction." -Would imply less grind. A big problem in DF was the need to have a maxed out character to compete in PvP. Which could take a year straight of heavy grinding/macroing overnight. This heavy Korean style grind, was completely unnecessary, and a poor attempt at player retention (had the opposite effect), was the most "hardcore" part of the game.

The rest of the stuff is just saying better RPG systems. A second big problem of DF was that the world itself had little life, basically little content. It was just the equivalent of a huge FPS map where players could capture some some home areas with better resources & topography than others. Then a problem was players would log in looking to fight, form up combat parties and go out raiding, and often spend hours wandering around looking for fights, mostly finding smaller, unready parties - ganks. Eventually if you stuck around in an area long enough your enemies would rally and you would usually then in turn face a force much bigger and in turn get smashed. We would often just hang around our cities and have internal sparring fights because that would be guaranteed to be decent, and not a waste of time like roaming could be.

So the big problem was even if you liked the fast paced, FPS style combat of DF (and a lot of people did), there was a punishing grind to get there, and even when you did then getting quality action was too inconsistent (partially because the playerbase was too low, because of the heavy grind). Then for downtime there was very little RPG intrigue. No game driven story or economic elementals, mediocre at best PvE. The original Greek/Norwegian devs were just too slow and broke to add new content.  So why play that game when you could just load of Warband, Age of Chivalry, or Quake and be guaranteed quality action, and fairer fights? No subscription required. 

Darkfall had a fantastic physics/combat engine, by far the best I've seen in a MMORPG so there's a good base to work with. There's a very good game possible with it if you have a better character balance & content design.


 

Thanks MahrinSkel! That is the one. Couldn't remember it, but used to read it when I would go on a web comic binge.

Since all of you are about as jaded as it is possible to be...

What WOULD be magical for you, these days? I often wonder about it for myself as a player, much less as a designer.

I honestly don't know anymore. MMOG-wise, anytime I start a new one I feel like I'm sucking on the crack pipe as hard as I possibly can, but that smoke just ain't doing it.

ArcheAge was the closest for me in a while, until I hit the Korean RNG hell. A good mix of world PVP, crafting and player housing/farming.

ArcheAge was definitely a step in the right direction. I want a huge world to explore, a skill based rather than level based advancement, and goodies like crafting and housing/farming. And PvP. And a pony. And  a time machine to go back and play UO as a PK instead of being a wussy carebear like I was.

So if "No Man's Sky" is procedural generation taken to it macro extreme, I want to see it at it's micro extreme. Instead of trying to dynamically fill-out an infinite number of cubic meters with content, try to dynamically fill-out a few cubic meters with an infinite amount of content.

Broken record here, I know, but modded Minecraft. And to a lesser extent, Kerbal Space Program.

I long ago realised that game developers could not keep up with our ability to consume content. Having decent, engaging and flexible frameworks within which to create my own content - and modders content - is all that works for me now, 99% of the time.

Yeah, this is much more interesting. Filling up space with navigable geometry is no longer interesting.

A time machine that would let me go back to a time when I had the free time and energy to really let myself get invested in a game? Aging has as much to do with what you're seeing from the gaming 'core' as anything in the games themselves.

The magic is gone, bro.

Actually I think we may be close to, or already past, a tipping point where people know what to do in pretty much any MMO game. This could kind of be put to work in a psychology experiment by relaunching a lot of UO features where you get players to intentionally ruin the fun for assholes like me.

I'm not sure if that made sense, but basically instead of the sheep/wolves problem we had with UO 20 years ago, the sheep hold all the cards and need incentive to try to fuck with the PKers as much as possible. In some meaningful way that is fun for everyone. Don't worry about the PKers (why people do that I have no idea - hint: they'll play anything with good combat)  just worry about making the rewards and gameplay meaningful for everyone else.

I've always kind of hated defined classes and defined levels and defined outfits and things like that. I LIKED wearing a chain tunic and a robe to make it look like I didn't have any armor on. No gorgets ever, etc. That mystery is long fucking gone. Like dig up that link describing TF2 development where they specifically made the characters easy to recognize based on the shapes and shadows they produced. That is the bullshit that we are dealing with now.

I could write a bunch of stuff that I hope is true but in the end probably isn't realistically true or deliverable. Immersion is a big part of it but the convenience of Mumble/TS in organizing and communicating breaks immersion when your group mates start talking about porn/politics/family.

Tell us what you want, what would make you go 'wow'. Figuring out how to deliver it is our problem.

--Dave

I got a few more:

A player-controlled world were PvP- and PvP+ have equal importance and sway over the world.

When I roleplay my character, the world roleplays back.

Dynamic tech trees.

Poverty and non-combat are a valid, flushed-out strategies.

Something to fight for in PvP+ besides epeen. Moral consequences to winning and losing.

We could talk a lot about higher quality games, and sophisticated RPG/FPS/RTS hybrids, but to get actual "magic", simply put you need a game that produces epic moments. Theme park PvE content won't get anyone excited especially as walkthroughs instantly hit the net, nor will even PvP that's constricted to small arenas, and finely balanced with in an e-sports style (looking at you planetside 2). On the PvE side, you need stuff like bigass monsters spawning anywhere, city invasions, on gong-show dungeons where anything can happen (even like those trains in old EQ/UO dangeons). On the PvP side, there should also be events that draw in people far and wide for chaotic event, and give players the chance to create super weapons, like flying battleships.

Pretty much this.

Though amazing settings and well-crafted worlds always have done it for me. WoW dragged me in based on the amount of story and care I saw in my 2004 Beta trip. Everquest before that did the same.

A world that reacts to you and others when your are offline. Fully. Type of gameplay can be discussed later. Not sure if we can do dynamic worlds yet like that.

If I could bring back things from the days when I played mmorpg's and enjoyed myself, not knowing what's next, the feeling that you get better as you play the game, getting to know people inside the game, do stuff you didn't think you would enjoy, feeling like you have a place in the world and that you fight more than soulless monsters.  Far too many developers puts a lot of their energy into guiding you through the game that it no longer feels like you are the one playing it. The other problem is that far too many games has copy/paste content that only exists for you to spend time on it and get more exp.

I have no idea how to design a game for it, but a starting point would be that you have a chance of dying when playing your character in the world. Leveling up to cap where you never challenge yourself and never run the risk of dying kills my interest.

I think the big one is going to be a world where things happen regardless of what the players are doing.  Rift started down that path and severely toned it down because players don't like their themepark disrupted, EQNext was making a lot promises in this direction before they got Romneyed.  A sandbox game with a living breathing world would bring back the magic.

Skill based, co-op fusion of Demon's Souls and Diablo 1 with character perma death.  Each character's skill sets and items are passed on to the next character as part of your blood line (e.g. if your first character learned fireball and took it to level 9 with the shatterstorm mod, then your next character would know fireball at level 1 with the shatterstorm mod).  Leveling any individual character is fairly quick, but death is inevitable.  A fair amount of the objective is to build an ancestral home (I think what EQ Landmark was doing was interesting).  The optimum path should be trying hard to survive, but also not playing so cautious that it's tedious.  I think maybe add in an afterlife where you can revisit playing dead characters (possibly they need to do something to give access to the living).

I like leveling.  I like playing new characters. I like dicking around with building stuff.  I like challenging gameplay, but I don't want to be hyper-cautious.  I don't want to lose my characters, but I want a reason to play new ones/try skill sets that otherwise might not immediately sound appealing.

Most recent game that really resonated with me was Life is Strange. And 7 Kingdoms: The Princess Problem. And from very much the opposite end of the spectrum, Rule the Waves.

I realize this is completely unhelpful :why_so_serious:

I'm going to be the outlier here -- I am neither particularly jaded nor cynical, although I am an "older" gamer. But I still find worlds to enjoy even now.

My primary MMORPG heritage goes like this: Asheron's Call, Anarchy Online, Earth and Beyond, Guild Wars, Dungeons and Dragons Online, Lord of the Rings Online, The Secret World. Theme park all the way baby! Give me an interesting story, cool graphics, nice scenery, and mechanics that don't kick me in the crotch too much and I'm a subscriber. I give exactly zero rat's asses about the inclusion of PvP in my RPG. If I want that, I prefer pure combat MMOs like WWIIOnline (the idea if not the execution) or Planetside. I have never played one MMORPG that integrated PvP and PvE in a way that compelled me to spend any more than a minor fraction of my time exploring the PvP side of the game.

Sandbox MMO? Maybe if I could actually live in it I'd like such a thing, but like many here with a real life to live that takes up a surprising percentage of the day, I don't have the time to properly develop a life in a virtual world anymore. And games like Minecraft don't count, since they are mainly building games where you can drop in for an hour or so a day and work on projects. I'm talking more the Star Wars Galaxies model, where a player economy/society is part of the sandbox.

And of course, the above is just one gamer's opinion, not meant to represent much of anything beyond that. But you asked...

As much as I would love a new great MMO, I think the magic with it is gone.  It's like chasing the dragon looking for a new one to get addicted to.  The only one I play, and barely, is SWTOR.  Although I am back into that with the expansion, for however long that holds me.  I also don't really see anything on the horizon that is calling out to me.  I would love a new DDO type game.. with more open world type MMO elements though. 

I think the biggest thing really is someone has to make a game that has something new, but also doesn't try to cater to every group out there.  Mainly they have to be able to produce enough content fast enough to keep up with the player base.  Which is a huge task in itself.  I think SWTOR could have probably done that if they hadn't of skewed off so much onto the PvP front and wasted so much time on half ass attempts at World PvP and the constant class balancing.  I know Star Wars needs to have that fell of galactic conflict, but I think they could have just done it a little bit better.  Even just leaving it as warzones and possibly weaving that with the raids so that every raid had a warzone that went with it.

Probably something that really felt social.  Like 99% of what MMO has come to mean is done better by single player games or more limited multiplayer (like Minecraft) so if an MMO wants to be interesting to me it needs to do novel things with it's large number of players.

Which, given that I'm turning in to an old recluse, is not easy.  I haven't seen an MMO that has been able to overcome my aversion to random internet people in a long time.  Most of them just say "you can't do X without a big enough group" and assume that will push me to make friends instead of push me to ignore that content and then wonder why I'm bored.  Not that I have any idea how to do better than that,  though.

And to show how hard game design is, balancing all the calls for meaningful PvP above, I and a great many of my older and/or female gamer acquaintances want absolutely nothing to do with PvP and direct competition, but want instead something that rewards cooperation without making soloing impossible and which encourages meeting new people but gives each person the ability to absolutely block any given person from ever interacting with them in ANY way ever again. I don't want to play volleyball or soccer without referees and with bullies who do everything in their power including cheating to win, why the hell is it so incomprehensible that I don't want to play with those same bullies in my virtual games?

Honestly, I think I may be done with MMOs. Too much grind, too many assholes, too much unfun for the sake of balance or PvP, too many kill 10 rats, too much ho-hum lore, too much gating and railroading. I'm much more interested in small "m" mMOs with 4 to 10 people in the same "zone" at a time. Which is really what most "MMO"s are nowadays anyway, be they massivley instanced 5-man raiding MMOs or Diablo/Marvel Heroes or Minecraft.

I'd like a game that mashes up elements from Minecraft (for infinite procedurally generated interesting worlds which can be permanently changed by players plus the ability to build and create) crossed with Crusader Kings (for random NPC's with varying traits, motivations, behaviors, factions and ambitions, and probably most importantly, feedback on all the above) and maybe Tera for its combat systems (minus having to aim at a lancer zipping all over the room to heal him!) and a dash of Warcraft I, II and III (for the ally and opfor NPCs and world that keeps happening with or without you doing anything, only much slower) and maybe some small amount of entropy so things slowly deteriorate without maintenance.

I'd like something where each player can generate one or a dozen worldlets, hosted on their own machine or in the cloud, with the ability to link (and de-link) their worldlet to anyone else's worldlet as they wish, though maybe it would require harvested resources to create and maintain the link. 

I'd like the setting to be medieval fantasy + magic with multiple NPC factions spanning the full range from "good" to "evil", not just Bioware cartoony good guys vs bad guys and not Bethesda angsty everyone is a bad guy either. The player should be able to align and interact with the NPC factions in various ways based on their actions and with meaningful but only very rarely irreversible consequences if at all (even the most implacable enemy may become an ally, given enough time and an external threat even more dangerous than yourself).

Maybe the players are immortal demi-gods or Capital "H" Hero Planeswalkers or something, with no permadeath and having a bit more power than mere mortals but still not omnipotent. Combat loss may or may not result in death and respawning with no character progress loss and with or without gear loss, depending on if gear is mostly a commodity that's easily replaced (like Minecraft) or extremely rare and valuable and either irreplaceable or requiring days and weeks to replace (EQ 1). You live and move and fight and talk and explore in the 3D world but also have NPC followers, build armies, make trade agreements and sign treaties with NPCs and generally build a kingdom. You can hire workers, buy slaves, conquer or recruit NPC groups, and give your subjects/followers orders for harvesting and exploring and defending and building and manufacturing and farming like an RTS but on MUCH slower timescales, more like the WoW housing stuff maybe.

And the world needs to be dynamic, with NPC groups doing their thing and reacting to other NPCs as well as players appropriately. Some kind of "real" economy with non-homogeneous distribution of resources and workers and corresponding trade systems. The world(s) should have seasons, biomes, weather and geological events, and socio-political dynamics as well with new resources discovered, old ones depleted, NPCs having kids, growing old and dying, conflicts between NPC factions breaking out and being resolved, NPC factions reacting to your and your kingdom's activities, etc.

Questing would be dynamically generated by the procedurally random activities of NPC factions and other events like weather and geology and magic and new NPC spawns. Maybe work in something like the dark/light stuff Mahrin was talking about, which could be used to limit how big a given worldlet could get - one player could only expand so far before the forces of darkness became too difficult to push back any further solo, but with a friend's help could go farther and a group could get even bigger yet.

Crafting and economics and resource gathering all need to be things that you set up and then let run on their own with minimal maintenance required until you want to change something, RTS style rather than EQ2's focus intently on whack-a-mole key pressing for 3 minutes to make one item, repeat 50 times to gain a level!  That was fun for awhile, but way too grindy the 5th time you take a crafter up to max level.

As others said while I was writing this wallOtext, the world needs to keep progressing even while the player is absent, although perhaps it might immediately start to slowly slow down and eventually stop after a couple days like a spring-wound clock until it's rewound the next time they log in. But that also means that it is possible to create defenses that the NPCs can maintain and hold ground in your absence without loosing all your shit just because you were on vacation for a week or working massive overtime for the holidays or whatever. I NEVER want to deal with a stupid game texting me while I'm at work to come play right now or risk losing the last three days of progress!!!!! Opposition NPC forces should be able to create setbacks and challenges, but your friendly NPC allies should be able to rally on their own to prevent massive rollbacks provided you've built up suitable defenses. Maybe that would be easier on whatever worldlet you've designated as your home, and other satellite colony/expeditionary adventures might be more risky and require more attention to maintain or stronger defensive infrastructure and garrisons if you want to let them fend for themselves.

I'd like infrastructure to be buildable and destroyable and worth building and worth defending. Castles/keeps for defense and territorial control, farms and mines and manufactories for resource production, harbors and shipyards and ships, roads and caravans, trade and magic and combat schools, maybe even aqueducts and irrigation works.

Probably most importantly, I've got to be able to play with The Countess, each of us with our favorite character, on either of our worlds, and both of us have fun, make progress, and gain useful loot/resources/rewards no matter what our level/power/time played disparity may be. Maybe I could send workers to one of her mines to get resources that I haven't found on my world(s) yet, or she could send a garrison of troops to help me storm a particularly difficult enemy stronghold.

DAoC without the grind, better balance, and less CC.

Oh... and a pony.

I can put it pretty simply for myself:  a medieval fantasy version of Eve.

I'm sorry but Eve has all the crap of the worst Feudal societies with very little of the good sides. I still play it occasionally for a bit of mission running, but If it wasn't internet spaceships people wouldn't touch it. The "massive sandbox" is ignored even by the majority of the playerbase of Eve for that reason.

Personally I think integrating PVP and PVE is a losing strategy. They are too fundamentally different modes of play and trying to satisfy both is the best way to fuck up your game. PVPers are by definition whiny bitches and will engage in forum PVP to get their special snowflake made more powerful. I learned that lesson from STO and the "KLINGONS ARE UNDERPOWERED despite them winning nearly every fight and having ships with better stats" forum crying. PVEers can be whiney bitches too, especially the "the only thing that matters is MORE DAMAGE Nerf defense!" crowd. Basically if you want to be PVE, then give the PVPers an arena to beat each other over the head with rocks and ignore them. Planetside is designed around PVP and does well because of that.

My ideal is a PVE co-operative environment with a good story and atmosphere. I remember in Tabula Rasa they had Base invasions where players had to defend against swarms of NPCs. The moment when you saw all the dropships coming in and dropping all the soldiers was one of the best feelings I had in a game. And if it was an "enemy" base they would get progressively harder till it was almost impossible to defend against. But that was part of the fun, to beat them back one more time. And all the bases had NPCs you needed so there was a reason for players to fight them so the battles had an effect, you lost the base or you saved it or you could attack a base to take it back. GW2 has the massive world bosses so players naturally gather together for those fights as well. Something like that with decent atmosphere would make me happy.

I always find co-operative way more fun than PVP. I'm just too old for my epeen to matter to me anymore. I just want to have a good time.

Heh, as others have said, age may be the big thing.  I remember when UO and EQ were coming out.  I was so amazed at the concept of a shared world.  I had so many ideas about what EQ would be like when it released.  While the game was much more hardcore and time consuming than I thought, just the action of running around in a shared world where I interacted with hundreds of players kept me engrossed.  I hungrily followed development news of all the MMO's being worked on, and filled in the gaps with my own dreams of what it might actually be like to have a true virtual world.  

Then of course they fucked it up for 15 years straight, and I'm pretty much over it.  I'm not sure if any game, no matter how amazing it actually is, could impress me as much as the first time I stepped foot in a 3d virtual world (no matter how crappy EQ actually was).  You can never go home again.

But looking back, trying to answer your question..... I think the number one thing at this point would be immersion.  I’ve always been an explorer at heart, and the last game I played that I enjoyed in that regard was Vanilla WoW.  Mainly due to its innovative use of an actual fucking art direction/style, unlike every MMO before it.  The world was big and seamless, the various environments unique and obviously hand crafted.  I spent hours and hours not leveling, but just running around trying to see new things and find places from the previous games.

Most of the MMO’s I’ve played in the last few years just have some very bland environmental art that gets used over and over again.  The zones feel like they are setup too specifically, each area for a specific obvious purpose (I burned out on GW2 very quickly for both of these reasons).  I think I’d like to see a game that returned to feeling as though you were in a truly big world.  Where picking up and moving to a new city is a bit of an investment.  I’m not advocating a return to total nut kicking inconvenience.  But a world where you do need to prepare a bit for a journey, that it actually takes time to move through.  A huge world that is filled with natural terrain, that has no specific game play purpose.  A chance to go out and discover things.   Actually, making an MMO with first person view only could be a big step itself in helping create immersion.  Another thing that set EQ apart from the post-WoW world.

On top of all that, the standard things about dynamic content and trade/crafting.  A real economy, sandbox,  ect.  Basically, a world that feels alive, that I’m totally immersed in.  First big step to that though is making, IMO, a world that feels huge again.  No matter how much bigger the games might actually be, no MMO world has felt nearly as massive to me as EQ’s did, in large part because you had to walk your ass everywhere.  How to do that without also making the game so inconvenient that it’s not fun (as EQ could be) is obviously the tricky part.

The sort of gameworld that SOE presented with everquest next sounded like it could be amazing. However, there is no chance in hell they can actually deliver on it.

Ok Raph, now back at you, what do you want to play?  What do you want to make?  If they aren't the same thing, talk about why.

I'd love SWG crafting in a world that had stuff to actually do. The problem was that SWG crafting was centered around combat that was pretty pointless after a while.

I do like skill based, and I do like achievements. I want to be able to contribute to the war effort while actually making gear that is distinguishable. Item decay is fine. Having crafters be the primary source of income is fine, if the materials come from raiding sources and aren't locked to people. That opens the game up to market forces dictating gear, which would be great. In addition to pvp sources of materials as well.

Combat needs to get away from the idea of target lock and press numbers. Rotations and cooldowns are rote now. If we wanted that kind of combat, here's WoW. If anything, there needs to be a better focus on mount and blade style of hand to hand combat and that actually provides some skill and feedback. Or Chivalry. Or whatever hand to hand multiplayer game you've played, but on a larger scale.

Worlds should end, and servers should have unique features. Similar to how Minecraft works now for the explorer mentality. The consistency should be in your character, not in your world. The idea of fighting against a common goal in a world is appealing, even raiding against it, but there should be ways to lose or win the world. There should be changes to the world itself. That's what people want when they say they want impact on your decisions and your environment.

The industry's been trying to get away from "press tab, 1234" for quite a while now. So far it hasn't worked very well. I can't say whether that's due to technical challenges or just conservative design. but even something like TERA feels way closer to WoW than to an actual action game like Dark Souls or Devil May Cry.

In absence of the eminent flow and accessibility of the latter, I'd still be okay with healing my way through WoW dungeons if they could consistently provide a challenge, and if the rest of the game would get out of my way. ARPGs is where most of the good group content is at now though.

How about a good Gladiator style MMO?  Combat would be small scale.  You could have character development and social aspects.

Seems to me to be worth making. 

The problem with that idea (while it is quite cool) is that the best way to do it would be World of Gladiators...


Oh and obligatory

(http://static1.gamespot.com/uploads/original/608/6081318/2605275-hbea4565a.jpg)

Koreans way ahead of you and already shat all over this idea. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNWK7qmJIE4)

(Greek, Romans, oiled up dudes showing off abs just the same)

I assume you are giving Camelot Unchained a try?  The more I read, the more intrigued I am, but churning out a new 5000 word essay every week is much easier than producing a good MMO.

A Mark Jacobs game?

Unchained is going to be a enormous pile and anyone thinking otherwise is willfully lying to themselves.


Hell even if someone could make DaoC 'right' it still wouldn't work because everyone is to savvy for the sub-genre now. Virtually no one is going to put up with all the shit we put up with in DaoC in terms of RvR investment. The nearest thing in modern times is GW2 and while fun, it's no where near the same player buy in that DaoC had at the time.

He asked "What would be magical?".   Don't shit on my wishing for a pony. 

I anjoy MMO PvP.  I liked it in DAoC, Rift, WoW, and SWToR.  I even loved Warhammer up to level 20.  I think it's possible and there's an audience out there for it.  It's just niche.

Warhammer online's PVP was actually fun... up to a point. The point was when you transferred out of the first zone and suddenly you were bottom of the pecking order again.

IT was actually fun I think because everyone was pretty equal and you got to that point fast with minimum grinding. Going to the next zone felt like someone slapped me in the face with a trout.

It had its moments even after that point.  What did it for me was when my faction kept saying to not defend any keeps we owned because the most efficient way to get loot and experience was to run around capturing other keeps and let ours get captured, then capture it back, in an endless game of Keep musical chairs.  I saw armies literally run by each other because it was better not to fight.

Same mistake every single capture territory game makes, over and over and over again.  Rewards for capturing = no fighting.

Well, another reason was that the alternative was playing Doorhammer...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEedUeDJ7Us

Oh hang on you were still playing Doorhammer. My bad.

Phantasy Star Universe actually did action combat well, but perhaps that was because of their tiny zones and such.  Also, I think a lot of the combat was offloaded onto the players' computers, I do remember some sync issues where I and a friend didn't see the monsters in the same location at the same time, and I heard a lot of rumors of cheating and such during the time I played, so...maybe good reasons why that hasn't been done on a bigger scale and such.

As for what I would want, I think Teleku nailed it as close to what I would say as anything.  Size of the world, back in both UO and EQ was a big deal.  UO is interesting there, since its mark/recall allowed for instant travel to pretty much anywhere, and yet the game still felt large.  Perhaps that's because it was simply the first, so anything would feel large?  EQ definitely felt large and stayed that way...well, up until I quit, I guess.  Even with all its teleporting later on - planes of knowledge books, guildhall portal, etc, it still felt large.  And it's not about travel time either - as a bard with all these teleports, I'm pretty sure I could be anywhere in the game faster than I can get places in WoW.  There's just something about the zone design that felt better.  Not to say WoW and other MMOs don't catch that feeling sometimes, but they've been a lot more hit-and-miss about it.

Here's something I'll point out as something subtle, but that I felt was a really important shift in EQ: I don't recall which expansion it was with, it was sometime after WoW and looked very much like a blatant copy, but they started setting it up so you have to accept a mission/quest before items for that quest would drop.  That bothered me.  Until that point in EQ, if I killed something that dropped quest items, they would drop.  Then I could see that it dropped a strange item, and find out what it was for.  Items not dropping unless I was already on the quest made it feel way more gamey and less immersive.  I can see arguments both ways: 'how would you know to cut the head off/open it up and cut out the splanch/pick up that particular token from its pouch?' but ultimately, it simply felt less satisfying and less worldy because I was required to go pick up a quest before going to kill something.

As someone else was talking about earlier in the thread, a deformable world with actual consequences to players' actions or inactions.

Dear God, its still got a website.  Dawn (http://www.glitchless.com/dawn.html)

Whilst Dawn had a lot of very mockable attributes - the concept of the blank world, with players being able to set up towns, cities, roads, mining camps, whatever sounded real interesting to me.  Older cynical me is sure it would end up being full of Cocktons and Cuntsvilles, but I still like the idea of people being able to work out where everything should be built.  Minecraft is the only similar thing I can think of, and it doesn't seem to scratch that mmorpg itch.

And I want positional melee damage targeting and aiming of projectiles/ranged attacks. I hate swinging at air in these damn games. When one swings or stabs, the attack should have a defined arc of effect in which one must position the enemy to deal damage. As far as projectile targeting, I just don't understand why MMO FPS mechanics can not be somewhat adopted in fantasy MMOs.

They have.

To start:

Stop trying to be all things to all people. There are two binary decisions that need to be made right off of the bat:

1) PVPers vs PVEers.
2) Raiders vs "Casuals".

My ultimate MMO that would bring the magic back?

No raids. No pvp. Push that shit aside. No gear grind. Gear is for cosmetics only. Think CoX or the uniforms in STO. Asheron's Call had no raids that I remember and I still spent hours in that game just exploring.
No more than 8-10 abilities on my action bar. TOTAL. If I can't fit them on my Razer gaming mouse, you have too many abilities. The Secret World does a good job of this with having a huge selection of skills to mix and match but you can only use 7 at a time. Perfect balance between ease of play and depth.
QOL stuff. Look at current STO for a good example of this. Instant recalls to bind spots. Unlocked speeder routes from the start. Quick and easy travel from planet to planet.
Player housing with as much customization as humanly possible. Hell, give me a system like Fallout 4 has where I take raw materials and build walls and furniture from a menu and unleash my creativity. I believe this is one of the few things Darkstar did right. (I just realized, I can't remember if that is actually the name of the game. I tend to think of it as "Red shit on the ground to dodge- The MMO" )
Robust guilds.
Ability to solo OR group with neither option forced on me. Make the content dynamically adjust based on the number of players.
No classes. Look at the Secret World again for a great modern version of this. It sort of has levels but those just give you another skill point to earn. Again, perfect.
Give me some randomness. Look at Bethesda games for a good example of this. People constantly tell stories about weird stuff NPCs do or events that caught them totally by surprise because it just happened in the spur of the moment. Basically give me the Bethesda radiant AI where I can randomly come across NPCs robbing each other or fighting in the streets. Make the world feel alive.

Though from looking at this thread I think you have your answer. I'm not sure any two people had the same reply.

I mirror the sentiment made earlier in the thread about smaller player counts. The 'massive' part of the MMO doesn't do much for me. The thing I love about MMOs is the attention to detail and ongoing updates. Spending hours and hours playing Minecraft has shown me it HAS to be possible.

I don't know what the audience for a game like what I would actually want would be, but I want to basically be able to spin up the equivalent of an MMO server for just me and my friends. Maybe have a very small slope for player progression, or have time = flexibility instead of power. Give us areas where we can build structures ala Fallout 4 or Minecraft, and have some structured content for us to do as group, scaled to how many people we have. Let us blow up the world if we want. Since it's just people you trust, let us have some politic system for large decisions where we decide to crater this one city, or integrate it into our nation or something.

Maybe give the ability to link up or cluster worlds temporarily. Let us be able to queue into some kind of structured PvP or PvE stuff cross-realm, but our world is our story - to the point where one group's world would end up looking entirely different than another person's world, and we all have our story. As the game would go on, the content added would keep spiraling out from there.

Obviously there are a million different scenarios and use cases, but I have more money than time as I get older and I would LOVE something like this.

Make us all 15 years younger so we can be the kinds of people who can immerse ourselves in a virtual world without needing to be burdened by the real one. And return the flat monthly fee only we'd be willing to pay, so we can get back to consuming content without worrying about the constant need to put quarters into the machine incentivized ads/MTX.

Of course, neither is possible. So instead I feel we just need to accept it. MMOs are not a thing anymore. They're whatever game system is already possible, played alone or occasionally with others, and with a strong outer loop of compulsions to play again.

Since that applies to just about every popular game there is now, MMOs can either be weaker versions of anything, or we just accept that MMOs are now everything.

Just in case anyone had forgotten what a colossal dick, Mark Kern was, he gives us a handy reminder (https://np.reddit.com/r/firefall/comments/4l1agq/what_buying_back_the_firefall_ip_really_means_by/). Basically the Tl;dr is that he wants people to stop playing Firefall so that it will close and he can buy it from The9 at a bargain price to have another shot at fucking it up. Which of course is a thing that is likely to happen in any sane reality.

Happily, a bunch of former Red5 devs come out of the woodwork to call him out.

I didn't know who Mark Kern was 20 minutes ago, yet somehow seeing that whole thread shit all over him brings warmth into my heart.

:popcorn:

At this point MMOG Discussion is just starting to feel like Groundhog's Day. Can we graveyard?

Hes all over the comments there white knighting himself, posting as Grummz. Heres a representative sample to a guy that said that the doors at Blizzard are closed to him.


(https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/8f/8c/68/8f8c6826f7d2d0882e8e44e008207a9d.jpg)

Dont suppose anyone has an archive link to the original post from Kern.  The Reddit link appearently shows he deleted the post, and only the comments are there.

Yeah, somehow he has become the figurehead around which the incredibly vocal tiny minority of people who want blizzard to release official legacy servers have decided to rally around.  Never mind that they literally have almost no coherent idea what they actually want in a legacy server (other then "bring back vanilla"), but they actually expect Blizzard to seriously entertain the idea of opening that pandoras box, and Kern, of all people, has somehow become the spokesman for their insanity (mostly due to him using the tenuous connection he has to the WoW dev team as some sort of magnet for attention he can then use to shamelesly self promote).

Mark Kern was the original Team Lead on World of Warcraft until he left in 2005 to form Red 5 Studios.

As someone who would love a WoW progression server, it saddens me that this dickbag is the one leading the charge.

archive.is/03B0V (http://archive.is/03B0V)

And this one will let you see the deleted comments, since he deleted the account those are all gone at Reddit (unfortunately only works for comments, so the original post is only visible at the archive):

https://unreddit.com/r/firefall/comments/4l1agq/what_buying_back_the_firefall_ip_really_means_by/ (https://unreddit.com/r/firefall/comments/4l1agq/what_buying_back_the_firefall_ip_really_means_by/)

Kern is weird.

You figure, just based on his resume, that he must have some talent and not be a blithering idiot. But he clearly is a blithering idiot - it's not an exaggeration to say that he has the mental capacity of an 11-year-old.

I decided to repost his op statement here in case something happens to the archive for some reason. Its under the spoiler

I admit I'd be a bit curious to try it myself, although I can't help but wonder what they'd do with all the class balancing issues and multiple changes.

I suppose the easiest would be to roll out the last stable version pre-TBC, run that for X amount of time, then roll out the last stable pre-WoTLK version, etc.

I kind of wish they'd stop dicking around with class structures in general. There's more than one MMORPG I couldn't get back into because I came back six months later and found everything was incredibly different. Starting from level one isn't an issue, but dropping in a mid-level or higher character? "Oh I guess I have to reassign all these skills/powers/talents whatever, but I don't know what any of them are or how they work in concert. I'm still trying to remember what the hell I was doing".

Yeah, thats one of the things you nevver get a straight answer out of the legacy crowd about.   If they get Legacy servers, what kind are they expecting?  Do they want a progression server (ie, start from patch 1.0 and release every patch on the same timeline as the orignal?), a "last patch" server (ie, Start with the last patch in Vanilla and that is it).  Some kind of hybrid between the two?   And what about bugs?  Some people think they should release vanilla AND fix the bugs (in which case, it isnt really vanilla any more is it, since the bugs were part of what made the game the game at the time).  And it goes on and on an on.

And then there is the entire pandoras box that they just dont want to acknowledge of "well, if a tiny minorty of whiners get official Vanilla servers, whats to stop everybody else who wants a specific flavour out of the current 6 potential flavours demanding their specific flavour as well?".   I mean, running a few Vanilla servers might not be that hard for blizzard.  It beccomes an epicc shitshow however when you add the possibility of having to run a couple dozen different builds of the game simultaneously.....

The games industry in general and the MMO industry in particular are full of people who continually failed upwards.

If I were Blizzard, here's how I would do it:

• Release 3 servers, beginning at 1.0.
• Every month, release a new (major, final version) patch. So assuming we launched Jan 1, Feb 1 would be 1.1.2, March 1 would be 1.2.4, etc.
• Two months after we've completed Vanilla, 2 of the servers get BC; the third remains Vanilla 1.12.2 forever.
• Repeat the monthly patch process for BC, wait two months, release WotLK for 1 server, the other remains BC 2.4.3 forever.
• Release WotLK's patches monthly until 3.3.5a, remains WotLK forever.

Assuming they still have all the old code laying around somewhere, this seems like the easiest solution that would also please the largest amount of players. You could even make a fourth server that continues the process through all of the expansions, although I'm not sure there's a lot of interest in replaying Cata and Pandaria.

The old code is probably "worthless" for a vanilla server purpose, as it's unlikely the old code will work with current clients anyway, so then they would have to update their launcher to support 4 totally different clients and make sure all the old crap still works (and I see this wreaking havoc with mods).  So they will have to implement legacy servers within the confines of the current server and client architectures (and be patched alongside current WoW).

I think everyone asking for legacy servers doesn't understand how much of an undertaking and how complex that really is.  I would not be surprised that even adding code so that only legacy servers gate content from specific areas and server specific xp curves (since everything is normalized now) is probably non-trivial effort.

*Edit*
Also didn't they completely redo the damage modelling at some point due to mud-flation and totally redo talents.  That's also not a trivial thing to revert I'm sure.

I was assuming you would need a totally new (old) client; separate download, login, etc. If you wanted mods you would need to go find old versions of them (or they would need to be remade).

I was thinking something like that as well. Even if they had pristine version control (which I'm sure they do), getting it up and working is not trivial.  Nothing with software ever is.

Even if they dusted off the old versions of the launcher, their old server code, and set it up completely separate (start the legacy launcher, not the regular one) they'd probably run into numerous headaches just getting it up and running.

I suspect the demand simply isn't high enough to justify it, especially when (and they're probably right) best case you have a bunch of nostaligics playing maybe 6 months tops before dropping out.

Vanilla WoW would never have tons of people playing it (today), but it would have a dedicated core of probably ~50-100k that would absolutely stay longer than 6 months. If people are still playing EQ and Runescape, they'll play vanilla WoW. The question is how much it would cost Blizzard to get a legacy server up and running, and nobody but Blizzard themselves would know. So far they've indicated it wouldn't be worth it, but maybe that will change.

Y'all made me go look and it turns out that Anarchy Online is still chugging along somehow.

Conan is still going as well.

As is Secret World.

Say what you will about Funcom, but they keep their properties going as long as possible -- which to date has been, well, to date.

Hell, isn't LEGO MiniFigs still going?

And apparently they just secured a new investor, so, maybe even more to come.