"MMO" term dilution

[Numtini]

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.

[kildorn]

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.

[Nebu]

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.

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.    

[Draegan]

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

[Malakili]

It's a sim at that point more than an MMO in what I consider them to be.

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.

[Rasix]

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

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

[kildorn]

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

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

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

[Sky]

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.

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

[Nebu]

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.

[Ingmar]

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).

[Paelos]

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.

[Sky]

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.

[Lantyssa]

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.

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?

[DLRiley]

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.

I meet a player online, i shoot him in the head, he logs off. Interaction is  . 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.

[Arthur_Parker]

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?

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.

[Malakili]

I meet a player online, i shoot him in the head, he logs off. Interaction is  . 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.

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.

[DLRiley]

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.

[Malakili]

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.

[DLRiley]

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.

[ezrast]

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.

[Malakili]

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

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."

[Ingmar]

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

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".

[Stabs]

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?

[Malakili]

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.

[Sjofn]

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

[Redgiant]

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.

[Ingmar]

DAOC has rather a lot of instances now, fwiw.

[Cadaverine]

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.>

[Ingmar]

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? 

[UnSub]

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.

[Numtini]

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.

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.

[Nebu]

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.

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. 

[Malakili]

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.

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. 

[DLRiley]

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.

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

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."

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.

[Paelos]

No no, golf is really boring

No no, you just suck at golf.