Does an MMO need a story?

Yea I have no clue who that is either, and I still play the game off and on. You actually read the quests?

Does an MMO need a story?

In hindsight? nope, it was ok the first time around, but I'll never level an alt thats for sure... I just want to create my own story, do world PVP and socialise in the Star Wars universe, craft my own wears (Properly) and customise my appearance. I'd play SWG, in which I could do this to my hearts content, but oh yea, they shut that down to make way for SWtOR.

Make a cross server LFG tool, add the ability to select all flashpoints and Ops from your pull down menu just like you can for Warzones, place all of the commendations merchants in the same pull down menu.

Welcome to Unreal Tournament with a 3d waiting room known as "fleet" or "my ship".

It depends.
If they pretend to sell it to me then it sure must have a good story.
If they have a different target audience then they don't need a story.

There are tons of MMOs without a good story and not too many with a good one. There is an eager and large audience waiting for good stories in MMOs. Aiming for them is good business decission. And it has paid of with a large initial subscription. Mantaining it will be the hard part.

Yes. /end

*nods*
A modified 'Marian's Stamp Collectors' dilemma (internetz for those who recognise the reference )
Sadly the cost involved in creating an A title MMO is such that decisions are ulitmately made by the accountants and bean counters, not by a creative team. This means that the 'cater to the largest possible group and then some' mentality will triumph.
Basically WoW has 10million subscribers, WoW has a linear gameplay that aims at moving playes as quickly and efficiently into the endgame raids and PvP arenas as possible. Ergo any new game must do the same to stand a chance at those 10 million subscribers.
Sadly, I can not even find fault with the reasoning. Apparently the majority of the potential mmo players use WoW as the measure of all things and want something similar with exciting new pictures. The group who wants something else is too small to justify investing 100+ million dollars.

By and large that would be a better direction to take the gaming industry in (or rather, back to, as following the UO open world PvP debacle few games dared to include PvP unless it was all they did. Dark Age of Camelot was the first major title outside of Korea after a long while that made PvP the central part of their game. WoW only grew into it over time, and mostly because the single player game brought a demographic into mmo gaming that thrived on PvP).

On a more practical note, creating a purely PvE game requires a lot more investment and will still be raid-centric, with all the drama that demographic brings along with it. The problem is that players, and especially the most dedicated and fanatical part of them, can burn through new content that took months to create in a matter of days. No development studio can hope to outpace players. As such the retreat towads PvP is not exactly laziness of the designers as well as surrendering to the inevitable. PvPers don't need content, they need other players, so they can be kept happy and playing a lot easier than the hard core raider community.
The big problem here is that there is relatively little overlap between the three groups. PvPers are pretty much never casual (they would not be able to play unless they minmax everything or the game is a lot more forgiving in builds and stats than is usual). Casuals rarely if ever see the inside of a raid (of operation) because it takes time and training to form a smoothly functioning army capable of taking on encounters designed to challenge players that eke out the last behind the comma bit of power out of the game systems. And only a subset of the raiders will enjoy PvP because it requires an entirely different mindset.
By restricting the game to only one group you also significantly reduce the playerbase, and that is something that will make finding funding for your game a lot harder. Especially if you need 100million or more. This means that the next big change is of necessity coming from an indi game, or not until after it becomes significantly cheaper (as in less than half the current budget) to create an A title mmo.

Did SWG even have an outline for your characters history and origins? How would you know what quests there was without SOME direction. I find it hard to believe after creation they just dropped you into the game with no guidance or direction. If true i would HATE that.

Perhaps there was a main quest line to follow then various NPCs spread out through out the game offering more quests? Wait thats what SWTOR is.

Perhaps SWTOR did some research and also played all these games and found out how boring and grindy EQ crafting was. Perhaps (Being a story based developer) they found that just having a wall of text that writers spent so much time writing wasnt being read. I suppose you could make the argument that the VO is only good the first go round but it just makes it seem more real and is easier for alot of people to see the story if they choose to. Most just spacebar through it and thats fine I DO TOO at times but i have that choice. If it was all TEXT ide miss the ENTIRE STORY cause I HATE reading anything but car magazines.

There was MANY MANY MANY MANYtimes i tried to log in to EQ (WARRIOR CLASS) to try to play only to log right out cause all the good camps were taken and the WAIT LIST was to dam long.

THERE IS NO WAIT LIST IN SWTOR!!!!!!!!

I can log in and play right away i dont NEED a group. I LIKE to group but dont NEED it.

What i would like is instead of separate servers totally isolated take all these servers put them in a cluster and only have ONE server per region to log into. That server controles what servers in the farm get used. This way we have a community of 1.7 million and a really vibrant GTN Market. Imagin with that many people crafting you would always find what you want and prices wouldnt be insane. There could be negatives too but worth a conversation.

Here's the deal...

SWTOR did change the playing field a bit in MMO's with the voice acted storyline, but in doing so it took MMO's backwards a bit-- back to more solo oriented game, instead of a dynamic universe that traditionally has been the hall mark of MMO's

In the end, there is no way a development staff can keep up with players demand for new content because it takes far more time to write and code an instance or a quest than it does to play it out. As a result, because of the demand requirements of this sort of an MMO, it is inherently doomed to subscription failure as people just get plain bored of rolling alts. Development teams typically fail to grasp and often underestimate players abilities to churn through content.

That being said, the way to successfully develop a long term MMO that players won't drop is to extend grind times and loot drops so that development can keep players subscribed until the new content comes out. This is why WOW was successful, and why people are catching on and quitting the game: they drew you in so that you constantly were looking for that next piece of loot that might take weeks to get.

It's also why I never got into WOW, I knew in the end it was just a waste time spinning wheel in a hamster cage, and caught on early. Lots in my guild still buy into.

I'm old school-- I like to make my own content and look for a strategic long term element to a game. It's why I loved SWG, for me and my friends it was about the open world sandbox element and the long term strategic game of territorial PVP. It was about planting your flag on a planet and perhaps moving on to another. It was about crafting gear that was unique and difficult to make. It was about opening your own shop and decorating your own house. People stopped playing SWG when the game became outdated and they moved away from that model, not because a sandbox element game is a destined failure.

In short, it invested player ownership in the universe, something WOW and now SWTOR have not been able to accomplish.

Until a player has some skin in the game as to the universe around them, they are simply nothing more than a subscription waiting to run out of content and hit the cancel button. One day some smart gaming company is going to produce an SWG game with the polish and gaming engine of a WOW or SWTOR and is going to make billions.

And until that happens I wait in breathless anticipation of how glorious it might be.

U know, u can keep asking "why are you still here" till theres 2 people left and even after that?

i think stroy add alot to the RPG side of the MMORPG.

(for teh following be using my undead char, my fist of 8 wow alts)
in wow i awake as a undead,one of thousands, stublealong, get to bree, later go os undercity, meeet the lady Salvanas(likely misspelled). after a while thought i'm still 1 of thousands, there was not great hope or destiny for me, i jsut muddle through and do what i can. there were a few poeple of note, Thrall, hellscream and the like, but if you did not really look around or know wow from prior games you likely did not remeber them that much. and always fun asa starting getting jumped by the crusade if you were unluck to explore the wrong way. a lvl 10-ish zone and then bam, lvl 30-40 zone(plauge lands i think)

in SWTOR (sith warroir) you get pulled in before most poeple, trained, betry a few poeple, get under a power player(darn you Baras) i become a specail one a high ranked sith warroir, not just a hey you(from wow) i'm am Lord #####(enter name)after this everyone i meet know i'm lord #### and tremble in fear of me. i meet alot of poeple, Mangus,Baras, The Dark loards, etc,but unlikely wow you less likely to know them since tehy not used in prior games so you always meeting new poeple. Thanks to the stroy i have a direction and a reason to move forward.


in wow i only moved forward due to me being bored and and i wanted to lvl so i had to find a spot were to go to do that(in wow that be fromb rr to under city, to shadow fang keep, airthi highlands, etc) you dropped off and hard to find something to do in wow, in SWTOR you come to a planet you like told to come here to stop X, recover Y, etc in a mission and there happends to be quest givers in route fi you take them, or not if you want to speed through the stroy.