The Stagnation of MMO industry/genre and why

As I was reading this it occured to me that City of Heroes does, or tries to do, almost all of this.

1. They have servers, but only about 12. They have had these same servers since day one.
2. There is no trinity. You can put together a team of anything and 95% of the time it is both fun and the content is doable. In fact, tanks are somewhat rare. People play brutes and scrappers which is like a DPS/tank combined. Pure healers are fairly rare. People play defenders or controllers. Many power sets have a self heal.
3. Yes, they have Heroes and Villains, but you can redeem your villlain and become a hero. Your hero can fall from glory and become a villain. Best of all, you can also play in the gray area and play both sides at once (going rogue or vigilante). So, two sides, but all intermingled. Now granted, their PvP is completely non existent.
4. Obviously they have levels, but with their super-sidekick system, you can team with anybody, at any level, and everyone will be about equally powerful. You can have a team of levels: 1, 10, 20, 26, 33, 38, 50, 50 and run level 50 or level 10 content. Everyone will get XP that is level appropriate for them. It is a magnificent system, perhaps the greatest MMO idea ever. Why it is not copied in every game I have no idea.
5. They didn't have all this at launch, but have added it all in their 7 years. The player base has slowly shrunk. They do have a loyal following of probably 75K-100K, but it is niche. I thought I would be there until the servers shut down, but I left too.
6. They went free to play so I'm not sure how profitable it was, but they do seem to be on solid ground at this point in time.

Great read and I agree with a lot of it.

For having a MMO sharding is horrible as you're instantly dividing up your player base so it is no longer massive.
Then again doing so with factions.

I'd love to see a game leave out the pvp aspect or do it right. You constantly see people whine about balance, but I've yet to see a game have true balance. Leave armor out of the equation, have a standard set of numbers fully across the board so everything is fully equal. Leave it purely to skill. That would be balanced. I like the occasional pvp, but rarely do I have a chance as everyone out levels me with gear. Most will disagree with this though. Oh well, it's part of why I dislike pvp.

Great point on the trinity. A group of dps should be able to have fun together as well. Dungeons would be more fun. I know WoW is taking a step in this direction with the scenarios coming in the next expansion and I'm curious to see how it plays out.

Grinding and leveling...this reminds me a bit of Ultima Online. The grind was only working up your skills. Originally there wasn't even much of a gear grind either. It was all about having fun with your friends and adventuring. The problem was a lack of story.

Something I have been completely unable to understand is why a game marketed on it's story, just dumps it once you hit max level. I understand it takes development and such, but why is there not episodic content every couple weeks? The rakghoul event was pretty cool but got repetitive pretty quick. It wasn't very long, but it was well done.

I'd love to see updates every couple weeks that gave a new episode of content to experience. This would also help retain players as you'd be excited about the next portion of the story. UO had something somewhat similar done by the event team, the problem there was it wasn't very far reaching. Lag was horrid when a bunch of people got to the same point. Continually adding new quests and story arcs would be fantastic.

If there is always new stuff incoming, it'd be easier to retain players.

I don't see why there isn't a reason we can't have the typical progression with dungeons and raids and such, and also have a continuing story that doesn't take half a year or more for something to happen. When was the last time WoW or Swtor had some sort of story advancement?


I'd also love to see a ton more customization, even in naming. The current system is sorely lacking.

I play CoX and love it dearly, but a lot of these are somewhat disingenous.

1. They have only 12 servers, but that's for the simple reason of having a smaller playerbase. Individual zones still shard themselves when they hit a certain number of people in them.
2. As discussed above, no trinity is a design decision that ends up falling prey to power issue- 95% of everything is beatable with any makeup, but that same 95% is insanely easy with a specifically crafted group- and that remaining 5% is *not* beatable without having at least part of a setup.
3. Spot on.
4. Sidekicking and exemplaring help a great deal with level disparity things, but it's not remotely close to being 'everyone is the same power level' for grouping, as it only increases your combat level (multipliers on your damage and your level to use in comparison to the enemy for level difference based multipliers). Your actual combat power is also drastically influenced by both your real level (by way of giving you access to more abilities) and by the enhancements in your powers (which a higher level character has access to much better ones). It isn't so much a situation of "every is about equally powerful" as "no one is useless".

With that said, it IS still an extremely wonderful system, and since people can have drastically different power levels even when they're at the same real level, ensuring that no one is useless is an excellent achievement.
5. Have you considered coming back? Content addition has been coming at a much higher pace than it used to, and the recent stuff is some of the best work they've done.
6. They went hybrid, not full free to play. By all indications, it's been extremely profitable- and their introduction of new content has come more rapidly, and been of good quality, so it hasn't hurt the players either.

Except the ones that scream about how every change except the ones they directly suggest will ruin the game forever, of course, but those are around all the time no matter what you do.

As a followup to this, I'd like to point out that there IS one solution that eliminates the group makeup problem, but it introduces the new problem of making a massive increase in workload- you make multiple versions of the major encounters, tuned to various group compositions, and have the game select the appropriate one. But that, at the very least, doubles the work on encounter design and tuning, and frequently would be closer to tripling it- to say nothing of bosses with special mechanics.

I have to agree with a lot of what the OP said. Certainly, if tanking and healing are as much fun as dps for example, why aren't there equal numbers of all three archetypes? The truth is it's not as much fun for most players. I agree personally though, I like to do all of it.

I was really hoping to see some innovation by BioWare with Star Wars: The Old Republic.

I wished to see a better character progression system firstly. Something that perhaps didn't rely on gear and more your actual character to be special. Gear I think should be almost entirely cosmetic, or mean something personal to the player. However, how do you get people hooked? How do you get people to stay if there is no gear creep?

After all it's all about endorphins and dopamine and those reward chemicals we all love so much.

It's a tough question to answer. I am sure though with some decent discussion, the answer is out there.

I also feel the Three Talent Tree system is silly too. I would have preferred they do away with classes altogether, and you are able to purchase attributes (Like Force user, Pilot, Crack shot with blasters.. etc....). Put points into lightsaber use or rifles or something similar. This gives the player unlimited scope when progressing and creating a character.

I would have preferred they do away with class story lines with this idea in mind. And just concentrate on more than one massive complex story instead of having to split up attention to different classes. that way you could have more than one levelling area, so when you level up a different character it would be different content again.

Another thing I thought could have been improved upon is in game infrastructure. The chat system in SW:TOR is ridiculous and out-dated, for example. I mean this is an MMORPG right? The thing I would first concentrate on before anything else (even story) is a modern, modular easy-to-use communication system. I mean there is no reason this can't be fixed in SW:TOR.

The problem with removing the "trinity" system is then you have to create dynamic encounters, so that they appear balanced no matter who or what abilities a given group of players has. This is not the easiest thing to do in the world. It is far far easier to control encounters and difficulty by giving a "boss" abilities that must be dealt with by a structured group (tank/healer/dps). Make no mistake though I am not making excuses for MMO developers. There really is no excuse for not bringing serious innovation to this genre of games.

The whole gear and levelling system is out dated these days I would love to see a game that had a much more dynamic system of character progression. Some innovation and care would go a long way to making a game like this much, much more enjoyable and giving it a lot more longevity.

SW:TOR 2 anyone?

To be honest I don't think it has anything to do with WoW, the main reason TSW will struggle is because 'alternative Earth' theme is going to limit its appeal. I love much of the design of the game but just have no interest in playing a human in a game set on Earth - I like swords and sorcery or space science fiction and always play non-human species so the whole 'alternative Earth' theme just doesn't appeal regardless how good the game is.

I miss the old Everquest dynamic faction system. I've never seen another MMO deliver so well in that regards.

There were no silly 2 team restrictions, splitting the number of potential partners in half. Instead, you as a character are permitted to make your own decisions. If you want to be racist against Trolls, you can exclude them; if you want to team with your enemy against a greater threat, you can do that too. But it was the decision of the player, not the game forcing you into these rigid restrictions.

If you can touch it, you can attack it. King of Dwarves? Yeah, your level 1 Dwarf Priest can punch him. Then he and all of his guards will kill you for the offense, and your Faction/Renown/Reputation/whatever-you-want-to-call-it takes a hit. You do enough scumbag stuff and they treat you as the enemy.

When the game is chalk full of NPC examples of betrayals and traitors and spies and whatnot, how can the game then rigidly force players into a linear story that is full of you-can-never and you-must-always. Why can't I shoot the guy working at the Cantina? Who cares if he's friendly, maybe my Imperial Agent isn't.

The biggest appeal I find in an MMO comes from the persistant world. Unlike a console game, I never 'beat the game' and then lose everything I worked for. I can always continue advancing. So if we're going to draw people in with a persistant world, then open up the choices that they're allowed to make, and then have consequences for those decisions. If you want to betray the Republic and join the Empire, you should be able to. It should be hard. It should involve alot of sacrifice and loss. It should take a ton of work in order to actually ingratiate yourself to the opposite faction. But making it hard motivates players; disallowing it only discourages.

If Bioware really wants to tell an epic story, they need to let us tell our own stories instead of insisting that 50% of the people we meet we are forbidden from ever disliking.

1. If an MMO publisher can dish out something like a mega server where people can play like they're playing a browser game, sure why not?
2. Any suggestions? Because every MMO's chracter pool can be classified under those three. Everyone as DPS is kinda lame, though it might work in a massive multiplayer survival horror game.
3. Other MMOs don't have this faction stuff, and they let the players make rivalries through the guilds or PvP. I think this is the way to go to make an MMO more interactive.
4. I'm not really sure how that would work when players just want to kill each other at most times and show off their e-peen.
5. ?????
6. Not sure if PROFIT.

Sadly, I don't have your optimism. SWTOR will be my last MMO game unless there is a breakthrough. Minimum, I don't want to play a game that has sharding and relive the same ghost server issue again. I want to see true MASSIVELY.

Unfortunately, EVE has too high learning curve and I personally don't really like sandbox design. I am hoping another "blizzard" who can take the good points of all the other games, innovate and take it to the next level. And definitely not WOW clone.

SWG started as a sandbox game. And while this debatable, sandbox game is essentially niche market. Anyway, sandbox or theme-park is not the issue here because such a design is not inherent to MMO.