The Stagnation of MMO industry/genre and why

Again, I don't deny that tanking or healing is fun for *SOME* people.

I myself find tanking fun too and I have all three tank characters in SWTOR.

However, statistics don't lie. Go ask anyone who is a DPS, how long it takes for them to find a group in the new group finder. Now ask a tank.

I have tank, DPS and healer characters. Here are my experience in the group finder :

Tank = immediate to less than 5 min
Healer = 10 min to 30 min
DPS = more than 1 hour

I did take a look at the secret world. It still has sharding, factions and trinity.

I'm not sure it has "leveling" or not. But the litmus test would be : can a new player immediately play with a player who has played for 6 months?

You have watched peacefull warrior a bit too much me thinks

Theres a massive elephant in the room in these discussions?

Broadband and high speed internet EXPLODED in and around 2005. Up until 2005 i was on 512k. When i came to japan i moved up to 2mB/sec (and then to 4) and LUSTED after fiber optic. Wow hit the market at a time when (or just after) broadband was hitting the mainstream household. It wasnt uncommon at its release to have people moaning about patch downloads on their dial up. In fact im pretty sure they used to advise people on it. So prior to wow not altogether that many people played or believed you COULD play a game online with graphics and stability like you got with wow. Lets not also forget the switch from single core processors to dual core to quad core and 2 to 4 to 8GB ram in AFFORDABLE PCs.

I remember (aside the ironforge slideshow of course) being STUNNED by the graphics. I was new to MMOs then and expected something akin to warcraft 3 graphics. I figured theyd be maybe two or three years behind mainstream gaming graphics. You need to get inside the head of THAT player. The MMO player of the time already knew all this, but they werent the 12 million. they were the 500,000 here and the 500,000 there.

So wow came along and blew the lid off mmo gaming. But the trouble was, good and as fun as the game was, it turned into a loot grind, and after the sheen wore off a few years later, we all realised we were stuck playing a game that wasnt really that fun in itself, but rather in the communities and reputations we built in it. If you were an average player in a low level to medium level casual guild, more often than not you logged in to help your guildies and just chill out with random people who you never met talking about virtual experiences you all shared. In many ways it was just as much a social network (also taking off in the mid 2000s) as a game for a great swathe of the playerbase.

Its what people miss when they try to copy the "magic formula". Alas, the magic was in their newness (for the mainstream casual gamer) and not necessarily in the game play. It was in the explosion of affordable internet/computers as well as the growth of social networking. That time is gone. (Well... in the most vocal mmo bases (Europe, East Asia, Oceania, North America)). So for the most part, the lack of actual interesting gameplay was allowed to slide back then. Now, not so much.

This is really a design problem and I do agree that designer has to balance it properly.

That said, I don't think it is difficult to design a boss fight that can be done by 4 DPS vs Tank/Healer/DPS.

The way I see it is that the 4 DPS will have a hard time (if all of them can taunt and shed aggro, their combined HP plus combined DPS output will determine if they can down the boss) Using a very simple scenario with simplified calculation :

1. Scenario 1 : 4 DPS
Each DPS has 1000 HP and does a damage of 10 per sec. Total DPS is 40 damage per sec. Total health is 4000HP.
Boss has 2400 HP and does 50 damage per sec.

In 60 sec, the 4 DPS would have killed the boss. The boss in turn would have done 3000 damage to the 4 DPS. If the DPS can take turn to taunt and shed aggro, that 3000 damage can be spread among the 4 of them. Assuming equal damages, each would take 750. Enough to survive.

2. Scenario 2 : Classic trinity group : 1 tank, 1 healer, 2 DPS.
DPS is the same.
Tank has 2000 HP and does a damage of 5 per sec.
Healer has 500 HP and does healing of 25 per sec (healer don't do damage). Assuming healer only heals tank and tank holds perfect aggro.
Total DPS = 25 per sec. That means it takes the group 96 sec to kill the boss.
In that time, the boss would have output 4,8000 damage. However, the healer's healing effectively cause the boss damage to be 15 per sec (40 damage, 25 healed) So the tank really received only 1440 damage (let's not talk about mitigation and blocking). Enough to survive.

From this simple example, you can see the classic group don't necessarily has it easier. In fact they took longer to kill the boss compared to the 4DPS group.

Not only that, I have just described the classic tank and spank group. You can add challenge with puzzles and the multi-boss squads.

I'm just saying you can de-emphasise trinity. Players can still be tank and healer if they want to be.

BTW, Bioware already did it. You can run normal mode BT and Esseles with any combination.

Finally, don't forget, there can be other roles besides tank and healer (DPS is basically a given). A designer just has to be more creative and as long as it is fun, people will play.

And no one mentions DaoC... for shame. Apart from a few poor design flaws (Vampyres, Atlantis, New Frontiers) its still a damn solid game that did alot of things before the others did and somethings none of the others have even tried since.

3 Factions, PvP that effects the game world, Crafted gear that is best gear, Interesting classes that aren't overly pigeon holed into rigid group roles.

The op has good points, but the problem is the balance a MMO tries to achieve to offer different gameplay to different crowds and doing that successfully.

Swtor has good character progression which is in the style of a themepark. That is internal development with a bonus of character creation to make unique characters, unique abilities per class, and armor customization. The story is good as well. These are benefits of themepark MMOs that have lvling systems.

Also the benefit of a lvling system is that it creates brackets. In those brackets there are different monsters and different rewards. By having different lvls there can be different difficulties and therefore its easier for anyone to pick up the game and progress to get more challenging missions which also teaches people about thier class.

Now that is for themepark MMOs or the internal development of characters with story and thier environment with lvling.

However, pvp, is more akin to what makes sense to what the OP is suggesting and to be about skill and fun instead of a gear grind.

So for pvp I agree, there should be less grind and it should be more about skill.

Swtor offers something different which goes to show how pvp is different. There is a bolster system from 10-49 making everyone equal in terms of stats and making pvp more about the competitiveness rather than the gear... until they reach lvl 50. Which is why I hope BW for swtor readdress this problem by introducing open world pvp that can allow for pvp stats to take affect instead of raid stats/gear to make everyone equal to have fun in that system.

So pvp is about being competitive but also about having alternative content. That alternative content is external development. Its what sand box games have. Its also a huge part of the game to include housing/castles, crafting to accommodate that, sieging etc. Nonetheless, it should have been better delivered in swtor by making swtor more into a balanced game for pvpers/raiders to have internal and external developments to the game.

Also I believe this is important because of the art style of swtor specifically and the lore. SW has many mature themes and the art style is mature as well, imo. They need to have a world that simulates reality better and fits the art style and lore. There needs to be war, and open world pvp. Just having a themepark of r SW is not fitting.

So pvp should as the OP was suggesting about removing a grind be about the content and having fun. However, the open world should be developed as well to have its own rewards for people who do indeed commit a lot of time to the open world part of the game. Rare items that offer rare abilities or stats, or looks but still dont give them a huge advatage and makes the game more about gear than skill. Since pvp is about skill, and is not the same as raiding and havin to prepare for the next lvl boss.

So imo, the internal development is good. The gear grind for raiders makes sense for themepark MMOs. Having a gear grind for WZ's is fine as well, but allow people to get comms from the beginning of lvl 10 and not rstrict them at rank lvl 40 valor or any caps. Then people can have more time to play the game they want by getting the WZ gear and playing story making it more feasible to try other end game content with several characters as well.

The other problem is external development of the game is lacking, and pvp is not shaped to accommodate for alt style playing as well - as mentioned before.

Also imo, not only should there be mini games to swtor to add to the mature part of the game and lore to make it feel SWs, but also there should be more Advanced classes shorter story and more end game for pvpers and raiders.

I take this last idea from DOTA (defense of the ancients) its a simple map but with a lot of heros with a few abilities but its dynamic in the sense there is lvling that is a short experience but allows people to profit and strategize on their lvling experience to get items to be offense or defensive.

So story is short, lots of heros, and more end game.

Also gambling should be in the game imo, which is kind of off topic, but i was talking about the lore and how the art style feels mature... and so it should be in but also losing money to gambling would make doing dailies have more purpose since dailies are too isolated to even offer pvp as a bonus to doing dailies.

So as a pvper I am disappoint. It would have been a huge bonus to this game to add more pvp content... and not just more WZs, but large BGs, ranked solo que, duel arenas, player housing/castles/seiging etc

Then by making the stry shorter the development could have included these things and people would try the other classes and have more content with different play-styles to do it with.

Story itself is not a bad thing. It's how you implement it.

Single player game story is analogous to a movie. You have a beginning and an end.

MMO game story should be more like TV series. The story should be such that you would want to return again and again to find out what's going on. And if you can attract your player to do so for the next 5 to 10 years, well, I would say you have had a very successful run of the MMO.

What WoW lacks in actual interesting gameplay (although I can't think of an MMO that does combat much differently, and certainly none with as many colorful abilities), it makes up for in 1400 achievements and endless quests tied to your reputation (both local and guild), and then additional achievements for your guild. The game sucks you in with one gold star after another: gold stars for quests, gold stars for pets, gold stars for guild participation, gold stars for running dungeons... it's a sticker factory. But it works.

You sound like you're saying WoW's time has past. Last quarter their subs were stable at 10.2 million (surprising pretty much everyone) at the same time as SWTOR lost 400,000 and was down to 1.3 million. They've lost less than 2 million from their peak and as much as people hate MoP, watch it sell 5+ million copies almost immediately. WoW is doing fine.

No actually. I don't even know what is that.