The Stagnation of MMO industry/genre and why

The greatest irony here is that the more mainstream MMOs get, the more dumbed down they will get. Though, I believe we have already reached a saturation point in regards to "dumbing" down this genre.

Think about this: 10 years ago, who was playing MMOs? White males between the ages of 12 and 30. And not many of them either, mostly the loners and computer geeks. Now, everyone plays MMOs, whether it's Farmville or SWTOR or WoW or whatever.

The only way for game companies to reach everyone is to make everything easy and accessible. It's not like Call of Duty where you know your audience. I would wager there aren't as many housewives or grandpa's playing CoD as there are playing SWTOR. It has a more mass market appeal now which is great! But concurrently it also means to keep everyone happy, game companies have to create easy content that takes time rather than skill.

edit: My point is, the "stagnation" as you call it is 100% intentional by the game developers. You can't make a super innovative game that breaks the mold because noone will play it. A small subset of players will love it sure, but it won't have massmarket appeal. EQ never had mass market appeal nor did UO. Both of which are still around in some form and have a dedicated fanbase. They never achieved massmarket success like WoW. That's why wow is the "grandfather." It make MMOs more M than ever before.

Have you noticed that the secret world(TSW) breaks pretty much all of these trends?

1) It still has sharding; to a degree. There are only 4 or 5 servers. The difference is that they sub-divided their servers into instances, much like SWTOR has done, but to a much larger degree. One area I was in had 8 or 9 different instances, each with hundreds of players, all on the same shard... And that's just one area. A shard could probably hold a hundred thousand or more.

2) Trinity. WoW kind of broke from this with Shadow priests in TBC, because you ended up with a class that wasn't amazing DPS but did decent heals. To a degree that still exists, but in TSW now you get characters that can be any mix of the three all at once, and still be viable. You'll never be able to move away from the idea of tank, healer, damage dealer; but you can blurr the lines a lot.

3) Factionalisation is a huge problem when it comes to dividing people. WoW is still the ultimate factionalisation game, you can't even read /say chat from the other faction. TSW is about as least factionalised as you can get while still being seperate. For instance, your general chats include all the factions, and you can even group with other factions for some quests. Yeah in PVP you're against each other, but in everything else you're really not.

4) Grinding and leveling: The only way to move away from this is an elder scrolls like system; or a system like TSW where there is no leveling, or cap... At milemarks for exp you get points to spend; semi-infinitely. You can keep doing quests until you've got every ability in the game, because there are no classes. Or you can get a few quick ability points then jump right into end game and pvp.

I am asking for the equivalent of space flight when we are currently in WW2 era flight technology. Something that is hard but doable in time. I am not asking for time traveling.

Single shard tech exist already for games like EVE online. You can also do a workaround with a cross-server EVERYTHING. So the intermediary tech is already there. The only thing lacking is the WILLPOWER to do this.

2. This is also another chicken-and-egg issue. The trinity is a "proven" way because the dungeons are designed for trinity fights. Re-design the dungeon for non-trinity and suddenly, it is not so proven anymore. Think about it. Was Esseles/Black Talon more fun or was hammer station more fun? (personally, I felt Esseles/BT was more fun due to the story element)

What about progress? There has to be progress. You don't , after all, keep paying monthly fees for theme parks; you pay once and go see the magic mountain. When you want to see the magic mountain again next week, you're required to pay again. That's why you need progress; to give players in game goals that keep them playing the game for more months to come. Your theme park model just wouldn't work financially with a game that is based on monthly fees.

Now, If you would want to make this theme park model work, it would have to be a browser based game, where you pay up every time you want to play and you'll have a certain amount of time, like 6 hours, to spend in the game world, with additional fees whenever you want to see certain "Magic mountains" or just need refreshments. I just don't think that would make for a very fun game.