The Stagnation of MMO industry/genre and why

we may never have another wow in the market, they came around at the right time with the right product, and for me they have harmed the genre more than helped it, but thats another story.

I think allot of mmo players are getting tired of the wow play model, strip away the fluff and easy play modes of wow and at the core you have eq, so pretty much we have been playing the same model since the late 90's, with different twists and turns.

One major issue I have with today's heavy theme park games is your toon, dosen't feel like it lives in the world, your just playing through, and when they add content, it is not really new content( how many ferris wheels do you need in the park) just more of the same, another war zone anotther raid, even though we already have a bunch, what we lack is diversitiy in our game play, maybe some sandbox elements might help mix things up.

On the other hand a true sandbox game lacks allot as well, no real content, swg was more like a sim, but one thing it had was to me it felt like my toon lived in the world, I played the game for 4 years through all the changes, and it was not the game that kept me playing but my friends, over all my friends and I, thought the game really sucked but we made our own fun.

I have no idea what today's mmo's need, maybe a combo theme park and sandbox with a little fps thrown in, more non combat activities, here Tor it could be cantina games, pod and swoop racing.
Good open world pvp that has faction perks like DAOC, not just a silly gear grind.

I know if I was a compnay with a game in devlopment that was using the wow play model, I might have reason for concern.

I kinda wonder how the secret world will do, it's a skill based game, I know gw2 will do well at first, the buy to play model is popular, but when I tested gw2 I still seen many elements from other games, and it did not feel that new to me, the world vs world was really good.

I hope someday some company will take a chance on somethig new, I do know one thing mmo's as we know them are changing, for the good or bad, they will not be what we are platying today in the not to far future.

So your idea is, essentially, throw away everything that has defined the MMO since Everquest.

And replace it with what?

Saying we should dump the old model is easy... And really old news.

I stopped reading at grand daddy of MMOs.

If you dont know who the grand daddy is, how can you form a accurate opinion!

But Ill save people the reading (even if it doesnt say this)

The genre is stagnated because it got to dumbed down

People that leave WOW are not looking to play WOW again, and those that didnt leave WOW are not your customers!

So stop copying all the dumbing down and add challenge and duration back into the games. Simple as that!

Anyone tells you other stuff and they simply dont have a foot to stand on.

And again, if you want grand daddy of MMOs, look back to 1991.
UO was # 7 or #8 if you want to be totally honest about the discussion.

I don't think you understood what I am saying.

Imagine Everquest was all there is to MMO. Imagine WOW did not exist. Wouldn't that be sad for the MMO genre?

So similarly, isn't it sad that WOW is all there is as far as MMO is concern? You mean you don't think the genre can be BETTER than it is now? We have already reached perfection?

For me, the answer is no. The MMO can and should take the next leap forward. My original post is my opinion of what should be done to take the next leap.

My first MMO was Ragnarok Online and that was in the early 2000's. After that it was Priston Tale, Lineage 2, and then WoW.

All the MMOs I played before WoW were click to move games and you had to use your F1-F2 keys. They were all one faction games and Lineage 2 was the most dedicated to PvP. The amount of world PvP on it was amazing and factions were created by usually a collection of different guilds controlling different castles. I played mostly on private servers after the initial games beta, but some of them I had really good experiences. Hell, one of them got raided by the FBI : http://www.gamespot.com/news/fbi-bus...ackers-6162100

When I played WoW, it was like playing a brand new innovative game for me and this was in 2005 right in the early Vanilla period of WoW. The graphics were good, having to quest instead of grind was fun, and the first time you leveled was the most memorable experience. Running my first instance was like "wow, this is cool!" There was no warzones so the world PvP was usually people raiding towns. I mean, the first time I walked into Darkshore there was a 20 or so man raid their killing the npcs and I thought it looked fun.

Early Vanilla WoW was much different than WoW is today. I mean 40 man dungeons was just insane. If you rolled a class you HAD to be a certain spec, end of story. Druids, Priests, Shamans, and Paladins were either a healer or ****. There was no feral/balance druids, shadow priests, or ret paladins in raids, etc.

Burning Crusade was a very large jump for WoW. It changed the game more than the other expansion packs.

It’s actually in the works now, one developer has decided it’s time to rip up the MMO rule book so will see how that works out …. I’ll be giving it a try.

But ya …. Some of the changes are really designed to allow players to group up with anyone, enjoy all the content regardless of level and remove the barriers the prevented players from playing and working together.

The trinity is self-contained basically in each class so everyone can fill any role, quests are replaced by dynamic content that changes course depending on if the players succeeds (yup you can actually fail a quest)

Encounters will scale based on the players interacting with it and each player is rewarded based on their participation, no more kill sealing you’ll actually welcome the help of others in the open world.

No Raids, but instead a focus on group dungeons and massive open world content , Top level player can also come back to lower level zones and their power will scale down so all content in the game stays relevant and you can come back to help friends at lower levels.

Endgame gear will be cosmetic instead of stat based, collect it if you want but you’re not forced into farming up gear to unlock content …. You’ll never hear…ya..no your gear isn’t good enough to play with us.

Combat will have a greater skill element to it making it more important that players learn how to play instead of stacking gear stats.

Open world PvP that pits World vs World … and no faction separation of player everyone on your server is pitted against another server along with you.

And no subscriptions fees.

So ya, there are some MMO's not far off now that are attempting to rewrite the MMO genre with a fresh approach.

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.