The Stagnation of MMO industry/genre and why

i would like to add that i think you missed one IMO
class servers
not sure when this started but the first mmo i remember playingwith it in was wow and i feel that separating servers by pvp pve and rp can be a bad idea.

ive played on pvp servers and battles in those feel epic and real players will use tactics plan out battles and defenders will counter (u get the picture)

RP server have a brilliant community they almost always help others can talk about lore of the game and can make u feel welcome.

PVE servers seem to be in the middle but don’t get either right.

But the problem here isnt just design it the players, when i played SWG the servers had no diction there was no rp or pvp servers if u wanted to pvp u ran around flagged if you wanted to rp you would click a button and a little rp would be next to your name, if you wanted to simply quest u could and people didnt mock each other for their choices (which sadly pvp playesr will mock rp players) .

the problem is many people like to do all 3 of these things sometimes i like to simply quest, other times i will pvp and sometimes i want to sit back and just RP. The problem is that playes who want to try it all cant RP servers tend to have poor pvp and you are mocked and heckled in PVE and PVP servers for trying to RP.

I didn't mention this because that to me is a derivative problem from sharding. Sharding is still the root evil. Without sharding, there is no need to split into all the various server type.

There is no reason, on the same world, not to have say a PvE continent/planet and s PvP continent/planet,

It's not just the MMO genre that's stagnating.

AAA gaming in general is stagnating because people continue to buy the same thing year after year. It's staying the same because that's what makes the most profits.

The unfortunate truth is that innovative games at most have a niche fan-base and even if it does attract a larger crowd, they always end up drifting back to their familiar things. Their WoW, Call of Duty, The Sims, and NHL/FIFA year after year.

The most successful in business are usually those that copy something else and improve upon it.

I think SWTOR did right in this regard. It plays in a very familiar style and is based on arguably the best possible IP (Star Wars) for an MMORPG or RPG. Sure, it "stole" the dialogue system from Mass Effect, the end-game from WoW, and the story from KOTOR, but put it all together and the players feel pretty invested in their characters even if each of those elements alone don't compare to their counterparts. I'm here because I loved WoW, BioWare RPGs, and Star Wars.

SWTOR has its fair share of innovation that most people seem to forget. While some aspects feel outdated, others were done outstandingly such as:

- Huttball. WoW's PvP can't hold a candle to how exciting and dynamic the gameplay is, even despite class balance issues which inevitably exist in every game. People seem to forget that WoW PvP is entirely two dimensional and you can't even leap/pull/push/charge to higher levels or across pits and fences.
- Energy/ammo/heat resource, the first MMO to ever use something other than a nearly limitless expendable pool (mana). The fact that this is available to healers makes it even more interesting.
- The class design - only the Guardian/Juggernaut and Sage/Sorceror are really reminiscent of traditional MMOs. The others put a nice new twist on them. Healers and tanks that stealth? "Ranged" tanks? Grapples, pulls, and pushes. Cover (this is another big one). I also like the idea of not having an auto-attack. If you've played games with auto-attacks you know there's always those people who are obviously occupied with something else and are not pulling their weight.
- Companions - this is a huge one. Although it's disappointing they aren't used too much at max level other than for dailies, it makes leveling up solo orders of magnitude funner than the old "auto-attack, alt-tab out, loot, rinse and repeat". It's finally viable (if a bit slower) to level from 10 to 50 as a pure healer or pure tank regardless of whether you like flashpoints, PvP, heroics, or questing.
- Story - don't really need to say anything about this. Even the people who hate SWTOR agree that it had the best leveling up experience, at least the first time. The only opinion I have to add is that I wish that the side-quests didn't consume so many resources and voice acting time, and that instead they focused more on the class storylines and the planetary arc.

nope...there all dead without a cleric...

I agree Huttball is an innovation in the sense that it allows same factions to fight one another in a reasonable way.

The different energy system already exist in WAR previously. No doubt some WAR designers influenced SWTOR.

Story and Companions are carried over from Single player games. And they are not very well implemented in MMO setting at that.

because,if you did that it would be a 3d avatar chatbox...basically,just another version of facebook

and there are alot of people who dont want this game turning into facebook

Leveling gets the average player to play the game more.

The is a reason every single game including FPS games now involve some sort of level process.

I just wish they had used an updated engine.. I couldn't handle it. While I like the premise of the game and their concept the overall 'no levels' is actually just a play on words. You still have to level per se in that you have to get the additional abilities. If it truly was a no level game you could select them all from the wheel in the beginning.

I wonder how much hardware technology is part of this limitation.

Let me play the devil's advocate here.

What's wrong with it being a 3D facebook?

If your girlfriend wants to become the cook while chatting away the time with her girlfriends while you are away slaying dragons, what's wrong with that?

If it means now we have more than 10 million players, so what? The developer becomes more profitable and can make more content or add to the game.

It's a win for all of us.

Also, that girl that wants to play a cook? That's call role-playing.