Why have MMO's lost the MM part?

[Deleted]

I'm wondering if the genre is broken, or if the problem is with me.

It seems the social and immersion aspects of these games don't exist any more. My first time leveling to 60 in vanilla was fantastic, I met so many friends that I still have contact with even to this day (some outside of wow even, via FB). I recently leveled a new character to about 80 without chatting to a single new person, I also leveled to 30 in GW2 without chatting to a single person there either. I recently tried Tera and the /area chat is full of toxic "4chan" type of verbal diarrhea, no community at all. Ask a question and get flamed by a bunch of people trying to come up with the funniest troll answer.

Do people really prefer 15-30 minute zergs of LFG instances where not a single word is spoken by any of the five members? Back in the day when the trip to the instance took longer than a whole run does today, and the dungeon itself was an hour or two? It was difficult too, including wipes etc, forcing communication and teamwork => making friends. The direction is just easier, easier, easier, now, now, now mentality. I'm not saying it should have grinds like the rank 14 pvp grind in vanilla when you had to farm 20h a day for several months, but a middle ground perhaps?

It just seems to pointless, everyone is isolated in the capital cities, queuing and doing solo stuff. Am I alone in thinking that's boring?

I also think flying mounts in wow and the teleport system in GW2 and other games etc are very destructive to the immersion. The flight master, zeppelin and boat system was so perfect and added such an awesome sense of being in a huge world. There would be an outrage if flying mounts were removed though, it's just not logical to me. 5 minutes less traveling time at the expense of ruining your whole sense of immersion? Either most people don't realize these things or really just don't care. What say you?

[Hraklea]

I like to play games that reward player skills rather than social skills. I still make friends when I play GW2, but it's not like I can't play the game if no one is online. On the other hand, playing WoW during TBC was a nightmare without an active guild.

And I couldn't care less about immersion in MMOs.

[shise]

MMORPG = Massively multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game.

Since millions of people play them, i honestly think that they are still "massively" and "multiplayer"


You do need teamwork to clear 25 men heroics and so you do to reach 2,2k and higer in a 5v5 arena team (with wow as an example)

It also takes skills, even tho people will argue that. The point is that those skills are gaming skills, nothing hard but it definitely takes some time to acquire it.

[Keny]

Too many "Casuals" around that want to see ALL the content, without having any time for actually learning and playing the game.
Is basically It, so because those kind of players you get all those system's that kills the MMO atmosphere.
That Is all.

[Deleted]

I think a lot of it has to do with the aging of the MMO-genre. It's not new anymore, it's not "exclusive" anymore. Meaning everybody is either playing it or has played it and the newness is wearing off. So people ain't out there anymore to explore and have a good time but to be as efficient as possible. This efficiency can lead to a selfish and greedy community exploiting the anonymity.

A new and small community is more personal and tight knit than a big and nameless one.

[shise]

Too many "Casuals" around that want to see ALL the content, without having any time for actually learning and playing the game.
Is basically It, so because those kind of players you get all those system's that kills the MMO atmosphere.
That Is all.

I am a casual player since mid-Cata and I only care about HC raid fights and other high end game stuff and I rather not be able to kil la boss than doing it because it's nerfed.


So please, stop pointing out "casual" players as a problem. Casual can perfectly be hard core, it only means that you play LESS TIME.

Bad players are another thing, and that's what you actually are talking about.

[Azgraal]

And I couldn't care less about immersion in MMOs.

We're on opposite points of the spectrum. For me, immersion is a huuuuuuuuge selling point.

On subject, bring back the night to Azeroth!

[Vankrys]

they are still Massively Multiplayer, maybe more so than before thanks to the superserver. what they aren't anymore, ar at least feel like they aren't, is open world.

it's the quality of life feature that give the impression of a "single player game"
why travel when you can teleport straight to the destination.

imagine a grand theft auto where you wouldn't have to cross the city to go to the mission area, you go to the game menu, accept the mission and you are teleported to the instanced mission area. Where is the fun of visiting the city, a big part of the appeal of open world.

[Itisamuh]

Because somewhere along the road the developers realized that forcing people to rely on socializing with people they have no interest in socializing with in order to get anything done is a bad way to run a game.

[Deleted]

Since millions of people play them, i honestly think that they are still "massively" and "multiplayer"

True. But I of course mean it doesn't feel massive nor multiplayer. It feels small, instanced, separated and soloplayer (at least in my opinion).

I also miss the days of knowing a lot of people by name on the server, whether it be someone with a very rare crafting or enchanting recipe etc, someone with some crazy/rare item (like the AQ gong mount) or some PVP'er of the opposite faction who you knew you were in trouble if you ran into.

I guess being immersion heavy, community driven and more of a time investment isn't as profitable as catering to people who just want to log in quickly, do something action paced and then log out. I'm not saying one style is better than the other, but it's really hard to enjoy a game when you're on the wrong side of the line.

[Deleted]

So please, stop pointing out "casual" players as a problem. Casual can perfectly be hard core, it only means that you play LESS TIME.

This is probaly nitpicking and with all due respect but you are either Casual OR you are Hardcore... you cant be a Casual Hardcore but you can be a Hardcore casual. Its not just time invested, but how fast are you there, how much time you have invested there, are you a first buyer, have you gone through all the content in a matter of weeks rather than months. Thats the typical classification of Hardcore.

@OP
I actually agree with you, but when you compare Vanilla to now (no LFR, no LFG, no "stones" in front of instances, harder quests that were nigh impossible to do on your own when batteling elites unless you were at least 3-5 levels above the mob, rudimentary guild system) you were pretty much forced to reach out and get to know your players because people were looking for the same stuff. Now with all the little comfort helpers, it does kill the social aspect of an MMO but it saves time to find a place to raid or instance. As good as Vanilla was in terms of social, it was terrible when it came to getting bands together to actually get an instance done. Advantage was you did not have people drop out so quickly, because they also knew it was a nightmare finding another group. It was a help and get help situation rather than "damn stupid group, i will drop out and spend 10 seconds finding another one if loot did not drop or someone did not know what they where doing".

A shame really, people are expected to know everything now, rather than getting the opportinity of advice from experienced players, teaching people a run through the instance, which was certainly much more fun then as it was now, but also cost a good hour more to get through something.

As a Hardcore than went to casual (too many other games), from Vanilla all the way up to Mist, every expansion etc. if I have not played for a few months, its nigh impossible to enjoy the game.

[thedingleberry]

while it would be fun to make dungeons require coordination, the problem lies in that as soon as there is a wipe, the tank and healer drop group leaving dps to sit and wait for 10 minutes for replacements. it would only work if people weren't so impatient. also, it will also only work if blizzard actually creates new dungeons. with our current tier, the mop dungeons are simply zergs because we are so overgeared for them. at least in cata, when you got to a certain gear threshold, you were queued into troll or HoT dungeons so you weren't ruining the experience for fresh 85s in the 4.0 dungeons. It's really blizzards fault for not creating decent scaled non-LFR content in each of their mop tiers. Let's face it, scenarios are boooooorrrrrrriiiiinnnngggg. They have no loot tables. They are purely quick VP runs with a chance at bad purple items in a cache.

[Hraklea]

...so because those kind of players you get all those system's that kills the MMO atmosphere.

Wrong. It is because MMOs developers failed at creating a decent difficulty scalling. Don't blame casuals for the game's flaws.

We're on opposite points of the spectrum. For me, immersion is a huuuuuuuuge selling point.

I'm totally ok with RP servers, but I don't see the point of "flying mounts are destructive" argument. If you like immersion, don't buy a flying mount.

I also miss the days of knowing a lot of people by name on the server, whether it be someone with a very rare crafting or enchanting recipe etc

Yeah, very good times when you had to farm the mats because the AH was always empty, spend days asking for enchant on /trade because no ones had the repice, and then pay a retarded amount of gold because that one guy had the monopoly over that enchantment...

[Deleted]

Some pretty crazy advice from me:

Download Star Wars: The Old Republic, and give that a go, F2P, to like... level 15 or something. The levelling in this game is genuinely pretty good. You have a main, class specific story, which (like all quests) is fully voice acted, and you get dialogue options and all sorts. This, to me, enriches what is otherwise a very boring solitary levelling experience that you see in most so called MMO's nowadays.

But what's really cool, is the social part of SWTOR. Firstly, they have "Heroic" quests, sorta like the old group quests WoW used to have. I've just started playing this game again, and I'm now level 25 on two characters, and general chat on each planet is full of people asking for groups for these quests, pretty much constantly. You'll get your first one (a 2+ man quest, max party size is 4 in SWTOR) at around level 8, and then there are some 4 man quests around level 12, and there's your first "Flashpoint" (basically a dungeon) at level 10 or so.

When you're in a group the game "rolls" for who wins the conversation, and gets to say their piece. What's cool about this is that you really do feel like a team (everyone steps forward to say stuff during the dialogue), and you kinda get to see the personalities of the other players, and also it creates a lot of conversation in the group during the dungeons/quests in my experience.

Also: There is a dungeon finder (or similar) in SWTOR, but honestly I see more people asking for groups in trade than using the tool. I don't know why, but I have a strong suspicion it's because all of SWTOR's dungeons are accessible from the main fleet (equivalent of Stormwind or Org), which is where a lot of people are anyway.

There are no flying mounts.

Finally I will leave you with a little story of what happened to me the other day as a young level 10 Jedi Consular, just arriving at the Republic Fleet for the first time:

I asked in general chat if tanks or healers were more sought after for dungeons and group content. Consular can either specialise (permanently) as a Shadow (tank/dps/dps) or a Sage (heals/dps/dps), so it's a fairly common question. Pretty much everyone advised that tanks were rarer, and one guy actually whispered me to add him to his friends list. He basically tutored me in SWTOR tanking with my Shadow, and has spent a fair amount of time going out of his way to give me a hand, craft me stuff and just in general be a nice guy, just because he was also a Shadow tank and he wanted to share how awesome it was. (And it is, it's like a DK/Rogue hybrid tank with some Enh shaman similarities! Also a tank that can stealth - yes.. ).

That may not be typical, but I've played WoW for 8 years and while I've done this for some people, I've never been on the receiving end of such niceness. Given that SWTOR is free, I'd say it's worth trying. I genuinely feel it's a very good game to play in short bursts when you feel a bit tired of WoW, or pine for how WoW used to be in some ways.

Good luck!

[namelessone]

Because players don't want to be forced to group with douchebags to play the game. You should have noticed that the biggest MMOs still have plenty of group-only content, the only major different from "old times" is that playing solo is viable, and it turned out a lot players would rather play solo than group with obsessive power-tripping jerks. I told someone recently in other threads, if you need the devs to force other people to play with you, the problem is definitely NOT with the game.

[jvbastel]

Wow is as social as you want it to be.

On spare evenings, I like to level alts in dungeons, usually tank classes since I like to set the pace for the dungeon (meaning i mass-pull like crazy). While doing this I usually try to start up a conversation with my party-members. By the time I'm lvl 60 I always have at least 3-5 new people on my friends list, some of which I talk to daily for months.

Start talking yourself if you want a social experience, people will respond, but someone has to make the effort.

[Forgettable]

I recently leveled a new character to about 80 without chatting to a single new person

The "MM" from MMO is gone because of you. You have nobody to blame except yourself. If you want to interact with people, you still can. Start chatting when you get into a dungeon. Simple as that. Just because you're no longer forced to, doesn't mean you no longer can.

[Fencers]

It seems the social and immersion aspects of these games don't exist any more.

Social aspects exist in MMOs of the modern era, of course. There is not a single MMO active where there is no socializing occurring. Whether that be in world/ guild/party chat or within the comms servers of player groups.

Now, it may be that the "community" of current MMO is coarser than at some point. Or that your own temperament is less in-line with the "community" of modern games. But this can't really be helped by game design as it is simple human nature.

I mean, what can developers do if you don't want to talk to anyone? The willingness to say, "Hello" is all you.

Do people really prefer 15-30 minute zergs of LFG instances where not a single word is spoken by any of the five members?

I think this is overblown really.

There was not greater communication within instances "back in the day". Which I am not sure what game you are speaking about; so this is so wide open as to apply to like half a dozen games with desperate systems.

What has happened in the current gen of MMOs is that people are more informed.

"Back in the day", a lot of "communication" was based on a group not knowing what to do or how things worked. Eventually that dissipates over time, as players see these instances over & over. Of course, we have more tools/websites to figure stuff out than when Alakazam and half finished wikis were the only info dumps around.

What is there to even say if everyone knows these dungeons nowadays? If you want to talk about your cats or aunt Sally to the dungeon group no one is stopping you really.


Also immersion is not gameplay. It has no relevance to gameplay. There is only gameplay. Concern otherwise is always a mistake.

[wombinator04]

The term MMO is useless. You can have a game with no social interaction what so ever and it can be called an MMO.

[ComputerNerd]

Too many "Casuals" around that want to see ALL the content, without having any time for actually learning and playing the game.
Is basically It, so because those kind of players you get all those system's that kills the MMO atmosphere.
That Is all.

Stupid argument, because a guild which raids only with its own members is doing very little interaction with the rest of the community.

If anything those in random groups are seeing more of the community than those in a closed guild group are.

How many other MMO's have exactly the same situation, people simply not wanting to talk.
The levelling in WoW has always been possible to do solo.
The use of alts for professions is nothing new.
What about the use of gearscore and similar addons pre-LFD/LFR, and the interaction with the community which came down to looking at a tooltip or a simple number request.

Get over these pointless "casual" arguments, because you can't use the word correctly.
Casual is about time commitment, nothing else. Organised raiders might play as much as a casual, just at consistent times.
That is all.

If LFR was "seeing all the content", then nobody would be in heroic or normal for that matter.
LFR is NOT all the content, only a fraction of it. Only a fraction of the experience.