"This doesn't belong in an MMO"..honest question

[Super Kami Dende]

Funnily enough every new MMO I've played in the last 10 years that came out post-Wrath has had the issue of the community demanding WoW-Like conveniences or risk having the Community split and scatter.

[GreenJesus]

Tibia? Oh the amount of hours I spent in that game

Was it a better game? Hardly.
I would argue that it was a better MMORPG than modern WoW is though. Mostly because eventually everyone that made it to some certain level knew (of) everyone else at or above that level on each server, and if you behaved like an idiot you'd only be able to surround yourself with other idiots in the end. Actions almost always had consequences in MMORPGs back then. I don't believe that they always do in the current generation of MMOs.

Maybe the playerbase for tibia was just really small? I honestly don't see how it's possible to know everyone on a server of even 10,000 people in WoW.

[Adam Jensen]

There's nothing that doesn't belong in an MMO. If it can be well integrated into the game and the players enjoy it, then it's fine.

There's no such List of Approved Activities For MMORPG Development. No High Council of the MMORPG that will fine blizzard for adding "unapproved content" to their game.

"tHiS dOeSn'T bElOnG iN aN mMo" is nothing more than a useless whine that essentially means "I don't like it."

Take Torghast for example. Some people are whining that it's "soloable content." Those people? Fuck 'em. Torghast looks like fun. Let them whine.

[matrix123mko]

Makes more sense...I mean mmorpg is a genre but these days i can count how many of it I can play with one hand


Hell I think more FMV games came out in the last 5 years (amazing how THAT genre made a comeback)

MMO is very expensive to maintain, I think.

[Vinictus]

My first mmo was in 1999, it was a free to play mmo, with the option for a subscription (5 dollar), that gave you "premium", which let you bypass login queues and purchase ingame houses for ingame gold & a rent system.

Later on they implemented stuff that was evidently pay to win, making premium zones better designed for more mob dense leveling areas, less travel time to get to said zones, it permitted you to instant travel with boats (for gold).

I liked this system, it was cheap and you could still play the game, most high level areas were infact still on the non paud areas, so paying players weren't secluded on their little island or w/e.

I loved playing Tibia

[Daedius]

When and where was this big golden era of "Real MMOs" where there we good ones as far as the eye can see that has all these "Real Mechanics". Cause from what I remember we basically just had WoW, FF11 and 14, Everquest, a thousand games trying to copy wow and mostly failing, and every f2p asian mmo monstrosity on the market.

There were plenty of MMOs prior to WoW, ye know... and not just western games, there were a ton of Asian MMOs.

Loved Mu Online, Legend of Mir, Myth of Soma, Ragnarok Online, etc.

[Logwyn]

In reality you are quite correct. Everquest started the MMO genre .

No Everquest didn't start it. MMO could be said to start with MUDs and Rogue that existed on mainframes. Then throw in Air Warrior the first MMO with graphics. Next up comes Neverwinter Nights and Gemstone. Then comes Meridian 59 and Ultima Online (two years before Everquest).

Everquest did not start the genre it was just the most popular MMO with 3D graphics.

[Arainie]

Maybe the playerbase for tibia was just really small? I honestly don't see how it's possible to know everyone on a server of even 10,000 people in WoW.

The playerbase at it's peak was around 10k concurrent players in 2003 and 65k concurrent players (online simultaneously) in 2007? and there were around 2M accounts created (not active) at that point, after that the game started declining rapidly, although apparently there are 40k online at peak time nowdays for some reason. However, back then the servers allowed less than 1k, I believe 850, players online at once and a server might have had 5-10k active players at the very most, of which only a few 100 had reached said "level" of progression. Additionally, you all converged in cities where you had your depot (bank), auction house (market) and personal housing, on top of the server community being organized in PvP oriented guilds battling for control over the server and hunting grounds as none of these were instanced. Essentially, it was very hard to be anonymous, and it was even harder to behave badly and still be anonymouse as word would spread like wildfire over the server forum and through guild communities if you did.

Basically, to those who immersed themselves in the game, it was a far more living world than I consider WoW to be nowdays. I socialize with my guild more or less every day, but everyone else is just "a stranger" that I'm unlikely to ever meet again.

[WaltherLeopold]

Maybe the playerbase for tibia was just really small? I honestly don't see how it's possible to know everyone on a server of even 10,000 people in WoW.

Things like all names were unique, you could not share names with another player on another server, which meant that very quickly you did come to learn peoples' names, especially early on in the lifespan of the game, when going above 45-50 was considered relatively high level (back then, the highest levels on the server could have been like 100-110, highest level globally was 200), it required a lot of time and effort to reach.

There were also guilds, which held considerable power on servers, due to their ability to enforce their own rule and with custom guild titles and ranks helped distinguished you from others, all in all the game was much more personalized compared to WoW.

[GreenJesus]

Things like all names were unique, you could not share names with another player on another server, which meant that very quickly you did come to learn peoples' names, especially early on in the lifespan of the game, when going above 45-50 was considered relatively high level (back then, the highest levels on the server could have been like 100-110, highest level globally was 200), it required a lot of time and effort to reach.

There were also guilds, custom guild titles and ranks which distinguished you from others, all in all the game was much more personalized compared to WoW.

So wow would need to break up all the servers and have caps of a couple thousand players. Is that what you want?

[WaltherLeopold]

So wow would need to break up all the servers and have caps of a couple thousand players. Is that what you want?

I didn't say that. I'm explaining to you, how the game was more community driven than WoW and why it could be.

[A Chozo]

Maybe I am in minority but I don't like MMO. I am playing Warcraft RPG with optional multiplayer, if I want to raid.

MMO-RPGs are unpopular by default if compared to other games. WoW made 'em a little more famous but before it, people avoided mmorpgs due to the necessity of grouping to do content.

They were games that you played by not playing.

[GreenJesus]

MMO-RPGs are unpopular by default if compared to other games. WoW made 'em a little more famous but before it, people avoided mmorpgs due to the necessity of grouping to do content.

They were games that you played by not playing.

I saw a reddit thread in r/competitivewow where a player was saying he has been sat for 3 of the last bosses in a row and hasnt been in progression for 3 months (they are currently on nzoth). He was forced to attend every night and watch the guild stream even though he was on the bench. People that said "find another guild" were downvoted. It was hilarious seeing how people just think sitting on the bench for 3 months and not playing the game is fine because "sacrifice for the group". Sorry, but why should a player dedicate 6 hours a week to sitting on the bench watching a stream? He should be getting paid for part time job.

It's hilarious how conditioned people are to just accept how things are.

[Razion]

I think a lot of people would point to the early 2000s when internet culture was just breaking out from web-based hang-outs and web-based chat-rooms to late 2000s when the MMO genre has decidedly been usurped by other categories since then with the rise of huge titles like Mincecraft in 2009 and more recently Fortnite. Different people will point to different MMOs as staples of quality or iconography for the genre - some people point to City of Heroes, others Ragnarok Online or otherwise. Genres are a construct, and saying something appeals to or doesn't appeal to a genre's conventions is something more in line of popular opinion. But it's not like MMOs can't become popular and mainstay staples of the genre after the genre itself was popular - Tera for example was and is a great example and considered by some a good example of what a game can strive for in certain respects, most notably the introduction and trend-setting of action combat for MMOs as a whole, echoed later by titles like Wildstar, Black Desert Online, and many, many more since then.

[justandulas]

MUDs still do some things better than modern MMORPGs

Example: they will have invasions of cities by mobs, and their leader will be a game GM role playing. I wish wow had the equivalent

[StillMcfuu]

MUDs still do some things better than modern MMORPGs

Example: they will have invasions of cities by mobs, and their leader will be a game GM role playing. I wish wow had the equivalent

Based off of how much people complain about any event that interrupts their daily routine, it's fair to say that Blizzard did try events like this before and they just don't work out.

[Kralljin]

Let's take for example the argument of Microtransactions. By all accounts wow literally has the least amount of them and most of them are fairly tame to maybe SLIGHTLY controversial. But somehow someway wow is the biggest offender in the bunch. How about when wow has a mechanic people don't like and its all "MMO's shouldn't have this mechanic Real MMOs dont." When in reality its LITERALLY just WoW.

What belongs in an MMO(RPG) or not is very blurred, but i do think the criticism in regards to MTX stems from the fact that WoW operates under a subscription model, not an F2P game.
Then again, i also feel like Microtransations are a poor example in this case, because they are closely linked to monetization and thus you obviously have collision between game design and the financial interest of the company.

In other words, discussion regarding Mictotransations is something that needs to take the business model into account, something that's not necessarily related to design of the game itself, whereas said phrase is also sometimes used to explicitly refer to something that entirely related to game design.

Personally, MTX are fine in an F2P game, because the devs need to make a living somehow but it's a very different story for a game with a monthly subscription.

[unbound]

I don't really hear that... when comparisons to that effect pop up on these forums it is usually between early WoW and modern WoW. so the golden era of MMOs was early WoW and people feel WoW is deviating from what made early WoW great.

This ^^^

The OP is fighting a straw man argument.

[Milfshaked]

When and where was this big golden era of "Real MMOs" where there we good ones as far as the eye can see that has all these "Real Mechanics".

That is not what they say. You are making a massive strawman. Every MMO has always had its own faults. There are also different types of MMOs that have their own subtype of the genre with different aspects.

That said, you can always learn from the past and the sad state of a lot of MMOs today is not beyond criticism.

[This One Time At Bandcamp]

If WoW wasn't the best MMO of all time, I doubt people would still be playing it after 15 years+

When Blizzard makes minor changes to mechanics, the community starts crying - That must proof of something.

Sure, other MMOs had fun mechanics, but I wonder why they don't survive for long.