What MMO would you recommend?

[Ashleyxoxo]

I hate leveling and don't care much about story, but I'm looking for exciting gameplay (dungeons and rais) and beautiful cosmetics. Which MMO would you recommend I play?

[Nikeyla]

I hate leveling and don't care much about story, but I'm looking for exciting gameplay (dungeons and rais) and beautiful cosmetics. Which MMO would you recommend I play?

I never played it myself, but many of my friends like the elder scrolls online. No idea, how long the leveling is though. However if you dont care about leveling or story and want a good gameplay, have you tried some ARPGs? For example PoE or Grim Dawn. These games have way more interesting gameplay than mmos ever offered me. Usually playable both solo or party, but these games are mostly played as solo within a community or discord over raiding in full parties etc. PoE has awesome cosmetics, but mostly in a form of mtx, while the base game is free. GD offers everything for free once you buy the game.
Edit: I see many ppl mentioning WoW, but its gameplay is everything but exciting, using 15y+ old combat mechanics that literally never change. The game is simply dying, because Blizzard just dont give a F about quality products, so I cant recommend that.

[Doctor Amadeus]

World of Warcraft but I’m personally considering EVE online

[Val the Moofia Boss]

We have a ask for game recommendations thread.

OT: Off of the top of my head, the MMOs I'd recommend would be: World of Warcraft (hard for me to recommend nowadays but it still has a lot of great gameplay), Final Fantasy XIV (hard for me to recommend to the OP because the OP said that they didn't care for story, and pretty much everything in FFXIV is unlocked by progressing through the story), Guild Wars 2 (has issues I will explain below), and Warframe (a 4 person cooperative 3rd person shooter where you kill hordes of enemies in randomly generated levels to collect loot and kill more hordes).

World of Warcraft
Tab target MMORPG. $15 a month to play + $60 box expansions every two years. Has a cash shop in which you can buy mounts for $25 and such. You can also legally spend IRL money to buy ingame gold, which can then be used to buy items and gear.

Positives

• + Timeless artstyle. Super iconic races and armor designs and abilities. Everything is clearly readable.

• + Huge amount of variety in player customization. There are over two dozen different races with different silhouttes, and each gender has a different silhoutte too. There are thousands of different armor models in the game. The only thing you can't really do is wear a trench coat (NPCs wear them so they might come one day).

• + Game is low performance (except for certain areas, such as Suramar) and still looks fantastic.

• + Huge amount of mod support via addons.

• + 16+ years of content to play through.

• + The zones up until Legion feel like real places. Very immersive.

• + New zones added in patches.

• + Best PvP in MMOs.

• + Most raid content in any MMO ever.

• + From MoP onwards there is a LOT of voice acting. Almost all of the main zone quests are voiced. All instances are fully voiced. Seriously. There is a huge amount of voice acting.

• + Wardrobe system called "transmog". However, you cannot permanently change your character's appearance, nor can you do so on the fly, so everytime you get better gear, you have to go back to town to apply your outfit to it.

• + Lots of achievement stuff to do. You can do old reputations to get mounts, pets, cosmetics, titles, transmog, etc. You can even track achievements on your UI like tracking a quest. It's very fun to track achievements and try to do them. Some achievements even require you to do some interesting gameplay or whacky things you otherwise would not do if you were playing normally.

Neutral

• +/- Overall good soundtrack. However, a lot of the soundtrack is ambient, so there aren't many iconic melodies. When you take a step back, you'll find that WoW has a good OST by virtue of the sheer quantity of music it has. On a per expansion basis there are only a handful of good tracks. WoW's music quality peaks with MoP (guest composer Jeremy Soule!) and WoD, and goes downhill in Legion. The music took a big hit in BFA as lead composer Dustin Brower stepped back and only composed for cutscenes.

Negatives

• - Content droughts. It is usual for the game to go 6+ months without a major content update. After the final patch of an expansion, there is usually a year long content drought, and you still have to pay $15 monthly subscription to play.

• - Blizzard doesn't really care about the story. The writing is unbelievably awful at times. The story is made up as they go along. The writers shamelessly retcon their own lore so often that they had to put out a series of codex books to establish the "yes really" official, current lore. And then those codexes were retconned and decanonized two years later.

-

• Facial animations are a little stiff. You don't really get close up cutscenes of characters in engine.

• - Unless you play a monk or a Demon Hunbter, every class uses pretty much the same animations as everyone else, just with different spell effects and sound effects.

• - If you want to go back and enjoy old expansion stories, you can't because Blizzard removed the second half of the story, such as MoP's and WoD's legendary questlines. You can't go back and do challenging singleplayer content like the Mage Tower.

• - Dailies and gear treadmill. Unless you're content with doing old content, the game revolves around logging in every day to check off your list of chores and grind. You have to do dailies, dungeons, Horrific Visions, and so on. You don't get to see the latest content unless you go through this treadmill.

• - Takes months to catch up to current content, as you have to level a character to level cap, then do every zone questline to unlock world quests, and then you have to start farming world quests to do reputations to get to the next patch's treadmill, until you finally reach the latest patch's content.

• - Crafting was forgotten years ago and is an unenjoyable gold sink.

• - Removal of flying. Prior to MoP, in order to fly, you simply had to go to the flying trainer and buy flight licenses for a few thousand gold (easily obtainable by simply vendoring crap and the gold you get from doing quests). However, starting with WoD, the flight trainers were removed, and flying was now obtained by spending months farming reputations for months on end and doing a lot of tedious chores. Furthermore, the zones were designed in such a way as to make travel on the ground as difficult as possible (not to mention that the mob density was cranked up to the extreme and mobs are now placed on roads, so you can't go anywhere without pulling mobs and being dismounted). The end result is that traveling through post-MoP zones is extremely aggravating, and makes me not want to explore the world at all.

Final Fantasy XIV
Tab target MMORPG. $15 a month to play + $60 box expansions every two years. Has a cash shop in which you can spend money to buy mounts and outfits and such.

Positives

• + Excellent controller support. You can even raid on the hardest difficult whilist using a controller and you won't be gimped compared to mouse & keyboard users.

• + Console support. PS4 and Xbox One.

• + One major patch every 3 months. It always contains new MSQ (main story questline) content, a new dungeon, a new raid, and other stuff. No content droughts.

• + Great writing. The overarching story of FFXIV has been outlined from the get go and the writers know where they are going. The Heavensward and Shadowbringers expansions are easily among the best - if not THE BEST - Final Fantasy stories in the franchise. Almost no retcons. The story will conclude in the next expansion, either in 2021 or 2022.

• + Lots of good quests. Cutscene heavy. Questing is like playing a JRPG. The main story, the raid questlines, and the Hildibrand questline are fantastic. Each job (FFXIV's term for "class") has its own questline, which varies in quality. There are also reputations which have their own questlines, which vary in quality.

• + Great character animations and faces.

• + Animation variety. Every job has a completely unique animation set (whereas in WoW everyone who isn't a monk uses the same melee and casting animations).

• + Amazing, melodic music by Masayoshi Soken. It's incredible how much music Soken manages to put out every year. He also has very wide range and tries out a variety of different genres of music, so the OST never feels stale or repetitive.

• + No catchup slog. There are no artificial timegates preventing you from reaching the latest content. The only thing stopping you is the speed at which you go through the main story.

• + Very little gear treadmill at endgame.

• + There is an ingame casino where you can spend your time and have a lot of fun doing fun, non-combat gameplay.

• + Player and guild housing which players can decorate. Players can buy one room apartments for 500,000 gil (easily achievable in FFXIV). You can buy housing plots of varying sizes (small, medium, and large) but there are limited plots per server so you have to compete with other players to snatch them up. It is difficult to get a plot of land for a house but everyone can get an apartment.

• + Wardrobe system in the form of glamour. However, you cannot permanently change your character's appearance, nor can you do so on the fly, so everytime you get better gear, you have to go back to town to apply your outfit to it.

• + You can teleport to any place you have visited before.

• + Flying. In order to fly, all you need to do is complete a few optional quests, go around the zone and interact with aether currents (you have a compass item that points you to them), and complete the zone questline. If you have done all of that, then as soon as you complete the zone questline you can fly in the zone.

Neutral

• +/- No class customization. No talent/perk trees, no picking abilities or passives, no nothing. Once you hit level cap and have obtained all of your class' abilities, what you see in your spellbook is what you get, and you have to make the best with what you've got. This can be great for people who don't like getting a migraine from reading huge class guides and DPS calculations. However, some job don't have a lot of depth, and you don't really have the ability to do anything about it other than leveling up another job instead.

• +/- No new zones added in patches, only in expansion box launches, so you don't get the feeling of discovering a new place as often, nor do you get to go to as many new places as in WoW.

• +/- Light achievement gameplay in the form of relic weapons, but a lot of them boil down to grinds (namely the Heavensward and Stormblood relics).

• +/- Crafting is better than in most games, as there is actual gameplay to the crafting process (each crafting job has its own abilities you use while crafting). However, it does boil down to a lot of repetition and macro usage and it's a goldsink. Not much more fun than WoW's crafting.

• +/- far less raid content compared to other MMOs. In WoW, you get to explore these huge, massive instances with a lot of lore, and as you progress you fight mobs and story developments happen with key NPCs, and it feels really epic. You get to explore the Mogu'shan vaults with Lorewalker Cho, or storm the beaches of Orgrimmar with Lor'themar, Sylvanas, Varian, and Jaina (and it's all voice acted!). In FFXIV, you queue for a raid and you are plopped on a platform with a boss, and that's it. If you're a RAIDER and you like the CHALLENGE of learning the fight with your friends, then you will like FFXIV as it gets straight to the point. However, if you really liked the EXPERIENCE of going through the raid, of exploring, and the story, then you will be very disappointed in FFXIV. FFXIV kinda tries to do it with 24 man Alliance raids, but they feel very weak compared to WoW's presentation. You don't really get to explore or fight with NPCs, and with the exception of a handful of bosses, there is no voice acting.

• +/- Decent addon/mod support, but addons/mods are discouraged by the publisher, Square Enix. For example, you can install a DPS meter, but if you go around posting results in the ingame chat, you can get banned (keep it in your Discord chat). You can install nude mods (the devs don't scan your computer or anything), but if you go around posting screenshots online, you can get banned.

Negatives

• - The game has an input delay.

• - The realistic artstyle does not age well and is very dependent on how powerful your system is. FFXIV is performance intensive. You may have to play at smaller resolutions and/or lower graphical settings to get the game to run smoothly.

• - The game doesn't really have racial options or gear items that dramatically change up the silhoutte of your character as much as other games like WoW, so player characters can look rather samey in silhoutte. Everybody looks like a human, with maybe a gnome or a big bulky human thrown in every now and then.

• - The first 284 quests of the MSQ (patches 2.0 through 2.55) have a LOT of filler in them, and the sheer amount of slog is often a deterent for new players. Fortunately, patch 5.3 is going to revamp the 2.0 through 2.55 storyline and make the filler optional, so new players should find that the revamped storyline will move at a far more brisk pace.

• - You can't do the MSQ instances with friends or other players.

• - Once you have completed the questlines, there isn't a lot to do besides crafting and raiding the current raid.

• - Because the game is hardly voice acted outside of cutscenes, dialogue during battle or boss quips appear as lines of text near the top of your screen, which is very easy to miss as you will have your eyes glued towards the AoEs on the ground, or looking at your ability cooldowns, or looking at your health bar or mana bar, and so on.

Guild Wars 2
Tab target MMORPG. No subscription but you have to pay for box expansions and DLC (which includes access to new zones and new content). $30 for the expansions and another $34 for all of the zones and new content DLC. Has a predatory cash shop (addressed in the negatives section).

Positives

• + One of the racial options is Charr, a lion like race that has a unique animation where if you run with your weapon sheathed, your character will run on all fours. This really helps differentiate the players.

• + Lots of voice work. Almost every event in every zone is voice acted.

• + Player is a voice character during the main story. Each race/gender combination has their own voice actor with their own tendencies, and the player is just as much of a character as the NPCs in the story, not a silent protagonist who just sit there and nods and does what the questgivers tell him to do. (Also, btw, you can do the main quest missions co-op. The other players are treated as sidekicks, while the party leader is the one who is voiced).

• + Jumping puzzles. Many of the maps in the game have jumping puzzles (some quite lengthy), which have rewards at the end of them which reset. There is a daily achievement that takes you to a random jumping puzzle, so if you want to do something that isn't combat, you can have a lot fun just doing the jumping puzzles.

• + One new zone added in every patch.

• + No gear treadmill. The developers stopped adding more powerful gear in 2013. Once you obtain at the Ascended Armor set, you now have the most powerful gear in the game forever. You have a tangible "yes really" end goal to reach.

• + Vanilla GW2 has beautiful, ambient music by Jeremy Soule.

• + On the fly class customization. You can change your build anywhere out of combat. Very easy to try out anything.

• + You can teleport to any place you have visited before.

Neutral

• +/- Jeremy Soule did not return for the expansions. The music is... okay. Nothing memorable.

• +/- Wardrobe system. However, you cannot permanently change your character's appearance, nor can you do so on the fly, so every time you get better gear, you have to go back to town to apply your outfit to it. You can even dye the colors of the piece of gear, and some pieces have multiple channels you can dye. Furthermore, each time you wish to apply your outfit to an item, you have to use a very rare resource which you must either save up from daily logins, or buy from the cash shop with IRL money.

Negatives

• - Extremely Performance intensive, despite the game not even looking very good compared to FFXIV or WoW. You will have to play at smaller resolutions and/or lower graphical settings to get the game to run smoothly.

• - The game looks very blurry.

• - Content droughts. It is often for the game to go several months without a major content update.

• - Sparse raid content. The game has a few raids, but even if you're interested in doing raiding, it's hard to actually find the people who want to do the content. You don't get better gear from doing raids and no story important stuff happens in the raids. The only reason to do the raids is for cosmetics and for the challenge. There is no LFR or dungeon finder to queue for that will automatically place you in a group, nor is there an easy mode/LFR difficulty of the raids. PUGs for raids exist but they are few and far between and it's hard to get in one. The raiding community is very small in GW2.

• - The game is designed around heavily incentivizing you to use the cash shop. Your bags fill up too quickly. Want more bag space? Cash shop. Your bank is too small. Want more bank space? Cash shop. Your crafting and gathering tools break too often. Want unbreakable tools? Cash shop. Your wardrobe requires using a rare resource that you have to save up by logging in every day for months... or you could just pay for it with IRL money on the cash shop. Want to be able to save your character's build loadout? Cash shop.

• - Bags fill up too quickly. You get too much trash, too many ingredients, and too many pieces of armor, so you have to stop every hour or so and spend several minutes clearing out your bag space.

• - Mob density in the expansions is absurd. You can't travel for five seconds without pulling a mob and being slowed down. You can't AFK outside of towns or else you will come back and your character will have died to some mob that wandered by or spawned on top of you.

• - The first storyline, the vanilla game's personal story, is extremely rough. The second storyline, Living World Season 1, was removed from the game, so you skip a lot of stuff and go straight to season 2. Season 2 is where the story starts getting good anyway, though, but you still have to slog through the personal story to get to it first.

Warframe
Third person shooter with 3 other players at a time. Lobby MMO. Free-to-play. Has a cash shop that is pretty good for the most part but has a few issues.

Positives

• + Addictive cycle of killing hordes of enemies to leveling up gear and farm loot to upgrade your gear and build new gear to go out and kill hordes of enemies and repeat the process.

• + Enough mission variety and variety in enemies, gear, abilities, and tilesets to make it interesting.

• + 48 different classes to choose from. You can acquire every class.

• + Huge amounts of customization. Want to be a sword wielding samurai? Can do that. Want to be John Wick and be an expert marksman with just a pistol? You can do that. Want to be a wizard who wields lightning? You can do that. Want to be a stealth guy an assasinate people? You can do that. Want to be an illusionists who mind controls enemies into killing each other? You can do that.

• + The lore is pretty original and unique.

Neutral

• +/- Is one of the friendliest F2P games out there, as well as probably the most polished, AAA tier game you can play for free. No pay-to-win. (You can buy gear and classes - which you can earn ingame at a reasonable rate - but you can't buy straight up better gear and classes. It's more like "pay to skip the farming process", which is actually a pretty reasonable rate. It can be frustrating if you're in the early game and don't have the ability to farm the classes and gear you want from the latter content, though. There are artifacts of late 2000's facebook game design, with things such as building gear having a timer on it which you can pay IRL money to skip, limited slots to store classes and gear, and so on. Fortunately, you can trade ingame items with other players for cash shop currency, but still.

Negatives

• - Terrible new player experience. The game is awful at explaining it's systems to you, so you have to ask other people in chat or look up info on Youtube or the Warframe wiki.

• - Fewer and fewer major updates. We used to get a lot of patches and had several events running every year, but over the past three to four years they've scaled back the number of content updates and we hardly have any events anymore. If you are veteran who has played the game for a long time you will burn out because there just isn't much of anything to look forward to or anything to spruce up the gameplay.

• - Touching on the above, once you've done all of the content and you obtained the builds you desire, there really isn't much motivation to continue playing.

• - The developer has a really bad habit of introducing new systems and then never doing anything with those new systems again. They are forgotten as the dev goes on to work on the next new system... so what ends up happening is that a lot of the game's innovative content is neglected and never iterated upon. Did you like this one type of gameplay? Too bad you will never get anything else like it.

• - If you're a fan of the main story, prepare to be disappointed because there is only about a dozen hours of main story and they haven't updated the storyline in two years. Still waiting for the next part!

[Daedius]

VR Chat

[Leyre]

Tibia, Mu Online, Lineage

[Ashleyxoxo]

Tibia, Mu Online, Lineage

Hey, Mu Online looks really cool.

-snip-

When is patch 5.3 for FFXIV coming out? Should I just not play until then?

[Val the Moofia Boss]

When is patch 5.3 for FFXIV coming out? Should I just not play until then?

It was expected to come in June (the norm is to have a new FFXIV patch every three months), but due to the virus it has been delayed and there is no word on when it will come. Possibly July or August.

I would advise waiting until 5.3 comes out because I want new players to experience the joys of FFXIV, but the current new player experience turns a lot of people away. So wait until the new player experience is reworked in 5.3. I dislike telling people "I know you're having a bad time, but trust me, it gets better! You just have to put in another thirty hours to get to the good part!". If the difference is waiting a few months for them to join versus them quitting after not having fun for hours, I'd rather recommend that they wait.

[ek0zu]

WoW is the best choice.

[Ange]

I hate leveling and don't care much about story, but I'm looking for exciting gameplay (dungeons and rais) and beautiful cosmetics. Which MMO would you recommend I play?

If you don't care about leveling (NO EXPLORATION) and don't care about story (NO READING) you should feel home with any Action-RPG with multiplayer features. And if you can't stomach player competition, you can just go full single player ARPG. Later gets dull pretty fast, thats why it popular with console gaming.

World of Warcraft got some anti-social gaming modes on the surface to get you into raiding/dungeons/pvp but its isolated from the main game for a very good reason. Not really sure if thats the right fit, since you are clearly not looking for areal MMO.

[Ashleyxoxo]

If you don't care about leveling (NO EXPLORATION) and don't care about story (NO READING) you should feel home with any Action-RPG with multiplayer features. And if you can't stomach player competition, you can just go full single player ARPG. Later gets dull pretty fast, thats why it popular with console gaming.

World of Warcraft got some anti-social gaming modes on the surface to get you into raiding/dungeons/pvp but its isolated from the main game for a very good reason. Not really sure if thats the right fit, since you are clearly not looking for areal MMO.

Aren't single player RPGs even more story-centric? Which do you recommend?

[Noct]

I am passionate about MMO's and want the industry to thrive! I regularly follow many in-development MMOs but there's only one right now that I think is worth your time, and that's Guild Wars 2.

+ Fast and fun combat.
+ EVERYTHING is evergreen content.
+ Free entry. Can even get to max lvl without paying a thing.
+ NO subscription.
+ Structured PvP is a completely even playing field. You can be a level 2 in starter armor and have access to the same skills and power level as anyone else.
+ Horizontal progression: not an infinite gearing treadmill every time new content comes out. Legendaries are legendary forever.
+ Extremely friendly and warm community.

The above posts' criticisms come off like they haven't seriously played it. You can download GW2Hook to get around the graphics looking dated at all. You earn mounts so the mob density problem really isn't a problem (sorry if the world wants to feel dangerous at times?). Yes, your inventory fills up, but it just takes proper management of it, which can feel confusing if you're used to more standard MMOs like WoW or FF XIV. Of course giving the game money helps this problem, but there isn't a subscription fee! Things like increasing bank space is PERMANENT. Additionally, you can transfer in-game money into the paid currency.

I've played WoW and GW2 since their launch, ~4 months on FF XIV and Blade & Soul, and ~2 years on Black Desert. Guild Wars 2 has far and away the best progression system, payment model, community, and PvP.

As you can tell, I deeply appreciate the systems and model of GW2. There is no perfect game and GW2 still has its faults but if you haven't given it a try you got nothing to lose.

EDIT: For sake of fairness and coming off perhaps a bit overly positive I wanted to share some negatives...
- There are gambling traps. They are pretty easy to spot but like any situation where they exist, sometimes when you get that dopamine from trying it once you get tempted to keep feeding it.
- There is no "e-sports" scene, at least not anymore. That said, I still think this game has the best and most fair PvP.
- Lack of traditional dungeons.
- No semi-afk activities like fishing. The game has non-combat activities but they still demand a level of focus.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

+ Free entry. Can even get to max lvl without paying a thing.
+ NO subscription.

I think this is rather deceptive. It's technically true, but a big part of the character progression system (masteries and elite specializations) are locked behind the expansion and DLC paywalls.

+ Structured PvP is a completely even playing field. You can be a level 2 in starter armor and have access to the same skills and power level as anyone else.

I found the arena PvP to be pretty crap. WvW was more interesting, but had the problem of being zergfests. It's just blobs of players following around their commander and whittling down other blobs of players.

One thing that is interesting about PvP is that it allows you to test any build you want, without having to obtain the skill points or the equipment in PvE. You can play around with different skill point builds and traits and stat setups until you find something you like, and then you can set your goal in PvE to obtain that build as quickly as possible.

+ Extremely friendly and warm community.

It's easy to be nice when there is little to no adversity in the game. Not to say that GW2's community isn't nice (it certainly is) but I've never made any bonds in the game. I've never been forced to make bonds with other people, nor did anyone come up to me and want to group up. Felt like everybody grouped up out of the convenience of the moment, ie grouping up for Vinewrath or the Dragon's Stand meta. In WoW and FFXIV, there is at least some pressure to make friends with other people. If you're doing hard content, it's in your best interest to find other people you can count on and make them your friend. Unless you're hardcore arena PvPer, there really isn't any incentive to do so in GW2.

- There are gambling traps. They are pretty easy to spot but like any situation where they exist, sometimes when you get that dopamine from trying it once you get tempted to keep feeding it.

Ah yes, the chests. TBH, I forgot about them. Never bothered with trying to get or buy keys or anything. I just threw them in the bank and forgot about it.

[Gatto]

...

Very Nice Analysis!
Much appreciated!

***

As for me, since I tried GW2 I can't properly deal with any other MMO.

GW2 has huge flaws in terms of combat, class balance, lag, released content frequency, and so on, but it also has QoL which makes outshine
the others mmo.

I'll compare now wow and gw2

1) Moving around the world

-WoW: you will be spending 1/4 of your time literally travelling ( to daily quests location, to dungeon locations, to raid locations, and so on )
-Gw2: you will instantly recall close to where you want to go, then you will walk a few second to get exactly on the specific point.

2) Unlock new features ( remember this is not playing, but forced content to enable extra features ).

-WoW: Once per Character
-Gw2: Once per Account

3) Bank access, Auction House access, Crafting materials deposit.

-WoW: Go to a bank/AH/. Eventually, enjoy the 1h cooldown bank from the engineer.
-From wherever you are, through basic features and portable bank/AH ( you have to invest, but once you have it it's done ), shared with all your alts through shared backpack slots

4) Equipment

-WoW: Infinite Grind, which resets every X months
-Gw2: once you have your equipment, that's it. It will be the best you can have forever. Eventually you can pass it to alts since HEY! there's no soulbound!

5) PvP

-Wow: Level a character, equip it, unlock stuff, wait for timegated things, pray for the drop you need, etc
-Gw2: Create a character and level it to 2 ( complete the 5 min introducing scenario ). You are now done and ready for pvp ( same equip, skills, perks, etc... as anybody else ).

***

That said, it is true that there's not much content to do, but part of this is true because of the missing progression.

In other mmo you find yourself pushing for better random equipment.

You find yourself spending time doing the same thing over and over waiting for the good reward you will be throwin away after few weeks.
The endgame content too will come available to everybody due to the increased ilvl and nerfs ( just check the ilvl the top guild managed to clear the mythic run and the nerfs "every boss" took until now. But it has always been this way.

ps: note that while it's true they are by definition "top players", on the other hands we have players with:

-Better equip
-More time spent on any encounter
-Facing an overnerfed content
-Sometimes even an ongoing ilvl progression ( like corruption now, which allows you to gain +3 CR every week, which means +% damage/healings every week ).

So that's it.
Loving Gw2 approach, as probably the best filler mmo game ever.

[Lex Icon]

you're wrong about the wardrobe system in GW2. you can change anything on the fly.. no need to go back to town. and if you do any wvw at all you'll be swimming in tranmutation charges. also Outfits are like costumes that applies no matter what other gear you have on but can only be dyed.

[willtron]

I hate leveling and don't care much about story, but I'm looking for exciting gameplay (dungeons and rais) and beautiful cosmetics. Which MMO would you recommend I play?

Planetside 2

[PACOX]

If you like cosmetics, GW2. A lot of the story is told their dialogue, either ambient or direct so you can either pay attention or not. Dungeons are dead in GW2 but Fractals (sort of like Mystic+) are alive. There's 7 raids. The raiding community isn't dead but vets eventually move on. The devs focus on releasing raid like bosses now instead of full raid wings (in dev speak they said it was to provide a stepping stone but in reality its easier to do a boss at a time rather than an entire raid).

Theres a ton of content that never becomes outdated due to ilvl. Lots of horizontal progression, which is or isn't some people's thing. The combat comes off as too chaotic for some people used to games with long GCDs and the absence of real projectiles. Certain parts of the game will also let you get by with being really bad at the game and then suddenly smack you with a ton of bricks. Classes are very balanced with each class feeling distinct even across class builds. Raids do have a couple of mandatory support roles that you bring but even then theres build diversity across that classes that fill those roles.

[TigerBanks]

MU online was the best one at her time.
Also I can say lineage, but it is time to spy for 3rd part release now, not playing the 2nd

[RadasNoir]

I'm gonna toss out another recommendation for Warframe, based on what you seem to be looking for.

You level stuff incredibly fast in Warframe; partially because you're asked to re-level things to make them more powerful. But again, it's quick and easy enough that you could potentially do it while doing other activities in the game at the same time.

It has fast-paced and active gameplay. No real dungeons or raids, but it does have some MMO-style bosses, and other activities that become easier if you're grouped with people.

Finally, cosmetics are such a big part of the game, other players joke about how "Fashionframe is the true endgame".

Beyond that, I suppose the biggest negatives (again, based on what you seem to be looking for) is that it's not an MMO in the strictest sense of the term, and it's a sci-fi game where you play a faceless cyborg-ninja...and I get the sense you're more of a traditional fantasy fan.

[Orby]

@Val the Moofia Boss

Thats an amazing break down