MMORPG's do not survive in this era of gaming

[Greyvax]

There's no adventure or sense of exploration. No myths or legends. It's all datamined and put up on WoWhead. Player's don't need to interact with eachother anymore. They no longer need to ask eachother for help.

MMORPG's are just doomed to fail at this point.

We already experienced that time in MMORPG's. the players asked for more quality of life and this is where we're at.

we interacted with each other in the past because we didn't have a choice. we had sense of adventure and exploration because datamining simply didn't exist.

the thing is, none of that will just magically go away because they people don't want to.

people can interact with each other more, but they choose not to.

if i were you, i'd boost up classic because there's plenty of interaction happening there.

[Kiivar86]

Datamining has existed as far back as TBC, if not back to vanilla proper.

[Darsithis]

WoW is no longer an MMORPG technically, it's more a glorified lobby with instanced content to do. Matchmaking is almost fully automated. No doubt that in the future, more stuff will get automated matchmaking. Such as arena and perhaps normal to heroic raid difficulty.

Yes it is. It's still an MMORPG.

And the other MMORPG's that come out, are too scared to innovate or address the elephant in the room:

Datamining.

You see, the reason why World of Warcraft felt so beloved in our hearts was because we didn't have much information about the game during that time. We had to explore, we didn't have a wiki to say which areas were useful to go into. We just saw a cool tower and we felt the need to explore.
Right now, tons and tons of people just datamine every little bit of information available in the game before it can even reach live at some point and putting that all into a wiki. Theorycrafting it to death as a result. It's impossible for a game to have any secrets that the community has to work towards discovering.
MMORPG's are community driven, or at least they should be. Nowadays, Blizzard artificially creates group content. Most of the players we encounter, we won't see again. Everything's phased or instanced. "WORLD" of warcraft, but most of the shit is phased/instanced, ironically.

It was new, but that's every game. Every game is shiny and new at the start, and once you know it, it's not so shiny. It's hard to recapture that kind of feeling, and WoW can never quite get that back. That's not a negative, either, because it's clearly not stopping players from playing for the entire length of the game. Many of my guild mates and fellow raiders have been raiding since Classic. I've been raiding for a decade, myself, since 3.3.

Blizzard does not want the community to ever interact with eachother, unless it's at a high end level. Like mythic raiding. Most of the game is easily soloable thanks to automatic matchmaking, or the content being nihil or easy to complete that you don't need a group for it. (looking at you old raids)

So party and level sync means Blizzard doesn't want people to level together? Low-level dungeons, choices of expansions to revisit, being able to talk to all of your battle.net friends regardless of faction or game, counts as "not wanting the community to interact"?

Expanding solo activities doesn't mean that you can't have a community at lower-levels. I know people who do transmog runs together or run old raids for achievements.

And yes, a part of it is to blame with Blizzard still catering to E-sports and mythic raiders.
There is literally no reason to venture out into the world if you don't care about "MOUNTS, MOGS AND CHEEVOS". Once you get past a certain point of Ilvl, WQs become obsolete to do. Aswell as profession gear and the rest of the "world content".

Because of course, if you had to go out and farm rep, let's say for an enchant on your gear that would boost your power level, Mythic or high end players would complain they had to do said content and it would get datamined and put up on WoWhead for all to see anyway. So what's the point of adding such stuff in the first place?

WQ's aren't meant to replace all other content, they're meant to supplement it, so it makes complete sense that it stops being particularly useful for a raider or an M+ player, but for my alts it's fantastic, and I suspect many other players are the same. The world is still there, and it's fun to finish up old storylines, hunt for treasures, or, indeed, find "MOUNTS, MOGS, AND CHEEVOS", as you put it.

Blizzard let WoWhead have too much influence on the game. There's no adventure or sense of exploration. No myths or legends. It's all datamined and put up on WoWhead. Player's don't need to interact with each other anymore. They no longer need to ask each other for help.

MMORPG's are just doomed to fail at this point.

I don't see how Blizzard could have stopped a wiki site. It's not illegal to discuss a video game or post information about it. Datamining isn't the issue anyway, as once a patch releases, everything about it will become known quickly regardless.

[Simple Rick]

I would argue they have never been more popular... how many games of valheim or minecraft servers are currently run?

I think having worlds with thousands of people who can't make any real difference to it is gone but having a dozen or so players making massive changes and shaping an online world has been a recipe for quick success for a while now.

WoW is honestly more of a lobby game and that is honestly fine but I don't see the genre as dying even oldschool runescape has seen a resurgence since going to mobile.

[LilSaihah]

No, MMORPGs are doing fine, you're just looking at WoW and thinking that MMORPGs are dead.
Keep in mind that Pokemon Go is also an MMORPG.

[Ange]

Bro we definitely had a database with all of the information lol. Sure, not on day 1 but Thottbot was up and running pretty quickly

Thottbot was re-written to become a searchable database that focused exclusively on World of Warcraft three months prior to the game's retail release.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thottbot

This games never existed without community information and the same amount of players that use such sources now, did back than aswell. The though alone, that Vanilla with the huge amount of experienced MMO players would exist without external community data is absurd.

WoW since day 1

[Zafire]

MMORPG

Massively
Multiplayer
Online
Roleplaying
Game

World of Warcraft fits all of those. I don't really know what else to tell you on that. You might not enjoy the particular take on it, but WoW's PvE game has always been around instanced content. The only parts that aren't are Leveling, Daily Quests (Now World Quests), and End Game questlines. PvP started out open world, sure, but then came BGs, and then Arenas. Theres no real motivation or reward for open world PvP, not that there hasn't been efforts to promote it, with the last gasp currently having been Ashran.

As far as "Roleplaying game", it generally is played that way.

You can also hit level 10, enter a city, and never move your character outside that city ever again. It's no more an RPG than say, Call of Duty, at that point.

[arkanon]

Is it? WoW is, surprisingly, but are the other games really doing that well? Maybe FFXIV.

The way I took OP is that the games have subs to a greater or lesser degree but they're not really MMo RPGs if by that we mean 'large persistent worlds that the player discoverd via exploration' because people don't do that as much as they did 15-20 years ago.

This isn't anyone's fault either. It's the nature of the beast. We're not going to NOT use YouTube, Wowhead and the like.

NOTE: I would define a thriving genre as one that continually gets new entrants because people see opportunity to both do something new and to make money there. What's the last new MMO that is still around with, say, over 100k active players? ESO, maybe?

Looking at steam charts, SWTOR was averaging around 6-8,000 players per day. This is only steam obv and I have no idea of its accuracy, but my understanding was they have done basically nothing with the game, released a few reskins and colours of sets, and thats about it. Im sure every game has a "dedicated player base", but the size of that playerbase, the payment model, and the overheads are what determines if it is still successful or not.

From what i can see they are just keeping their operational costs extremely low and hoping the brand name keeps people playing.

[Sughs]

MMORPGs will rise again once VR improves in a decade or so.

[AcidicSyn]

Thottbot was re-written to become a searchable database that focused exclusively on World of Warcraft three months prior to the game's retail release.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thottbot

This games never existed without community information and the same amount of players that use such sources now, did back than aswell. The though alone, that Vanilla with the huge amount of experienced MMO players would exist without external community data is absurd.

WoW since day 1

So even more so then lol

[GUZ]

WoW is no longer an MMORPG technically, it's more a glorified lobby with instanced content to do. Matchmaking is almost fully automated. No doubt that in the future, more stuff will get automated matchmaking. Such as arena and perhaps normal to heroic raid difficulty.

And the other MMORPG's that come out, are too scared to innovate or adress the elephant in the room:

Datamining.

You see, the reason why World of Warcraft felt so beloved in our hearts was because we didn't have much information about the game during that time. We had to explore, we didn't have a wiki to say which areas were useful to go into. We just saw a cool tower and we felt the need to explore.
Right now, tons and tons of people just datamine every little bit of information available in the game before it can even reach live at some point and putting that all into a wiki. Theorycrafting it to death as a result. It's impossible for a game to have any secrets that the community has to work towards discovering.
MMORPG's are community driven, or atleast they should be. Nowadays, Blizzard artificially creates group content. Most of the players we encounter, we won't see again. Everything's phased or instanced. "WORLD" of warcraft, but most of the shit is phased/instanced, ironically.

Blizzard does not want the community to ever interact with eachother, unless it's at a high end level. Like mythic raiding. Most of the game is easily soloable thanks to automatic matchmaking, or the content being nihil or easy to complete that you don't need a group for it. (looking at you old raids)

And yes, a part of it is to blame with Blizzard still catering to E-sports and mythic raiders.
There is literally no reason to venture out into the world if you don't care about "MOUNTS, MOGS AND CHEEVOS". Once you get past a certain point of Ilvl, WQs become obsolete to do. Aswell as profession gear and the rest of the "world content".

Because ofcourse, if you had to go out and farm rep, let's say for an enchant on your gear that would boost your powerlevel, Mythic or high end players would complain they had to do said content and it would get datamined and put up on WoWhead for all to see anyway. So what's the point of adding such stuff in the first place?

Blizzard let WoWhead have too much influence on the game. There's no adventure or sense of exploration. No myths or legends. It's all datamined and put up on WoWhead. Player's don't need to interact with eachother anymore. They no longer need to ask eachother for help.

MMORPG's are just doomed to fail at this point.

I do really enjoy the secrets they put in the game like hivemind but even that is datamined but was still cool

[Kokolums]

You see, the reason why World of Warcraft felt so beloved in our hearts was because we didn't have much information about the game during that time.

I asked myself a long time ago "what are the most memorable moments I had playing WoW?" and they were are all social activities. One of the big changes that hurt WoW was the loss of server identity. Back in vanilla and BC, server identity was a big deal. Being the top guild on the server was huge. Your guild name WAS your title, and YOU helped build its prestige with your bare hands. Raiding was so much more interesting back then. Not only were you trying to kill bosses for progression, but you were racing other guilds for server-first kills. In-between wipes, you'd eagerly await reports on progress by rival guilds. Did they just kill a boss and get further ahead? Or catch up to your progression?

With all the massive server merges, that's been lost.

That's why one of my major fixes to the game, to make it a LOT more interesting, is Guild Leagues.

Guild Leagues would be about putting x number of guilds in a league and they would race each other for league-first kills of raid bosses, M+ clears, achievements, etc. Maybe have an interface detailing which guild is killing what boss and when. Get live reports from the in-game guild league menu.

I've had that idea for a number of years but no movement, of course. I think it would revive the game quite a bit and bring in millions of players.

[bloodkin]

WoW has had databases from the start, with datamining following not that much later (relative to WoW's age). If it were an elephant in the room, it'd be pretty dead from starvation lol.

However, there's something to be said about the RPG parts in wow. Without a doubt, wow is still and MMO, but the RPG elements have been smoothed over and devolved over time to a point that there is little to no choices you can make on how you build your char, all you do is pick a spec and that's about it, pick the correct talents, stick to the correct stat(s), which is all in a guide. Sure, some specs might have more than one playstyle (mist/fistweave) but those are also bound to limits in talent choices. The lack of the old talent systems, the dumbing down of stats/reduction in stat options and ability pruning severely hampered the options to try and build a unique playstyle.

Some might like this or not mind, but I do think wow did lose something that was very good along the way, and I would argue that wow is now an MMOG.

[draugril]

Just drop a patch like a bomb.

FFXIV does that, and I love it. Jumping into the new content and just figuring it out with other people together, as opposed to the WoW expectation that you've watched all the videos and are already completely prescribed to the predetermined methodologies.

[Darsithis]

As far as "Roleplaying game", it generally is played that way.

You can also hit level 10, enter a city, and never move your character outside that city ever again. It's no more an RPG than say, Call of Duty, at that point.

You can do that if you want. Doesn't mean it's not a roleplaying game.

[Poppincaps]

While I don't agree with some of the conclusions you make, I do agree that datamining is a big problem in WoW. I never really realized how much it ruins the game until I played FFXIV. FFXIV patch days are super exciting because everyone's discovering the content together and working through things. I remember beating on of the Trial fights on Extreme week one with a PUG before any guides were out. It was really cool.

In WoW not only is everything basically spelled out before you far in advance, but the community expects you to know all the fights before they have even released.

[Appelgren]

Agree to disagree

[Darsithis]

While I don't agree with some of the conclusions you make, I do agree that datamining is a big problem in WoW. I never really realized how much it ruins the game until I played FFXIV. FFXIV patch days are super exciting because everyone's discovering the content together and working through things. I remember beating on of the Trial fights on Extreme week one with a PUG before any guides were out. It was really cool.

In WoW not only is everything basically spelled out before you far in advance, but the community expects you to know all the fights before they have even released.

It's a mixed bag, for sure. I enjoy learning dungeons by just doing them, but my raid team rightfully expects me to read up and learn boss fights beforehand to minimize our initial time wiping like crazy. Of course, you don't have to use datamined stuff, and in general, I don't. I prefer just to play and learn rather than read it ahead of time.

[arkanon]

Agree to disagree

Agree to agree with your agreeing to disagree.

[mbit]

Most MMO's are just a standard copy of WoW at this point. They're too scared to innovate on MMORPG aspects.

Its a bit different. Most western players play wow or themepark mmos that could be labelled wow clone. If you look however at the market i dont think the majority of mmos qualifies for wow clone and outside the west its not wow clones that dominate.