MMORPG's do not survive in this era of gaming

[Overlordd]

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.

[Frinata]

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.

[Florena]

MMOs are doomed to fail because of third party sites? I can get not liking the way everything gets datamined in advance but WOW is still going strong, as are FFXIV, ESO and maybe some other MMOs I don't keep track of.

Maybe one aspect of MMOs that you like has weakened because of stuff like wow head, but the genre itself is still going on.

[clevin]

I agree that the ease of data mining and all of the resources make it very hard to maintain that feel of open exploration of a new world.

It's also that Azeroth etc is no longer a new world and really hasn't been for years. I remember leveling my first character... going to all of the new, varied zones was cool. Ungoro! Dinos and jungle! I took something like 20 days /played to do 1-70 (I started just before TBC released) in large part because I wanted to explore. But you can't recapture that feeling of newness once it's gone and the new zones are almost always just riffs on concepts we've seen. Sholozar was well done... but it's basically Ungoro.

If a new, really well done MMO did launch now, even if it had a breadth of content similar to WoW, I think it would only last until it was explored.

[klogaroth]

You might think that. On the other hand you have massive groups of people working on solving puzzles within the game.

Others couldn't give a fuck if stuff is datamined or not.

[Dread Pirate Phayde]

Doomed to fail yet WoW, FF14, SWtOR, GW2 seem to all be doing fine, with dedicated player bases.

I'd suggest if you don't enjoy WoW or any of the others to branch out and try something different. You also don't have to read all the data mining. I stopped reading all of that stuff for the last few expansions.

[clevin]

MMOs are doomed to fail because of third party sites? I can get not liking the way everything gets datamined in advance but WOW is still going strong, as are FFXIV, ESO and maybe some other MMOs I don't keep track of.

Maybe one aspect of MMOs that you like has weakened because of stuff like wow head, but the genre itself is still going on.

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?

[Leakage]

gaming has changed and wow has just adapted to the evolving scene, thats it.

[AcidicSyn]

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

[Valette]

Isnt there like no datamining done for ffxiv? I havent played the game in a while, and I wasnt very serious about it when I did. But I seem to recall the only information people had about a patch before its release was teasers from the developers and the patch notes published like a day before.

If I remember correctly, then clearly its possible to keep things secret and to surprise the players. The wow secret finding community also proves this. It just comes down to blizzard allowing most of their content to be datamined, not that they can't stop it.

[The Butt Witch]

WoW is the most mainstream MMORPG on the market, with the widest array of features.

All other MMORPGs are either low budget or very niche-oriented, like FFXIV being for weebs, and ESO being for single-player gamers (how ironic), and TOR being for Star Wars fans and no other people.

[Santas]

Gaming has changed and WoW is simply adapting to survive, I won't argue whether or not solo queue is good or not -- but it's really needed right now, that's one example of catching up with the times.

... data mining has nothing to do with anything.

[Master Guns]

Sorry OP, but..no. WoW is an MMORPG. And it's thriving. So..yeah.

[Echocho]

Who says MMORPGs can't have matchmaking? It's only barely true in WoWs too. The only types of content that have matchmaking is the bottom of the barrel easy and irrelevant content, for everything else you have to form the groups manually.

[d00dles]

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.

This is so wrong on so many levels. We always had thottbot, thou not as comprehensive as what we have today.

We also has leaks dating as early as WotLK, the peak of WoW. We had leaks on this very forum about the expansion.

----

What we need is more world interaction. GTA 5 is still selling like hot cupcakes. What we need is hookers. Goblin hookers.

[hulkgor]

Completely disagree with the OP, and i actually find it laughable.

That said, MMOs aren't the fad anymore, and other genres grew in popularity (MOBAs, ARPGs, Battle Royales, Mobile, etc) and newer players want faster action, instant gratification, not 'work towards a goal' over days\weeks\monthgs... but even if a new super innovative MMO came out, it would still face a 17 year old World of Warcraft -full of content- and novelty items, where the vast majority of the playerbase is commited to their characters, legacies, achievements, novelty items, etc, and will most likely play until the days the servers are brought offline.

It just isn't a fair fight.

Datamining... make me chuckle. Thanks.

(There are also a lot of smaller, successful MMOs out there, as some people pointed out. EVE Online, Guild Wars 2, SWTOR, FFXIV, but i'm pretty sure you never even played any of those)

[klogaroth]

... data mining has nothing to do with anything.

I wouldn't say that's true, but I don't agree with OP that it kills the genre.

Data mining affects explorers far more than anyone else, but it isn't the whole picture of what's affecting explorers in the modern era. You could remove data mining entirely, and it would move the problem back by maybe a week. Maybe.

The problem explorers have is that the speed of information has increased. Once someone has found something, it is widely known very quickly in almost all cases. The counter that Blizzard have come up with to this is to implement some pretty sizeable puzzles to the game, that have had communities like the secret finding discord all working together to solve.

This does somewhat remove the old exploring solo and with the people who happened to be in the zone at the time, but I'd argue that something like a secret finding community is even more MMO than that was. You just have to be a part of it to actually do the exploring, as opposed to following a guide afterwards.

[mbit]

There are a bunch of mmos in development. Clearly even corporate still believes in mmos. Secondary data mining is not the reason for wow player interaction. Its simply a lack of necessity from the game design. Look at sandbox mmos with open world pvp and you will find player interaction. At the minimum because people group up to avoid getting killed solo by other groups.

[Overlordd]

There are a bunch of mmos in development. Clearly even corporate still believes in mmos. Secondary data mining is not the reason for wow player interaction. Its simply a lack of necessity from the game design. Look at sandbox mmos with open world pvp and you will find player interaction. At the minimum because people group up to avoid getting killed solo by other groups.

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

[Razion]

MMMORPGs do fine nowadays, they're all just releasing on mobile and monetize differently. Or are we just ignoring mobile entirely right now?

A lot of the biggest games played now: Pokemon Go, Minecraft, Fortnite, Fall Guys, Among Us and more are all MMOs, and the fantasy genre is bigger than ever.

It's also funny you say everyone's scared to innovate -- if anything, everyone else is innovating and WoW is copying the homework of features that do well in these other MMOs and adopt them after - taking none of the risk for itself.

Like, where do you think the notion of endless leveling for Artifacts and Torghast and everything came from? Other mmos. All the new features are like this.