The MMORPG

[ed8150]

Gamers, if you could change things that are fundemental to the genre what would they be? iam not talking about balance of npcs and pcs ect but of things that have defined the mmorpg up until now. what are the fundemental things that are wrong?

this is a prelude to my planned article, i have drawn conclusions already i would like to have the opinion of some of the gaming public.

[Lehman]

i dont really have anything to ask for....Shadowbane is my "GOD" of mmorpgs as it has everything that i have ever wanted in an mmorpg, in it or so they say. It doesnt release till May or June, and it will have a player run government and it is PvP based. If you havent heard of it, which im sure you have if ur hardcore mmorpg'er, check out sb.xrgaming.net

[ed8150]

player run goverment isnt all that new. ever played a mud?

[Xayd]

Fundamentally, the developers are going about this all wrong.

They make a half-assed game and get an idea in their heads of how it should be played. Then they micromanage a very complex game that should have been more simple to try and force players to do what they want them to do, and play how they envision that the game should be played.

On the other hand, many of the more popular MUDs and on the graphical front UO succeeded where others failed, due to making a very open and simple game, with the pretense of "let them make their own fun".

That's why skill based games are always more attractive to players than level based games. No level based game other than Everquest has survived, and Everquest IMHO only because it was the first. At this point, Asheron's Call 2 looks like the best new game coming up, and Turbine devs look to be the only ones with a grasp of how to develop and maintain a game with any longevity.

Look at DAoC. I'm playing it now, since there's really no other decent alternative that I haven't played yet, but its longevity was destroyed in the first two months. Mythic released a game that wasn't finished content wise, and players hit the max level faster than they expected them to, only to find tons of stuff missing from the higher level characters and zones. So, to combat this Mythic has put their foot on the proverbial heads of players to try to keep them at lower levels putting in silly caps on per-mob exp. What this has lead to is not longevity in the game, it has on the other hand led to people NOT replaying the game with different classes after leveling out their first. Rather than do so, they ebay their accounts and quit. Basically this is how to ruin a game 101 . If you respond to player success with methods to keep players down in an attempt to get them to play longer with no new rewards, you're gonna lose your customer base quickly.

[Orcmonkey]

I'd say just more interesting stuff to do. I don't want to fight stupid little creatures for 45 hours until I start to get to a decent level. I'm reffering to EQ here as it's the only MMORPG I've tried.