Anyone play mmos still?

Post Reply New Topic

It seems the age of mmos is finally dying and being replaced with the destiny hybrid single player/mmo model, so I was wondering if any one still plays mmos.

I only play Star Wars the old republic and Star Trek online with some secret world sprinkled in sometimes.

Nah, they're still just as all over the place as ever. But you dont hear about them these days since the big popular games like Minecraft, Dota, and whatnot sorta have more presence. But MMOs are still bloody everywhere.

...unless you're on consoles, but they've barely been on those to start with.


Me, I used to play tons of these. Tons! I started with the original Everquest, and it was wonderful. And murderous. Ah, the days when MMOs didnt hold your hand in the slightest.... if you died in some horrid dungeon, 3 floors down? Well, guess what, your corpse.... and all of the items you were carrying (and I do mean ALL of them) is stuck down there until you can manage to get back to it. ....with the equipment you no longer have, because it's sitting down there with your pathetic remains. And if you dont get there within about 7 days, it's gone. Yeah... good luck with that.

And other games were not QUITE as brutal, but still very tough. And many of them were creative and interesting.

....until World of Warcraft came out and corrupted the market. It printed money. Which meant that, in their infinite stupidity, rather dimwitted publishers everywhere figured that because WoW is basically a money factory, it meant that if they copied it, then OF COURSE their game would fart money at the same rate!! ! And thus, the clones came. And the genre just.... ugh. It was sad to watch, it really was. The creative stuff stopped coming for the most part, the same-y crap just kept being made.

The last MMO I really played was City of Heroes, which was bloody brilliant, and NOT LIKE WOW AT ALL. It was.... so very good. It shut down fairly recently, and aside from that.... I just havent been able to get interested in anything else. Particularly since people are STILL copying WoW's elements, like the mind-numbingly simplistic combat (uuuuugh, I hate the way it does that; just fire off the same damn string of spells against EVERY foe, rinse and repeat...) or the obsession with "raids" (easily my most hated element of the genre).


Ugh. I'll stop here before this becomes a huge rant about that blasted genre. Just thinking about it annoys me these days.

I remember those days, I started with Ultima Online, that was brutal. It had open pvp which made the whole dying 3 levels into a dungeon worse like you run all the way back to your corpse and find some jerk stole everything you had on you.

I can't say I miss that but I do miss Star Wars galaxies, no hand holding and full range to create completely custom builds. Grab some pistol training, boost it with smuggler training then grab some creature taming skills and tame a rancor to tank for you and..... You still die because the game is freaking hard lol.

Those really were the days though for mmos.

I can't stand MMO's I think it's the laziest form of gaming. I find nothing enjoyable about them. I don't know what you're talking about Riker, they're on the rise. More companies are going to find validity in that formula which basically milks the gamer for the most amount of money while providing the meekest form of medium. I've tried researching the costs of an MMO compared to conventional games, couldn't find anything, but I highly suspect they're way cheaper to make while maximizing profits by having a constant inflow of new gamers who pay subscription fees and other micro transactions for custom objects within the game during the MMO's lifespan. It's basically a giant dick measuring contest of who can spend more money to get cooler looking gear. KOTOR and Elder Scrolls Online has spelled the beginning of the end.

It sounds like the really old mmos were actually fun , then WoW came in and ruined everything.

Just started recently playing Star Wars - The Old Republic. Amazing game. Yes, I'm still playing MMO's. I'm waiting on MapleStory 2 to be released. That will be the next one to dedicate tons of time to.

They still seem incredibly popular to me, it's just that e-sports games have stolen the spotlight. All fad phases pass eventually.

I'm in FFXIV. I just pay the monthly and get new content a few times a year included with that. Yoshi-P apparently likes the subscription model because it gives developers a more stable idea of what they'll be working with as far as funding goes.

If you would like a hand in the old republic, I'd be happy to help.


As for mmos being successful still where do some of you see this? Every month gaming news sites report mmos are hemmoraging players. Even wow lost several million recently.

Other way around: MMOs are often very dramatically more difficult to make (and many times, very, very costly) than normal games. Firstly, an MMO has to be HUUUUUUUGE. Normal games can get away with having 6 hours of content if they have the ZOMG STORY CUTSCENES and such. An MMO? Nnnnnnnnope. You better provide HUNDREDS of hours of constantly expanding content if you want to keep an audience. Typically, these games are the ones with the most and largest areas in the games; you cant get away with small, short areas here like you can in most games. Hell, I remember in the original Everquest, there was one zone that took 30 minutes to cross on foot (and most of the time, you were on foot). Think about that for a second. And that was the ORIGINAL Everquest, many many years ago. They've advanced since then. So that wouldnt be enough anymore. And all of those areas need to be very carefully designed. And then you've got BALANCE to worry about. You typically have many different classes, each with a TON of different skills/spells (this can number like, over 100, depending on the game.... for just ONE class) and all of the equipment VS all of the different encounters, and you need to make sure none of the classes are overly strong compared to all of the others, or everything falls apart.

That aint enough though. Once the game launches, your work isnt ended, but instead just keeps perpetually going. You need admins to constantly patrol the servers and deal with the many issues your playerbase will have, you need to do CONSTANT patching and updates, you need to make new content.... you get the idea.

Far as I"m concerned, the laziest form of game design is something like CoD.... simple repetition of concepts and assets, using just bright shiny visuals and such to suck the player into the land of buying it.

But MMOs? No. There's just too much that needs to be done.




WoW is losing players because, by MMO standards, it's freaking ANCIENT. And I think people are starting to realize that, hey, this game.... was never very deep to begin with. The mindlessness of it is finally starting to reach some of them, and the formula is growing old.

WoW-ish MMOs (of which there are many) are now facing the same problem. Hell, that Wildstar one that everyone was freaking out about before release; once it did come out, it started to fail almost immediately.... because it was just yet another WoW clone. The formula SERIOUSLY isnt working anymore. It's been done to death, and was never really any good to begin with.

Have a look here: MMORPG.com

That's the main resource for these, with constant coverage of about a bazillion games. The thing with MMOs is that, when it comes to things like gaming news sites, you only ever hear about the ones that people will RECOGNIZE. Even if those arent even very good or very populated. This is my biggest problem with gaming sites: They focus ONLY on the "big" stuff, yet ignore the HORDES of smaller and often better games. This is part of why I switched mostly to indie gaming once I found it, because suddenly, I learned what I'd been missing out on. Namely, everything. I dont bother with gaming news sites anymore. Bloody useless places, really.

Heck, even Steam is farting out MMOs at a rapid rate these days, as more and more of them come to that service/platform.

News sites report on news and drama. "MMOs are alive and well, but some things are changing" doesn't get the clicks of "MMOS ARE DYING RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!"

Players leaving WoW are only leaving WoW. They may or may not be leaving MMOs. FFXIV forums have been getting floods of WoW refugees lately and some people I know drifted in several months after leaving Aion.

Pokemon is an example of something that's survived after its fad phase for over 10 years. People were afraid it was going to die in 2001 because some kids lost interest and it wasn't a problem in schools anymore, but... here it is.

It's sad even gaming media is full of that crap, it's as bad as the mainstream media with paid game reviews and drama mongering.

Once a genre gets creatively depleted, things typically turn around. It's been happening since the Atari days.

It just takes a long, long time for MMOs to cycle, since they're so hard to make. I figure in a year or three, there may be some good options available from a major publisher, which is about the only entity that can fund and maintain something so complicated.

My first was WoW, in early 2005, and I loved it. Because what Blizzard does well is game implementation, not game design, and it was simply a superb implementation of the existing MMORPG formula.

The more they tinkered with the design, the worse it became, because they always think in terms of optimization, not fun, and certainly not community impact.

I don't think making a game less hardcore necessarily ruins it, but it does remove a filter on the player base that has to be replaced somehow, or else the player base turns purely toxic. I don't think anyone's come up with a good solution for that so far. But it would be great if that could happen, because it probably makes for a better community if many different kinds of players are interested in playing it.

It's Saturday at noon...where's my spouse?

(finds them playing LOTRO...)

Neverwinter.

I've never been able to get into them, and back when all of my friends were into them, I didn't have money for a subscription.

Now that I have a job, all of the fan favorite classics are free (whether officially or not), so I've tried out a few of them.

UO seems pretty neat, and I've always loved Ultima, but I haven't tried it online yet (just did the tutorial mission).

I tried EQ and I can't figure out how you're supposed to get anywhere without grinding for hours and hours and hours...and then I died and I couldn't figure out how they expected me to punch bats to death and get enough money for a new weapon (I fell out of a tree and couldn't loot my own corpse).

Meridian 59 seems neat, but the controls aren't very good are very bad, and I have no idea where I'm supposed to be going =) On the plus side, unlike EQ, you aren't completely useless when you respawn!

I really like PSO, although I know it's nowhere near being an MMO.

Raid with my guild 2 days a week on wow but thats about it im waiting on legion to come out

I play League of Legends, which I find to be pretty fun. It is also entirely free to play like the entire game you can choose to spend money if you want different skins for your champions you battle with or little extras but its not like you can only partially play if you don't spend money. Is kind of basic 5v5 and you basically have 3 lanes guarded by turrets and a jungle to sneak around in...and you have to make it to the enemy base to destroy their 'nexus' or large crystal thing. But yeah the map isn't all that big, game play is actually a little complex though I think...granted this is the only mmo or whatever that I've ever really played. Kind of reminds me of chess in a weird way.

My old computer wouldn't even run some other games I tried downloading, but league was ok so long as I turned the graphics down to the lowest setting.