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I've always loved teamwork and social interaction through video games. I guess that's why even before MMOs really took off, the idea was facinating to me. And yes, for several years, World of Warcraft was my MMO. But over the past year, I feel like no matter what I do, I can't find a MMO that I can play without becoming furious over it's own incompetence of MMO quality. Yet, I guess I am chasing that MMO purple dragon for so much that I continue to pay subscription fees, knowing I'll be dissapointed. I'm looking for something that I won't think sucks. Here's some examples on how my mind works when I play these games:

World of Warcraft: How the mighty have fallen. And I don't mean old. With every expansion you continue to well like a helpless tick, negating premises and a good third or half of content available in previous expansions, forcing characters to ignore large swaths of what you spent millions to develop. Players can either see everything and get nowhere, or blaze through to level 85 and leave half of the zones untouched. Seriously... jousting?! And why is it that as soon as you go to the next expansion zone, the item powers jump tremendously? It wrecks the ability for anyone in that level bracket who can't acess the expansions yet. Why couldn't you just be happy adding new raids in patches? I remember back in the day when the game explained everything to you, so you didn't walk around in a grinding haze, spending 10 levels ignoring a feature you needed to use to get by properly. Why do I have to learn about using medals to buy special gear through players, and not the game? Why does keeping up with the Joneses require something convoluted? And the class system... jeez. What's the point in classes when more than half of them can perform all major functions for a party? Why leave classes like Warrior and Rogue in the dust while everyone plays Paladins and Death Kinights because they seriously can do *everything*? You know how you can tell your game isn't balanced? When half of your server population is playing the same class.

EVE: Great concept, good engine. Unfortunately, clipping my toenails is more exciting. I don't understand how regular players can tell me I'm playing EVE wrong because I'm bored, when the game itself tells you that you can't do it wrong. If this is a problem, then the game is wrong for allowing players to so easily stray. I can sort-of deal with the incredibly steep and poorly explained learning curve. I can deal with a unforgiving and vicious PVP system in a world where griefers win. What I can't deal with is sitting in a hangar for 4 hours waiting for my corp to get their crap together for something that will last 30 minutes. I can't deal with being able to do nothing to get me a decent starting income that doesn't involve orbiting an asteroid for two weeks. And I really, really can't deal with out any serious motivation to do anything. The whole point is to make money... for the virtue of having money. And then you spend that money to make more money. I do that at work. And the missions? Boring, boring, boring. The whole game is a snooze-fest. It's like watching 2001: Space Odessy minus HAL or any dialogue of any kind.

Rift/LOTRO/Etcetera: Warcraft, but different. There may be a deep, yet acsessible mid and end game. Maybe everything is more streamlined, less ridiculous, with more mature players and just a more solid experience. But for some reason every time I fire up the game and try to play with my level 3 characters, I can't help but think to myself, "I might as well just play WoW." Seriously, the games are DESIGNED to be just like WoW and catch WoW's run-off. The biggest thing that chases me away, though, is that in their efforts to be different, they come up with some of the weirdest character development systems and races. "We don't want dwarves and orcs, so let's come up with something else" ...like what? You're playing a fantasy game. Fantasy games have dwarves and orcs like space games have spaceships and planets. It's what people know, and it's how they relate to the genre. And why the hell is every player character in Rift some risen-from-the-dead inhuman freak automatic hero right from the beginning?

D&D Online: I haven't touched this one with a 10-foot pole mostly because it's the Ebberon campaign world, which I thought was a horrible idea even before it was available in the table-top game. The more you saturate your world with magic and technology, the less amazing it feels. And yet we go from Greyhawk to Forgotten Realms to Ebberon. Through 1st to 4th edition D&D, they more and more hand out magical items out like tic-tacs when the skill and effort to create them in the world's story always take an insane personal investment. If everyone has flying ships, than normal ones look stupid and flying ships just look cheap. Races like Warforged demonstrate this. You can play a construct, and suddenly the appeal to acsess to strange and mystical cultures just takes a dive. And swashbuckling was supposed to be a part of Ebberon, but it just comes off as silly.

Minecraft: I actually have a lot of good things to say about this one. The reason I left this one is because I realized that I was spending hours building relatively small things... and that's all the game was. Survivor mode is a joke, buildings have no technical purpose other than that you make believe that they do. I might as well play with my 15 year-old Lego blocks. It's faster that way. Plus, once I build something, then what? Explore someone else's giant and pointless bridge to nowhere?

So I think to myself, do I even know what I want? Am I just a malcontent who hates everything, and nothing is good enough? Perhaps. But this is what I think I would like to see and play:

1. A western-world fantasy MMORPG grounded in more classic and realistic physical abilities. Example: no backflip downward sword thrusts off of waterfalls to deliver 10,000,000,000,000 damage which eliminates %5 of a normal monster's life.

2. A streamlined and easy to decipher character stat system. Example: Players should know what raising a point in strength will do to the performance of their character specifically. Characters should not have more than 6 primary stats and 10 secondary stats. More than that and you are overlapping purpose and making everything convoluted and very difficult to understand. In WoW this is dumb stuff like previous and current abilities like Defense Rating, Expertise and Haste. Toss that crap out.

3. Side-show gameplay should never take precedence over the main game. If players feel like they have to drive go-karts to get this one ability or item to make the rest of the game flow, then you're forcing players to learn how to deviate from the pattern of the game, and possibly making it very easy for inexperienced players to miss necessary steps. An example would be using a normally labeled quest, seemingly optional to unlock a significant chunk of player abilities. Like how in WoW, to get your berzerker stance mode, you have to swim to some offshore island in a poorly explained journal entry that just makes you think you're picking up another sword.

4. Prefixes and Suffixes of weapons are confusing and pointless, so make that simple as well. Names like "Shrieking Demonic Pocket Trebuchet of Searing Doom-like Necrotic Doom" may have worked in the early 2000's with Diablo 2 (and I disliked it even then), but at this point it really just looks silly. I get it... you cant specially name every magic item in the game. ...well, maybe you shouldn't hand out magic items so freely. If "necrotic" and "poison" damage are so similar that players just don't think about it, then you ought to just toss both or stick to one. I always hated it when I had two magic items, each with 5 seperate yet similar individual enhancements and I really could never tell which one was better for me.

5. Acsessible endgame. Endgame content should give players a lot of reasons to keep playing at level capacity, but should shouldn't cheapen the leveling experience.

6. Eliminate player-ignored stuff and replace with new stuff. Dev-teams should avoid slapping on constant additions to content and instead find the least used aspects of their game and replace them with new ones.

Well, I'd better stop before I spend all day talking about this. What do you guys think? And do you have any suggestions for games I might try?

http://www.mudconnect.com

This is what MMOs used to be.

No fancy graphics or sophisticated interfaces, but you can find just about anything you're looking for out there... somewhere. And if you don't like what's available, make your own!

I agree... you get stuff to have more numbers than the other guy to get more stuff to have more numbers... for what?

I have to agree with you diesel. I see my friends playing WoW and I want to get back in. At the same time I remember the boring grind fest that made me leave in the first place. I have some delusional hope that maybe, just maybe, the mmos coming out this year will change things but I'm not holding my breath.

I actually have no complaints regarding MMOs. I have never played one.

I can't complain about reality TV either. I turned off my cable 12 years ago.

Ignorance is Bliss.

I don't have a TV either. It's pointless. Just get it on DVD. We're in the UK so 'everyone' on the internet (ie the US) has seen it and has been talking about it before us

I appreciate the history and value of MUDs but I've always kept my distance from them because I'm spoiled. I've always wanted ease of use, intuitive GUI, ect., since the 16-bit age.

diesel7270 wrote:And why is it that as soon as you go to the next expansion zone, the item powers jump tremendously? It wrecks the ability for anyone in that level bracket who can't acess the expansions yet.

It's because Blizzard likes making gigantic bags of money and setting new records with each sales expansion, instead of forcing a constantly shrinking player base like EverQuest had. If you make a barrier to getting into the next expansion, people who hit the barrier won't buy it (which means less money), so they're not going to require people to gear up in old stuff. If you require people to gear up in old raids to get to new raids, then new players, returning players, and players who didn't raid in the past can never catch up, so have no interest in your shiny new content. Each new expansion restarts the gear climb so that anyone can get in on the new stuff, not just the handfull of people that have been around since the start. And everyone on a given set of servers can access the expansions. Are you seriously asking why a for-profit company would want to encourage people to buy the newest expansion?

You can't just say 'I did that stuff, everyone should have to', because that isn't a good way to make money.

I remember back in the day when the game explained everything to you, so you didn't walk around in a grinding haze, spending 10 levels ignoring a feature you needed to use to get by properly. Why do I have to learn about using medals to buy special gear through players, and not the game? Why does keeping up with the Joneses require something convoluted?

World of Warcraft has never explained everything to you, that's just not the way complicated games in general work. Thottbot was created back in the beta to track what gear drops from what bosses, it's the way EQ-descended and EQ-influenced MMOs work. Purchased gear is even easier, you can find all of it just by talking to vendors if you really don't want to look on a website to see a list. I mean, it's not like 40k teaches you about combinations to use, or what armies that aren't from your codex can do.

Why leave classes like Warrior and Rogue in the dust while everyone plays Paladins and Death Kinights because they seriously can do *everything*? You know how you can tell your game isn't balanced? When half of your server population is playing the same class.

According to WOW Census, at 85 11% of players play DKs and 10% play warriors, and the most played is paladins at 14%. That's nowhere near close to half the server population playing the same class. I don't think that any game is going to get every one of 10 classes at exactly 10% representation, and I think that would be a dumb goal for a game.

Also, what can DKs do that warriors can't? They're both capable of melee DPs and tanking. Warriors can do damage with a 2-hander, 2x 1hander, or 2x 2-hander, while DKs either use a 2-hander or 2x 1-hander. Neither once can do heals or ranged damage.

2. A streamlined and easy to decipher character stat system. Example: Players should know what raising a point in strength will do to the performance of their character specifically. Characters should not have more than 6 primary stats and 10 secondary stats. More than that and you are overlapping purpose and making everything convoluted and very difficult to understand. In WoW this is dumb stuff like previous and current abilities like Defense Rating, Expertise and Haste. Toss that crap out.

Wow only has 3 primary stats and 10 secondary stats, and the secondary stats that have no effect for your class/spec/role are very easy to determine. If there is any depth at all to character abilities and any variation in talents and abilities used, then you're not going to be able to get a simple '1 point of strength gives me 10 more dps'. Unless you're trying to min-max down to the 1% difference level, you can eyeball two pieces of gear and tell 'better, worse, or basically the same'. Cutting the detailed min-max out of the game would reduce the depth of the game, reduce options for gear to hand out (sword of +5 damage versus sword of +5 damage?), alienate a lot of players, and not really help people who refuse to pay attention to the game (like Death Knights in intellect gear).

Like how in WoW, to get your berzerker stance mode, you have to swim to some offshore island in a poorly explained journal entry that just makes you think you're picking up another sword.

WOW ditched class quests for abilities two or three years ago, and it wasn't really any big deal to miss one since you could always go back and do it later once you realized you were missing something.

diesel7270 wrote:I appreciate the history and value of MUDs but I've always kept my distance from them because I'm spoiled. I've always wanted ease of use, intuitive GUI, ect., since the 16-bit age.

Those things cost money. And if you want money, you have to appeal to the things you pointed out in your opening post: grinding, high-end gear loading and a rush to the really cool end-game content. MUDs have the benefit that they're generally designed for a small population (usually less than 100 people online at one time), they're mostly run by hobbyists (meaning they're more likely to put in something just for fun), there's a lot of competition for players (leading to high customer/player support and response), and they are easy to develop (which creates the broad array of concepts that are available).

No problem if you don't want to play them, I just threw it out there as an option.

You could also try out this generic MMO.

I'm still enjoying FFXI after all this time, which is apparently 9 years since the anniversary celebration is going on now. I have taken a year off here and there but I've gone back to it each time and still enjoy it and the community. Sure there are always some jerks but overall it is a decent group of players.

The learning curve is pretty steep but not impossible. It is certainly more paced than most MMO's out at the moment and can take some getting used to. The newer expansions have made small group (and solo) activities possible but there are still things that require full parties and alliances (raids).

It doesn't really do the X Y Weapon thing either, though getting some of the best gear is a pain or impossible for non-hardcore time sink players everyone can have perfectly good gear without having to trade your life out.

Some of the changes in recent years have been less than kind to some jobs but overall it still is a fairly robust world with a decent community, but it certainly isn't going to be to everyone's taste.

biccat wrote:

You could also try out this generic MMO.

High five. That was the funniest joke site I've seen in quite some time.

Yet, I guess I am chasing that MMO purple dragon

Think you sort of summed it up there yourself.
I spent several years on WoW, had a great time (periodically I might add) and tried out a few other mmos both during and after its time.
However, none of them ever captured that first 0-6 months of Warcraft feel or that "Oh wooow factor" not to mention the basic level of addictiveness that mmos can have.
I look back on Wow with fond memories but wouldnt go back to it for several reasons. Subsequent mmos have simply rehashed the forumla (Eve imo is the most "original" of the bunch). I dont think you can capture that Dragon until something truely original or groundbreaking appears (what that might be I dont know) because you've seen everything all before. As a small example take Rifts talent system, it tried to be original by allowing you to mix and match or mix things up but at a basic level it was still Wows talent tree system. There are innumerable other examples, thats just one.
In short, theres nothing new or really original with mmos these days, they all take a basic formula, tweak it and throw it into the market. You know this, when you pick up the next one you know what you are going to get and whilst there might be a few small "oh wooow" moments, overall its fairly predictable and ordinary.

Its akin to going to the same holiday destination each year, you know its pleasant and safe and even fun in parts but its impossible to recapture that buzz you had the first year you landed.

Ratius wrote:

Yet, I guess I am chasing that MMO purple dragon

Think you sort of summed it up there yourself.
I spent several years on WoW, had a great time (periodically I might add) and tried out a few other mmos both during and after its time.
However, none of them ever captured that first 0-6 months of Warcraft feel or that "Oh wooow factor" not to mention the basic level of addictiveness that mmos can have.

It's true. Once you get to max level and start understanding the game, you have basically 4 options.

1. "Casual". Level tons of alt characters, mess around, don't really "accomplish" anything in game, but still have fun.
2. "Bad Casual". It's like the casual, except instead of having silly fun, you try to do hard end game content, and fail at it.
3. "Raider". You raid. The better you are at the game, the more fun you will have, until you get into a guild that treats raiding like a job. Then you're gone Too Far.
4. "PvP". PvP is fun and pretty easy for anyone to get into. Honestly it's the thing I did most in the few months before I quit.

OP: Ever tried playing Guild Wars?

There isn't a huge amount of grinding to get to the top level, all the high-end stuff (with the exception of one or two areas) is pretty much accessible straight away, skills and attributes are easy to understand and allow for a huge amount of variety in character and team builds, it's free to play........

..... it can seem a little over-simplistic at first, especially if you're used to WoW but there is tremendous depth and replayability to the game once you get over the initial 'figuring out what to do' stage

Why isn't this in the Video Game forum?

(Hate To Party Crash)

Indeed. Off we go then...

J.Black wrote:OP: Ever tried playing Guild Wars?

There isn't a huge amount of grinding to get to the top level, all the high-end stuff (with the exception of one or two areas) is pretty much accessible straight away, skills and attributes are easy to understand and allow for a huge amount of variety in character and team builds, it's free to play........

..... it can seem a little over-simplistic at first, especially if you're used to WoW but there is tremendous depth and replayability to the game once you get over the initial 'figuring out what to do' stage

Seconded. Guild Wars is pretty fun, and it is a one-time-only payment which is reasonable. Best of all, Guild Wars 2 is in development right now, and it's looking to be really really good and boundary-pushing (for one thing, no more holy trinity of dps-tank-healer), with awesome graphics.

I don't mind the trinity of dps-tank-healer... I guess it is a bit simplistic and too departmentalized. But having a whole bunch of guys who are kindof good at everything and great and nothing may have a harder time. If there's no designated healer, people may heal others of their own desire, but all could just ignore that need and keep fighting. Just a thought.

I tried Guild Wars for a bit. I never got past the "figuring out what to do" stage. The area transitions threw me off, too... but again, vanilla WoW spoiled me.

As a sort of re-attempt to capture some joy of WoW, I signed a new account, this time playing Alliance, with a friend. And honestly, characters develop BLAZINGLY fast, now. In the span of six hours I am at level 25, and that's just from me goofing off. With the exception of mining appropriate ores, I can stand around in ironforge and do engineering to a point way above my character level. I'm going to have to skip entire zones because I level faster than I can complete quests, just from completing quests.

Hm. It must be fun, because I keep playing. But really... it's too easy. Way too easy. Or maybe that's because I picked a hunter.

If your lookin for something a bit different then you should perhaps try Perfect World International. Yes its still a grind fest as with any MMORPG.

The way the stats work is really simple, 4 stats str, dex, vit and mag. Thats all you get to increase and upon leveling you get 5 points to spend on the stats you choose.

For the most part from level 1-30 is a questfest, simply quest till you level. After that quests dont quite get you to the next level so you have to go out and grind on mobs till you level.

The talents you get aswell follow a very loose tree. IE you need ability x to get ability Y. But its not just a case of "buy ability Y and thats you" you are limited to buying and upgrading abilities by the use of Spirit, this means that you need to carefully think of what abilities you use and pick the wrong one and the Spirit is wasted.

The only bad thing about Perfect World is the fact its free and run by Cash Shoppers, pretty much the more cash shop stuff you buy the easier the game is. After redownloading it it hasnt changed and it seems that the designers are trying to milk the cow as much as possible.

Not only that but they punish legit players because of bots, the DQ(dragon quest) items were the easiest to obtain but sold well and then they slashed the price of them in half to "stop botters".

It might be worth trying out though.

Edit: For those wondering, I no longer play this. I do go on now and again to see how its "changed". If anything Runescape is still my MMORPG of choice with WOW following.

I used to be a MMO addict.. started with Meridian 59, then EverQuest, Anarchy Online and then WOW. WOW was my holy grail and I happily played it for years before one day I just decided it was getting me nowhere in life so I quit. I went back a little while later to check out the cataclysm stuff and was just so bored. It was like a single player game, the whole phased area thing just messed it up. So, you play solo, but you can sell your junk to other people playing solo. Great... I'm gonna go back to my PS3 now.

I think for me when it comes to online games, there's really nothing new and exciting anymore. It's just a different story or graphics but ripping off whatever came before. These days I'd rather just do something more worthwhile with my time, like sit around painting army men.

You should just try to play some other things besides MMOs.

I try to stay off of them now, they take too much time, take time away from other games, and take too much time away from everything else in life(these things apply if you actually want to progress in the end game). MMOs are bad.

diesel7270 wrote:I don't mind the trinity of dps-tank-healer... I guess it is a bit simplistic and too departmentalized. But having a whole bunch of guys who are kindof good at everything and great and nothing may have a harder time. If there's no designated healer, people may heal others of their own desire, but all could just ignore that need and keep fighting. Just a thought.

Self-heals are the main heals, with support and protection skills taking up the slack of helping others, so it's good to be selfish a bit. lol There's loads of interviews and videos and stuff about GW2 on the internet which just explain everything.

Blizzard did that because it would take you months on end to reach max level if they didnt. We are talking many days of game time. By increasing experience gain at lower levels, players can catch up to the majority of the server population where they can interact more and play as a team.

I played wow for a couple years. I quit because I feel that it is stupid to spend so much money on a single game. People who have been playing since the original game have probably spent aroudn $1300 on the game by now. I simply refuse to spend that much on a video game instead of one of my (much more interesting/rewarding) hobbies.

I have tried out many MMOs and I can honestly say that none of them can even come close to where WOW was when I left (some point in the end game raiding of wrath of the litch king). I dont know if any MMO will ever compare to wow, and I dont care, because MMOs arent worth the time and money in my opinion.

daedalus-templarius wrote:You should just try to play some other things besides MMOs.

Ill give you that, playing MMOs only is a sure way to make you feel disappointed with them.

I try to stay off of them now, they take too much time, take time away from other games, and take too much time away from everything else in life(these things apply if you actually want to progress in the end game). MMOs are bad.

Actually the only "bad" thing about MMOs are the fact that the players themselves cant get of their backsides to have some form of life. You can still play an MMO and still have a life. You dont need to nolife MMOs to progress in endgame content, iv played Wow casually loggin on for a few hours or so every week just to do a specific raid. Am I progressing?? Yes I am, but im not no lifing it either.

johnscott10 wrote:

Actually the only "bad" thing about MMOs are the fact that the players themselves cant get of their backsides to have some form of life. You can still play an MMO and still have a life. You dont need to nolife MMOs to progress in endgame content, iv played Wow casually loggin on for a few hours or so every week just to do a specific raid. Am I progressing?? Yes I am, but im not no lifing it either.

If you are on a server where you can casually hop into pugs and do content, then sure.

If you actually want to do hard modes, you basically have to join a guild of no-lifers, who all want to raid 4+ nights a week.

daedalus-templarius wrote:

johnscott10 wrote:

Actually the only "bad" thing about MMOs are the fact that the players themselves cant get of their backsides to have some form of life. You can still play an MMO and still have a life. You dont need to nolife MMOs to progress in endgame content, iv played Wow casually loggin on for a few hours or so every week just to do a specific raid. Am I progressing?? Yes I am, but im not no lifing it either.

If you are on a server where you can casually hop into pugs and do content, then sure.

If you actually want to do hard modes, you basically have to join a guild of no-lifers, who all want to raid 4+ nights a week.

No you dont, the guild I was with is owned by one of my friends that I know personally, and it was mostly a casual guild we were still doing hard mode raids, sure we didnt get any of the "you guild was 1st to kill Lich King" feats of strength. You dont have to nolife raids just to progress.

I'm partial to Star Trek online, myself. Level'd with story quests to Admiral with a friend(took about 2-3 weeks maybe?) and it feels much less grindy than WoW unless you're staying in the battle areas for hours on end.

Also, the ship customization is fun and love the fact that you have an entire bridge crew to customize characters and costumes for in addition to yourself.

johnscott10 wrote:

No you dont, the guild I was with is owned by one of my friends that I know personally, and it was mostly a casual guild we were still doing hard mode raids, sure we didnt get any of the "you guild was 1st to kill Lich King" feats of strength. You dont have to nolife raids just to progress.

Well, I am glad you found a guild like that, because most of the ones I've been in are most definitely the opposite.

However, I must say that most of the raids in WotLK were not nearly as difficult as some of the new ones on Cataclysm.

Basically this boils down to... find yourself a guild that doesn't want to raid all the time so you still have time for all the other stuff you want to do. I never managed to find one.

daedalus-templarius wrote:

johnscott10 wrote:

No you dont, the guild I was with is owned by one of my friends that I know personally, and it was mostly a casual guild we were still doing hard mode raids, sure we didnt get any of the "you guild was 1st to kill Lich King" feats of strength. You dont have to nolife raids just to progress.

Well, I am glad you found a guild like that, because most of the ones I've been in are most definitely the opposite.

However, I must say that most of the raids in WotLK were not nearly as difficult as some of the new ones on Cataclysm.

Basically this boils down to... find yourself a guild that doesn't want to raid all the time so you still have time for all the other stuff you want to do. I never managed to find one.

Yea thats one of the benifits of being introduced to Wow by a casual guild owner.

I recommend Champions. It's different enough that it's actually worth playing for its gameplay, nevermind its awesome level of customization. And it has a nice free aspect.

Melissia wrote:I recommend Champions. It's different enough that it's actually worth playing for its gameplay, nevermind its awesome level of customization. And it has a nice free aspect.

Pretty much, any MMO by Cryptic is worth it(Champions, City of X, Star Trek).