Why were pre-WoW MMOs so much better?
They didnt try to be like WoW
Because after WoW everyone was copying WoW.
Because everything was better when your were younger and had less responsibilities.
Because you were younger.
>>319650876
Because you were satisfied with nothing but endless grinding until WoW came along and tried to actually change the formula.
I keep hearing that Ultima was a really cool MMO. I never played it, so I wouldn't know.
So what was so great about it? Surely it can be done in modern games as well.
Because before WoW you just played a single MMO and did not bothered with the quality of the MMO, you liked the theme, the gameplay or just the community.
Now when you plug on a MMO you expect a streamlined version of MMO, that if he is not a theme park with a quest line to level you up he is grinding bullshit or if he has a quest line to level you up, you say it's WoW clone.
They were focusing on pulling in the NEET demographic instead of normies. They acted more as stand-ins for real life instead of soulless gear treadmills where you got a daily treat just for logging in.
I miss City of Heroes.
>>319650876
Because they were actual massively multiplayer online role playing games that focused on community, challenges, and enjoying the journey over the reward.
They weren't. It's one part nostalgia, one part you had so much free time back then and didn't know any better that you would put up with the horrendous grinding they offered.
Now granted, the communities were a hell of a lot better and even I miss the days when not everything was a theme park. But if we're going to talk about gameplay, they were pretty shit m8.
>>319650948
>>319650957
Wrong Ultima, Shadowbane, and Ascheron's Call Darktide server are all objectively better games then wow
>>319651146
/thread
>>319650876
They were just as shit as WoW.
Everquest invented poopsocking raids which were a design flaw created by the devs to appeal to a small niche of hardcore players who played for 16+ hours a day and complained about having nothing to do. WoW copied this formula, but applied it to instances and eventually other MMOs copied the same formula and mistakes Everquest and WoW did and now that's why we have themepark MMOs that revolve around grinding to max level just to do the same bosses/raids until new raids come out.
>>319651189
The "horrendous grinding" could be drastically reduced with no negative impact. Most old mmos have done just that. It took months of playtime to get to 75 in ffxi. Now you can go from 1 to 99 in less than 12 hours /played.
It's not the grind that makes old mmos good. It's the world that was created and the ideology of the developers.
>>319651045
ultima online was a sandbox mmo, nearly every mmo you will have played otherwise has been a theme park mmo, they were totally different models really.
theme parks are all about the "rides" or basically dungeons and shit you go in, and its about levelling up and killnig shit and progress and dings and skinnerbox press button recieve reward gameplay.
UO was more akin to something like second life in a way, a lot of it was more about socialising and exploring and just doing your own thing, success was measured in wealth, and you didnt have to fight monsters to get loot, you could just be a blacksmith and repair peoples armour all day, or go fishing and bake fishcakes and sell them, or become a master beggar.
it was just more of an open free world with so many different ways to enjoy the game, and nothing has really tried to replicate it since.
>>319651713
>It took months of playtime to get to 75 in ffxi. Now you can go from 1 to 99 in less than 12 hours /played.
Only after they butchered everything that made the world and progression of that game great.
>>319651509
Except your objectively wrong.
>>319651509
asherons call was a horrible mess of a game, the designers basically didnt know what they were doing.
the one reason... the only reason they were better is they forced people to play together. WoW doesnt do this. You could go from 1-100 without ever seeing another person if you wanted to. In everquest only druids and necromancers could solo worth a shit. You had to have a group to do anything at all. The game also had down time so you'd chit chat. This lead to making friends.
WoW has none of this. Pugs are like fucking a prostitute. Just a race to the end with no talking. Guilds mostly are all business and you'd better know your shit from watching youtube or you are out because no one wants to have to fucking talk to you to explain shit.
That leaves RP which is gay as fuck. 90% of it is ERP anyways so fuck that. RP in EQ was less gay. It wasn't just red vs. blue and all the NPCs didnt say shit like "There goes the commander! hero of the wrathgate, destroyer of deathwing! I heard his dick is as big around as a coke can!"
>>319651794
I agree. The ability to solo everything ruined the game but it's on its last legs and this let's players access all the content.
My point here is the grind isn't what's integral to good mmos.
>>319651742
>UO was more akin to something like second life in a way, a lot of it was more about socialising and exploring and just doing your own thing, success was measured in wealth, and you didnt have to fight monsters to get loot, you could just be a blacksmith and repair peoples armour all day, or go fishing and bake fishcakes and sell them, or become a master beggar
You could do the same thing in FFXIV, after you beat the tutorial no one forces you to do dungeons or go through a themepark experiences. You could become a miner, culinarian, goldsmith, etc and just craft or gather things for people to make some great profit. Each crafting and gathering class in that game has its own specific endgame.
>>319651864
Not sure what makes you say that - I've actually gone back to AC just as much as I have WoW, and had more fun with AC each time.
>>319651935
Well, I would argue that it killed a lot of the social aspect, but then you're right it's on its last legs anyway so go hog wild I guess.
I stand by the shit gameplay though. As much love as I have for FFXI, the height of combat was gear swapping.
>>319651983
Except crafting in ffxiv exists solely to make other gear for crafters. It's 100% pointless.
>>319651189
>But if we're going to talk about gameplay, they were pretty shit m8.
Gameplay-quality was always irrelevant in MMOs. The whole draw of the genre that no other genre could give you was that it plopped you down in the middle of a large open world with thousands of other people and gave you the facilities to sorta write your own story or form deep relationships with people from around the world. Anytime people reminisce about older games, it almost always revolves around times they interacted with other people and all the fun that came from it.
And the thing about this "But they were grinding and poorly-designed!" argument is, MMOs are still shit gameplay-wise. They're still largely tab-targeting based(or they have some horrible attempt at "real-time" combat that mostly just ends up being a more convoluted form of tab-target), are still padded out the ass with fetch/kill quests, and still have awful endgame gear treadmills. Only now, that social aspect is gone and they've had all the flavor and flair sucked out of them in service of making this shitty endgame more streamlined and "user-friendly". What's left is a soulless singleplayer experience, and if that's what I'm getting, I'll just go play an actual well-designed singleplayer game.
MMO's now are fucking worthless.
>>319650917
>>319650923
This.
That's not to say pre-WoW MMOs were necessarily better mechanically, but there was challenge and greater focus put into lore and worldbuilding.
WoW casualized the MMO genre, even more so over the years to the point where people doesn't even need to level up their characters now and they can solo "Group" content.
WoW also prevented the MMO genre from evolving as well
The worst part is that I played EQ2 when it was released (A few days before WoW came I recall) and it was so fucking good in how stats mattered a lot more, with Wisdom for example increasing resistances against certain elements, Agility increasing avoidance and so forth.
It made it possible to customize a lot with gear, with every stat being useful to every class in one way or another.
Of course, after WoW and it's casual bullshit came out and got super popular, games like EQ2 began to change and make things "Simpler" for the sake of attracting the retards that want no complexity.
>pre-WoW MMOs
WoW was the first MMO you retard.
>>319652098
>Crafting HQ food for raiders
>Crafting materials to be used for player housing
>Pentamelding materia for hardcore raiders
>Make your own glamour or sell it to others
>Etc...
crafting is a lot more than that unless you main just one crafting job like a retard
>>319652046
It's from 2001. Of course it has shit combat.
There's so much that could be done to "modernize" the old style of mmo without ruining them.
Mmos of today are ruined by attacking each letter of the mmorpg acronym.
>>319652275
Only one of those serves a purpose and lo and behold it doesn't require you to level up a craft.
Crafting is meaningless in ffxiv. You can make gil selling useless shit to retards. It's a good thing gil is also meaningless in ffxiv.
>>319650876
I think two main things fucked up MMOs.
The solo quest to level cap then gear treadmill the dungeon of the month model fucking blows ass. You have no reason to join up with anyone else unless they just happen to be on the same quest as you and even then a lot of times that means just grinding out more guys for drops, keeping you away from that quest reward a little longer. Then you have the lovely "end game" where all of your progress gets thrown out the window once the new dungeon comes out - or worse, they release an expansion and no one ever looks at the months worth of old end game content again.
The other thing is MMOs keep wanting to make the combat more action based. The problem here is, if you are hammering your skills every second for maximum damage while running around to avoid the bad ground, you can't fucking type to chat with anyone. People shit on old games like FFXI or Ragnarok Online because the pacing in battle was so slow, but that meant you were always free to chat with anyone at any time. You weren't following any specific quest line, so you could join up with anybody who happened to be there - and it was actually worth your time because you'd get more exp out of it as well as a new social connection.
Any time I hear someone say some variant of "wait until end game" I know I don't even need to bother.
>>319652481
If crafting was meaningless then I guess all this millions of Gil I made from hosting my crafting services in party finder is useless then since obviously Pentamelding my accessories for savage raiding and making the best HQ food and potions is also useless.
RMTing said Gil made in 2 days of fakin
AFKing for $250 is also useless :^)
>>319652674
Nailed it.
Wait, isn't Tree of Savior going to have some kind of professions like baker etc? I just remember that I read about one of the asian games having classes like blacksmith or trader or something like that
MMOs are too fast now. Everyone played like shit back in the day but they could still raid and pvp, but the players who were great stood far ahead.
Average players now hit 80-90% of their potential leaving less room for the best players to stand out. While bad players can barely play the game, it's fine to want people to get good but you need that base of players for an MMO to stand on.
>>319652674
If you can't type while fighting in modern MMOs, you have some poor WPM skills or the multitasking level of a 6 year old.
>>319652741
You're proving my point anon. That gil you made served 0 purpose in the game. It was worthless. If you want to make money playing shitty videogames you could always get a job.
Ffxiv is pretty bad but not the worst thing ever. The crafting however is ABYSMAL.
Are there any non-themepark mmos alive now?
>>319652948
>Served 0 purpose
>Gave me the best gear in the game currently and lets me pay for my sub by just AFKing
>>319652919
You literally cant activate your skills with the chat window open, anon. Or are you telling me I should be able to play an FFXI monk, tabbing back and forth between my chat window and gameplay, in between hitting skills every two seconds while rotating around the enemy for positional bonuses and avoiding AoEs?
MOBAs replaced mmos.
Think about it, you know it to be true.
Why grind for months when you can grind for 10 minutes and enjoy the rewards?
>>319653171
Sorry, FFXIV monk. FFXI was like, the easiest mmo to chat in, but I should think the positionals and AoEs should have given that away
>>319653094
If crafting can make better gear than raiding then crafting has changed a tiny bit for the better. Good thing it only took how many years?
also congratulations on exploiting a game. Doesn't change that crafting is worthless and gil is worthless.
>>319653094
>AFKing in a game so you can make money to pay for said game so you can AFK even more so you can pay to AFK for many months to come
>>319653171
If you can't chat while playing Monk in FFXIV then you are retarded.
I wouldn't be surprised if you also played on a console or with a controller too.
>>319653501
not him
you can type a fucking novel while playing anything, it doesn't mean you aren't going to be a shitter doing no damage
>>319653478
It's okay to be jealous, I make money not doing anything and use it to buy more vidya and shit I want.
You can't go a single MMO thread without mentioning FFXI, why do nostalgiafags always crawl to that game?
I mean, look at this shit and tell me with a straight face that this is fun and worth investing over 1000 hours into.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SkeiYrqr-M
>>319651146
^ This.
Now greedy sharholders and have normies (that want to log in 15 minutes a week and accomplish everything the game has to offer) taken over the genre.
>>319653691
And we don't have to play ffxiv. I'd say we are better off than you imo desu senpai.
>>319653501
See, now you're just being rude for the sake of it. Sure, I can literally be "playing monk" while standing around with my characters thumbs up his ass and type whatever I want just fine, but that's not what I was talking about and you know it.
>>319653879
I can do the same thing posting that level 1 archer gif from FFXIV where they are just hammering the shit out of their one button.
Yes. That shit was 100% worth investing the time into because it had something MMOs these days decided was only fit for "end game" - people who depended on each other.
>>319650876
The main difference I see is hand holding. In original EQ, you had to actually read all an NPC's dialogue and figure out what to do. Your quest journal was a pad of paper next to the keyboard. You had to talk to NPC's by physically typing what you wanted to say. All of this created what I regard as the most powerful force in gaming: player agency.
Agency is what gets people truly invested in a game because it makes their actions matter. Modern MMO's are just a systematic process of running from one glowing exclamation point to another, clicking through everything as fast as possible, and proceeding on to yet another glowing exclamation point. You are on such precisely defined rails you could have a bot play the game for you and get exactly the same experience. Fights are as scripted as WWE. Everything important to the plot happens in a cutscene. The player has absolutely no agency, and thus no reason to care, because nothing he does actually matters.
>>319653879
It's not nostalgia and it's not the combat that made the game great.
Imagine killing a rare monster at level 20 and getting a best in slot item that you will use until level cap only ever needing to get side grades for specific situations.
Imagine players communicating in a live world.
Imagine no shitters at level cap because shitters don't get group invites and thus don't get to level.
Imagine all crafts serve a unique purpose.
Imagine 16 amazing unique classes useful in different situations instead of the modern 3 classes of tank, healer, dd.
>>319654268
Imagine a person who is this fucking delusional with nostalgia goggles to think any of this was true.
>>319654368
? It was all true. Mmos of old are extremely different than the mmos of today padawan.
Because they were social games and the concept of an mmo hadn't been publicly marketed yet.
It was like playing a MUD with actual graphics or playing an online DnD with people. You pretended to be an ogre or an elf and you made friends with other nerds who were pretending to be elves.
Friendships were formed and even relationships/marriages.
On a gameplay level they were nothing special by todays standards. EQ 99 is a giant mess of a game but the games were about social aspect not so much the gameplay.
MMOs are alien concepts to people now. We live in an age where people can contact each other within seconds. Back then dialing up your shitty internet through a phone jack was a technological miracle.
>>319651987
well for example. none of the starter classes were remotely viable, or in some cases even playable.
its a game about killing monsters and they literally made some classes not even have combat skills like the enchanter or the vagabond.
ergo everyone just ended up rolling custom characters and making either a 3 school mage + a weapon skill, or a 4 school mage.
horribly unbalanced shit like hoary mattekar robes, mages buffs completely outshining actual armour to the point they made hollow weapons, which made mages useless, so they made "mage armour", an endless cycle of rebalancing
not to mention the content was basically just going to the one dungeon suited to your level and grinding mobs as they spawned, lugians, olthoi and then tuskers, grind grind grind all day long, rebuff, continue to grind.
the game was just poorly put together and they had to learn as they went. not to
>>319654368
That shit was ALL true, dude. Just because you didn't like / play it doesn't change what it was.
>>319650876
Back then the genre wasn't standardized. The only expectations of an MMORPG were community and online multiplayer. Devs tried all kinds of crazy shit which made for quite different mmo experiences.
WoW standardized the genre and after that there was a much more defined expectation of what mmorpg was supposed to be.
>>319654424
BiS gear that revolved around autistically gear switching with macros during combat to switch jobs that you had to level to make any sort of progress in the endgame
Nobody communicated in a live world since everyone was busy chatting in linkshells or party chat.
People getting refused to level or play at the endgame level breeded one of the worst static/circlejerk environments in a MMO close to even WoW or FFXIV.
The only thing FFXI did right was having unique classes and have some good music, but what good is all that if everything from the combat, Playonline, community, and everything else was just plain awful?
>>319654765
HAHAHAHA I get it now. You're a shitter who couldn't get into an endgame ls.
You should try ffxi now. You can solo 99% of the story content. You'll still never get into an endgame ls though lol.
>>319654474
I met a chick on Ragnarok Online who lived another country, we started dating, flew to where she lived, took her virginity and lost mine in the process.. all thanks to an mmo of the past.
>>319654268
>imagine an endgame which consisted of you only ever being invited to content to use one spell or ability once.
>imagine some fag sperging out when you did anything but that
FFXI was a really great game.
>>319654901
>You should try this corpse now
no thanks, I'd rather play a real MMO like Ultima or Everquest than a badly released Japanese copy of those games.
I liked runescape.
>>319653879
FFXI players were the FFXIV players back in the day.
Everyone knew their game was garbage compared to EQ or other relevant MMOs of the day, but they still remained the most vocal and hostile whenever you talk about their game. Figures that most of those autists were consolefags who played on PS2 or god forbid Xbox 360.
>>319655395
What MMO is better than FFXIV right now? Really the only problem I can think of with FFXIV is the invisible walls everywhere
>>319650876
The audience was much much smaller and way less casual, so they actually focused on making good games instead of pandering to mouthbreathing furries, 13-year-olds and soccer moms.
>>319650876
Overall not only were videogames better and more innovative back then, but also the people that played them were different.
Show me a producer that tries to take an old title and have it go a step further. You can't, since the market is now dominated by casuals and devs rarely either evolve a title or create something that includes something uncommon or many uncommon things.
>tfw I'll never experience the magical feeling of playing this game for the first time again
I know it's grindy as all hell and now that I look at it it's really clunky and pretty shitty but it did start my addiction to hats and I loved the character designs, settings and music when I was still a teen never really did get into UO
>>319650876
They weren't better, they just seemed that way because of the circumstances.
During that time a lot more people were on dialup, internet information exchange between hobbyists was still at its infancy, a lot of those games were you and a friend or a guildmate hearing that there is a powerful dragon in the mountains of the Azdan empire, guarding the Cudgel of Xelos, a powerful arcane artifact, preparing for a week, then setting out on a journey to find the dragon to see if you can beat him to try and obtain the legendary artefact.
These days its just clicking on an automatch button for a dungeon who's boss has a 36% chance to drop an item which will help you optimize your min-maxed cookie cutter build which you decided on six weeks before you bought the game because the wiki has all the drops listed and that particular item was most helpful for the elitist build that is the only one anyone in the community will party with because they just wanna beat shit as fast as possible.
tl;dr Games were never the issue, it was the Community, and the tools which cmae to their disposal.I honestly think data mining is worse than fucking Hitler, he only tired to kill some jews, data mining fucking creates them.
>>319655395
You realize ffxi is literally an (amazing) eq clone right? That you separate them is laughable.
>>319655135
>I couldn't get into the endgame then cause I sucked.
>I don't want to now that it's soloable.
>>319654954
Mm. This is an issue with your linkshell or job choice. Not all jobs being perfectly equal in all aspects is a big part of why it was so good.
>>319653094
>lets me pay for my sub by just AFKing
I've yet to find any real effective way to make enough money in game to pay for my sub. The bots the game has can barely farm properly.
>>319654268
>Imagine 16 amazing unique classes useful in different situations instead of the modern 3 classes of tank, healer, dd.
I want a MMO game designed by /v/.
>>319658071
Tree of Savior
And there's 80 classes
>>319658183
Once it comes out it'll just become min-max shitfest like every other game and will only have 3 acceptable classes.
Games aren't shit because of their mechanics, but because of their community.
>>319658183
ToS devs are incompetent. Lots of good ideas and designs but shit execution.
>>319658071
Ideaguys don't get a game made.
>tfw we can never go back
>tfw hoped that FF14 would be the one to save us from modern MMO garbage
>It just turned out to be a modern clone that had forgotten everything from it's predecessor
the pain
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVYhcXmXSB0>tfw you realize all the characters in the logo are you and your friends standing together as one
>>319658332
>Games aren't shit because of their mechanics, but because of their community.
Now that doesn't sound right. I'm pretty sure a game can be shit simply because it has shit mechanics.
On the topic of MMOs though, they're shit because of their playerbase is shit.
>>319658071
It would be terrible. But ffxi genuinely had 16 unique classes. All better and worse than the others in certain situations. Not to mention you had 15 subjobs to choose from that changed the way you play.
Granted every job only had two to five viable subjobs but it was still far more options than available today.
>>319653501
If you're typing while playing MNK of all things you will be complete ass, there's no getting around that and I have no idea why the fuck you'd think otherwise.
>>319658334
>Ideaguys don't get a game made.
I know, still think it could be fun to play the ultimate /v/ dream, unless it'd turn into a nightmare.
>>319658609
>Now that doesn't sound right. I'm pretty sure a game can be shit simply because it has shit mechanics.
No, I don't know how long you've been playing games, but I've played them for over twenty years, I've played plenty of games with shit mechanics and had fun because people I played with made it fun, meanwhile no amount of fun mechanics can offset dealing with fagots and assholes constantly.
>>319658635
>All better and worse than the others in certain situations
Except for RDM which could solo everything and was pretty much universally accepted as the best class in the game.
>>319658635
XI actually has 22 jobs now.
>>319658546
Well you could it just wouldn't be that fun. the final story stuff has ended so its officially on life support until they drop console support next year. then who knows.
https://youtu.be/JLBPYzrMxdY?t=8m27s
Guild Wars was better than WoW
>>319659090
Emulators and private servers filled with bots.
>>319658842
>I've played plenty of games with shit mechanics
>and had fun because people I played with made it fun
Somehow game being shit and having fun can't be true at the same time? I can have fun watching a shit movie but that doesn't make the movie any better.
>meanwhile no amount of fun mechanics can offset dealing with fagots and assholes constantly
People seem to manage that with ASSFAGGOTS all the time. Though I'm not sure if they're even having fun playing those. Maybe occasionally.
>>319659000
And they're not all unique anymore. Ffxi isn't what it was.
>>319658887
They could solo a lot of nms, sure. They couldn't solo for exp like bst or Drg though. They couldn't solo hnms with the speed of bst. They couldn't offer hardly any damage to a party/alliance.
>>319650876
Lineage female dwarf>Elins, Lyns, Lalafell, and every other modern MMO loli.
>>319659523
>Somehow game being shit and having fun can't be true at the same time? I can have fun watching a shit movie but that doesn't make the movie any better.
Now you're just being pedantic, I don't know why the fuck you feel the need to make an argument out of this, but you're welcome to fuck off if you think I'm wrong.
>>319650876
more sense of wonder.
Even after so many years I still get excited to explore areas in era-1999 everquest, they were all very well made. EVE online is the only "modern" mmo that has captured this experience for me.
>>319650876
2 reasons.
Because none of them where the mega success WoW was, no one really tried to copy each other. They took some things here and there from each other, but no one outright copied. WoW was the first to go "lets make everquest with a WoW skin + lore, but at the same time, lets fix everything we hated about Everquest." During the end phase of vanilla and during the time of TBC (when its popularity was soaring higher and higher every month), no other MMO stood a chance. Good ones with unique ideas DID come out during that time, and some /did/ survive (sorta), but none could take its throne and most died.
Second reason is after TBC, every IP needed an MMO (just like every IP needs a moba, every IP needs an FPS, etc) and they all pretty much went "WoW's popular, lets just copy that and we can have some form of success". We no longer really had growth and the market became extremely over saturated.
I played FlyFF so much. Why can't MMOs just go back to a crazy world full of monsters and unique places and ridiculous grind? I just want to explore and grind. Why can't MMOs do that anymore? WHY?
>This game is supposedly amazing
>Try it
>An absolute chore to play and no fun at all
Every "legendary" old game game ever
>>319651070
No. It's not as if there are great sandbox games for contrast.
>>319659905
>post-WoW baby can't stand the grind
Yea just keep playing your dead WoW clones. The reason the MMO industry will never recover is because now it's filled with people like you who are trained to only play quest based theme parks.
>>319656042
FFXIV is a good game, but it's not a great game. Plenty of good ideas floating around, but a lot of them are executed poorly or have long term consequences that stunt the growth of the game. Take the Duty Finder as an example:
Pros: No need to shout for a dungeon group. Get to play with people on other servers.
Con: Every dungeon must be designed around the tank/healer/dps/dps setup. Every class must be pigeon-holed into a trinity archetype. Can't send or receive tells or look at your social UI windows while in an instance.
Cross-server play is something frequently requested in older games like EQ where many servers have dwindling populations and finding people to group with can be unduly challenging. So having it built in from day one was a very good idea. However, enforcing a holy trinity setup with class roles severely limits their creative freedom with new classes since there is no place for anything that doesn't fit the mold. Likewise, with group content using only four people, and raid content using only eight, there is little to no wiggle room in content design. Everything has to be designed to accommodate that trinity, and nothing can have the complexity or uniqueness made possible with, say, 24 or 54 man content.
And that brings us to another design point. People in other games complain that the hardest part of doing X content is getting Y people online at the same time to attempt it. FFXIV's solution is to simply scale things down to four or eight people.
Pro: It's usually not hard to get four or eight people online at a particular scheduled time.
Con: It forces people into small cliques of group mates instead of encouraging guild-level cooperation. Also, reduced complexity and trinity issues as outlined above. Essentially, when you have eight players on the field instead of some arbitrarily larger number, there is naturally a smaller set of actions those players can be doing at any given time, and thus few things enemies can do.
>>319650876
i played a rogue my first time in EQ. I was such an autopilot class with no way to heal or do shit on its own. The first day at level 1 i got invited into a group of other level 1's , without even knowing how to use chat and we stayed friends for over 5 years. EQ was a slow as fuck game
where only a few classes could go at solo, and to be honest the game wasn't good. But god damn it was amazing exploring with people, all equally clueless and broke, being helped out by high level players and slowing progressing out of the newbie dark age. The fact that it was so slow and difficult made every achievement mean something, I remember shitting myself at like level 12 when the whole group pooled their cash together to get me a magic weapon. Or the first piece of black wolf armor i got, after which some random guy gave me the rest of the set. You don't get that feeling of accomplishment and community anymore. I'm
a nostalgia fag but i recognize the old mmos as bad, but i don't give a fuck because the people made them amazing. WoW is to mmos what CoD is to tactical shooters, simplified beyond repair with a illusion of multiplayer aspects.
Fuck that was long dumb rant.
>>319659635
Tell me more about the dwarves. Did they make good little magical girls?
>>319660016
I don't play WoW or its clones tho. I got bored of it ages ago and nothing after it has been any good so I tried some older games that were just as bad if not worse.
>>319658546
I seriously don't get FFXI fanboys, I played the game back when the 2nd expansion was brand new and I always found the game to be a huge wad of ass.
From how slow the netcode is compared to other MMOs at the time, how garbage Playonline patch servers are, how everyone is driven into a clique from linkshells to exclusive farm parties, etc.
The golden Era of MMO RPG is simply gone.
I played Ragnarok in high school, and at the time, being connected with so many people, exploring field, grinding all days, having a unique character, being immersed in this "social" world was all i expect from a MMORPG.
I did not ever recaptured something similar in any game. And the internet community has become more meme and much more circlejerky than ever, there is nothing interesting to do in MMO now.
At the time game were much more different and trying their own thing, then it became a generic copy of each other, and made simple to appeal a wider audience.
>>319660448
The first things you listed were genuine issues. Coincidentally they don't really matter.
>getting mad about cliques
You mean people finding people they like and doing things with them is a bad thing? I don't get it.
>>319660741
Cliques in MMOs are what breed awful server communities. Once there's an established "inner circle" of hardcore players, they pretty much have control over everything from farm spots to who is/isn't on the blacklist from socializing or grouping in the game.
If you weren't in a good clique, you weren't going to level or do anything endgame worthy unless you sucked peoples dick or offered them something they didn't have. It's thanks to cliques why MMO devs these days try to implement dungeon finder and instance queues so everyone has an equal opportunity at the game instead of trying to poopsock to join a good clique.
>>319659905
>>319660129
That is pretty much the reason why old-styled MMOs will never come back.
One of the main methods to keep an MMO alive is to create friendship with "forced" teamwork. If you can't progress in these games, you can bet that someone else is on the same boat, so all you had to do was start a conversation. "Friends" means "reasons to keep playing/paying" to mmo devs.
Nowadays, if you can't progress in a MMO because of required teamwork at some point, you can just unistall and play any other game with auto-party-finder, solo-friendly leveling, daily bonuses for non-NEET players and the combination of artstyle/soundtrack you might enjoy. So, instead of friends, people will log in because of their dailies quests/weekly raid.
>>319650876
>>319660665
Boo fucking hoo
>>319661117
You claimed the problem was cliques in linkshells. Now you're claiming the clique is composed of an entire linkshell. That's weird how it changed.
Also it doesn't explain why if you didn't get along with one ls you could go join one of the 20 other endgame linkshells. Or were all 20 apart of the same clique?
Let's face it bud. You were either a shitter who got denied from 20 linkshells from being a shitter or you never played the game and are making things up.
I'm leaning towards never played it because if you think any group had control over the "farm spots" you're retarded.
people are complaining about endless grinds, but this is basically where the fun is, where you actually have a purpose besides farming your mats and killing the same bosses over and over for your loot when you reach endgame,
while grinding, you basically created a battleground, because most of the playerbase were gathered a the same spot, not fighting in a sterile instanced battleground like modern shits try to do, just cause it's way efficient server wise
controlling leveling spot was really amazing, and it served a real purpose, control of a real environment, not a shitty place where you grind honor & badges semi afk
SWG was great.
>>319658546
It might have been, but they forced the alpha, and ultimately full game, out entirely too soon.
It needed at least another year to cook, reduce the copy-pastedness of the terrain, and balance some of the silliness, like a lv9tool taking lv20 raw materials.
And the worst part was that they forced it out early in a retarded gambit to compete with a WoW expansion...
>>319661498
you're right, bots/RMT had lockdown control over key farm spots.
also people saying mmo seemed good cause you had lots of time, it's nostalgia, you played with your friends...
i never played with my friends, i always made buddies while playing online, i still have lots of time cause i arrange my schedule the way i want with my work, so nothing changed there for the last 10 years,
mmo are not social anymore, they just sink their budget in a model that is not working at all, because wow-theme-park is already doing it and better, and the devs seems to be surprised at release when everybody test their game for 3 months and leave,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvK8fua6O64
>>319650876
I played EQ, Silk Road, Ragnarok Online, and other MMOs back in the day and I still think that they don't come close to FFXIV.
Real adventure
>>319662041
I got my peacock charm and my emperor hairpin when bots were at their peak. Two of the most heavily botted items in the game.
Not to mention they only did this for nms and not regular monsters which was the safe bet for gil anyways.
You're just a shitter m8.
>>319661890
I'd be very surprised if they didn't actually outsource the entire project. Whoever worked on it clearly had no idea what they were doing, every single mechanic was broken or just plain retarded.
>Can't regen mana
>Have to walk across the entire zone to touch a crystal to get it back
Not only did these people not play FFXI but they might have never even played a MMO at all in their life.
>>319651509
>Ultima
Freedoms and systems were good for its time, but nowadays, the gameplay is ass.
That is an objective fact.
>>319662298
>I autistically farmed these two items back when bots were getting them and selling them for RMT
great to know m8, we get it that you miss your crack I mean "FFXI"
>>319659659
>Even after so many years I still get excited to explore areas in era-1999 everquest, they were all very well made. EVE online is the only "modern" mmo that has captured this experience for me.
Isn't that the whole issue though? EVE is from 2003, it is a pre-WoW MMO. That it happens to be one of the only ones that has actually survived doesn't change that. It has plenty of flaws, but the core foundation dates from an era when there was no set formula and everyone was experimenting with all sorts of crazy ideas and felt like it was ok to be wildly ambitious. It was also fine to aim for a target of just a few tens to hundreds of thousands of consistent solid players. With no giant push to require millions or more, niche stuff that could be more experimental and targeted and less generic was economically viable. Obviously sometimes those attempts didn't work, but that was okay because there'd be more and one failure didn't break the bank.
EVE, FF11, SWG all have their roots in that time, when it wasn't the very first gen of MMOs and experimental or even pre-3D, by that point PC and even console tech had gotten past the truly rough stages of development and were starting to get into a more modern form, albeit with immensely less power of course. But it was still much more Wild West in the true sense. Unfortunately a lot has changed since, with WoW greatly accelerating the trend but some of it was probably inevitable.
>>319662479
It is possible.
Though, the mana thing might have been an attempt to make ethers and the like valuable.
Similar to how every melee class had a disposable throwing weapon for pulling. (War had throwing axes, pld daggers, Mnk chakram.) So that crafters had a reason to craft, and gil would have purpose beyond "Pay this NPC for a trinket."
On the flip side, the game suffered from whoever's brilliant idea no-AH was. They made a deep, fiddly and interdependant crafting system, then made it impossible to find anything you might need in a reasonable amount of time.
Even the flagging of retainers who were selling the good in mid-late 1.0 was a vast step up from "Individually check every single person's items for sale," that was the alpha and launch...
>>319662648
>here's why this game sucked!
That's not true.
>well also this!
That's also not true
>well..well..
zzz
>>319650876
I despise MMOs and when I played EQ back in the day I wasted so much time grinding out shit myself as a Necro or dicking around as a rogue. However, I think the actual strength of MMOs have been lost post-WoW.
I don't think there was any deliberate design philosophy for early MMOs so the games kind of stumbled onto their strength by accident: human interaction. Goading people to work together for a long period of time forces interactions and relationships to happen. The grinding is awful, the gameplay is awful but it's just an excuse to try and get people to form bonds.
The upside of a long grind is that you should have people to talk to while you're doing a mind numbing task for hours. Without a cleric you couldn't heal very quickly so you'd just sit there and shoot shit with the other idiots that didn't roll cleric. Or alternatively, if you were a cleric or had one you'd have to shit there and shoot shit while they regenerated their mana.
The gambling addiction skinner box shit was a sideshow to having to actually talk to strangers. Now the skinner box shit is on the main stage with the horrors of human interaction a mere memory.
If I were to make a game to bring back the feelings of an MMO it probably wouldn't be an MMO at all. You'd get matched up with complete strangers (they aren't on your friends list) and forced to do some kind of task like survival on a desert island, find a solution to get out of a locked room etc. But the task takes as while to solve and once you're matched up with some people you're stuck with them for like two weeks or some shit. Better get friendly because you're going to be with these faggots for a while
>Log in
>City is bustling with people crafting, advertising their stuff in chat, or just AFK on benches
What 2015 MMO am I talking about?
>>319663364
None for $300.
>>319663487
wrong, it's FFXIV
>>319663769
Lol
>>319650876
Sandbox MMOs were pretty bad tbqh, there's a reason why people used to shun them before WoW and now only miss them because WoW is dying.
>>319663769
I award you this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBKr8YLuVgs
>>319664463
>Sandbox MMOs were pretty bad tbqh
No, the good ones weren't (and for that matter still aren't). There's also plenty of room for hybrids with both sandbox areas and crafted content, it's never been a zero sum game. In fact the best ones would definitely have both to make for a diverse community. Like EVE, even though it's PvE missions and crafted content was always pretty shit it was still there and a lot of the community sticks to it pretty exclusively, and can do so in a sandbox but one that's also got varying levels of risk/reward. That tied in well with the overall economy and items coming in from PvP and more sandbox-y high risk areas. If CCP weren't such fucking hacks and hadn't pissed away so much on stupid shit and WoD then it could have ended up excellent in both areas.
There's no reason the same principle couldn't be applied to other settings and mechanics too.
>>319665890
>>319650876
Because back in the day MMORPGs were more concerned with having a healthy playerbase than just having a large one. This meant that they were more niche and community oriented than previous mmos but also meant that they had barriers to get into the game.
Basically they were more social and based around tabletop RPGs or early PC rpgs in general. Rather than nowadays where if you don't have MASSIVE numbers you're considered a failure and the market is just flooded with WoW brand themeparks that are pretty much single player games.
This isn't to say vanilla WoW wasn't a community based game, it just was on a lower end of the spectrum and basically made to gather casuals who had never experienced the genre.
>>319666561
>>319650876
EverQuest was violent shit. Played year one, it was shit.
>>319666665
Yeah, and that would have been fine if only if hadn't cast such a shadow and made the whole industry chase after one LE WOW KILLAH after another, all of which obviously failed as expected because of standard economics, thus killing all experimentation for a decade. Then F2P cancer and grindan', one of the few ways left to try to grab big numbers and social shitters and such, pretty much finished the job.
There's still a market for alternatives with a playerbase of maybe a few hundred k, but who knows if/when we'll see somebody aim for that again.
>>319650876
They didn't have so many fan sites ruining the game's mystery and sense of adventure through unecessary datamining
They weren't stream lined pieces of crap
They made the player rely on other players and interact with them.
>>319667089
The problem is that the genre 'evolved' but didn't take anything good from the old MMORPGs when they did so. I'd say combat IS drastically better in MMOs now but everything else is ten times worse.
Instead of looking at the community building mechanics or trying to innovate through cooperation developers just redacted anything that was complained about. Now it's instant gratification, easy leveling, and gear based endgame where the game finally has multiplayer. It's sad really how the majority of players in the genre are basically comprised of casuals who had having to work for anything.
I wish MMO's did playable monster races more or had more unique classes choices with Multi-Classing, like in guild wars.or I could just play DND again.
