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[Codician]

Anyone playing any MMORPGs or got any they're looking forward to?

To me, it seems to be a dead genre. I haven't mustered any enthusiasm for one in a long, long time.

[Damiac]

I'd agree the genre has gone down the toilet.  I wonder if it was ever a decent genre to begin with, or if it was just fresh and new so we didn't care that they weren't actually very good games...

[Urist McScoopbeard]

The problem with MMOs is that, the only models develops know will make money aren't fun or actually sustainable. Unfortunately, an MMO is such a large investment of capital it's hard to break the mold.

[Silverthrone]

It also doesn't help that a MMORPG that ambles along with a substainable amount of players is still considered a failure for not attracting millions. I mean, Age of Conan and Lord of the Rings Online is still going, far as I know. They didn't attract millions of subscribers or (dare we dream, said the producers) overthrow WoW, but still puttering along after nearly a decade is not too shabby. I imagine that Warhammer Online might've managed to live on in some form if the plug hadn't been pulled. And clipped apart, and burned, and the ashes mixed with the concrete of nuclear waste containers headed for long-term storage. Eve Online isn't what it was, but that game seems to not go anywhere. In both senses of the word, regrettably, but not bad. Considering that it's likely older than some of its players. And there's Mr. Guild Wars 2 over there, mowing the lawn. Done pretty well for himself, might stay around for a good while. Good that he's not bitter that he didn't re-invent the world. Moved on with what he had. Sensible chap.

It's also a pretty risky venture, the MMORPG business. Wildstar was a nice attempt, but it was a mistake to listen to vanilla WoW veterans. Turns out that old school, 40 player, hours long raiding isn't what people actually want. Along with its other problems. I'm not sure how that game's going, if its set to move along with what it has or if it's floundering, but it can't have been terribly fun for Carbine. Star Wars probably had higher ambitions than Wildstar, but if not even a brand name of that gravitational magnitude can do a WoW 2.0, nothing can.
EverQuest Next didn't even bother to come out. That was a shame, and I would've felt like a proper chump if I had invested in that weird Landmark thing. Looked nice and colourful, and it had cool Lionmen. Oh, well.

WoW's ticking along. As always. Not as big as it was, but it's still there, doing stuff. Seems to have come out of rehab after its Orc-overdose. Bet'ya fiver that the next expansion will be Wrath of the Lich King 2.

But all in all, I think that the big MMO age is over, for a lot of reasons. There won't be another WoW, at least not in that kind of form. The next super big MMO will probably be tablet and phone-based (and in there is a debate whether it'll count). If nothing else because a lot of people had desktop PCs back when WoW came out that they don't have now. The people who do have gaming desktop PCs aren't likely to adopt a new online RPG en masse, either. It's done, chapter close, fun while it lasted.

I'd agree the genre has gone down the toilet.  I wonder if it was ever a decent genre to begin with, or if it was just fresh and new so we didn't care that they weren't actually very good games...

Eh, they were good for the time. It was a novelty thing at large, but if it was genuine fun, they did what they meant to do.

[nenjin]

Last MMO I put any time into was Secret World.

For me, I'm just too time strapped to play most MMOs. They're designed for people to play stupid amounts of hours grinding.

And yet, I hate casual MMOs, they just don't do it for me. Even if I had the time to play them, I put so many hours into WoW that I'm sick of their loot system showing up in every other game I play.

I want a fresh experience that feels like when I first played EQ. Where the rules were unfamiliar and the structure of things wasn't what I'd played in the last four dozen fantasy games I've seen.

[Urist McScoopbeard]

LOTRO was actually far above WOW in terms of quality until they went F2P in my opinion. Ironically, while the F2P model is apparently the more lucrative, every time an RPG goes F2P it decimates the player base and eventually leads to the stagnation of the game.

[debvon]

Raiding has always been the main draw with MMOs for me. Small group content only goes so far since it's mostly just random people you're scraping together. Raiding 2-3 times a week with the same group of people can be very rewarding. You can make new, solid friendships, learn how to handle people in different ways, discover how to rally people and get them working as a team. It's so easy to get into.

I spent a year raiding in WoW a long time ago before the first expansion, and spent 3 years raiding in EQ2. EQ2 is pretty much garbage solo. The group content is okay. Spell variety is quite good, playing a class well is difficult. Stats are out of hand for a game with so many expansions. Everything is above 100% and has hard/soft caps, damage is in the millions, re-use stat is 100% so your spells come up very quickly forcing you to learn a proper spell rotation. At this point they're bringing back old content "revamped" by making all of the enemies max level. New expansion comes out in november. I recommend it if you're looking for something to raid in, and I can help anyone who wants to get into it, although I've recently quit playing

[Urist McScoopbeard]

MMOs are just promises that you've wasted a lot of money. It would take a truly innovative MMO to get me interested, and substantially good word-of-mouth recommendations before I would play it.

TOR is a good MMO that has a lot of relatively interesting content though. So I will say that.

[Aklyon]

Last MMO I've played would be Black Desert, but after everyone moved on to another guild I didn't really feel like continuing. These aren't very good solo games.

[Silverthrone]

I'm in it for the PvP, and I like a bit of RP. Always made my heart sink a bit when there was no RP potential at all in an MMO.

I did raid in WoW, but I was never that good (just managed to get involved in the vanilla raids when BC turned up; floundered my way halfway through there, and sunk my teeth into early Wrath. They cracked). I liked the core of it, and the novelty of fighting huge monsters on the internet. I prefered the instances, though. Smaller groups, smaller objectives, and a more managable little adventure. I was one of the few who missed it when the need to actually gather a group and go there disappeared.

I stopped raiding because it stopped stimulating me, same like how I didn't grind very much (which explains the lack of progress on my part) if I didn't have to. Did PvP while that was fun, did RP while that environment was tolerable. Good times, but it does make me wonder how grindy the mechanics really where back then, considering how much grinding I shirked and wormed my way out of. All tallied, I feel that I got my money's worth off of my time in WoW, after all.

(As a note, it's fun to look back at the most grindy, drawn-out parts of old WoW and thinking of just how humane it was for the time. Original EQ veterans have my eternal respect.)

[Wiles]

I dip my toe back in the MMO waters from time to time but I keep rediscovering that I don't like MMOs much anymore.

I think I enjoyed MMOs at first because it was a new experience, and then later I kept enjoying it because I fell in with a bunch of players that I really enjoyed spending time with.

Eventually playing MMOs felt like a job and I quit playing. Every time since when I've gone back to it I've never rediscovered the sense of community that I had when I started playing WoW. So I end up playing for a while and once I've exhausted the fun bits (quests and such) all that is left is the not-so-fun bits (the grind, or playing dungeons over and over with randoms).

[MrRoboto75]

City of Heroes died tho

[Cthulhu]

WoW's success was the same success as all its games:  Take a niche genre and make it something everybody wants to play. 

Everyone was playing WoW when I was in eighth grade.  The football team had its own guild.

My friend's been telling me they've turned around a lot of the bad decisions from Panda/Warlords and that Legion is the best the game's ever been.  Notably the loot for LFG and LFR has been made mostly useless, so it's only good for learning the fights.  You'll have to actually organize a group and physically travel to the dungeon to get good loot, and repeated wins unlock harder difficulties with even better loot, encouraging organization and guild-play again.  So instead of going from waste of time LFR where you can afk through the dungeon and get free welfare loot to crazy hard raids you need a guild for, you can progress slowly from easy to hard.

Not interested in finding out for myself though.

EVE is also going free to play soon.

[Urist McScoopbeard]

EVE going free to play!?!? RIP.

[Aklyon]

EVE going free to play!?!? RIP.

Its a fairly limited, mostly-combat f2p last I'd heard though. You still have to pay up (either in the license things or in moneys) to actually do all the things.