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[Flying Dice]

To be fair, GW2 at least managed to avoid endless grind symdrome. You could have a toon maxed and kitted for WvW in 20-50 hours, depending on class and efficiency, and small-scale PvP was totally disconnected from the core grind.

Now the WvW meta, that sucked donkey dong, but it was nice if you were on a top server since you could always hop on TS and there'd be one or two PUGs rolling under a volunteer dorito despite the AoE spam. That, and the solo meta was a lot more open because all that mattered was outlasting, rather than maxing AoE DPS. I always just ran in zergs with dual axes warr because fuck gs meta and hammer meta, Beyblade is fun.

[Xardalas]

I rather liked Shadowbane. It went under years ago but they got a emulator of it up now. Openworld pvp was kinda nice. With all the classes actually being different. Was fun. Dunno if it is still up and running though. The Emulator version anyways.

[nenjin]

I remember being really hyped for Shadowbane, had a guild lined up, everything, and like 2 hours with the Open Beta was so incomprehensibly bad I never looked back. I should check it out for lulz.

[Cthulhu]

Blizzard always insisted vanilla was bad and we only liked it because of nostalgia goggles, but playing Nostalrius (a former private server that offered pure vanilla wow with no added features or alterations, rip in pizza) was the most fun I had with wow probably ever.

Going back to vanilla as an adult instead of a dipshit kid was like a completely different game.  Back then if I leveled up twice in one day I thought I was on fire.  I constantly distracted myself and blew all my gold on new random greens in the AH, switched zones all the time, frequently tried alts for ten levels or so and went back to my warlock.  I was horrible at PvP and became well-known in trade chat for bitching about how every class but mine was OP.

Playing as an adult was a completely different experience.  Undead Rogue.  I never did quests, I almost never bought anything on the AH, rolled Mining/Herbalism so I was rich as fuck and laden with twink gear I used to blitz farm mobs and level up ten times faster than anybody bothering with quests. Bought my mount as soon as I hit 40 and still had enough left over for Wirt's Third Leg and Tigerstrike Cloak.  I was on the pve server but ran around flagged all the time, murked the shit out of anyone who tried to do anything about it and camped their bodies until they logged out.

I hit 42 a few minutes before they announced blizzard was taking down the server.  I was sad.

[Rince Wind]

I really enjoyed EvE, and would play it again if I had the time and money (don't want to grind for PLEXs). You can get this nice "you are just a cog in the machinery" feeling in bigger fleets and still be important in smaller ones.


Unrelated: I hate DPS rogues. There is no proper reason at all why they should be doing more damage than a warrior that trained most of his life for this. Rogues should have most of their uses outside of combat. (Which, I know, is an area most MMOs don't really put a lot of importance on.)

[Silverthrone]

Being a good li'l trooper for the raid was a special kind of fun.

Yeah, haven't ever really gotten that experience in any other kind of game.

Which, if I could get that fix elsewhere I would. I'd like to enjoy that same raid experience in WoW but like, in a First Person Shooter. But the only way you really get that is by joining a wonky gaming league with strict rules. All the F2P and/or vaguely MMO-like games out now (Warframe for example) are making stabs at raid-style content but I don't think it's quite there.

For me I think the fact is, all of it requires joining a guild and getting into an online social circle and after years of MMOs, guilds, drama and time spent organizing people in the name of fun, I just don't have the interest and time. Maybe one day when I'm retired I can get back into true online gaming, and can be that person in the guild that's vastly older than everyone else. Til then I'll continue to watch what people are calling MMO games.

Yes, that kind of experience does take a lot of social commitment. I started out just waiting around for someone needing extras, but I did have to get guilded to really get anywhere. Worth it, had my fun, but don't want to do that again. Just being a meltdown bystander is pretty unpleasant, being in the thick of it, managing the effects, must be way worse.

I kinda sorta maybe-ish liked Eve Online, but the sort of commitment that game needs just ain't what I want to give. Thing is with time is that you can usually make time for something that's really, really worth it. If it's not worth stretching the time, it isn't.

MMORPGs are dead. WoW killed them.

Even what passes for a PvP MMORPG these days still requires you to spend 100 hours doing fetch quests and collecting 30 wolf assholes as a tax to get to the content.

Thing is, though, I'm not sure WoW was the game that began the long, horrid tradition of bear arses. Of course, it helped popularise it, but to its defence, most of that got toned down in Cataclysm and onwards. Somewhat, at least. Hell, WoW was pretty humane when it came out. I grumbled a lot about "sissifying" when they removed Elite mobs from the overworld, and blimey, it's was a very different game by the time for Panda.

As for the story, well... I liked it, always had a soft spot for Warcraft. I like the colourful, dorky, pretty little universe they've got. It's a bit of good old fun. I was interested enough to get a bit of engagement, certainly in vanilla and Wrath, at least. Good old Scourge. Fighting them was fun, infiltrating the Plaguelands to cross their plans was fun. I think one of the reasons why I quit was because I didn't feel like I knew or, more importantly, cared to know what was going on and who was who. I need a bit of story to feel at home in.

Then Rogue essentially turned into Ninja and I got to be one of the privileged few who had one very simple, self-involved job. Wizards had all sorts of other shit to do besides DPS and usually were the first to die when anything went wrong. Rogues? We were the ones that got to hide and save our asses, and crack-wise over the corpses of less savvy individuals. I always like saluting the rogues that survived a wipe while were were stealthing around. Until Blizzard started making it a point to have raid bosses and mobs see invis/remember their aggro so you had to wipe out along everyone else, so the fight reset cleanly.

And now, yeah. Everyone thinks the Trinity is bad to greater or lesser extents and everyone is DPS. Maybe they self heal, maybe their heals do damage. And the Trinity does kind of suck because it's hard to make a good solo game as well as MP game that relies on it. But it enforces teamwork and coordination and specialization, which I like a hell of a lot more than everyone being interchangably generic. I'm playing The Division right now with my roommate (which is basically an MMO-lite console game at its heart) and even IT has the Trinity.....but in a very generic "pick whatever skills you want and swap them around, I dunno, whatever, go fuck yourself" sort of way.

Yeah, suppose it's streamlining for it's own sake (grr grr) at work. I mean, it works. The trinity works fine. It's difficult to count on an even solo experience, but it's an MMO. Teamwork is kind of the bread and butter.
I've always loved priests in this kind of game. I love the idea of going into battle in your coat, a staff and your towering, unyielding faith as your shield and sword. Keeping everyone standing, slipping out of the jaws of death, giving that final, decisive heal before you finally succumb... Love that good shit. Holy paladins was that, too, but with armour. Hell, yes. Emphasis on "loved", I did not love it towards the end where I was expected to keep up with a cocaine-addled speedrunner tank who'd sulk and threaten to quit if you asked for a ten second mana break. Not that it mattered how you behaved at all, thanks, dungeon finder.
Healer PvP was quite fun. It was also a way to learn hatred for your fellow man. For a while, I think the game went entirely overboard for stuns and crowd control. It was as if you step out of your base and basically do nothing for ten minutes, while the ten million frost mages facerolls to your doom.

Blizzard always insisted vanilla was bad and we only liked it because of nostalgia goggles, but playing Nostalrius (a former private server that offered pure vanilla wow with no added features or alterations, rip in pizza) was the most fun I had with wow probably ever.

Going back to vanilla as an adult instead of a dipshit kid was like a completely different game.  Back then if I leveled up twice in one day I thought I was on fire.  I constantly distracted myself and blew all my gold on new random greens in the AH, switched zones all the time, frequently tried alts for ten levels or so and went back to my warlock.  I was horrible at PvP and became well-known in trade chat for bitching about how every class but mine was OP.

Playing as an adult was a completely different experience.  Undead Rogue.  I never did quests, I almost never bought anything on the AH, rolled Mining/Herbalism so I was rich as fuck and laden with twink gear I used to blitz farm mobs and level up ten times faster than anybody bothering with quests. Bought my mount as soon as I hit 40 and still had enough left over for Wirt's Third Leg and Tigerstrike Cloak.  I was on the pve server but ran around flagged all the time, murked the shit out of anyone who tried to do anything about it and camped their bodies until they logged out.

I hit 42 a few minutes before they announced blizzard was taking down the server.  I was sad.

Ach, bad luck. Still remember that first 40 ding. Off to the mount trader! "Here's all the gold I've misered and deprived together from the start, one plz!" It was juuuuust enough. It was glorious. GLORIOUS.

I'd like to try a nostalgia server sometime, but... Nah, not sure. I've got my memories, I've got my little corner of nostalgia. It gives me all I need from that experience. I'm afraid of spoiling it, it's been a decade, after all. Not to mention, I don't feel like there is much left to do. It'd just be a novelty sightseeing tour for me. Maybe, though. Maybe.

Going back as an adult would be fascinating, but again, don't want to spoil my happy little nostalgia box for it.

There was a really cool little private RP server, too. Really nice, centered entirely on RP, with additional tools, gear and nice GMs clueing in to see what they could help with. Like turning a long-term Necromancer roleplayer's character into a Lich, that kind of stuff. A bit of a gated garden, with all the downsides, but, you know... It was refreshing to be in a place where everyone was there for the RP, and it also meant less of the weird, weird shit you get on RP servers. Luvverly. I'd like to hunt down another server like it one day, but... Not sure. Not sure what else I could do with it.

As for the Green Jesus Thrall thing, I'm glad that it's over. Too late for me, but it's nice to see Legion being a determined rehab attempt.

EDIT: Oh! And they killed off Varian McMisguided Teenage Marketing. Fun. The best thing is that I kind of care. He was the king, after all. It's the first bit of lore from the game that I've cared about for quite some time. At least since they threw Gilneas under the bus because it wasn't Orcy enough. Long live Anduinus Rex, I guess. Maybe the Allies gets to win something, for a change.

[Cthulhu]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

His death was pretty intense.  There was a long kind of animo sequence wehre he's battling them to the death and you think he's gonna die like Haldir, real slow with the music fighting them until he dies, but Gul'dan just uses this crystal that basically disintegrates him into a green cloud while he screams.

Tirion also gets murked, Gul'dan has him hanging over a pool of lava when you get there and he summons this huge demon and Tirion's like "don't worry, the light will -- aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa" as it breathes fire on him and killed him, then drops him in the lava.

Vol'jin dies, but his is slow and dignified.  Tirion and Varian both die screaming.

[xaritscin]

EVE and Mortal are pretty much the only MMORPGS i play nowadays.

WoW isnt enough thrilling for me and finding a private server inst worth it

Lineage 2 is too much lvls to take and not enough sandbox

Dofus requires a subscription but i jump from time to time to look the newbie zone

Wakfu is hard to stick playing it, i love the franchise, but its hard to keep hyped on it.

anyways i recommend all.

i also enjoyed Shores of Hazeron, at least when it was F2T (free to test)

[Flying Dice]

Joking and nostalgia aside, old-school Runescape was actually a lot of fun in the PvP scene. I don't think any game I've played before or since has quite managed to capture the same rush when you're chasing someone down, that thrill when you see them drop and you see that massive right-click menu come up, the sheer terror of almost losing a significant chunk of your capital on one poorly-chosen fight, the sadistic glee when you cheese someone with snare+DDS special spam right after they got a kill. The game died when the PvP was turned into a soft-touch hugbox, and reverting it back didn't help things. That or when they changed trading to make scamming impossible, before that it was real Darwinism in action, you actually had to hunt down good deals and pay attention to avoid getting ripped off.

Also the mental image of characters cramming entire sharks down their throats mid-fight.

The grind and PvE was fucking awful though. The quantity and quality of quests was surprising, given that it was a fucking browser MMO; there was very little in the way of "go gather twenty toad tongues" "quests".

[Cthulhu]

A lot of MMOs seem to be taking that route, gutting the community for some reason.  Community is what makes these games great, though as the playerbase ages (what percentage of wow players do you think are new at this point?  I bet 75% of current subs have been playing since Wrath at least) I can see why the gathering and organizing becomes more onerous.

I'm pleasantly surprised by Legion.  A lot of things I liked about older versions of WoW are back, and there's a lot of new things as well.

Stats were squished and abilities were pruned.  Numbers are still pretty high but seem more reasonable.  Specs are highly distinct now and play very differently from each other.  That's been around for a while but tehy've done a lot to further refine them.  Warlocks are finally back where they used to be.  You can tell the veterans from the nubs by what they think of the "new" affliction spec.  Panda/Draenor affliction was this bizarre thing where you stacked up dots on an enemy and then spammed this weird ability that copied afflictions and sent them to different players, which always felt really weird and clunky.

"New" affliction's a lot different but it should seem pretty familiar to Burning Crusade people.

It's SL/SL baybeeeeeee.  Obnoxious death-of-a-thousand-cuts raid boss in arenas, passive lifedrain and shields, best spec.  Biggest problem is that interrupts seem to be even more common than they were in Panda so you'll be constantly getting trained and since Affliction is pure shadow you're helpless while locked.

You get XP and item drops from PvP now, mostly obsolete pvp gear for transmog.

Speaking of which, transmogs are now a collection like mounts.  Any gear found is added to your transmog collection which is account-wide, as long as the character can use the item you can transmog it and you can sell it once it's in the collection. 

Everyone gets an artifact weapon which is unique to their spec, providing a special ability.  Artifacts can be leveled up with items you get in Legion (replacing weapon drops) and effectively have their own specs, though with enough points you can get all the weapon talents available.

Most content has been normalized to restore the community element.  You can play the zones of Legion in any order and they'll always be the right level, and that applies to everyone, so a 100 and a 108 could group up in the same zone and be equally challenged.  It's a little weird but I'm glad Blizzard is trying to get people playing together again.  That also applies to battlegrounds and dungeons.  You can play any of the dungeons with people of any level and the challenge will be the same, instead completing dungeons unlocks new difficulty levels with better gear; there's like 25 levels or so of mythic and they go from decent to needing raid-tier coordination to win. 

A lot of the changes, many of them very strange, most of them positive even if they are weird.

In other weird but positive change news, Legion has no flying.  Period.  Probably ever.  Flying was stupid anyway and, like many of the changes Legion is reversing, mostly served to obviate most of the game.

[Flying Dice]

That's the thing, though, the community is the only thing that can make an MMO worthwhile; single-player games are flatly superior in all other respects. It's a big part of why I like EVE so much even though I don't play or want to play it. If you make an MMO with little/no interaction it's basically a single player game with more grind, spawns that randomly disappear, less involved plot, and no potential for modding.

Naxza nailed it: RS was great because pretty much everything you did ended up with you shooting the shit with whoever was around. There was a real unintentional genius to it that allowed a very strong player culture to emerge, and it was almost entirely due to the way people tended to naturally congregate at banks, Edgeville (and oh, the irony of calling the PvP hub that), good farming locations, &c. I mean, the fucking farming etiquette that developed at places like blue drags where everyone would hang out in the proper kite spot, taking turns grabbing spawns so that everyone could get their loot, that was remarkable.

Castle Wars was brilliant, I legitimately spent more time playing that PvP minigame in a shitty browser MMO than I did for all but my most-played games. I think I kept membership for something like a year and a half just to play that, never even leaving the area.

Also sorta funny to note that the one place where most MMOs have a lot of player interaction, running boss raids or trains, flat-out didn't exist because of how the loot system worked. Either you solo'd bosses or you ran with a group that you really trusted and sold all the loot to split gold evenly/let group members buy it out from the rest.

It was ruined because they tried to make it more like other MMOs. That's not why it was good, and that's not why people liked it. It was quirky, weird, and heavily community driven, such that even with the monumental grind you didn't really care because you weren't grinding, you were sitting around BSing with the other people grinding the same stuff. Oh man, and for how thoroughly meme'd the yellow overhead text (and all the so-'90s special effects you could use, heh) is, that was innovative in and of itself, because it was a simple but very good way to link the identity of "that person talking in chat" to their actual character. It felt like that person-the character-was talking to you (as your character) rather than you both chatting in IRC while a game ran in the background.

Yeah, there's nostalgia involved. But a modernized version of RS... maybe as of ~the Construction release, minus the little bits of bullshit added before that (like, keep the old trade system, scamming and all; keep the original form of Wildy PvP as the high-risk variant, stuff like that)? I'd be on that like shit on a pig. Hell, keep it browser-based and with the old graphics. I'd pay $5/mo for an MMO where I spend most of my time making friendly conversation and doing weird little quests way more readily than I'd pay $20/mo to fetch rat assholes and get endlessly outscaled by no-lifers who play 12h/day with the dream of one day (approximately five years later) being able to do the good content, even if I have to right-click to loot without grabbing everything and click tiny little pixels to go up or down levels. Oh, and fucking bring back drop-trading. That was so much less bullshit than wasting time grinding money on alts that you were just going to do pure CL PvP with, and it always carried the risk of someone stumbling upon your drop spot and grabbing everything while you were logging in on your alt. And ditch the fucking gravestones, if you screw up and die you keep your 0/1/3/4 and anyone lucky enough to be nearby gets the rest. No way I'd go back to RS as it is now though, I tried and it's unrecognizable.

[Codician]

What would get you guys into MMOs again, then?

[Flying Dice]

Exactly what I just said. An MMO with the following:

1. Low cost of entry. Either $6/mo sub or <$40 one-time with no non-cosmetic microtransactions.

2. Large degree of player freedom in trade, chat, farming &c. rather than centralized automated systems. Enough such that players would naturally congregate in areas which were the most convenient/effective for whatever they were doing.

3. Well-written, interesting quests with actual plot and dialogue instead of dialogue boxes that you immediately close and "quests" that consist of "go here, kill 15 of these" or "go there, collect 20 of those".

4. A mix of PvP types to include both high-risk high-reward unregulated PvP in large chunks of space with the loss of most/all of your equipment to your killer(s) and any nearby loot jackals willing to take the risk to clean up the survivors, as well as no-risk organized PvP including both 1v1 and small-group FFA and team duels as well as a large objective-oriented team game.

5. Combat emphasizing stats, positioning, and equipment choice rather than proper cooldown rotations.

6. A sort of skill system that's like RS's in that you have all the skills all the time and they're the sole and fundamental source of how well you can do a thing, rather than any of the weird crap with slotted skills, perks, point distribution, &c.

7. Most/all PvE content solo-able if you have high enough stats, good enough gear, and sufficient game knowledge/skill.

Those are the basics. Don't ever anyone fucking bring back the unbalanced combat costs from RS though, where melee is nothing->only food, ranged is ammo (cheap)->ammo (so fucking expensive)+food, and magic is literally an arm and a leg->you will spend the next fifteen years as a slave to pay for these castings.

[Frumple]

Heh. It would take someone taking the best mechanical features of the MUD morass and making it graphical

Never did get into anything MMO-y much, unless you count subspace or infantry, but I did manage to hold on with some muds for a while, usually ones with lots of legitimately neat shit being done play wise. Party/pet management that's worth mentioning, crafting systems/growing weapons, meaningful building construction/automation, interesting enemies and areas, etc., etc., etc. Building on single player games of note and adding multiplayer functions and new shit is pretty nice, too (there were a couple of angband muds that were really intriguing, ferex, though I'm pretty sure they went down at some point). Conglomerate that and market it and you might actually get me interested (and, more importantly, sticking around) in something that's presenting itself as an MMORPG.

E: Basically, if the game's largely mediocre (or worse) and relying on the community aspect to keep people around... it's not going to keep me around. If I'm going to integrate with that sort of community I need something to talk about that's more engaging than you normal MMO grind.

E: Ah! I forgot about Dungeon Fighter Online. I did/do have trouble keeping myself playing consistently, but that, is actually engaging, and that's me as someone who isn't too wild about beat-em'-ups. If you're going to do grind at least make it more fun than cooldown whackamole or iffy 3d brawling.

[Starver]

MUDs and MMO's have been a big part of my gaming life, ever since I discovered ArcticMUD back in Jr. High just before Diablo 1 came out.  I think the major stick in the craw of the genre people fail to acknowledge is that the biggest draw to these games wasn't the gameplay, or the graphics, or the accessibility.  It was the social interaction.

This.

Never really gone for MMORPGs, but there's been some MUDs in my life (the graphics are better in my head..!) and the familiar 'faces' and the SpeedMafia talker channel and those little bits of personalisation from the player-administered, player-governed, player-designed, player-developed, player-flavoured and player-maintained free¹-to-play game... Same sort of vibe as private Minecraft servers, I suppose, but not so simplistic in gameplay.

Commercial games don't have the same background, so far as I have experienced. Every DLC is made to keep players grinding, or at least not retiring due to 100% completion.

I've got my own ideas (played with for years, the concept adjusted every now and then when something like No Man's Sky comes along, so to avoid being accused of plagiarism of ideas that actually happened later) and I've never really wanted to make it commercial, but if it were to ever see the light of day outside my home network I'd need it to have a social experience outside of PvP (never really my thing, so biasing my concept probably) or PvE (intrinsic and player-wrought), and that brings the same issues as Toady insofar as having to then also corale cats if they become unruly, be prepared to weild banhammers, etc, and/or find some trustworthy community members willing to take on all but the most executive decisions in my stead...

And that would put me outside the community.  I'd much rather there be an Us that I could be a member of than being a mystical Them.

Thems're the problem with things like that.  And all MMORPGs or similar that I've experienced of that kind are necessarily Them-driven, granting treats to the Usses in an impersonal way.


Which is a draw, to a new-concept game, but "come for the gameplay, stay for the community" is a big thing in my book.  (The only other draw I have is !!science!! on the game mechanics...  That keeps me playing even dead games, so long as they survive...)


¹ Money-wise, essentially, but not time-wise; and change of circumstances dragged me away from that scene, much to my regret...