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[noodle0117]

So I've been looking at quite a few MMO's lately and I've been thinking quite a bit about what formula or element makes the successful ones successful.

World of Warcraft - Not first of its kind, but was the first big and properly done MMO. Nice set of class options, many skills, famous company ect.

Maplestory - I believe it was was the first mmo to properly do the F2P style. Simple graphics also made it quick and easy to update and expand.

Eve Online - Never saw it played before, but from what I hear, it's the depth and complexity which draws players to the game.

Perfect World - Maybe not as well played, but its nice graphics did catch the interest of quite a few players.

RIFT - Don't know much information about this one, but judging from the reviews, it seems to be the fact that it's really well polished overall that just makes it a good game.

So I'm trying to figure out what are all the elements that constitute a good game?
Graphics?
Gameplay?
Quests?
Battle/combat/interaction mechanics?
Player interaction? (guilds and the like)
The amount of grind involved? (less = better?)
Or some magical combination of them all?

Maybe what I'm really trying to figure out is what is it that makes a game "fun" to play?

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

(One mmo I tried was War of Angels which had nice graphics, a decent guild system, fairly large lands to look around, and the ability to explore the world via flying, but which I eventually found to be as boring as hell)

Discuss.

[Android]

non-repetitive gameplay / player driven story

[Astral]

These days, it's more about building hype by using existing IP and incorporating some form of addiction mechanics in order to keep people playing. For some, it's community (because if you play with friends, or make friends through the game, you lose more than just a game.) For others, it's a good PvP balance, with rewards that only come from grinding hours of points. Whether its amassing gold, items, continually trying to become stronger, or feeling like you have some form of control over an aspect of your life (which you then devote to the autonomous collection of items). All this comes to form an MMO which is easy enough for beginners to pick up, and hard enough for the "hardcore" gamers or more advanced users to have a challenge. Its mostly a balancing act between the two, that makes a "good" MMO.

http://www.cracked.com/article_18461_5-creepy-ways-video-games-are-trying-to-get-you-addicted.html

I honestly read this and had some serious doubts about my ongoing World of Warcraft addiction. Managed to finally break it a couple months down the line, while keeping in contact with the friends I had made. Old habits die hard, though, and I'm still gearing up for The Old Republic with those friends, whenever it comes out...

[Leatra]

1. Crafting. Most of the items should be crafted and not sold by NPCs.
2. Less NPCs and repetitive quests in the game is better.
3. More interesting quests than "plz kill 10 goblins kthxbye"
4. Levelling up and making money should be very difficult
5. Economy built by and controlled by players. An auction house that you can sell anything. Shops created by players. Resources gathered by players.

Puzzle Pirates is a good example of the economy thing. In that game to create a simple black colored boots players had to
1. A pirate captain pillages a ship and finds 1 unit of Kraken's blood. She/He sells the Kraken's blood to the highest paying weaver.
2. The weaver and his/her employees (they are not NPCs. Workforce comes from the players.) spend 15 hours (not real-life hours) to create 1 unit of black cloth using 10 units of hemp (which he/she bought from other players or got it from an island) and 1 unit of Kraken's Blood.
3. After creating the black cloth, weaver sells it to a tailor. Tailor uses the black cloth and spends 7 hours with her/his employees. After that, a player buys it.

It's actually a little more complicated. This is roughly what happens when you buy a simple pair of boots. In this game, color of black in clothings is a sign of wealth. Not even one item is sold by NPCs.

Also, I hate games that are broken with an exploit that can make you a lot XP/money in a short time. I said exploit because it is not a bug and a feature of the game. These exploits also fills the forums with people who brag about how did they become like level 50 in one day. This happens at Knight Online a lot. Example: A creature/boss that can yield big amount XP or money.

[Servant Corps]

Sample the MMO and then run away before it grasp you. It's not worth it to be addicted.

[EuchreJack]

The only MMOs worth playing are the ones where random players ship beer to your house from their native lands (and no COD crap).   

[Flying Carcass]

Successful MMOs are ones that are "good", have sufficient marketing to attract many players at the release of the game, and have sufficient content to keep players playing for at least a few months ("empty" servers tend to drive folks away from an online game).

Factors that contribute to making an MMO good, in my opinion, include:

Character customization --- Let me choose my characters' body types, hair styles, faces, and race from a wide range of options. Ditto for whatever clothes/armor the character is wearing.

Diverse power/skill selection --- Let me choose from a wide range of abilities so I can tailor my character's skills to fit my play style.

Fun exploration --- What's the point of creating a big game world if there's nothing cool to discover? And did I have an adventure while finding something? Great!)

Community --- While not something developers directly control, the community and how it interacts has a large impact on one's enjoyment of the game.

PvP --- Do PvP objectives facilitate getting into the opponent's face and stabbing it? Are the various classes balanced? Do characters have counters to crowd control powers?

Dungeons/Raids --- Are they fun to explore? Are there challenging enemies and epic bosses? Maybe a puzzle or two?

Story --- In regards to quest lines and story arcs, will the story entice me to experience the narrative through successive quests/missions?

Automatic PvP former --- Can I get into a PvP match instantly from anywhere in the game? Great!



Things that can be a detriment to an MMO's quality, in my opinion.

Bad community --- Who wants to play with whiny, egotistical, narcissistic brats?

Unbalanced PvP --- Has my character spent the last five minutes frozen in a block of ice?

"Theme park" questing --- Does my character's journey seem less like a series of perilous adventures and more like a sight seeing tour? Do I feel the need to rush through a quest area so I'm not competing for kills with the numerous folks a quest or two behind me, while the folks in front of me are doing the same.

"Theme park" dungeons and pvp automated group formers --- By "theme park" I'm referring to the lines. Did I just spend a half hour waiting for a group to form up for a dungeon/PvP match just because the line for my role/faction is much larger than the line for other roles?

Grinding.

Boring crafting.

Long travel times.

Lack of content --- Did reaching max level mark the end of my character's adventure? Is leveling alts a chore due to a limited number of questing areas.

[Haschel]

Story is optional. Do it right or don't do it at all. Graphics are optional. Actually, it's better to go with lower-end graphics as much as possible with an MMO, the only depth it adds is that "shiny new game" factor, and can very easily detract from core gameplay. My biggest gripe with MMOs these days is the way they try to copy garbage mechanics from WOW instead of coming up with their own ideas, stuff like simply player controls that are unbelievably clunky and mechanical. The whole targeting monsters and waiting to attack thing makes combat feel slow paced and watered down to me.

Other than that it's obvious stuff really, less grind is better*, interesting crafting mechanics is always a plus, and while player interaction is important that generally happens regardless of what the developers decide to do.

*Developers seem to have a fear of players hitting the level cap these days. The level cap shouldn't decide when a player has burned through the game's current content, there should be content that perpetuates more player investment regardless of where they stand on the level or story content. The most basic answer is robust, player rewarding PVP, but I'm sure someone could come up with other mechanics of worth.

[Mechanoid]

So I've been looking at quite a few MMO's lately and I've been thinking quite a bit about what formula or element makes the successful ones successful.

Easy.
It's supposed to be abusively addictive, so it can take your money like an arcade machine of old.
Except instead of dying and taking your quarter, and forcing you to start over, you have to keep feeding it quarters every 10 minutes otherwise the game shuts off. But you can't die, ever, so as long as you keep paying you can keep "playing" ... Unfortunetly, gameplay consists of working inside a system that is an infinitely incrementing (n=n+1) system, where each iteration increases the list of items by one, and the power of that item and the enemies by one. Sword of power +1, Sword of power +2, Sword of power +3...

...
As for what a good mmo is? Play the game single player. Is this game something you would want to play single player?
If not, what parts of that game make you want to not play it? Would adding more players solve these problems?

Example:
There's a BYOND game called "Nestalgia" that is styled in the old NES RPG games, but using the BYOND engine which allows multiple players to connect to the game server and play together. Unfortunetly, being modeled on old NES RPGs, most of which were based around leveling-up your characters to rediculous heights in order to be strong enough to defeat the bosses you encounter... You're stuck grinding monsters repeatedly in order to defeat a boss that would otherwise obliterate you. Oh, but you can play this "game" with other players! Yeah... No. Not fun, and i did all that crap once already.

[noodle0117]

In China (and possibly starting to happen in the U.S too), programmers and companies are starting to make way too many cheap, low quality, and unoriginal mmorpgs. They make me want to pull out my hair whenever I try to get any further than 5 minutes into the horrifically designed tutorials.

Judging from the posts above, it seems almost as if going the path of the mmo just isn't worth it anymore.
Indie games and smaller scale entertainment (ipod games) seem to be taking hold quite nicely though.

I wonder what the future of entertainment will be.

[nenjin]

To me it's got to be a game where I can't see the end of it before I've gotten there.

WoW is pretty much the poster child for this. The gear, talent and questing system are designed to be so user-friendly, and so clean from a mechanics standpoint, there's no mystery to me. "Easy to learn, hard to master" is a phrase I'm kind of sick of hearing, because it delivers on the first part, but the second ultimately ends up being trivial. Who cares what mastery really means when 99% of it seems to be less about your understanding and more about your twitch abilities.

Compared to Everquest, which lacked a really clean, repeatable, reusable system, there were ALWAYS surprises. Unique kinds of gear. Really unique kinds of environments (that contained real hazards with real consequences.) Experimentation was a key part of that game.

On the one hand, WoW is almost flawless from a design perspective. It's so neat and tidy and modular and packaged, ready to be shipped, consumed and defecated. It's managed to be fun without consuming your freaking life like older MMOs.

On the other hand, it's hard to feel an attachment to newer games, because they don't really challenge you intellectually or really challenge your gaming abilities. Because companies aren't interested in making niche games these days, they want the holy grail. I don't feel involved in newer games like I used to feel with old ones. I feel like one more schloob treading a plotted path, more like watching a movie.

I'll stick with the next MMO that remembers what made the originals so appealing....where game play was constantly different and not trapped by the overall game design, where gameplay is allowed to emerge from the mechanics instead of being strictly dictated by them. I want to feel like I'm playing in a world again, not in some carefully monitored and regulated instance where novel things are rare and avoided because of the problems they bring with them.

[ukulele]

I like games where i can be better to some one, not only by lvl, but in knowledge or skill, where every character its really diferent and trying new "builds" might pay off. I played a lot of ragnarok, it was lots of grind with almost no quests but no 2 characters where the same, and you could demonstrate knowledge putting up a great character, or skill by killing someone 10 lvl higher than you.
I tried WoW, and its preatty much all i dont like in a game, i like to fail in my first 2 or 3 characters, i like to create new one and learn new things from each of them.

[Askot Bokbondeler]

take out the first M and an MMO will be an infinitely better game in my opinion. i think mmos are a terrible principle, a multiplayer game, especially if you want it to be an rpg, requires for all players to be somewhat like-minded, and the more players you add, the less they'll be like me. the masses of average thirteens may enjoy the game and each others company very much, but effectively render my gaming experience absolutely unenjoyable in any mmo in existence

there are some salvageable concepts in most mmo's, like huge uninstanced continents to explore, and i'm also fond of the tamagochi style gameplay common in browser based games in which the game never stops, though it might be inconvenient for people with too many responsibilities.

[nenjin]

I really miss the days of wandering an uninstanced MMO world....and meeting another player and actually talking to them. I remember, as a primarily rogue-type player, finding myself in all the wrong places and running into higher level folks who were super nice. I remember when you actually used to kind of bond with strangers in the wilderness, because damn, it was huge, scary and confusing.

Now adays when you see another player, they piss you off. They're there to bug you, steal whatever you're after or they're just intruding on your personal fantasy. At least that's how I remember my last months of WoW. The only real social interaction joy I found was in raiding, with comes with its own package of BS and stress.

[Dakk]

I haven't played an MMO in ages, because it takes alot of time, and time is a resource I don't have much of these days and I'm probably not gonna get much more of it as I get closer to the last 2 years of college. But if there's one thing I can say that really bothered me while playing mmos were the pointless grinding and the fact that there's tons of other people running around doing the same thing as me.
If I were to start playing an mmo today, i'd choose the lowest pop number server. It just sort of breaks the experience when there's 20 other people running around doing things on an area that supposed to be a peaceful forest or an abandoned old castle. I support instanced dungeons because of that. Also, I really hate the current player shop mechanic most MMOs use. Walking into some town's plaza and seeing all those stupid signs or offline characters selling random things is really bad for immersion.
Maybe my problem is that I like doing things by myself when I'm on an mmorpg, I rarely play with other people unless massie events like raids are hapening.