Why do MMOs feel so empty now?

>10-12 years ago
>most town centers are bustling with activity, lots of people talking in the chat, people hanging around and having fun
>now
>all town centers are practically ghost towns, even if there are some players none of them say anything, virtually all sense of community is gone

What happened? MMOs now just feel like single player games. And now just WoW but also Runescape, I remember the town centers of Lumbridge and Varrock were bustling with activity. Yes, there are still people there now, but the atmosphere is so different, people just don't seem to be having fun anymore.

Every MMO but WoW and FFXIV are ghost towns unless you play on some donate to win private server

FAGGOTS WITH THEIR VENTS AND FUCKING CHAT SERVERS AND SKYPE

FUCK YOU GAME KILLING FAGGOTS EVERY DEV NEEDS TO PATCH IN SOMETHING SO THESE THINGS CANT WORK WHEN BLAYING THE GAME

FUCK YOU GAME DESTROYING FAGGOTS USE IN GAME THINGS TO BUILD COMMUNITY FUCKING REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

Someone resub WoW with me and lets meet in moonguard Goldshire

Get off vent or I'll have you bent

What are you talking about? Runescape towns are still very active, stop playing on low pop servers.

And with WoW, the game world has quintupled since Vanilla, the playerbase halved, and queues have been added, so that's just a matter of poor game design on blizzard's part.

There are still many MMOs that do "community" very well, just go look for them

ffxiv is pretty active

So glad I stopped playing MMOs. Christ alive

I bet you dont even enjoy the time youre not spending playing mmos.

yea but its slow and fucking boring.

They had to cut out all of that pesky gameplay to allow people to properly enjoy the gear treadmill.

just like your mom in bed last night

Blizzard saw the success of EQ and thought, "What if we took EQ and made it completely soloable and extremely casual?".

Blizzard then released World of Warcraft to great success enticing people who normally couldn't dedicate enough time to MMOs before it.

The issue here is that World of Warcraft broke all the rules of what makes MMOs MMOs.
>No need for player interaction
>Extensive use of built-in fast travel (not player run)
>No penalty upon dying
>Monsters aren't difficult to kill nor pose any danger
And it only got worse from there as the game went on..
>Cross server content
>Dungeon finder
>Portals in every major city to every major city
>Flying mounts

WoW turned modern "MMOs" into Facebook/MSN/Myspace.

Now every other AAA publisher saw what Blizzard did and wanted to make a quick buck as well. So for the next 10 years we got these HUGE budget WoW clones expecting to build up the same subscription numbers as Blizzard. Well it turns out that the target audience wasn't as big as these companies expected and almost every single one of these games crashed and burned.

Meanwhile anyone still playing MMOs before WoW are growing up. They don't have 8 hours a day to put into FFXI/EQ/DaoC/etc. They start playing WoW/WoW-clones as well. Younger people have no idea what MMOs were before WoW and play WoW-clones as their "first" MMOs.

We'll never get another true AAA MMO, but that's okay. There are some niche games coming from veteran developers who worked on the classics. Pantheon, Ashes of Creation, Camelot Unchained, etc. And bigger publishers are starting to get more experimental, but unfortunately still playing it too safe with how casual the games are. We should be happy with that. In the meanwhile, private servers like project99 are extremely populated and great fun.

It could be a while, but there'll be a return of true MMOs.

Catering to normies. This is literally the reason. Back in the day the only people who really had time to play MMOs were teenagers and NEETs. Thus, in order to keep them playing doing anything required a huge time sink and multiple players, making real social connections.

But There's only so much NEETbucks to go around and blizzard realized designing everything to be as time consuming as possible was scaring normies away. So they casualized it, starting slowly and increasing until things just got easier and easier, focusing on solo content because getting a group going to do that raid took too long. This made it so normal players could actually log in a few hours a week and get things done. It just had the side effect of destroying everything special about the games to begin with. Unfortunately there is no turning back, MMOs have seen the money that comes with this sort of design and unless you yourself are still a NEET you probably don't even have time to play one of these games any more.

Just keep fantasizing about the good old days user. You can never go back.

basically sandbox mmos went extinct because modern players don't have the patience for them. we live in a age where everything is fast paced and delivered instantly.

my fucking sides were blown apart you summarise that entire post with a golden meme

fucking IQ of 250 over here guys unbelievable

None of this was true in vanilla. Everything went to shit years later.

It's less miserable and that'll have to do.

Game worlds became too big and centred around specific locations.

>No need for player interaction
>Extensive use of built-in fast travel (not player run)
>No penalty upon dying
>Monsters aren't difficult to kill nor pose any danger
These were all true in Vanilla.

Fuck me, I wanna play Warcraft 3. Why am I so shit at RTS?

I would kill for a new good MMO to come out, years ago when I was in school I wanted to have a paid off house in the woods living a simple life and playing WoW stress free, now that I am at the point where I can afford a place to live and have my financials under control I'm totally burned out on WoW.

What gameplay?
More recent mmos are starting to have decent gameplay, the problem is most of them haven't put as much though into enemy and encounter design. So you end up getting shit like black desert where the gameplay is great but the mobs are the same braindead no challenge shit as every other mmo.

Because they decided to give everybody convenience and instant gratification, which means you don't need to interact with anybody anymore.

Back then.
>Go to a big city to buy and sell shit at the auction house
>Go to any town to sell trash loot and craft items
>Hang out in whatever town that's closest to the dungeon, so you can run there quickly.

Now
>Instantly buy or sell anything anywhere using the auction house menu button.
>Instantly craft anything anywhere because you can summon anvils and cauldrons and shit
>Find a group for a dungeon by clicking the dungeon button and get automatically assigned and teleported into the dungeon from anywhere in the world.

the problem is that people have unrealistic expectations from mmo development teams. they want content faster than it can be created

>No need for player interaction
Except grouping for quests was common
>No penalty upon dying
Objectively false, the degree is different but it is still a pentalty.
The others are various swathes of subjective and travel systems are an incredibly hard to thing to tune properly, I think Vanilla got it right with 1 or two per zone.

maybe because 12 years ago you didnt have as many MMO's as you have today

>It's another Sup Forums discusses mmos thread but are completely fucking oblivious to them and still clinging onto decade old nostalgia and dreams

>Except grouping for quests was common
The only quests you needed to group for were dungeon quests.

No one would ever group of quests because you'd get an extreme hit in exp from mobs which can be easily soloed.

>Objectively false
Losing durability and having to run to your corpse for 30 seconds is not a penalty. That's a privilege.

>It's another WoW-babby pretending he somehow knows better than people who have been playing MMOs for 17+ years.

Come play on Project 1999. We had a wedding and a huge PVP brawl last night. 1000 players average during US Hours, 1500-2000 during peak, always groups to pick from.

Classic EQ.

>playing MMOs for 17+ years
that's not something to be proud of you retard, you wasted your fucking life.

>less miserable

And there goes your shitty argument right out the window!

just like your life went out the window long ago mr.mmo loser

because everyone knows MMOs are an endless grind to get gear to defeat encounters to get gear. the only way out is to break the cycle.

>The only quests you needed to group for were dungeon quests.

There were a few vanilla quests here and there that had elite NPCs that needed a group to kill.

>LGF OTTO AND FALCONCREST

>LFG BORELGORE AND DUSKWING

MMO's that exist right now are like that, they don't have to be though, they don't even need to be about combat or raids.

oh non the wow boogey man

>The only quests you needed to group for were dungeon quests.
>No one would ever group of quests because you'd get an extreme hit in exp from mobs which can be easily soloed.
Outright false
>Losing durability and having to run to your corpse for 30 seconds is not a penalty. That's a privilege.
Semantics, still not in tune with reality.

For WoW I understood the dungeon finder, it was retarded spamming general chat in hopes of finding a group.
Looking for Raid was the absolute worst decisison however. The first raid tier since its introducion the game lost its mystique.
There was no revelation of your first raid clear with your guild, everyone had already seen the raid in lfr. The first experience you got to a raid was this shitfest with strangers you hated.

Raiding was always the end game, you always had something to look forward to which meant there was content you could experience. After LFR no, you saw it all, why bother anymore.

>i didn't play vanilla

MMOs died with City of Heroes.

Thanks, I try

>thread is about mmos "now"
>"but vanilla"

>Why do MMOs feel so empty now?
Elysium and Anathema vanilla wow servers are so packed that I fucked off to a less populated one.

No idea about retail wow, other than if you wonder why everyone left it it's because it systematically ruined everything that made it fun with each subsequent expansion and patch.

You can't backtrack on that.

>MMOs are dead, empty, and extin-

try reading who i'm replying till you figure out why i mentioned vanilla shill

>Semantics
Semantics are facts now? Interesting.

>Outright false
What? Did you play vanilla? Being in a party induced a HUGE exp penalty to mob exp.

you can only do the repetitive grindfest so many times before its dull, reroll different classes builds, play other games and do the same shit, after 10+ years of that shit its gotten to a point that it feels like a job instead of enjoyable.

I started playing tekken 7 on steam to get my mmo pvp fix without having to grind for 14 hours a day for the best gear

I played from release through BC and quit in WotLK.

The game was always casualized from the start. WoW-babbys just like to think that they were part of "real MMOs" because they played vanilla.

>The only quests you needed to group for were dungeon quests.
If you deliberately waited until you were grossly overleveled to do said quests, but that's missing the point.
>No one would ever group of quests
Okay you have no clue what you're on about.

>For WoW I understood the dungeon finder, it was retarded spamming general chat in hopes of finding a group.
I still prefer using chat channels, personally. It encouraged you to build a group of contacts you could rely on to help you... err I mean make friends.
>Looking for Raid was the absolute worst decisison however. The first raid tier since its introducion the game lost its mystique.
Raiding without a consistent guild would be incredibly dull. One of the things that makes vanilla raiding so great is that everyone collectively improves week after week as they all get used to each other.

>you objectively lose durability and objectively lose time
>t-that's not a penalty it's a privilege
You are outright basing your argument on semantics.
>muh exp penalty
Cool, that doesn't means people didn't group for shit, afterall the value in quests was the turn in exp and the rewards themselves. Did you play vanilla?

Vanilla still exists today, pleb. Hell, it thrives.

>Okay you have no clue what you're on about.
see
>If you deliberately waited until you were grossly overleveled to do said quests, but that's missing the point.
You didn't have to. The game was fucking easy.

>it took 30 seconds to run from any graveyard to your corpse in vanilla
sure thing mate you did play vanilla
not even the fucking mc corpse run was 30 seconds and its the shortest one i remember

Losing time and durability is not a punishment opposed to losing gear, experience, your body, 6 hours, etc.

I know it's hard to imagine for you WoW-babbys but death used to be a very scary thing in MMOs.

>Cool, that doesn't means people didn't group for shit
You're right, they grouped for instances.

>afterall the value in quests was the turn in exp and the rewards themselves. Did you play vanilla?
Did you? Quests were a nice bonus to the EXP you got while doing them but you couldn't rely entirely on them or you'd end up grinding all day and it would REALLY hurt you late game 55+ when the number of quests were nearly non existent and you spent all day grinding in WPL.

>it thrives
just barely. nostalrius shut down, elysium has corrupted mods and is donate to win, and every vanilla other server has low population.

You know, you're the only one arguing the difficulty of the game so let that one sink in for a bit and come back with relevant points.

I'd say it's mostly because of "min-maxing" culture in games. Previously achieving a rare weapon in MMO was something only few could do with the help of their guild/friends. Nowadays everything can be done if you only watch a video on YT or check some datamined information from the game.

There is no feel of adventure anymore and no need to experiment when you have everything said to you on the internet.

This + fast pace need of new games caused the fact that MMOs can't exist at this point. This genre is dead.

Ulduar to ICC was the pinnacle of MMO genre in any case.
No LFR, amazing lore heavy design, good number of bosses, I enjoyed the top guilds competing for world firsts. Absolute joy.

because of dungeon finder/ we've all grinded through an mmo already, so theres an elitist mentality to leveling, nobody wants to explore.

>I played from release through BC and quit in WotLK.
Then you either suffer from memory loss or overleveled for each zone in a painstakingly dull way so as to ensure that you would be ready to deal with new quests.

OR you played as a hunter or warlock. They had no trouble soloing elite mobs unlike other classes.

And you're the only one arguing difficulty as well. What's your point? If you played MMOs before WoW you'd know what difficulty actually was.

I have plenty of points, did you even read my post?

Moonguard is unironically the best server. You actually see people wandering around the most remote parts of towns, it actually makes you feel like it's 2007.

>Losing time and durability is not a punishment opposed to losing gear, experience, your body, 6 hours, etc.
>I know it's hard to imagine for you WoW-babbys but death used to be a very scary thing in MMOs.
>I-IT'S NOT A PUNISHMENT COMPARED TO THESE OTHER PUNISHMENTS
Desperate as fuck, google what Objective means.
>the grouped for instances
And quests with elites, maybe also at times when it was particularly busy.
>you couldn't rely on them
Shitter detected, the optimal way to level was going to different zones to clear the quest hubs.

In the case of WoW cross server bullshit and instancing. Cant even do a proper city raid these days because the raid group ends up in different instances of the servers

Fuck this shit

>Then you either suffer from memory loss or overleveled for each zone in a painstakingly dull way so as to ensure that you would be ready to deal with new quests.

Nope, I just played MMOs before WoW so I didn't have to be handheld through the already super casualized leveling experience.

Come back when you've spent 2+ days grinding levels in a group of all real players against mobs that will actually kill you if you fuck up.

Maybe you could have a system where you can only enter 5man dungeons with your guild mates, but otherwise the process of finding a group was tedious and shit. Even if you have few guildies to go with its annoying to start looking for the remainder from chat.

Yes and everyone else has pointed out they're outright retarded.

>just barely. nostalrius shut down, elysium has corrupted mods and is donate to win
2016 called, they'd like their conspiracy theories back.

Every mod who was accused of doing that shit long since left the elysium team. This was several months ago. You've been living under a rock or something.

Every modern MMORPG is optimized such that people no longer have to communicate with eachother nearly as much as they used to in order to get ahead in the game

i'd join but i've never played EQ in my life, and small communities are always dicks who never want to help a nigga out

>the optimal way to level was going to different zones to clear the quest hubs.
When did I ever say anything differently?

Did you even comprehend what I said? You can't skip out on quests in vanilla or you'll be extremely underleveled and have to grind extensively.

Dalaran is constantly busy, RP servers have people in every city, moonguard goldshire is packed to double capacity, and trade chat is constantly overflowing with conversation about topics ranging from gun rights to government mind control plots to game discussion to [Thunderfury, Blessed Blade Of The Windseeker].

People don't talk in dungeons, but that's because dungeons have become so easy a blind retarded female could run them without knowing what's going on and cross realm play has killed any sense of community.

>Everyone else has pointed out they're outright retarded
Where? I mean I know it's hard for WoW-babbys to accept the fact that their game was made for 11 year olds who just logged off call of duty, but it's the truth.

So the value in them was the exp and the rewards, thanks for agreeing.

AAAYOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Everytime i want to commit to an MMO i keep being haunted by the feeling that its gonna be such a waste. You spend tons of time, effort and perhaps even money on an MMO then one day, the publisher could just pull the plug and all those will be washed down the drain.

Or where the player classes are trimmed down to literally just do their role with maybe 1 or 2 moves that support the party, so the devs basically don't have any wiggle room to make weird encounters where classes have to use specific shit like crowd control or mana burning or kiting

thats why i never cared for achievements grinding

>Dalaran is constantly busy
Sitting AFK waiting for dungeon queue to pop isn't what I'd call "busy"

Busy usually refers to people interacting with one another.

>Come back when you've spent 2+ days grinding levels in a group of all real players against mobs that will actually kill you if you fuck up.
Yeah that's vanilla wow. I've been playing it the last few months. Mobs do kill you if you fuck up, unless you're playing on some sort of undertuned piece of shit like kronos.

it's not about the destination, it's about the journey

Elder Scrolls Online is pretty active.

Agreeing with what? What is even your argument? You've gone on this huge branch off of the original points which was that WoW was a casual shitfest for babbys who never played an MMO in their life.

You don't need groups, you don't need to put in any actual time. You just log on, play the game solo without interacting with anyone and log off wishing you were dead. That's what WoW was outside of endgame.

you can still "donate" real cash to guilds to give you anything you want endgame wise and the mods do nothing about RMT

>i'll call them wow-babbys and say the game is easy, that'll make what I got wrong true
Sort yourself out lad.

>Ulduar to ICC was the pinnacle of MMO genre in any case.

Ulduar and ICC were the pinnacle.

TOC was trash and we all know it.

People would be more inclined to interact with each other if they were only allowed a limited number of alts. Everybody has all the professions at this point, so why would you bother talking to anybody. The problem is made worse by the fact that you can start training current content professions from level 1 instead of having to go through all the same work that older players have had to put in. LFG just makes the problem even worse.

That said, I still throw my professions up in trade chat and say LFW.

ESO is actually really good, best loooking mmo, quests with full voice acting, dungeons are tough, pvp is unique, map is huge, your class isn't shackled to one weapon, etc.

why does it have a bad rep again?

But as has been shown time and time again that is objectively false, you can't feign ignorance when all i've done is rebuke whatever you say.

>Yeah that's vanilla wow
AHHHHHHAHAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHHHHHAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAH AHAHH

AHA

AHA

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Okay thanks for confirming that you didn't even play vanilla WoW. Holy shit a not even WoW-babby trying to "prove" WoW took any actual time or group involvement to play.

Holy shit wow. Are people really this delusional?

Jesus fuck neo-Sup Forums is a fucking joke

You're talking about an existential problem that all servers in all MMOs have. All suspicious gold trading in game on their servers results in bans.

Look, if you got butthurt because someone got your favourite name before you or you were mercilessly ganked in the first contested zone you wandered into I get it, that sucks. But grow a pair and stop talking shit you have no understanding of.

>getting buffs from people in town before going off to battle
>tipping people for buffing or crafting things for you
>having to sell things by yelling in public chat channels just like everyone else because no marketboard exists
>having to find/form parties by talking to people in local chat

you will never experience these things ever again

>that'll make what I got wrong true

What did I get wrong? See my original points. They may be hard to comprehend for someone who hasn't touched a non-WoW clone, but they're the real deal.

Because everything is instanced now.


There is no world anymore, only hubs. There isn't a reason to interact with anyone on your server that isn't your Clan/Guild/Free Company because you will probably never need to do anything with them due to everything being instanced.

FF XIV is a perfect example, nothing relevant exists outside of instanced shit.

I fucking miss FF XI

Because that's how they were designed. It's all about convenience, socializing takes too much effort.

Wasnt ToC when blizz started testing the waters with different difficulty levels? It was a precursor to LFR.