Why did MMOs die universally? Why did they all stop being good at the same time?

Why did MMOs die universally? Why did they all stop being good at the same time?

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mud.co.uk/richard/The Decline of MMOs.pdf
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Why do tens of thousands of people still play on legacy server MMOs then

Basically

>be subculture
>pick up speed
>everyone wants a piece of the cake
>market is flooded with MMOs
>to keep your audience devs streamline their games
>essentially killing the soul of their MMO to keep revenue streams
>when the soul goes audience leaves

its essentially a catch 22 situation

Devs forgot what was actually so fun about these games, ie. exploring a game world that felt actually alive and the feeling of wonder and discovery that came from this, and focused on the gear treadmill.

The few games that don't have a gear treadmill are sandbox memes that bank entirely on the ~player-centered emergent gameplay~ shit, which just turns them into glorified PvP deathmatches. See: Eve Online.

>give MMO players QoL
>turns out MMO players are all solo single alone playing autists who would go trough any hoops just to play alone
>cash out on this
hmmmmmmm

They pandered to normies. Normies ruin everything.

I wouldn't say they "died" necessarily, the problem is people are only interested in Themepark MMOs that have all the staples (i.e. Dungeons/Raids, PvP, quests, crafting, etc) and the MMO that does this the best is WoW. So every now and then a MMO that does a slightly different take on the formula will become popular, or has some sort of gimmick that WoW doesn't have to make it popular (like being playable on consoles) so those will get semi-popular but will eventually die out.

So basically MMOs are locked into this cycle where the only ones that are popular at a given time are WoW and 2 or 3 other ones that will fizzle out in a couple years.

So basically if you want to play MMOs but you don't like WoW, ESO or FF14 then you might as well find a new genre.

Internet developing and creating guides for everything contributed to killing the exploration aspect

They got replaced by mobage. Which is a cancer even worse than mmos.

Too jewish for casual players.
Not social enough.

Blizzard ruined

>RTS
>MMORPG
>Card games
>ARPG
>FPS

>ruined

you mean popularized

you're just being a contrarian faggot who dislike anything mainstream

Man I keep writing a shit ton on the death of the MMO era but functionally all the early MMOs and especially World of Warcraft were successful because they were on the cusp of a new era of video gaming. People were just then discovering how powerful the internet was for gaming. It wasn't just new demographics, but old demographics suddenly grew tenfold. The death of Everquest and the subsequent interest from the success of games like Ultima Online were slowly revealing this new genre that could only exist with the internet. Celebrities were going on talkshows about how they had a secret WoW account. But that shine of the internet is gone now. The internet gaming playerbase is heavily diluted and broken apart. People looking for a team-based game are probably playing Overwatch. People looking for something competitive have DotA/LoL or CSGO. People looking for a game to just spend some time with friends have endless amounts of titles like PUBG. This is further complimented by widespread use of TS3 and Discord which serve as a connector between online friends, no longer requiring a need to log onto a game to talk to people.

MMOs served a very specific and interesting purpose at the start of that era. It was a way for people to just spend time in a world with other people but with some menial tasks to do in the mean time. I mean just look at vanilla WoW... what exactly is the gameplay up until end game raiding? It's super basic RPG stuff. It's not new, it's not interesting, it's barely interactive with other players or creatures. But it created a necessity to interact; who doesn't remember the members of their first guild?

People don't need that world anymore and spending hours away in that world isn't as enticing as it used to be. So the only MMOs that can thrive now are those that push story or the raiding aspect hard (FFXIV) or manage to have secured a niche with legitimately unique gameplay and world infrastructure (EVE)

Not sure what you mean?
Final Fantasy 14 is the first good MMO

too many companies tried easy cash grab with shitty games after seeing how well wow did. and then the market just got over saturated with very similar mediocre titles and people lost their interest in new mmos.

datamining and wikis kinda killed the core theme of mmos, which was all about exploration and community cooperation.

also mmos are in a weird market niche, because the average person can only realistically dedicate themselves to one mmo at a time, so competition between mmos is a lot more fierce than other genres. because of this and how expensive they are to maintain, companies don't take risks and instead opt for safe options (copying wow) and so you end up with lots of soulless games that splinter the target audiences. and if mmo players are all split between a bunch of games instead of focusing in on one (like in the early days of eq/runescape/wow) then your mmo won't have enough people playing it. and if there's no community, there's no point in playing an mmo, unless you enjoy the single player aspect, in which case there's no point in it being an mmo in the first place.

mmos live and die by their community, and developers not understanding this is the main reason why they all suck now.

Nope. Ruined. They pick up a genre, casualize it to the point that there is no reason to play it and then all other devs do what blizzard does but worse.

That is why there are so many wow copies, Hearthstone copies, Diablo 3 copies and Overwatch copies.

>le same but with a tweest xD

>all the other devs do what blizzard does but worse
how the fuck is that blizzard's fault? isn't that all the other devs faults?

>ruined TCGs
mtg still exists and have begun going down the drain long before Hearthstone was a thing

Blizzard doesn't do a very good job in the first place. Inferior copies of an inferior original are bad.
Blizzard are showing developers it's ok to half ass it and that your MMO will make money no matter how shitty it is. That's not a good thing.

Pretty much. I think MMOs should get some ideas from Souls Games. If the user interfaces weren't as detailed, then the guides wouldn't be as immersion breaking.
Basically, WoW but without

>Addons
>World maps
>Minimaps
>Detailed quest tracking
>Boss fight information

Sure you need quest tracking because there are so many of them, but don't give them waypoints.

or you know, don't fill the game with rubbish garbage back and forth filler quests

you were right the first time, blizzard make shit popular but often introduce bullshit which in turn lowers people´s opinion on them
for instance in WOW you have the match making for all the dungeons and if not not mistaken some raids

oh yeah and the diablo auctionhouse which introduced real money as a part of the game

I agree with this. Even if there are websites to look stuff up on, I could still play it blind like I do with Dark Souls and have an actual game

that still doesn't describe how that is Blizzard's fault and not other developer's faults for copying a supposedly shitty game

Pantheon is exactly what you described

This is a major problem. The player base has come to expect MMO to mean themepark MMO (or sandbox MMO). They want MMOs to have various features that work in certain ways and actually get upset when a game doesn't follow this formula.
Developers are naturally catering their games to their largest player base. Just so happens this player base wants a pretty shitty experience.

There are obviously many other reasons for MMOs being shit, but simple fact of the matter is most MMO players want the next gen WoW clone so that's what developers are trying to give them.

devs blame the changing tides in vidya and the average player not having the attention span or the time to dedicate to a real mmo, but i don't believe it for a second.

this

because it got popular thats why
eat shit millions of flies cant be wrong, thats how it works

Intrrnet and guides removed all mystery and exploration from the worlds and turned everything into a giant to do list.

>make a shitty TV for whatever reason
>other people start copying my shitty TV design
>people buy those knock-off designs
how the fuck is that my fault, how about you just start blaming other developers for copying a bad design?

>thottbot wasn't popular during vanilla WoW
very few people give a shit about exploration and the lack of exploration certainly isn't what killed the mmo genre

i blame who started the trend and the shitters who follows them altogether
is that the answer you want?

I don't like to tell you this. But you are a fucking retard. And I am not going to waste my time trying to explain how marketing works.

Just know that you are stupid and an inferior human.

No, you're still being retarded. You can't ruin a genre by making bad shit.

I can't ruin rock by making shitty rock music. Do people still make good ice cream even though there are inevitably some people out there who make shitty ice cream? Are the people who make shitty ice cream RUINING the very concept of ice cream? No, that's fucking retarded.

are there any mmos that involve aim and dodging rather than just spamming a rotation? that's my biggest gripe with most of them, you don't even feel like youre playing really

Basically MMOs stopped playing like social, interactive games where you can find friends and form communities, to just single player grindfests.

Nobody wants to help anybody anymore. If you enter a raid without knowing EXACTLY what to do, you either get kicked, everyone else leaves, or you get berated endlessly. Which creates a toxic environment where new people don't want to play, and just makes the old people more bitter since nobody is playing their game anymore.

Also, devs relying too much on cash shops and pay to win models for most games these days.

This is partly the developers fault. Data mining can be prevented and there is certain stuff (a lot of stuff actually) that does not need to be included in the client. Developers include all this shit in the games client because it's easier to have the client handle it than the servers.

An example is Tree of Savior. Lots of stuff remained a complete mystery for over a year after release, despite it being easy to datamine the game. Until very recently when developers talked about it, people didn't even know how item drops worked (and we still do not have complete drop tables for every monster).
The client doesn't need this information since the server handles it, so it wasn't included in the client.
Likewise, the game has loads of quests, raids and other content players know very little about because you just cannot datamine something that's handled by the server.

This, coupled with addons that basically play the game for you and the developers straying away from group content and more into singleplayer territory you end up losing what makes an MMO great in the first place - the community.

I'm just glad I got to experience the golden age when Anarchy Online, Guild Wars and vanilla WoW were at their peak.

>Space Planet

>I don't have an argument so i'm not going to explain anything
wow I totally didn't expect that at all! and I really hope you don't reply to this either

apparently millions of people still enjoy hotbar based MMOs as shown by the hundreds of WoW private servers out there and how many people flocking to FFXIV as their subreddit keeps gaining users

>indie
>amateur
>unity
>kickstarter-like
I meant a proper game, user

>the developers fault
Nobody could've predicted how big data mining would become.

Thottbot was pretty obscure during most of vanilla. Most people played like shit, didn't mixmax, and more importantly had fun.

I can't play Magic: the Gathering or Netrunner anymore, Blizzard ruined them for me by making Hearthstone

I played ffxi from ps2 launch until they started pandering to casuals. online guides were always a thing as far as i can remember. the main draw of the game for me was the community. leveling took so long it almost forced you to make friends. eventually it got to the point where i looked forward to exp grinding because it was mostly just bullshitting with people.

only things like mission fights and a few battlefield fights were instanced which helped a lot. there were also rarely ever any areas that got used once and never again. The whole game felt like a world rather than the trash nowadays where you stand in town waiting for X then you take a teleporter straight out there and then just warp back to town when you're done.

Yep. MMO's suddenly became a job, the community aspect crumbled. You no longer had to socialize to do anything because it was either piss easy to do alone, or you would just click a button, join some randoms, finish the crap, no one would talk, and they would all go their seperate ways to finish their to do list.

Sure info existed for vanilla wow, guild, dark age, and EQ. But it wasn't like what it is now. There was less hand holding in general so you WANTED to play, WANTED to succeed, and WANTED to meet new people. The players have changed as well. Today's "gamers" are not the same as yesterdays. Different audience. All of this combined was the doom of the glory days of MMO games.

This. MMO forums used to be full of "can you solo this game?" and "what is the best solo class?" threads. Devs saw a gold mine and decided to invest on it. Not only that, but the MMO audience changed a lot since the golden era of [your favorite MMO]. The internet as a whole changed a lot. Half of the old MMO's magic as the community, and that is something that will never come back.
Plus you have . Korea flooded the market with their games, nowadays you pick a game based on the artstyle alone. Some games are designed to last a year or two at best (very similar to mobage games), then they will leave it on "life support" mode and work on the next cash cow.
It's not like they "died", but it is a completely different genre now.

not anyone from this convo but I think he just means that without blizzard making these games, the genres might still be doing what they were doing earlier.

It's not blizzard's "fault" but if they didnt make the games then the genres wouldn't be "ruined"

Its just that the internet progressed
no need to interact and meet strangers ingame shit nigga you already have all those social media shit.
and there's no more sense of mystery and discovery because everyone just google whatever the fuck they need in those datamine sites
you could basically start out in the game as a noob but with the power of internet you could just solo the grind because you know everything. builds, loots, maps, quests.
whereas in the older days you start a character, you ask other players for tips, builds, directions and try to get friends and beg for money or gear. If you both didn't knew shit you would party up and try to explore it.
also no more haggling and scamming stuff because auction houses

I'm probably just a nostalgiafag tho

mud.co.uk/richard/The Decline of MMOs.pdf

Here is a piece written by a professor on the subject.

A mixture of being dirt poor and nostalgia

There's a reason that most private servers are fooded with BRs and chinese.

>Auction houses kill game economies

LOL

okay so we are gong to do it this way, okay listen up you god damm shithead im going to break this down in a easy to digest fashion so even you cant miss the point

companyX makes a bad game called gameX with a huge marking and and development budget behind it
gameX becomes popular and is a financial success, it have millions of fans but they want more
companyY makes clone of gameX but calls it gameY, they also have success but to a lesser degree than companyX
companyZ makes gameZ which reminds of gameX and gameY mixed together but ultimately fail to become a success, game genre is considered dead by big companies and many years pass between new games of that genre

if you fail to understand the above then you should contact a brainshrink since you are obviously the most autistic fuck around here, get well soon
you got it somewhat right, they may not even have started it but they helped continue the downfall of RTS as we know them among other things
look i love the old blizzard but frankly speaking anything they have done after burning crusade have been shit, incidentally they have gotten more staff with unnatural colored hair and such
im not opening that can of worms but you get the idea

their appeal isnt there anymore.

all the new 12 year old kids that would normally start an mmo and spend years playing them arent picking them up when they could just play other games instead.

older players dont want to spend another 4-5 years in a new mmo either.

im not sure why but thats part of the reason.

They used to make games for players.
Now they make games for shareholders.

>There was less hand holding in general
hand holding increases accessibility in the short term, but undermines everything in the long term, because players don't feel responsible for their actions.

everything else was spot on though. not even sure how you have a proper MMO without a player driven economy. maybe he was arguing that anonymous auction houses kill it?

You disrespect Pantheon. Pantheon is based on real games that shit all over Soulstrash.

Money.

>older players dont want to spend another 4-5 years in a new mmo either
Why not? I'd love to find a game I feel like spending years on again.

>RTS
ASSFAGGOTS community and devs running out of ideas did it, Blizzard was actually too slow to do anything (good or bad) about it.
>FPS
>Card games
Market was already flooded with these kind of games before Blizzard touched it.
>ARPG
Diablo 2 was the only game that had any impact in the genre as a whole, and it was very minor outside of the few Diablo clones out there. But Diablo helped Sonic Team to create my all-time favorite game, Phantasy Star Online.

Blizzard is a piece of shit, but they just deliver western/cartoony versions of other people's ideas (especially chinks). The only genre they actually had any impact was MMORPG.

>Blizzard falls ass backwards into a good MMO with a great community
>becomes so much of a monopoly that they are basically the entire MMO industry
>slowly destroy the game with incompetence and going full dreamworks by appealing to the lowest common denominator and trying to crank out expansions as fast as they can
>kill the industry
on the bright side xiv is nearing their popularity in NA and Europe, they are already halfway there

But it does. Look at games that didn't have them built in. The economy takes a fucking nose dive as soon as auction houses are implemented. Not just the economy but the game world suffers.
>Hey I have a quest taht needs a faggotroot, gotta go find one!
>Go to auction house, buy 1 of 37,000 faggotroots for sale
>finish quest only having to walk across the street from quest giver and back again
>Ahh the feeling of success! Job well done me!
Meanwhile out in the faggotforest I can't find a god damn root because farmers are completely wiping it out.

Vanilla wow was the ultimate sandbox, which was then ruined with attempts at making it linear.
Every other mmo has tried to copy post-vanilla wow.
For some reason mmos are still super popular. The premise is good, the execution is trash.

all mmos are basically the same shit, if you put a bunch of time in one you basically played them all so you see no reason to start a new mmo when you could just play the old one where you're super ahead already.

we should be seeing mmos that arent rpgs soon enough and they might succeed.

Entirely depends what he's talking about.

Automatic group finder that teleports you to a dungeon with 4 other random players then teleports you back? Thats cancer.

Group finder that requires you to list what you're running and have players apply and slowly form a group, then make your way there? Thats an convenience aka QoL feature that is actually good.

Yeah, nah.
EvE has an auction house - vibrant player driven economy. If you can buy quest items, thats its own individual problem. Just make them Soulbound. Wow. big issue.

Yeah great games like Vanguard, and Star Wars galaxies, and Jimmy Neutron. lmao

Before
>Online RPGs with immersive Fantasy words marketed to autists. Everything takes ages to do but it's ok because the point of the game is just doing shit inside the game world.
Now
>Single player pseudo-RPGs with optional co-op marketed to ADHD kiddies. Grinding is virtually non-existent but everything except end-game content is a chore to get through because it serves no purpose

>Vanilla wow was the ultimate sandbox
What

they were never good, people are just now realizing it

>indie
That's the only way to make anything but a WoW clone, faggot. Investors and publishers demand you go by the proven skinner box formula.
>amateur
What does this even mean here? This is a porno tag. If you mean the developers are amatuers you're wrong, they've got a lot of veteran staff from old MMOs and CRPGs.
>unity
Engine development costs a shitload of money they don't have.
>kickstarter-liked
Again, the money can't come from typical sources.
>I meant a proper game, user
You are what killed MMOs. Your faggotry and sense of entitlement. Screaming "MOMMY I WANT IT" won't get a game made, you need to ante up.

>Vanilla wow was the ultimate sandbox

No.

isn't xiv just another wow clone though? when it comes down to it

hello blizzard shill

They died the moment web1.0 died. Normalfags ruined internet for all of us.

Its quite a bit worse.

vanilla was more sandboxy than current wow. Now it's all linear as shit. Just follow the quest marker and get your free legendary weapon

WoW clone that copied half of FFXI's models kek

>Just make them Soulbound. Wow. big issue.

You would think, but it isn't something that most games consider or implement. Just because EvE works doesn't mean that everything else is fine. There are exceptions of course, but on a whole auction houses have never been handled well when they are added into games and end up fucking thit up.

The problem is less casuals play MMO now. They were the ones that kept the game alive by being social and chatting. They quit because now they can get their social fix in other ways.

>shilling vanilla

Please, user. Vanilla was shit. WotLK was where it's at.

opposite, WoW took the hero story from xiv, the artifact weapons, and even the squadrons and cracked it up to 11 and fucked themselves over in WoD and Legion

>VG
>SWG
>not good
Oh, ok, you're just subhuman then.
>leaving out EQ because you know you'd get torn a new asshole over it
Soulsbabbies are a disgrace. Shouldn't you have asked reddit what the Dark Souls of internet communities is before you started posting, or is that what led you here?

>vanilla was more sandboxy than current wow
Yeah, perhaps slightly
>Vanilla wow was the ultimate sandbox
No, pretty god damn far from a sandbox

WoW had an auction house and its economy was fine.

Its absolutely fine as long as you aren't absolutely retarded with it.

Unity is a shit engine for online gaming. Of course that making MMOs is expensive, you're having thousands of players connected to the same server at the same time, that doesn't make using a subpar engine acceptable.

When the past 10 years have been people copying the WoW formula which is dying on its own, it's not surprising that it takes it clones down with it

this is why you need to have crafting be a worthwhile thing for both gear and consumables. which ties into many other things such as gear swapping during combat and vertical vs horizontal gear progression....

Lazy gamedevs don't know how to write code anymore. Just drag and drop some shit together in a GUI catered to students and other newbies, shove it as early access on Steam and ta-da, you got most of the new indie games that came out the past 5 years.

Degeneracy, all of them. Especially pubg

Because WoW infected the mind of every player in its reach and those hordes of retards would ignore any other MMO if it wasn't like WoW, so companies got greedy started to copy WoW, following MMOs became more or less like WoW and died off with a few exceptions.

I fucking despise people with that "WoW mentality" who go into other games and run their mouths why X is not like WoW and bitch why a different game feels or plays differently from it. We will never get fresh and original MMOs again because it's a costly undertaking and the devs and suits in accounting want to make a profit not selflessly entertain players.

auction house ruined diablo 3. It made it too easy and quick to get the best gear for your level. Localized market vendors is the best way to do it (like eve/swg/shroud of the avatar).

There is nothing worth interacting in terms of people and/or community.

For example, FFXIV has one of the worse mmos communities I have ever ran into. They can't take advice, they think every critizism is an attack them, you question why when they're at a high level why they can't keep a basic rotation; aoe; or do foes and you get called toxic for calling out bad players. Me the bad guy who expects at least a decent person who knows how to do basic shit.

I mean, tonight I had over 5 fucking brds and not one of them did foes until either I called them out on it or they outright refuse to do it and worse of all they lie saying shit like they're new but they know how to do their sing rotation and do battle voice.

Fuck people and the mmo community.

They don't. You don't want this, trust me. You think you do but you don't.

Arx Fatalis MMO when?

It's clearly a generic mock up for a MMO concept.
The funny part is MMOs are universally so generic you have to look closely to even notice this.

>le no argument generic Sup Forums reply
>wow

No, he's right. You're a retard buddy

You don't seem very trustworthy Mr. Brack

>It's not blizzard's "fault"
>you got it somewaht right
ok that's all I needed