I honestly feel like the basic foundations that make up MMO's

Agreed

So, basically Guild Wars?

You're a very short sighted individual and all your opinions on game design are fundamentally retarded.

Unless you intend to produce an MMO with all the worst features of modern MMOs, you're not thinking straight.

>>385674145
Absolutely true.

>>385674145
It already exists. It's called guild wars 1. A fat fuck of a balancer ruined the skills in that, and then instead of fixing the mess he created he sodded off and created a new mess of a game we now know as GW2. A game that takes everything good about GW1, throws it out of a window, and replaces it with shit from "traditional" mmos.

TLDR
We had the game you describe, it was killed by the devs.

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>>385674145
It doesn't work like that tho, you don't just "have an idea" and implement it, and bam your fantasy mmo exists.

MMO players are the most entitled little pricks our of any playerbase, they all think they know how to make a perfect mmo, and unless every little complain is met the game is shit to them. Because they played an mmo at some point that was perfect for them, but that game no longer satisfies their autistic compulsions, or they imagine fantasy scenarios that don't really work: I want perma death, I want to be a pirate, I want to build cities and destroy them, I want politics, I want to craft my own brand of clothes, I want to dual wield shields and roll like metroid, I want to have naval combat, I want full loot pvp, I want to marry an npc and have my children become a local guard, and if all of my demands aren't met the game is shit,

The genre is stuck and stagnant because the playerbase won't let it evolve, most projects trying to deviate from the formula have failed, and mmos are stupid expensive to produce.

Also mmos take too much time, so it's rare for someone to play multiple mmos. People nowadays commit shorts bursts and spend more time on their phones. You can barely hold their attention for 1 hour tops, and if you can't have any significant progression in that small timeframe they'll lose interest rather fast.

You can juggle with "design ideas" all day, about what's the perfect formula and all, but if you don't appeal to the psychological quirks and dependencies people develop towards digital entertainment, the game will just be another one in a sea of generic mmos that tried to deviate and didn't deliver anything significant.

If you want to propose something, at least point out a game that already did something right and how the community accepted it.

>>385674145
>I honestly feel like the basic foundations that make up MMO's
An MMO is a bunch of players in a persistent world.

Your radical changes are the same shit in a different coat of paint.

>>385674145
Nigga I ain't gonna read that shit.

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>>385676274
i don't know if this shit was supposed to be funny but
>I want to dual wield shields and roll like metroid
kek
>I want to marry an npc and have my children become a local guard
MAXIMUM OVERKEK

>>385675072
Guild Wars had a lot of good things going for it, but it still was plagued with a lot of cookie cutter MMO designs that hold the genre back. Quests are still poor, and level design is nothing to be proud of.

I feel as though quests should be fewer in number, but better in scale. they should funnel players into a well designed area where grouping or individual focus can be applied, and enemy placement is deliberately placed. I wouldn't even mind if quests felt more like traditional Party Finder dungeon runs instead of your standard "kill X of Y monster" design we currently have, but with more focus on group content that doesn't invole simply killing mobs/bosses.

Hell, something simple like having a fortress full of guarded artifacts, and it is up to you to find and bring back one of dozens of possibilities based on what the quest giver requested. The better the item, the better your reward will be. This takes the traditional fetch quest, and offers player input on the outcome, while item placement is shuffled to prevent a singular "best way" to complete the quest.

>>385676669
Because you are one of the few people left who play video games for a sense of discovery and adventure.

Most players now just want to look shit up on the wiki and then hop over to the next treadmill.

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I think small scale co-op would ironically hearken back to what MMOs are missing now. Like if you had to form a 4 or 5 man team with other players and were forced to stick together for a week or a month or longer due to survival constraints. If you were all "man fuck these clowns" you'd get fucked up wandering off on your own so you had to stick together.

It would organically generate the kind of inter-party relationships people play RPGs to experience. I guess the main limits are 1) how to force players to stick together in a way that doesn't feel really shitty 2) how not to punish people if one player isn't logged on at the same time as the rest.

it's a really weird idea but it was inspired by FFXV and monhun. Imagine traveling with a group of bros and gradually through being forced to work together you became friends, running around and killing spooky shit, delving dungeons and all that. that would be tight.

>>385674145

So... you want a MOBA?
First off, MMOs that focus on a "leveling = setup for endgame (real game)" are garbage. Don't touch these games with a 10 ft pole. Themepark MMOs were a mistake.
Stick to the more "sandboxy" type MMOs. an example being the original EverQuest.

>Monthly fees should be replaced with access fees to new content that is released

You then describe buy-to-play models with expansions (guild wars 2) which has microtransactions. Monthly fees are a fucking blessing when done right. Without monthly fees you would have shit fucking microtransactions garunfuckingteed.
Literally nothing escapes this formula. I can think of two exceptions and those are EVE and Runescape.

Besides, MMOs should strive to push out content regularly (like Runescape) instead of big shitty batches.
MMOs should feel like a constantly evolving world to explore. Not an experience to be upgraded every year. This is where MMOs should get a huge advantage over singleplayer RPGs.

And you go onto describe horizontal progression. The kind of garbage that killed the fucking genre. I should be able to go back to content I skipped over, and shit all over it. Try Guild Wars 2 to play exactly what you're describing. What a lifeless, characterless world.

>>385676274
Except games like Guild Wars already do a lot of what I suggested (as others ITT have already stated), and building classes to progress horizontally is a completely doable thing.

The thing killing MMO's are uninspiring worlds and level design that have no baring on the gameplay, along with unecessary grinds to pad out a subscription fee.

MMO's might be the only genre where smaller but well made DLC content would work, and I would argue is potentially a more satisfying alternative to monthly fees.

>>385677327
That's a neat idea, and it almost incorporates a sort of "role playing" into every day interactions.

Think back to the old tabletop D&D shit, people picked different alignments and you had to figure out how to get along to survive.

I just have no clue how you could implement it.

>>385676669
Literally describing MGSV and acting like that is a good design.
No, fuck off.

MMOs aren't dead because of gameplay design, they are dead because making a free game and adding a shop and esports is far more profitable than making an extensive game that requires full price sales and monthly subscriptions to cover the production costs.

>>385674145
Stay in school, kid.

MMOs, not as a genre or implementation, but as a goal are conceptually flawed because pleasing a massive population in a multiplayer setting is not feasible.

>>385677553
GW2 literally has zero horizontal progression to it, Anon. You should probably look up what the term means. The game is literally one of the best examples of vertical progression you can basically get.

And no, I don't want a moba. I want an MMO where leveling your character isn't a thousand hour grind the results in you not understanding your class any better than you did 20 levels back. There is literally zero reason for level grind at all. Seriously, give me one reason the helps improve the gameplay where a ton of character levels results in a better game.

>>385677875
So open worlds with instances content is now MGSV? Guess every MMO on the market is MGSV then.

>>385677827
You're right, I didn't see that link but that's a good connection.

Probably no real way to capture that outside of a pre-arranged static party, in which case it would be the same as something you could do in WoW or FFXIV anyway.

>>385677327
You described tabletop DnD.

>>385677875
>>385677958

Maybe the trick to making a good modern MMO is to make it less "Massive" from the get go.

Instead of a world the size of azeroth, just make a world the size of Hyrule or Dark Souls. Still plenty to do, with not as much filler.

New kingdoms could be released episodically.

>>385677327
Diablo's Chapter system feels like the best solution to this. Have certain certain areas be open for all players, but if you initiate a quest, it will create a seperate instance of that region for everyone who currently has that quest active. It's a more organic Party Finder system and can allow developers to utilize the map specifically for better/wider quest mechanics for the players.

You essentially force players to work together in this fashion, because you are all essentially funneled together with the same goal in mind by default.

>>385678264
Yeah, as I acknowledged with the other anon, I hadn't realized it. However, those people are already your friends (usually?). The idea is to simulate the in-universe experience of a dickass thief, a drunk barb, a tough-but-fair cleric and a wise, tricky wizard coming together to slay some monsters or something without stopping to order pizza and asking your buddy why the DM had to bring his annoying girlfriend to the thing. Also muh graphics.

>>385678221
The only way I can think of it would be to artificially inhibit the player.

Instead of clicking the LFG button or spamming the chat channels, and getting automatically warped to a random party, make it hard to find a group again.

Maybe you are forced to find players at a "help wanted" bulletin board in town, or you are forced to walk into a tavern to elist people. Have some mini games like poker and dice so you're chilling in the bar shooting the shit waiting for people to show up.

The problem is that people want instant gratification so this would never work.

>>385678326
This. This is why I keeping bringing up using expansions as a means of widening your available content, because it allows devs to use the limited space available to it's maximum effect.

>>385678610
gas all casuals

>>385674145

leveling exists because every dev goes, "I want a grassland/cold/desert/water level" then they have to come up with some sort of bullshit excuse to make people travel through them

>>385678326

That's an awful idea and would get crowded fast. The only reason worlds the size of Azeroth are bad is because they pushed all the relevant content into instances (rides). This kills your overworld.

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I want an MMO where you pour your levels into different skill trees to make your own class, like Payday 2's system but less janky and retarded.
I believe items should break and have to be fixed by crafters and shit. Not like a durability meter, but like your sword blade fucking breaks so you need a new blade installed or a full replacement. Different parts make for different stats.
Materials for all the good shit have to come from group content to encourage cooperation. No fucking queues bitch. Go make friends.
Maybe some other shit. Get back to me.

>>385678892
Except games like Phantasy Star Online pretty much proves you're fucking wrong, and it can work great. And that game came out a thousand years ago on dial-up internet.

>>385678892
>The only reason worlds the size of Azeroth are bad is because they pushed all the relevant content into instances (rides). This kills your overworld.

And if you don't push bosses into instances, you have hundreds of people camping in one place waiting for the world boss to spawn, and some random dick troll guild stealing the kill.

>>385679265
This so much.
Fucking ESO has this so bad.

Honestly it's not fucking complex to fix mmos

1. Only make boss fights instances and everything else open world. Do away with the theme park rides of instances and bring back that magic of going through a dungeon and running into another group.
2. There should only be 2 forms of pvp: Arena and overworld pvp. Arena for the try hards and overworld pvp for memes and fucking around with your bros.
3. Don't make your game a fucking korean shitfest grinder. No one likes enchanting systems even more so if they break your fucking weapon. The best gear in the game shouldn't be 10 times more powerful than the level below it. Seriously fucking stop this already Korea.
4. Make your overworld the main source of content. Give people reasons to do shit in it that should be 75% of the game.
5. Politics are great. Add systems that cause factions but be smart about it. Don't make it so everyone bundling up into the same faction gives them the advantage.
6. Don't make your game only about leveling. Give people other reasons to fuck around in your world.
7. Region IP ban china. FUCK CHINKS.

>>385679619
>implying IP bans work on 4chan of all places
Paywall it. Cost of entry plus sub with none of that coin to sub shit.

I think MMOs will hit a point of evolution whenever we finally figure out how to do god tier procedural generation. Like, miles and miles above stuff like Dwarf Fort. You'd need to be able to generate amazing landscapes, interesting dungeons, memorable NPCs, cities, quests, treasure and artifacts, everything.

The moment you have an engine that can somehow do all of that, you can finally kill the "wiki problem" that plagues games these days. You could make a game where the only way to figure out the world was by exploring.

The real problem with MMOs is that you have to play them with other people who play MMOs.

MMOs don't work in today's world anymore.
People want instant gratification in short bursts, not a long-term investment that will require months, possibly over a year of their time almost nonstop.
It's why MOBAs have effectively replaced them, because they give people just that;
Instant gratification in one quick game that doesn't require any investment other than learning the basics and getting yelled at for not being a Korean Professional.

>>385679265
FFXIV hunts are actually a good way of doing world bosses, but I think if they make it so the boss could actually run away to different zones under certain conditions and heal would improve on it.

First off, world bosses shouldn't BE a massively shared event. If you find one, YOU or your small band want to kill it and get the glory. There is nothing heroic or financially beneficial to having 100 people all divvy up a $100 cash reward from some chucklefuck Mayor trying to stop a wvern from eating townsfolk. World bosses should be treated like a bunch of mercenaries on a first-come first-serve rat race on who can find/kill the target first. The beginning of Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust is a good idea on how I think World Bosses should be treated in this regard.

World bosses should want to survive. If it sees hundreds of players approaching to kill it, the fucker should skirt tail and run, because that is what any actual self sustaining organism would want to do under similar circumstances.

>>385680315
>getting kited around the world by a boss running away
>because that's "realistic"

>>385674145
I played Ultima Online for 4 years and another MMO for 2 years after that (Knight Online). Haven't played one since, haven't wanted to play one though I sometimes get nostalgic feelings for UO/KO. I don't think we'll see anything good until a VR MMO comes out. I think it'll be similar to how UO was at its peak because the new hardware will make it new and interesting. You can only do so much with the same hardware for so long.

>>385680315
Guys theres the dragon, attack attack

>See a bunch of other players running toward a giant dragon.
>The dragon is laughing hysterically

hold up guys retreat retreat

>>385680045
thats not what people that play mmos are there for if you belive that mmos success has anything to do with anything but its fanbase your distracted by the lights of the keno machine the only thing mmos thats why wow is the only game ion town is beacuse it has the people noone plays an empty mmo

>>385680409
>Wants to hunt monsters in an MMO
>Doesn't want to track said monster

News flash: You don't actually want to hunt down monsters. You want to whack at a training dummy that slaps back and have the NPC world hail you a hero for doing so.

>>385678156
>I want an MMO where leveling your character isn't a thousand hour grind the results in you not understanding your class any better than you did 20 levels back.
Any MMO that lets you pay to skip to endgame (or if people just buy an account from somebody) will have people who used that being complete garbage, even compared to a fairly bad player who leveled up the normal way. The leveling curve of a lot of MMO's could probably be trimmed down somewhat with nothing lost, but when you're going for as wide of an audience as possible there's definitely upsides to gradually introducing new concepts to players

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>>385680625
...What?

>>385680471
Why do so many people think VR will help? Have you not played any VR games? They're always worse to accomodate for VR. The only exception is cockpit and small room simulators.

>>385681242
That is a result in quest/level design not teaching players how to play their class.

But here's a concept you probably never thought of: The players who auto skipped their characters to level 60 will learn how to play their character at an end game level far faster from that character's inception than the player who level grinded the entire way there.

Sure, the player who put in the work will have a better understanding upon hitting 60, but yu can't just ignore the time sunk GETTING to that point as though it doesn't count. Meanwhile, someone who auto-levels to 60 will be trash, maybe even for 20 full in game hours, but if it took the grinding player a 100 hours to get to the same level, which player actually learned their role in a more time-effective manner?

>>385680625
Fucking mobileposters.

>>385681736
You're talking about giving someone algebra 1 through pre calc and saying "be ready for calc 1 by next semester". Sure it can happen and it would be faster than progressively adding things but they will have a worse understanding because they're forced to focus on the important stuff rather than building solid foundations and understanding.
The other anon is right, the problem is we have 10 levels where you just have shield and heal instead of 2.

>>385681965
Except bringing up a wiki on class rotations isn't the same thing as learning, deconstructing and understanding mathematical theory, Anon. The time needed to invest in learning ANY class in any MMO at a competent level can be done in a weekend of gradual play. You know what you can't do in one weekend of gradual play? Level a fresh character to max via grinding. The difference here is that the player who auto leveled has more access to content they will enjoy quicker than the player to dredged through the same rotation for 10 hours before unlocking a new passive skill that just increases the effectiveness on something he already has.