I wasn't saying that your style of MMO can't be done or that it shouldn't be done, I was just giving reasons why MMO developers aren't doing it. I'd like to see someone try because there's clearly a small, but dedicated audience for that sort of game.

Short answer: Not any more.

Long answer:

I was a hardcore progression raider during The Burning Crusade. Four hours of raiding, three nights a week. The other four nights were used to farm things needed to progress. I played Priest DPS and Paladin Tank at a time when both classes were only ever invited to groups as healers. My main motivation was outperforming other people with a suboptimal class. Being able to say "Hey, look at me! I just tanked Kael'thas Sunstrider - as a Paladin!" was really the only reason I raided. As soon as we killed Illidan Stormrage (who everyone assumed was the final boss), my motivation completely disappeared. I quit the guild soon afterwards and transferred back to join my friends on an RP realm.

I hated the endless preparation and organisation. I didn't care about the loot exactly, but I still hated that after working my arse for three full raid tiers of content across eight different instances, I still didn't have a full set of matching class gear. And I really hated that no matter how well I prepared or performed, one of the other 24 people could fuck everything up and completely waste my time.

These days I still put in just as much time into the games I play, but only if I actually find them fun. I still enjoy running small group content with my friends, but I'm not interested in joining pickup groups or hunting for a guild. And I have absolutely no desire to ever again try and get 9, 14, 19, 24 or 39 other people to show up online at the same time. I do still get a kick out of doing well with a suboptimal class, spec, weapon or character, but that need to prove myself is mostly gone now.

 

Syao - which server do you play on? Right now me, Glernaj and Howdy are playing on Zul'Jin, currently trying to beat Heroic Siegecrafter.

Lok'tar Ogar!

 

Played mage class since 2005 stop after cataclysm. About two month ago I saw that blizzard banned and terminated my acount. So, 9 character deleted, one with a game time of 422 days logged. Maybe more my memory is fuzzy. And yeah, it fucking hurt man.

Was on Arthas, horde. I miss the game, but ill never get into it ever again.

 

12 hours of raiding over 3 nights a week aint hardcore by anyones standards these days >.> My guild is 5 hours a night, 5 days a week during progression, with sometimes pushing past the end if we're close to a kill.

Also, there is a lot less prepwork you need to do. Hell, my guild pays for all the consumables I ever need. All I needed to do outside of raid was valor cap so I could upgrade gear.

Hopefully we'll bump past US 5th in WoD.

 

My original account got banned 2 years ago (for selling gold, early days of cata was boring as fuck), and that one had been around since 2005. Only real claim to fame was getting a world first on one of the karazhan bosses, and it was so long ago that I can't even remember which one. I started early enough in the game's lifespan that I did most of the raids while they were relevant, which does give me a lot of fond memories, such as being the only horde guild on my server able to do the AQ opening event, which was awesome. Not exactly unique though, so it doesn't really matter.

My new account that I played with Syao with is about 7 months old, though I actually really haven't played in about 2 months, other than logging on once a week to clear MC to try and get thunderfury/sulfuras. I got cloaks on 2 of my characters and couldn't be bothered to finish doing heroic SoO.

 

I used to hardcore raid in wow too. Vanilla and TBC.

Honestly? Once you lose that core group (and they're essentially your best friends, 5-6 hours a night 5 days a week. I knew them better/ spoke to them more than I did my own family), all the drive to play just leaves.

At least it did for me.

Take out the friends and I've never felt that MMOs were ever that great on their own (ToR had a decent story, but without people to play it with, I maxed a few characters then never played again).

I say all that because hearing those stats about most people wanting to play MMOs alone boggles my mind.

Even Wildatar -which is a fucking fantastic game- feels hollow and pointless because I've no one to play with (or, to be fair, the inclination to make new MMO friends).

I've played a lot of MMOs since WoW popped my cherry (ToR, CoH, NWN, GW2, FFXI and XIV, Planet side 2 and Wildstar) and none have stuck because I just don't have the people around me anymore that can make the monotonous into a night I'll never forget.

Like throwing snowballs at the main tank every time he tried to pull Nefarian and hearing him freak out on vent...

Good times.

So yeah, those stats make no sense to me. What even is an MMO without other people? A medicore game that turns into an interactive chatroom 80% of the time?

 

Ever spent an entire day in the same alterac valley? Its one of my fonder memory. I used to feel like a boss walking around with my Commander Anduriel atop my name 5 year after pvp rank where removed.

You guys are making me resolution about not joining another mmo falter. Still, no matter how much I might want to join you lot right now, my computer totally died a week ago and I still need 200cdn$ to get a new one.

So its going to wait.

 

I remember on my server you had to be in queue for HOURS just to get in. Alliance outnumbered horde by... A lot.

 

Agreed, exept on Arthas it was the oposite, 1 Alliance for every 5 Horde player. There was 1-2 Alterac valley a day and they where absolutely awesome.

Those sidequest? They where needed to get anywhere. Iceblood, armor scraps. Tame some wolf and clear the damn mines.

 

Yup. We'd start a fresh AV one day after school (which itself would take a few hours just to get enough people) and the next day when I got home, it would be the same AV going on. It could take hours just to summon the big guys without being interupted.

 

I started playing WoW right before BC. Never really raided much before the Naxx revamped. That's when things started to get serious. Group of friends got together and started raiding and finding new people to raid with. We had a lot of fun in Ulduar, I remember Mimiron with a fond smile everytime. When ICC came out we up the schedule; 5-6 days a week, from 6pm to 1am sometime. That was pretty hardcore. We were doing 2x10Man group and 1x25Man. Let me tell you, it was pretty hard to organize all that shit.

Once Cata hit, we were so burned out we decided to drop our raiding day to 1 day/week, from 6pm to 1am max. We were in the top 5% US I believe. That was pretty amazing. We'd watched people struggle to do bosses in 3-4 nights we cleared in 1 day. I think by the time Dragon Soul hit we were 6/8 or 7/8 Heroic Firelands. Liked that instance pretty much. Dropped WoW after DS (the instance was really lacking) and haven't touched it since.

I tried SWTOR, but like someone said, the MMO is all about the players you're playing with. No one followed me around as I tried new games (GW & SWTOR mostly), so that ended up with me never even reaching max level. I remember playing with a couple of DLPer on GW though. Gizmore and Faerenlis I think. Was pretty fun.

Since then, Dota2 has been our game. Won't take much more than 1H/game. Problem with MMO is how time consuming they are. For 1 night/week of raiding in WoW, we still had to farm consumables for the whole group, look up strategies, min/max, run dungeons for VP cap, etc.

 

I just keep on playing with the same people, really. I followed a bunch of wow buddies to SWTOR for a bit, then I was recruited to guilds via reference from buddies in the past.

Now I have like 3-5 people in the guild I'm currently in (of the past year and a half) that I've raided with since ICC. If you have any interest in networking at all, its really easy to make friends amongst all the top US guilds if you're already in one yourself.

 

Once games started having Oceanic servers, and I got a job (so i couldn't raid in the mornings/ US evenings anymore), I ended up losing touch with everyone, unfortunately.

 

Yeah, those stupid oceanic servers killed my vanilla guild.

We were so awesome.

 

I have been playing MUDs on and off now for a few years. They kind of scratch my MMO itch. Some of them have neat game mechanics we haven't seen since (at least) UO. Almost all of them have competent player housing mechanics too. It's all text though. All the good MUDs have very small communities too (<50 active players concurrently). So I can't really recommend any in good faith.

But seriously, some muds, like HellMOO, have amazing systems in place I'd die to see in any AAA MMO. HellMOO was inspired by Fallout, Darklands, and a few others - its design is really neat: The world has "ended" (Well, the "metaplot" is perhaps more sinister than that - some kind of divine apocalypse sends all of humanity into robot hell) after a nuclear war took place. With so much radiation in the wastelands, you acquire "mutation" points as you level up. Each mutation point can be spent to mutate your character. A lot of the mutations come with downsides and some synergize or anti-synergize with other mutations. Some of the mutations are weak, or cosmetic, or just stat bonuses, while others totally revamp the playstyle.

Zombie
Vampire
Abomination

Are the main "megamutations", taking them precludes the use of a lot of minor mutations. If you mutate into a vampire, you no longer need food/drink to maintain your character's lifeforce. You need blood instead, blood which is best collected from other player characters (usually your friends). You also take lethal damage from the sun, basically forcing you to gather experience by night and hide in dark rooms during the day. It totally changes your playstyle and makes you roleplay as a vampire. The death penalty is pretty harsh late game, so it makes vampires pretty interesting.

Zombies are ridiculous. I don't know if they're really balanced. If you go zombie, you become one. You don't need to eat or drink anything, your body rots and you lose all the feeling in your limbs. Your intelligence degrades significantly (if you have <6 int, if you try to talk to other players it tends to come out as garbled "Hi ... BRAINS there", which is pretty humorous. Conversely, there are builds where you STACK intelligence as a zombie (zombies can eat brains to temporarily boost their stats)... it's pretty hilarious. Anyway, zombies can only be killed if they are decapitated when knocked unconscious. Since PVE monsters don't usually do that, it makes PVE pretty forgiving. On the flipside though, with significantly reduced intelligence, it makes crafting, repairing, operating vechicles, and researching - which is a big part of the game - difficult.

Abominations emit radiation, so they pretty much can only live among other abominations. Radiation is lethal to most players because it can't be soaked by armor and only reduced in part by flimsy radiation suits. They also get claw-hands, making crafting difficult. In exchange, they can explore some pretty harsh parts of the world...

Anyway, enough of HellMOO - lots of interesting mechanics. What really turns me off to most MMOs these days is class structure is super rigid, with little incentive for roleplay and little deviation in how classes play. I get that "focus groups are too dumb to figure out complex mechanics", but I'll never play a mainstream MMO again unless this changes. I suspect in the future, indie MMOs will be possible, but it will require leaps in technology which reduce their complexity to make and maintain.

 

Well sir, I'm sold. Checking out HellMOO right now. Looks fun as hell

 

Definitely. I played MMOs for ~5-6 years through high school and undergrad more or less non-stop. Had one group of friends for the first few years, then found a second one after the first broke up. I'd spend at least 8 hours a day on the game - basically playing from when I got out of class until I passed out, only taking breaks for food or when I had an assignment due, and the whole time I would be on Ventrilo or Teamspeak with my guildmates. But eventually we drifted apart due to real life - I went to grad school and didn't have the time, a bunch of others quit, there was some interpersonal drama - and it just wasn't any fun anymore. I've occasionally had a bout of nostalgia and tried to play for a week or two, and I just can't get into it. It's boring as shit without anyone to play with.