Traditional MMOs from powerful developers are archaic. World of Warcraft was the beginning of the end. It took too many subs, brought too many diverse gamer types to the genre, and over time deteriorated with its catering to players the essence of the classic MMO: a struggle against a paradigm. Blizzard attempted a paradigm shift when they started instituting daily quests, gear redundancy/solvency, and then raid equality. More options is not always better. Playing to the crowd is almost never a good option. Governments fail because of it. Companies fail because of it. And now an entire genre of video game is collapsing because of it. EverQuest developers never listened to their player base. Furor and Tigole constantly bashed their decisions, yet they still drove their guilds ahead and praised certain aspects of the game. Through their struggle and grief players forged alliances with other members of their community. The entire process is akin to the drill instructor instilling mutual hatred towards himself amongst his maggots; the most important part of being a leader is leading, which means doing potentially self-damning things for the greater good. Producers and developers don't do that anymore. They take the easy road. They gather information, read forums, do podcasts and create transparency in an effort to build a trust with the players, but trust isn't earned through succumbing to the whims of the mob. That was the downfall of Rome.
Now we're left with pay2win models and knock off games whose only ingenuity and diversity are funky graphics and dildo lightsabers. WoW proved you don't have to innovate, you just have to polish and take a passionate interest in what your game is all about. I hate to bring it up, but we need a game that has The Vision. Call it crazy, maniacal overlord tendency, or whatever you want, but these games are supposed to be based around the D&D model where the gamemaster does everything in his power to challenge you and hopefully kill you. Simply put, developers these days have no balls, and it's all our fault. Or better yet, it's the fault of all the people that decided to invade the niche environment that had been created, and with their infection came the parasitic greed that we see so readily in the genre presently.
In the ocean of MMOs all the games are these tightly wound life jackets suffocating the players as they bob around helpless, unlike previously, like in EverQuest, where the game was a giant fucking ship with majestic sails and grizzly pirates shooting muzzle loaders down at the players as they tried to throw grappling hooks onto the deck and hopefully hoist themselves up and snag a piece of loot or two.
