What does your ideal modern MMO be like?

I wish dungeons would be designed for both 1-run story playthrough (like WoW) and the camp grind (like EQ).

Here is what I mean... the first time you run a dungeon, your group gets a quest or two from the NPC outside of the dungeon or the local town. You run through the entire dungeon in Story Mode, with all the named/story mobs automatically up (instanced-WoW-style). Except on rare occasions, the named don't drop anything, but they complete your quests and at the end you get a reward item or two.

After you complete this Story Mode, you unlock the ability to re-enter the dungeon as Adventure Mode camp-grind (open world-EQ-style). The mobs are on a re-pop timer, the named spawn occasionally, and they have new 'Common-Rare-Epic' loot drop tables.

This style provides progression by unlocking the Adventure Mode dungeon. It promotes replay-ability for your content and the content you have gets re-purposed to the way your players want to play. If you hated that dungeon, then skip it and move on to the next area. Everybody wins.

Randomly generated dungeons and boss encounters. With some type of module system to change up fight mechanics the devs can swap out add/subtract on the fly. I'm not talking 4 different encounters, just keep adding them to keep things fresh and new.

VR full environment suit (with feelies) and lots of big breasted barbarian girls to wrestle.. err, fight with. Oh, and magic.

shabushabu said:

GROUP CONTENT FOCUS

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CHALLENGING GAMEPLAY

CLASS INTERDEPENDENCE

CLASSIC HIGH FANTASY

IMMERSIVE IMMERSION

GONNA ROCK

My ideal MMO would refocus on social aspects of the gameplay, which is what made the original MMO's so memorable. Wanna be a douche? Fine, but there are consequences for your actions. Class interdependency would also be a main focus. Some kind of death penalties (without them, the world doesn't feel dangerous or meaningful). Rare loot that is tradable and not BOE or BOP, and is more than just +gooder. Finally, big fucking dungeons that aren't hallway, boss, more hallway. Get back to the basics.

Hekotat said:

Randomly generated dungeons and boss encounters. With some type of module system to change up fight mechanics the devs can swap out add/subtract on the fly. I'm not talking 4 different encounters, just keep adding them to keep things fresh and new.

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No. Keep Diablo out of MMOs. Blizzard is already doing this with WoW and it's annoying and frustrating. Keep every randomly generated thing on earth out of my MMO. I want a persistent world. Not a random world.

Khane said:

No. Keep Diablo out of MMOs. Blizzard is already doing this with WoW and it's annoying and frustrating. Keep every randomly generated thing on earth out of my MMO. I want a persistent world. Not a random world.

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I think intelligent use of random generation could be cool in the right type of game. For example you could do a game with a seasonal server set up ala crowfall that created a different world per server. The worlds could be generated by using randomization to place hand made assets. So what I mean by that is you have your devs hand craft dungeons, items, quests, etc. The server randomly generated locations and inhabitants. You would then just need to have your dev team tweak various variables for quests, item drop locations, and difficulty ramping. Boom, you have a relatively unique world on that server with a large portion of the dev work removed.

The problem with randomly generated shit is that we are still seeing it utilized in a way that is fairly rudimentary. I feel like if it was utilized in combination with dev worldbuilding it could be really cool. Fully randomized design (D3 rifts for example) gets old pretty fast. I'm not a fucking dev tho, what do I know.

Yea those games are called ARPGs and they are fun to play in their own space. I don't want that shit in an MMO.

Honestly, I like what Pantheon is pitching from a concept perspective, but that needs to be actually developed. Give me Wows fluidity of animation and netcode, Rifts class design (original Rift, not the shell it quickly got raped down to), and pretty much all the other parts from what Pantheon is promising, but will probably never ever deliver on, in a somewhat bug free sandbox and you have me for years.

Pretty much EQ but prettier and some more class customization options delivered before I die of old age.

Edit: Also, make sure some of the content is time released and not available in beta so there is some mystery left by the time we actually play it.

Khane said:

Yea those games are called ARPGs and they are fun to play in their own space. I don't want that shit in an MMO.

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Sure, ARPG's do that on a small scale. What im referring to is something more like using randomization as a tool for a Dev/GM to create and maybe even manage a game server in a way that could be loosely compared to how a DM creates a gameworld (or pieces one together from D&D books). I may not be articulating my point very well, but I don't think randomization should be completely disregarded just because the current iterations of it kind of suck.

Fantasy-based

Somewhat cheap initial box cost, a small subscription fee, BUT also a deposit because I’m a gatekeeping dick. I hate modern games and gamers with minimal emotional investment. A deposit provides leverage over the player. If you break the rules your account is banned and deposit is returned. However, if you’re caught cheating – account ban, deposit lost. You normally get your deposit back 24 hours after your sub ends.

My thoughts are something like $20 initial box cost and the first month free. If you like it, you can deposit $50 and sub for $3/month and keep playing. Bounty system so reporting cheaters or game breaking bugs rewards you with a credit you can apply to your sub, or pay out when your sub ends.

Two characters per account. Name change and server moves are heavily restricted.

Combat somewhere around old-school EQ, but very fluid. Not too much button mashing, more tactical and resource-minded combat. Limited slots for abilities (15-24), but a large pool of abilities to choose from. Keeps the UI clean and prevents too much bloat in the late game. A few of the slots should be for utilities, and there should be some powerful/cool or just plain fun ones. Spells should have unique names and scale with character power/level.

Class system allows a lot of flexibility, so you can do pretty much any job as long as you are spec’d and/or geared for it. You can have a primary/alternate spec. There should be a large-ish money sink to change your specs after you have them finalized.

Crafting should be cool, useful, and not overly painful. Phone integration for crafting/trading would be nice.

Gear should be unique have a long lifespan. There will be quested and tradeable clickies/gear, but they should generally have a cooldown or require an ability slot. Oh yes, bring back the clickies.

Wall of Text, I know.. But I just dove into this too hard.

As soon as an MMO makes the player feel like they have an actual impact on the world, the better. No matter how awesome your gear is, how skilled of a player you are, at the end of the day you're just killing things that repeatedly respawn and thats it.

If you played WoW during the fire lands, or during Mists of Pandaria. As your faction got better, so did your base or farm. Something changed around you. Phasing was used to accomplish that, but I want the changes to be seen by anyone. Ashes of Creation is doing something similar to this, with the land gaining exp in order to grow the city bigger. Thats great start, but buildings outside of cities should pop up too. A small fishing dock grows the more people that fish from there, or send trade boats away from there. Etc. Players having more impact in that area. If anyone remembers Horizon, that unfinished game had some really great ideas. But dont make people manually build any social structure like bridges, ew. (Your actions cause the area to change)

Instances are good, and I like them in moderation. But Im not alone when I say I miss EverQuest dungeons and open world areas like Crushbone. Having some zones or dungeons being persistent would be a nice touch, with world wide events. You kill Dvinn, 2 zones away in mistmoore, a general and royal body guard spawns to come liberate CB. Link lore to it, and its all good. Just make these zones more interesting than sitting and waiting on that particular place holder or rare to spawn. (Your actions cause the NPC's to change)

I think Blizzard is wrong about how theyre doing factions and they should be deeper than an exp bar. They should be something that tied you to the world and made you feel like you belonged to that faction. I know a lot of people loved the factions in Scars of Velious. You grinded those factions, but you really only had to raid those specific targets to get maxxed with them. But your armor design matched the faction you had, and each armor set had different qualities that benefited you towards killing the opposing factions. Where you spawned and got supplies at within the land was heavily influenced by your faction as well. (Your character looks like it belongs in the world and has a place in it)

Which...In a way, I can look back at Velious raiding as a difficulty level. Killing Dwarfs were by far easiest, killing giants, for the most part, seemed to only take moderate amount of team work, and killing dragons took a lot more effort than all of them. Its taking WoW's raiding difficulty system, putting a dress on it and making the player choose what content they want to do. Kael, Thurg and ToV had what some would consider a town aspect, or was a town. They were dual purpose for the sake of development. However, ToV was the only one that had a real raid zone aspect to it. (You had a reason to pick a side)

- We should have two types of raid zones. Type one, being faction aligned and lasting all expansion. Progression in tier one is based off how well you do in tier 2 raid zones. Tier 2 drops complimenting the gear in tier one in some type of way. Tier one gear sticking with you through the entire expansion (unless you switch factions) and the only pieces you steadily replace are the tier 2's. The idea being that you're only killing one, or two bosses in the faction you chose and have limited gear choices. You get enough raid zone type 2 gear and you're now strong enough to move up to the next boss. (A bond with the gear you're wearing)


This all being based on the fact that the game runs smoothly, the graphics and ability queue is smooth and pretty and the game is relatively free of bugs.

1. Cap the number of actions each person can make per day. (Low time commitment.)
2. Competitive, strategic, slow-paced, team-oriented game.
3. Servers that end.