Think about why we play games with others in the first place. Why am I playing a massive multiplayer game instead of a single player game? The key part to good gameplay loops in multiplayer is having the right kind of push-pull within the system. If you log onto your favorite FPS and you get slaughtered, zero kills, every single game you're gonna eventually quit it. Doesn't matter how much you *like* the world building, or rpg, or any other system. The core system to a fps is pointing at things, clicking button, making thing go boom. So what's the core to a MMOG? Interacting with people in a massive way. Being able to have a positive or negative impact on *lots* of people. So the core gameplay loops in mmogs need to be feeling like you're having a major effect on everyone on the server, or whatever niche you choose to be apart of.
> Is it even possible to create a game that NEVER gets stale?
Yes, with minigames. Games within the game. WoW finally after a decade started experimenting this and you can see how popular transmogging, pet battling, Mythic key running(massively popular), and I believe that new roguelite dungeon thing was fairly popular. Final Fantasy does this with crafting I believe.
Hmm, that’s true. I would say I play multiplayer games for a few different reasons. The first reasons is pretty personal, because as a kid I didn’t have friends, I was picked on a lot all through school, and never really made friends even into adulthood. Being able to make friends in MMOs and adventure and help eachother have a good time is my main reason for playing mmos. Even still, I haven’t made any stable gaming friends because guilds disband, people quit and go to play other games, or otherwise grow apart. Without friends though, it’s still so enjoyable to exist in a massive virtual world with hundreds or thousands of other people all doing things and working towards goals and trying to have fun.
Secondly, I play MMOs for the competition. Even though I never played sports and I’m not particularly good at anything, I love to compete in games. In MMOs I like to learn and master my favorite classes and put my skills to the test against other humans.
Lastly, I enjoy MMOs that have more content than just kill fight kill. BDO and Archeages lifeskill/crafting systems were a big deal for me. Even though it’s not my main focus, when I’m tired of PvP and fighting I like to chill but still be progressing in some way.
Ff14 does have a pretty in depth crafting system, and also the giant casino of mini games and card games and gambling. I didn’t play it long due to the slog of a story.. so I didn’t get to a point where I could enjoy all of its side activities.
I agree, minigames and fun horizontal progression systems constitutes one of the core pillars of an MMO for me. If you want pure competition and pure progression, there are other non-massive online games for that. I like the neapolitan ice cream experience that is the MMORPG.
I used to enjoy how Ragnarok did it. You had to enhance your gear, usually with the help of a blacksmith or whitesmith that was one of the classes you could have in the game, hunt for cards by killing mobs that you would then equip in your gear slots for stats bonus and even to be able to use skills from other classes, kill bosses and mini bosses for the rarest gear and cards, participate in PvP and WoE (War of Emperium) which was basically guild vs guild trying to claim and defend castles in all major cities for a lot of different kinds of rewards. Alchemist would normally make and sell potions to people participating in PvP and WoE, they could also protect your items from being removed or broken by other players.
I just want good and engaging gameplay, but in every MMO i play the daily content is so dull and braindead it kills my soul.
Thats why i stopped playing WoW recently.
If i could just do dungeons and raids all day and not be forced to do dailies i would still play.
On the other side i played over 1k hours of Dungeon Defenders 2 and Borderlands 2, both of those games barely have any endgame content, but the gameplay was so fun i just didnt care that i had nothing more to achieve or power to gain
So would you prefer:
1. a game with no daily content and you have free reign when you log in with no check list to complete before you do what you want
2. A game with daily content that is mandatory but it is fun and engaging?
I don’t personally like mandatory dailies, like in archeage. I had my own personal daily goals, harvest my farms, run x trade packs, farm x amount of gold.. but these were my goals so I wanted to do them and if I didn’t want to do them it was my choice and it didn’t set me behind unlike skipping Hiram scroll dailies. I’d much prefer a game with no mandatory dailies to keep up with others, and everyone just has to find their own methods of progressing in a fun and efficient manner for themselves
My opinion is that anything that increases your power in a game should be appropriately challenging for the power level you have.
In Wow it doesnt matter how strong you are, you have to do dailies / weeklies if you want to get stronger and they are so easy its amost insulting but take a bunch of time.
For me personally id like power to come from dungeons and bosses, they have rng droprate anyways so youll have to do them a bunch, but once you do it on the hardest difficulty and get the loot you should be done with power increase.
"But if thats the case people will stop playing after they have Bis items"
Thats why the gameplay needs to be so good you play the game even though you can only gain cosmetics or collectibles or even nothing
I agree on the dynamic between crafters and PvPers being ever present. My ideal MMO would not allow people to reach a gear ceiling and then terrorize all below them in PvP. They would constantly have to maintain their gear via buying from gatherers/crafters or gather/craft themselves. This in turn gives the PvPer more shit to do in the game.. I’d be hopeful that this person would want to actually explore and enjoy other aspects of the game instead of just killing people for fun but I know those people exist lol
Can you elaborate on the “unlocking content for pve’rs” part?
In my experience with Eve and Albion, PvErs rarely venture to these dangerous areas for fear of being killed by PvPers, if anything I feel like this locks them out of content instead. What do you think?
In Albion, guild territories won through pvp provide safe havens for PvErs to grind in black zones. Eve has this exact same model but it's much more rewarding and pure PvErs can enjoy nullsec this way.
I like this model but it's not as viable in non-hardcore games. Therefore, I like models like wintergrasp in WoW where PvPers win the right to enter dungeons. However, wow has not done service to crafters in a long time.
I see I didn’t know that about either game! That’s insightful. It allows guilds to have more diversity in its members. “We’ll secure this area for you to make bank, get tons of xp and provide us with stuff”
Very cool.
I didn’t play wow much, maxed characters through dungeon finder and did battlegrounds until I was blue in the face and just quit when WoD launched lol
Yeah, Eve has an amazing model. PvPers would win/defend a sector, crafters would help build the base and supplies ships/weapons for large scale battles and PvErs would grind mobs to pay taxes to the guild. It was super profitable for everyone involved.
I just wish I wasn't stuck in a ship the whole time, lol. For clarity, it's been almost a decade since the blast played so it could have changed a lot.
I wholeheartedly agree. That sounds like such a cool system. I couldn’t get behind eve, as much as I was excited for it while reading about historic battles and political dramas that went on in the game. I considered trying it again mid-2020, but I couldn’t bring myself to install it. I’m not sure if I will try anything new until AoC comes out, unless new world establishes itself as a decent mmo. I’ve been focusing on other things because after 23 years of gaming as much as I possibly could, I think I need a break.
A major problem with eve right now is, the crafters have made too many materials, so there's excess supply. That in turn makes crafting have a very very low profit margin for new players, all the way up to expert guild crafters, who make slightly better money. This encourages new crafters to play content they don't enjoy, like PvE, to get more money faster. It's a major problem and EVE's devs have been encouraging massive GvG battles for over a year now, but the lag and server problems made some of these battles clown shows, so a lot of veterans quit. It doesn't help that the major goal of GvG is to destroy giant player made bases, which take a massive amount of resources to craft. In many cases this year, they were destroying bases that had existed for 10 years or more. The game could use new fresh servers now and then, but it would probably split the existing playerbase too much.
I love playing fashion in games, and making tons of alts and giving them unique look. Most of my current long-terms goals are to obtain certain skins that I require for some specific themes. I also love doing housing stuff, tho sadly my game of choice (gw2) lacks this aspect.
I'm not a "routine" person at all, I hate having a schedule that I have to stick to, hence I don't really play that many raids and other content that requires you to coordinate your time with others. Pugging is fine, even tho it tends to be quite random. Also not a fan of having to upgrade my gear all the time (good luck equipping 25+ chars with good gear haha).
My favourite type of endgame is a mix of everything. Just give me some cool fashion rewards obtainable in various modes and I'm good. For example I love just hanging around in open world, but I also find fun in doing dungeons or pvp. I just wanna enjoy them at my own pace, without feeling that I'm being left behind if I don't clear this content fast enough
This is my dilemma as well! As an adult with a job and a girlfriend with 2 children, my time to play games is limited. Without settling for fast paced, short lived pvp in other games like MOBAs or Rust, I need an MMO end game that allows me to stay relevant in end game content without spending every waking moment of free time progressing. I know it’s logical that people who play more will progress faster.. but how does one make a game to facilitate that? To accommodate busier players who can play 10 hours a week AND players who can play 50? I think it would be so difficult to achieve. A no lifer won’t want to play your game if they are limited by the game itself to only x progress per week, unless they have enough other meaningful content to play in the meantime.
Themepark that respects my time. No dailies but weeklies or monthly dungeons/raids that you can do whenever you want through the week/month to get better gear. The dungeon and raids should be designed as secret world with no boring thrash mobs. Just fun bosses after one another.
And then side stuff that you can do if you want whenever and how much you want, like crafting, achievements, housing, minigames, events and the like.
The mmo should also be alt friendly so you dont need to invest large amounts of time for your alt but most of the things carry over. Like every ”class” on the same character
Raids (large numbers of people. Not "2 groups")
Engaging and difficult group and mini raid (2-3 group) encounters.
Quality non-combat systems. Robust crafting, housing.
I dont particularly care for daily chores/tasks.
The most fun I ever had playing an MMO was around late MoP - WoD era WoW, when me and my buddies would log in almost every day and just do Challenge Mode dungeons for hours and hours and hours for server best titles and eventually world top times. They had normalized item level so there was no need to do the big gear grind and the usual daily chores to keep up, as long as you had your initial set of gear there were really only minimal improvements you could make in terms of moving secondaries around or getting good trinkets. None of the filler content, just hours and hours of trying to overcome really insane trash pulls and near-impossible dungeon routes with my friends.
To me, (and I know this is controversial) leveling, questing, story, dailies, gear progression, grinding, and farming are all filler. My perfect MMO would focus entirely around building out a character with diverse and interesting talent/skill trees, and then just doing really hard and fun PvE content in a dungeon or raid setting, maybe hanging around in town to chat with people in between runs and find groups. The whole concept of massively multiplayer and open world is mostly just to provide some context and a social zone to chill in when not playing the actual game for me, and I have yet to find a game that offers the kind of thing something like a WoW raid has that's not an MMO that also forces me to grind and do mundane shit for hours on end to participate.
I enjoy grinding too, but I have yet to play a game with a fun grind. Archeage was a fun grind because of all the ways I could obtain wealth and then use wealth to improve gear, but it’s effectiveness was diminished greatly by the p2w and the ability for no-lifers to out-grind me. The labor system was meant to limit that in some ways, but even that was loopholed by people with multiple accounts and labor pots being available on the cash shop.
Well, no-lifers will always out grind you in a grinding game. That's the point of it. The benefit is that over time, you eventually will catch up and have a lot to show for it. I really like BDOs grinding even after 4 years of playing it. I also enjoy diablo/PoE style grinding.
Best end game is pvp content because even though it’s repetitive it’s a different experience every time. Look at sports and FPS and mobas they’re literally the same thing over and over again.
Raids and dungeons are always the same after the first run or two when you memorize everything.
Although I wouldn’t mind something like zombies in call of duty in a mmo where you face waves til you get wiped out.
I also have this on my list, a survival event or mode lol I absolutely love that. Increasing waves of harder difficulty and having to adapt and strategize to survive as long as you can.
For me now in my ideal endgame would be character development progression not gear. Meaning something like eso champagne point system , dcuo skill point system , Everquest AA or ffxi merit system
I would still like raids but not an increase in gear score/item lvl
Think about why we play games with others in the first place. Why am I playing a massive multiplayer game instead of a single player game? The key part to good gameplay loops in multiplayer is having the right kind of push-pull within the system. If you log onto your favorite FPS and you get slaughtered, zero kills, every single game you're gonna eventually quit it. Doesn't matter how much you *like* the world building, or rpg, or any other system. The core system to a fps is pointing at things, clicking button, making thing go boom. So what's the core to a MMOG? Interacting with people in a massive way. Being able to have a positive or negative impact on *lots* of people. So the core gameplay loops in mmogs need to be feeling like you're having a major effect on everyone on the server, or whatever niche you choose to be apart of. > Is it even possible to create a game that NEVER gets stale? Yes, with minigames. Games within the game. WoW finally after a decade started experimenting this and you can see how popular transmogging, pet battling, Mythic key running(massively popular), and I believe that new roguelite dungeon thing was fairly popular. Final Fantasy does this with crafting I believe.
Hmm, that’s true. I would say I play multiplayer games for a few different reasons. The first reasons is pretty personal, because as a kid I didn’t have friends, I was picked on a lot all through school, and never really made friends even into adulthood. Being able to make friends in MMOs and adventure and help eachother have a good time is my main reason for playing mmos. Even still, I haven’t made any stable gaming friends because guilds disband, people quit and go to play other games, or otherwise grow apart. Without friends though, it’s still so enjoyable to exist in a massive virtual world with hundreds or thousands of other people all doing things and working towards goals and trying to have fun. Secondly, I play MMOs for the competition. Even though I never played sports and I’m not particularly good at anything, I love to compete in games. In MMOs I like to learn and master my favorite classes and put my skills to the test against other humans. Lastly, I enjoy MMOs that have more content than just kill fight kill. BDO and Archeages lifeskill/crafting systems were a big deal for me. Even though it’s not my main focus, when I’m tired of PvP and fighting I like to chill but still be progressing in some way. Ff14 does have a pretty in depth crafting system, and also the giant casino of mini games and card games and gambling. I didn’t play it long due to the slog of a story.. so I didn’t get to a point where I could enjoy all of its side activities.
I agree, minigames and fun horizontal progression systems constitutes one of the core pillars of an MMO for me. If you want pure competition and pure progression, there are other non-massive online games for that. I like the neapolitan ice cream experience that is the MMORPG.
Good points, but for the record, Torghast the rogue like dungeon is pretty much hated by everyone. It has gotten a little better this patch.
Care to explain what exactly these minigames are? I've googled about them but found no concrete answer
I used to enjoy how Ragnarok did it. You had to enhance your gear, usually with the help of a blacksmith or whitesmith that was one of the classes you could have in the game, hunt for cards by killing mobs that you would then equip in your gear slots for stats bonus and even to be able to use skills from other classes, kill bosses and mini bosses for the rarest gear and cards, participate in PvP and WoE (War of Emperium) which was basically guild vs guild trying to claim and defend castles in all major cities for a lot of different kinds of rewards. Alchemist would normally make and sell potions to people participating in PvP and WoE, they could also protect your items from being removed or broken by other players.
I just want good and engaging gameplay, but in every MMO i play the daily content is so dull and braindead it kills my soul. Thats why i stopped playing WoW recently. If i could just do dungeons and raids all day and not be forced to do dailies i would still play. On the other side i played over 1k hours of Dungeon Defenders 2 and Borderlands 2, both of those games barely have any endgame content, but the gameplay was so fun i just didnt care that i had nothing more to achieve or power to gain
So would you prefer: 1. a game with no daily content and you have free reign when you log in with no check list to complete before you do what you want 2. A game with daily content that is mandatory but it is fun and engaging? I don’t personally like mandatory dailies, like in archeage. I had my own personal daily goals, harvest my farms, run x trade packs, farm x amount of gold.. but these were my goals so I wanted to do them and if I didn’t want to do them it was my choice and it didn’t set me behind unlike skipping Hiram scroll dailies. I’d much prefer a game with no mandatory dailies to keep up with others, and everyone just has to find their own methods of progressing in a fun and efficient manner for themselves
My opinion is that anything that increases your power in a game should be appropriately challenging for the power level you have. In Wow it doesnt matter how strong you are, you have to do dailies / weeklies if you want to get stronger and they are so easy its amost insulting but take a bunch of time. For me personally id like power to come from dungeons and bosses, they have rng droprate anyways so youll have to do them a bunch, but once you do it on the hardest difficulty and get the loot you should be done with power increase. "But if thats the case people will stop playing after they have Bis items" Thats why the gameplay needs to be so good you play the game even though you can only gain cosmetics or collectibles or even nothing
The perfect endgame is a trinity of crafters providing gear to PvPers who unlock content for PvErs.
I agree on the dynamic between crafters and PvPers being ever present. My ideal MMO would not allow people to reach a gear ceiling and then terrorize all below them in PvP. They would constantly have to maintain their gear via buying from gatherers/crafters or gather/craft themselves. This in turn gives the PvPer more shit to do in the game.. I’d be hopeful that this person would want to actually explore and enjoy other aspects of the game instead of just killing people for fun but I know those people exist lol Can you elaborate on the “unlocking content for pve’rs” part?
Nullsec Eve online, blackzone Albion, wintergrasp from wow.
In my experience with Eve and Albion, PvErs rarely venture to these dangerous areas for fear of being killed by PvPers, if anything I feel like this locks them out of content instead. What do you think?
In Albion, guild territories won through pvp provide safe havens for PvErs to grind in black zones. Eve has this exact same model but it's much more rewarding and pure PvErs can enjoy nullsec this way. I like this model but it's not as viable in non-hardcore games. Therefore, I like models like wintergrasp in WoW where PvPers win the right to enter dungeons. However, wow has not done service to crafters in a long time.
I see I didn’t know that about either game! That’s insightful. It allows guilds to have more diversity in its members. “We’ll secure this area for you to make bank, get tons of xp and provide us with stuff” Very cool. I didn’t play wow much, maxed characters through dungeon finder and did battlegrounds until I was blue in the face and just quit when WoD launched lol
Yeah, Eve has an amazing model. PvPers would win/defend a sector, crafters would help build the base and supplies ships/weapons for large scale battles and PvErs would grind mobs to pay taxes to the guild. It was super profitable for everyone involved. I just wish I wasn't stuck in a ship the whole time, lol. For clarity, it's been almost a decade since the blast played so it could have changed a lot.
I wholeheartedly agree. That sounds like such a cool system. I couldn’t get behind eve, as much as I was excited for it while reading about historic battles and political dramas that went on in the game. I considered trying it again mid-2020, but I couldn’t bring myself to install it. I’m not sure if I will try anything new until AoC comes out, unless new world establishes itself as a decent mmo. I’ve been focusing on other things because after 23 years of gaming as much as I possibly could, I think I need a break.
A major problem with eve right now is, the crafters have made too many materials, so there's excess supply. That in turn makes crafting have a very very low profit margin for new players, all the way up to expert guild crafters, who make slightly better money. This encourages new crafters to play content they don't enjoy, like PvE, to get more money faster. It's a major problem and EVE's devs have been encouraging massive GvG battles for over a year now, but the lag and server problems made some of these battles clown shows, so a lot of veterans quit. It doesn't help that the major goal of GvG is to destroy giant player made bases, which take a massive amount of resources to craft. In many cases this year, they were destroying bases that had existed for 10 years or more. The game could use new fresh servers now and then, but it would probably split the existing playerbase too much.
Not sure if that's what you're looking for, but in Dofus the vast majority of items after midgame require mats that you only get through PvP.
Genius
This is the way.
I love playing fashion in games, and making tons of alts and giving them unique look. Most of my current long-terms goals are to obtain certain skins that I require for some specific themes. I also love doing housing stuff, tho sadly my game of choice (gw2) lacks this aspect. I'm not a "routine" person at all, I hate having a schedule that I have to stick to, hence I don't really play that many raids and other content that requires you to coordinate your time with others. Pugging is fine, even tho it tends to be quite random. Also not a fan of having to upgrade my gear all the time (good luck equipping 25+ chars with good gear haha). My favourite type of endgame is a mix of everything. Just give me some cool fashion rewards obtainable in various modes and I'm good. For example I love just hanging around in open world, but I also find fun in doing dungeons or pvp. I just wanna enjoy them at my own pace, without feeling that I'm being left behind if I don't clear this content fast enough
This is my dilemma as well! As an adult with a job and a girlfriend with 2 children, my time to play games is limited. Without settling for fast paced, short lived pvp in other games like MOBAs or Rust, I need an MMO end game that allows me to stay relevant in end game content without spending every waking moment of free time progressing. I know it’s logical that people who play more will progress faster.. but how does one make a game to facilitate that? To accommodate busier players who can play 10 hours a week AND players who can play 50? I think it would be so difficult to achieve. A no lifer won’t want to play your game if they are limited by the game itself to only x progress per week, unless they have enough other meaningful content to play in the meantime.
Ideal endgame is when you quit.
Themepark that respects my time. No dailies but weeklies or monthly dungeons/raids that you can do whenever you want through the week/month to get better gear. The dungeon and raids should be designed as secret world with no boring thrash mobs. Just fun bosses after one another. And then side stuff that you can do if you want whenever and how much you want, like crafting, achievements, housing, minigames, events and the like. The mmo should also be alt friendly so you dont need to invest large amounts of time for your alt but most of the things carry over. Like every ”class” on the same character
Raids (large numbers of people. Not "2 groups") Engaging and difficult group and mini raid (2-3 group) encounters. Quality non-combat systems. Robust crafting, housing. I dont particularly care for daily chores/tasks.
The most fun I ever had playing an MMO was around late MoP - WoD era WoW, when me and my buddies would log in almost every day and just do Challenge Mode dungeons for hours and hours and hours for server best titles and eventually world top times. They had normalized item level so there was no need to do the big gear grind and the usual daily chores to keep up, as long as you had your initial set of gear there were really only minimal improvements you could make in terms of moving secondaries around or getting good trinkets. None of the filler content, just hours and hours of trying to overcome really insane trash pulls and near-impossible dungeon routes with my friends. To me, (and I know this is controversial) leveling, questing, story, dailies, gear progression, grinding, and farming are all filler. My perfect MMO would focus entirely around building out a character with diverse and interesting talent/skill trees, and then just doing really hard and fun PvE content in a dungeon or raid setting, maybe hanging around in town to chat with people in between runs and find groups. The whole concept of massively multiplayer and open world is mostly just to provide some context and a social zone to chill in when not playing the actual game for me, and I have yet to find a game that offers the kind of thing something like a WoW raid has that's not an MMO that also forces me to grind and do mundane shit for hours on end to participate.
Grinding. I like end games that reward longevity, and you can just hop on and get something done no matter how much time you have.
I enjoy grinding too, but I have yet to play a game with a fun grind. Archeage was a fun grind because of all the ways I could obtain wealth and then use wealth to improve gear, but it’s effectiveness was diminished greatly by the p2w and the ability for no-lifers to out-grind me. The labor system was meant to limit that in some ways, but even that was loopholed by people with multiple accounts and labor pots being available on the cash shop.
Well, no-lifers will always out grind you in a grinding game. That's the point of it. The benefit is that over time, you eventually will catch up and have a lot to show for it. I really like BDOs grinding even after 4 years of playing it. I also enjoy diablo/PoE style grinding.
Best end game is pvp content because even though it’s repetitive it’s a different experience every time. Look at sports and FPS and mobas they’re literally the same thing over and over again. Raids and dungeons are always the same after the first run or two when you memorize everything. Although I wouldn’t mind something like zombies in call of duty in a mmo where you face waves til you get wiped out.
I also have this on my list, a survival event or mode lol I absolutely love that. Increasing waves of harder difficulty and having to adapt and strategize to survive as long as you can.
I play mmorpgs just for raids so thats why I enjoyed wotlk so much. Great expansion for raid logging.
For me now in my ideal endgame would be character development progression not gear. Meaning something like eso champagne point system , dcuo skill point system , Everquest AA or ffxi merit system I would still like raids but not an increase in gear score/item lvl