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Rich story, missing the grind, and losing interest in cash shops
Beyond_Eternia
Member UncommonPosts: 102
We all know about the "honeymoon period" of a game. You see the announcement, keep up with it, play the beta, get early access, totally in love with the game for a couple of months. Then the losing interest starts. Well it does for me anyway. These are reasons why IMO
Rich story- It starts out great, but then you find yourself killing your space bar. All you want to do is level. In most recent mmo's it has been very easy to achieve.
The lower level grind- It just does not exist anymore. Your blowing through zones. Ripping through levels until you hit cap. Then doing the same dungeons over and over until you get max leveled gear.
Cash shops- I admit, I have dropped a lot of money in cash shops. Mainly for limited time based items, extra inventory, character slots, and cosmetic. It's huge and successful way of doing it nowadays. I am beginning to think it's a poison though. I just think it takeaways from a great mmo experience.
In conclusion, this is the trend and it's very successful. It's not going to stop anytime soon. No developer is going to gamble their company to take a different route. Maybe it's time to go back to where it all began. A single player rpg. At least until the trend is over. 
Comments
I play MMOs for the Forum PVP
its not a honeymoon period. Thats how mmos are being developed now. And devs keep focusing on endgame like thats what everyone wants. So until they learn thats not the most important thing in an mmo, ill be just playing my journey from lvl 1 to cap. At level cap i make a new alt. If i have to start and progress through the exact same content than the previous character then i just leave the game go look for a more fun and varied mmo.
Thats how devs want it to be nowadays, i guess they really dont like to keep players around.
Why is anyone surprised that sometimes you get bored after playing a VIDEO GAME after 2-3 months?
Last I checked, Video Games are an entertainment product for most people.
Gdemami -
Informing people about your thoughts and impressions is not a review, it's a blog.
Therefore, they have to be fun. Making generic bland games is not making games for your enjoyment. Of course not everyone likes the same things. But taking that sentence into account, a dev should focus on the biggest definition of fun, and not the biggest definition of boring (which tends to be mindless grind, dumb AI, and worlds that feel dead).
My opinion of course.
Of course when one person says something like "biggest definition of fun" someone else always says that that's just another way of saying "lowest common denominator" which inevitably turns into, that just means "mindless grind, dumb AI and worlds that feel dead."
Kind of a circular argument.
By this point it should then be obvious that many people do not feel that they are mindless grinds, dumb AI (or at least they feel they are interesting AI) or dead worlds.
Entertainment doesn't have to mean "fun". Entertainment is immersion. You can be "entertained" watching a horror movie or riding a roller coaster or reading a depressing book.
Help get Camelot Unchained made, a old-school MMORPG, with no hand holding!
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/13861848/camelot-unchained
I love grinding dumb mobs if it has a good story.
Planescape: Torment, SWTOR is an awesome game for me cause they have a good story.
What you find fun and what I find fun are different.
Trick is to know if my definition of 'fun' is worth investing because there are many more people like me.
So far, the answer is yes.
Gdemami -
Informing people about your thoughts and impressions is not a review, it's a blog.
MMO's have had the makeover that a lot of modern fantasy literature has had, in pursuit of appealing to as wide an audience as possible. To quote a great lady of the genre, Ursula Le Guin:
“Commodified fantasy takes no risks: it invents nothing, but imitates and trivialises. It proceeds by depriving the old stories of their intellectual and ethical complexity, turning their action to violence, their actors to dolls, and their truth-telling to sentimental platitude. Heroes brandish their swords, lasers, wands, as mechanically as combine harvesters, reaping profits. Profoundly disturbing moral choices are sanitized, made cute, made safe. The passionately conceived ideas of the great story-tellers are copied, stereotyped, reduced to toys, molded in bright-colored plastic, advertised, sold, broken, junked, replaceable, interchangeable.”
That makes sense. So the only hope is looking for developers that are not catering to the masses.
Maybe you should try a different approach?
Don't play the Beta, Don't get early access, just buy it on release day. Then when you do play, stop and smell the roses instead of racing through the content. You have been conditioned to play that way by yourself and other players not developers.
You are the one who sets these goals for yourself. You want to be completely geared and preferably yesterday and it can only happen too slow. In a way you are your biggest problem
Here's what I do. I avoid playing with people or guilds that only has raids in mind and getting there as fast as possible. I take my time and make a few alts, I dabble in some crafting from the beginning instead of at max level in between dungeon runs. There are a lot of ways to extend your enjoyment
I dont care about story, i want to create my own.
I want a looot of grind / farm on mmo.
I play mmorpg to stick with it for years ... not weeks or few months.
Why?
and i play MMORPG like any other game. I enjoy it until it bores me, and then i move on. I don't watch just one movie. I don't read just one novel. I don't play just one video game. And i certainly do not just play one MMORPG.
Some people enjoy prolonged entertainment or delayed gratification in their entertainment. Some people may enjoy the setting in which their game takes place.
Just as you get short stories, novels and series not everyone is going to enjoy the same thing or enjoy it for the same reasons. What you enjoy may annoy others.
I'm trying to understand what you are looking for:
You want MMOs to have better storylines
To be honest, I think some MMOs offer better storylines than others. The Secret World or Star Wars: The Old Republic have both good storylines. Tera was fine, though you only have a single main storyline to follow and little choice. Voice acting helps a lot. I'm currently playing Neverwinter Beta: the storyline isn't that great but the Foundry is a gateway to gigantic opportunities.
You want to grind at lower level
This one I'm having a hard time understanding what you mean. You want bigger zones like World of Warcraft 1.0? I could understand that you want leveling to take longer. But it depends from a title to the other. Tera was way too fast considering you only have one single storyline. Neverwinter is kinda fast though my main character is only level 23. I think Star Wars is a bit quick, but it's closer to my sweet spot. Rift is also kinda quick considering you have 2 main storylines. Though you can decide to focus on dynamic events for your next toons and so on.
Then you mention that end game consist of grinding the same dungeon until you get best-in-slot gear. I think that's a philosophical problem and I'm with you on that one.
Cash shops
As a gamer with a job I appreciate it a lot! Not having to pay a monthly fee also makes me much more willing to try or play many MMOs at the same time. You do have be careful with them though: Some games it's better just to subscribe (Star Wars) then just to buy your missing perks in the cash shop (Tera).
In conclusion, I don't see a 'trend'. You still have subscription, free to play and buy to play games, you have action or target mmorpgs, you have futuristic, sword and board, asian or world war 2 fantasy, and so on... But to me the best way to play a MMOrpg is to find a good group of friends and enjoy the ride.
Leveling too fast is my main issue. The one positive I like about cash shops is that it has almost eliminated gold sellers. If there was one thing I would like to be removed is boosts. Not just in the cash shops, but in drops, and guild perks.
Is it possible for me to play an mmo for years instead of months? I believe there is. I mean WoW did it for 7 years for me. I am always willing to give a game a chance. My desktop icons speak for themselves. I am loaded with them. lol
I think in WoW's case, Blizzard did well to release a lot of content (free or through expansion packs) every 2 years or so. Also you could level up many characters without doing the exact same quests, which helped a lot in WoW's replay value. That, combined with a very active pvp scene, are amongst the reasons which kept World of Warcraft so popular for so long.
Having that much content in WoW was more of an exception than a trend, in my opinion.
AC kept the updates coming before WoW but they were not on such a large scale. Lotro get the trend going after WOW, but I know of no other MMO with as many solid updates. But it is more of a side note on design than a trend, as you say. Player modded updates could be the key to maintaining end game interest, but that is fraught with issues.
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse.- FARGIN_WAR
Launch, sell box, run subscriptions until box sales die, go cash shop.
They have decided it's better to make a movie than make a TV show and work for season 2 renewal. With the death of subscription based MMO's is the death of persistent worlds and content development.
Canned MMO