What MMO have you been playing long term and what is the core reason you are still playing it?
Specifically an MMO you ve been playing consistently, not just for a month during an xpac launch.
For me it is New World, think it is the only mmo I ve managed to play long term and it is for one singular reason.
Your time is valued because resources are valuable since they craft max power gear, and since crafting isnt gated or capped every time you login there's something valuable to do. (Unlike achievement hunting)
In most mmos, crafting gives weak sub par trash gear with organized group content being the only source of good power rewards, that is thankfully not the case for new world which means crafting is valuable.
Crafting being valuable means resources are valuable, so is your time spending an evening doing nothing but farming runewood or orichalcum ore. You can login a day and just farm resources and feel great cuz you now have valuable items that can be used from crafting gear to making gold.
This solves two major issues, in most games once you get max gear or near max gear the game becomes quiet dead until the next gear reset, in other situations since resources are not timegated you can actually login and do stuff instead of having to wait for the weekly reset.
And all those things are only possible because devs realized raiders are not the center of mmos thus max gear is not gatekept behind group content and thus gives value to crafting.
Comments
Have not yet though. Maybe there is hope?
Nah there is really none for me or the human race.
For LotRO I like the atmosphere and the population. Granted I got pretty bummed out when they changed the character looks and my class (warden). Didn't help I'd just slogged through Mordor and was working on the next region which was also very dark and unappealing.
But I came back, skipped out of those regions back to the more up beat area and I'm playing again.
For DDO there's just no better dungeon crawl game out there. I'm going slow on my main, but like making new alts to go back through low level content.
SWG (pre-cu) - AoC (pre-f2p) - PotBS (pre-boarder) - DDO - LotRO (pre-f2p) - STO (pre-f2p) - GnH (beta tester) - SWTOR - Neverwinter
You know how a lot of MMORPGs make it so that in order to do progress, the optimal thing to do is to loop one thing endlessly? Farm the mobs in this particular spot, or run this particular dungeon a bunch of times, or whatever. In extreme cases, people sometimes figure out to create an instance, kill two mobs, then reset the instance, and repeat that for hours at a time.
You don't have to play that way if you don't want to. But if you just do what seems fun, then you progress far, far more slowly than if you turned the game into horrible grinding. Don't you hate that?
UWO actually breaks that in two ways. One is that there isn't a canonical set of goals for players to achieve. It's very open-ended, and players can, should, and commonly do have wildly different goals of what they want to do in the game. That's not just true for mid-levels, but remains true at the top end.
The other is that for pretty much any reasonable set of goals, the optimal strategy to get there is not to loop one thing endlessly. Rather, it's to do a lot of different things each day. And often a different collection of things from one day to the next. Even if you're obsessively trying to mix/max something, there are a bunch of things constantly changing in the game that make it so that the optimal way to do X is constantly changing.
ESO is the closest thing to DAoC PvP. I love Cyrodiil and would still be playing this MMO but for the really bad way Cyrodiil is optimized. Classes and builds are sloopy and everything that makes your character will keep getting the nerf bat. Keeping up to builds is a full time job. Also one of the best crafting systems I have played. If they fix Cyrodiil, I would happily just stick with ESO. Ashes is the next PvP game I am chasing and would drop it like a sack of crap if ESO got fixed.
EQ1 is my first MMO love. I have played it since launch and the best raids and raid progression I have played was is EQ1. I mostly go back to play my characters and say hi to friends still playing 20+ years later.
Right now I am playing every AAA games I have missed over the past 20 years, while I was only playing MMOs. 2 years of doing that has me itching to go back to a solid MMO. Just wish there was a new one that was quality.
There is a major new content patch every four weeks, and that has cumulatively meant that the game has a lot more content now than at launch. There have also been a lot of bug fixes and quality of life improvements, though the game wasn't in a very bad state on either of those counts, even on launch day.
That said, if the game were to launch today in the state that it is today, it would get about the same brutal reviews that it did at launch and for the same reasons:
1) An MMORPG that has combat but isn't primarily about combat is always going to be a niche game. It doesn't help that the combat is mediocre. One could argue that having auto-combat available is the most important feature of the combat, as it means that you don't have to fuss with it very often. Mostly you just turn on consecutive combat, then go AFK for an hour or whatever and come back to higher level characters. Ultimately, if you don't like exploration or trading, then you're not going to like the game, and it really is that simple.
2) If you look through the item mall without understanding what things mean, the game looks very pay to win. A lot of people log in, see the item mall, see the gachas, ragequit, and leave a nasty review. That would happen today for the same reasons that it happened at launch.
3) If you haven't played any of the Uncharted Waters games (including UW Online and the old console games), then the game is just very different from what you're used to. Things that people think they know what they mean from familiarity with other games don't actually mean what they think.
For example, if you log in for the first time and see your admiral's chronicle, it says go here, talk to this person, do that, and so forth. It may look very on-rails. If you focus on the chronicle, then after a while, you'll hit a wall where you're not high enough level to continue. That doesn't mean that you need to grind to level up before you can continue. It means that you're not supposed to focus purely on your admiral's chronicle as opposed to mixing in a lot of other activities.
People see the energy system and think that you can't play very much without running out of energy, or that you have to be a whale and buy energy to progress at a reasonable rate. That's what a lot of mobile games do. But the game doesn't sell energy at all, and only a handful of things in the game require energy. Even an account that was actively played for 24 hours per day by people rotating in shifts would only infrequently be limited by energy--and not much more so than an account that is only online for an hour per day.
People especially see the gachas and freak out. Having gachas selling S-grade mates for real money, and at absurdly expensive prices, looks very pay to win. For comparison, the free gacha (bought with in-game currency, not real money) has no S-grade mates at all, and A-grade only at very low rates (0.0311% each). What people don't realize is that the C-grade mates in the free gacha can be trained up to S-grade, or eventually SS-grade (though this is more limited), and those are the mates that high end players heavily rely upon.
4) The game really takes a different mentality to play than most other games. You're surely used to logging into a game, actively doing stuff for a while, and then logging out. When you're logged out, nothing about your character changes until the next time you log in. If that's how you try to play UWO, then you probably won't like it very well, as you'll progress way too slowly.
UWO is a semi-idle game. It's not a pure idle game akin to Adventure Capitalist, but there are a lot of situations where you set something up, then go AFK for a while, then come back in 20 minutes or an hour or whatever. Leave the game running for hours at a time, actively playing it part of that time, but just leaving it running in the background much of the time. You can stare at the screen the whole time, but you really shouldn't, as you'll get very bored.
Arranging your plans such that you do the stuff that requires you to actively play while you have time to do that, but are in position to leave the game running for consecutive combat or land exploration or long-distance travel or whatever while you're doing other things in real-life, is an important part of playing the game well. Which is to say, you can and should fit the game around your own real-life schedule, whatever it is, and the game will generally accommodate you unless you can only infrequently touch a computer at all.
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2024: 47 years on the Net.
Anyway happy New Year to everyone. I wish you all a great 2024.
Alas it only lasted seven years and even now almost nine years after its shutdown there is no valid successor to it in sight, not even at the farest horizon.
It's free with no agressive super-heavy restrictions (like no chat at all or "to buy this you need to be VIP).
It is low fantasy.
It is with cozy, normal graphic. Not 8 million colours and each mob explodes into 65536 parts, each of different colour. No super-sized items, like skyscraper-size swords, no "adult only" options.
It is of known IP, so - easy for me to immerse.
When I started, it had an option to roll good dps class and enjoy good dps. Not now, alas.
It has good members of community, even if they form some 0,2% of population.
You can be self-sustainable with crafting. Especially if you roll one alt.
Right now I am playing with some sort of disappointment (too many things nerfed, too many regions have no physical entrance and some co-exist in some 4 versions, all in different time)., lost illusion about "good community", and developers are just self-loving humans (nop wish to hear legitimate criticsim). Yet it is the only mmo that I enjoy.
Bloxd probably does not count as mmo. Even if I met more good players there within few months than in Lotro within few years.
http://www.mmoblogg.wordpress.com
The game is not perfect by any means and even among the multitude of different server types i can't say anyone of them has the kind of gameplay i'm really looking for. Still, it's the most enjoyable MMO gaming experience i've had since 2004.
- I like how the ranks (levels) are advanced through exploration, finding new monsters, and finding new resources.
- Gear cannot be repaired so there is value in making your own items or selling gear.
- Although half the map is PvP, there are very view outlaws.
- The orb system. Orbs are how you power up schools (magic schools, fighting schools), but these orbs are rare. You can imbue items to work around the orbs so you can be powerful, but still have the long term orb collecting goal.
- Everything you collect has value so there are reasons for advanced characters to run around in noob zones; and noobs can make good money farming items in noob areas.
I now have 4 homes all of which are strategically located so I can make my own stuffs. The game started out really slow for me but the further I get into it the more I appreciate its systems.How is inventory management? Do you run out of space fast?
There is plenty of inventory space in Fractured Online:
- You could fill a housing plot with chests if you wanted, and in fact, some people do exactly that.
- Some of the crafting stations hold inventory, for example, I store several types of wood logs in my woodworking station.
- Each bank is regional, so you have tons of storage in banks all over the place. Your gold wallet is global.
- Heavy items such as ore/wood/crystals/coal are transported by wagon and can be stored on your plot in those wagons. You can have as many wagons as you care to build.
I'm not finding storage to be an issue and friend guildmates to my home so when they're hunting in the area they can use my house to drop off loot for storage. They can take up several chests in my house and not crimp me at all - and I save everything.Which leads me to a funny story - one of the best PvP players on the server is a woman who asked for space at my house. She has filled a chest with incomprehensible riches she's looted off reds.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
Went to play Runes of Magic for a bit, was actually a relaxed play... some old school bright forest type leveling and questing stuff. actually contacted older players and had fun discussing the game mechanics(very nice dual class unique skills).
Getting actually tired of triple A's. for couple of reasons:
Forgot to mention THE NEW WORLD OF OF SIX SKILLS. very impressive, lets see old mmo action bar.