MMORPG: Which one?

NWN persistent worlds will never compete with a proper MMO, there just aren't enough people playing for starters and they just don't work as well.

They are fun, I ran one for quite some time for a bunch of friends to play on but you really can't compare them to a fully fledged MMO.
 
I don't think PWs were what NWN's online component did best though... I think PWs were just an added bonus,and the main point of it was to enable GMs to run a game live over the internet - so basically to take that pen and paper RPG group and put it on the computer. I know that's not what most people used it for but I think that was its main innovation - to revive the live RPG group rather than to create PWs which were like mini-MMOs. No MMO can ever do that, in spite of Richard Garriot's frequent attempts to pop up in his own games and boss the players around! :p
 
I last logged onto WoW in november last year, and for some god forsaken reason im tempted to sign back up to it.

my guild has gone too far for me to catch up, so its probably a bad idea
 
manveruppd said:
I think you're wrong, people for whom WoW was their first MMO have become horribly spoiled by it - you should check out the AoC forums or the AoC thread on here, it's full of pointless little whines like "OHNOEZ THE COLOURS IN THE CHAT WINDOW ARE NOT LIKE WOW!!" or "I HAVE TO PUSH A BUTTON TO CHANGE WEAPONS ON MY CHARACTER IT'S NOT LIKE WOW!!" or "THIS SUCKS! I CAN'T SEE THE WORLD WHEN I TRAVEL FROM HUB TO HUB LIKE IN WOW!!", they get hung up on the tiniest little things and are annoyed by them to a huge disproportionate degree.

For me that's not a sign of how good WoW is, because most of the complaints I've read were truly petty. Rather, it's a damning indictment of just how these games (WoW possibly more than most, but true of ALL of them) are built from the ground up to be a completely addictive experience, offering mindless repetitive gameplay with the carrot of reward suspended just beyond reach. If people are so addictive to a particular MMO that they can't adjust to even the tiniest things in another, then I think that's indicative of just how addicted to the other one they are, not of how much worse the new MMO is.
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Hmm - if I'm wrong then are you speculating that people are happy in their current MMO and don't want to move on to another one?

Silly nit-picking complaints about a new MMO's way of doing things seems to indicate people are trying it - not staying put.

I no longer go to the forums for MMOs unless I'm specifically looking for something. The noisy minority there rarely has anything useful to say. Perhaps there is a generation gap here - older people who have been with computer gaming since the start would have a different attitude to those who came in later after the money men took over everything and now promote games as something to be bought, consumed and thrown away. The old hands wouldn't expect standardisation across multiple games. Thinking cars for a moment - the controls on cars are all pretty standard now but it wasn't always like that. Somehow the current layout became the accepted standard. No reason something similar shouldn't happen in computing - after all that was one of the main reasons we all accepted the Windows interface.

You speak of new games being worse than WoW or well established MMOs. My point is that people are waiting for something MUCH better, not just the same. There's no real point killing skeleton thingies, furry toothy thingies and beweaponed nasty thingies in a new game from scratch, when you've been doing it in your old game for years. You might as well stay put. Many aspects of any new MMO will be worse than WoW upon release. They won't have had years of cash flow, development, bug fix and fine tuning. I think it is the big new idea people are waiting to see. Sadly the money men think success lies in just doing the same old things over and over again.

An MMO is a time sink for players. It has to be. Endless repetition of something fairly simply is the only way to give people things to do in such a game. We gamers can consume about 1000 times faster than developers can develop.

What you describe as adiction is actually narrow-minded over familiarity.

The real issue of computer game addiction at the expense of real life is actually quite worrying.
 
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