What could resurrect the MMORPG genre if anything? Is World of Warcraft really the last successful one?

This is just a child. Barely gnome-like.

number of gnome players skyrockets

Blizzard should hire you.

I mean Tera online wasn't some kind of fluke. There were a shit ton of Elins about simply because they bore some similarities.
Gnomes are short and ugly little gremlins, like goblins, hardly the similar to OP.

WoW is the king of rubble atm. The MMO genre is mostly dead with no real competition because all major studios decided to chase the fortnight and competitive shooter/e-sports craze and destroyed multiple studios trying to accomplish it. There is 100% a hunger for a new MMO, but the issue is that new MMOs can't be structured like WoW. You can't compete against WoW because you'll just be compared to a game with close to two decades of content and expansions. A new MMO needs to be structured more like an old school MMO where immersion is a key point of it because modern audiences crave escapism from the current shitty reality. If not, it has to be something truly unique or at the very least fun like PSO2. Small team based fighting with a shared lobby world that has lots of activities could also work. PSO2 casino was a very awesome thing to play with. Tons of fun doing casino games with randoms. More MMOs need stuff like that where it makes playing with randoms easy and fun, without forcing you.

Raiding definitely needs to be less of an emphasis going forward. Only trannies and hyper sweats care about that and they make up less than 1%. Most other people barely touch it, if at all. Crafting is another thing that is more or less something to put on the backburner. Immersion, satisfying grind, co-op events, shared activities in safe hubs for pure social fun, large world events, and DO NOT MAKE A CASH SHOP. They seriously need to stop selling mounts, armor, and other things. It ruins immersion, ruins visual progression, and makes a clear class divide in a fictional world. This shit needs to stop and greedy companies shoot long term for short term revenue.

Also STOP FOCUSING ON GRAPHICS. FFS it ruins the ability to have large scale content because it'll blow up most people's PCs. Poor people and 3rd worlders also can't run the game at all and they literally keep games like WoW and Runescape afloat at this point.

Prompts?

*plap*

(Continuing)
Don't be scared to go older as long as you have a good aesthetic. PS2, N64, or maybe even PS3 era at most would be good. Why? Because it's less taxing on PCs, requires less resources to make new content compared to high fidelity models, allows more people on screen at once, allows more monsters on screen, allows more intricate environments, and ages much better over time. WoW still looks decent despite its age compared to "realistic" Korea slop MMOs that came out after it. WoW also runs on just about everything while Korean games can sometimes run like ass even with older ones.

Finally, NEVER introduce pay to skip leveling or any sort of money advantage to an MMO. Use sub-based payment structure. People are used to subscriptions at this point for lots of things. They will 100% pay your sub if it's actually a good game. F2P does not work for MMOs in the West because we have no tolerance for P2W. Unlike the bug people, we will quit games if we see money giving you advantages, doesn't even need to be P2W. FFXIV made the mistake of adding a cash shop and it ruined the in-game cosmetics as the whales constantly had things that clashed with the in-game aesthetics or were given special mounts not available in the game, like large multi-seater mounts. It also ruined the focus of the devs as now the cash shop received some better items than what could be acquired in-game. You should be able to 100% an MMO's collection without a credit card.

TOO MANY FINGERS AND TOES
REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

Child

I don't see a problem here.

SLOP I LOVE SLOP, THE MORE SLOP THE BETTER

my tinkering skill is getting HARD

eso is absolute garbage
gw2 is completely cucked and near death
final fantasy is gay
im planning to play wow once the one button rotation releases in june

child, barely gnome-like

sex with Chromie (female)

Based take. The MMO genre lost its soul when everything became about instant gratification and lowest common denominator appeal. Immersion, community, and world-building were what made early MMOs addictive, not transmog contests and damage parses. The dream MMO nowadays would be something like old-school RuneScape mixed with the social spaces of PSO2 and the thematic immersion of something like Morrowind. A static game with no real player economy, no world simulation, no real reason to explore or interact outside dungeons is just not an MMO—it's a loot treadmill with chat. Devs need to stop designing games for hours played metrics and think long term again.

Forget MMORPGs, even good normal RPGs are hard to come by nowadays.
Game studios should hire more crackheads to write lore, and games should be designed around lore instead of relegating it to some item descriptions in the corner of the inventory menu.
Although Metzen is washed up nowadays, the stuff he wrote in the WC3 manual carried both WC3 and WoW for a decade.

Hot!

there will never be another MMO that tries to keep immersion sacred, higher ups are always going to push devs to put in paid content where your character does the floss dance or some other retarded shit.

If only gnomes looked like this and not the absolute abominations that they are.

sounds good to me

its gone a gnome serra

I don't think the current AAA industry is going to last much longer. GTA VI will likely be a success because of normies, but apart from that most AAA releases have been flopping and taking out the studios they're attached to. You have to keep in mind WoW came from a studio that had mostly been releasing smaller scale games until then. It was something really ambitious that had never been seen to that extent. Yes, MMOs existed, but WoW was trying to bring it to a mass audience for better or worse. The blueprints of how to make MMOs are there, it's just that a company needs to not make WoW2 and instead look at older inspiration or a mix of several. Almost every post-WoW game was just trying to be WoW but "better" and most of the time this meant graphics, which was a stupid thing to focus on. I don't think MMOs are dead, but we might have to wait for the western industry to crash before anything ambitious is made. Based on how many firings and closure have happened lately, it probably won't make it many more years if they continue to chase e-sports and fortnite.

short

pink hair

twintails

im gonna cum

as much as I hope the soft crash comes quickly. it's not going to bring in a renaissance of better games or anything. You already said yourself, the void is just going to get filled by quick microtransaction games with no content and gachashit.

The genre is dead because latency means wow’s gameplay is the best that can be hoped for. Every attempt at a “wow killer” just ended with a system that was either simply inferior or didn’t work. This isn’t an implication wow’s gameplay is good.

Game studios should hire more crackheads to write lore

This, nu-RPGs and nu-lore are JRPG-manga tier "the goddess is good, the demon king is bad" level fucking slop

What could resurrect the MMORPG genre if anything?

A MMORPG built around VR

You don't want MMOs to return. You want to go back in time and waste the best years of your life on WoW again.

low IQ take from Mr. Original

You are in your mid 30s.

Nope. You're a depressed tranny.

The death of discord and anything like it. And WoW is a shithole of an mmo as it is now. Successfull my ass.

impregnanting flat girls..... IMPREGNANTING FLAT GIRLS

IMPREGNANTING FLAT GIRLS IMPREGNANTING FLAT GIRLS IMPREGNANTING FLAT GIRLS IMPREGNANTING FLAT GIRLS IMPREGNANTING FLAT GIRLS IMPREGNANTING FLAT GIRLS IMPREGNANTING FLAT GIRLS IMPREGNANTING FLAT GIRLS IMPREGNANTING FLAT GIRLS IMPREGNANTING FLAT GIRLS IMPREGNANTING FLAT GIRLS IMPREGNANTING FLAT GIRLS IMPREGNANTING FLAT GIRLS IMPREGNANTING FLAT GIRLS IMPREGNANTING FLAT GIRLS IMPREGNANTING FLAT GIRLS IMPREGNANTING FLAT GIRLS IMPREGNANTING FLAT GIRLS IMPREGNANTING FLAT GIRLS IMPREGNANTING FLAT GIRLS IMPREGNANTING FLAT GIRLS IMPREGNANTING FLAT GIRLS IMPREGNANTING FLAT GIRLS IMPREGNANTING FLAT GIRLS IMPREGNANTING FLAT GIRLS IMPREGNANTING FLAT GIRLS IMPREGNANTING FLAT GIRLS IMPREGNANTING FLAT GIRLS IMPREGNANTING FLAT GIRLS IMPREGNANTING FLAT GIRLS IMPREGNANTING FLAT GIRLS IMPREGNANTING FLAT GIRLS IMPREGNANTING FLAT GIRLS IMPREGNANTING FLAT GIRLS IMPREGNANTING FLAT GIRLS IMPREGNANTING FLAT GIRLS IMPREGNANTING FLAT GIRLS IMPREGNANTING FLAT GIRLS IMPREGNANTING FLAT GIRLS IMPREGNANTING FLAT GIRLS IMPREGNANTING FLAT GIRLS IMPREGNANTING FLAT GIRLS IMPREGNANTING FLAT GIRLS IMPREGNANTING FLAT GIRLS IMPREGNANTING FLAT GIRLS IMPREGNANTING FLAT GIRLS IMPREGNANTING FLAT GIRLS IMPREGNANTING FLAT GIRLS IMPREGNANTING FLAT GIRLS IMPREGNANTING FLAT GIRLS IMPREGNANTING FLAT GIRLS IMPREGNANTING FLAT GIRLS IMPREGNANTING FLAT GIRLS IMPREGNANTING FLAT GIRLS IMPREGNANTING FLAT GIRLS IMPREGNANTING FLAT GIRLS IMPREGNANTING FLAT GIRLS IMPREGNANTING FLAT GIRLS IMPREGNANTING FLAT GIRLS IMPREGNANTING FLAT GIRLS IMPREGNANTING FLAT GIRLS IMPREGNANTING FLAT GIRLS IMPREGNANTING FLAT GIRLS IMPREGNANTING FLAT GIRLS IMPREGNANTING FLAT GIRLS IMPREGNANTING FLAT GIRLS IMPREGNANTING FLAT GIRLS IMPREGNANTING FLAT GIRLS IMPREGNANTING FLAT GIRLS IMPREGNANTING FLAT GIRLS IMPREGNANTING FLAT GIRLS IMPREGNANTING FLAT GIRLS IMPREGNANTING FLAT GIRLS IMPREGNANTING FLAT GIRLS IMPREGNANTING FLAT GIRLS

She's a cute gnome.

You want to go back in time and waste the best years of your life on MapleStory again

FTFY

WoW until Warlords of Draenor operated with distributed computing, the client not checking with the server, and the server updating in batches, which were of longer duration than expected, with a standard tick rate of 2.5, that's a window of 400 milliseconds.

anthro pussy....

White game designers, Asian character designers.

Same

WELL SAID

It's so sad. It's something I've "felt" for a long time without being able to put into words until recently. We've been living in an age where every single online game is a fucked up charcuterie board of every possible IP crossover clashing with the world they're in. It's been like this for so long now I think everyone has forgotten what it used to be like and believes it's always been this way. Especially young kids now who have grown up basically with Fortnite being the only gaming experience they have. Why should I spend time making a realistic soldier man in a game when I know I'll be playing in a match against bright neon pink cat ears helmets and Megan the stallion? I just want it to end. The problem is, going F2P with item shops has been so insanely profitable for these companies. Even selling every player a game for $40 and then collecting rent from a monthly subscription results in not even a fraction of the revenue made from battlepass-type games. If you're a profit-driven firm it doesn't make sense to make anything else until very recently where I feel many people are sick of it.

Also to keep in mind, 20 years ago when WoW released, computer gaming was much smaller than today. Most people did not play video games. The games were being made for a smaller, more focused audience of people who actually enjoyed playing them. Look at the depth of systems in Daggerfall or any CRPG. Being expected to sit down for a few minutes and actually read the manual of a game before playing was normal. New games are sort of implicitly designed to be able to be played by any middling IQ hog at Walmart who might have never even played a game before. It's like going to a movie theater where only children's movies are being screened 24/7. You'll never develop good taste and you'll be happy to eat the garbage fed to you over and over again. Immersion is not something people conceive of in online games anymore.

I would damn my sons to manletism if real midgets had these proportions.

I feel like mmorpgs had some popular games but was never a popular genre in itself. They have fallen off though.

Same, I'd be like Gilgamesh fucking and impregnating all the tiny women.

you'll always be overlooked for the desire of the almighty normie money, it is what it is.

kys slopper

AI art is awful at making smol characters in a set environment because it makes them look much bigger than they should.

An mmo thats not a themepark or themepark-lite. Attempts were made but they always end up getting cold feet halfway into development and end up redoing everything to emulate WoW.

Just make Ultima Online but 3D with a stupid as fuck huge procgen map and dungeons. MMOs saved, infinite content you can incrementally improve by adding more stuff to the procgen encounter and dungeon list to keep it fresh as the game ages. Its the simplest and most elegant solution to content.

cheongsams and similar outfits that drape down in front like that are so fucking HOT god damn

What could resurrect the MMORPG genre if anything?

banning phones

This is true for MMOs and other multiplayer games (both f2p and otherwise) but mostly absent in singleplayer open-world titles (Assassin's Creed, Elden Ring, Red Dead, Breath of the Wild, etc).
And when people (normies included) review these games they often talk about how "immersive" or "realistic" the worlds are, so there's some hope.

You're mostly right, but I think you're overestimating how much quantity of content actually matters.
1: People who play WoW usually aren't there to experience every zone and questline of Wotlk, Catacylsm, Mists of Pandaria, etc. Most of that content gets skipped deliberately or unintentionally on the way to the 1/2 latest expansions.
2: There's formats of content that give much more hours of gameplay per hours of development than the traditional themepark format.
Like how PvP MMOs use player conflict, or how Warframe or Spiral Knights used tile-based procedural dungeons, or how sandbox mmos use player-creation and extra grinding, or people replaying classic WoW or runescape over and over with different challenge modes.

What could resurrect the MMORPG genre if anything?

remove discord.
ban wikis. guides for singular things are fine.
force people to use ingame methods for communication and talk about how to do stuff.
nothing short of reeducating gamers and changing how devs make games and train players to play them will change how things are done.

To elaborate on 2, I think a themepark-like MMO could get a lot more out of its content by improving the dynamic event systems that RIFT and GW2 dabbled in, kept content reasonably difficult so that people couldn't do 100% of leveling solo, gave mid-to-high level characters reasons to return to lower level zones, and rewarded the creation of alts to keep people replaying content.

For me classic MMOs are dead. The target combat gameplay worked back in the day but at this point I'd expect something more sophisticated. The problem with this is that this requires much more server power with collision checks and so on and this doesn't scale well unless you push things to the clients side which invites hackers. I personally would still play a MMO with small group co-op gameplay like spiral knights but most games following this formula are mobile and games designed around mobile controls are always arse.

if wow gnomes were elins instead the game would have double the subs

sex with a artifact ridden sloppy loli

They need to be cheaper to produce and designed to have smaller populations. Also the companies behind them need to understand that MMOs are long term investments. Making foie gras with the hen that lays golden eggs is stupid.

Get rid of main character levels. It's poor design that relegates large portions of the game to being irrelevant or rushed through as quick as possible because the destination matters more than the journey.
Stop cosmetic cash shop items too. Dress-up and customization are core parts of an MMORPG and cash shop cosmetics undermine any attempt at having in-game cosmetic rewards or progression.

i'd say stop caring about cutting edge graphics, so you can make absolutely huge and immersive worlds to rival good old ones, like EQ and AO, much easier/cheaper, but that hasn't worked for projects like Pantheon and that not-Runescape one, etc.

but really, i think there has to be a way to appeal to boomers. that's most of the market. you need to make the game easy yet deep and satisfying - im not sure devs know how to even do that anymore. and absolutely huge. so even with datamining, open betas and all that shit that kills mystery, just make it so big and grindy that it gatekeeps zoomers and people that just want to warp to the instance for The Next Awesome Thing™ and their free epic lootz.

gw1, EQ1/2, FFXI, and old CRPGs likes Morrowind- an MMO doesn't need to look much better than that if it has a cool style. the size of those worlds make them immersive and evocative. graffix faggotry just makes them slow, 300Gb and prone to crashing. you want being in the game to be easy and snappy, fast UI and no/fast loading so you are comfy for hours.

sounds like sea of thieves. No levels and only cosmetic unlocks. It has paid cosmetics on top of the grindable ones but you cannot skip said grind by cashing.

MMORPGs were fun when nobody knew what the fuck they were doing.
Now people just wiki the fuck out of everything and expect everyone to know everything so they can skip everything to do fuck all on repeat.

Rare female artist knowing what men wants.

sloppa can almost emulate lilandy's artstyle

It'll be a bountiful day if it gets there.

lilandy

holy fuck you're right

Best I can do is another WoW clone that won't even run at 60 fps in the character select screen without a current gen gpu.

WoW needs to fix itself. That's it. If Blizzard stopped being shit we'd get better MMOs.

Release on console to pad player numbers

Discontenue M+

More focus on open-world activities

Revive the whole of the open world/older zones with new activities

Delves and Player Housing is a step in the right direction. Single-button rotation killed all of that good will.

I play SOD, HC, ANNI
and I WILL play LEGION remix

it'd be nice if all they stopped copying retail wows design and tried to emulate classic wow

vanilla wow was so successful because it's a better version of cookie clicker. retail fucked up the cookie clicker aspect really hard. get rid of most of the catch-up, stop being lazy with the gear and making everything budgeted towards ilvl, stop letting people skip raids, etc

Make everything completely random to kill builds and guides. Your character starts with completely random stats. No item, attack, or spell is the same, and the world is endless and uncharted in every direction. Then at the end of a season the world is destroyed and your character passes on his experience to the next generation.

I want MMOs to die, and for survivalcraft games to evolve from just punching trees on deserted primitive islands.

This post screams "I'm a retard that gets all my opinions from my e-daddy Asmongold" kek.

aka the average Anon Babbleermin

WoW should continue to do what its ancient playerbase is expecting from it. Blizzard doesn't care about bringing in new players. They already have a playerbase that has nowhere else to go.

mobile gacha have pretty much replaced MMORPGs

So to summarize from this thread:

account levels instead of character levels to disincentivize focusing on one character at the expense of the rest of the character content

create mystery and prevent information leaks to ensure people have something to discover (would making things as esoteric as they are in games like Noita work?)

substitute graphical fidelity for artistic expression and performance optimization to allow for lots of characters and big environments on lower spec PCs to ensure more people can participate

incentivize group play: avoid the pressure to turn it into a solo-able game

prioritize content that is accessible for medium and casual gamers: sweaty gamers can have some high skill content if it provides community server benefit like greater building abilities, new items or cosmetics for everyone, or server story progresion

prioritize artistic integrity to create a world that immerses people

Honestly, I think the thing that will replace MMORPGs will be Co-Op RPGs.

Just hear me out, the games will be something like Skyrim / Oblivion / Morrowind in terms of size and scale, but will have better interactions for storytelling, joining factions, bartering, combat, etc. You will be able to hop into the save file of your friend's game world and vice-versa and tackle quests together solving real-time puzzles and combat, owning a house, and roaming the game world near or far away from each other almost like in a private server.

We aren't there currently, though. As people still play MMORPGs that can run on toasters and closest to the above is shitty open-world crafting games like Palworld, enshroud, Valhime. Skyrim Together sounds close to what I'm suggesting.

That's all.

the whole appeal for me in MMOs was to explore a vast, interesting world. most MMOs neglect the development of the world in favor of gameplay or endgame. Probably because the biggest MMOs like WoW were always getting criticized for having bad or basic combat/gameplay

people say they want to play an MMO for the story, world and lore but they're just lying to themselves. they just like killing the bosses, getting upgrades and seeing the numbers go up

No, the only thing that will save us is, the Riot MMO coming in 2035

I want to play MMOs to interact with other players as we explore and uncover more about the world and level. But like nobody really interacts with each other in-game anymore and mostly uses discord.

There is also the fact that the games now have options to tell you where to go on the map and will automatically walk you to the location or teleport you. So no real reason to click to see where you need to go.

Datamine niggers also spoil everything along with endgamefags.

makes a clear class divide in a fictional world

What did he mean by this?

Almost every popular online game is about competitive PvP. Steam Charts is dominated by PvP games while PvE games come and go. MMORPGs need to focus on PvP to become relevant again.

Lilandy is a kino Loli artist

Yes, off model niggers are like this. News at eleven.

You forgot lore and story. WoW hit you with exposition 2 seconds into vanilla trailer because it works.

i think VRMMOs will be its chance for revival, VRchat with quests and shit, people have a reason to interact with eachother again in world and do shit together, but that requires VR to become commonplace and less shit

Part of that was in artistic integrity, but you are correct. I should clarify that it also includes inciting background lore to provide meaning, and effective story presentation to ensure the player is neither is bored nor confused.

Truthful & agreed

Yeah I think MMOs are actually over with

As addicting as an MMO loop can be, you can't compete with all the instant gratification entertainment there is these days. WoW became instant gratification and it just makes it pointless. Also the home PC is the only hardware appropriate for MMOs, and zoomers and boomers use phones and tablets unless they have a work laptop or something, so whatever MMO you make has to run on shit laptops that aren't even as common as they used to be. Also MMOs aren't novel at all anymore, and I don't see any tech breakthrough in the near future that can make their low bandwidth and processing gameplay more interesting.

How did the French manage to make the best MMORPG?

compared to a game with close to two decades of content and expansions.

bruh what. Every expansion you can't play the previous decades of content the fuck

DOFUS could be on tablets and mobile, there's already DOFUS Touch
the problem is Ankama didn't have cross-platform and made DOFUS Touch it's own thing for no reason. But they apparently plan to have a mobile cross-platform DOFUS.

Ankama is literally ran by the most inept people.

you had me til 'crafting needs to be put on the backburner.'
crafting is literally one of the most soulful things in most MMOs that don't rhyme with Shmorld of Warcraft, which eceleb gave you this opinion?

You don't want MMOs to return. You want to go back in time and waste the best years of your life on WoW again.

I felt this way spending a lot of time on wow in the BC era, I would type /played and get anxiety. Ironically I would later realize those were the good old days. I was having fun and making friends. Not only have I lost my old wow friends but I didn't make any new friends with classic relaunch, don't know if it was me or the players weren't the same.

You know what I really regret? Spending years on Anon Babble

You need anti-datamining and anti-reddit technology, less emphasis on player execution (though still some room for it), less emphasis on raiding, and more RPG elements in general.
MMORPGs were at their peak when 5 mostly sober teenagers could drag 35 drunk gamer dads through a raid or encounter. Knowledge should be the main power source in these games, but for that to be the case you have to

have some way to combat datamining/wikification so not everyone knows where everything is all the time

disincentivize posting big discoveries on reddit/youtube for updoots

I didn't make any new friends either in classic weirdly enough. I made some life long friends back in actual vanilla and TBC but it didn't happen the second time around. Maybe it was just luck who knows

Gno haha :D

We've been living in an age where every single online game is a fucked up charcuterie board of every possible IP crossover clashing with the world they're in

Do you feel how I feel? Like its anime and western animation, fantasy and science fiction, celebrity cameos, effectively genreless because its all genres and no consistent identity or world. I'm not even a lorefag but I can't suspend my disbelief to feel like I'm in a different place than real life when I see that shit.

False dichotomy, it's just both. Sometimes MMOs are campfires in the woods, sometimes its dopamine from lootslop

whats weird is people are addicted to tribalism, and with faction big team pvp your personal responsibility for losing is as low as its going to get. Yet blizzard hyper focused on arena for some reason and it wasn't even the fun pvp that brings out your inner psychopath.

sup MMO's

Wow is so carried by its opening cinematic and the opening voice over with the fly over when you make a character. Sure the game is good but few games hook you within minutes like that.

finally, a well-articulated point on Anon Babble

anti-datamining

That'd be more easy these days than you'd think. All the really generic surface-level stuff like mobs in the zones, standard gear, etc, don't need to be hidden. So what does need to be hidden?

ultra rare or zone drops

bosses and their mechanics

sekrits

With these things, all that would be needed is for the game server to detect the first time a player encounters them, then push a micro-update to everyone adding it to their installs database file(s). This could run anywhere from a mere kilobyte for some rare item, to a few MB for a boss(if we're assuming it has a unique model and textures). Boss mechanics could even be stored separately from the boss itself so that someone has to see it first(could lead to interesting situations if they don't use hard rotations and leave the possibility open of the first people to fight it not seeing something). Back in the day this wouldn't have worked so well(at least for people in-game rather than logging on and getting the updates) because not everyone was on broadband of any flavor. This is no longer an issue because for the most part, people in the civilized world have extremely high bandwidth internet.

If even that seemed like too high a bar, the game could very easily encrypt parts of its data, then using the same "someone encountered X for the first time" setup have the server push the decryption key to everyone for that specific chunk.

crafting and gathering in almost every game makes me so fucking mad man, literally just gather material and watch the bar fill to craft
how the fuck has not a SINGLE game put a minigame in for crafting or gathering? having it be a minigame would deter bots too

ffxiv you can only datamine a few hours before it goes live

Wildstar kinda did, though not as involved as you're probably talking about.

god i wish i had supported wildstar more, i was young and stupid
i uninstalled at level 30 because i got one shot by a questing mob and i thought it was unfair
also it was buggy as fuck on launch

I'm thinking it was the players back then. I was a retarded narcissist highschooler who knew nothing about the game, but pugs would take me on dungeon runs, people were chill and social, and they would run the dungeon multiple times with their friends coming to carry, and you stay in contact, join their guild, etc.

When I played the classic rerelease, everyone's time was so precious I wonder if only CEOs and ER doctors played the game.

I did have fun on wow hardcore of all places though. The community was better because you were in the same foxhole and people trust you to be competent even though the stakes are 100x higher. Just don't be underlevel or undertuned, which you wouldn't want to be for your own sake anyway. I had to quit though because blizzard fucked the mail for new subscribers so I couldn't keep any wealth after my characters died.

I never uninstalled it after it died. I still start it a couple times a year to hear the login music, and look at the greyed-out planet caused by no server connection.

Ultimately, Pandora's box has already been opened for this kind of thing, with everyone's communication being centralized to Discord. Even outside of gaming, I feel that everyone's ability to learn and retain information for later use has been absolutely wrecked by having constant access to the internet at all times on their phone. Same with everyone now having a second monitor that's permanently used for displaying wiki pages.

The enforcement of this seems tough. In a singleplayer game, you could rely on the individual player to recognize the value in discovering the world for him or herself, but in an MMO, the little aristocrats of the soul who want to do this would be left in the dust by the guy using 30 quest plugins and speedrunning guides on triple monitors. An invasive kernel-level anticheat that kills Discord processes would be fucking hilarious and awesome.

The worst example of late has been the spiteful hermaphroditic troglodytes at Bungie making an explicit decision to not have proximity chat in Marathon because of toxicity. Gamer cultural revolution is needed Now.

A game with a lewd loli race. It's how Tera and PSO2 survived for so long

private server soon tm tm

I don't use discord, can someone spoon feed me how it ruins MMOs? People leave discord up and only socialize with their discord friends inside or outside the game?

Is World of Warcraft really the last successful one?

GTA Online, depending on how anally you want to define the term I guess.

Back in the day this wouldn't have worked so well

Wow did this as a part of their netcode 20 years ago.
The client stored spells and items as relational database rows, which it requested from the server when it first saw them.
If you tried requesting item data from the server before anyone had properly seen the item since the last server restart, you'd get an error response (in the patches where it worked correctly).
I think they also use the encryption trick nowadays with cinematics, since those have to be predownloaded due to size.

this
something as massive as elden ring is fantastic with co-op like that and i want a game that specifically delivers that exact experience you're describing

anon there have been andava lora for fucking years

lora

The what?

I think the best way to stop datamining is randomization of basically everything important, or just having so many variations you can't read 20 contingency guides. Just make the game readable with situational awareness.

data doesn't matter at all in FFXIV because it has very little in the way of RPG elements.

Where does X drop?

The new raid or primal. The drops are homogenous across raid tiers. The items are all the same but with 1 or 2 substats switched. I can tell you, without having played the game in years, that the next tank body will have STR, VIT, and two of DET CRIT DHIT SPEED (and whatever other substat I'm forgetting). FFXIV is the most tragic game because despite having great presentation it barely qualifies as an RPG.

When you're using generative AI to make your slop you have the model, and you can add a loRA to that, which helps to fine tune the end image.
While not explicitly correct, you can think of it as a mini-model you add on thats trained on the specific thing.
So if I want an image in the style of aroma sensei, I use a lora that was trained on a bunch of her images, and you get her duck lipped blond bimbos out the other end,

Making discord a requirement for guilds creates a work atmosphere in the game that invades privacy and diminishes the player's feeling of freedom in a big world. I'd rather join the anti-social guilds that don't talk outside of recruiting for raids