When did MMOs stop being good?

nah that's not the problem

miss ffxi so much but would never play "classic" ffxi again

ffxi > wow and i'll never say otherwise

based

They were never good. Single player focused and small scale PvP/PvE was and will always be superior.

EQ1

WoW ruined them.

Somewhere after WoW Cataclysm.
No one wanted to do anything different, everyone just trying to ape WoW but not even half the polish or interesting stuff.
Everyone lacked focus, either going pvp heavy or pve heavy, usually somewhere in between and failing both.

WoW Classic never topped.

You're wrong, he's right. It was a huge problem and just embolden solofags even more. Which is why MMOs are nothing gachas with a mandatory sub now.

Always has been. It's been hard filtering out WoW players for 20+ years too. You have to have played both to have an unbiased opinion thought, which is the true and correct opinion.

they were never good, people were mostly excited about what they could potentially become if ways around the laws of physics were found

Vanilla was good

t. zoomer that never played MMOs back in the early 2000's

/thread

SOVL

mmos went to shit as soon as they required you pay a subscription to play

lol

Truth

Yeah this. Original UO was cool because it was the wild west.

Around the time WoW became such a commercial success that everybody tried to copy them, sending the entire genre into a two decade long deathspiral it has yet to recover from.

Is catseye xi good?

My favorite Cataclysm moment was casuals complaining about the difficulty when it came out because people can’t stay put the fire.
Ghost walker goes and writes a 200 word essay on why hard wow is good.
The very next patch, every 5-man is nerfed

Subscriptions exist to keep turd worlders out. You must be one of them.

Has anybody here actually played UO? I tried a couple of times in the mid 2000s but couldn't really get into it. The first MMO I played for a longer time was Lineage 2. I kinda hoped Darkfall Online or Mortal Online would be a good successor, but they both ended up very disappointing.

I don't know what caused MMO's downfall, but it sure as fuck wasn't this. Going F2P is a sure sign that the game is about to die.

Instances with the unholy trinity and non tradable items meant the game was single player from day 1. All dungeon finder did was make it clear to those who somehow didn't realise this.

So only MUD's were okay? Cause even before the MMORPG term was created, the online RPG games like Meridan 59 or The Realm required subscription fee.

Same I tried a bit of UO and NexusTK but lineage II and FF11 were the first MMOs where I actually got addicted, reached high levels, became a part of the community etc. basically the MMO experience

That's not WoW's fault, that's the inept competition desperate to recover after being utterly mogged by the greatest MMO to ever exist. Success breeds jealousy, no doubt you can tell just by reading posts in this thread

This

These definitely contributed more to the problem than DF.

Having most communications between players happen outside of the game is what killed it for me.

sovl overdose critical hit on my mind

WoW's success was certainly not for its gameplay decisions, and yet every copycat tried to do just that and turn into the stalest boring dogshit with no innovation whatsoever.
Even MMOs that predate its success ended up completely revamping their system for the endless gearscore treadmill because that's what hooks people.

Yeah, man, it became an industry leader and everyone tried to copy it because... it had bad gameplay decisions. I'd say that checks out. Of course, EQ and the like don't just have insufferable self-obsessed fanbases, they were also made by insufferable self-obsessed people. The exact kind who would just start copying an obviously inferior product, right?
Get real.

Of course, EQ and the like don't just have insufferable self-obsessed fanbases, they were also made by insufferable self-obsessed people

Said "insufferable fanbase" went on to make WoW.

Who the hell is still playing WoW in 2025? Pretty sure even Lineage II has more active players, that shit has like hundreds of different (non-english) private servers and each one has an active community

Are you forgetting the heavy advertisement campaigns for a genre that was an actual novelty to be able to talk to people from other parts of the world? You know, before voip clients and discord ruined that? A massive fucking seamless world that was basically unheard of in most games of that era?

The game itself was ass, has always been ass, and will always be ass, and every clone of it will continue to be uninspired boring ass.

MMO’s were always a novelty with limited shelf life by combining an online chatroom with a simplified RPG that necessitated group play to overcome challenges. The more a game moved away from group play with things like hirelings, LFG, “soloable content” etc. was when the social aspect began to die, which left a mediocre at best rpg aspect that very few games bothered to try and make more complicated (the exceptions being Ragnarok online, DDO, Rift etc. being the few exceptions to the trend of overcasualization) because it hard filters who keep your game alive. Add in the mass popularization of social media and guides and that social aspect became even more diluted.

that shit has like hundreds of different (non-english) private servers

Nobody wants to play with russians and brazilians

A small portion, sure. A guy named "tigolebiddies" being insufferable was obvious even back in 2004 and beforehand, retard-kun. But insufferable as he was, he and his teammates obviously did something right if the rest of those insufferable shitheads ultimately bent the knee the way they did, failing miserably when they tried not to.

Are you pretending MMOs were the only way people communicated across the world before Ventrilo and Discord came along? Are you just a total idiot or what?

When wiki troons removed the element of free form play and discovery from the game and forced everyone to play the meta in an effort to rush to the end game content.
Back when MMO were good, getting to Max level was seen as an accomplishment that most players would never do. Usually you'd just hang around easy areas making friends and grouping up to play dungeons.
Now there's role queue and every piece of content is perfectly tuned so that even the most brain dead is expected to clear it the first time.
Basically you can't have fun back because the Internet and wikis ruined the genre.

True but I dont wanna play with discord trannies either
Guess I'll just go back to singleplayer RPGs

Final Fantasy XI is the only video game that matters

ive been playing uo since 1999
i mostly play on hybrid now but i still have my OSI account

Yeah, they were the shiny new casual friendly MMO.

I'm older than you and played more mmos than you ever knew existed.

never played everquest but these legacy of steel guys seem based as fuck
It's apparently free on steam? what are the limitations?

They never were.

did you ever play 2moons?

for me it was yogurting

Unfortunately that's the way it is with MMOs. Can't have anything nice anymore.

every old MMO needs to add trusts / mercenaries now

and contiues

Stopped reading right there and discarded. If you are going to make a wall of text infograph, pay attention and try not to fuck it up; retards.

I wish I knew anyone that still played it. We never even made it to Dynamis - Xarcabard

LoS were faggots, kill yourself.

ALL online multiplayer games stopped being good when discord became popular.

EverQuest is a very cool world with a couple of very fun experiences that’s watered down by literal hundreds of hours of bullshit and tedium. Not even Project1999 saves it due to all the content being completely and very few new players joining so you will be stuck for the vast majority of your time playing content solo that was never meant to be played solo, waiting 2 minutes between mobs to recover your health. Also most of the systems are obtuse and poorly explained so you will need the wiki in another tab to understand what you are supposed to be doing

I still remember that one time my bitch mom kicked me out of the house and I had to go to my fat faggot friend's house to spend the day and he introduced me to this new MMO he was playing (FFXI)
Take me back

WoW did quests, combat, class balance, UI, server stability etc. all better than EverQuest. There’s a reason it died off so quickly once newer MMO’s became popular

Based

One of the more retarded zoomer takes. Vanilla WoW was a complete and utter masterpiece of a game and if you can't recognize that then you have no soul. The zone design and music alone are enough to make it one of the best games ever made. I say this as someone who spent the majority of my teens obsessively playing Everquest along with most every other mmo made during that era.

MMOs "stopped being good" AFTER WoW is because WoW was so good and so successful that other companies stopped trying to innovate and just started trying to make WoW clones. Before that it was a genre full of innovation, some more successful and some less, and you had lots of generic but not too bad games like Asheron's Call or the Star Wars mmo, or more ambitious stuff like Dark Age of Camelot.

All that came to an end after WoW but that's not WoW's fault but the fault of lazy developers chasing that success rather than trying something new. If you weren't there at the time then you have no context.

There are a lot of factors why modern MMOs are less appealing games to me but I think an easy historical indicator is when devs gave up the idea of connecting people from all over the world. A lot of early MMOs had a huge ambition that you were playing with people from other countries and able to share an experience through the language of the game. Even if you couldn't completely speak to each other you both understood what the game required and could have an adventure. Now everything is segregated by region because people would rather just have low-latency action gameplay than have a meaningful interaction with someone far away. I think that perfectly encapsulates when the ideals of the genre became lost.

When korea became greedy

so you stopped reading at the very end?

Came here to say something like this.

When you make that post, you're meant to post a good MMO, not slop.
MMOs were never good. Not a single MMO in this thread is good. It's all numbers/grinding autism for stupid retards who cannot separate the social experience they had AND the game itself.
There's a reason the genre is dead.

I've been having more of an interest in trying FFXI, is it fun?

I know I'm a minority but I actually hate the over reliance of modern MMOs, and actually all modern RPGs, on completing "quests" rather than just engaging with the mechanics in the way you want to.

Old school EXP grinding where you just try and find a camp that works and make a plan to earn XP as efficiently as you can, feels a whole lot less like a job to me than having to complete arbitrary and pointless "quests" that all require different shit

The specific point where I identified the end of the genre was in MoP when they started merging servers and having instanced zones shared by a bunch of different servers. It was the end of feeling like you were in a shared world with a static community and the beginning of worthless interactions with faceless people you would never see again.

Dungeon finder wasn't a problem before this because you were still being matched with people from your server, people you'd see out in the world and people who would remember you if you were especially good or bad. Once you started being matched with people from other servers, all that went out the window. Being part of a community gives people an incentive to behave but when your groups or the players you meet in the world are people from other servers who you'll never see again, there's really no point to making an effort to socialize with them.

It's the best game I have ever played, and I used to be an MMO-hater who only played it because I wanted to play every FF game

ctrl+f

Secret world

zero results

A good, new, innovative mmo was released back in 2012 and nobody gave a fuck, game predictably turned to shit and jews jewed what they could with a "remake" before abandoning it.

If people played it, would have been cool.. but no, rather spend money on a tranny dragon in wow to ride on.

MMOs always had region-based servers, the hell are you smoking? Except launch UO.

lying on the internet

I am bested lil'zoom, I /kneel.

It sucks ass now you have to pay gil for anyone to even think about helping you. And the towns are just filled with mercenary spam.

Do Secret World Private servers exist?

It's a shadow of its former self but still better than anything else still on the market. Just remember that these days the early portion of the game is essentially an extended tutorial you will be playing with yourself and NPCs, but the spirit of community and co-op progression is still alive at endgame

They were never good.

started playing EQ for the first time several weeks ago

not true. It started with Burning Crusade and the pandering to try hard sweat lords.

It was like that even in 2006 bruh. I would run BCNMs and people would only join if I paid them upfront or promised a cut of the profit if Peacock Charm dropped

you missed out

people never talked outside of any of any other game except for MMO's, therefore the genre was never... le good!

Most retarded take possible

this is and always will be the king
7 (or 6 if you can afford 120 scrolls) skills across the board, gm em, and start nuking niggers
hopefully you can afford the artifacts required now
or just play hybrid and ask lamb of god or a chia pet for a 7x skillball

go look at videos of people playing it
does it look fun to you?

secret world quests were kino
sadly, the combat was unbearably bad and the remake made it even worse
to this day, I've not found an MMO with better quests than TSW. People talk about Runescape quests but the fast majority of runescape quests are either just outright chores or simple skill checks.

Were you in Asura? I think that's where all the money grubbing pricks were even back then.

What people who make/post pics like this don't understand is that the "pre-raiding" portion of MMOs is the part that takes years to develop. No matter what you do, people will complete is faster than you can make more.

I've never gotten a good response from these people on the problem of the MMO endgame. What do you expect people to do once they reach max level and there are years to go before another expansion comes out? There's no way to avoid repeating content at that point and so far the only viable options for an engaging, lengthy endgame are very difficult raids that take a long time to clear or pvp.

What alternative would you suggest?

This. Pre-2005, most MMOs played very differently from each other.

Grinding and co-op plan/execution gameplay is not for everybody I understand, but FFXI legitimately has better job design than the majority of single player RPGs. Just coming up with new possible party combinations and unorthodox strategies to clear challenges is so fucking fun. I don't even play any more but I still get the itch to test out new ways to beat bosses with unique party combinations

I was playing MMOs and MUDs since before you were born.
I just have a brain, you don't.

it's a great time and even after playing a lot, it's the only mmo for me that still has an air of mystery about it
HorizonXI is your only real option for a modern 2007~ era private server and it's alright, but has issues
you can also play the retail game and power through the story solo with the Trust NPCs if you just want to see the content, but you won't have much of any of a social experience that way

When the players stop interacting with the players within the game's built-in method of communication the sense of a living world/community is gone when everyone is just relying on third-party voice chat. Also when players only care about following quick leveling guides and how-to guides to finish quests and also using guides to defeat raid bosses instead of trying to learn from trial and error.

EvE didn't. The international competition was key in that game. You actually had to group up with people from other timezones to get a head. nta

fpbp
eat a bag of shit, wannabe boomer

Ironically this also fostered playgroups better imo than forcing people to quest together.
I do miss the grind sometimes, though I doubt I could still do it today. Some overnight convos with the bros happened while we plvled shit strong enough to yield the highest level of XP for our level range.

Yes
Play on Catseye, it's the best private server

the first second that someone said " I have a wife and kids, how am I meant to play?!" and anyone gave them a gram of attention. That was the death knell of the mmo

when disney killed toontown

A: When WoW codified the genre and turned every game after it into the same boring grindfest
B: When developers started catering to the same 20 no-lifers who always complain about running out of things to do because they play 100 hours a week
C: When datamining became a thing and everything gets spoiled the moment a patch drops, if not before
And most of all, the ongoing push by developers against any sort of meaningful interaction between players, effectively removing the social aspect from them and turning players into glorified NPCs. You could make everyone in WoW outside the player's guild a bot and nobody would notice.

True. Nowadays some games let people move to different servers, so your guild would not only be forced to interact with faceless people, but the people you did get to know would sometimes transfer to another server.

What's her name though?

Never played EvE, is latency not a problem in combat?

no rebuttal

I accept your concession. I'm sorry you were born too late to experience these games the way they were meant to be played.

christine huang, but that is her only good webm

time dilation is the term you're thinking of. As there are more players in an area, time slows down. So massive fleet battles turned into turn based affairs

When developers started catering to the same 20 no-lifers who always complain about running out of things to do because they play 100 hours a week

This happened? When? Seems like MMOs started catering to people who don't have time to play MMOs, so now you have dailies, weeklies and gearing being invalidated every new patch so returning players can easily catchup.

Thanks anons I'll give it a shot
Private servers?

fuck yea it is on large scale battles

I played UO, projecting chromosome hoarder.

Old school EXP grinding where you just try and find a camp that works and make a plan to earn XP as efficiently as you can, feels a whole lot less like a job to me than having to complete arbitrary and pointless "quests" that all require different shit

100%
There was an enjoyment to making a dungeon xp group that doesn't exist in a quest-xp-driven environment. In a world before party finder, you would just grab the first handful of dorks that were in the same level range that you could find, meet up somewhere safe, and then cut your way to the dungeon, then you would try to set up in a safe spot where you could start killing everything in sight. There were tons of little things that could go wrong; wandering mobs could roam into agro range and turn easy fights into struggles for survival, other groups in the area could flee monsters who they were fighting and risk getting extra mobs to attack your own, you would have to deal with inter-party problems like different skill level players or different abilities you have access to and such, tons of little things. It all felt way more vibrant and interesting than doing quests, because a quest has a very particular goal and a very particular way of going about it, whereas "get xp by killing things" just involves killing things, and there's a lot of different systems you need to engage with to kill things efficiently.

Wtf, that's interesting, but I doubt that'd work in a traditional MMO.

This happened? When?

Everquest specifically with the group that the Overwatch guy, Jeff kaplan, used to run with. He and his pals sent so much shit to the devs of Everquest that it made them focus more on the devlopment of the endgame instead of the entire world for every player.
This model was seen as successful by Blizzard and that's why the current "endgame is the only thing that matters" plague came to be.

No you weren't, and no you don't. Feel free to post proof indicating otherwise (you won't).

what do you mean? eve is a traditional mmo, the same issues that you are imagining in a traditional mmo are the reason why people don't like time dilation. It takes fucking forever to resolve big fights and you're basically locked in place waiting

Mabinogi is the only current MMO where I still feel like exploring and trying new things is fun and the core of the game.

And even Mabi suffered from casualization, when they introduced Blaanid's quest that just gives you midgame gear and skills and skips 80% of the game.

Unpopular opinion

Guild Wars was actually responsible for the hot garbage that we are dealing with right now because the game allowed you to finish a lot of it with just NPC Henchman resulting in a singleplayer experience in online games

inish a lot of it with just NPC Henchman resulting in a singleplayer experience in online games

So did Diablo 2.

Guild Wars wasn't an MMO.

Is Mabinogi the only MMORPG you are playing? That might explain it.

It wasnt but it was nontheless very popular and effectively the only counterforce to WoW for a time.

subbing incentivizes the devs to waste as much time as possible. You're the brownoid if you can't understand this.

No one wants to admit it but the solution to stop everyone from just looking up strategies on the wiki is to make leveling up take a really long time again.

Oh the wiki says this fight is easy with a Paladin and a Cleric? Well it takes a long as time to level those up and there's not an appropriately geared Paladin and Cleric both online right now. So we can wait a week to try and get the guys from the wiki strategy or we can just try out a new strategy with the people we have.

nooo i'm retarded so you have to be retarded

even normies moved on from dogshit mmos and they can realize retarded skinner boxes aren't worth anyone's time

except for you
you wallow in your stupidity
you see the number going up and you clap like a seal, then barely remember to breathe before wiping the drool off your chin
among retards, you are THE retard, and I really mean that. gaming has a lot of terrible genres full of idiots, but to unironically play MMOs in the current day, ESPECIALLY because of nostalgia, you have to be a special kind of retarded, I actually pity you, but then again, maybe it's nice. I wish I was so easily amused.

I really enjoyed my time playing there.

The best MMO of all time was actually the online sandbox mode of a facebook game called cube wars because I met my first 3 online girlfriends there

There is nothing wrong with World of Warcraft.
The ONLY problem is the players in general
MMORPG fans are disgusting for one simple reason: they demand that every mmorpg must be free. They refuse to support the people and infrastructure behind the game.
Asking a MMORPG player for $30 a month is like trying to get garlic from a vampire.
In other words, MMORPG fans are nothing more than parasites who refuse to give anything in return. The niggers of the gaming environment.
Almost every major MMORPG has tried to be fair and go for the subscription business or/ xpac model, but the players said no! it's too much for ... too expensive... Everything must be free!
Now, Lineage 2, Wildstar, TERA, Tabula Rasa, AION, Rift, SW Galaxies, ... and many other are dead or have become a p2w abomination because of this nigger mentality of the mmorpg players.

I've played every MMO listed in this thread. Again, stop pretending like everyone is as retarded as you.

You might as well claim Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas also influenced WoW because it was also a popular game that was released in 2004.

Pre-WoW MMOs were full loot PvP sandbox games that would filter 99% of modern MMO players.

This is a really good post that showcases the environment that I enjoyed most when I played MMORPGs between 2007-2012.

paragraph of text with no proof

That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence
Keep screaming impotently into the void I guess, dumb zoomer

Thats a silly proposition because GW and WoW are much more alike than GTA and WoW.

umad?

i think the general landscape of people playing games has just changed too much for MMOs to exist like they did back then, in the same way that something novel like Omegle for actually meeting people is no longer viable because there are just too many bots, faggots, Indians, and predators on it now.

What about PKO/TOP or FLYFF? That's the pipeline I took to eventually reach Mabinogi, but haven't played in a decade.

they were never good, they were a novelty that has been slowly fading since the rise of social media
these days, the only people still playing are people horribly addicted to the genre or people who have spent so much time on a game they can't let it go

Cataclysm

Played XIV

Bought Expac plus subbed

Learn they used my sub money to make dogshit like forespoken instead of back into XIV

They have the nerve to add more shit to the cash shop

Take longer between patches only to deliver paper thin content

unsub

Game is bleeding subs

They got what they fucking deserved

They have about as much in common as Soccer and Football does. Hey, they both involve balls in fields and moving balls across those fields. Same thing, right?

My favorite Cataclysm moment was casuals complaining about the difficulty when it came out because people can’t stay put the fire.

Man I remember that. I was having fun being a healer and having to actually manage my mana. One greater healing wave was like a third of it.

I loved doing that in Age of Conan because it would always result in PvP during release because there wasnt enough quests for you to level up. I still vividly remember two 24man groups duking it out regularly for the grinding spot in the last are (at release)

The landscape didn't change, the sales standards did. An old style MMO could probably release today and get the same niche playerbase than MMOs had back in the day. But that's the thing, MMOs back then were expected to be niche. Modern MMOs are expected to rope in everybody and their mothers. What was considered a good subscriber base for an old MMO would be considered low and not worth the investment today.

samefagging "le social aspect" over and over

Zoomie, you were a fetus when these games came out, please leave this thread.

The thing I don't understand about this is that the old MMO playerbase was almost entirely composed of adults with jobs and many of them had wives and/or kids.

I don't think so anon, I think that people and gamers are just totally different now. Even those hardcore MMO fans are different imo.

So did anyone play Erenshor? The dev was on Anon Babble a few weeks ago, apparently it's some new MMO which is not really an MMO? It's like a fake simulated MMO where every "player" is fake

it has nothing to do with how long it takes, it's what you DO in it
leveling up being called leveling up, even by definition, means it's a means to an end

that's the fucking problem
leveling up shouldn't be a phase, it should be a byproduct of playing/enjoying the game. Leveling up should be THE game.
Why, instead of having me collect 5 bear asses to see a number go up by 1%, don't you have me do something interesting? Give me a real challenge, that not everyone is going to be able to beat without ingenuity or player skill?

ablooo but then people will get stuck!!

good
that's the point of a fucking videogame
you get stuck and try to get past it by getting better or by teaming up
i don't understand this whole perspective nowadays that games are just some kind of experience you cruise through where the point is to just see everything in the game and god forbid a player can't do something or might miss something
what a fucking retarded bunch of shit
THAT mentality is why MMOs aren't good
because they only want your time and nothing else
an MMO should be interesting and stimulating from the moment you start playing it
and the concept of endgame in itself is fucking stupid
if the game itself is fun enough and you add enough variety to it, people won't need some shitty endgame gimmick, they'll just play through the game again.

oh I agree, my dad used to work 8am-7pm, get home, boot up FFXI on his PS2, and play until like 3am, get a few hours of sleep, and repeat. I'm assuming most of the ppl he was playing with were the same.

MMOs cater solely to raidtrannies and utter casuals that actually want to play stardew valley but with an ERP chat, there is zero inbetween.

Dunno the other two but I played a ton of Flyff when I was younger and have very fond memories of it.

Complete garbage pile of game. Nice music.

This is a good take.

Also: the IRL grind makes playing MMOs that much less desirable. MMOs were peak between 2000-2010 (or so; argue this with me). That just so happened to coincide with two deep recessions coupled with low inflation. It was economically viable to stay at home playing videogames with strangers for long periods of time, both because the job market sucked AND because your purchasing power wasn't getting rekt every 3 months. We've been near full emplyment since 2012 with relatively high inflation since 2020, so everyone's daily quest is going to work.

UO is sandboxslop, zero soul

Yeah, I know about Tigole, but MMOs aren't really designed for no-lifers anymore. Everything worth grinding has a daily or weekly cap to prevent no-lifers from gaining an "unfair advantage" over Bob who can only play 2hrs on the weekend.

both are online rpgs

both focus on group content and group interaction

both have pvp that pits players against each other

difference is that one is instanced and one is open world

gw focuses the character strength on builds and skills while wow on itemization of which both are obtained by doing pve (at least at the beginning)

I bought and I still have the original FFXIV 1.0
Months later it got shutdown and later I received a single-player, labeled as mmorpg, transvestite called A Realm Reborn.
FUCK ME!

The other two were two slightly different versions of the same base game, Pirate King Online and Tales of Pirates.
Definitely agree with you on Flyff.

The first M in MMO stands for "Massively" which was used to denote that the majority of zones in the games were shared, non-instanced spaces capable of holding hundreds of players. Any game where you only see all the other people in towns/lobbies and then most of the world is instanced does not and never had fit the definition of MMO. The first M was added specifically to denote a difference from that type of game.

ffxiv is so fucking weird because playing it now you can see that there were the trappings of an mmo there, but EVERYTHING has been gutted out. There is no purpose to the overworld now at all. All that beautiful scenery and music for nothing. Was it full of stuff at release?

I never played Age of Conan, but I did play Dark Age of Camelot, and yeah very similar story, although DAoC did it in a realm vs realm context where nobody on the same realm could attack one another, but you could attack different realms (there were 3 such realms, each one with a different set of classes), and the best xp spots were always in areas where each realm could fight other realms.

Instanced MMOs were such a fucking mistake.

An old style MMO could probably release today and get the same niche playerbase than MMOs had back in the day

No anon, just no. No they can't. Project Gorgon couldn't do it, Embers Adrift couldn't do it, Fractured Online couldn't do it. Legends of Aria couldn't do it. No private server of any MMO that existed back then will ever see close to the same numbers the same games had back then. The landscape has definitely changed.

it's dogshit. usual gm cliquery and it's just a crappy retail knock-off for third worlders who don't wanna pay a sub.

It's amazing how 1.0 graphics still look superior to the current game. This was built for PS3 by the way.

come to jhelpm farms and say that to my face faggot, youll be enjoying a grey screen within seconds

An amazing game but at least 40% of its quality was created by the people who played 15-20 years ago. You simply cannot go back there, I'm sorry.

I want to go back. I unironically loved 1.0

Private server when?

I appreciate you chiming in but I have personally noticed that efforts at explaining such thing is mostly lost on zoomers because their only point of reference is garbage like modern WoW or FFXIV where all content except an overworld area is instanced, so you are essentially never needing to engage with more than 3-5 people at any given time. They don't know games like that existed because no "MMO" has tried being massive in the past 15 years.

GW1 is western fantasy PSO. It was not a counterforce to WoW in the slightest.

2008

Don't forget

Make an expansion MSQ so shit that it makes base Stormblood look like a masterpiece in comparison

This thread is making me want to go back, but I gave everything away when I quit and I had so much it'd be hard going back to having nothing while also playing catch-up.

What MMO has / had the most complex and autistic combat?

no "MMO" has tried being massive in the past 15 years.

it's because you can't moderate and curate a player driven experience, which is the antithesis of modern game development. so they make a five player lobby and proclaim it an mmo because you can see other users in town (but you can't communicate other than emotes, of course)

It also never actually released on the PS3.

Did you never play the FFXIII trilogy?

Personally I think it has more to do with the sheer volume of games that exist today. The central premise of an MMO is an environment where tens thousands players are all playing and interacting with one another, if not hundreds of thousands. There just plain weren't as many different games one could play in the "golden age" of MMOs. How can you achieve the same environment if so many different games vie for player attention that you can never get the raw numbers needed to make your central game concept work? Even relatively popular games like XIV feel utterly barren in sections of the game that aren't current-year content. Between that and the advent of AI, it makes me think that the devs that references may be onto something where you just have to fake things, deranged as that may sound.

ruins final fantasy

how can one game be so based?

Mabinogi has like 400 combat skills and endgame requires you to weapon swap to use all of them stacking various buffs and debuffs while weaving between cds and using movement skills.
Top play requires thousands of hours to make your set of gear and will take just as long to learn to play.

This difficulty is being dumbed down and wow-ized as we get closer to the Unreal Engine remaster of the game.

google meta

Leveling in modern MMOs is also complete dogshit with how they scale everything where your character is actually WEAKER after leveling up, and you are forced to be at the level cap to even make progression on your power.

Give me a real challenge, that not everyone is going to be able to beat without ingenuity or player skill?

OSRS absolutely nails it with a bunch of progression items locked behind such content

I agree with that, but I also believe that the people and landscape have changed too.

Is it true that the whole thing can be played solo?

the reason vanilla wow was so popular was because it was a better version of cookie clicker. Modern MMOs started fucking up the cookie clicker part and it's why they all went to shit

to to ask advice in an old mmo

get told to fuck off and read the wiki

yea, it was gorgeous
large areas and very atmospheric.

mmos are fine
its a you problem

A bunch of indie MMOs not being able to do it means that it's impossible

Anon, you do know that all those old MMOs were also tied to big publishers. right?

I miss 1.0 asses

stupid gyaru

god I miss FFXI. Yeah, I know it still exists. I could re-install it right now but I won't, the game I knew is dead because the game was the people you met and played with and they're all gone now.

youtube.com/watch?v=smJrVboIOjA

Modern MMOs aren't even MMOs, so no, they're not fine.

dont play modern garbage then?

do you know any old MMOs that regularly get new content, have enough players for all content at all levels, and haven't been turned into hideous shells of what they once were?

*sips*

Ahhh... White Knight Chronicles II, now THAT was... something

Old MMOs are literally nothing but constant fresh servers or paying to catch up with a player base years ahead of you. So you end up playing solo with NPCs until the latest expansions endgame.

post 'em bro

none that fit all your requirements
its a modern audience problem
even with old boomer mmos that happens

I genuinely don't believe that an old school styled MMO could be successful today just because it was published by EA, Sony or Ubisoft. That's not going to want to get people to play a modern version of everquest.

mmo thread

no one talking about the hot new Aion 2

youtube.com/watch?v=vrBvk3nJ5iM
it's time sisters

good graphics = not fun to play = no play

there's also that Dune MMO just dropped and Anon Babble doesn't care but all the normalfags are playing it

I just want a MMO that has a good gear system like Ragnarok Online. Every other game is trash in that regard.

I believe that it could. The problem is that every attempt it has been from indie studios who can't match the scope or quality of early MMOs.

KMMO

Straight into the trash it goes

What makes it better than FFXI gearswap?

lol at my first internship in 2013 the woman that hired me at the bank was a HUGE aion fan, she would play all day during work. Really cool woman but the only person that I ever knew who played it

dog you can't seriously shill Aion 2 without being profoundly ignorant of over 2 decades of NCSoft

Well I don't know enough about FFXI to compare but gear in RO is not exactly dependent on level and endgame monsters don't necessarily drop the best shit. Also every single monster drops a "card" that can be socketed in items to boost their power. Like +20% against Water monsters or -30% Damage from Dragons and shit. Tons of customization and even gear you could farm at level 5 is used by max level characters.

what happened sis?

Nvidia still hosts the 1.0 benchmark, you can download that and see the asses.
http.download.nvidia.com/downloads/nZone/demos/FFXIVBenchmark.zip

XI has a similar system, all the gear at level cap tends to be sidegrades of each other or have specific niche uses, so endgame players will use macros to change their gear mid-fight for specific tasks. It also means that instead of just getting flat out stronger than other characters as you proceed through endgame you instead become more versatile

/thread

FFXI is still extremely fucking janky to play though. Ragnarok Online plays a bit like Diablo, it's a lot more fluid.

NCSoft's most successful game was Lineage 2, released in 2003.
Our Current Year is 2025, and they haven't even come close to surpassing Lineage 2's revenue.
This is because NCSoft is profoundly retarded at designing games that are fun while also satisfying their endless desire for greed.
NCSoft is second only to Nexon in terms of intentional incompetence in gaming. Every single MMO developed by NCSoft has EOS'd in 2-3 years.
Note: Guild Wars is developed by ArenaNet and therefore different from the MMOs developed AND published by NCSoft.

When it started appealing to optimization nerds

That's what I loved about FFXI
Multiple carrots to chase, and having niche sets for specific JAs, WS and situations was so much fun.

What FFXI did was it had a sea of sidegrade gear and it let you swap gear mid-combat so you'd have a couple dozen different sets that you'd swap between as you fight. A melee fighter would have for example a set for generating more Tactical Points (TP, you spend it to use weapon skills) so it'd prioritize haste, STP, accuracy, ect, then you'd also want a set for your weapon skills, each weapon skill would have a different set as some scale on STR, DEX, CON, CHR, ect. Then you'd also want a set for FireDef, MagicDef, PhysicalDef, ect that you'd swap to when an boss is going to use an AOE. End result was you'd have hundreds of individual items you need to hunt down to be "fully geared" and as they added more content they rarely added anything that was just objectively better, just another side-grade that you'd add to one of these sets.

Okay but what does that have to do with being hype for the day 1 dopamine that is a MMO? And why'd you call me a shill in a thread about MMOs sis? Any way I hope you show up for the day 1 dopamine too

FFXI not available in my country on steam

Square enix website doesnt have my country in billing either

What do?

That's bizarre, what country? Maybe a VPN would work.

VPN it up
What country though? That's new to me

Play on CatsEyeXI or one of the myriad other private servers.

World of Warcraft. Actually WoW fucked up a lot of things, it's the single most damaging video game ever made

bro i just want to see some asses, you just told me to download a full fucking benchmark... are you out of your mind?

WoW did this shit even in vanilla. One of my first guilds died because of it. We were the top guild on the server progressing through AQ, only had two bosses left to clear it, and before we could an entire guild from another, older server transferred in and cleared it first. Half the guild quit because they were so disgusted with it.

This. MMOs all became Themepark garbage becuase they all decided to copy WoW. No, this doesn't mean vanilla WoW was good, it was Themepark garbage too.

we had unique MMOs like SWG, DAOC, And AO

WoW comes out

Everyone now tries to copy them instead of making something unique

it hurts

Do you want to see these asses or not?

Phoenix?
I'd throw a month at it for some scheduled shit.

Why do people recommend catseyexi over leveldown when the latter has trusts as well but unlike catseyexi it also has all the WOTG expansion?

Nah that I remember that , think the oldest mmo I played was maybe maplestory or mabinogi both in early/mid 2000s

I'm playing mabinogi right now

That's a lot of vidya now. COD4 brought the brown and bloom Military shootan objective marker era.

yeah not even MMOs. We wows RPG and social aspects in almost every game nowadays. Like how every modern AAA slops have items with rpg numbers on them

epoch wow will fix MMOs

Epoch isn’t happening

You could just buy gil again or steal from your linkshell

It's my game of the year. I've already racked up over 200 hours.

2 more months

Anon Korean mmos are dog shit after a few weeks, it’s for sure going have p2w, horrible upgrading, and other dumb shit unless proven otherwise

Also like to add this probably isn’t coming out for YEARS

I’m waiting for the ue5 update

discord killed mmos, people used to have other chats obviously, but you could still communicate well enough within the game. nowadays you have to join discords if you want to group up and party which is retarded and defeats the entire point of an mmo. (not to mention most mmos are singleplayer these days, so there is no concept of 'group up and party' which is also dumb as fuck)

Remember that Ragnarok 2 that was just a horrible wow clone? Damn shame and also shame tree of savior was so fucking bad

mount shit

Instantly awful, this is another reason why MMOs are dogshit

Pretty much this. And I say this as someone who got into MMOs with WoW (specifically the South Park episode introduced me to the world of MMOs). I was the problem (in my defense I was like 14)

Aren't you happy that they're making a RO3 that's top down again?
I really hope it's not just another re-release of a shitty mobile client like they've been doing for 15 years now

When you grew up. Once you stop being a kid doing dumb shit MMOs become boring because you quickly realize that the only thing that "matters" is late game content

discord killed mmos

Dumbest and most underage take I seen and keep seeing. That’s like saying xfire, Skype, vent, teamspeak, yahoo messenger, or msn killed mmos. No that didn’t kill MMOs, MMOs just cost a shit ton of money to make now. Back in the day all the Koreans were trying to make something because it was the hottest thing, you can’t do that now unless you got a major backing or well established ip.

maybe the blue protocol remake will save us...

context? never played WoW, I played Runescape

Shadowbane was the last.

I didn’t even know a 3 was coming out, all I see are shitty mobile mmos from them

I would pay 30 a month for a quality mmorpg in 2025, if it was better than anything we have seen before.

you would quit it the second that asmongold or cohhcarnage joined the server, made a massive guild, and ruined it by funneling the economy into their pockets. or everyone in general was talking about streamers or politics.

WoW comes out

biggest success story of an MMORPG on the planet

everyone else starts aping WoW from now until the heat death of the universe

This is a problem for two reasons

1. Anyone who wants to play a WoW-like game is just going to fucking go play WoW
2. when WoW starts turning into irredeemable dogshit, which every Blizzard IP has been doing ever since the Activision merger, every MMO trying to ape WoW copies everything it does regardless

implying EQ or retarded hurdcore UO were not 10x worse

I hope this ends up being fun.

pic

God, jannies are such gigantic niggers.

Anyone and everyone playing MMOs at the time made fun of WoW for being baby's first MMO before it even left beta. The running joke was that it rewarded you with level 10 just for logging in. WoW's runaway success was very obviously attributable to being disgustingly casual, a fact which should have been glaringly obvious the nanosecond a genre which had otherwise been reserved for giga autists suddenly had mainstream normalfag appeal.

WoW clones were shitty precisely because they were WoW clones.

every thread with a 2hu image as the OP is considered a 2hu general

me too bro, i hope it takes some inspiration from ffxi like a minor level syncing system like maybe yuou can sync your level max 5 below you, and a class changing system so you can play every class on one character than needing to make 8 alts. finding party members within your level range was always the worse part of these games

had fun with project gorgon

had fun with pantheon

I feel like I will have fun with M&M
also pantheon needs to hurry and release

They can still be good.
I liked Dawntrail.

Hate those fags so much.

actually interesting vidya question in the OP

nope, it's actually a secret Discord circlejerk thread for retards who refuse to go back to Anon Babble

trans people should not be allowed to play MMORPGs

OSRS absolutely nails

Can you explain?

I'm not trans. I have shit taste, I'm sure, but not trans no.

Content good, story meh to shit in 7.0 but 7.2 shows promise . I’m enjoying grinding stuff in eureka 3

I liked Dawntrail.

You liked the samey dungeon and raid content produced. The actual story, music, writing, etc (aka 90% of the actual game you paid for) was irredeemable dogshit.

I like the jobs since logograms were jew as fuck. But god the zone is so bland. No duels or NM/Fate mob farming, also fates are too low in HP they die immediately after spawn.

There is nothing wrong with World of Warcraft

Terrible bodypaint fashion unless you get a full set and the pauldrons don't take up 30%+ of the model

Need addons that helps with auction houses, buff tracking and turns your game into an EDM rave in-combat with 20 popups

Classes and specs are either 1-2-3-burst or micromanaging 5 buffs at the same time

/thread
WOW spawned clone after clones and retard devs transformed god tier mmos like Star Wars Galaxies into the same copy&paste shit.

Pic rel is going to bring us back home.

OSRS has challenges that take good knowledge of the game and lots of preparation to complete.
Most people do not do them but those that do are rewarded with rare items.

tfw WoWfags left their shit game to go to XIV and brought all that bullshit plugin trash there too but with the added cancer of SL boomer ERPniggers and their ugly mods and characters as well

i lost interest in shadowbringers when i realized how simple every instance was and how the story quests still haven't evolved from walk to place and click something+walk back repeat. i played tank and every new instance literally was the same aoe first group and run to the next because there will always be 2 packs of enemies before something stops from proceeding of just press 2 defensives spam aoe and kite it in a circle repeat

Content has been great desu. Raid tier is amazing, even the regular dungeons are fun. Story was ok. I'd put it at stormblood tier desu. Maybe ARR tier. Which is fine for me. Eureka 3 is a lot of fun, I enjoy the grind.
Also the last patch had the best Hildibrand chapter yet.

music

I actually really enjoy all the music in 14. Especially the raid tier's, yes, but the rest has been great.
Writing and story has been ok. It could have been better, probably should have been better, but it's not as bad as people act. They could never have lived up to Endwalker and especially Shadowbringers with this expansion. Never. They're starting a whole new arc, this is ARR2 and that's ok.

you won't join my guild so you shouldn't have access to all the game

The secret is that they were never good, we just didn't know better at the time. We had to learn that it's a trash format.

Ohh, okay. Do the challenges come naturally or is it like in the quests? I know Runescape used to be praised for its quests but now I only see people complaining about the PVP being fucked or MTX. Can you give an example or just direct me to a video or link?

FF14

MMO

i was a Nintendo baby when ffxi came out. i been playing it weekly now for 2 years on a pserver because its so satisfying when everything comes together and you make real progress. i have zero nostalgia for this game and pretty much didn't know it existed until that projared video. I just want a new classic mmo so i can finally enjoy these games when they were new, it's not fair boomer bros were eating this good.

Back when my weight started with a 4 and not a five.

Nowadays I gave up on MMOs and just play Dark souls, BOTW while hating myself.

Nah. I never want to play with spics and niggers so I’ll gladly pay a subscription to keep shitskins out.

Writing and story has been ok

after DAOC

What's wrong with this? Other than the forced inspect the workshop "minigame"

Yes. MMOs are for social gamers. Go back.

youtu.be/DnUgdYGGIjI

here's a random guide vid going over one of them

Play genre that was all about socialisation

Cry when you have to socialise

They're starting a whole new arc, this is ARR2 and that's ok.

I never understood that argument because Alphinaud's nativity and sheltered mindset in ARR cost lives and wasn't fully resolved until Stormblood, but Wuk Lamat's nativity didn't have any opposition or drawbacks, as if she was a primal herself. We also don't have a new group to replace the Scions either, but that might be a marketing disaster if they wound up as shitty characters like her.

when they added dps rotations instead of emergent reactions. Who finds pressing 20 buttosn to do dps cool? If it were something like devil may cry where its actually flashy and cool i would understand it despite not really liking the genre but standing still and pressing buttons on loot pinatas without any reaction to your input is so fucking lame holy shit id rather have an auto attack only with heavy reliance on positioning ala avoiding red rings or projectiles like touhou than whatever shit modern mmos are. lucky me wow released a one button rotation which is a bandaid fix otherwise i would never pick up that game

Oh don't get me wrong, Wuk Lamat could have been a lot better. I think it's fine that there were much lower stakes. It was fun imo. No universe ending threat, just relaxed adventure. I can see why people don't like that, and I fully understand and respect it, but myself? I didn't mind it at all.

new group to replace the scions

Never happening. They're too marketable; even if new characters were better, these are the ones we know.

thanks a lot fren. i love hearing about older MMO's and their history, what happened to them, and all that. but actually playing MMO's? eh, not really
thanks again tho, have a good day

can't talk to npc to ask him what he wants because of cultural reasons I guess

do forced minigame

he immediately starts talking to you, disregarding the established cultural reasons that forced you to do this nonsense in the first place

Might as well explain this one too since anyone who hasn't played xiv might not get it

Tribe of bird people are starving, your party tasked with figuring out why

Rather than using logic, science, genuinely any intellectual capabilities at all, the dev's pet who you're forced to help decides the solution is to throw a party according to their ancient customs, which they haven't bothered with in a while because reasons

sureokay.jpg

Your group throws the stupid party

Turns out the stupid party was actually an old harvest ritual that they used to do every year to ensure a good harvest so they wouldn't starve

With a spectacle like this in front of you, you are left to wonder how the fuck these retards forgot about a big shiny light show instantly causing their crops to triple in size plain FORGOT how those whole magic harvest ritual thing worked

t. babbies first MMO

DQX is still good

What pserver do you play? Why did you choose it over others or retail?

somewhere around 2010 when MMO developers gave up trying to make anything original and started making slight variations on the WoW formula

Feel like they should make it so fates/ce spawn in all zones so it isn’t just fun to two fate and then a ce

I can't stress enough how it was even more magical back in the day when nobody knew anything and everything was novel and exciting. You'd hear rumors about items and quests from friends, like you were being let in on some secret.

The experience of playing with the Japanese, Europeans, and Americans all on the same server was like nothing else I've experienced in a game since. I still remember some of the interactions I had with Japanese players even 20 years later because working together towards a common goal while bypassing a language barrier felt really good.

When you stopped playing them with your real life friends. You didn't have fun because of the games but the people you played them with.

I suspect that it's just bots, people just instapull when in Eureka people usually gave a grace timer so everyone could get some XP in.

i chose horizon because it was the hyped up one when i found out 11 existed. i tried eden and retail but eden zero level sync downsides just meant i only partied in the dunes until i was a level 35 brd. I still haven't seen 1/12th of the world.
retail i just don't like trusts, they are too simple and just not really fun to use. if you could give them minor commands or order them to attack instead of having to melee swing as a caster i wouldn't mind them so much.
putting all of my hopes on monsters and memories right now. i just want one classic mmo that i can learn with everyone instead of playing catchup. growing up my dad was a high-ranking member of a top guild on eq, and i have very fond memories of clicking buttons on his hotbar when mom made him run to the store.

Was spamming chat with LFG posts really that fun?

shitter

nta but getting into a group felt a lot better when it wasn't a given. especially when there were travel times to dungeons instead of instantly being teleported in. it felt like going on an adventure as opposed to playing an arcade game. that's probably the best way to describe old mmo vs new mmo design, the old games were about adventure while the new games are more arcadey.

There is nothing wrong with World of Warcraft.

It ruined my chances of getting another Warcraft RTS and butchered the story.

Fuck off. Lok'tar ogar.

everything you just described exists in retail and literally everyone hates it

No it doesn't.

The first couple months of Horizon was amazing. The private server code had matured enough to the point it was playable (Although still filled with many inaccuracies) for the average person. Enough people were working from home thanks to COVID that the audience for that nostalgia bait could justify playing. Even if the numbers were faked, towns, Ronfaure, Gustaberg, Saruta, and Valkurm were all packed to the brim. Neat little notifications marking server-firsts were popping up constantly. People were hanging back in the starter zones coming up with new ways of partying (level 10 syncs in Ronfaure in chill parties where you picked an area and everyone mauled EP mobs, which would respawn in 1-2 min rather than 6). Gusgen was teeming with people trying to get their magicked skulls. Corpses littering the minecart rails and caves.

I wish we could get a reset of that lever every couple years just for a taste of that FFXI greatness. It'll never be the exact same as the original because everyone knows too much about the game, but for a while it's so satisfying. I'm not even completely mad about their extremely slow update releases now, just that XI eventually boils down into a second job simulator. Scheduled linkshell events will never be fun for me. I hope one day someone optimizes the whole thing for a single player trust experience where I can have fun grinding while keeping the old content meaningful.

if you don't know what M+ is or how it works you have no right to talk about retail

Nothing about that felt like an adventure.

isn't m+ the most popular content in retail?

I love FFXI but the ToAU expansion is what really made that game something you could play forever, I don't know how I lived without it. The fact that private servers have such a hard time making ToAU work is part of why I don't care for them.

Shitty dungeons with shitty modifiers that grants high gearscore items

except some retard can hop brink your entire run and waste your key

That is not comparable to finding a group, going a journey to a dungeon and doing a dungeon run at all.

it is
it also uses the old school "ask to join a group and fly to the dungeon" model
which tons of people (if you can call dpsissies that) absolutely hate because they can't just solo queue and go do something else

looking for players is not fun lol, i love classic party setups but the setting up party fucking sucks. my only memory of classic wow vanilla release was me asking a druid to heal for him to have a meltdown.
nigga you picked a healer class, nobody asked you too.
he really didn't like i pointed out he can still heal without talents if he has a intelligence set for mana, it really doesn't matter not like dungeons require minmax. when i play a warrior i still talent into damage and just throw on a shield for dungeons
its really not that complicated.
i also remember this priest mad when i asked if they want to heal sfk
"wah wah wah im shadow"
nigga all priests have the exact same talents at level 20 wtf
same thing paladins that don't want to heal or warriors not wanting to tank.
if you just want to dps play rogue warlock or mage. I don't even get it, why not just accept the party invite. its not like its going to be forever

it's literally the same thing you fuckin retard, the dungeons just aren't slow single-pulling boredom simulators anymore

It does bug me that there are so many things that could be done design-wise with a virtual MMO world that has hard limits on communication, but it would be impossible to ever make because people would just use a 3rd party program to get around it.

What's your most autistic accomplishment in an MMO? For me it was capping guard in 75 era.

Yeah, they're shitty autism runs where random mobs shit out poorly telegraphed AOE mechanics. I have no idea why you these retarded devs keep trying to turn fucking MMOs to high RPM autism games where one wrong move by one player is basically a party wipe. I can only guess it's because they listen to their retarded player base of losers who suck at actual competitive games.

I had every mount and every cosmetic possible in a korean MMO.

Pking a kid in the wildy for saying he had a level 152 main, finding out his password was just 'Dragon', and then actually getting into his account. Didn't take anything cause he was just a kid. I just wanted to scare him a bit

*APM

being fair, early WoW was great, but shit turned into casualised trash with tbc

WoW was casualised trash from day 1, which is exactly why it blew up.

having a few streamlined features does not turn something into trash

Yes, but you're too late. Retail has been ruined by the Adoulin expansion pack (relatively overpowered gear is easy to get, and trivialises 90% of the game - except for the boring ass Adoulin content), making most areas a ghost town. Private servers are buggy/missing content, even less populated, and have problems like cliques or most of the players being boomers who need private server cheats to play at all, and also underage poorfag ESL monkeys following their favourite ecelebs.

You can play with trusts, but it will get tiresome fast - they're not a replacement for human beings of a similar playtime to you.

TBC prevented people from seeing the rest of the game because they couldn't vashj and KT. That's like the opposite of casualised bro

You said it turned into casualised trash with TBC, but the fact is that the game was always casualised trash. Seriously, I don't know why you idiots reward casualised trash games with money, then get upset when it becomes even more casualised trash.

it didn't turn casual with TBC. That guy is just delusional

I'm not the anon you were arguing with. I didn't say that. I'm just saying retail wow on launch was not trash. I played it, had fun, and moved on. Themepark MMOs have never and will never be my bag. But I can still acknowledge WoW at launch as a non-trash game.

I mean eureka is different from oc and you can’t really bot it yet

No, he has a point, since TBC added flying mounts. Fuck I hate flying mounts in MMOs.

horizon was my first experience with FFXI and i really enjoyed it, i eventually stopped though part out of i had my fill i guess but also i was playing it waayy too much and it really does feel like you have to play full time to keep up

it's also the only expansion with attunements the entire time. That don't get removed till the sunwell patch. Retail would never do anything like TBCs attunements

In the ideal world we would've had one by now, there hasn't been any real competition to wow/xiv since amazon's new world, and that was a huge flop that keeps shambling on somehow. Other big money devs are probably look at that and deciding they should stick with safer and easier investments. I really doubt we're going to get a good mmorpg for another 10 years or so. Korea seems to be trying to pump them out again and promising "prease this time we not rie about no pay to win" but everyone knows they can't help it.

I hate modern players autistic obsession with flying and jumping. HOW FUCKING OFTEN DO YOU JUMP IN REAL LIFE

hole on let me hop on my flying machine that skips over the entire beautifully crafted landmass with all its intricacies and secrets far far away from me.

ew why would I want to run into other players in the world

why dont more MMOs have action/hack and slash combat? 99% of them are point and click trash.

I'm not saying launch was trash either, I'm simply going along with his line of thinking that casualisation = trash. When it was said casualisation that led to the gaming blowing up, so of course they'd continue to casualise it as time goes on.

holyshit how did I not know about this. I love Aion. Day fucking 1

Lost ark won't be p2w

it's p2w

Black Desert won't be p2w

it's p2w

archeage unchained won't be p2w

it's p2w

Odin Valhalla won't be p2w

it's p2w
repeat forever

But alternatively games like Swords of Legends Online that have no p2w at all and never had it added get ignored and shut down within a year. Maplestory 2 falls into this as well. Buy 2 win or cosmetic only games just get ignored. Faggots need gacha to get hooked. And retard boomers refuse to play anything new.

I liked Cabal.

dropped as soon as I saw this shit was just Eureka and the job actions were boring as fuck. I thought they would change the gameplay up, but nope they barely do anything. Its so bland man.

Ctrl + f Tibia

no matches

You are all trash

I thought they would change the gameplay up

Bro we're talking about Final Fantasy XIV
The only changes made to gameplay have been ones dumbing it down. It's been a decade and the game plays the same and gets the same content types.

You forgot to mention

Black Desert lived for more than 10 years

Isn't dying anything soon

3rd more popular MMO in the world behind WoW and FFXIV

Was Pay to WIn as fuck and SURVIVED LMAO

hahahaha THE LOOK ON POOR NIGGERS FACE RIGHT NOW

minmax bullshit, datamining, and communities that suffer from collective delusions and think they're on par with their favorite nolife streamers because they act like dipshits to others in groups

Not a single line of text in this post has proper grammar, spelling, or punctuation.
I am making fun of you third world monkeys by saying you need gacha to feed your retardation. Why did you play into it?

learn to read

people used to have other chats obviously, but you could still communicate well enough within the game

when they added the dungeon finder in wotlk. you could just "queue up" for a dungeon from anywhere without talking to anyone, and suddenly nobody had any reason to speak to each other anymore.
this is why vanilla had SOVL, because you had to actually go around asking if anyone wanted to go on an adventure with you.

December 15th, 2011

This video made WoWtrannies seethe so much for showing how the autism feedback loop basically made the game into a soulless number simulator.
youtube.com/watch?v=BKP1I7IocYU

I know and I fucking hate it. I love this game, I really do. But I wish someone could wipe my mind of 2.0 and 3.0 so I can "enjoy" post stormblood XIV. Content wise, yea its crazy how they have only continued to take away instead of add. I don't know what 8.0 will shake up, and I don't believe their BS about FINALLY changing job gameplay. Also I hate their constant addition of totally-not-second-life-bullshit. But thats every modern-mmos issue and its here to stay.

modern MMOs don't really copy everquests design. It's more like a bastardized super casual version of a themepark than a true themepark. It's like saying morrowind everything that's wrong with modern gaming because it was the one of the first open world RPGs

Calls me 3rd world

Have more money than he does to spend on whatever I want

POOR ASS WHITE PIG. Imagine being WHITE and POOR LMAO I thought you run the world LMAO

Every patch the suck the soul out of older dungeons to just be AOE Dodge shit instead of cool mechanics

It's because of Trusts

Why even play and pay for an MMO if you're just going to do content solo. I swear this is why I still see players in end game still double stacking stack markers.

I got 9 jobs maxed and already sick and tired of so few CEs
what were they thinking? they needed to add far more, there also needed to add more content in-between CEs the zone is basically completely dead during CEs because if you are not in it you might as well re-instance
this shit is gonna be dead in 2 months while bozja will still be at least used for leveling

FF14 felt like a worse version of retail wow when I played it. The gear in that game is not fun to get whatsoever

It's trash, even with illegal damage meters you can barely tell the difference, without them you can't even measure your hard work getting upgrades, the boss dying 5 seconds quicker is within crit RNG window.

Every piece of gear affects the same stats and just has higher numbers than the last one.

After a few updates the numbers get too high so they developers have to lower all the numbers in the game so they can make the numbers on gear start going up again.

I have no fucking idea why anyone plays this

XIV's gameplay literally is just "wow but bad"
you play it for the dogshit story (which has always been bad, don't let them fool you) or to ERP with schizoids

Pretty much this. The "wow but bad" can't be stressed enough.

You guys shit talk MMOs so much with a passion that it's obvious you're still playing them and worse... you yearn for the next one. It's like you're in a bad marriage lol

No one in this thread has the balls to play a REAL crusty ass MMO where you literally just watch boats sail trade routes for hours

nobody plays XIV for the game, its playerbase is almost entirely tranny and pedo erp

I've spent over $5000 in BDO, I'm more than capable of buying anything I want in games. I am also capable of seeing that the amount of monetization in BDO ruins the design of the game and is a negative.
When the game first launched it was pretty easy to get +15 gear which was the cap and boss gear didn't exist either. I think it was Agerian + 15 with Mark of Shadow and Witch earrings at duo minimum for BiS, if you had an ogre ring base or pri even better.
This was the soft cap for gear, it took maybe 2-3 weeks to achieve and then you could content with nearly everyone in the server. PvP was fun, balanced, and fair.
Now softcap takes months, years, or thousands of dollars. This does not make a better game. Want to re-roll? too bad fuck you pay us $150 (I know this got removed) is another good example.

I've spent over $5000 in BDO

I actually just tried WoW for the first time last week. It was alright. Probably would've kept playing it if the F2P trial wasn't so absurdly short and the game didn't seem price gouged to fuck on everything. Decided to go give Runescape another try and I've been enjoying myself. I only ever played F2P as a child and my account never got very far, so this is my first "real" go at it and its been nice.
My only major complaint besides how inflated the EXP requirements are are how fucking bot heavy the F2P worlds are. I had to just fucking give up mining since every world and every half decent ore spot had at least five bots at all times crowding around it. I've already decided on buying a sub once I finish up Dragon Slayer, which hopefully will happen tomorrow once I'm done grinding my combat skills to 40.

It's all I played for like 6 years of my life. We're talking like 18k+ hours of active play.
I had many virgin badges.

the funny thing about Dungeon Finder today is that nobody uses it, like it could be removed from the game tomorrow and it wouldnt matter.

everyone uses the LFG tool, which is just the old school trade chat spam put into a nice neat list. if you want to do a mythic you have to find a group. if you want to raid you have to find a group.

Mask off moment. I'm here to shill [my favourite MMO] like it's the best game ever. I help keeping it alive because I can't quit after spending this much time on it. I know I'm not the only MMO player doing that.

I've spent over $5000 in BDO

I tried out OSRS like 5 years ago with the F2P version and I got pretty hooked desu. It was only after a few hours of play time I subbed then the next month my whole existence was basically OSRS.

I'm fuckin out here playing Mabinogi in 2025.
Whenever I post about it I am doing charity work. Please play Mabinogi, it needs more players.

Needed duels.

all those MMOs after wow trying to copy wow and failing because instead of carving their own niche in the genre they tried to steal the playerbase of WoW which had long been captured by that point

It was such a an embarrassing time for MMOs man.

over 20 years ago. where in the fuck have you been?

Then how is ESO still kicking?

I enjoyed some of these obvious clones like Runes of Magic, Rift and Allods.

Are you still playing it?

I know some 2.0 dungeons were shit, but they added to the charm. Seeing them just turn them into regular "4 mob packs then boss" is fucking soulless. Even the actual bosses got turned into tank and spank kek. They really want this to be a single player mmo with no personalization whatsoever, and that sucks.

Bethesda is the publisher.

NTA but BDO is pretty poor people friendly, honestly you don't need to whale at all to experience 99% of the content. I think in 4-5 years I've spent maybe $200? I really can't think of who might be whaling for gear nowadays since uncapped pvp is nonexistent and you really don't need hardcap gear to grind anywhere, or to do the guild bosses or solo bosses and the dungeons. PA actually did a good job at rearing back on how strong the pearl shop, inventory slots, weight, artisans and the value pack used to be. Like sure the option is there but you don't get hard walled by the cash shop at any point.
Rerolling isn't hard though nowadays because of the tag system. Yeah sure you can't tag your weight or inventory slots but that shit literally doesn't matter in 2025, base weight is enough to farm every spot and grind spots drop like 6-7 total items now instead of spamming your inventory with unstackable scrolls/relics, armor/weapons and trash loot that weighs a fuck ton.

9 jobs maxed already

Anon gave you been playing for like 50+ hours? I’m at 30 ish is only got 6 jobs

No I had my fun and got bored like with many vidya in my life. I think about playing it again sometimes though

I did read it and I still think you’re a stupid retard

MMOs were never good. Just a few good games happened to be MMOs, like the one you posted.

My real life friends almost destroyed my MMO experience.

anon theres people almost done with this shit
im just above average

What does that have to do with anything? It's still financially solvent.

2010, Cataclysm ruined all of them.

No anon that’s not average that’s nonstop playing for like 5 days, only reason I’m at 6 is because I took 3 days off and I played like 17+ hours the first two days

when (you) grew out of them. you're an adult anon. even playing other games is more valuable..

Basically just Everquest 1 in Unity

Jan 1st release

Looks interesting, I'll definitely give it a whirl

Wasn't Allods moderately popular in Russia? That one undead race looked kind of cool but I never played it

If you had to recommend someone a MMORPG to play right now what would you suggest?
Doesn't matter what year it came out, how dead or alive it is, how often it gets content, etc.

What MMORPG offers the best experience to play right now?

I can't, there are exactly two reasons to play an mmo and you just told me to ignore both

guild wars 1

If you had to recommend someone a MMORPG to play right now what would you suggest?

I'd suggest they build a time machine and go back to 2005

FFXIV.

Guild Wars 2. Evergreen content without power creep, game has huge room for skill expression and for good players to pull the weight of multiple ordinary players, the open world having bosses means the community is still social and loves to group up to do content even if its not mandatory, and the class design and combat is fun.

Downside is the story and characters are boring as shit, but the NPC's around the maps and ambient world building are top tier. It's a weird disconnect where wandering the maps is more immersive than the actual story missions.

It’s just an MMO without any RPG elements. Its a more casualized version of WoW

thread over

I thought I saw a thread about one last year here actually. Or it was someone who got a rare build and did a playthrough or something?

It's because of Trusts

it's not you fucking retard, i feel like xiv is the only fucking game where people never blame the casual as fuck playerbase that sit in limsa all day doing absolutely nothing. everything is dumbed down cause your average 14 player is genuinely incapable of pressing buttons in a video game, thats it, it's not fucking complicated.

The farthest I've got in this game is the dunes and everyone got mad at me for not already knowing what to do.

i feel like xiv is the only fucking game where people never blame the casual as fuck playerbase

Wake up you delusional cringelord, casuals make up 99% of every MMO population, you need to let go of the idea that they're the boogeyman because they ruin your PUG experience once in a while.

yeah and continue to complain about the dumbing down of every aspect of the game since it's re-release

Fake story. People were extremely helpful in early FFXI days.

I played 2 private servers like 2 years ago, I never touched retail.

WoW is shit and was for braindead morons even on release day.

I had friends quit the games they were playing for WoW because and I quote

"Its so much easier! Everything just kinda works, and I don't have to think about it!"

Little did he know that he contributed to the permanent death of MMOs...

do people play fff11 retail or private servers, i always felt like private servers are trash.

from what i can tell private servers are ok small communities but retail is a better solo experience because everything is faster and trusts are ai party members. if you want to see the story, go retail. if you want to play an old mmo, play private servers

Retail is always superior. There's literally always tranny drama on private servers.

I've spent over $5000 in BDO

the fucking cuck

I want a spiritual successor to the original PSO

that was played by Anon Babble not long ago

you want a tank control piece of shit slow chunky movements, slow combat, slow animations, in the year 2025? Nah bro a wish that'll never come true unless (You) make it

tank control

You've never played PSO.

I want a lobby based multiplayer game where you complete a large variety of missions and you collect a large variety of gear.
There will be special event missions, lots of grinding, and very little story.
Also needs a mascot.

Ah, so, you wanna play Sword Art Online Fatal Bullet bro? It's fun bro. I'll carry your ass

Ultimately MMOs were only ever a vehicle for hanging out with people and people found different communities or places online to do that. And once people realised that they just seemed bad in comparison.

game has huge room for skill expression and for good players to pull the weight of multiple ordinary players

so I can solo raid bosses using entirely my skill with subpar gear?
GW2 to me felt like the loneliest game I've ever played. Tons of people around to do things along them, not really with them.

Those millions of people who still played MMO's after they all became lobby queue waiting rooms where no one interacts with each other? Heh.. they ackshually just played for a decade because... um.. because they just DID OK??

the field content and deep dungeons in xiv are good. but overall it's a game you can't play reactively though as opposed to wow where the net code is good enough that you can actually play reactively, you need to be proactive in xiv, which is why it appeals more to girl gamers(biological).

it's the worst fucking game i've ever played

These Anon Babble threads be like "BLACK DESERT!? AYOO THATS THAT PAY TO WIN GAME" meanwhile in gacha "ZAAMMNN NEW WAIFU!? I'M DROPPING $500 DAY 1 I NEED MUH DUPE COPIES FOR MY WAIFU!"

Fucking crazy how it's okay when Gacha does it but niggers still live in the past when it comes to MMOs
Also Gacha is the new MMO. You can't prove me wrong and you refuse to adapt

You have to be 18 to post here champ.

there seems to be a bunch of gacha general tards with access to way too many IP addresses to be normal and who believe they're in a fated battle against traditional MMORPGs

because they use gacha to fuel the pretend culture war they fight about in their heads

culture war out of nowhere

????

what do you mean out of no where, gacha players defend gachas to hell and back because the west and east (japan) has fallen and that china are the real gamers that make real games. thats literally their entire reason for shilling them so much, mmo players don't do this.

Does LevelDown even still exist? The main reason recommend it is because there's probably only 5 people that even still play there, while CatseyeXI always has hundreds.

I've never played on either but CatseyeXI at least gets frequent updates/tons of new custom content.
I play on HorizonXI and the population has been decreasing month by month due to no new content updates.

fuel the pretend culture war

what? are you schizo'ing out? what the fuck are you talking about

literally go into any gacha thread this god forsaken board sees almost every day and you understand

yea

To be honest, this. Most mmo anons here are 30 - 40s, have a job, have expendable funds. I'm pretty sure they spend money in gacha and whatever MMO they're still playing or some GaaS game like The First Descendant, Warframe. These people are obsessed with Online Multiplayer Hub World games.

it wont unfortunately. It's almost entirely an Everquest clone, which sucks because I personally think FFXI took the better qualities from EQ and left out the dogshit like corpse runs and retarded spellbook shit.

Can only hope Square Enix brings back some employees and does FFXI Classic for the 25th anniversary in 2 years, but not likely

gook shill shitting himself and screaming at the voices in his head

Every day with this nonsense.

I think Anon Babble just lives in your brain rent free

How about instead of watching boats, you're the one sailing them by playing Dr. Mario and Bejeweled?

an FFXI player made Discord

Dragons Dogma Online is the best MMO I've ever played with the only downside being the number of reskinned enemies there are.

The two biggest things that killed MMOs:

1) TeamViewer / Discord / Etc "voice chat" super-sekret club / high school clique.

2) DPS tracking mods

Bonus: Abyssea effectively killed FFXI and it never recovered.

I had so much fun in this game. I'm sure it still exists in some skeletal, awful form but I'm not going to look it up.

1) irc existed before all that other nonsense. aol chatrooms and such too.
2) sweaty faggots absolutely destroy every game they play and push out casuals. that's why games that cater to competifags die.

Why do xiv bucks always yap in anything vaguely mmo related?

I just plan on playing Blue Protocol Star Resonance when it release. It's the only anime MMO on the market. There's nothing else. I'm going to find a wife in game and live happily ever after.

Yeah, it's been shambling along for years. Ever since Sega bought out OOO to help them publish Spiral Knights, YPP has been on life support. 99% of updates are just pumping out cosmetics, the game has a huge botting problem which at this point has become accepted by the community, and almost everyone just sits around playing poker all day.

In 2016 they relaunched a PVP-oriented ocean and it was some of the most fun I had. 500-600 people online most nights, blockades could hit 800-1k (although with multi-clients and bot accounts you'd probably put it around 400-500 real people), you couldn't go out on a pillage anywhere without being at risk of getting sunk by an enemy. Lots of drama but in the best ways, at least for me since I was a top dog in one of the major flags and would out-navigate anyone.

All I want is to play an MMO that matches the quality and experience of single-player games

there is no "wife" in mmos only guys roleplaying as girls.

That sounds really great, thanks for sharing. And all this while playing Bejeweled.

wowniggas love to act like wow tokens and the things/services you can trade them for aren't p2w too

When did MMOs stop being good?

I have uyst to find any non-weeb say this

When I had real life friends, I was always a solo WoW player. The moment I became truly antisocial was when I joined a guild and took it seriously. I never had so much fun talking to randoms on Discord as I did on Azeroth At War, it's the server where you can be a murloc or an ogre or a naga or a furlbog etc. Blizzard sucks and it's up to the fans to add in all the cool races that should've been added decades ago.

A truth so obviously, overwhelmingly, universally correct it cannot be called an "opinion"

FF14 has a better endgame than WoW because of catgirls and dress up dolling, but WoW's levelling progression and quests and map design will always be superior.

for the first one, Nah, you're missing the point. FFXI and many MMOs back then there was no voice chat. And then these faggots came along and "required" you to use it to join linkshells and participate in endgame content.

Quite simply, regardless of the form of "extra chat" it's just not needed and tarnishes the original game- making the Linkshell chat, and In-game signals etc all moot.

if you didn't want to voluntarily join teamspeak and have a night with the bros as you grinded out a 4 hour dynamis shitfest, you shouldn't have been playing FFXI
no one used voice chat while regularly playing the game and no one still does to this day