matches81 said:
I voted for the grinding, since imo it's simply the most glaring problem: MMOs are utterly boring, tedious and more work than game. Running around killing some arbitrary monsters by pushing 1,2,4 and then 3 exactly in that order for hour after hour simply is not fun.
In reality, you could say that about almost any game =\. RTS boil down to hitting hotkeys and telling units to go somewhere. FPS boil down to pointing your crosshair at an enemy and firing. Racing games have you pointing the car in the direction you want to go.
The execution of these basic tasks is what makes a game good or bad. The majority of MMO's, sadly, have a very boring combat system. This is thanks, mainly, to EQ where tank classes, generally, had two buttons they pressed (three if you count auto-attack), the majority of casters had one or two spells they cast, and then most people had macros set up to auto-buff the group. Stuff like this went a long way in changing the MMO from UO to WoW.
The biggest problem in MMO's tends to be the speed of things. Combat will either be too short or too long with not a big enough reward the majority of the time. This isn't to say that grinding is a bad thing, as MMO's that tried to eliminate grinding simply couldn't do it (Vanguard with its naggingly long runs to turn in a potion to some fondle-monster isn't exactly thrilling), but having to grind is generally a bad way to go about things.
Sadly, the majority of end game content in MMO's boils down to who, or what group, can grind what the longest to achieve the biggest e-peen of them all. In fact, that seems to be the entire WoW experience in a nut shell.
Anyway, I think there are a lot of problems with MMO's, so I'll just list them in no order of importance.
1. No character love. The only two MMO's I've actually cared about my characters in were UO and EQ. This is partly due to those games being incredibly unforgiving in death and partly due to those games having you invest time into the characters for them to be worth while. In EQ this equated to grinding. In UO this equated to any number of things.
2. No real impact in the world. This is a pretty big problem and some MMO's have tried to tout that the player can have an impact on the world when nothing of the sort ever happens. "Oh man. If I finish this quest this man will move over to this rock over here!" Big deal. EQ2 tried to emulate this by not allowing a race to be played until a player completed a quest. No, I'm not talking about you... I'm talking about any player on that server. In UO, your player actually had some sort of an impact in the world as you, the player, could do any number of things to actually have an important impact on not only other players, but the lay of the land.
3. Risk/Reward. No MMO has done this right. The risk needs to be equal to the reward. EQ and UO had this all wrong (very high risk, very little reward) and now WoW and all the other MMO's like it have it the exact opposite (very little risk, very high reward). When I kill a goblin, he should have a few things on him. The value of these items should make sense according to the world you are living in, not according to what the player base thinks. This brings me to #4.
4. Economy. MMO economies suck. Not enough reliance on NPC's for essential good required for every day play makes farming incredibly simple. It should be very hard to actually make a living as an adventurer. Those riches should be reserved for very high risk areas. This doesn't mean, though, that the player should be starved for items. Part of the problem of in game economies are the fact that the majority of items are not Unique... that is to say that a player can't have more than one of that item.
5. The grind. Just make the risk equal the reward. This way, it doesn't feel like grinding as it should actually feel like you are getting 'better'. In fact, the biggest reason grinding exists is because levels exist. MMO's without levels generally don't have the feeling that you're grinding. Games like UO did this very well, although you could easily cheat your way through some of the skills in a day.
Monthly fees aren't really an issue at all. 15 bucks a month is less than you pay when you go to the movies and will easily net you more entertainment, regardless of if you like the game or not, than a movie will. They also, generally, ensure that you play that one game more than others. I can't even begin to count the number of games I've bought since I stopped playing MMO's that were simply terrible but bought them because I had beaten the other games I had to death.
