- What do you think of the state of MMORPGs these days?
Can't say I've really been following it. None of the "big" MMOs like Tera, Guild Wars, LotR, etc appeal to me. My "perfect" MMO would prolly be a Korean meatgrinder, maybe sandboxy maybe not but certainly not WoW-style linear (character level used to open up/close off zones as a way to force you to follow a defined path through the world), focused exclusively on PVP, where if there's a PvE endgame at all, it exists solely to be exploited to improve your character in PVP.
- What is the last MMORPG you have played?
Ragnarok Online 2.
- Are you still playing it?
No. Hit max level in about a month and found there wasn't really anything interesting to do besides raiding. Overall the game was a pretty generic WoW clone.
- Which MMORPG have you spend the most time on?
Ragnarok Online. (Perhaps you are seeing a pattern emerge!) Played it for about 6 years. I could write a novel about all the things I liked about it, all the memories, etc, but briefly...
a) PVP was the endgame, period. Specifically, scheduled twice-weekly, two-hour guild vs. guild battles for control of castles. Owning a castle was orders of magnitude more profitable than any other ingame activity, so all "elite" players devoted most of their time outside of that to improving their ability to contribute to their guild winning, and community prestige was entirely oriented around skillful play in that environment.
More broadly, there were far fewer barriers to interacting with other players: no "tagging" monsters as your own, no threat (some aggro monsters followed their initial target forever, others could be "trained" on others as they attacked the nearest target), boss monsters were free-for-all with the spoils going to whoever did the most damage (prompting indirect PVP there), and the best leveling area for years was PVP-enabled (with exp loss if you die.) Essentially, it was impossible to act as if it were a single-player game.
b) The design was incredibly broken. I'm listing this as a huge plus, btw. The people who created items, monsters, classes, etc clearly had no idea all the ways any individual thing could affect all the other systems in the game. Tons of items were totally worthless, while others were unbelievably powerful. If you watch Extra Credits, the game was basically full of hundreds of incomparables. This turned out to be an incredible boon: with so many different systems interacting in weird and unpredictable ways, there were so many opportunities for intelligent players to find exploitable loopholes that totally changed how the game was played.
Cleverness, foresight, experimentation, and encyclopedic knowledge of the game were all rewarded when a design oversight radically alerted the game. A "useless" new skill that summoned a boss and its mob could be farmed by another "useless" class to get 2-5x more exp/hr that "traditional" leveling in a game where it took at least 6 months to get to max level. Exp could be shared with other characters, enabling you to level PVP-oriented chars that would otherwise be impossible to create. This led to at least a year where everyone was summoning this boss (it took forever), hunting for copies of the boss that others had summoned and abandoned, hunting for enemies' bosses to kill them and ruin the enemies' ability to level, hunting for copies and threatening to reveal their location if you were not let into the exp share... it was a totally different game. Or the discovery that an aura that does damage and knocks back enemies can be used on bosses (which are immune to knockback) to machinegun damage, or discovering a skill that summons people next to you can be used to put people on ledges, bypassing several floors of a castle, etc etc etc.
c) Major cities as hubs, open/public communication. Y'know how in WoW, you can just afk anywhere near guards and generally be safe, or even afk in fields and just fetch your body if you get ganked? RO, with free-roaming monsters, items that could spawn incredibly powerful monsters anywhere, and exp loss for death outside of towns, you couldn't do that. There were also no chat channels: you had public, 1-to-1 PMs, guild, party, and that's it. What this meant was that people were force to congregate in towns, and people tended to communicate in public chat with people in their immediate vicinity. This had a huge impact on giving the game a social life more like offline spaces: people and groups had specific areas in town they tended to meet and hang out, passers-by could overhear and join in, being in proximity to another character had meaning, and everyone could see who you were talking to. So you had cliques and circles of friends, news and rumors could spread organically, and the various communities in the game were all "aware" of each other because the dynamics mimicked functioning, "real-world" neighborhoods.
Furthermore, there were a limited number of "best" maps for specific classes for leveling, farming, etc, but they were equally accessible to people who'd been playing 2 months and 2 years (grinding revolved on killing large groups of weak monsters as quickly as possible, so low- and high-level players leveled in the same areas with varying degrees of efficiency.) Thus, all the knights knew each other, all the wizards knew each other, etc. This kind of direct interaction between the different strata of players is unheard of in games like WoW. Even though all the guilds that "mattered" were maybe less that 5% of the total playerbase, and for the vast majority it was an anime chatroom with leveling minigames, everyone knew the political situation and had a side they were rooting for. It was so much more like a community than most MMOs. Edit: (Also it was remarkably close to gender parity, possibly because of the cutesy graphics. And character gender was defined by the account as a whole's gender. So with close to equal male/female rep and a relatively high rate of online/offline gender correspondence, aaaaall the relationship drama of a high school came into play as well.)
Anyway...
- Are you looking forward to any new MMORPG?
I'm cautiously optimistic about ArcheAge. It seems to shun the WoW approach ("Do this, then this, then this, then...") and take the Eve approach ("Here's a world, we don't really give a fuck what you do.") Player-built and player-run cities, farms, castles, player-run trade routes, shipping, crime system/jails, faction-based and indisciminate open-world PVP, piracy (!), basically just seems like a sandbox with the right systems in place that it could develop a rich culture/politics/etc rather than just being a series of PvE fights.
