I believe MMO's, regardless how good, are all moving the genre in the wrong direction. I enjoy GW2 I love tera and slowly i see this genre turning into a FPS / RTS / Platformer hybrid. 

All these MMO's coming out are suppose to be the next big thing but i feel they are lacking the one thing that makes MMO's great. Community. Every mmo is going into you can play solo with others and its action packed.. Why? I thought RPG's were more about Lore, community and character development. Every MMO until i would say AoC wasnt really action packed. Maybe DAOC comes close but I dont even feel like that could relate to whats happening now.

 I feel most MMO players moved over to this genre expecting things that could never exsist. Like class balance in PVP. Sure a class that can one shot you is OP. But being a tank and fighting a healer should favor the healer 99.9% of the time. Characters arent created equal.

 I feel that MMO's should be moving forward towards how to bring us players together in a unique way. Instead games are trying to make everyone the same and trying to amp up the action to keep you entertained longer than you would be to keep your sub. Even to the super casuals who just want to get on level and quit, i feel would have more fun logging in socializing, creating a unique charater and logging off. Super combat action, fast paced, is fun but not needed to keep interest. 

My character is suppose to represent who me, but they dont. In the days of EQ your personality could mimic your character. Now it's oh your a rogue and you dont tank? Noob get out of this group. Your killing this boss also and dont rez me? Your dps is 300 while mine is 1000, really? /kick.  

I agree with you but I think it's not only MMO but almost all games.

It all come to the speech of Michael Douglas from the movie "Wall street" : "Greed is good"

"The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed -- for lack of a better word -- is good.

Greed is right.

Greed works.

Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.

Greed, in all of its forms -- greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge -- has marked the upward surge of mankind."

This sums pretty much the gameplay of a lot of games nowadays. So instead of offering innovation they keep developping the same over and over based on this greedy model, greedy gameplay and greedy company and of course greedy player.

There can be no innovation since greed is the center, the only evolution wil be how far we gravitate around this axis.

One of the very few trying to change and yet reach masses of player is guild war 2.

If you guys want a change, be sure to check what are the basic of gameplay before buying. Game like diablo 3 is one of the best example of greedy model, greedy gameplay and greedy company and of course greedy player.

A thread like this must pop up everyday, but anyway...

My character is suppose to represent who me, but they dont. In the days of EQ your personality could mimic your character. Now it's oh your a rogue and you dont tank? Noob get out of this group. Your killing this boss also and dont rez me? Your dps is 300 while mine is 1000, really? /kick.

Are you looking at EQ through rose colored glasses?  You were required to do specific roles in EQ groups.  You didn't go into an EQ group and say "I'm a Cleric, I'm only going to cast DPS spells and not use Complete Heal, you'll have to find another healer"  or you'd quickly get a bad reputation on the server that would be very difficult to fix.  Not to mention the wait times on groups if you weren't a Cleric, Shaman, Enchanter, Druid, or Bard.  I've seen people in PUGs make excuses to reform parties just because one player underperforms and they want to get rid of them nicely.  Honestly I'd rather have them tell me to my face I suck and get it over with.

The only reason we didn't see fast action oriented combat in old school MMOs is due to limitations in latency and performance.  The games simply couldn't handle them.  So of course we are seeing more action oriented combat games cropping up.  There are still actually plenty of games that capture the more old school slower RPG oriented combat system available.  Maybe you don't like the action oriented combat, but you should understand that maybe others do.

We should credit GW2 and Arenanet for what they are trying to do for community.  Not write it off.  For one, there is no kill stealing since anyone can participate in an encounter and get full (and seperate) loot credit.  Unlike for example EQ where only the group (including in raids!) that did the highest damage got experience credit and you can literally walk up and steal all the loot on a corpse you didn't participate in.  No factions being split up, everyone on your server works cooperatively.  Reviving is a step up towards building community.  Most of the features in the game support community more than Everquest ever did.

Originally posted by Jaylanonyous

     I believe MMO's, regardless how good, are all moving the genre in the wrong direction. I enjoy GW2 I love tera and slowly i see this genre turning into a FPS / RTS / Platformer hybrid.  

...

My character is suppose to represent who me, but they dont. In the days of EQ your personality could mimic your character. Now it's oh your a rogue and you dont tank? Noob get out of this group. Your killing this boss also and dont rez me? Your dps is 300 while mine is 1000, really? /kick.  

The genre was called MMORPGs. Now we call the games MMOs. Why?

Because a lot of the players that joined the genre with and after WoW don't really like RPGs, they like FPS/RTS/whatever games but those didn't exist as MMO. Thus the gamers needed to play the RPG part of the MMORPG when they wanted an MMO experience.

The gaming industry noticed the trend (of course) and started to remove the RPG part from the games. Many of the games released these days should be called MMOAGs: Massive multiplayer online action games. Frankly, that's what a majority of the players wants.

You make the mistake into thinking that the gameplay of the old mmo's is what made the community better, while it's simply the amount of people playing. There are a vast amount of players more now than there was back then. The bigger the community the worse it gets. 

You simply get a lot more rotten apples, maybe not in percentages, but certainly in absolute numbers.

Tera actually already has a very strong community.  There are a lot of people who started playing in K-Tera for 6+ months who have moved over to W-Tera.  One thing that you will notice is that Tera's class system goes back to the traditional model of tanks being tanks and healers being healers and dps being only dps. This creates interdependence which is the fabric for building a close  community. A lot of MMOs that shall rename nameless are focusing on making classes one man armies that rely only on themselves which is bad for communities. 

Also the political system making engaging the community a rewarding endgame experience instead of an obstacle to get gear. Lastly all the PvP takes place on the same server so players will face other high levels they know instead of random strangers. This helps builds rivalries and makes bragging rights in PvP actually worth something. 

This is my opinion here but the fact that Tera is not an overhyped bandwagon game works out community wise. It seems that the most popular mmos also has the most immature/prejudice people playing it.  It's safe to say that MMOs like Tera, Minecraft and EvE have communities filled with people that understand a game doesn't have to be popular to be good. 

I know EvE community has a bad rep for killing and looting each other.  But if you played the game you'll see that the majority of the community is pretty friendly.  Stop reading all the yellow journalism people say about games they themselves don't play.