From SWTOR's storyline them, to GW2s trinity breaking mechanism, to numerous other games such as D3 that are heralded by fans as ground breaking and will change the face of the MMO world are a myth.  That's not to say that innovation is dead.  In fact I see nudges in certain directions from many games.  While everryone can point to some game in the distant and not so distant path that did it first, there are games that have the pull that actually make the community take up and notice.

SWTOR and it's storyline driven gameplay.  Many have said in one form or another that this was gonna have a huge impact on future MMOs.  I don't think so.  I believe it may have some impact, depending on the success of the format, and even if it isn't totally successful, developers might take inspiration from something that it provided that they might use.  People often take inspiration from something that isn't totally successful, but might have potential iff ttweaked.

GW2 and it's trinityless society.  Definitely something that people are keeping an eye one.  Will this be the death knell of the trinity.  I hardly think so.  Like my belief in the case of SWTOR, may nudge the future of MMOs one way or another.

Just like most evolutions are concerned, they creep up on you, and the next thing you know, you are in a new era.  It isn't until years after the revolution has take place that people come up and say that this is the time when things changed.  it's very rare for something like the rise of something like the cell phone or some other innovation that completely takes the world by storm.

Is 'nudging' bad.  absolutely not.  It bridges the gap between older gamers and newer games to find common ground where they can enjoy MMOs at the same time, while slowly transitioning to a new model.

Hail to the nudge.  You are the future.  Not the 'game changer'

IMO

Problem is that not all nudges are in the right direction. Same with your evolution analogy. Evolution isn't moving in the right direction at all times either:

Popular themepark mmorpg's are a bit like Panda's; all bears are omnivores and not picky regarding their source of food, this makes them great, flexible survivors.

But not the panda.

It once lived in a time and place with an abundance of specific types of bamboo and said "Screw them other sources of food. Only gonna eat bamboo all day and sleep when I am not hungry lol!"

Despite bamboo being a very nutritient poor food source there was no problem because there was so much of it anyway and they could eat tens of kilos each day ... until bamboo forests started to disappear and mister Panda became almost extinct. V_V

i.e. being so dependent on one kind of player base / food makes you vulnerable.

Also sometimes change isn't brought by a nudge but by a distinct revolution / shocking circumstances. Personally I feel it just takes a single, overwhelmingly popular game to accomplish that. (Which game that will be is anyone's guess).

Originally posted by DarkPony

Problem is that not all nudges are in the right direction. Same with your evolution analogy. Evolution isn't moving in the right direction at all times either:

Popular themepark mmorpg's are a bit like Panda's; all bears are omnivores and not picky regarding their source of food, this makes them great, flexible survivors.

But not the panda.

It once lived in a time and place with an abundance of specific types of bamboo and said "Screw them other sources of food. Only gonna eat bamboo all day and sleep when I am not hungry lol!"

Despite bamboo being a very nutritient poor food source there was no problem because there was so much of it anyway and they could eat tens of kilos each day ... until bamboo forests started to disappear and mister Panda became almost extinct. V_V

i.e. being so dependent on one kind of player base / food makes you vulnerable.

Also sometimes change isn't brought by a nudge but by a distinct revolution / shocking circumstances. Personally I feel it just takes a single, overwhelmingly popular game to accomplish that. (Which game that will be is anyone's guess).

I agree with you, but this is why I think the evolution analogy fits.

Not everything has to go in the right direction for it to make a difference. 

Lets take a look at one issue MMO's had in the past, not even a design issue necessarily. Think of all the terrible bad launches MMO's have had over the years, technically speaking. I'm using this example because it doesn't necessarily reflect a specific gameplay design philosophy that we could argue about all day. This is something that affects all mmo's regardless of what type of game systems they employ. 

MMO launches have traditionally been known for huge technical problems at launch. Not all of them, but a large number of them in the past were unable to solve these problems. Servers crashing, game crashing, huge lag fests, gamebreaking bugs, loads of missing/non working content,  etc.  There are a thousand technical reasons why this stuff happened, but it did. 

Now, companies realized that this was hurting them and couldn't go on forever. In the past few years they have begun to innovate in this area. Rift's advanced server technolgy and SWTOR's instancing are two things that have gone a long way to creating stable launches, at least from a server standpoint. Server capacity has probably also improved over time.  Early access head start processes have helped too. Again, Rift and SWTOR are good examples of this. 

Now, these companies have been able to create pretty good launch environments (compared to many past releases), and provide a stable playable product to their players on day one. They knew this was costing them money and harming their appearance to customers. 

So they've addressed some of these technical issues, but they are still missing a pretty big piece of the puzzle. A common problem still faced by these games, and one that has been faced by many mmo's is that of opening up too many servers to accomodate the massive launches, only to see poorly populated servers within months. We've all seen it with almost every game to be released.  Server merges are hailed as the failure of a game. They scare investors and damage communities. In this sense, part of the solution to creating a stable launch was a step in the wrong direction as you put it. 

So the next wave of MMO's has learned some tricks from these guys on how to handle the stability problem, however someone still needs to solve the dead server issue. SWTOR and Rift and other games may have shown the industry how to create a stable product at launch, but a large part of that is due to the opening of way to many servers relative to what their stable post launch population is going to be. Both games I mentioned have very obviously faced this issue. 

Someone needs to come along and say "Ok, that staggered launch thing Bioware did worked really well, and Rift provided very polished software with very robust server technology. We can use things like that but we have got to put a stop to this server merge business."   While both companies were unable to solve that issue, they have provided useful information for future developers. There are lessons to be learned. As far as the server merge issue, I don't think there is a better example of how damaging that can be to your games image than SWTOR, and they haven't even merged servers yet.

In this sense, I believe Bioware definitely moved in the wrong direction in this area, but there is still much to be learned from their mistakes. They simply weren't capable of solving the problem. I don't think anyone really has been. 

From a gameplay or design perspective, mistakes can also teach future developers. This is why the evolution comparison is apt in my opinion. 

TL;DR:

Companies have figured out how to make a really stable launch, when previous developers have failed. They are still making big mistakes though and moving in the wrong direction by opening up way to many servers and later having to merge them or sitting on a bunch of dead servers. They are making it apparant to future companies that this process is very unwise and damaging to their games in several ways.

Someone will find a way to innovate in this area in the future to help alleviate this problem, but they have the shoulders of their predecessors to stand on by implementing the things that did work. 

I agree on most of that, Dub. Thank god they are at least learning some things from eachother.

Originally posted by DarkPony

I agree on most of that, Dub. Thank god they are at least learning some things from eachother.

Well, hopefully they are. I'm mostly speculating wildly and blowing hot air. 

I think my main point is that the progression is harder to see because the dev time takes so long. I really believe that this wave of mmos is the response to Warhammer and that wave of games. Even though it seems like forever ago to us gamers, it was just yesterday in the development cycle of mmos. 

i htink this years games are not GAME CHANGER but they are a step into the right direction

Game Changer!

Most game changers are small things and the problem lies in the fact that most gamers don't have a clue what they are talking about but have the freedom to sound like they do.

The public are always shouting for that 'game changer' but when it comes along people shout "too difficult", " not like (insert current game". The trick is making changes that are big enough to move things along but not so big people won't accept them.

The reason a lot of games that come out are "WOW clones" is simply that when looking at game design you want to take things that work and improve them enough so they are better but not so much they are unrecognisable because then people resist the change. You also want to remove things that don't work. Too much change and people don't accept it, too little and people complain there is no difference. It is a subtle line.

from my perspective there are a few key features I consider to be real progress in MMO maturity.

group crafting/group use. requires more than one person to realistically get together to craft some uber item that also requires more than one person to use, think Catapult for example.

strongholds and regions conjurable or controllable by players (think darkfall)

player createable quests (I know there are huge holes in this but with the proper tweaks I think it can happen)

basically what I am shooting for is this. currently regardless of how many hours you play NPC's still rule the land. at some point it makes sense to become a king or a prince etc. and at somepoint it makes sense to have a army.