people who dont run away from tanks when having agro.

there was a simple rule back in the days, you have agro? move your ass to the tank.

 Now days the mmorpg industri have removed that  becouse now the mmorpg industri is big business and here come the economics who cant think outside of a spreadsheet, even if it would get them more cash (ROI).

Player owned houses (NOT instanced)

PS been playing from the 80's mmorpg, muds  and I do smile when some one says its a WoW clone as then they give out there actauly a true 'Newbie.

I miss the sheer scale of the old MMO's, the massive part of MMO. Current games restrict us too much with their 20 or 25 man instances. I remember when EQ brought out the epic weapons and 120 some mages went up to Plane of Sky to raid for one of the rare drops.

Same goes for PvP, with BG's only allowing small numbers. DAoC allowed for hundreds of players to take part, and while GW2 has gone some of the way to replicating that I don't think they've quite cracked it yet, given the queue times some people have been experiencing.

I also think that the older games had a more polite playerbase. Maybe that's an age thing and maybe not but I definately find todays MMO crowd more abusive than 10 or 15 years ago. This leads to a lack of community, something that these types of games should be encouraging as much as possible.

living in a world not a level.

In EQ i lived in the world of norrath and adventured, explores, worked on the grind be it levelling or crafting or even repuatation. being able to solo mobs at the start of a zone and still have a chance of a rare dropping.

Rare items!

Rare items lived up to the name. Schimitar of the mistwalker was a sought after extremely rare weapon for a Ranger. it wasnt a case of killing a mob and it would drop, the mob was rare due to it taking a week to repop after being killed, then the item was a rare for the rare mob. so back in the day not many existed. play a game today and it's usually just a case of killing the same boss at the end of a dungeon a few times and you will either get your drop or it will be awarded as a quest reward.

No maps!

Originally posted by Zylaxx

For me it has got to be near endless horizontal progression.  Playing Asherons Call for years and never reaching the level cap.  Having something to always strive for in character progression that didnt include gear or having to group with 80 other individuals is what I miss the most.

 

Ohh how I would love to have a classless based MMO which used a combination of Asherons Call experience based skill system with TSW's skill deck building system.

My one and completely obsessive single thing I miss about old school mmo(s) is actual travel methods.  In detail, I miss the boat rides in EQ1.  That is literally the thing I miss the most.  There was always methods of downtime fun that I would do between spawn camps I hung out at, and the main one was riding a ship from one point of the world to the other.

I've talked about it for years and no game has ever even attempted it.  I miss that so much.

For me? Nothing. 

To expand on that. What I do miss is any sense of progression in the way MMO's are designed in recent years. Most new titles feel like clones of clones of clones of clones. The skin may be different but on the inside it's still the same as what has come before. What I would like to see are new MMO's in the future that don't try and copy what has come before. But actually try something new. Ten years ago for instance. You had a new generation of MMO's allt rying new game mechanics and concepts. Some of them survived to become the massive titles we know today. Others failed and others died a slow death over time. 

What I'm trying to say is that developers mostly don't seem to be in the innovation business any more. It's the demogrpahic and money making business. Cater to the widest audience possible based on what has been most popular in the apst. Rather than trying to do new things and trailblaze new standards in MMO design. 

One can only hope if this trend will decline long run. 

finding that 1 rare mob that spawns like once a week/month. Eq i remem camping that snow griffon for the eyepatch of plunder, or the pegasus for the cloak, or the  ( i think) cyclops for the jboots. Its just finding or doing something so rare that when done or found it puts you in a top 5% of pop who have found/discover it .

Also just being different. Most of todays mmos everyone looks or has the same stuff. I remem seeing ppl running around with epic weapons or 1.5/2.0 versions and being like  " WOW he has an epic weapon thats so cool" ,Cuz it wasnt every day you see one.

The freshness of a new game to discover and learn. With the first MMO it was just a complete new experience. Every MMO after that, I already knew basically what to expect. And now it is more about enjoying or nitpicking small things. A MMO will never feel that new to me anymore I suspect.

I also realise that I would not be able to enjoy some old MMO's anymore that I played back in the early days. The reason I did enjoy them back then is because the whole (skill)lvl experience was new to me, so I didn't really mind the crappy implementation of them or the buggy state of the game. It was a whole new type of game so I had nothing to compare to.

Originally posted by zigmund

A sense of danger.

EQ1, AC1, Shadowbane

All made it difficult to die. It was actually something you didn't want to do.

Today's mmo's - dieing means nothing.

totally agree