What was the original purpose of Mob Tagging Mechanics in MMO?

I know many MMOs have this mechanic,
and would like to know what its purpose was originally for.

in some of the newer MMOs like GW2 and another MMO, they have no mob tagging.

seem like a great concept to remove the mob tagging.

so it seem strange that older MMO originally would have this mob tagging system in the first place.

I just dont see what it adds positively to a MMO game.

it doesnt eve make sense from a RP point of view ether.

so whats the deal?

RPers are the last thought on most MMO designer's minds though.

I think it might be because back in the day, the loot system is not dynamic to the individual, so mob-tagging has to be necessary otherwise you ended up with situation where like for example in Entropia Universe where whoever do the most damage get the loot and people wasted time/ammo on the mob. So it was a pretty common practice back in the day that people come in and steal mobs of others.

Of course with the newer system nowadays (where players get loots tailored to themselves) it is no longer necessary.

To prevent griefing.  Once again, the community ruined their own lands... err game :)

Many griefers back in the day would just go to low level areas, wait till a newb attacked a mob, then nuke it, preventing the newb from ever getting xp.   (In EQ the tagger had to do 51% of the dmg to get the credit).  Tagger being the person or group that hit the mob first. 

From an easy mode, casual PoV, no tagging is fine. Lack of tagging WILL however increase the rate at which players level, and the rate that coin and loot enters the economy.

1 player or group gets the loot and that baby Orc will drop 1 Rusty Sword and 10 coins, if everyone gets the loot and say 10 players hit it, 10 swords and 100 coin enter the economy.  If a player even contributes 1 damage to any mob they get full XP value.

The individualized resource nodes in GW2 lead to rampant resource value deflation. If nodes were first come, first served, then   only 3 resources an hour would enter the economy, instead it is now '3 resources' x #Players per Hour. Prices have plummeted to where listing cost is eating up much of any potential profit a player may have hoped to earn. Buy orders are below Vendor levels becuase resources are so common as to be effectively profitless.

So, tagging or not becomes a factor in leveling rate and economic balance factors.

Maybe a better style would be to proportion drops out. Do half the damage, get half the XP, get half the coin, and a 50% chance for each item.

Ignoring for e moment the people using this thread to make up a way to bash a particular game. Why tag enemies?

Well because early games it didn't calculate XP on damage dealt or otherwise. Someone got close with mentioning Entropia, but their system was actually an attempted solution at an older problem in kill stealing.

Knowing who was responsible for getting XP was generally solved by who killed the monster. You get the kill, you get the xp, you get the loot. It was amazingly easy to ninja xp from people as a result.

This wasn't a universal thing. The other problem (like Everquest displayed) is anyone could loot a corpse. This meant that someone could camp another's kills and sprint through to grab loot off rare or hard to kill mobs without putting forth effort.

Different solutions have worked to different scales with players. Making xp and loot rewarded based on how much damage one does to a target helped out somewhat. The advanteges of that stopped however when you started getting people better geared or higher level intentionally killing mobs others were trying to kill in order to grief them.

In the end to force people to essentialyl 'play fair' the bese general solution found and employed to a degree in DAoC and letar in WoW was to flag a target when attacking them. Meaning the xp and loot for the kill could only go to whoever attacked first. This wasn't a universal solution either, because you still hav players attempting to get a first initial strike before a player opens up with a bigger attack (so the ninja wouldn't keep aggro, but still gets the kill). This also lead to problems with powerleveling initially too. 

In WoW at first it rewarded unscaled xp and loot for killing things. This condition allowed players to take a low level character to a high level zone and get powerleveled by getting a first strike on a big monster and then another high level character finishing the creature off. Needless to say Blizzard fixed it so xp rewards scaled and were impacted by interference. :p

As for how it affects economy, that's dependent on how the economy of each game works. In the case of GW2 a lot of the valuable assets comes out of things you have to do yourself, not buy. What you see in game is the low value of common goods. Rare items that can be sold are still sold at high value and many special sets you simply can't buy yet/at all.

I believe to a degree it was rather intentional in the case of GW2, didn't want people playing the market to cheat others on mediocre goods necessary to progress. :p