The debate boils down to this: limitation vs. freedom.

Some people enjoy limitations more than others. Conditioning has tilted the ratio in favor of those who prefer limitation.

The terms 'freedom' and 'creativity' have been so badly bastardized throughout time that we no longer understand their true value or meaning.

It's a much larger topic than mmorpg's, but I think it's relevant to the discussion nonetheless.

Originally posted by Iselin

So... Ultima Online. Was there an Ultima MUDD that escapes my memory? I mean remeber playing Ultima one through one-too-many on Atari, Comodore and PC computers in the 80's.

But whatever... if you MUDers want to get credit for having been there first, so be it. You were there first. Happy? Now tell me again why anyone should give a shit in 2012?

If you are so hell bent into pushing this into the area of the absurd, where is the WoW cooprpg?

If the claim of Raph Koster that ultima has been heavily influenced with dartmud is not enough for you, then i dont know.

And it only shows the shallowness of the discussion, we should be talking abount nvn, if something.

But in the end you are as boned as everyone else, the devs that share your vision, that mmorpgs are just small scale cooprgs are firmly in their seats happy with lobby gameplay as the  "logical" improvement over small scale cooprpg.

Flame on!

:)

It makes you wonder whether we need the "massive" part at all to experience the kind of gameplay we have in MMORPGs now.

I always said that the game that would "take down" WoW wouldn't even be an MMO.  That's because the only way to make the games more streamlined and efficient than they already are is to get rid of all the remaining MMO aspects: the persistant world, the guilds, the zones, etc.

If you think about it, the MMO format's greatest competition was from peer-to-peer or "lobby" games, and lobby games have some advantages over MMOs: you get to screen your community, you can get right into the action, play time can be more easily structured, etc.  This is coupled with some significant advantages on the developer/business side as well.

If the combat, quests, loot and teamwork is all a player is looking for they, quite frankly, don't need an MMO.  So if this massive multiplayer format is going to survive, the player has got to like the "massive" format for other reasons.

Here is the problem though.  Every single time people bring up the "other reasons," they get slammed as 'niche' (like roleplay and open world PvP) or 'too expensive' (player housing and customization) or 'not viable for the business model' (crafting important things as opposed to getting them at an item mall).

Originally posted by Iselin

Originally posted by Wayshuba

Originally posted by XAPGames

I call it "Lowest Common Denominator Game Design".  Maximize profits by reaching the largest number of people by providing a gameplay experience based on the desire of that group.

 

To my understanding, these players don't want worlds.  They want interactive entertainment.  That's how they see gaming.

 

Evolution or decay?  That depends on if you like the direction taken, or not.

 

I'm just glad the financial performance of the industry is proving otherwise. The number of failing, or barely surviving titles, should be a wake up call that indeed the majority of players are not going for it.

 

Give you head a shake. The bulk of the mmo market money is still going to WOW. Your statement only makes sense if you ignore that one rather large fact. 

WoW is an outlier that people need to stop taking into account. The last 8 years of failed WoW clones should show how futile it is to keep thinking WoW style MMOs are viable to anyone other than WoW.

Heres a thought............

 Isnt it kind of hard to take out wow when every game since wow has been wow? Perhaps stop copying and chasing their success and have dev teams set out to make a good freaking game for a change with all the features and long term survivability and you might just be able to do so. But kind of hard to beat wow when your game only last 2-3 months and sucks worse than wow ;)

Glad some sandboxes are coming because i dont even touch these newer themepark games at all. Even older themeparks had so much to offer.

Lobby games? That is your only hope?

Which you actualy already have in mmorpgs...... its called instancing ;) 3-10 players doing a mission or pvp together you normaly group up before hand. Same thing.

Gaming is a tough industry for those who develope.  It costs millions of dollars now a days to develope a game to the standards of todays mmo qualities.  

It's tough for developers to make everyone happy and we all know that.  There are different types of games for different types of people, but what they are really failing at is remembering that they are artists and what they do is art.  Yes at the end of the day they have to make enough money to pay all those involved, and feed their families, and that is a concern of everyone.

They need to stop looking at games in forms of business models and they need to just be creative.

Originally posted by DavisFlight

Originally posted by Iselin

Originally posted by Wayshuba

Originally posted by XAPGames

I call it "Lowest Common Denominator Game Design".  Maximize profits by reaching the largest number of people by providing a gameplay experience based on the desire of that group.

 

To my understanding, these players don't want worlds.  They want interactive entertainment.  That's how they see gaming.

 

Evolution or decay?  That depends on if you like the direction taken, or not.

 

I'm just glad the financial performance of the industry is proving otherwise. The number of failing, or barely surviving titles, should be a wake up call that indeed the majority of players are not going for it.

 

Give you head a shake. The bulk of the mmo market money is still going to WOW. Your statement only makes sense if you ignore that one rather large fact. 

WoW is an outlier that people need to stop taking into account. The last 8 years of failed WoW clones should show how futile it is to keep thinking WoW style MMOs are viable to anyone other than WoW.

Like it or not WOW exists and it's an MMORPG. Denial won't make it go away just like none of the clones did. Personally I don't particualrly like it and would love to see some new creative MMO take its place. But any conversation about people's taste in MMORPG has to include the fact that it probably has more players than all the others combined.

You can slam developers (I certainly do occasionally) for trying to cash in on the WOW formula by making yet one more clone all you want. But it's no wonder they do since people's wallets say that's what they like to play.

There are a lot of people in this forum that come accross as elitist nincompoops with all their contempt for players who like that type of game--that's their prerogative and I seldom bother to respond. But when people start talking about how the MMORPG posting, WOW-hating, sandbox advocates are the majority of MMORPGers I just have to call bullshit. 

Originally posted by Iselin

Originally posted by Aelious
Iselin

It's not about romanticizing the past. The common design for MMOs is indeed different now and some people don't like it, myself included. The gameplay is form fit and premade like Spam and though some people like it I find it a slap in the face from what I considered an extension of the fantasy genre.

Whether people like having a set story put out in front of them to play with others is none of my concern. I don't think they are any more or less than me. The spirit of the MMORPG did change though and even if the change suits more players now than before it still, to me, is far to fake.

Luckily there are others in the right places that seem to agree. There's a certain person by the name of John Smedley that is supposedly releasing "the biggest sandbox style MMO ever made". We'll have to see about that but if you look at the comments he is making right now about EQN and the current state of MMOs it's more than just a small minority that thinks we've strayed too far.

Let's also not forget how stellar sales have been for the recent crop of MMOs :)

Don't get me wrong: I'm not giving the unimaginative garbage that some big studios release to try to cash in on the "WOW phenomenom" a free pass. I think it's rather sad that the bulk of the MMO-gaming money these days is still going to the same place it went 7 years ago--Blizzard.

But I also refuse to go backwards and call painful, repetitive harsh grinds innovative games "in the true spirit of real MMOs." You see, I remember lengthy corpse runs in Asheron's Call and losing items because I died repeatedly trying to recover that first corpse--that was just a colossal time sink and not fun at all. Nor do I yearn for a pre-Auction House world where scammers ruled the roost preying on the unsuspecting or trusting--young kids most of them when you think it through. Trading back then was almost literally taking the kid's lunch money.

Nor do I buy the "there's only sandbox OR themepark" simplistic garbage often spouted here. There are many good elements in both types that should be carefully blended and incorporated in future MMOs...MMOs that will hopefully knock our socks off by bringing things to the genre we haven't even considered.

And btw, I would take what Smedley is saying with a grain of salt. "Sandbox" is becoming a marketing term used these days to try to separate you from your money with vague promises of "better." I'll beleive him when he delivers and not a minute before then.

Neither do I and I think the two are melding together to form something that fits the spirit of "MMORPG" very well.  I do not wish for the timesinks either but what is missing from the newer games IMO is what older games had: a bigger world that went on if you were there or not.  You had to insert yourself in that world, not be programmed in from the beginning.  That's why this OP is pretty relavent, it's starts with the world around you.

As far as Smed and EQN I think it will be more upfront than you may think.  EQN will be a "play for fee, buy what you want" type of game so other than preorders, which wouldn't come close to covering costs, there really isn't a cash grab to be had.  He was careful to say that it will be the biggest "sandbox style..." so it's not going to be 100% sandbox.  Taking into account PS2's open world and the tools EQ2 has I think it will go a long way in putting the RPG back into MMORPG.  I'll know for sure when more info is released oif course as all we have gotten thus far is hints.  The term "sandbox" is becomming a buzz word but adding real sandbox elements to almost any game IMO would make it better.

On the WoW topic I think WoW is a great game and shouldn't be bashed as much as it is.  It's the cheap, shallow copies that have come after that are the problem.  WoW itself, though not giving much into being an individual, is a pretty open on where you want to adventure (see level).  There are many other titles for a better RPG experience such as Vanguard and EQ2 but WoW has it's own charm that is hard to resist sometimes.

Originally posted by Beatnik59

It makes you wonder whether we need the "massive" part at all to experience the kind of gameplay we have in MMORPGs now.

I always said that the game that would "take down" WoW wouldn't even be an MMO.  That's because the only way to make the games more streamlined and efficient than they already are is to get rid of all the remaining MMO aspects: the persistant world, the guilds, the zones, etc.

If you think about it, the MMO format's greatest competition was from peer-to-peer or "lobby" games, and lobby games have some advantages over MMOs: you get to screen your community, you can get right into the action, play time can be more easily structured, etc.  This is coupled with some significant advantages on the developer/business side as well.

If the combat, quests, loot and teamwork is all a player is looking for they, quite frankly, don't need an MMO.  So if this massive multiplayer format is going to survive, the player has got to like the "massive" format for other reasons.

Here is the problem though.  Every single time people bring up the "other reasons," they get slammed as 'niche' (like roleplay and open world PvP) or 'too expensive' (player housing and customization) or 'not viable for the business model' (crafting important things as opposed to getting them at an item mall).

well have said it before, Diablo 3 and the sort of game, is the kind of "MMO" most people seem to want, it have the 100% solo, 100% group, it have the auction house, the group play let you flash your uberness....ofc the individual person can point out things they do not like, but that happen no matter what game you talk about...

not to claim this is all that I would want...

---

Originally posted by Aelious
D3 doesn't have a "world" though and no matter how many people like the game and it's features that doesn't make it more of an MMO. This has nothing to do with the quality of game itself, I think it's pretty fun, but that doesn't change what it is and isn't.

---

---

Originally posted by Aelious
One that has a "massive" amount of people around in the same space? I thought the shared space was for one group but I may be wrong.

---

Originally posted by Banaghran

Originally posted by Eleazaros

I laughed a lot at your post.  Not insultingly really but it was a most excellent laugh. 

MMO gamers don't play anymore - they "race through it" - to "have" and "be there", not explore and adventure. 

Challenging?  To do that you can't have "published info on every encounter".  You can't have "overpowered players farming others in PvP" nor "better stuff" and "higher levels" (easing all other aspects of the game).  etc...

Challenges are from not being able to predict and not being able to out gear your opposition and that is *NOT* how MMO gamers operate be that in PvE or PvP.

Why the hell do you think you have gold and item shops for these games available everywhere?  Look at the "logic" of "risks vs rewards" -- they don't want to adventure and be challenged, they want to have and be rewarded with things to make it much easier to play and obtaining the levels and items is "grind time".

If you want challenges and open worlds to play in, try Oblivion, Fallout, The Witcher - standalone.  For PvP style coflicts try Starcraft or Civ - that ilk for competition.  Going with games that have 'better weapons" and 'higher levels" for how you compete and such -- that doesn't work for challenges - that becomes fodder and farmers and farmers don't need better skills, just "better stuff" when they can start encounters much more powerful than their opposition.

MMO's haven't been balanced for combat...  *EVER* because they based it upon the PvE gaming model Dungeons & Dragons which had levleing up, which granted more power to your chars.  D&D was built upon groups of friends doing things together - not soloists "grinding out levels".

That means "grind time" > skill and if you can't "grind time" to get ahead, check the local gold & power-leveling services -- which now are "adjusted" in other ways so your wallet is for "winning". 

Again, it's not about playing - it's about winning and this is what is killing MMO's these days.

Everything is about winning by having - levels & stuff.  They become boring and non-challenging when you have "won" and if you haven't "won" yet, "you suck".  Nothing to do with adventures and exploration - everything to do with "rewards" of a pixel variety.

 

I see it as depressing that we have reached a point where the audience is so fractured and "gone" that we have pen and paper purists telling people how to play a computer game.

There will be always guides, it depends on the content if the guide destroys it or not, good content is good content even with a guide.

Obtaining the gear (or skills) to outgear the content can also be challenging, it is more funny if you consider that the same people arguing for "unpredictability" as a challenge sometimes (but maybe not in this case) argue against rng.

Farming is not only solo and not only negative, because it temporarily removes the "win" aspect, replacing it with "being as efficient as possible", which can do wonders in the community area if done properly.

But with the winning you are right.

Flame on!

:)

Naw - no flame but, again, a good smile.

I've been playing video games for a long time.  (old M59 player and I go back farther with other "non-internet" games but that's far enough IMO)  Oh and I've been programming computers longer than I've been playing games on them.  One of those first "pen & paper" changes was where we wrote all those dice randomizers into programs to handle it for us.  I also haven't played a pen & paper game for decades.

Over the years these MMO's have shown just how weak they are at building communities - which was a cornerstone of playing both table-top models and pen & paper games.  If you have a friend that joins the game but who doesn't have matching times to play that you do, they won't be able to "catch up" and game with you.

The roots to the tabletop games were based upon people working with others who arranged to be around at the same time for *ALL* their progression - that is no longer the case with computer games.  Yet the advancement model is still used all the time and this model could use some revamping - even if it's along the lines of the current 'chase the carrot'  gearing up.

It's a different environment than those old games. 

Those games didn't have independent advancement. As such, what happens in these computer games is that players advance at different paces and, at some point, you get to choose whether to stop advancing or dump your "friends" and keep progressing by finding others to hang with - not necessarily "better people" just other players, often with some you'd prefer not hanging around outside of "progression".

That sucks.

----------

As I mentioned I have a history with computers and the technologies used in these games is fascinating.  It's about at the point where it can do things that would have been impossible to envision even a couple years ago.

A brief simple idea, with huge amounts of complexity behind it: 

Instead of "leveling up" and "gearing up" - how about the chance to become part of the lore of a world and both physically, as well as within the recorded history of the world - actuallying being able to be recorded as changing it with your character/group?

Save a city and they record your deeds.  Discover a new place and help found a city there...  That kind of stuff vs "levels" and "gear".  Gear which is only good until the next expansion - levels that the cap is raised every now and again.

Instead, you actually change the world you are playing in - really change it.  And where you can have a friend or family join you almost instantly upon their joining the game "in the thick of things" vs spending days or weeks trying to help them catch up and such.

The technologies to do this currently exist but haven't been stretched in these directions. 

It's not something that most look at.  The current paradigm of "carrot on a stick' is so heavily ingrained in the industry that looking at changing it is not something that most think of.

Yet having players able to have their characters written into the history of a game.  Having them able to actually change the face of a world that will still be noticed years afterwards? ...

I played EQ and at one point I had a huge reputation on my server for being exceptional at what I did.

I played WoW and when TBC shipped, I was one of the top 3 most viewed profiles on the north american server's due to some of what I did in that game.

I played Rift for a bit and was in the top 5 PvP players when they first published their listings in that game.

All ancient history and meaningless.  All the stuff I got, all the levels and ranks I earned -- nothing but personal memories about it and no marks showing in those worlds.  There may be a handful of folks that might recall some of the stuff I did if I brought it all up to try and remind them but none of it means anything with respect to how long I played and what I did back then.

If a game world came out where the players actually could change the world itself, leaving signs of their having been in it - that would be different in ways that might offer alternatives to "grinding levels" and such.

Even games like EVE online only leave "community" markers of what those players have done online.  New people joining have to be told of things that happened, it's not part of the "game lore" and there are no signs those chars and groups ever existed once they are gone.

The ability to do this exists and would be quite different.  You wouldn't "grind for rep" nor "grind for levels" nor any of that.  You'd play the game and what you did would change it in ways others would see and such changes could be very lasting - for years or even the life of the game.

A bit different type of motivation.  Changing a game world so everyone could see the changes you helped bring about.

Think that might be a motivation beyond "Got the White Dragon Scale from Vox!" or "got the Eye of Sulfuras from Ragnaros!" or any other now worthless piece of "ubah rare" junk that someone got many, many years ago that nobody cares about these days?

Originally posted by Eleazaros

Naw - no flame but, again, a good smile.

I've been playing video games for a long time.  (old M59 player and I go back farther with other "non-internet" games but that's far enough IMO)  Oh and I've been programming computers longer than I've been playing games on them.  One of those first "pen & paper" changes was where we wrote all those dice randomizers into programs to handle it for us.  I also haven't played a pen & paper game for decades.

Over the years these MMO's have shown just how weak they are at building communities - which was a cornerstone of playing both table-top models and pen & paper games.  If you have a friend that joins the game but who doesn't have matching times to play that you do, they won't be able to "catch up" and game with you.

The roots to the tabletop games were based upon people working with others who arranged to be around at the same time for *ALL* their progression - that is no longer the case with computer games.  Yet the advancement model is still used all the time and this model could use some revamping - even if it's along the lines of the current 'chase the carrot'  gearing up.

It's a different environment than those old games. 

Those games didn't have independent advancement. As such, what happens in these computer games is that players advance at different paces and, at some point, you get to choose whether to stop advancing or dump your "friends" and keep progressing by finding others to hang with - not necessarily "better people" just other players, often with some you'd prefer not hanging around outside of "progression".

That sucks.

----------

As I mentioned I have a history with computers and the technologies used in these games is fascinating.  It's about at the point where it can do things that would have been impossible to envision even a couple years ago.

A brief simple idea, with huge amounts of complexity behind it: 

Instead of "leveling up" and "gearing up" - how about the chance to become part of the lore of a world and both physically, as well as within the recorded history of the world - actuallying being able to be recorded as changing it with your character/group?

Save a city and they record your deeds.  Discover a new place and help found a city there...  That kind of stuff vs "levels" and "gear".  Gear which is only good until the next expansion - levels that the cap is raised every now and again.

Instead, you actually change the world you are playing in - really change it.  And where you can have a friend or family join you almost instantly upon their joining the game "in the thick of things" vs spending days or weeks trying to help them catch up and such.

The technologies to do this currently exist but haven't been stretched in these directions. 

It's not something that most look at.  The current paradigm of "carrot on a stick' is so heavily ingrained in the industry that looking at changing it is not something that most think of.

Yet having players able to have their characters written into the history of a game.  Having them able to actually change the face of a world that will still be noticed years afterwards? ...

I played EQ and at one point I had a huge reputation on my server for being exceptional at what I did.

I played WoW and when TBC shipped, I was one of the top 3 most viewed profiles on the north american server's due to some of what I did in that game.

I played Rift for a bit and was in the top 5 PvP players when they first published their listings in that game.

All ancient history and meaningless.  All the stuff I got, all the levels and ranks I earned -- nothing but personal memories about it and no marks showing in those worlds.  There may be a handful of folks that might recall some of the stuff I did if I brought it all up to try and remind them but none of it means anything with respect to how long I played and what I did back then.

If a game world came out where the players actually could change the world itself, leaving signs of their having been in it - that would be different in ways that might offer alternatives to "grinding levels" and such.

Even games like EVE online only leave "community" markers of what those players have done online.  New people joining have to be told of things that happened, it's not part of the "game lore" and there are no signs those chars and groups ever existed once they are gone.

The ability to do this exists and would be quite different.  You wouldn't "grind for rep" nor "grind for levels" nor any of that.  You'd play the game and what you did would change it in ways others would see and such changes could be very lasting - for years or even the life of the game.

A bit different type of motivation.  Changing a game world so everyone could see the changes you helped bring about.

Think that might be a motivation beyond "Got the White Dragon Scale from Vox!" or "got the Eye of Sulfuras from Ragnaros!" or any other now worthless piece of "ubah rare" junk that someone got many, many years ago that nobody cares about these days?

You seem to long for some technical revolution, but you yourself are stuck. Stuck in the concept that the online community is you, your neighbor and his brother, stuck in the concept that if you dont do a thing at the same time, you and your friends are not really working together, stuck in taking the shallow and simplistic concept of modern mmos as the standard, thinking that it was always like this, probably because you were always at the top, while nowadays everyone has your passing experience in the games.

Mmorpgs were not weak in building communities, you were, probably charging towards old naxx instead of helping a clannie mine dark iron (mandatory jab at the evil elitist :) )

Communities are not built around an achievment, but around the effort towards it, whatever the goal might be.

Effort in the broadest sense of the word.

Flame on!

:)

Meh. I just remember this major difference between Ultima Online and games today.

Ultima Online was about adventuring. Grabbing some people and wandering off to go do this thing or that thing today. Yes some people spend hours on hours grinding skills in a house somwhere to build their pvp character. The vast majority just played the game.

Modern MMO's are about grinding to the top as fast as possible and aquiring shinies along the way. It's all about the UBER gear. Everyone has to have this item or that to compete. Every looks the same. Everyone does everything the same. Lets all min/max our way to maximum effectiveness. If you don't have XX build and XX items then you are worthless.

This attitude seems to dominate among MMO's these days. I think the last MMO that which did not have this emphasis very strongly was Fallen Earth. I remember some class contention but very little and I don't remember much this class was mandatory and that class sucked. Fallen Earth was just fun to PLAY. It wasn't a min/max grind and crafting was pretty dang fun.

I also enjoyed playing Wurm, EVE, and Darkfall. Those were also games where I could simply PLAY the game and immerse myself into whatever I was doing. I wasn't spending hours grinding away endlessly to achieve maximum effectiveness. I played the game, enjoyed what I was doing, and advanced as I played.

These days it's all about advancement. People are not even content locusts because ultimately they don't care about the content these days. Players these days race to the top as fast as they can and then get bored because there is nothing else to do and they don't understand immersion or sandbox content.

I don't fault the developers. They create a product that people buy. I blame the gamers who allow themselves to follow this ultracompetative mindset. People don't care about the storyline anymore, they don't care about crafting, they don't care about adventure. Time and time again they rush into grinding to the top so they can participate in whatever crappy version of PVP the developers are hocking off on the masses.

What happens? The ultracompetitors as one person once put to me "scream, throw the chess peices around, poop on the game board, and strut around declaring that they've won the game". Then they get bored and quit. Subscription numbers drop and leave behind the rest of us. The developers sink so much money into catering to the people who just quit, that they can't afford to run the game and then it dies.

I think if a developer came along and designed a modest game for the casual or long term player it may not bring as much money in, but it would probably last longer and be more stable in terms of number of players.

If you look at games like Darkfall, Ultima Online, Shadowbane, Wurm, Salem, Haven and Hearth,EVE,  you would probably find the same community playing them all. In nearly every one of those games, I've found clans or individuals who follow all those games and end up in the next incernation developed along those lines.

Originally posted by lizardbones

 

---

Originally posted by Aelious
One that has a "massive" amount of people around in the same space? I thought the shared space was for one group but I may be wrong.

---

No, it's just a virtual world. As I said, the aspect of being shared is very limited, and there's no persistence. It's definitely not an MMORPG. It might be an MMO, depending on your point of view or how the idea of an MMO has been presented to you.

** edit **
I'm not even sure Blizzard classifies the game as an MMO. It's a multiplayer action RPG.

 

Classification is just a label.

It is classified as an online ARPG, but it shares a lot of players with MMORPGs like WOW, and its play style is very similar to the wait-in-city-for-dungeon-pop.

Originally posted by nariusseldon

Classification is just a label.

It is classified as an online ARPG, but it shares a lot of players with MMORPGs like WOW, and its play style is very similar to the wait-in-city-for-dungeon-pop.

Classification helps us fine tune the search for the entertainment that suits our tastes. The labels are there for good reason.

And my god "wait-in-city-for-dungeon-pop"? What an awful concept for a genre capable of so much more. So wasteful and so shameful. Genre killer on the loose.

Originally posted by Banaghran

You seem to long for some technical revolution, but you yourself are stuck. Stuck in the concept that the online community is you, your neighbor and his brother, stuck in the concept that if you dont do a thing at the same time, you and your friends are not really working together, stuck in taking the shallow and simplistic concept of modern mmos as the standard, thinking that it was always like this, probably because you were always at the top, while nowadays everyone has your passing experience in the games.

Mmorpgs were not weak in building communities, you were, probably charging towards old naxx instead of helping a clannie mine dark iron (mandatory jab at the evil elitist :) )

Communities are not built around an achievment, but around the effort towards it, whatever the goal might be.

Effort in the broadest sense of the word.

Flame on!

:)

Naw - you seem to miss a bit of what I'm saying is all and I go ... ??? at some of what you say there.

Effort towards goals, without succeeding = spinning your wheels.  Both are part of it.  "Milestones" style in long term efforts.  Yet what prevents groups from remaining cohesive is all the "advancement" that goes on as this or that person can or cannot be in the game as much as someone else -- time "in-game" pushing you beyond what your friends can keep up with.

No, I was not always at the top and not there for long in most cases.  It takes a great deal of time to stay "up there" and that is a sporadic deal for most.  Yet critcizing something with a view that hasn't seen it from "on high" is taken differently and, incase you didn't notice in my post, What I bring up is elimination of a great deal of that "on high" attitude - by pointing at the flaws of it.

As for the technologies - they exist.  There is no "revolutionary advancements" needed.  They just haven't been implemented in a way to enable what I described.  Some of the technologies aren't that old but all of what I described is possible to do these days.

Think about it this way - you have stand-alone games with different "models of progression" and various ways they work that combine progression in different ways.

One such model is like The Witcher -- choose a path and the world changes but it still has the progression model in it of "stuff" and "levels".  Yet the story in the game is of importance as you move through it.

A different type of "progression" can be seen in a game like Spec Ops: The Line.  Equipment is there for all from the start and you may find you'll use "starting equipment" at the end of the story.  There are no levels, no XP, etc.  The focus is going through the story to the end.  (not the nicest story but an example of lack of gear & levels while still having a "game world" you "progress though".) 

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Now let's look at what I describe.

No gearing up being of improtance.  No leveling up being of importance.  Everything doable within minutes of joining the game.

Does that sound like your typical MMO elitist attitude?

What I suggest is a change in focus and removal of things thta prevent one from joining with friends to do things at the same point in the game when you have different amounts of time you can spend in the game.

A game world that doesn't really have a story - it's one where the story is created by you but not in some "personal only" format.  One that actually is etched into the game in ways that everyone in that world can see.

E-peen style brag rights for those into that?  As a player's story builds and expands, the in-game history would show it and it would be recorded in the game world. 

A change from the current MMO "persistant world = static world" to "persistant and ever changing" but the changes being due to the players actions that also actually change the game - like some standalone games only changing/maintaining it for everyone.

Think of it this way - each major fight would be like "waking the sleeper" or "opening the gates of AQ" - individuals and groups and entire server populations working at events and such but things in the game world actually changing as these happen.

Yet not "fixed" style but where these changable areas and such, are all based upon the players doing it and scale from the small 'clear out the bandits' near a town, or on the roads between towns, around to massive efforts but where it is recorded into "the game lore".  Again - not "static" style but that quest/event happening 1 time - then other such quests & events occurring "elsewhere".

Very different approach but one that has been hinted at by some MMO's recently yet they all fall back to this older "elitist" model that doesn't encourage the "comfort level" teamwork that this model would allow for.