Not needing to find a new game every 2 or 3 months because I "won" (saved the world) and there was nothing else to hold my interest.

The roleplay tools.

I miss the housing, the character customization and the emotes.  I miss the big maps and the regionalism.

A "Golden Age" is a period of creative variety and wide-spread propserity within an industry or art form.

There has never been an "MMO Golden Age".

The Feeling of playing something new and experiencing a burgeoning genre's mechanics and mores for the first time.But I know I'll never get that again just liek no matter how good a FPS is it'll never match the experience I had with Doom and then Half Life.

Originally posted by Quirhid

Reply to the topic: Less whine about the "good ol' days".

 

1. Need to form a group? Huge inconvenience. Probably one of the biggest hinderances of the genre.

 

Considering grouping and playing with other people (as opposed to playing a soloRPG in a multiplayer world) was originally the entire POINT of the genre if you're complaining then you probably should never have picked an MMO up in the first place.

It's like going to a swimming pool and asking them to drain the water because you don't like swimming.

If WoW had never happened we'd probably still have group-centric MMOs but instead WoW brought in a new solo audience who now believe the rest of the genre should cater to them exclusively... There are a LOT of burnt MMO vets looking for a solid game with oldschool values regarding grouping and community, if only a dev would willingly forgo trying to target WoW's solo fanbase for once (seeing as it leads to nothing but failures anyway).

Originally posted by DamonVile

The golden age of mmos everything was never been done before. That type of innovation has big risks. Something game companies try never to do anymore.

Um, that's because the genre was new and it had literally never been done before.  That's just not the case today.  It wasn't anything magical in the past, just the way reality works.

Quite possibly the single most depressing thread Ive ever read on mmorpg.com, for a few reasons.

One, I miss a lot of the stuff mentioned here, and when I look at (and experience) just how shallow new mmos are (GW2 anyone?) it makes me a little sad.

Two, that a lot of the people responding never got to experience what others are talking about firsthand, all they know are the stories they hear about, how horrible things were and that what theyve got now is so much better.

Yeah, logging into (insert current MMO here) for an hour, running around doing daily repeatables and looking at a chatbox sure puts the MM into MMORPG.

I'll add a couple extras things...

1. Grouping with a reason. You didnt have to, if you wanted to solo there were plenty of things to do, but grouping was more fun, allowed you to advance quicker and gave access to places soloing just couldnt get you. Plus, if gave the chance to meet new people and develop friendships.

2. Crafting with meaning. usually only found in sandbox games, but nowadays eveything below crafting level cap is garbage and no-one will ever use it. Take UO, or SWG, even starting out you could make things people wanted.

3. Non-instanced player housing. If youve never experienced it, youve missed out.

4. Player owned NPC vendors. Sure, they had their issues, but owning and running a shop (see 3) and stocking vendors was such great fun, playing a merchant in MMOs is a great experience.

Community. I remember in EQ i was a jerk for 2 weeks in a dungeon in EQ ksing mobs at lvl 20-25. For years the reputation followed my character. I was REALLY good at ksing:)

Furball Hairball
Dwarf Cleric
Owner of the dungeon Unrest:)

Well, miss it too. Instead most games are multi-million business deals now made for the masses that look for some quick entertainment fix.

Always funny to read posts from people that complain about having to spam the chat for hours to get a group. Personal reputation mattered a lot in those older games and when people couldn't get a group it was because nobody wanted them in their group.

Those games were much more about social skill than about the skill involved in hitting a mouse button.

Originally posted by Alberel

Originally posted by Quirhid

Reply to the topic: Less whine about the "good ol' days".

 

1. Need to form a group? Huge inconvenience. Probably one of the biggest hinderances of the genre.

 

Considering grouping and playing with other people (as opposed to playing a soloRPG in a multiplayer world) was originally the entire POINT of the genre if you're complaining then you probably should never have picked an MMO up in the first place.

It's like going to a swimming pool and asking them to drain the water because you don't like swimming.

If WoW had never happened we'd probably still have group-centric MMOs but instead WoW brought in a new solo audience who now believe the rest of the genre should cater to them exclusively... There are a LOT of burnt MMO vets looking for a solid game with oldschool values regarding grouping and community, if only a dev would willingly forgo trying to target WoW's solo fanbase for once (seeing as it leads to nothing but failures anyway).

I know this is going to fall on deaf ears but here it goes:

• The "entire point of MMOs" is not grouping. Its about sharing a game space with other people.
• There is no "solo-audience" - just a large segment of players who sometimes like to play alone.
• The oldschool vets are a relatively small audience. Likely a high profile game catering to this crowd would be very risky business. For the moment, you have to settle for indies.
• Many of the aforementioned vets wouldn't return to an oldschool game specifically because of those values and the many inconveniences they bring.
• Much of the glow of the so called golden age MMOs was just novelty. They were new and exciting then, but if you'd return to them now, they'd be anything but. Try it.
• Using impossible stereotypes doesn't give you any credibility or help your point.
• Failure, it seems, is largely subjective. One thing is for sure: to my knowledge, every themepark marked as a "failure" by the bittervets has made profit - every single one of them. Yes, even SWTOR.
• Meanwhile, these bittervets have only one, just one, example to show the viability of oldschool values.

I don't often post on here but.. What i miss about the old days is...

1) being that Speciltiy Character (Healer), after running a few groups with others and some random poeple who asked you to group with them, would have you on stalker status!!! no sooner you logged in you get a spam from 20+ diffrent people to group with them =)    (nothing better than the feeling of being needed in thoes days, now a day its not even necessary to have a healer around atleast for leveling with the expcetion of dungeons because almost everyone has some sort of self heal or a mass amount of health potions to spam every minute or two to keep themselfs going)

2) The Death Penatly!!! Oh no I just lost 10 - 30% of everything i just gained because I died, Armor beaten to hell I need to repair!! or Find the Healer or hybrid who can Rezz you!!!!!

3) The hard End Game content where you spent hours fighting the boss, not this run in , spend 10 - 15 minutes top clearing your way to the boss then killing the boss in 3 - 5 minutes (longer with cutsceens and phases).

4) Being the healer and in a really crabby mood, grouping up with people and you have that one asshat who just hit an ability and destroyed his/her health with an attack, thinking that your gonna drop all your mana on him/her to heal him up so your party now has massive down time because you spent a good chunk of your mana healling the asshat. Then telling him/her you only get a regen spell, if you can't manage your health with that your dead and don't think i'm wasting my mana to rezz you because you just put us in major down time, you better warp back to your save point and run your ass back here!!

5) The Traveling & learning the areas you're going into or having to go through to get to where you needed to go with the chance of death!!! The Excitement was so nice!

6) Crafting!! having to actually figure out what combination of ingrediants will make items. Hmm lets try a piece of glue, feather, and a tooth... Holy Crap i just made a fishing lure!!! lol...

7) actually having the ability to have your character set to a native language and spend the time to actually learn other character languages so you could commnunicate with them!!! (SWG back in the day had a great system on this) now a day poeple get so mad any pissy if you have your character set to their native language (provided the game your playing allows it).

Golden Age of MMOs? You can't be serious. That's like telling a infant the best years of his life are from the ripe old age of day 1 to 3 days old. More like the Stone Age of MMOs... Or are you seriously trying to tell me that MMOs were at their peak 10 years ago? And what criteria would you based that off of?

• Creativity
• Popularity
• Variety
• Technical advances
• Saturation

Or are you basing this off some desire to return to the days when connections were slow, variety was counted on 1 hand and populations were making headlines with 100k players (see UO). I mean if you really do miss those things then I can tell you that UO, EQ, AC and DAoC are still alive and kickin. Enjoy!

Originally posted by Quirhid

Originally posted by Alberel

Originally posted by Quirhid

Reply to the topic: Less whine about the "good ol' days".

 

1. Need to form a group? Huge inconvenience. Probably one of the biggest hinderances of the genre.

 

Considering grouping and playing with other people (as opposed to playing a soloRPG in a multiplayer world) was originally the entire POINT of the genre if you're complaining then you probably should never have picked an MMO up in the first place.

It's like going to a swimming pool and asking them to drain the water because you don't like swimming.

If WoW had never happened we'd probably still have group-centric MMOs but instead WoW brought in a new solo audience who now believe the rest of the genre should cater to them exclusively... There are a LOT of burnt MMO vets looking for a solid game with oldschool values regarding grouping and community, if only a dev would willingly forgo trying to target WoW's solo fanbase for once (seeing as it leads to nothing but failures anyway).

I know this is going to fall on deaf ears but here it goes:

• The "entire point of MMOs" is not grouping. Its about sharing a game space with other people.
• There is no "solo-audience" - just a large segment of players who sometimes like to play alone.
• The oldschool vets are a relatively small audience. Likely a high profile game catering to this crowd would be very risky business. For the moment, you have to settle for indies.
• Many of the aforementioned vets wouldn't return to an oldschool game specifically because of those values and the many inconveniences they bring.
• Much of the glow of the so called golden age MMOs was just novelty. They were new and exciting then, but if you'd return to them now, they'd be anything but. Try it.
• Using impossible stereotypes doesn't give you any credibility or help your point.
• Failure, it seems, is largely subjective. One thing is for sure: to my knowledge, every themepark marked as a "failure" by the bittervets has made profit - every single one of them. Yes, even SWTOR.
• Meanwhile, these bittervets have only one, just one, example to show the viability of oldschool values.

Clearly you have either, 1: never experience a golden age mmo , or 2: are more bitter then the aformentioned "bittervet". You are missing the point entierly. If we the vets have to explain it you won't ever get. But clearly you my friend, are in the minority here.

Originally posted by Ramonski7

Golden Age of MMOs? You can't be serious. That's like telling a infant the best years of his life are from the ripe old age of day 1 to 3 days old. More like the Stone Age of MMOs... Or are you seriously trying to tell me that MMOs were at their peak 10 years ago? And what criteria would you based that off of?

• Creativity
• Popularity
• Variety
• Technical advances
• Saturation

Or are you basing this off some desire to return to the days when connections were slow, variety was counted on 1 hand and populations were making headlines with 100k players (see UO). I mean if you really do miss those things then I can tell you that UO, EQ, AC and DAoC are still alive and kickin. Enjoy!

I think your last sentence pretty much summed it , THEY are are still kicking. Show me a "modern" mmo besides WoW that is kicking?

what you miss is 20 million less mmo players.

Certain things are just not possible in giant games that were possible in old games that were populated by a small group of dedicated nerds.

The up side to the huge influx of new gamers and turning the genre into a cool thing to do for most people is the sheer volume of games lately.  There are so many poeple buying and playing games we are seeing like 8 major title releases a year these days and yes none of them have aspects from old games but they each have some fun to be found in them just play it suck out the fun and move on to the next :)