Originally posted by Phoenixs
The end effect should always be a great and fun game. If innovation is a part of achieving that it should be done, if it isn't it shouldn't be done. You should not innovate just for the sake of innovating. That serves no purpose.

LOL,

Many SWG players would agree with you.  No matter how you spell it, Dev are having to equate FUN = MONEY.  For them they are not exclusive issues.

Innovation has to do only one thing.  Make more money.  It can be a crap grind that all will do and hate.  As long as it makes money they wont mess with it.  Let some other poor suc...  Gaming Company develope a idea that works.  If its good (and easy to implement) then others might copy its formula.  Heck, all the devs of the popular MMO's live in Austin.  They probably swap ideas and solutions all the time.  FRS --->Honor Rank--->GCW Rank    anyone?

In truth, making money is great but does it make a better company with better games?  You need people with ideas, talent and vision to change the status quo.  Are there still people out there that can do that?  Lets hope so.

Originally posted by Dreneth
It's time that players demanded MORE from the games they play, and it's time that the game publishers recognized that they have been dropping the ball for years.

Actually there are ppl who Do get BORED of thier houses thats why there called "investers"

That would be great if I had the money to develop my own game, but since I don't this seems the best thing to work on.   Plus I still have my original game ideas.  Ideas don't make you money unless you have money or a way in.  I have neither, wish I did because I think my ideas are good.  I can't just got to EA games or Activision and say "I have an idea" and their going to want to listen.  Its like all the people with screenplays out there that try and hand them to directors, 99% of them get thrown away without being read.  This gives me a little hope even though nothing may come of it. 

Originally posted by Ciredric

"I'm working on the David Perry Secret Project "

P.T. Barnum once said "There is a fool born every minute"

First off that secret project is strictly a publicity stunt.  Secondly even if it weren't why give away ideas for free?

The investment community is very wise to David Perry scams, I much doubt he will get enough funding for this.

What MMO developers fail to consider I think is that the players are taking a risk too, not just the developers. We players are awful hesitant to part with our hard-earned $15 per month; we need to feel there's real value in what we're being offered. I play WoW, for instance, for two reasons: 1, because all my friends play it, and 2, because there's nothing else out there I am willing to risk getting hooked on, because ultimately its going to be the same old experience, only I'm going to have a few less friends to play with.

Any developer that wants to eventually oust WoW as the obscenely-wealthy-market-leader, needs to give us a reason to switch. At the same time, they need to make us feel like we're still getting the same experience, plus added value. In other words the devs have to sell The Players just like the have to sell the studio execs or publishers or whoever. They do that by offering a comfortable, familiar and natural experience, but adding a level of depth we haven't seen before, that becomes more apparent as we get more into the game.

WoW is advertised by word of mouth. That's how it got to be the dominant product -- people said to each other, "Hey, its just like what you're playing now, only it sucks less, and I'm playing too."

Other devs need to take that just one step further. As soon as I can say to all my WoW-playing friends, "Hey, its just like what you're playing now, only it sucks less AND its got a lot more depth, and I'm playing too" then I'm pretty sure they'll all come running, and so will everyone else.

Really when you get down to it, you really don't have to innovate as there are lots of good ideas used by some of the early MMO's that were ditched by Wow and all it's clones.

I still have many fond memories of times spent in Pre-trammel UO of course when they introduced Age of Shadows in the attempt to make it more EQ like, they really destroyed the essense of the game.   But the wonderfully implemented skill system is to this day better than almost anything out there.  If you did not like the skils on your character you could change it,  you did not have to make another character.

EQ is the evil incarnate monster that introduced rigid class lines in this genre.  Just lazy developers that use this because they don't want to take time to balance skills, instead of balancing classes.

Asheron's Call introduced a huge world with very little zoning and more dungeons than any game to date.  It was a skill based system, while not as good as UO's skill system, it was still good.  The prevalence of botters though pretty much ruined the game and Turbine reacted too late to correct the problem. 

DAoC was a great innovator, but made some major goofs too.  Too many classes at the start of the game and then constant adding of more with every new expansion doomed the game.  They just could not balance the classes and all the class lines.  They also started with far too powerful crowd control and allowed buff bots to dominate the rvr scene.  Then they gave the powerlevelers their wish with powerful weapons and special powers for really hard quests and the game just died.

SWG after a rough launch became a very interesting game with it's skill system and player maintained economy.   It was not like some other MMO's because when you killed something it did not drop a sword, gun or armor, it dropped raw materials which other used to make things.  Besides the new player equipment almost everything was player made.  It was not until NGE destroyed the skill system and introduced reduced rigid class lines that the game died.

Innovation seemed to die with Wow, until Eve came along.  Eve extended the player based economy of SWG and added a unique skill system that trained skills over time, whether you were in game or  not.  While you can still find things from hunting pirates in Eve, the items manufactured by players is as good or better than most of the stuff found on pirates.  Eve's is not perfect, the rules are very confusing for the restricted pvp in the Empire space, so called safe area and really need a restructuring.  They also have a problem with large fleet battles, mostly because they use a lot of interpretive code verses compiled code.  

So if I were to design a better fantasy MMO, it would be:

#1 be skill based.  I personally like the time trained skills that Eve uses, who cares if you play 1 hour a day or 10 with such a system.  With such a system levels would supperfluous,

#2 have a player crafted economy.  Creatures would drop raw materials mostly, but if the creature could carry weapons or armor then it has a possibility of a good drop.  Player manufactured items would be the better items except for a few rare exceptions. 

#3 have a large world, with few zones.  Difficult to eliminate zones, but limiting them would be paramount.

#4 Lots of dungeons, Some instanced ,some not.  So both crowds can choose what they like.

#5 Open pvp in some areas, BUT with consequences.  Those who player killed often would have restrictions.  Sorry pvpers you can't have your cake and eat it too, others just won't play if you dominate.  Some areas would be dangerous and open pvp, probably would have the rarer resources too.

#6 Player towns are something I would like, but are a problem when it comes to being attacked, how do you defend an attack at off hours, definitely need a mechanism that only makes it difficult to destroy one quickly.

#7 Questing seems to be still well liked, but would include puzzles as well as quests that are not tied to one specific area.  Perhaps many of them would require you to gather resources to get something made and would be repeatable and the item recieved could be random in it's usefulness.

#8 Crafting would be important in this game.  Highly skilled crafters would be able to make much better items than the run of the mill crafter.

This is just a skeleton of a what I think a good MMO needs, I am sure many of you differ with what I would like, but I really don't think innovating is as important as just using the good ideas that are already out there.

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EQ is the evil incarnate monster that introduced rigid class lines in this genre. Just lazy developers that use this because they don't want to take time to balance skills, instead of balancing classes.

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Classes and levels technically come from Dungeons and Dragons. EQ was not the first online game to use this system, but it was the first that seemed to go to great lengths to strip out any semblance of depth from its core design, thus introducing the terrible phenomenon known as "Evercrack".

That said, I agree with Ozmodan; innovation isn't entirely necessary when there are many giants gone before upon whose broad shoulders a developer could stand and still be touted as an "innovator". Just as an example, one thing I and others enjoy about WoW is the "seamless" nature of the game world -- go from one end of a continent to the other without interrupting the game experience to load a new zone. But Ultima Online offered this feature (of course the non-MMO Dungeon Siege was the first, I believe, to offer this in a 3D world).

However I want to re-emphasize that all of these features are just a different shade of the same color. What's important -- and what developers have yet to really figure out, despite over a decade of MMO history, is that players want to make a difference in the world. If you you finish a quest and kill all the bad guys, but the bad guys respawn and the quest doesn't ever change, the whole experience feels cheap.

There are technical issues with addressing this issue, but thats what I'm saying -- the time has come for MMO developers to invest time and resources to deepen the experience we've already got, rather than to "innovate" new features.

Excellent point about deepening the experience.  Everyone wants to have some effect on the world, yet rarely does it happen in current MMO's.