Well

Better character customization is always good, in both abilities and appearence.

I don't like characters that switch between classes or can access all skill because they lack any identity and seem too generic.

Better looking gear is also good, more customization (statistical and aethetic) would be even better.

But these do not effect grinding.

What makes something a grind for me comes from how fun the action is and what I am grinding for.

To make actions more fun they need to engauge the player more.

Combat for instance could stand to be faster, not in faster deaths but faster ability execution so that players have to be more attentitive.  Making it smoother would also help, if I press three abilites quickly then it would feel much better to have my charater smoothly perform the attacks as if thery were a combo.  Making combat more flexible would also help, abilities should not be one trick ponies, they should have different effects when used in certain situations, like the target is stunned or on the ground and also in a combo with other abilities.  Variety in abilities is also a big plus.

Crafting would be more fun if the player did more than combine regents or followed recipes. Being able to have more control over the statistics of items is useful but not really fun, the fun part I think would be in visual customization, designing a sword or piece of armour would make crafting much more fun, I don't think anyone gets a kick out of watching a bar fill up or getting that 3% increase in damage protection.

Gathering abilities should not require the player to make macros and walk off from the game.  The actual act of gathering is rather dull, instead of hitting a rock with a pick the fun part would be organizing a mine.  If you could hire NPC underlings to do the boring work then scouting new areas and creating mini mine dungeons to extract minerals, while also being able to help out would be pretty fun.  This applies to most other gathering skills because simulating manual labour isn't my idea of fun.

Mob AI also helps.  If mobs were more intelligent and had a wider array of abilities to use and different mobs had different personalities and tactics it would make fighting them more fun.  And if mobs were more proactive as in they randomly attacked towns or traveled around then it would be much more exciting.  PvP does this too, and if you combined PvP with more intelligent PvE then there should be much more interesting things to do.

Variety of action.  Realize that having crafting and combat does not always make for more variety, since they are not substitutes.  If you want to fight things there should be multiples way to do so, the big thing here is purpose, some people can enjoy aimless killing but I like more purpose.  you could incorporate more random events like bandit attacks or a monster infestation that randomly happen and do not immediately respawn when complete, this adds a more dynamic degree to the game.  Again PvP and battlefield objectives do this too, giving players the unpredictability of other players with the more purpose driven aspect of open objectives.  Crafting and gathering could also have random events for them to give dedicated crafters and gatherers interesting things to do.

Another aspect is what you are grinding for.

What I hate about most MMOs is that you are forced to grind to experience the game and not grinding puts you behind, this amplifies the already dull and repetitive activies.

There is a another way to do this, Call of Duty 4 for example, though not a MMO does have grind technically but it does not feel like grind.  For one shooting people is fun so that helps a lot.  But another aspect is that unlike MMOs if you do not grind you are not useless and you can still play with your friends.  In CoD4 you grind for little perks but there isn't much statistical advancement.  In MMOs you grind to get higher levels or skills and since the focus of grinding is statistical advancement not grinding means your character can not participate with players that are higher than them or they will auto-lose, infact there are many areas you can't set foot in because you auto-lose from being too low a level.  If the power gradient was smoothed and grinding gave players access to unique abilites and gear and more character customization then grinding would be something you do while you are having fun and not grinding would not be penalized.

As for crafting I think that crafting needs to hold much more weight, where player crafted items are the main source of items for other players, but NPCs could craft too and compete against the players for sells, to add variety.  Then again I do not like stat increasing items, it makes gear too important and creates too much power difference which has adverse effects.

There are real world economists and there are MMORPG economists.  I am the later.  I have spent several years identifing problems in the generally accepted F&D modle (see my sig).  I have also spent that time developing my own solution, though I have not made it publically avail I have shared it with a few people.

I belive that all MMORPG's start with a good economy and go from there.  The economy is the foundation on which any good MMO should be built.  SWG (ver1) was about as close to a "good" economy as I have ever seen, but we all know what happened to that....

If you're really trying to find out what people like and don't like, I think it's pretty important to find out information about what a players expectation is and fit them into several catagories.

How can you grind against in game support people making it a virtual world , I sahre hereby my experience in a recent F2P game called Atlantica Online.

Atlantic Online – A Critical Analysis.

I have been playing this game for a while now. Here is where I break down and critically analyze the game.

Graphics
Well not really remarkable but then again if you are using a low PC and you are not into good graphic options the game is quite alright. There are shadow textures and the strategy battle mode is kind of silly and it takes away the surrounding graphical resolution as all the battles are just a loading of 2 monster types similar yet different in Mdef and Pdef randomly numbered in a set from 6-8.

Community
It is pretty much as the free to play community of other free to play games. It is nothing much special. Every now and then you will find people using racism or slang and the chat filter kind of makes it more prominent. Some of the players have even found out a way to overwrite the filter by calling people “nab” than noob.
The community section is for accessing players and no matter how many times I have added people from the beginner’s column, I have found they are either placed there to be used by players or just kept online to fill the list. I have actually found a few players from the beginner’s column who leveled after being added into the guild.
In this section you will find crafters and I think it is more of a gameplay support system than a real mass of online game playing players.

Gameplay
Almost majority of the gameplay is solo stuff without much team gaming found. Team gaming forms the essence of the Mmo gaming and it completely lacks in it. Every now and then you will find over-leveled players spamming peer chat and trying to get a party to do some solo quest. By over – leveled players I mean players who have leveled but do not have good skills or armors or weapons to do the solo quest or continue with it. The most irritating portion of the game is the inventory system and the opening of the boxes kind of locks you. This is again an item shop dependent portion so we can well make out where the game is trying to make the money out of cash shop.

Monsters
The game has a strategy oriented battle system and the monsters generally form of a mix of two separate monsters. Strangely every group will have 2 separate monsters one with a high Mdef and the other with a high Pdef so as you have to select proper mouseclick to make the most damage.

Game-Balance
This is the best portion of any game that I like to analyze.
The game has auto battle option and auto battle is again limited to license and auto battle points. I have seen the worse use of this system throughout the Atlantic playfield. Sometimes it is so bad that many free league toons are also into auto battle and their geek armor / rings or their geek skills won’t allow you to proceed further in division.
So here we see that the game is ready to gear up for item shop based free games that form a bulk of population in mmo list.

Sorry for all the folks out there trying to make Atlantica Online a success , here is my review after playing the game and picking up tits and bits form what exactly is going on.

Guild / Town System
There is not much here but a chat panel and a few town buildings for making town grow.
You can make the town grow but if your guild is not active it can be taken away by another guild with more guild points. So the urge to make the town grow is limited to the cash flow from the tax payments and nothing more. The numbers of towns are limited and as such it is more likely that you will be bided out eventually from a town as you will loose guild points every time you try to save it.
I lost my town through guild point bidding as my guild had many support members of the game who didn’t join when we had to do training centre to keep the town. Also support people go offline after a point of time in guild and then the only way is to dismiss them from guild.

Market and Economy
The economy is quite nice and I have found that your stuff usually sells at quite a steady rate. I think it is mostly support controlled but you can still have the pseudo feeling that this is player controlled.

Crafting
You can craft but it is really no point crafting if you see crafted products are not special and they sell for lower gold than the amount of gold needed to craft. There are some special products that can well only be crafted but the stats in them is not that much appealing to level up your craft skill which is a very costly and time consuming process.
Support people will always have greater crafting level as to them they need it to make the Market balance.

Mini Games
You have the training centre and the treasure map hunting or the developer challenge which are pretty good and can be fun for some time.

Errors
The game is dependent on time. Each turn takes 30secs. So if you lag you will miss turns either against monsters or against opponents in free league. The game has many battle speeds and I have found that the same toon and the same opponents difficulty level rises or falls in free leagues with different battle speeds and thus I think the game is a bit dependent on the internet speed when it comes to free league. The game still lags a lot in it’s near to release from the days of CB.
There are few glitches for the exploiters. If you want to have skill increase in any crafting you go to taj and dismantle Walachia stuff for flame shrda , you will get craft skills up.

At-last and not the least, I have played the game again till 60+ levels and I feel kind of bored going further. May be it is the lack of team gaming that makes it more of a multiplayer diablo mix with the market and the chat to connect players.

All said and done I think from free leagues to the community with artisans and beginners this is all made up support of this game. I do not want to waste my time here anymore in atlantica online. I deleted my character at level 70ish and I am sure not going to give this game another try, reasons being lack of actual players and support community trying to control every part of the game this way or that way including all the towns. If you want Matrix in a mmo world, go ahead waste time with this game for sure.

Originally posted by Nixish

On the topic of crafting, do you guys feel crafts should mainly produce consumables and leave the gear up to pve/pvp activities, or do you think they should be on par and/or occasionally exceed their pvp/e counterparts? (but with a high material cost of course)

In my opinion crafted gear should be able to be better, or at least on par with, looted items.

Two of my favourite games ever are Diablo 2 and Star Wars Galaxies (at least up until CU). In Diablo 2 the stats on items were random and could vary alot. People sought after so called 'perfect items'. There were yellow items that had a lot of stats that potentially could be better than unique items or set items. In D2 these items were random drops but I'd like this randomness to exist in MMORPG's crafting where maybe the skill of the crafter also would determine how good an item was together with the quality of the materials.

Most systems today are quite lacking and boring and it comes down to who has looted the right receipt/plan/pattern/whatever rather than crafting determination. People also skill up their professions TOO fast. Imagine that to reach max skill level in WoW crafting it would take months playing as much as a hard core raider... now those people would be famous for their skills and everyone would like their armour.

The crafting system in SWG was superb, it was just that the armours/weapons etc was a bit bland... i'd like a game with SWG's crafting but loot like WoW with Diablo 2's randomness.

With every update to the game where the PvE loot gets better the possibility should also be to craft better gear... maybe with new materials released with the same update. And no, the materials should not come from the new raid instance. (I have the same opinion about world drops in WoW as well... there should be improved world drops with each content patch but that is another topic).

Sorry for the rushed answer... at work, don't have time to think what I write completely through! :)

Players have little reason to explore, or little benefit from exploration
>Add rare items for gathering professions that grow/spawn in out-of-reach areas
.Mob AI too predictable
1. Little to no mob intimidation on a global scale (inteligent humanoids or dragons need to raid player and npc cities)
2. Little to no reason to return to an area after leveling past it other than to gather materials or power level a friend
3. Zones with no flavor and/or not at all breathtaking

Exploration in thses games is something that I think really needs to be....ummmm.......explored?

There needs to be a reason for the adventurer to explore too...not just rare crafting items.  Maybe rare armor/weapons/clothing found in random camps with chests, a unique player title for exploring numerous areas......I don't know.

In WAR I took my zealot to every spot in every map....even to Order areas...and I got nothing.  I climbed a mountain, found an abandoned camp....and got nothing.  After a few levels of doing this it was like screw it....what's the point?

I love to explore, but if there is a risk of death...as there should be....there should be some reward also.

Here is my list of things that would make a very good MMO.

First Impression.

When you start you first make your character, this is the first impression of a game for me. I love the customization of City of Heroes; it has a ton of options, but it would be the best if you could custom build the face and body.

Level or Skill

I hate level/class based games. As said before I like the Oblivion type of setup. But there should be restrictions based off of race. Example; A human should not be able to use a Giant’s axe, or train skills in that area.

Group or Solo.

Everquest 1 was the best in this area.
Grouping is a must; it brings in the social aspect of the game. Soloing should be available but only to small areas. Public quest in Warhammer is a awesome idea, and soloing should only be available to those areas. While grouping is required in most of the zones, excluding the corner for public quest.

Make if freaking hard.

Most people have played a MMO who are going to play a MMO. No use of making it super easy. Most people whine about a game is hard. But if it works and there are no technical problems, then they love it. I usually find it satisfying to take that hard thing down. This does not mean grind hard, meaning it is always a tough fight.

Risk vs reward, have we heard of this one before?

Reward to me (with a high risk), is getting something NO ONE or very few people have. Let’s say we as a group take down a Cyclops named BOB. We fight for 10 minutes to take him down, and all we get is a sword only a tank can use? Or we all get something that you can buy on the broker en masse. It has to be unique not something that is just put out there that anyone can have. And the experience should also be added for the length of time it took to take that monster.

Make everything attackable and it can be captured.

Example; There is a city named York and it has a ton of guards. My army comes in and kills all the guards and we take it over. I can change the name of York and make it the city of Desire for Pink Rabbits. And we own this town, spending resources for guards, buildings, etc.

Travel.

This is where Everquest before Luclin really shined.

No portals, you either huff it on foot, or take a boat, or get a mount. If there are teleports, it should be a small distance, like the old D&D game Menzoberranzen. I don’t mind spells being used for teleport, but short distance.

Of course all of this is my own opinion.