I think it is a very legit mmo.

According to many people the only real mmorpg's  are a hardcore  group forcing games, the problem with those games is that'

after a short vile people have formed guilds that does not have any social action with other people other than puting up items on sale in the auctionhouse and raiding with their guildmates.

That is what many people find the only real mmorpg.

Let's ask Garriot?

An mmo to me is a game that has a great landmass and a majority of that landmass in the game is persistant IE non-instanced and on that great persistant landmass  there should be able to be at least a thousand players logged in at the same time. This great landmass does not have to be seamless.

SWTOR fits so it's an mmo but still a crappy one for other reasons (altough a good bioware rpg game).

Originally posted by fenistil

Originally posted by Icewhite

If you have any question about what mmorpg means, you might want to review the "Development of EQ".

The redefinition game is ultimately futile when dealing with a field as varied as this one.

WoW style Intanced Dungeons or instanced "BattleGrounds" contradicts the Massively Multiplayer part. If the game is infested with instances then it is not a Massively Multiplayer.

If you've ever found yourself seriously proposing that WoW is not an MMO, for example, you might need to just stop treating abstract concepts as concretes.  You're splitting hairs and indulging your pedantry.

WoW is still an MMOrpg ,but almost everything Blizz did with this game since Vanilla - like prioritizing instance gameplay, making Arenas , making cross-server LFG tools with auto-teleportation, phasing , redesinging game so players spent 90% in instances ,etc  - all of this imho is pushing WoW outside of MMOrpg sphere.

Don't get me wrong WoW is still mmorpg ,but imo barely.

 .... 

 Yes.

It's funny because the post-WoW themepark philosophy has basically been:

 "Let's hide the fact that this is an MMORPG as much as possible!"

And as you say, this even applies to WoW itself.  In exception for things like public quests, rifts, and invasions, almost all new features added to modern themepark MMORPGs are just standard multiplayer things, i.e. instanced dungeons, PvP, and soon scenarios.  Or even crazier, things that deliberately undermine the persistent world.

It's like developers see the persistent world as a "problem" that they have to overcome somehow.  For example...

Hmmm...players are complaining that the world never changes when they do their quests.  I know!  Let's make it so players at different stages of quests just get shunted off to different instances of the world which reflect their current quest state.

Yeah, you succeed in making the players feel like they are changing the world, but you do so at the cost of isolating them from other players...making the world less shared which is a key aspect of an MMORPG.  This also goes along with...

Hmmm...players are complaining that there aren't enough mobs for them, they say that other players keep taking them.  I know!  Let's make a ton of separate shared instances for each zone so that there are only so many players in one instance at a time.

Yeah, you make sure that players always have enough mobs, but you do so at the cost of making the world feel much more empty and less shared.

Originally posted by Adamantine

A MMORPG is a "Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game".

Thus it would have to be:

- Massively Multiplayer : Not just multiplayer, but massively multiplayer, i.e. there have to be at least hundreds, if not thousands of other players in the same world with you.

- Online : The game is played in the internet

- Role-Playing : The game is based on character properties and statistics, rather than on the reflexes etc of the gamer. Unlike a shooter, where the power of the game character depends mostly upon the amount of physical skills with the game controls the gamer possesses. Using a roleplaying rather than a shooter control allows for better tolerance in respect to ping.

- Game : There is no actual gain from the program; it is art and entertainment.

 All of this, especially the highlighted.

Originally posted by elos_rekat

Originally posted by Adamantine

A MMORPG is a "Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game".

Thus it would have to be:

- Massively Multiplayer : Not just multiplayer, but massively multiplayer, i.e. there have to be at least hundreds, if not thousands of other players in the same world with you.

- Online : The game is played in the internet

- Role-Playing : The game is based on character properties and statistics, rather than on the reflexes etc of the gamer. Unlike a shooter, where the power of the game character depends mostly upon the amount of physical skills with the game controls the gamer possesses. Using a roleplaying rather than a shooter control allows for better tolerance in respect to ping.

- Game : There is no actual gain from the program; it is art and entertainment.

 All of this, especially the highlighted.

Originally posted by fenistil

 

WoW is still an MMOrpg ,but almost everything Blizz did with this game since Vanilla - like prioritizing instance gameplay, making Arenas , making cross-server LFG tools with auto-teleportation, phasing , redesinging game so players spent 90% in instances ,etc  - all of this imho is pushing WoW outside of MMOrpg sphere.

 

It is more like WOW is redefining what MMORPG means. Put it this way, do you really think at some point, if WOW goes down this road further (and it is, they just put in LFR, and they will have instance group quest called scenarios in the next expansion), the industry, and the market will refer to it as something else?

All this discussion is just moot. No one is going to change language use just because of some discussions on forums.

Originally posted by Fadedbomb

Originally posted by Teala

Originally posted by Calerxes
~Random Jibberish that didn't make sense...

When you quoted Thomas Edison you lost me, Thomas Edison was a hack, so anything he said is worthless, he gained fame off the work of others - people like Nicolas Tesla.  

As for what a real MMORPG is?  Well SWTOR is not one.  That I can tell you.  :)

~QFE

 

Examples of REAL MMOs previously done:

~DAOC

~EQ pre-Planes of Power

~SWG Pre-NGE, maybe even Pre-CU

~Shadowbane

~UO

 

Instances detracts from the "open world" of what an MMO is. ZERO instancing is EVER allowed!

Hand-Holding linear questing destroys immersion, and eventually turns into a grind of Exp per hour (EPH).

Uninteresting generic itemization destroys any sort of uniqueness to character customization.

 

 

Enjoy your hand-holding SWTOR, it won't last long. People don't want that old Wow-Clone model anymore.

Hmmm, based on pre-order numbers alone, as well as the number of servers that are high-pop, I'd say you are wrong and people want TOR-style gameplay way more than the other games you mentioned. Hell, 2 of the games you listed are shut down, are they not?

Originally posted by MMOExposed

Originally posted by elos_rekat

Originally posted by Adamantine

A MMORPG is a "Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game".

Thus it would have to be:

- Massively Multiplayer : Not just multiplayer, but massively multiplayer, i.e. there have to be at least hundreds, if not thousands of other players in the same world with you.

- Online : The game is played in the internet

- Role-Playing : The game is based on character properties and statistics, rather than on the reflexes etc of the gamer. Unlike a shooter, where the power of the game character depends mostly upon the amount of physical skills with the game controls the gamer possesses. Using a roleplaying rather than a shooter control allows for better tolerance in respect to ping.

- Game : There is no actual gain from the program; it is art and entertainment.

 All of this, especially the highlighted.

 

That red part is not true at all. Because that would mean that Skyrim isn't a rpg

Skyrim has and relies heavily statistics.. try and fight a mob on hardest difficulty at level 50 with a weapon you have not leveled and perked up in.

The trend is moving from Massive to "Moderately Populated Channels", Multiplayer to "Small Group/Solo Instances", Online to "Undergoing Unscheduled Maintenance", and then dropping the "RPG" part altogether.

I'm not the biggest fan of this trend.

Originally posted by NaughtyP

The trend is moving from Massive to "Moderately Populated Channels", Multiplayer to "Small Group/Solo Instances", Online to "Undergoing Unscheduled Maintenance", and then dropping the "RPG" part altogether.

I'm not the biggest fan of this trend.

Yeah I feel it's all a matter of convenience for the host now, to split up the game and section people off for the least hassle on the servers (in some cases, different servers and instanced content), yet they still want to call them MMORPGS.

By the way, your avatar hit me like a freight train of nostalgia.

Massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) is a genre of role-playing video games in which a very large number of players interact with one another within a virtual game world.

As in all RPGs, players assume the role of a character (often in a fantasy world) and take control over many of that character's actions. MMORPGs are distinguished from single-player or small multi-player RPGs by the number of players, and by the game's persistent world (usually hosted by the game's publisher), which continues to exist and evolve while the player is offline and away from the game.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mmorpg

---

Originally posted by Calerxes
,,, there are plentry of other things to fill your time rather than bemoaning the demise of the genre. 

---

yada yada yada

You know there was a time when MASSIVE meant something more than 10 people in a group or 20 v 20 instanced PVP.

In games like Ultima and Shadowbane there'd be literally hundreds upwards to a thousand or so actual players in each other's territory or even player made cities playing the game together.

Sure this caused people with lower end computers, crappy connections, this or that to have a less than stellar experience.

I don't even thing most games allow more than 40 people in the same instance of a zone together any more, and really it came about to take some stress off of the technology. That's understandable.

But it has truly taken the term massive out of the "MMO".

Just because 10,000 people are on the same server you'll probably see about 4% of that population in any given game session.

We're 8 years removed from when these "fixes" became the norm.

Technology has grown.

There's a good section of us who have been patient with the developers in this genre. Except they don't take advantage of the new technology. They keep it simple because they know the majority of MMO players now are noobs who don't know what the word "massive" means.

Hell seeing people describe large scale pvp as having more than 6 people on either side is just mind numbingly stupid to me.

WoW is not an MMO anymore. SWTOR never was. Guild Wars admits its not an MMO, mad props for the truth.

As for forced grouping, since WoW brought in all these casuals and people who never played an MMO before and aside from SWTOR never played one aside from WoW you have to force grouping, because people refuse to do it. Which is fine, but why not play srpg or corpg and stop shoving the mmo genre slowly towards corpg? GW was corpg in 2005 and WoW is slowly pushing instancing and phasing over to the GW model. SWTOR is doing it too and they are even doing the story and voice acting thing. And heros and henchman diablo type crap is in GW and apparently to some degree in SW.

Why would people group when they can just have henchman and shit doing it?

Luckily we are getting people who want to push the genre back to what it was meant to be about. Soon enough diablo 3 or diablo 4 will merge with GW and SWTOR and WoW as a new genre and we can get back to the goal of MMOs.

I guess we could just give up to the tyranny of the masses and make a name specifically for real MMOs and then just leave this debate behind. Once 99% of the population never even played a real MMO its probably not reasonable to get them to understand what MMO was supposed to mean.

Originally posted by PukeBucket

 

---

Originally posted by Calerxes
,,, there are plentry of other things to fill your time rather than bemoaning the demise of the genre. 

---

 

yada yada yada

You know there was a time when MASSIVE meant something more than 10 people in a group or 20 v 20 instanced PVP.

In games like Ultima and Shadowbane there'd be literally hundreds upwards to a thousand or so actual players in each other's territory or even player made cities playing the game together.

Sure this caused people with lower end computers, crappy connections, this or that to have a less than stellar experience.

I don't even thing most games allow more than 40 people in the same instance of a zone together any more, and really it came about to take some stress off of the technology. That's understandable.

But it has truly taken the term massive out of the "MMO".

Just because 10,000 people are on the same server you'll probably see about 4% of that population in any given game session.

We're 8 years removed from when these "fixes" became the norm.

Technology has grown.

There's a good section of us who have been patient with the developers in this genre. Except they don't take advantage of the new technology. They keep it simple because they know the majority of MMO players now are noobs who don't know what the word "massive" means.

Hell seeing people describe large scale pvp as having more than 6 people on either side is just mind numbingly stupid to me.

There's always a desire to just throw a ton of people in the same area in an MMORPG and just say "have at it."  After all, it's a MASSIVELY multiplayer game right?

But I think you really have to question whether or not this is a good idea.  Is it fun for the individual to participate in a truly massive event?  Personally, I don't think it is...at least not for me.  WAR and Darkfall had massive fights that would happen in the open world, but I actually found them quite dull.  They mostly consist of two sides staring at each other and being afraid to commit, both side trying to "skirmish" to get an advantage.  Then eventually the fight will happen, will be fairly short, and then will be over.

it's fun maybe once or twice, but it gets old fast.  After a while you're just thinking "okay get on with it..."

To me, massive doesn't necessarily mean that you have to have a ton of players in one area at once.  I look at it more along the lines that all the players in the world share something that feels tangible, they all have a sense of community and culture.  Just like how a real country works.

In EQ for example, you really didn't do much on a "massive" scale.  Most of the time you would just be in fairly small groups.  But the game still felt massive.  You really depended on other players for certain things all the time like ports and stuff, and your reputation was VERY important.  If you got a bad rep, it would be hard to find a group.  The game felt massive because, even though you never shared the same space with a bunch of folks at once, it required players to act as a society to succeed.

Nowadays though, the only massive thing I can find in modern themeparks is the auction house.  There is no sense of society in WoW...you can be a complete prick and never be punished for it.  And with things like phasing and excessive zone sharding, you never feel like you're part of a world with tons of other people in it.

Originally posted by nariusseldon

Originally posted by fenistil

 

WoW is still an MMOrpg ,but almost everything Blizz did with this game since Vanilla - like prioritizing instance gameplay, making Arenas , making cross-server LFG tools with auto-teleportation, phasing , redesinging game so players spent 90% in instances ,etc  - all of this imho is pushing WoW outside of MMOrpg sphere.

 

 

It is more like WOW is redefining what MMORPG means. Put it this way, do you really think at some point, if WOW goes down this road further (and it is, they just put in LFR, and they will have instance group quest called scenarios in the next expansion), the industry, and the market will refer to it as something else?

All this discussion is just moot. No one is going to change language use just because of some discussions on forums.

yes, if the abuse of the term MMO keeps going the way its going, there definitely will be new terminology made.  MMO will just become totally meaningless (like it pretty much already is) and there will be a NEW set of words or acronyms that actually MEAN something.  anybody using the old terms will get drawn into needless verbiage (like is happening now) that centers around trying to find out what the hell the other person is talking about.

thats the way language works.  the whole point of language is to clearly get across ideas, so when a word gets too confusing, other words are created and migrated to.

yes languages change.  especially ones that refer to very dynamic subjects.  such as the game industry.

things in the real world don't necessarily have much overlap with things in nariusworld.

---

Originally posted by Creslin321

---

Originally posted by PukeBucket
 

---

Originally posted by Calerxes
,,, there are plentry of other things to fill your time rather than bemoaning the demise of the genre. 

---

 
yada yada yada
You know there was a time when MASSIVE meant something more than 10 people in a group or 20 v 20 instanced PVP.
In games like Ultima and Shadowbane there'd be literally hundreds upwards to a thousand or so actual players in each other's territory or even player made cities playing the game together.
Sure this caused people with lower end computers, crappy connections, this or that to have a less than stellar experience.
I don't even thing most games allow more than 40 people in the same instance of a zone together any more, and really it came about to take some stress off of the technology. That's understandable.
But it has truly taken the term massive out of the "MMO".
Just because 10,000 people are on the same server you'll probably see about 4% of that population in any given game session.
We're 8 years removed from when these "fixes" became the norm.
Technology has grown.
There's a good section of us who have been patient with the developers in this genre. Except they don't take advantage of the new technology. They keep it simple because they know the majority of MMO players now are noobs who don't know what the word "massive" means.
Hell seeing people describe large scale pvp as having more than 6 people on either side is just mind numbingly stupid to me.

---

There's always a desire to just throw a ton of people in the same area in an MMORPG and just say "have at it."  After all, it's a MASSIVELY multiplayer game right?
But I think you really have to question whether or not this is a good idea.  Is it fun for the individual to participate in a truly massive event?  Personally, I don't think it is...at least not for me.  WAR and Darkfall had massive fights that would happen in the open world, but I actually found them quite dull.  They mostly consist of two sides staring at each other and being afraid to commit, both side trying to "skirmish" to get an advantage.  Then eventually the fight will happen, will be fairly short, and then will be over.
it's fun maybe once or twice, but it gets old fast.  After a while you're just thinking "okay get on with it..."
To me, massive doesn't necessarily mean that you have to have a ton of players in one area at once.  I look at it more along the lines that all the players in the world share something that feels tangible, they all have a sense of community and culture.  Just like how a real country works.
In EQ for example, you really didn't do much on a "massive" scale.  Most of the time you would just be in fairly small groups.  But the game still felt massive.  You really depended on other players for certain things all the time like ports and stuff, and your reputation was VERY important.  If you got a bad rep, it would be hard to find a group.  The game felt massive because, even though you never shared the same space with a bunch of folks at once, it required players to act as a society to succeed.
Nowadays though, the only massive thing I can find in modern themeparks is the auction house.  There is no sense of society in WoW...you can be a complete prick and never be punished for it.  And with things like phasing and excessive zone sharding, you never feel like you're part of a world with tons of other people in it.

---

That's a really shallow and pedantic way to look at it at first, but thanks for saying what I said and douching it up towards the end.

And you obviously never tried to wake the Sleeper in EQ.

So yeah, massive multiplayer online role playing games should have a massive amount of players doing things together.

Originally posted by PukeBucket

 

---

Originally posted by Creslin321

---

Originally posted by PukeBucket
 

---

Originally posted by Calerxes
,,, there are plentry of other things to fill your time rather than bemoaning the demise of the genre. 

---

 
yada yada yada
You know there was a time when MASSIVE meant something more than 10 people in a group or 20 v 20 instanced PVP.
In games like Ultima and Shadowbane there'd be literally hundreds upwards to a thousand or so actual players in each other's territory or even player made cities playing the game together.
Sure this caused people with lower end computers, crappy connections, this or that to have a less than stellar experience.
I don't even thing most games allow more than 40 people in the same instance of a zone together any more, and really it came about to take some stress off of the technology. That's understandable.
But it has truly taken the term massive out of the "MMO".
Just because 10,000 people are on the same server you'll probably see about 4% of that population in any given game session.
We're 8 years removed from when these "fixes" became the norm.
Technology has grown.
There's a good section of us who have been patient with the developers in this genre. Except they don't take advantage of the new technology. They keep it simple because they know the majority of MMO players now are noobs who don't know what the word "massive" means.
Hell seeing people describe large scale pvp as having more than 6 people on either side is just mind numbingly stupid to me.

---

There's always a desire to just throw a ton of people in the same area in an MMORPG and just say "have at it."  After all, it's a MASSIVELY multiplayer game right?
But I think you really have to question whether or not this is a good idea.  Is it fun for the individual to participate in a truly massive event?  Personally, I don't think it is...at least not for me.  WAR and Darkfall had massive fights that would happen in the open world, but I actually found them quite dull.  They mostly consist of two sides staring at each other and being afraid to commit, both side trying to "skirmish" to get an advantage.  Then eventually the fight will happen, will be fairly short, and then will be over.
it's fun maybe once or twice, but it gets old fast.  After a while you're just thinking "okay get on with it..."
To me, massive doesn't necessarily mean that you have to have a ton of players in one area at once.  I look at it more along the lines that all the players in the world share something that feels tangible, they all have a sense of community and culture.  Just like how a real country works.
In EQ for example, you really didn't do much on a "massive" scale.  Most of the time you would just be in fairly small groups.  But the game still felt massive.  You really depended on other players for certain things all the time like ports and stuff, and your reputation was VERY important.  If you got a bad rep, it would be hard to find a group.  The game felt massive because, even though you never shared the same space with a bunch of folks at once, it required players to act as a society to succeed.
Nowadays though, the only massive thing I can find in modern themeparks is the auction house.  There is no sense of society in WoW...you can be a complete prick and never be punished for it.  And with things like phasing and excessive zone sharding, you never feel like you're part of a world with tons of other people in it.

---

 

That's a really shallow and pedantic way to look at it at first, but thanks for saying what I said and douching it up towards the end.

And you obviously never tried to wake the Sleeper in EQ.

So yeah, massive multiplayer online role playing games should have a massive amount of players doing things together.

 LOL "douching it up?"  I have no clue what you're talking about.

The only thing I can gather from this is that I disagreed with your ideal of an MMORPG and you got mad about it ;).

Originally posted by Eir_S

Originally posted by NaughtyP

The trend is moving from Massive to "Moderately Populated Channels", Multiplayer to "Small Group/Solo Instances", Online to "Undergoing Unscheduled Maintenance", and then dropping the "RPG" part altogether.

I'm not the biggest fan of this trend.

Yeah I feel it's all a matter of convenience for the host now, to split up the game and section people off for the least hassle on the servers (in some cases, different servers and instanced content), yet they still want to call them MMORPGS.

By the way, your avatar hit me like a freight train of nostalgia.

Final Fantasy. My very first addiction.

"Enter a whole new realm of challenge and adventure."