Eh there,

I am Anofalye, I am an ex-MMO addict and I haven't been playing any MMO for over 5 years.  Yet I am neither proud nor looking particuliarly to fall back again in the mood, yet since tonight I can't sleep, I figure out I could come back and share some "old" ideas about the topic.

1st common mistake: No gameplay is superior or inferior to any other gameplay.  However, many devs will try to "force" a gameplay beyond a point in the game, if not many gameplays...with the hope the players will change and keep playing.  Thing is, if the player get a 2500% blast experience from it initial gaming experiences, he will likely stay until he get over that amount in "displeasing" experience.  This could usually be transfered into roughtly 50% of the initial gaming time, and note that since the player isn't stopping his initial gaming experience in a day, it still add ups...so it could means weeks, months or even in some case years before they gave up on a gameplay which would never have appeal to them.  For exemple, if someone is enjoying the tradeskills of a game but has to adventure out to get components, eventually it will wear out on him.

2nd common mistake: Lack of relevant content.  Devs will add bazillions things, and this is a good thing.  However they should be adding more of what is successfull, not new games.  It is very hard for a worker to always be improving the same things, human nature is frivolous and when you are paid to work, you often need "changes".  But if you made a successfull game in a way, changing the gaming experience is just about as developping a new completely different game.

3rd common mistake: Lack of revitalisation of the newbies areas.  You can interest veterans players in twinking only to some extand, there is a point where they won't want to play a new character.  If you want your game to last "eternally", you have to make sure every old area is interesting to come back, both for the veterans and for the newbies.

Now, I could go on, but I will switch my message to a brief presentation of myself, so peoples could understand my "agendas" and counter it, as it seems to be a common missconception that we will convince the devs to give us our precious and not our neihbor if we are convincing enought...yet to do so would be the undoing of any game, you cannot favorised any type of players over another, if you have a gameplay, no matter what it is, you have to support it, completely.  You don't have to support accidental gameplays, yet you can, as long as you do not stop supporting what makes the game successfull.

So about me, beside saying I am a highschool teacher who give up teaching for lack of governmental vision, that  my domain of expertise is social studies, that I work in the past as a game designer and work in many customer services departments...I used to be playing too much...my life isn't either a success nor a failure...I have a lot to think about silly stuff...such as games and hobbies and taking it too seriously.

About gaming I am a former solo terrorist who becames a group nazis which try to undermine raiding or PvP as much as I could, as I never like these and devs often put these gameplays in a feeble attempt to retain my subscribtion...and fail with a critial mistake.  I played extensively EQ and CoX and tries a dozen MMOs or so.

As to the solutions I see, they are neither complete, nor enought...but they are the basic IMO (not so humble).

A- Every area of the game needs a level cap.  This is essential, otherwise you completely destroy the gameplay in that zone.  There might be many work around this level cap to "cheat" within the rules, so you are indeed stronger than someone barely at the level cap, but the game has to remain interesting.  A level 50 killing level 10 orcs is destroying the game.  If a player wants to experience that, I have nothing against the idea, but it should be AWAY from the community and without significant rewards.  There could be plenty of things to still earn in old zones, such as secondaries abilities, stats, tiny powers/edges, LOOT.  This is right, there is no sense that all the best rewards are always in the level 100 dungeons, it trivialised everything else, make it useless at best.  Would it be soo bad that the best chest item are made by the dwarves in a zone with a level cap of 15?  Everyone is 15 or lower in there, so the challenge is there.  And there is a beauty in knowing easily, for the players, which zones hold which items locations best items, be them quests, purchasable, drop loot or whatever, they are all in this zone...and you are sure veterans will come back to this lowbie zone from time to time if they play the game a LOT when they feel they need a better breast item.  And as well as working on the loot, they still work on another XP side bonus skills/abilities/powers...

The logic behind this, beside gameplays, could be among these lines of arguments, for peoples who cares about logics in a game of elves, fireballs and dragons.  1- The energy of the Gods doesn't support higher levels.  2- The strenght and clumsiness of this area doesn't allows you to benefit from skills beyond a point,  sword mastery is only that good, this orc is twice bigger than you afterall.  3- Gravity changes and affect basics laws on this world, you can't tumble over a 3 floors building in there but in other places you can.  And so on...but first and foremost, gameplay is the main reason.

B- The MMOs has to be as "endless" as possible, without losing the interest of the player.  Every activity has to be the BEST to get good at doing it...you don't want the PvP folks raiding a mob, you don't want raiders soloing components to open the next door, you don't want soloers raiding to get decent loot...Nothing prevent you from "protecting" a gameplay from "easier" gameplay, perhaps solo gear isn't efficient in groups...has quite many idea on how to make that.

Anyway, I'm bored...and going back away from this MMOs area for now.  As an addict, we are never "cured", but since it has been over 5 years since my last MMOs experience, I'm not going to fall for BioWare putting some stories in the old schemes or Blizzard redoing what was done before.  Not that I don't respect what they do, they just do fit in for me.

Back to sleeping mode hopefully...

OP needs a little Guild Wars 2.

Was slightly difficult to follow, but I like the points about gameplay and that just because one type of gameplay is more popular than another doesn't mean we need to get rid of all the minority gameplay. Solo gameplay is obviously more popular than group gameplay, but a lot of games just take that to mean they can make solo gameplay fun and ignore group gameplay mechanics.

But you're right, there is no "better" of the two, its all a matter of opinion and personal situations (like you only have 30 minutes to play) say if 35% of the MMO-population love solo-play, 20% love group play, 15% love raid play, 15% love crafting and 15% love pvp then a great deal of developers will make a game solely focused on solo play since it is the biggest piece of the pie... but its sort of overlooked that a game focused on group play and crafting also represent an equal amount. 35% = 15%+20%. I guess at that point its more about the company being more effecient by focusing on the largest piece of the pie, instead of attempting to make all pieces equal.