I was just reading another thread on the perceived technological advances in the mmorpg genre over the past few years, phasing came up.

Combined with multiple servers per game and instancing of most dungeons and some zones, at what point are so called "mmorpgs" no longer massive?  It seems like we're using technology to make the games smaller instead of bigger.

I'm playing a game with 300,000 players.  That is broken up into 20 servers of 15,000 players each.  I enter a zone that only allows 200 players per instance.  Then perhaps I enter a dungeon that only allows 5 players.  That doesn't feel very massive anymore.  It feels more like lobby game with a subscription.

When I think massive, I think 400 vs 400 man fleet battle in Eve.  Not the 5 vs 5 battlegrounds / arenas common today.

400 is massive to you but not 200, hrm...

EvE online is one of the Few games I can say that is still massive and OPEN.. no Instances etc.. were you can get to anyone at any time.. You cant hide in missions and you cant hide in systems.. (unless you have a cloak on your ship.. and even then people can decloak you if they are skilled)

I find these heavy instanced games to be a serious let down to what MMOs could have been about... But few Devs have the balls that CCP dose..

SWTOR - Massive amounts of loading/cutscenes (useless ones like the 6 it takes to go from one planet to another)

WoW - Massive amounts of bad jokes

Most Asian MMORPGs - Massive amounts of grinding

EVE - Massive learning curve

LoL - Massive amounts of unskilled players (not really an MMO but is massive)

So yes, MMOs are still massive imo.

The problem is that players say they want massive, but what they really want is safety and isolation.  So we constantly have to scale things down so people can be confortable in small group content.  And don't you dare mix pvp into their pvp, then how can they just kill the 10 rats they were instructed to, they don't want distractions!

"massive" is relative, so it's inevitable that when massive games became common players' definition of massive would stretch beyond the original "Oh my god, a multiplayer game with more than 24 concurrent players on the same server in the same persistent world?!" meaning.

Of course the more meaningful question for most players is "are MMORPGs still fun?" or perhaps "Did being an MMO ever really add that much fun to gameplay?"  Personally I think if there's any question to MMORPGs' fun it's that they haven't created a new game for players to unravel.  If a game is 80% familiar, then it's 80% solved at launch which makes the fun last a lot shorter.  So I don't feel like the fundamental reason MMORPGs aren't as fun has anything to do with how multiplayer-ish they are (nor was it a big reason early MMORPGs were fun.)

The Ms in MMORPG stands for Massively Multiplayer, not just massive. But yes the OP is right, MMORPGs are going more and more from Massively Multiplayer to simply Multiplayer.

The reason is that it is hard to code and create the infrastructure needed to host houndreds of people interacting with each other so they instead created instances, zones and phasing to separate people which is wrong solution for a technical problem because it takes the first M out of MMORPG.

Reason is that, ThemePark, devs, or rather the producers, really dont care about Massively Multiplayer aspect of MMORPG. They dont care about creating worlds, they care about maximizing profits and catering to as much people as possible, not to create Massively Multiplayer Online Games.

Originally posted by dave6660

I was just reading another thread on the perceived technological advances in the mmorpg genre over the past few years, phasing came up.

Combined with multiple servers per game and instancing of most dungeons and some zones, at what point are so called "mmorpgs" no longer massive?  It seems like we're using technology to make the games smaller instead of bigger.

I'm playing a game with 300,000 players.  That is broken up into 20 servers of 15,000 players each.  I enter a zone that only allows 200 players per instance.  Then perhaps I enter a dungeon that only allows 5 players.  That doesn't feel very massive anymore.  It feels more like lobby game with a subscription.

When I think massive, I think 400 vs 400 man fleet battle in Eve.  Not the 5 vs 5 battlegrounds / arenas common today.

Hopefully not always. A random massive sea of players is not always fun. I will take well crafted, small group dungeon crawl (like in Diablo, WOW and many current titles) any day any time over a dungeon with 100 players.

Technologies is used to make the game FUN. There is no need to be massive just for the sake of it.

Massive has *some* legitimate use .. like in a gathering city where you can feel there are a lot of players, or a massive pvp battle. But that does not need to apply to ALL aspects of gameplay.

Oh, and sometimes 50 vs 50 feel massive enough. if you whole screen is filled with players, it does not matter if you put in another 100.

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Originally posted by dave6660
I was just reading another thread on the perceived technological advances in the mmorpg genre over the past few years, phasing came up.
Combined with multiple servers per game and instancing of most dungeons and some zones, at what point are so called "mmorpgs" no longer massive?  It seems like we're using technology to make the games smaller instead of bigger.
I'm playing a game with 300,000 players.  That is broken up into 20 servers of 15,000 players each.  I enter a zone that only allows 200 players per instance.  Then perhaps I enter a dungeon that only allows 5 players.  That doesn't feel very massive anymore.  It feels more like lobby game with a subscription.

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If there is a non-instanced world in which your character can battle and interact, it's an MMO. Otherwise, it's no more "massive" than Diablo. Simply because EvE encourages huge group PvP fights does not make it any more of a massively occupied world than WoW or TOR.

Originally posted by Vryheid

If there is a non-instanced world in which your character can battle and interact, it's an MMO. Otherwise, it's no more "massive" than Diablo. Simply because EvE encourages huge group PvP fights does not make it any more of a massively occupied world than WoW or TOR.

I disagree.  The frequency you see 50+ player activities occur in EVE dwarfs the frequency of those activities in WOW or ToR.

So it can definitely be said EVE has more massive multiplayer.

EVE has 99 problems limiting its fun for most players, but being an MMO ain't one.

I think the game real estate is still as big when you combine instances, phases and so on. The problem is, the perception of "massive" is out the window when you start subdividing your world no matter how large it really is in its entirety.

Analogy time! Take a giant palace where you can go anywhere. Now subdivide it into a bunch of condos. It's still the same size palace, but you can't go in every room in the building anymore because of all the walls and rules and so on. You have shared areas like hallways, rec room, and the laundry area... but what was once a grande palace is now gone.

This is what MMOs have become to me. It doesn't matter how big it is. If you cut it into tiny rooms and corridors, it becomes small. And people must go where the design leads them, so inevitably you run into less players because it is designed that way.

Yes..Vanguard=Vast.

Originally posted by Axehilt

Originally posted by Vryheid

If there is a non-instanced world in which your character can battle and interact, it's an MMO. Otherwise, it's no more "massive" than Diablo. Simply because EvE encourages huge group PvP fights does not make it any more of a massively occupied world than WoW or TOR.

I disagree.  The frequency you see 50+ player activities occur in EVE dwarfs the frequency of those activities in WOW or ToR.

So it can definitely be said EVE has more massive multiplayer.

EVE has 99 problems limiting its fun for most players, but being an MMO ain't one.

 

Really? Tol Barad in WOW is having a battle every 2.5 hours on ALL the servers. Each side can have up to 80 players (more than 50 than you named).

However, frequent and how many 50+ battle is happening in Eve? Is that more than 236 (that many just in the US) every 2.5 hours? How about if we count the rest of the world?

And we have not even talked about the OTHER battlegrounds.

Funny Planetside 2 will be the most massive MMO to come out in a long time (possibly ever) and it isn't even an RPG.

MMOs are still as "massive" as they ever were.

/beats dead horse

/shoots dead horse

/MMOs remain the same

Generally speaking, they are still massive.

Unfortunately, most MMORPGs do not have a framework or systems that actually make use of the open persistent world or the large population within it.  Opportunity after opportunity squandered.

Instanced-based gear grinding is the only meaningful activity they can come up with, which requires neither a persistent world, nor a massive concurrent playerbase.

MMORPGs now are just Single Player RPGs that require an internet connection.

Period.

Originally posted by Rohn

Generally speaking, they are still massive.

Unfortunately, most MMORPGs do not have a framework or systems that actually make use of the open persistent world or the large population within it.  Opportunity after opportunity squandered.

Instanced-based gear grinding is the only meaningful activity they can come up with, which requires neither a persistent world, nor a massive concurrent playerbase.

This I think is the best critique of themeparks.  While I like themeparks more than sandboxes, I pretty much agree with the limitations of current TPs.  

I think the big question is how many people you put in a place till the server start crashing.

personally i do like instance dungeon, because it's easier to design it for a fix amount of people, say 5 or 10, or 15.  I'm not sure how you design dungeon for an unknown amount of people.  If there's too many people it's too easy, if there's less people it's impossible.