Started playing an Diku mud at uni many years ago - then progressed to Everquest (on dial up /cry) . Still think there is something to be said for Muds, the social nature of them hasnt been captured in a game since then.

They have captured the comic book style really well although the radioactive bug girl with guns was a weird toon, least you can make a radioactive bug girl i suppose...

DnD online falls further into the "what could have been" bucket - cash shops seem to follow when a game subsciptions are so poor that they look for new ways to make cash off old stuff  - sad, really sad.

I think that games that would be considered "hardcore" are the old generation games, the game world has moved on from these version 1.0 mmo's that reflected their roots in MUDs. When games were first online it took considerable income and time investment into them (good enough internet to play Everquest 1 was rather costly) and only the small gaming population that had the inclination to overcome these obstacles (time and cost) played them.
As the internet got more widely used and cost dropped off significantly you had more people coming into the market, often these would potter about in mmo's but because they were by nature more casual - having a mixture of entertainment sources/real life commitments (most of us who played Muds did so as students) etc etc meant that the traditional model for an mmo did not work for them - for example when you have a job and have 2 hours to play every 2 days or so you could only achieve a small amount on the old mmo's, if you think back to the xp required to level in EQ1 it would take many weeks to get up a single level and it was really off putting to die and loose 2-3 weeks’ worth of xp. Someone with limited time wants to achieve something, have some fun and feel like their hobby is providing entertainment - having all your week’s worth of work undone because of a lag spike or stupid pull etc does not equal fun for most people so mmo's failed to keep much of their casual game players - basically the time verse reward was not good enough.

With the rise of the 2.0 mmo's WoW took a leaf out of its RTS games and made sure that you could log on, play for a few hours or less and have something achieved and that if you died your achievements were not undone in an instance. This made really good sense from a game point of view and catered for the vast majority of people who were now using the internet and wanted to have a fun game that they could play. Wow tried to cater somewhat for the version 1 players by including raids etc which they discovered had most of the casual players wanting to know why they couldn’t have good gear just because they didn’t have the time to invest - they started to play wow because it catered for casual and the change at the end game made 0 sense to the average gamer - so WoW over the course of its time has made more and more content of near equal look and power availably to the casual gamer - dungeon instances requiring 30min can be run each night and over time in small bites a player can get their epic gear that is nearly as good as raiders. - Very smart move Blizzard!

So there are a few reasons why hardcores are ignored:
1. hardcore players are a minority
2. hardcore content by its nature does not work with the vast majority of a games player base
3. mmo's have progressed from version 1 to version 2, making a hardcore mmo is like forcing people back to using an old typewriter, their day is done and most people dont want to go back to a harder, slower and more clunky system.
4. the model doesn’t work with the current player base - look at everquest2, started out with several hardcore elements, corpse runs, loss of xp on death, slower levelling, mostly group content, all good gear in group based fights - players left it in droves, citing all these things as the reason they were quitting, EQ2 reinvented itself towards a more casual game but it was too late for a lot of people and they have never recovered.

So if you want a game that caters for the hardcore minority I suggest you look at the version 1 mmos because it’s unlikely that we will ever see a new mmo follow down what is now a failed business model.

A lot of games have RMT now so its worth discussing - gives us a chance to vent our wraith at RMT anyway :D

This game has been "coming soon" for far to long

Downloaded it to check it out, tried it for about 1 hour before uninstalling.

graphics wise seemed ok, bit like diablo in its feel with the break a crate quests

just 0 appeal to me, first few hours of a game need to grab me, this one gave me a distinct "why bother" feel to it

no ability to custom character looks, no ability to choose race, gender etc etc

controls were painful

full screen didnt seem to work very well - kept feeling like i was having the top of the game cut off, including people talking when i could only see their legs and a bit of a speech bubble...

After many years of playing mmo's I started back on an old TFE (the forests edge) mud clone with a friend who had just lost his job and wanted some free entertainment (that wasnt like every other free mmo).

Much to my surprise I found that I had missed the world of text and that the game felt richer and more interesting that half the mmo's Ive played (prob since eq1 - you always have a soft spot for your first mmo!)

Anyone else delved back into the deep past and been amazed by the quality or interest they found in the humble text mud?

Originally posted by SubL_Jedi

Atlantica Online

P.S. ow the heck are some people playing Aion? Also, I played tcos fun game but the itemization and the crafting burst my bubble. You look like when you first create your character forever lol...

Yeah how are you playing Aion - or do you speak Korean?? 

With tcos  I found the starting in "cool gear" that never changed worse than starting in rags with a stick - and item drops from mobs were always dull bits of meat and fir, no chance of a random magic item it seemed...

I cannot (maybe will not) get over my dislike of a mode of play that allows people to get better gear/fluff because they spend more $$.  If there was a cap of say $15 dollars a month that you could spend in a cash shop f2p game or something then maybe the idea wouldnt be as unpleasant but currently it seems to me like having a "i win" button for $20 dollars a shot in a game.

I like the fact in subscription games if you see someone in cool armour/weapons/random gear you know you have a chance yourself if you want to work at it to get that same gear, and thats half the fun of most mmo's progressing your character from rags to riches - insert the ability to skipp that character development by purchasing gear with $ then I think you loose at least half the fun and all the sense of achievement that comes wtih questing/raiding/crafting/etc for your gear.

WoW atm - until we beat the raid content and get sick of the wait for the next things, although dabbling in alts is kinda fun
Just quit WAR - just doesn’t hold my interest long for some reason - something to do with the pve and graphics, when I switch between WAR and WoW that means that I find WAR less appealing...
Played 7 levels of spellborne but the interface/combat just annoys me - I know its new and exciting (tm) but I find it tiresome...
Tried some "free" mmo's but they mostly sucked or lost interest after a week or so
Was waiting for Aion but it’s taken too long, bored of the wait now so not sure if ill bother with it.

Have Age of Conan, Everquest2, EVE, Vanguard, lord of the rings, Dungeons and Dragons still on my pc so i keep them up to date, almost missing EQ2 but after playing it for 4+ years I think i would get sick of it fast.

Not a lot else out there interests me atm

on the upside that gives me some more time to write books, read books, watch tv, spend some QT with SO etc..

LDON, took the vibrant world questing and grouping in open zones and hid them away in 6 person instances, made the world seem dead.  I couldnt find a soul out in KC or DL or anywhere I was running with alts and some of them (esp my cleric) were not solo friendly.

Although POP zones were not that much fun the nexus and POK pulled poeple together so at least once you were high enough to get to POK the game was more alive with people (KEI at bank!) etc

I think that kunark was my fav expansion. - was sooo disapointed how EQ2 did it, making all those zones crapy quest chains for solo play /meh

Unrest in EQ2, has a great feel to the zone, tough fights and lots of fun.  

I also loved old seb in EQ1

Having started my online gaming in text based muds it wasnt the graphics or quest helpers etc that had me give up it was the grind with one skill and one special attack that got really boring.  Its good to see that the game opens up to something interesting later on but I have no idea how people surive the grind to see it.  I dont mind the lack of quests (everquest you leveled on grinding rather than questing)  or the features of wow, I wouldnt expect that FFXI would be like wow - that would be dissapointing however I think they need to look at their first intro levels and work out a way to make the game accessable to more people if they want new blood to come fill the gaps of the retiring people (everyone gets burnt out)

I tried a thief and found it painful with 1 skill and then tried a white and red wizard and found them a bit more fun but still very limited when it came to cool ablities.

I'm happy for it to be a group based game, I started to loose interested in eq2 when they made it solo all the way thru to 80 and the thing I hated about AoC was that dungeons were able to be solo'ed so you never needed to group up.

Ncoin would be a game breaker for me, I hope Aion doesnt go down that path - we have SoE doing it in EQ2 now I would hate to see it become an accepted way to play an western mmo. 

why do these companies insist on peddling substandard rubbish and thinking anyone will be amazed.

It was the dull fighting and lack of any skills that finally killed the game for me, what a yawn fest during battles - it might get better later on but I couldnt stand it enough to keep playing.  I could handle grinding xp on mobs alone if i could do anything but a lame skill and wait for a threshold to build to do another lame skill,  the excitement of getting a skill every 10 or 15 levels to augment my two lame skills wasnt enough to keep my attention.  Ive played muds with more class intrest than this.

as a side note, mainly because predicting wow to loose massive amounts of players due to x mmo is silly,  Aion is looking like the quests drop  off by 20 leaving you with a progressivly worse grind untill the last 10 levels its 5% quest xp and 95% grind - now that may be because high end quests are to be released for the NA/EU market or not,

There was a link in one of the aion forums to some graphs with the xp required broken down into xp by quest and xp by grind.

honesly though if the "grind" is exploring dungeons, fighting waves of monsters with cool attacks and spread across many different zones it would be that bad, not sure I want to go back to EQ1 days of sitting in the same spot for 5 hours (although I did make some good friends that way)  excessive questing is almost as bad as excessive grinding - I know in wow that i only read quests to find out what to kill etc and most of the quest there are grinding mobs for quest items instead of just grinding mobs...

but yes, back on subject - people will dabble in other mmo's as they come out depending on their interested - a lot of the wow players i know went and tried WAR and most returned - some kept both accounts and a few didnt return back to WoW.

I came to WoW from EQ2 and when playing EQ2 we had plenty of players turning up from WoW and some stayed, some didnt

I think that the difficutly is now that people expect their mmo's to be released with the same content of WoW -if you look at most of the threads (mostly) about the last few games its been bugs and lack of content have seen to be terrible sins (maybe they are /shrug) but if you cast your mind back to the release of EQ2, WoW and the other games about that time they were all released "too soon" with bugs and lack of high level content. Because WoW has been adding free and not free content for all these years it has such a rich gaming world that a new start company cannot hope to complete with it, unfortunatly I think players do not accept that a new start company = less time to produce content that a 5 yo behemoth.

Mylin

Part of the fun of mmo's for me is the mixture of different cultures in one game, IP blocking takes that away to a great extent so I'll pass on any game that is stupid (imho) enough to enforce something that is against the entire reason muds/mmo's are fun for me and my friends from all different countries across the globe.

Sniff, Yeah I miss my chanter and his KEI days - also miss having a cleric cast temperance on your lvl 1 noob and running around with +400? hp for 30min - sure it unbalanced the game for true noobs but it was fun to be able to twink a little with spells instead of always having to twink with gear