Welcome to Journalism 101, where we do not assume our readers have read every article written on the topic prior to this one, or that they'd heard of the subject at all.

On behalf of everyone else clicking the link in the newsletter because it said "Valve", "Blizzard", and "settle", and are not interested enough to Google it...  What the hell is DOTA?

EVE would be the best game if they found a better system of leveling for newer players.  Football Superstars gets my vote until then.

Did Darkfall, joined one of the most powerful guilds on the server.  They were very helpful, defending our holdings was interesting, and my FPS and artillery game experience helped tremendously at archery.  Forced onto a bad wifi connection, Darkfall doesn't handle latency at all (not just "poorly", if you drop packets ever, you might as well not even try to play), and I stopped to save the money and until I could get my proper connection back.

Gave Asheron's Call a try, but it's dead at the low levels and starting town.  If I wanted to have to solo to catch the high level population just to find people who are grouping at a given level range, I'd go bore myself with WoW.

Looking for a new game (or not new) again, decided it wasn't quite what I was looking for, so here I am back at this thread, bumping for great justice.

Emphasis this time :  People always on.  Lots of people.  Not just the top-heavy hardcore population.  Always someone to group with at all levels.  Game design allows for soloing, but people will actually WANT to group at all levels (either because the game is hard or because they give bonus XP or soemthing else mechanical.)  Large world.  Questy bits that actually take some thought from the player.  Randomish monster spawns and dungeons (procedurally generated games are awesome - see roguelikes or Spelunky.)  Player crafted items are very functional, yet rare (scarce?  To use an economics term), and crafting does not have a painful interface.  Classless and levelless a plus.  Experience should be based on how much time is spent actively playing the game, and a "busy" and effective new player *will* make significant strides on a complacent veteran.  (Does it sound like that that one explicitly excludes EVE?  It is meant to.)  Genre is unimportant, but can't be outright silly.

Most of all, the game must look like it was published by a competent company with a decent sized staff, preferably who knows how to test their own game for bugs without basically beta testing on the end user.  Graphics aren't a big deal (my Atari 2600 is still hooked up to my TV right now), but they are one sign that the game is well designed.

Yes, I know I ask too much, but I am really getting sick of making new characters or parties in Neverwinter Nights 2, or having to always fall back to roguelikes (Incursion and ADoM, mostly.)

I knew the game existed because I tried it, but took me almost an hour of Googling to figure out the freaking name.

Bam.

http://www.sociolotron.com/

Not my type of game, as it turns out, but an interesting design anyway.  Seemed to be populated enough to be worth looking at if you're okay with isometric view and sprites.

Cowboy Bebop MMO?  Jumpgate has the space flight, if that's what part you want.  Being able to get out of your ship to finish off hunting criminals would perfect that, but I haven't seen a good space game where you aren't a ship all the time.

Clearing space now to reinstall Darkfall, I suppose I'll spend the first while looking at clan forums.

I actually uninstalled Darkfall as soon as I logged off after a marathon seven hour start, I suppose I'll download it again and try moving far away from a starter town.  I never got far enough in to bother trying grouping, how is it for finding groups easily?  Is there much in the way  of  "dungeon crawl" type areas currently in the game?

I don't know why I didn't mention it in my bump post, I had played CoH and EQ2 within a month of making the post.  Not being able to get back into either was what made me post.  Bit of a waste of money for the reactivation month in each game except when I do EQ2, because I usually play a million hours on an alt for a month and then not have the money to keep the account going (I seem to have bad timing with that game, heh.)  It was the first time I'd unsubscribed from CoH willingly.

Finally got around to trying Darkfall.  Game looks decent, I love the skill system and combat system, hate that there's nothing to do but grind skills or kill other players.  So much so, that someone followed me around (still under protection) for quite a while waiting to see if I'd die to PvE enemies, and looted my corpse when I did.  I'd put away two sets of equipment in the bank, but that's still too much of an indication of a lack of compelling PvE content.  Make a game with Darkfall's combat and everything else (full PvP included!) in a world the size and depth of EQ1 and you'd have something.  (And with a functional alignment system.  Planetside certainly did it right...)

Anything else I haven't tried that might be decent?

Took me a bit to search for my old post to bump it.  :)  Didn't want to have to spend a few hours thinking of everything I'd played before and typing it up again.

Vanguard's mechanics were fine, graphics not distracting, slightly better combat than the standard "mash every hotkey as soon as it refreshes" WoW or EQ2, crafting system was frustrating yet satisfying when you finally make something, umm...  The diplomacy game could have been a little more complex and challenging, but it was an interesting alternative to simply running around killing every badger, frog, and undead you can find.  Been a while since I played it, can't think of anything else specific, but even having found a fairly active guild, I still couldn't just log on and find players my level looking for a group or groups begging me to join.  (In fact, the only game I know of on the level of group finding-ness I want is Planetside, but the genre and mechanics play a huge role in that, obviously.  On the plus side, I racked up plenty of XP even without a group by driving support vehicles near combat and then hiding in a nearby hill and sniping.)

I think what I want most when I say "roguelike" is the lack of explicit game guides (for some.)  Even if the basic overworld map is static, dungeons (if instanced, public - I want to see other players!) would be mechanically random so that guide websites would only be useful for game mechanics - the overall design should limit the usefulness of maps and quest guides found on various web sites.  Soloers or groups would have to actually go into a dungeon and explore it, and the NPC AI should be good enough that you actually have to prepare in a general sense (knowing you're going to be running into a dungeon of illithids still could mean they're mages, warriors, priests, or some mix of those, and no telling what they're keeping as pets/slaves), and then figure out the actual combat strategy when you get that far - preferably with options for finishing quests or dungeons without any combat at all, if you're good (of course, the game design would have to prevent exploits, but stat and skill system making it manageable.)

In a tabletop RPG setting, you never know what the DM is bringing in terms of location, monsters, quest-y bits, or anything else on a given night.  That's the aspect of roguelikes I want to see in an MMO, but I'm pretty sure does not exist yet.  That's why I'm posting here, in case I'm wrong and someone else knows which game I'm looking for.

So, three years later (or so) and I'm looking again.  I've tried just about every micropayment game since the last posts, but there hasn't been a subscription MMO out since then that I've been particularly interested in.  (Might have gotten myself stuck in STO if I'd gotten into beta, but it definitely looked bad enough in gameplay videos and reviews that I would never buy it.)  Still waiting on Jumpgate Evolution, but that will always be along whatever sports and fantasy RPG titles I'm playing at any time.  Been playing Football Superstars since last January, got stupidly banned (game staff stupid, banning me instead of the player who actually broke the rules, long story), and still play currently on a newer account (game staff seems to be "over it".)  Cant get myself to stay into DDO or EQ2 lately, since DDO has that D&D hook (if not much else) and I have time invested in EQ2 (too much work to catch back up in EQ1.)

Then I realized that I always go back to roguelikes!  Incursion, ADoM, Nethack, Angband - I'll play just about any roguelike over and over forever, even installing emulators on my portable devices like DS or Palm Pre to play them!  So, I ask the impossible question...

Are there any MMOs I haven't tried that play like a 3-D multiplayer roguelike?  Same preferences apply : crafting, large persistent world without instances, mechanical encouragement for grouping but at least mostly soloable, non-sucky lore, and if the game is older, the population cannot be at "on life support" levels.

Way too many people are comparing Aion to Lineage II at me to think I will like it at all.  Everything I've heard about Final Fantasy MMOs has made me think I'll be better off sticking to MUDs.

Mortal Online looks pretty good from the early feature descriptions, but there's no way I'm preordering for full price now to maybe have access to the beta servers in over a month, only to have the characters wiped at launch, and then not be able to get a refund if things turn out bad and the forums fill up with posts describing the horrors (kind of like Darkfall, but MO doesn't look like it will go that way.)  I'll definitely keep an eye on it and check into it again near launch, if I'm not too busy by then with Forza 3 and Jumpgate Evolution.

Been a couple weeks, so I'll bump the thread to see if I still don't get replies, proving the impossibility of my idea.  :)

Never seen a good one that is entirely browser based.  Check out Pox Nora or ChronX.

I'll finally be getting my cable back on at home within the week, and I want to decide in advance which game I should try next.  Currently, I tend to bounce around between games, being extremely active in the first week after resubscribing, with activity drifting off to other things over the course of one or two months before unsubscribing and picking up another MMO.  I still play free-to-play games often, specifically Counter Strike (for which I donate $10 a month to a server for a reserve slot), Football Superstar, Puzzle Pirates, and Pangya.  I also make an effort every once in a while to find something to do in Second Life or There, but without gambling in Second Life and entry barriers to buggy racing leagues in There, I tend to drift away from those quickly.

Other games I have played and why I tend to leave :

Everquest - Played since two weeks into launch, subscribed for over seven years cumulatively.  Too many places to go and not enough people to populate them.  I want to go back and do all the zones and quest lines in expansions that I missed, but I've never found a guild that does that.  Every time I go back, I manage to level cap my original main character, but never find enough pick up groups, raids, or a new guild as good as my old ones that make me want to stick with the game long term again.

Everquest 2 - Lack of pick up grouping and lack of me having a level cap character makes it hard for me to find things to do with other people as often as I'd like.  Easy to get into really great guilds on the server I play on, fortunately, but they all only tend to run high level events.  I hate games with no solo options, but when you make it too easy to solo too much of the world and path to the level cap, people tend not to group often enough for me to enjoy the game.  This leads into...

World of Warcraft - Got boring soloing or grouping too much too often.  Never gotten a character past level 45, even since all the modifications that make leveling insanely fast now.  I generally don't last more than a few days with this and waste the rest of the month that I resubscribe.

City of Heroes - A good balance of grouping and soloing, where it gets somewhat harder to do missions as a group, but the reward scales more than the difficulty.  Small problem with the small population, unfortunately, and I have no interest in PvP in that environment.  This is one I frequently resubscribe to, however, and never feel bad about it for the few weeks I play.

Anarchy Online - There was a time when I led my organization's PvP events in a fairly large organization, but I had to stop for a while for money reasons.  Never found that again any time I tried to come back since.  Soloing gets boring in a hurry, crafting is not what it should be, and finding a group tends to be more effort than it's worth.

Asheron's Call - Had fun with this when my roommates played, but I no longer live with roommates.  Not sure how much the game has changed in my seven or so years off, but I won't go back until I can get my characters back, even if I won't use them.  (Darn conversion from Microsoft billing...)

Lord of the Rings Online - Same problems as many above, I get bored too quickly doing the early level solo missions, and never get a character high enough to find groups, so I don't know how much it exists.  The way the lore is used to make an MMO in general is irritating in a way I can't describe (to give you an idea of how without putting it directly, I think all of the movies are too short.  Yeah.)

Auto Assault - Almost the perfect crafting system if you didn't have to collect 100 separate piles of crap in your inventory.  Game was fun enough to play, but the performance and population killed it.

Vanguard - I can usually find groups, but it's odd how little conversation will go on in most groups, even more so than WoW.  Not too tough to find a decent guild, but I've never been in one with better events than PvP contests among members and group screenshots.  The crafting system is excellent in its current form, as is its resource management relative to the inventory system.  A little tedious to level by soloing, and travel can be a pain.  Not really sure what it is that makes me ever stop playing it, but it wears off like most others.

Planetside - I play it like I play Counter Strike whenever I have my All Access subscription for SOE games, whenever I feel like shooting something.  Hard to make any comparisons to other MMO styles or genres, and there's nothing about it that specifically drives me away from it over time, I only ever leave when I can't afford to keep subscriptions to however many games I have at once.

Jumpgate - If the population was larger and much more active, as well as having active GM events again, this post wouldn't even be necessary - I'd be playing it right now!  Another unfair comparison to fantasy RPG styled games, and I do like flight simulators.  Kind of a wait and see situation for Jumpgate Evolution...

Dungeons and Dragons Online - I love Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms stuff, I like AD&D 2nd Edition, 3.0, 3.5, and d20.  I first played tabletop RPGs (D&D specifically) when I was 4 years old, with my older sister's group at the bowling alley while my parents were bowling.  DDO fails at giving you anything close to the tabletop game experience (Everquest in 1999 did a lot better job of that), doesn't use any of the tabletop systems well, has a horrible setting, and instanced dungeons instead of a world proper is just lazy.  It doesn't deserve to have the D&D name attached to it.  (Oh, if only there could be Neverwinter Nights Online...)

EVE Online - Even with as populated as space is with both other players and NPCs, it feels empty.  The skill system is atrocious - if they want to let players train them while offline as they do, that's fine, but they should increase through use while playing even faster.  I hate not being able to directly fly my ships.  It's hard to find anything interesting to do, in a large PvP corporation or otherwise, if you're not a combat character, and then rarely even if you are.  I like almost everything else about the design of the game, but I just can't get into it.

Star Wars Galaxies - Loved it before the NGE, but never developed a character enough that I was actually interacting with other players on a regular basis.  I was told by a support staff member of another MMO (privately, of course), that it had improved since I'd last tried it, but I find it hard to believe that it's anything close to the game I remember or would want to play.

Other games I have played and didn't dislike, but didn't play enough to describe as above and don't really intend to try again :

ACE Online

DAoC (beta)

Exteel

Guild Wars

Lineage 2

Maplestory

Pirates of the Burning Sea

Priston Tale

Ragnarok Online

Roma Victor

Voyage Century

Wizard 101

Games I Have Tried And Denied :

2Moons

Age of Conan (beta)

Atlantica Online

Dungeon Runners

Rappelz

Scions of Fate

Silkroad Online

Vendetta Online

Wonderland Online

Xiah

So, if you're still reading this and haven't fallen asleep yet, you can see that I've played a lot.  Now for the list of features I want in a game : 

Excellent character customization.  Too many games have newly created character that look like one of a dozen or less combinations in their "naked newbie" form.  I'm not asking for Second Life levels of face and body features, but more than nothing would be good. 

Excellent item visual variation.  There should be as many texture and model combinations as there are items in the game, and user customization of said items should be more than a simple tinting of the texture.  (Full pallete swap and then tint maybe, but more models and textures is better.)  Basically, like character generation, clones should not happen by accident. 

Excellent skill system.  I actually prefer d20 feat style characters or even level-less systems (like Darkfall was supposed to be, for instance.)  Everquest's system of both levels and individual skills that increase as you use them was pretty good as well, but I've never seen a 3-D MMO that got anywhere close to the complexity, variation, and balance of the designs of many MUDs.

Excellent crafting system.  For this, I point to an old RPG add-on made into a DOS game in 1990 - Renegade Legion Interceptor.  You can attempt to min-max when building custom ships, but the somewhat punitive cost and balancing of weapon requirements and engine output on ships made it impossible to make something that instantly killed any ship it fired at, and impossible to make something invincible.  (A combination of the creation system and game rules, I suppose.)  More so, the items that can be crafted by characters should be equally viable for regular use in PvP and PvE as items acquired from PvE.  The components to create something as powerful as items dropped by the most powerful NPCs in the game would, obviously, come from the most powerful NPCs in the game, and be functionally equivalent.  There should be as many potentially crafted items in the database as dropped items, and they should be customizable in Diablo slot fashion or something similar in function both during creation and afterward.  Vanguard comes pretty close to this.  Also, per item visuals above, you gotta have the armor dyes...

Large persistant world, preferably without instances of any kind.  Instant travel should be special, but foot travel should not be insanely dangerous between most largely populated areas, and not take more time in travel than time in actual play during a session.Somewhere in between Everquest/Everquest 2 and Asheron's Call/Anarchy Online in this respect.  Lots of cities, lots of lore, lots of NPCs, lots of questy things to do at all levels.

No forced grouping.  No soloing so easy that no one wants to group.

I am not opposed to perma-death for my characters.

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...so.  Having listed all that, am I asking for something impossible, or is there a game out there that I have somehow missed that covers all of the features I like while alleviating most or all of the problems I have with the existing MMOs I list above?

Oh, I knew the lore.  The lack of "unregistered heroes" or "completely mercenary villains" (was there even a lore explaining why villains didn't have capes at level 1?) is as bad as the lame story of Hero 1.  Rather than turning a failure on the part of the developers into a "carrot" for leveling, they should have been given to characters of all levels with an apology that covered the front page of the game's website.  At the very least, unlocking capes should be attached to an account - finish the mission on one character on any server, and all of your characters would have access.

I've been busy with other games and haven't rotated back to CoH in a while (darn Gamer ADD), how many new players pick up the game that need to know how to get their capes have there been?  The only MMO that seems to get advertising outside of gaming magazines is WoW, so I wouldn't expect a large influx of players in any other game.

Excellent guide for a poorly implemented feature that should have been in launch and available to characters of all levels.  Something like this probably wasn't needed when they first came out, because everyone was talking about them, but hopefully this will be seen by newer players that have no idea how to get started on their cape.

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Originally posted by Zorvan

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Originally posted by Desirsar

The RPG in MMORPG.com has been lost for a long, long time. If "RPG" was mandatory to be listed here, half of the games would leave the list.

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And believe me, we try to get them removed whenever possible.

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Good luck with that, I don't think the site is going to shun its biggest advertisers and contest sponsors...

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I saw this "There" on Dr. Phil once lol. Anyway, if you like this, you're gonna love Second Life even more.

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Second Life falls on its face compared to There in terms of server and client performance, there's no way any of the sport-like activities in There would work in SL. Each one is good at a lot of things the other is bad at, so I'll keep on splitting my time between them like I always have.

Originally posted by Binny45

one that will come from a relatively unknown company, with unknown people who do it, not for profit, but for a love of the game.

It is my belief that being limited by the demands of investors limit creativity and often result in games that are released WAY too early, often leading to their unfortunate demise.

It's my hope that soon, one will rise from the ranks that will establish itself as a true, 3rd generation MMO.

Are there any takers out there?

That sounds to me like Jumpgate Evolution, but I have a feeling they'll make it too "easy" for the veteran Jumpgate pilots to like it, and too "hard" for casual MMO players to enjoy having to actually fly their own ship.  With any luck, they'll prove me wrong...

The RPG in MMORPG.com has been lost for a long, long time.  If "RPG" was mandatory to be listed here, half of the games would leave the list.

Most of the other posts in both this thread and forum seem to try to compare it to the wrong type of MMO - it's no different in terms of pricing than any other micropayment game.  It certainly has its share of roleplaying (I use a female avatar and I'm not female), but I think what's putting off most people is the lack of goals defined by the game - no levels that mean anything to gameplay, no "endgame", and anyone can have anything anyone else does within the payment structure of the game.  Some people can't define their own direction, they need to be told where to go and what to do - this is probably the wrong game for them.

My only big issue with it is the technical problems that it has.  Too many developers buy servers that just barely handle the expected load of the users rather than figuring servers that could run, say, ten of the game world simultaneously at that same expected load on each, and then figuring that cost into their business model.  Then they would just have to work out the issues with their client, and they'd be all set.

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Originally posted by uncus

DDO's mechanics were never going to be like PnP D&D - that was made clear from the start by Turbine.

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I read from the back of the box :

"For over 30 years Dungeons & Dragons has been the legendary benchmark for all roleplaying games. Now you can experience the first online 3D virtual world faithful to classic D&D."

What else is "classic D&D" other than pen and paper? SSI Gold Box games? Neverwinter Nights? Both of those certainly qualify...

I live in web forums as much as the next addicted gamer, but "made clear" is what is marketed to everyone, not just people who hang all over the developers in forums. This is why the marketing staff at game companies, especially MMOs, need to sit in on all development meetings. (Heck, let em alpha the game and maybe write some of the quests and back story, get them involved in the process.)

As far as what Turbine does best... if I could recover my old characters, I'd rather go back to AC. I never could remember my old Zone password and they insist that my old credit card numbers (of which I have all) and mailing addresses (of which I have all) don't match the account. I was already giving Turbine the benefit of the doubt in buying another of their games after that... bungle.