What can be done to revive the MMO genre? Can it be revived? Is there any hope?

[Val the Moofia Boss]

We all know how WoW was the king during the 2000s, back when all of the systems and "inconveniences" and difficulties forced people to begin grouping up from early on to do a dungeon, which led to people forming the huge guilds required to tackle the 40 man raids and then making out-of-game guild websites. How WoW player's population began to plummet as Blizzard thought they knew better and started making the game easier, removing "inconveniences", allowing people to fly over any threats (effectively teleporting), adding quest markers, adding easily acquired catchup gear that cuts the longevity of the game by allowing people to skip straight to the latest patch content, adding LFR that allows people to teleport into dungeons, cross-realm which killed server communities, etc. A death of a thousand cuts that killed the social aspect of MMOs that kept people playing the game in spite of its mediocre gameplay as non-MMOs began delivering on more entertaining gameplay. As of 2025, the genre is effectively dead. The four biggest paid MMOs, WoW, FF14, GW2, and ESO, are all in managed decline with people getting less bang for their buck with each expansion. Everyone else is either in maintenance mode or dead, or languishing as an obscure kickstarter title (perhaps due to a combination of outdated hotbar gameplay and a lack of advertising budget?). Star Citizen has languished in development hell and its servers can't handle more than 100 people online at a time. Our only hope was in Riot's League of Legends/Runeterra MMO directed by Greg Street aka Ghostcrawler, but that project has also languished in development hell for years and experienced a reboot, and Greg Street left.

Is there any hope?

[GhostCow]

People need to go back to the drawing boards and make more oldschool games. Figure out which parts of the evolution were actually good and drop the rest. MnM is doing this and there is a new Everquest in development that is supposed to be going back to it's roots as a hardcore game. There isn't much hope, but there is some.

[Oyster Sauce]

Yeah, just assemble a development team that consists entirely of 20 year old white guys who all played Dungeons & Dragons in the 80s and read books for fun and take all of their MMO inspiration from games that were made before they were born

[rusty_shackleford]

obsolete genre

[Valter]

Star Citizen would be interesting if they deliver all they've promised, but as you mentioned I don't see it happening.

[GhostCow]

obsolete genre

I disagree with this, but I also think that it will never be as big as it was in the past because multiplayer over the internet isn't a novelty anymore

[Tweed]

WoW was the king during the 2000s,

WoW killed the genre, its success put to death all creativity in the marketplace. Even then, people in general moved on and seemed to be less interested in full-fledged worlds and I use that term loosely. Most MMOs even from the heyday didn't try to simulate a world, they were glorified MUDs, even sacred and hallowed EQ. In the end people want something more compact, hence, the endless survival slops with room for dozens to hundreds instead of thousands of players. All of those games are just as creatively bankrupt as the MMOs left on the market.

You can't duplicate the 90s or 2000s, you can't relive the special situation that could only exist on crappy dial-up and playing stuff like Meridian 59 or Ultima Online back then.

[Tinky Winky]

genre is effectively dead

MMORPGs aren't dead; they have just fundamentally evolved (or devolved, which is the term I prefer) to the point where even a wowtard would find modern releases repulsive, as most new MMORPGs are nothing more than Progress Quest with predatory p2w and scheduled daily events (so they can glue their players to the screen as if they were factory wageslaves). The genre is still pretty alive when speaking about profit, considering how frequently new slops were still being sharted out on googleplay.

[Just Locus]

Refocus the emphasis on social interaction, people want full control over their experience but will never interact with other players if that was ever the case. WOTLK introducing the LFG function made interacting with people obsolete and because of the expansion's popularity, everyone began to adopt it.

Vertical progression killed WoW.

[TKVNC]

Among other things, censorship killed MMO's.

It was a way to play games with your friends, or random other people, and just do stupid ****, no-one knew who you were, so you could do whatever you wanted.

Now with heavy-handed censorship, doxxing, and meta-gaming, they're ultimately pointless. Communication is sterile, and there are very real risks of being 'exposed' for your online activity, and with information readily available, there's not really anything to 'discover' anymore.

Honestly, MMO's were a thing of the early 2000's. They're never coming back.

[J1M]

First, the game takes place inside your head.

Second, a lot of what people have said about the MMO being a form of novelty that had retention due to the social aspects is true. But let's not forget that progression systems and acknowledgement of virtual accomplishments was a big driver as well.

I don't see the modern trend of 50 different difficulty levels and no challenge until max level bringing the masses back.

Let's instead talk about what it would take to retain a monthly subscription from an individual. The absurd amount of time people spend on social media tells us that the time commitment is not an issue. It's just that the real and para-social relationships available there are more stimulating than the ones available in an MMO.

With the use of AI technology that could change. Imagine if you could log into a new MMO that interested you, and you were guaranteed to meet other avatars with similar play schedules that meshed well with the topics you like to talk about, the amount of interpersonal drama you secretly want, and had the same level of combat skill. Does it really matter if those people you only interact with in the MMO are real?

Remember, the game takes place inside your head.

[WhiteShark]

Does it really matter if those people you only interact with in the MMO are real?

I think that very much depends on the degree of solpsism an individual can tolerate. Some people can do solo tabletop RPGs. Personally, I need my fictional reality to be shared with at least one other person for it to feel substantial. In a traditional single-player cRPG with scripted dialogue, I share the fictional reality and interactions with the developer. In an MMO, I share them with both the developer and the other players. In a MMO with chatbot players, with whom do I share the social interactions?

For me, the game takes place in two (or more) people's heads.

[J1M]

Does it really matter if those people you only interact with in the MMO are real?

I think that very much depends on the degree of solpsism an individual can tolerate. Some people can do solo tabletop RPGs. Personally, I need my fictional reality to be shared with at least one other person for it to feel substantial. In a traditional single-player cRPG with scripted dialogue, I share the fictional reality and interactions with the developer. In an MMO, I share them with both the developer and the other players. In a MMO with chatbot players, with whom do I share the social interactions?

For me, the game takes place in two (or more) people's heads.

I think we have enough evidence from social media and the "boyfriend AIs" that people find interacting with an AI chatbot to be a novel enough experience. Especially if they continue to improve and induce emotional states in the person using them.

I don't see why a game like this would not allow you to invite a real friend to play too. It's an expectation of the genre. At the same time, I tend to think that an AI bot would not be much different from some of the people we filled out FFXI XP groups with...

Will it eventually prove to be a fad like many other game features? Probably. But for a while it will be a novel experience people will pay for.

[Xenich]

My solution is to build an MMO, but for smaller server setups (kind of like how survival games and FPS games will have a server setup).

Build it generic in basic design, then put a lot of attention to the administrative side to allow people to manage game settings and feature adjustments more easily. Basically a user friendly admin interface.

Market this finished game and then sell the package to the public so they can run their own servers configured as they like.

Then... on the side, sell a development package as well, similar to a mod toolkit which would allow people to modify the game, add new content, etc... past basic server and rule-set configuration of the core game suite.

If you pick a sweet spot where the server can host a fair amount of people (500-1000 cap more or less), this would spur a new direction in MMOs. It would probably kill the current MMO market (ie companies selling people to play on their own servers), but it would create a new market for people buying the clients and servers.

Basically, I am thinking more along the lines of an MMO in the concept of how "Fantasy Grounds" sells its role play software with a sever and client setup and modules that you can add to it (but obviously not to this monetized, but we know it would end up this way anyway, so.. /shrug).

Point is, we move away from the whole problem of MMOs being "games for everyone" and more products sold to people who want to configure/design the game the way they want it.

[Xenich]

More thoughts on the MMO thing...


I noticed Monsters & Memories is doing something not traditionally done with MMO design. They are not starting huge, rather they built a smaller set of content, fleshed it out and are making it for release. Then, they will release modules over time which will expand the world.

I always thought this was the way to do MMOs these days due to the fact that the cost to compete with a modern MMO is just not possible due to the content requirement. Sticking small, but polished and feature rich is the best approach, even if it means you will be light on content.

I look at Pantheon and think about its 1-10 game with the first main zone and I think, if they had just focused hard on the game for 1-10 first, maybe even 10-20 as well.. they would have been finished already. The game is fairly complete on basic concept at this stage. If they had only been working on the 1-10 game and fully fleshed it out, they could have made sure that the progression was slow, but with enough variation within the zones (adding several more dungeons in each zone), the game would have done exceptionally well and had cost MUCH less to produce (I am not dealing with their incompetency and wheel spinning) .

I think this is why M&M is in much better shape. I think they are currently only about 70K in expenses currently and are looking for a end of 2025 for a full release of their first module.

Point is, take this concept of design, then... apply my client/server development style package above and I think this could be a completely new direction in game making as games could be played solo (ie someone reconfigures the game for single player like some do with Emulators) or increase difficulty for a heavier group focused game.

In the end, the "consumer" gets exactly what they want rather than this constant battle to appeal to all types of expectations.

[Norfleet]

My thoughts on the MMO: The modern gaming landscape has changed so significantly that the old model that people are still clinging to doesn't work anymore. You can no longer demand a monopoly on the player's time and attention. In the old days, you might have been able to expect this: The typical player would either experience your game as "My First MMO", or at least, "The Rebound After I Broke Up With My First MMO". There weren't very many other options.

This doesn't really work anymore, even as existing MMOs use increasingly aggressive tactics to try to monopolize player attention.

[Xenich]

My thoughts on the MMO: The modern gaming landscape has changed so significantly that the old model that people are still clinging to doesn't work anymore. You can no longer demand a monopoly on the player's time and attention. In the old days, you might have been able to expect this: The typical player would either experience your game as "My First MMO", or at least, "The Rebound After I Broke Up With My First MMO". There weren't very many other options.

This doesn't really work anymore, even as existing MMOs use increasingly aggressive tactics to try to monopolize player attention.

Different type of player, those are not the target audience for this style of MMO though (ie classic design).

Modern MMO players want to play it like a mobile game during lunch. Those are the WoW casual gamer base that was picked up during that time.

Pantheon has around 40K+ people who many want this style of play (bulk of your 40k players are pledges who knew exactly what this game was going to be). There is a market it for it, but... it isn't a massive in size, though it is sizable enough to sustain a base on a classic pay system (sub + expansion). It really depends on the studio and how competent they are.

In the end though, the argument about time is really just the rehashed "only losers who had no jobs played games like EQ", which is usually made by those who were kids living at home during EQ. Most of the people I played and grouped with over the years in EQ were adults, had jobs, families and responsibilities.

The claim that someone can't play a game like EQ these days (outside of contested raiding which is a fair argument depending on what the person expects to accomplish) isn't really a sound argument.

In most cases the issue comes down to the desire of instant gratification in play which requires the removal of slow and even progression as well as choice and consequence. There is a reason some people hate this style of game and it is because they play it stupidly, never learning from mistakes and throwing caution to the wind which is why they spend all of their time in CRs, finding their corpse, and earning back lost exp. These types of games aren't made for them, they never were.

[Norfleet]

In the end though, the argument about time is really just the rehashed "only losers who had no jobs played games like EQ", which is usually made by those who were kids living at home during EQ. Most of the people I played and grouped with over the years in EQ were adults, had jobs, families and responsibilities.

The thing is, it's not even that. In the old days, people simply didn't really HAVE another game. It was this or nothing at all. Today, there's a game fighting for your attention every other week, if not more. And if you're into this sort of thing, you probably already have a game. Gaming is not new and you haven't exactly been sitting idly by doing nothing. In the old days, something like EQ may have been your first and only. Nowadays? You're probably already playing a game. If you're the kind of person who's willing to dedicate lots of attention to playing a single game, you're already DOING that, and are therefore unlikely to suddenly defect to the latest shiny thing. If you're the kind of person with attention span issues, then you're not gonna have the focus to play this new thing like EQ of old, either.

So, your target audience is either already playing a game (so what's their incentive to defect?) or too scatterbrained to actually play any one game that would demand that level of focus.

[Xenich]

In the end though, the argument about time is really just the rehashed "only losers who had no jobs played games like EQ", which is usually made by those who were kids living at home during EQ. Most of the people I played and grouped with over the years in EQ were adults, had jobs, families and responsibilities.

The thing is, it's not even that. In the old days, people simply didn't really HAVE another game. It was this or nothing at all. Today, there's a game fighting for your attention every other week, if not more. And if you're into this sort of thing, you probably already have a game. Gaming is not new and you haven't exactly been sitting idly by doing nothing. In the old days, something like EQ may have been your first and only. Nowadays? You're probably already playing a game. If you're the kind of person who's willing to dedicate lots of attention to playing a single game, you're already DOING that, and are therefore unlikely to suddenly defect to the latest shiny thing. If you're the kind of person with attention span issues, then you're not gonna have the focus to play this new thing like EQ of old, either.

So, your target audience is either already playing a game (so what's their incentive to defect?) or too scatterbrained to actually play any one game that would demand that level of focus.

There were plenty of other MMOs at the time though.

Meridian 59 (1996)
Ultima Online (1997)
Lineage (1998)
Asheron's Call (1999)
Everquest (1999)
Dark Age of Camelot (2001)
Runescape (2001)
Final Fantasy XI (2002)

Those were just the more well known ones and within a close range. If you keep going on there were numerous MMOs all through the "peak" era of EQ.

Pantheon just mentioned they hit the 100k mark in the Discord (Their claim, but I know for a fact they are around 50k+ and most of those were pledges over the 10 years).

There is more than enough to sustain a game like EQ and I think the number of people interested in that speaks for itself. Not to mention, if you go over and look at the number of people following with great interest Monsters & Memories (10k on their mailing list alone), there is in fact an audience for this style of play as M&M is essentially EQ reborn.

Most of the people interested in these games aren't playing mainstream MMOs because they are ******** gimmicks. These types of games aren't seeking that audience specifically, rather the audience that essentially doesn't play modern MMOs because they can't stand how they are played.

There is a distinct difference in position on gaming concerning the MMO crowd. There always has been. The EQ crowd moved on to WoW not because they "didn't have time and hated EQ mechanics", but because the game headed down the path of mainstream with Smedly in charge AND they completely dropped the ball on their small group game by catering to only raiders around that time. WoW on the other hand at release was ALL about small group dungeon running and while it was a bit lax in its style, it was still enjoyable in its group based play.

That said, WoW picked up a massive audience of players who were console gamers and casual non-gamers. I knew many who started playing these types of games for the first time with WoW and they had no concept of what a game is, they just saw it as "muh entertainment". Add in the fact that console gamers are ******** anyway and it wasn't a surprise how WoW (as well as most MMOs) turned into "entertainment simulators" over the years moving away from actual game play.

These games don't need mainstream numbers to survive and they can function perfectly well with standard pay models (ie sub+ expansion) and to be honest, that is exactly what the audience they are attending to wants.

So while I agree that mainstreamers don't like this type of play, don't want choice and consequence and risk vs reward, the gamers that would play these types of games do and as I said... the numbers speak for themselves.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Figure out which parts of the evolution were actually good and drop the rest.

Can there be a consensus as to what was good and bad?


Good: Game is hard from the get go. Soloing is strongly discouraged. Be it people unable to fight mobs solo or being unable to craft everything by themselves. Incentivizes people playing in a group and making friends and socializing, ie the key point of a MMO, rather than just playing mediocre pseudo-action games by themselves and having to be always online for it.

Bad: game being easy enough for a long time that players don't need groups, spending many hours playing alone, become conditioned into thinking that they can be passive and not interact with other players, and then get struggle once they reach level cap and the content requires cooperation, but they have not built up or integrated into a friend group or a guild and thus are condemned to mercenary-esque PUG hell. Player somehow feels like they can't find friends or guilds to join (you have the /sea function to form your own group and there are levelling linkshells shouting in town, but you stood in town for 3 hours complaining you didn't get a party invite?).


Good: opportunity for player leadership and community, be it players forming their own created guilds or factions, or players being allowed to elect each other as leaders of factions preestablished by the devs and then collecting taxes and allocating war chests, or leading the faction to war against another. Guilds being allowed to capture castles for their own use, incentivizing guilds to participate more in the server community as they need the help of others to fight or defend their territories, or to at the very least be reputable enough to not get collectively blacklisted from holding a castle.

Bad: many players becoming a grunt with no agency, a cog in a machine for a huge 2,000+ player corporation/alliance like in EVE Online.


Good: allowing players to spawn a boss at will so most of the playerbase is literally unable to see a big cool boss because they are reserved by the top guilds camping them and the loads of guild drama and blacklisting and strife that comes with that.

Bad: siloing players off into instances so they don't bump into each other in the open world and interact.


Good: making levelling up a character a large time commitment and banning alts/multiboxxing, forcing players to cement their identity on the server and as distinct from one another, rather than people constantly saying "brb on my healer" where everyone is a vague roster of classes.

Bad: player spent a lot of time levelling up a class in the hopes that it would be fun later on, only for it to turn out that it didn't and they wish they had levelled a different class.


Good: some stakes, be it the risk of losing some exp or an item upon death (as opposed to be able just casually dying and respawning over and over like nothing matters), or the risk of a quest being failed or an enemy guild/faction capturing a zone, pushing your faction back and forcing you to either rally your faction for a counterattack or to play in other zones.

Bad: player feels like they lost everything and they are wasting their time playing the game and quit. The faction conflict is overwhelmingly imbalanced and the position of one faction is unrecoverable, players in that faction feel like they can never win. Players in the winning faction never feel like there is any real threat of failure.


Good: some sandboxyness. Open world PvP at any time. Games like EVE Online or Lineage make you stick up straight in your chair and be more engaged in the game world knowing that a guy next to you could whip out his bow and start shooting you at any moment, and other people could join and it could escalate into a big fight on the spot. Potential to run across a player built store in the middle of nowhere like in SWG or Ultima Online. Makes the world feel more alive and full of possibility than sterile games like WoW or Final Fantasy where the game world is predictable and safe.

Bad: Criminal PvP with no ramping up punishment system to detour camping the same player over and over until they quit the game. Allowing players to liter the world with unsightly shacks and haphazard shantytowns.

obsolete genre

MMOs will never obsolete. The point of them is that you are inhabiting a fantasy world with other people. Simulation RPGs like Skyrim might be able to improve their NPCs and provide pretty immersive companions, or games like Mount & Blade might provide large battles, but none of these are replacements for interacting with other real people, which is generally more interesting and fulfilling than offline games.

obsolete genre

I disagree with this, but I also think that it will never be as big as it was in the past because multiplayer over the internet isn't a novelty anymore

I don't think tens of millions of players are required. With the right presentation and design, a private server of 3,000 players can feel more alive and social than a subscription MMO with several million players who don't interact with each other.

You can't duplicate the 90s or 2000s, you can't relive the special situation that could only exist on crappy dial-up and playing stuff like Meridian 59 or Ultima Online back then.

While yes, you can't quite go back to the 2000s, the enduring popularity of private servers for classic MMOs would imply that there is something there that people still want. Nostalrius had over a million accounts. If you have 800,000 people wanting to use your software (and you can charge $15 a month to them), perhaps you should provide a way for them to do it.

genre is effectively dead

MMORPGs aren't dead; they have just fundamentally evolved (or devolved, which is the term I prefer) to the point where even a wowtard would find modern releases repulsive, as most new MMORPGs are nothing more than Progress Quest with predatory p2w and scheduled daily events (so they can glue their players to the screen as if they were factory wageslaves). The genre is still pretty alive when speaking about profit, considering how frequently new slops were still being sharted out on googleplay.

I would argue that a lot of those newer "MMOs" are not actually MMOs. There are not designed to be virtual worlds that players socialize and interact in like in classic MMOs. Rather, they are meant to be dopamine cookie clickers/skinner boxes where the player is strung along by the chase of higher numbers, ie the precursor to gacha games (though those often rely more on a different customer motivation, ie selling people husbandos or waifus to become emotionally attached to). They just didn't know how to market those cookie clicker dopamine games any other way yet.

Refocus the emphasis on social interaction, people want full control over their experience but will never interact with other players if that was ever the case. WOTLK introducing the LFG function made interacting with people obsolete and because of the expansion's popularity, everyone began to adopt it.

I would say that LFG was a symptom of the real problem, the final nail in the coffin, rather than the source issue. The issue had begun long before LFG, where the levelling experience had become so easy that people were reaching level cap having never made a friend, because they never needed connections to progress. So players have been conditioned to be passive and believe that they don't need anyone, and are now suddenly being brickwalled by group content they have no friend network for. Hence the need for PUGing, which has a mercenary mentality. LFG is the simplification of a behavior that was already going on.

Vertical progression killed WoW.

I would say that catchup gear is more of an issue. Each patch adding a new tier of easy accessible catchup gear means that you no longer have years of content to progress through with friends. Instead, you only have the latest raid to do, and then once you beat that, the only thing left to do is to speedrun that same raid over and over again high difficulties, chasing gear with higher numbers that will soon be made irrelevant when the next patch drops even more powerful catchup gear anyone can acquire within a few hours of solo questing.

You can't duplicate the 90s or 2000s, you can't relive the special situation that could only exist on crappy dial-up and playing stuff like Meridian 59 or Ultima Online back then.

With the use of AI technology that could change. Imagine if you could log into a new MMO that interested you, and you were guaranteed to meet other avatars with similar play schedules

Interesting. Perhaps this could help resolve or mitigate the response I have sometimes seen on other forums about people standing around waiting to get a party invite, though perhaps the game design needs to be prod people into being proactive and talking to people rather than waiting around.

You can no longer demand a monopoly on the player's time and attention.

People have been playing gacha games nonstop. I think the issue is that current MMOs are not attractive enough to new up and coming gamers that they instead go play the husbando/waifu game - which seem to be more entertaining right off the bat - rather than slog through the mediocre earlygames of MMOs.

These types of games aren't made for them, they never were.

Perhaps this is an issue with discoverability/marketing, where the important information as to how a game actually feels is not being properly conveyed, so people are coming into the game with a wrong mindset/expectations? While awareness about the game is also somehow not reaching the people who should be interesting in this.

[Wretch]

We all know how WoW was the king during the 2000s, back when all of the systems and "inconveniences" and difficulties forced people to begin grouping up from early on to do a dungeon, which led to people forming the huge guilds required to tackle the 40 man raids and then making out-of-game guild websites. How WoW player's population began to plummet as Blizzard thought they knew better and started making the game easier, removing "inconveniences", allowing people to fly over any threats (effectively teleporting), adding quest markers, adding easily acquired catchup gear that cuts the longevity of the game by allowing people to skip straight to the latest patch content, adding LFR that allows people to teleport into dungeons, cross-realm which killed server communities, etc. A death of a thousand cuts that killed the social aspect of MMOs that kept people playing the game in spite of its mediocre gameplay as non-MMOs began delivering on more entertaining gameplay. As of 2025, the genre is effectively dead. The four biggest paid MMOs, WoW, FF14, GW2, and ESO, are all in managed decline with people getting less bang for their buck with each expansion. Everyone else is either in maintenance mode or dead, or languishing as an obscure kickstarter title (perhaps due to a combination of outdated hotbar gameplay and a lack of advertising budget?). Star Citizen has languished in development hell and its servers can't handle more than 100 people online at a time. Our only hope was in Riot's League of Legends/Runeterra MMO directed by Greg Street aka Ghostcrawler, but that project has also languished in development hell for years and experienced a reboot, and Greg Street left.

Is there any hope?

Mmos were better back then because the internet was young and people were better. You cannot have good mmos or online communities now because people are terrible. There is no fixing this without massive societal shifts. Every other guess or explanation is nonsense.

[Tweed]

If people don't want to play then the genre is dead. Everyone keeps preaching M&M as the second coming of EQ, but I didn't like what I saw in the slightest, I do not want to play the worst aspects of Everquest again for any reason ergo:

You can no longer demand a monopoly on the player's time and attention.

I do not have the tolerance I once did for sitting in one spot killing the same over and over and over again for weeks at a time. I don't have the tolerance for sitting LFG for hours doing nothing and then logging off having wasted the night. I don't have the tolerance for five hour corpse runs or trying to sell crap to specific vendors or any of that other nonsense. Also in nearly all MMOs the endgame is garbage. You reach the top and raid or twiddle your thumbs. Having a second or third job just isn't as much fun as it used to be.

There were loads of penalties to stop people from murdering in UO, but it never thwarted griefers, only the addition of Trammel put an end to it. You also have no clue how hard UO was at the beta. No gold, a dagger and the tools of your trade, not even a weapon of your chosen skill. Later on you got 100 gold and a weapon if you had the kill and finally 500 gold. Finally they started doing that young player crap and a lot of other stuff the mollycoddle new players because the game was too merciless and back then you could lose all of your things in a heartbeat.

[Xenich]

These types of games aren't made for them, they never were.

Perhaps this is an issue with discoverability/marketing, where the important information as to how a game actually feels is not being properly conveyed, so people are coming into the game with a wrong mindset/expectations? While awareness about the game is also somehow not reaching the people who should be interesting in this.

Possibly. I do notice that if you get some mainstream players isolated and into a group of players who understand and enjoy such mechanics, some will learn to love that style of play. They just need the right surroundings of players to explain and reason this while in play as well as seeing how these players deal with the negative consequences in play.

In Pantheon, I joined a leveling guild for a while and most of the players were old school EQ or other classic MMO players. There were some random modern mainstream players that were in the mix and you usually got the basic narrative objections to the same old mechanics. Though after a while, listening to the old school players talk about things, grouping with them and seeing how the game is played, they actually came to enjoy it and had a very positive outlook on those classic systems, experiencing it and understanding "why" they are so meaningful.

It is difficult to convey this to people like that in open forums where the average mainstream ****** pushes the narrative and people begin piling on to that position to which others just fall into line with it.

Some could come to like these games, but I think social pressure/attitudes and modern day conditioning of existing MMOs distracts from them truly finding out.

[Xenich]

We all know how WoW was the king during the 2000s, back when all of the systems and "inconveniences" and difficulties forced people to begin grouping up from early on to do a dungeon, which led to people forming the huge guilds required to tackle the 40 man raids and then making out-of-game guild websites. How WoW player's population began to plummet as Blizzard thought they knew better and started making the game easier, removing "inconveniences", allowing people to fly over any threats (effectively teleporting), adding quest markers, adding easily acquired catchup gear that cuts the longevity of the game by allowing people to skip straight to the latest patch content, adding LFR that allows people to teleport into dungeons, cross-realm which killed server communities, etc. A death of a thousand cuts that killed the social aspect of MMOs that kept people playing the game in spite of its mediocre gameplay as non-MMOs began delivering on more entertaining gameplay. As of 2025, the genre is effectively dead. The four biggest paid MMOs, WoW, FF14, GW2, and ESO, are all in managed decline with people getting less bang for their buck with each expansion. Everyone else is either in maintenance mode or dead, or languishing as an obscure kickstarter title (perhaps due to a combination of outdated hotbar gameplay and a lack of advertising budget?). Star Citizen has languished in development hell and its servers can't handle more than 100 people online at a time. Our only hope was in Riot's League of Legends/Runeterra MMO directed by Greg Street aka Ghostcrawler, but that project has also languished in development hell for years and experienced a reboot, and Greg Street left.

Is there any hope?

Mmos were better back then because the internet was young and people were better. You cannot have good mmos or online communities now because people are terrible. There is no fixing this without massive societal shifts. Every other guess or explanation is nonsense.

I disagree. Pantheon is a testament to this (at least in EA currently). While there are the occasional *** hats, over all the community on the servers reminds me of early EQ. I was shocked honestly because I have had the same opinion as you over the years due to my various interactions with the ******** masses in mainstream MMOs.

Granted this is likely because the bulk of these players are those who played original EQ and early classic MMOs. Most of them don't play many MMOs today and most of them have the same gripes you and I do about the base in them. So maybe it is just that a bunch of old farts from the old days happened to walk into the same bar and you have that vibe. Maybe this will all change come release or if the game becomes popular enough to attract mainstream *******, I have no idea.

As it is now, I think the type of game Pantheon is has kept a lot of those at bay and so you have a more "original" experience present currently as it concerns the social environment.

It is kind of why I want Pantheon or M&M to be successful, but not enough to attract the masses as I know they will "**** it all up". Then again, maybe that "style" of play will make it very difficult for those types to progress and sustain themselves in game. Who knows...

[Tinky Winky]

I would argue that a lot of those newer "MMOs" are not actually MMOs. There are not designed to be virtual worlds that players socialize and interact in like in classic MMOs. Rather, they are meant to be dopamine cookie clickers/skinner boxes where the player is strung along by the chase of higher numbers, ie the precursor to gacha games (though those often rely more on a different customer motivation, ie selling people husbandos or waifus to become emotionally attached to). They just didn't know how to market those cookie clicker dopamine games any other way yet.

They are different in term of business model, gacha slops profit from, well, gacha, while mobile MMOs profit from player dramas. Those cookie clicker mobile slops do actually emphasize on socializing (via daily events) and discourage solo play. They designed it intentionally so paypigs (and also paid shills) can have a reason to bully free players, which makes the game even more predatory and toxic than your typical f2p wow clones, as mobile slops are centered on paypigs competing and the fact there's nothing to do in them outside dailies. Sucks but I'd count those slops as MMO nevertheless.

[rustys-name-is-kumar]

paying 15 bucks a month for janky gameplay, **** ui, and down syndrome tier grindfests

mmos serve their purpose as ****** wranglers

[Yankee Zulu]

Revive what? New mmos come out each year. It's the same 'Oh golly games were so much better in good old times!'.

[Demonic Fate]

MMOs were cancer and I'm glad they're mostly dead.

For each heckin' wholesome heartwarming story of people making lifelong IRL friends or even marrying their guild partners, there are 100 stories of people getting addicted to the virtual world and dropping out of university or getting divorced or generally ruining their lives.

Of course there are new kinds of cancer around (gacha, ai girlfriends), but wishing for the old cancer to come back is ********.

[Kain]

No, outlaw it, kill it, burn it with fire!!!

[LemonDemonGirl]

Probably not. All of the AAA "companies" keep spitting out dogshit, and even if a few dudes in their garage made a game, there's a very low chance of it going anywhere.