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

[Norfleet]

Okay but it's still turning a profit so they have no reason to change anything

That's not how corporations work. If it did, and merely continuing to generate profit was enough, they'd leave it alone once they had a working formula. No, line must go up. There must be MORE profit.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

From a business perspective I'd say that focusing on GW3 is the right call as right now there is a big hole in the MMO market.

The problem is that GW2 is already a shadow of what GW1 used to be and all the important people have left the company before GW2 released.

I liked GW2 much more than GW1, enough that it is probably the third or fourth MMO I have sunk the most amount of hours in. Colin Johanson was also the director during HoT (which was the best expansion GW2 ever got before Anet started moving people off of the team trying to make their other game) and has come back to direct GW3.

I also don't put that much stock into MMO talent. It became a meme how many ex Blizzard devs left to go found their own companies and make competitor MMOs, but ArenaNet and the Guild Wars franchise is the only one that people remember.

[Decline]

I liked GW2 much more than GW1

My condolences.

[Norfleet]

There is no such thing as an eternal winner, there is only eternally bad game design.

Disagree. Once someone starts winning, they quite likely ride that momentum all the way to the end of the game. It's not easy for a new player to overturn an entrenched advantage of players who have benefitted from all the pre-nerf advantages as well as a positional advantage due to a head start. I know this because I do it every time I'm winning. Because winners never quit.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Monetization (aka how to entice whales in an MMO to spend without antagonizing Western gamers)

There is no going back to 2004, of buying a one time box purchase or even a $15 monthly sub. The economics just doesn't support it for high production value, high operating cost live service games like MMOs. It isn't enough to just turn a profit. You need a comfortably large enough profit margin and cash reserve so that you can endure some bad times, otherwise (as commonly happened to dev teams in the 2000s and 2010s) it just takes a short while of being in the red and then you die.

According to Naoki Yoshida's biweekly column in Famitsu magazine and his book Yoshida Uncensored, Square Enix conducted market research in which they found that the subscription model was a major deterrent to younger gamers to trying out MMOs. WoW and FF14 managed to get in and lock down an audience before high quality F2P games became plentiful and normalized, but are unable to capture the youth and replace older players who lose interest in the game and leave. A constant influx of newblood is the lifeblood of any franchise and especially MMOs.

Whatever MMO comes out is probably going to have to be F2P. Probably something like a gacha where most players are free or are low spenders who just buy the cheap high value monthly sub options, while the bulk of the revenue comes from a minority of really, actually well off people (as in they own multiple houses) who can afford to dump thousands of dollars every month. Like that guy who spent $32,000 to max out Castorice in HSR or that other guy who spent $16,000 to max out Acheron and then another $16,000 the next month to max out Boothill.

The tricky part is figuring out how to reward these leviathans without angering the rest of the MMO playerbase too much.

Gachas like Genshin and HSR are mainly played singleplayer and you can beat the story with the free characters you are given and little to no grinding. It is possible to encounter a turbo gimped player in multiplayer, but multiplayer is a novelty that most people do not engage with, and people tend to be thankful to get carried by the big spenders when doing the one off co-op events. There are weekly resetting endgame modes (singleplayer only, no help from other players) with escalating difficulty that incentivize spending money to vertically invest in your characters and teams, jacking up their stats and unlocking new talents. But a lot of people view the the endgame modes as an afterthought and do not care if they do not fully complete. PvP and leaderboards in gachas has also fallen out favor and the current big ones like Genshin do not have them so as to not make people feel like they are "losing" to the big spenders.

But for a globally successful MMO, you are likely going to be courting the Western market too. Historically, adding any system in which you can pay real money for direct power upgrades incites massive discontent and mockery from the West. Or at least, Millennial MMO players and older. (Zoomers and Alphas may be more receptive to this now in the age of Genshin). Any MMO derided as "pay 2 win" in the West always flops here (typically imported from Asia which were accepting of these elements).

So we have to find another outlet for well off people to want to dump a lot of money on. The current cosmetic cash shop models are flawed as past a few hundred dollars, you have wound up equipping the transmog items you want in every slot available and there is no point in buying more stuff unless something comes out that appeals to you more than whatever you have currently equipped in a slot. You can't wear multiple chestpieces or ride multiple mounts simultaneously. Paying for conveniences (aka selling solutions to a problem that you engineered into the base game experience like lack of inventory or build slots) likewise is usually short sighted as past about one hundred dollars, you will have bought enough inventory slots and you are set for the rest of the game's life.

The solution of the new Chinese MMO-lite Where Winds Meet is to just make it requires a lot more money to acquire a slot item by making everything either cost a lot more money than in current Western cash shops (ie $43 for a feather coat) or come from a limited gacha banner (like sword swing VFX or a mount). Where Winds Meet has a boat skin that can cost $40,000 to $70,000 to pull, and there have been players spotted with it. That paid for a dev's annual salary and you only need a few hundred of these whales for your studios' costs to be covered for the year. Star Citizen operates similarly, having crossed the one billion dollar thresh hold by selling $2,000 capital ships to people who don't care.

Another hypothetical idea is to make the MMO into a JRPG/gacha-lite, with you being able to gamble for NPC party members. Asia founded a multi-billion dollar industry on having people gamble hundreds to thousands of dollars for beloved characters. GW1 requires a 8 man, but you can either play with NPC party members or real people. FF14 wound up retrofitting every dungeon and even some of the raid boss fights to allow you to use NPC party members from the story. FF14 is a 500 hour long JRPG/visual novel and people are extremely invested in the characters. Mass Effect and Baldur's Gate 3 have also shown that people can become very invested in Western RPG characters too. So maybe a gacha for these party members might occur. Maybe this will be mixed with a NPC phasing system like in WoW where you are running around with High King Varian at your side, but you see another player on the same quest but the NPC at his side that you see on your screen is an Alliance soldier (but is Varian on that player's screen). But then you run into other game design issues such as when are these NPC party members supposed to be used (is everyone running around with a NPC party? Or does the party only appear in instances? Or is it like GW1 where every party is in its own instance? Etc).

Player identity as expansion selling points

A historic problem with MMO expansions is that they advertise new classes and races. However, this runs contradictory to the nature of MMOs, where you typically have a steep time investment on one character that becomes your "main", the one you are most invested in. As the game goes on longer, people get more and more invested in their main, so new expansion classes and races don't do as much for existing players as fewer and fewer people are likely to abandon their main and start over again as a new class or race. This is one of the reasons why GW2 stopped adding new classes and instead opted to begin adding Elite Specializations as the new key expansion selling point, new specs that people could enjoy on their preexisting characters without having to abandon it. FF14 likewise allows people to play all jobs on one character, so people get excited for new expansion job announcements and then switch to maining that new job on their character. So a new MMO should probably let you do this.

Allowing players to switch classes also plays less stress on class design, as a class no longer needs to cover multiple different roles. Ie Paladin doesn't need to be designed to cover DPS and tank AND healing AND Crowd control AND support and so on, which causes too many problems with the design of the class and how it dilutes the class pool. Instead you could just swap to a different class if something else is required. Classes can become more niche in design and coexist better.

Similarly, a key selling point for WoW's Shadowlands expansion was Covenants, which were like new specs and new factions bundled into one. (Basically you joined a faction that gave you access to their unique school of magick). Blizzard allowed you to join any Covenant with your preexisting character and allowed you to switch Covenants if you wanted to see all of the Covenant exclusive content (as opposed to the old MMO problem where you need to have roll multiple characters to see every faction and all of the unique questlines). So if your MMO has a faction system then you might want to let players do that too.

For races, I see no solution. I guess you could let players race change for free, but players are going to be less likely to do that than becoming the new expansion job. So you're just going to be stuck with the problem of new playable races seeing less and less adoption rate the longer the game goes on and thus being less worthwhile to produce. WoW has become loathe to add proper new races (as in new animations, not reskins of preexisting rigs) anymore, and FF14 director Naoki Yoshida has declared that it is too difficult to add more races and that they will no longer do so. So you probably want to really plan out which races you are going to add and get them out of the way before it stops being worthwhile to add them. If you are making a game for a global audience then you need to take into account tastes in different regions. Beastmen/monster races are popular in the West so be sure to have one. Half of the Japanese FF14 population is Lalafells so make sure to have a kawaii race. Asians love pretty beautiful people so you probably want to offer those in addition to your ugly "realistic" or roided out Western men. Etc. I don't know if India is going to become a substantial gamer demographic or if you want to target them, maybe assign a guy knowledge about their pop culture and ask on forums and find out if there is any archetype they want to see.

Narrow class design, many gameplay elements

In order to continuously release many new classes over the years as a selling point, the classes will need to be narrowly designed so as to minimize overlap. Also, in the aforementioned section on progression, it would be best if the MMO was designed so that you needed a party from almost immediately. Larger party sizes necessitate that each player be more specialized to meaningfully differentiate everyone from each other.

An example of how class roles could be broken down into:

• Deals damage (DPS, can be subdivided into DPS who hit a button to immediately deal damage, casters where their damage comes at the end of a cast that can be interrupted, and DoT dealers where once applied the damage automatically happens).
• Reduces incoming damage (tanks, shielders)
• Heals damage (can be further subdivided into HP healers and shielders)
• Does something to the party (Buffer)
• Does something to the enemy (can be subdivided into debuffers, DoTs, and crowd controllers)
• Does something the ground/environment (Geomancer turning earth into quicksand or raising earth walls to block incoming fireballs. A mage who creates a Reality Marble to transport the battle to another dimension with special rules. A tinker who lays down or conjures a fold out fort for players to jump into)
• Miscellaneous utility class (thief which can stealth and run fast to scout a dangerous mob filled area for safe passage or pull enemies to the party. Thief that can increase droprates or acquire better loot for the party to roll on. Thief that can lockpick open doors. Mage which can portal the party in a game where transportation takes a long time and/or is expensive. Geomancer that can freeze water allowing travel over a river to reach otherwise inaccessible locations. Etc).

Additional gameplay elements can be added to further differentiate classes from each other, even within the same role. Gachas usually add an element system for this reason. Two characters might both be tanks, but one might be earth and the other might be ice. This increases how many unique characters the devs can add before they start repeating (ie making two earth tanks). And then you can add more gameplay elements like energy regeneration, stagger/break bars, etc. One of the GW2 dev team's regrets was that they removed an energy system during beta, which in the long run meant that there were less dials to fiddle with and differentiate abilities and classes from each other. They added a break bar later on in the game's life, but you probably want to be planning your gameplay elements and knobs and dials from the get go, not trying to rebuild your plane in midair after you already leapt off the cliff.

You will need to design the game in such a way as to prevent zerg parties of everyone being a DPS and bursting down enemies extremely quickly. The typical solution is to make the mobs severely tanky and threatening. Ie, they are tanky so you may need a debuffer to shred their defense stat so your DPS aren't hitting a brick wall and dealing hardly any damage (depends on how you have your damage formulas set up). The mobs may hit so hard that you need a buffer and/or shielder to increase the team's HP so people don't get one shotted. Perhaps mobs often come in packs (or can summon adds) and a crowd controller is needed to delay at least one or two problem mobs to prevent the party from being decimated or overwhelmed. Perhaps this game has a lot of other objectives besides just killing mobs to win (ie hold this position for X amount of time), which makes defensive classes more valued. Etc.

[7Trickster]

GW3

GW3 is being made? Do you reckon it is going to be a furry **** game like GW2 or hot woman based game like GW1?

vs

The OG devs from Guild Wars were inspired by Diablo, among other things. Which is why the tone of GW1 is way more serious and more memorable.

Nowadays the story and decisions for GW2 are made mainly by women. EoD being a prime example of woke dogshit. I have a funny video that perfectly sums it all up :

► Show Spoiler

Also, the real furry game is WoW now. It's genuinely sad to see how yet again clownifornian ***** pander to these absolute ******* and freaks.

Even if they pull out GW3 out of their dirty asses they are faced with 2 problems :

• First, it's still the same team. Between woketards and incompetence in balancing their games (eg : mesmer being insanely op in pvp and pve, still is afaik to this day While destroying other classes that didn't need nerfs.). Genuinely the only MMO where I felt the need to leave because they ruined classes I enjoy.
  
  Second, is that GW2 is similar to WoW in the sense that you have to grind for good skins. It's even more true for GW2 with super long grinds. Sure you can somewhat speed it up by buying gold, but for a lot of those skins the grind is there. I don't see everyone going "hey, let's give up all our skins and start again from scratch !". Path of Exile 2 did it best by letting you transfer your skins.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

GW3

GW3 is being made? Do you reckon it is going to be a furry **** game like GW2 or hot woman based game like GW1?

vs

The OG devs from Guild Wars were inspired by Diablo, among other things. Which is why the tone of GW1 is way more serious and more memorable.

Nowadays the story and decisions for GW2 are made mainly by women. EoD being a prime example of woke dogshit. I have a funny video that perfectly sums it all up :

► Show Spoiler

Also, the real furry game is WoW now. It's genuinely sad to see how yet again clownifornian ***** pander to these absolute ******* and freaks.

Even if they pull out GW3 out of their dirty asses they are faced with 2 problems :

• First, it's still the same team. Between woketards and incompetence in balancing their games (eg : mesmer being insanely op in pvp and pve, still is afaik to this day While destroying other classes that didn't need nerfs.). Genuinely the only MMO where I felt the need to leave because they ruined classes I enjoy.
  
  Second, is that GW2 is similar to WoW in the sense that you have to grind for good skins. It's even more true for GW2 with super long grinds. Sure you can somewhat speed it up by buying gold, but for a lot of those skins the grind is there. I don't see everyone going "hey, let's give up all our skins and start again from scratch !". Path of Exile 2 did it best by letting you transfer your skins.

On the r/GuildWars3 subreddit, there is a guy with a spreadsheet tracking all of the job openings and linkedin profiles for Anet. Apparently one of the devs on his Linkedin page talked about how he was porting GW2 assets to Unreal Engine 5. So it may be that there might be some carry over. Or maybe it is just some creature models like Aurene, though I'd imagine after however long the sequel begins she would be a lot bigger and need a new model (again).

I think GW3 will largely try to appeal to a new playerbase like how most of GW2's playerbase were not GW1 players. I also feel that in the GW2 community, most people thought that the end of the Aurene/Elder Dragon story in End of Dragons was the conclusion of the game for them, in a same way how a lot of people checked out after FF14 ended its original main story with Endwalker. GW2 post EoD is clearly in managed decline with the mini expansions and it feels like a waiting room for GW3 or some extra postgame content if you just want a little more stuff after finishing the main story.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Combat design and chat

There was a trend to move away from autoattack tab target MMOs to action combat where you press a button every second and to dodge an incoming swing or fireball or AoE. Action combat was perceived as an evolution or superior to flaccid tab target combat. This was short sighted. Action combat is fundamentally at odds with MMOs because the MMO genre is built on social interaction. Most people do not wear headsets or microphones all of the time, so the primary mode of chat is through text. That means you need to be able to type on the keyboard. You can't type on the keyboard to chat if you are having to press a button every second to do damage. Therefore the combat needs to designed so that you do not need to be pressing buttons to move or attack every second.

Combat design: pressing a button millions of times to hit like a wet noodle

Having to press a button every second to do damage also feels awful in MMOs. Action combat is great in singleplayer games or small scale multiplayer setups. You press a button, your character swings and kills an enemy, or chunks an enemy for 60% of its HP, etc. You rarely need more than 2 or 3 button presses to kill something. The point of MMOs is that they are larger scale multiplayer experiences, but the enemies have to be designer to accommodate this larger group size. Let's look at WoW/FF14/GW2 dungeons. Enter the typical issue of the designer wanting a mob to last for at least 10 seconds. Against a 5 man group where 4 of the non-healer players are pressing a button every second, then that means it took at least 40 total button presses to kill that one mob. For an individual DPS player, that was 10 button presses. Each time they pressed a button, they only hurt the mob for 2.5% of its HP. You pressed a button and your character hit like a wet noodle. This feels terrible.

This becomes exacerbated on dungeon boss fights where the boss is designed to live for at least 2 minutes, so each button you press only chips the boss for around 0.2% of its HP bar. It is very difficult to notice how much damage my one button press does to a dungeon boss. And it gets way, way worse once you start scaling up the total group size (ie 10 man raid, 25 man raid, 40 man raid) and the boss' lifespan (6 man long boss fights). Past 10 players my button press' effect is unnoticeable. Now obviously this is napkin math that doesn't account for ebbs and flow in your damage output, downtime where the boss flies away or becomes shielded and invulnerable and you can't attack it for several seconds while other stuff is happening like adds spawning, etc. But my main point is that pressing a button to do damage every second in action MMOs generally feels dissatisfying.

Action combat is also bad in the long term as the playerbase ages. WoW currently has a problem where a lot of people are getting old, don't have fast reflexes anymore, or are getting arthritis from cramping their hand on the keyboard.



The fix for both of these issues (inability to stop DPSing to type and chat, and dissatisfactory button pushes) is to go back to autoattack combat. Ie, classic FF11. You only have to press a button once every several seconds to launch an ability (ie consuming all of your accumulated rage on a weaponskill, or using a job ability that has come off of a 3 minute cooldown). In a 6 man levelling party with 4 DPS/tank players fighting a mob 7+ levels higher than them, each of those player will press their weaponskill about once or twice during the fight. That is about ~8 or so total weaponskills. So your individual button press to launch a weaponskill did about ~12.5% of the mob's HP in damage. Now this is napkin math. I was using the samurai subjob which gave me significantly higher TP generation than my other party members so I was able to weaponskill more often, but you can see how your one button press feels far more impactful than under the action combat system of pressing a button every second.

Another reason for a slower paced autoattack game is that the next MMO will need to be crossplatform. But playing action combat games on the tiny phone screen with no tactile sticks or keys to push feels really bad. Turn based RPGs or slow paced autobattlers are better suited to phones, and so would an autoattack game where you don't have to mash buttons every second.

Also, part of the reason why tab target was derided is because Western RPG and MMO basic attacks tend to look really meh, while action combat games had a little more effort poured into their animations. A new MMO needs to step up their game and heighten the presentation of the autoattack experience. FF11 has a zoomed in camera showcasing your character and the enemy, camera framing which makes it look more interesting than your character centered in the middle of the screen, and normal battle music playing. This - combined with being able to chat with the party - makes the autoattack combat more engaging. This could be further heightened with Asian level animations and/or cutscenes for the attacks and abilities. Gacha/JRPG quality animation cutscenes would also go a long way to making non-combat classes like healers or buffers/debuffers a lot cooler. You're not dealing damage but man you look really cool and important.

Autoattack combat where you only use an ability once every several seconds, as opposed to the current setup of having many players each pressing a button every second, will prevent the screen from becoming a nonstop blinding cacophony of VFX.

[DemoGraph]

Autoattack combat where you only use an ability once every several seconds

If you attack every 3 seconds, and your animation is 3 seconds long (to make you feel important), you're moving nonstop. If there're 10 people and 10 targets, it's constant mush, just like on your screenie.
A character should have a special action no more than once a minute to feel at all noticeable. Maybe even once per 10-15 minutes.

[GhostCow]

Autoattack combat where you only use an ability once every several seconds

If you attack every 3 seconds, and your animation is 3 seconds long (to make you feel important), you're moving nonstop. If there're 10 people and 10 targets, it's constant mush, just like on your screenie.
A character should have a special action no more than once a minute to feel at all noticeable. Maybe even once per 10-15 minutes.

I don't like modern MMO combat where I feel like I'm playing a rhythm game, but this is too much. I should get to mash a button every few seconds.

[aimlesshealer]

Combat design and chat

There was a trend to move away from autoattack tab target MMOs to action combat where you press a button every second and to dodge an incoming swing or fireball or AoE. Action combat was perceived as an evolution or superior to flaccid tab target combat. This was short sighted. Action combat is fundamentally at odds with MMOs because the MMO genre is built on social interaction. Most people do not wear headsets or microphones all of the time, so the primary mode of chat is through text. That means you need to be able to type on the keyboard. You can't type on the keyboard to chat if you are having to press a button every second to do damage. Therefore the combat needs to designed so that you do need to be pressing buttons to move or attack every second.

Combat design: pressing a button millions of times to hit like a wet noodle

Having to press a button every second to do damage also feels awful in MMOs. Action combat is great in singleplayer games or small scale multiplayer setups. You press a button, your character swings and kills an enemy, or chunks an enemy for 60% of its HP, etc. You rarely need more than 2 or 3 button presses to kill something. The point of MMOs is that they are larger scale multiplayer experiences, but the enemies have to be designer to accommodate this larger group size. Let's look at WoW/FF14/GW2 dungeons. Enter the typical issue of the designer wanting a mob to last for at least 10 seconds. Against a 5 man group where 4 of the non-healer players are pressing a button every second, then that means it took at least 40 total button presses to kill that one mob. For an individual DPS player, that was 10 button presses. Each time they pressed a button, they only hurt the mob for 2.5% of its HP. You pressed a button and your character hit like a wet noodle. This feels terrible.

This becomes exacerbated on dungeon boss fights where the boss is designed to live for at least 2 minutes, so each button you press only chips the boss for around 0.2% of its HP bar. It is very difficult to notice how much damage my one button press does to a dungeon boss. And it gets way, way worse once you start scaling up the total group size (ie 10 man raid, 25 man raid, 40 man raid) and the boss' lifespan (6 man long boss fights). Past 10 players my button press' effect is unnoticeable. Now obviously this is napkin math that doesn't account for ebbs and flow in your damage output, downtime where the boss flies away or becomes shielded and invulnerable and you can't attack it for several seconds while other stuff is happening like adds spawning, etc. But my main point is that pressing a button to do damage every second in action MMOs generally feels dissatisfying.

Action combat is also bad in the long term as the playerbase ages. WoW currently has a problem where a lot of people are getting old, don't have fast reflexes anymore, or are getting arthritis from cramping their hand on the keyboard.



The fix for both of these issues (inability to stop DPSing to type and chat, and dissatisfactory button pushes) is to go back to autoattack combat. Ie, classic FF11. You only have to press a button once every several seconds to launch an ability (ie consuming all of your accumulated rage on a weaponskill, or using a job ability that has come off of a 3 minute cooldown). In a 6 man levelling party with 4 DPS/tank players fighting a mob 7+ levels higher than them, each of those player will press their weaponskill about once or twice during the fight. That is about ~8 or so total weaponskills. So your individual button press to launch a weaponskill did about ~12.5% of the mob's HP in damage. Now this is napkin math. I was using the samurai subjob which gave me significantly higher TP generation than my other party members so I was able to weaponskill more often, but you can see how your one button press feels far more impactful than under the action combat system of pressing a button every second.

Another reason for a slower paced autoattack game is that the next MMO will need to be crossplatform. But playing action combat games on the tiny phone screen with no tactile sticks or keys to push feels really bad. Turn based RPGs or slow paced autobattlers are better suited to phones, and so would an autoattack game where you don't have to mash buttons every second.

Also, part of the reason why tab target was derided is because Western RPG and MMO basic attacks tend to look really meh, while action combat games had a little more effort poured into their animations. A new MMO needs to step up their game and heighten the presentation of the autoattack experience. FF11 has a zoomed in camera showcasing your character and the enemy, camera framing which makes it look more interesting than your character centered in the middle of the screen, and normal battle music playing. This - combined with being able to chat with the party - makes the autoattack combat more engaging. This could be further heightened with Asian level animations and/or cutscenes for the attacks and abilities. Gacha/JRPG quality animation cutscenes would also go a long way to making non-combat classes like healers or buffers/debuffers a lot cooler. You're not dealing damage but man you look really cool and important.

Autoattack combat where you only use an ability once every several seconds, as opposed to the current setup of having many players each pressing a button every second, will prevent the screen from becoming a nonstop blinding cacophony of VFX.

Want to briefly say I've been reading all of these and thoroughly enjoy hearing your thoughts. I will write a response after you've covered all your points (been keeping notes as I go)

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Tanks

(I had a threat pondering about this before)

The standard tab target tank (mob does heavy single target damage towards whoever has the highest threat) setup is flawed:

• 1. it places a disproportionate amount of stress on one player. If that one player dies, everyone else dies and get mads at that player. This historically causes the tank role to become mythical to casual players and shy away for it or misunderstand it, and thus a tank shortage for small group content.
• 2. The tank role usually does not scale with larger group sizes. In party, you need 1 or 2 healers. In a 25 man raid, you need 5 to 7 healers. In a 40 man raid you need 8 to 12. But you never, ever need more than 2 tanks (outside of the Vanilla Four Horseman fight, and the FF11 Ark Angels fight but people just use a kite strat for that which only requires one person to tank whichever boss is pulled off of the runner and is being burned down). This winds up creating a tank surplus for large group content and tank mains struggling to find an empty slot to fit into.
• 3. Immersion wise, it does not make sense to have all of these plate knights in melee but the orc chieftain or the dragon is only attacking one.
• 4. it is not cool to be playing a swordsman, but then you wind up standing behind the dragon slashing at the back of their ankles while the tank is over there standing on the other side away from the rest of the team.

When I played FF11 Horizon, the threat multipliers were not easy to access nor that effective. (Only warrior had a "taunt" ability, but the aggro multiplier would fall off over 30 seconds. Aggro multiplication gear was extremely expensive). What wound up happening often (not as much in our RPGhq premade group, but when I was levelling at Horizon's launch, and then pugging from 65 to 75 towards the end) is that the mob would ping pong around between the heavy armored melee DPS who were doing the most amount of damage. If you choose to play a heavy melee class (warrior, paladin, samurai, dark knight, dragoon), then you're just going to wind up sometimes drawing the ire of the foe and getting whacked for a bit. And that's okay. Because you are wearing heavy armor, you have a defensive ability you can press, and if you die before you lose aggro then it's not the end for your party. There is 2 other heavy melees right there who will hold aggro and prevent the rest of the party from wiping.

I think this greatly reduces the stress, both for the "designated" tank, and for players looking on the outside in as it normalizes "tanking" and makes them much more comfortable with stepping up when needed, since they aren't doing much different than what they were already doing. And obviously it lessens the group pressure on the designated "tank" since if he dies the whole group does not suddenly wipe.

I think this system could be improved somewhat. Make the mob's attack cleave, but the damage is split amongst targets. Incentivize the heavy melee players to stand together to split the damage together, that way they are heroically standing in front of the boss instead of people slashing at the back of the ankles. Etc.

The only major complication here is on the healer's end, as now instead of just watching one person's HP bar (the designated "tank") and pressing a macro to /HealFocusTarget, they are now having to be aware that multiple people are being whacked. Perhaps their healing spells could heal in a small area around the target and thus heal the heavy melee standing together. Mainly a targeting issue.

Encounter design

Adding on the prior point, the main content of the game needs to be designed so that you don't have a lot of people wailing on a boss that lives for 2+ minutes and each feeling like a wet noodle, as in retail WoW/FF14 where the main gameplay is really about doing boss fights over and over. Your average content needs to be designed to break up raids into smaller groups that are still coordinating with each other, so that individual players can feel their contribution. Ie:

• The Field Operation raids in FF14, where the raid has to break up into two parties with one party going above to fight a boss there while the other party fights a boss below, and the bosses can attack people in the other arena and both bosses have to die at the same time. Or the raid splitting into two advancing down the two corridors and the switches at the end of both corridors have to be flipped at the same time to open a door. Or the raid having to split up into several parties each going to different rooms to stop the prisoners from being executed.
• GW2 meta events where you have at least 3 or 4 lanes that and there needs to be a party at each lane pushing down it, and they need to coordinate so that one lane doesn't go too far ahead of the others and people transfer to help out other lanes.
• FF11 Horizon's launch when we formed an 18 man alliance in Gusgen mine and spread out into two parties camping in two different adjacent tunnels filled with extremely threatening skeletons and bandersnatches (they had to die ASAP or the tank would collapse within seconds) to farm magicked skulls for our subjob unlocks.

Do not waste your time developing raids.

Only a small percentage of the playerbase ever bothers doing raids aka rehearsing and dying on the same boss and killing the same boss over and over and over again for weeks on end. It's not fun and was never popular. WoW's leadership wound up being hijacked by no-lifer raiders who then redesigned the game around raiding at the expense of everything else, but even at the peak of WoW during Vanilla only a microscopic fraction of the millions of players made it to Naxramas. Ever since the Isle of Quel'danas patch, Blizzard has tried giving people catchup gear so that they can skip straight to the last raid, but participation did not significantly improve. In 4.3 Blizzard tried to justify the amount of resources they were pouring into raids by adding an easier mode called LFR that you could queue for bifurcated instanced versions of the raid with other randoms, but this too did not significantly improve participation either. During WoD, the game director Ion Hazzikostas said that they would not implement player housing - a highly desired feature by the playerbase at large - because it would cost a raid tier, something that only a minority of no-lifers cared about. And then in TWW Blizzard added an even easier story mode version of the raids where you could do it with NPC party members. And still we have the problem where casuals will do a lot of overworld content, get high ilevel, get 30+ alts to level cap, but will not touch the raid whatsoever. This pattern holds true for all of the other MMOs.

If you are going to design elaborate boss fights then they need to be out in the open world like FF11's Voidwatch bosses or GW2's meta events, which sees far more engagement from casual players doing stuff in the open world and coming across a boss.

[rusty_shackleford]

Raids were one of the worst additions to the MMO genre, adventuring in small parties was always more fun

[Val the Moofia Boss]

The posters on r/GuildWars3 have been tracking Arena Net job applications for the new MMO onto a spreadsheet, and they have also been following Anet people on Linkedin. They found someone who they believe was hired for the Combat Designer role. His portfolio which has two action combat demo games on it. So maybe GW3 will be some sort of actiony game along these lines. He might not be the only guy handling the combat, so who knows.


It seems quite fast paced, reminds me of Warframe.

https://i.imgur.com/R6diM4X.mp4


Somewhat slower, though I'd wonder how something like swinging a heavy two handed warhammer as Untamed would feel, or if enemies would be fast enough to move away before you could swing it.

https://i.imgur.com/Y8TmuAG.mp4


Different demo about Orc combat. He does feel more threatening than your average mob. Imagine if that was a Charr or a Kodan!

https://i.imgur.com/vKO0UbL.mp4


Obviously these are just barebones demos so no idea how abilities would fit into this, or how playing a ranged character would feel.

[rusty_shackleford]

Years away from release at best

[mynameismortis]

The posters on r/GuildWars3 have been tracking Arena Net job applications for the new MMO onto a spreadsheet, and they have also been following Anet people on Linkedin. They found someone who they believe was hired for the Combat Designer role. His portfolio which has two action combat demo games on it. So maybe GW3 will be some sort of actiony game along these lines. He might not be the only guy handling the combat, so who knows.


It seems quite fast paced, reminds me of Warframe.

https://i.imgur.com/R6diM4X.mp4


Somewhat slower, though I'd wonder how something like swinging a heavy two handed warhammer as Untamed would feel, or if enemies would be fast enough to move away before you could swing it.

https://i.imgur.com/Y8TmuAG.mp4


Different demo about Orc combat. He does feel more threatening than your average mob. Imagine if that was a Charr or a Kodan!

https://i.imgur.com/vKO0UbL.mp4


Obviously these are just barebones demos so no idea how abilities would fit into this, or how playing a ranged character would feel.

i find reading ur posts to be actually very refresing from the standpoint that alot of comments about the decline of mmos are just made by copying what other people said on youtube or another oonga boonga social platform.Thank you sir for writing this!

[7Trickster]

Autoattack combat where you only use an ability once every several seconds, as opposed to the current setup of having many players each pressing a button every second, will prevent the screen from becoming a nonstop blinding cacophony of VFX.

Action combat is fine and more engaging.

The problem with Guild Wars 2 is that everything is over the top visually : may it be armors, weapons and especially skills. So when everyone fights a world boss, it's a ******* visual mess.
It's a VFX design issue, not a combat/gameplay one.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Autoattack combat where you only use an ability once every several seconds, as opposed to the current setup of having many players each pressing a button every second, will prevent the screen from becoming a nonstop blinding cacophony of VFX.

Action combat is fine and more engaging.

How would you tune the mobs and the combat so that players don't feel like a weak noodle because the mob/boss was designed to be live for X amount of time while being whacked by Y amount of players attacking every Z seconds?

If people can't type during combat because they need to be pressing WASD or pushing abilities, then what about the effect on socialization this would have since people would be talking to each other a lot less? Any ideas to remedy that?

Autoattack combat where you only use an ability once every several seconds, as opposed to the current setup of having many players each pressing a button every second, will prevent the screen from becoming a nonstop blinding cacophony of VFX.

The problem with Guild Wars 2 is that everything is over the top visually : may it be armors, weapons and especially skills. So when everyone fights a world boss, it's a ******* visual mess.
It's a VFX design issue, not a combat/gameplay one.

I think a lot of the GW2 VFX are quite good, particularly Untamed with the exploding spores/goo magicks. I wouldn't want to lose that.

[DemoGraph]

Tanks
(I had a threat pondering about this before)

Spam a bunch of mobs, make them target squishiest targets - tank problem solved.
Give large mobs ability to kick - tank problem solved.
Make giants and dragons wear goddamn armored boots and simulate it properly - tank problem solved.

Whole tanking system is possible only because mobs are implemented as dumb shooting range bullet sponges and devs cater to the current mindless role specialization.
Tanks worked in dungeoncrawls, because dungeon corridors usually fit only 1-3 characters at a time. Same goes for armor obstructing casting for some dumb "balancing" reason. Both of these mechanics were used only to make melee kiddies feel relevant.
(Crawls taint the proper gameplay again! REEE)

The real solution would be to make a series of "realistic"( or at least not completely dumb) mechanics that should account for combat geometry and basic logic. And go from there.

[TKVNC]

Raids suck.

5 to 10 man is the superior form of content.

Melee should be control and damage, like shield slam, trip attacks or hamstring.

Ranged should be bows or crossbows, with traps and such.

Casting should be damage and healing.

Let everyone be anything, and forget balancing. People WILL play what they think looks cool, even if it's not very good.

To add, hard and fast classes are not practical to be added into online MMO's. Because in TTRPG, you rarely if ever play the same character for every campaign.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Megaservers and instancing

MMOs have historically struggled with having lots of individually separated servers. Once a MMO crosses the point where new players joining < oldtimers leaving, you run into an issue where some servers aren't getting a lot of new players, so for the few new players on that server they are running through desolate wastelands or waiting hours in queue for a levelling dungeon by themselves. Because all of the other active players are at level cap doing level cap things. That new player is effectively playing a crappy singleplayer game and they usually do not make it to level cap. There is also other frustrations such as people creating a character on whatever server the game automatically assigns them, they invest many hours, and then they want to play with a friend but then find out that they can't, and they are too invested to start over and redo everything again.

Once you have the dying isolated server issue, the only recourse is a server merge, which companies are loathe to do because of programming difficulties and the bad PR from it.

The solution is to just make a megaserver system from the get go, or make it as easy as possible for your character to commute from one server to another like in FF14. Anybody can play with anybody. People are never cut off from their friends and new players will never be trapped on a server with no other new people to play with.

I know that the community feel of small servers for the first few months was enjoyable for many, but when you take a step back, those only exist for a short time for the playerbase at large as the population decline sets in and the above problems become severe and outweigh whatever benefit the small community feel might have had.



This then leads into the game design issue of needing a world big enough to accommodate so many people packed into it. One week into FF11 Horizon's launch, the Valkurm Dunes (level 10 to 20) zone kept crashing because there were 2,400 players packed into it. That experience was extremely fun! Spending 15 to 20 minutes running past 6 man party after 6 man party, each camping a mob spawn, trying to find a spot that wasn't taken. Imagine going to the fair but crowds started being rendered 20 feet in front of you. The chat was scrolling with activity. There was a lot of trade happening an impromptu bazaar in the middle of the zone, far away from any capital cities. Lots of friendships and guilds formed there. There were other zones people could have gone to like Buburimu Peninsula (and some did to get away from the crashes), but the Dunes craziness was where the fun was it. The devs had to alter the level sync system so that you got diminishing returns for levelling there past level 20 so as to incentivize people to move on from it. Now past Dunes, there were actually real problems with there not being enough mob spawns in maps for that level range, but the devs added more mob spawns across various zones incentivizing the playerbase to spread out across the world rather than fight over camps.

Now, for an actual big MMO release rather than a private server with 5-10k players, instancing is just going to have to be a thing because no company's server can handle 100,000 players concentrated in a single zone like Dunes. 12 years and one billion USD later, Star Citizen never got their fabled server meshing tech to work that would allow a thousand people in a bar. But with retail WoW/FF14/GW2 there is unfortunately a dev mentality that they have to have multiple instances of the zones with only 60 to 200 max per instance, which sucks IMO. For 100,000+ concurrent players I'd say that the solution isn't to over rely on instancing but to make a bigger world for players to spread out across. Maybe have each zone instance at 1,000 to 2,000 players.


Orgrimmar on Ascension. It is very odd that despite NA Retail WoW having several times more active players than private servers like Ascension and the megaserver technology to condense players into instances, the capital cities on Retail are nowhere near as packed with players.

Global chat

All too often in MMOs, you cannot access a global/server chat channel from anywhere, only seeing a city chat that lets you communicate with people in other cities. Outside of cities, the most you can see is the chat for the zone you are in. This zone chat is almost always dead. So what do people do? They often go to a megadiscord for the game and chat in there, like the FF14 discord, the WoW discord, the GW2 discord, etc. FF14 has a Novice Player chat that veterans players co-opted as an impromptu server chat and will try to attain mentor status just to get in it and be able to talk to people from anywhere. This has resulted in some incidents where new players got banned from Novice Network because they used that chat for its intended purpose by asking a question which interrupted a conversations some vets were having.

The solution is to just let everyone access a global/server chat. Let everyone see and talk to each other from anywhere in the game. This will also reduce how many people move their socializing out of the game to discords.

I have also heard suggestions about combining the ingame global chat with a megadiscord, so that people ingame can also look at their ingame chat and see what the people in the discord said. This has the benefit of allowing people on their lunchbreak being able to communicate with people ingame, like trying to secure a spot in a PUG that is happening in 30 minutes or talking to guildies. But this seems like a heavy dependency on a separate company's service. Discord servers tend to get centralized in the hands of power tripping nutters, so unless it's being run by the devs then it's probably a bad idea.

[Tadeusz]

The solution is to just let everyone access a global/server chat. Let everyone see and talk to each other from anywhere in the game.

Do you mean a global chat where everyone on the server can speak? That can turn into disaster with many players. Division into area, group and guild chats is reasonable so it won't turn into a stream of spam.

[Stack of Turtles]

This then leads into the game design issue of needing a world big enough to accommodate so many people packed into it. One week into FF11 Horizon's launch, the Valkurm Dunes (level 10 to 20) zone kept crashing because there were 2,400 players packed into it. That experience was extremely fun! Spending 15 to 20 minutes running past 6 man party after 6 man party, each camping a mob spawn, trying to find a spot that wasn't taken. Imagine going to the fair but crowds started being rendered 20 feet in front of you. The chat was scrolling with activity. There was a lot of trade happening an impromptu bazaar in the middle of the zone, far away from any capital cities. Lots of friendships and guilds formed there. There were other zones people could have gone to like Buburimu Peninsula (and some did to get away from the crashes), but the Dunes craziness was where the fun was it. The devs had to alter the level sync system so that you got diminishing returns for levelling there past level 20 so as to incentivize people to move on from it. Now past Dunes, there were actually real problems with there not being enough mob spawns in maps for that level range, but the devs added more mob spawns across various zones incentivizing the playerbase to spread out across the world rather than fight over camps.

I thought you were being sarcastic but it seems like you weren't and you actually like this and think it's great?????

[Oyster Sauce]

This then leads into the game design issue of needing a world big enough to accommodate so many people packed into it. One week into FF11 Horizon's launch, the Valkurm Dunes (level 10 to 20) zone kept crashing because there were 2,400 players packed into it. That experience was extremely fun! Spending 15 to 20 minutes running past 6 man party after 6 man party, each camping a mob spawn, trying to find a spot that wasn't taken. Imagine going to the fair but crowds started being rendered 20 feet in front of you. The chat was scrolling with activity. There was a lot of trade happening an impromptu bazaar in the middle of the zone, far away from any capital cities. Lots of friendships and guilds formed there. There were other zones people could have gone to like Buburimu Peninsula (and some did to get away from the crashes), but the Dunes craziness was where the fun was it. The devs had to alter the level sync system so that you got diminishing returns for levelling there past level 20 so as to incentivize people to move on from it. Now past Dunes, there were actually real problems with there not being enough mob spawns in maps for that level range, but the devs added more mob spawns across various zones incentivizing the playerbase to spread out across the world rather than fight over camps.

I thought you were being sarcastic but it seems like you weren't and you actually like this and think it's great?????

He's right. Overpopulation in MMOs is a non-issue that fixes itself within hours. Gimping the game permanently to solve a very temporary issue is dumb. And it is fun to experience.

[Stack of Turtles]

This then leads into the game design issue of needing a world big enough to accommodate so many people packed into it. One week into FF11 Horizon's launch, the Valkurm Dunes (level 10 to 20) zone kept crashing because there were 2,400 players packed into it. That experience was extremely fun! Spending 15 to 20 minutes running past 6 man party after 6 man party, each camping a mob spawn, trying to find a spot that wasn't taken. Imagine going to the fair but crowds started being rendered 20 feet in front of you. The chat was scrolling with activity. There was a lot of trade happening an impromptu bazaar in the middle of the zone, far away from any capital cities. Lots of friendships and guilds formed there. There were other zones people could have gone to like Buburimu Peninsula (and some did to get away from the crashes), but the Dunes craziness was where the fun was it. The devs had to alter the level sync system so that you got diminishing returns for levelling there past level 20 so as to incentivize people to move on from it. Now past Dunes, there were actually real problems with there not being enough mob spawns in maps for that level range, but the devs added more mob spawns across various zones incentivizing the playerbase to spread out across the world rather than fight over camps.

I thought you were being sarcastic but it seems like you weren't and you actually like this and think it's great?????

He's right. Overpopulation in MMOs is a non-issue that fixes itself within hours. Gimping the game permanently to solve a very temporary issue is dumb. And it is fun to experience.

This is like that thing that happens to **** when they go to some ****** third-world market in Africa full of noise and smells and stimuli and are suddenly transported back to a racial memory of the Shtetl as they discover for the first time what it's like to have their minds fully occupied so they don't have to be alone in the quiet with their anxiety-ridden thoughts.

[Oyster Sauce]

I thought you were being sarcastic but it seems like you weren't and you actually like this and think it's great?????

He's right. Overpopulation in MMOs is a non-issue that fixes itself within hours. Gimping the game permanently to solve a very temporary issue is dumb. And it is fun to experience.

This is like that thing that happens to **** when they go to some ****** third-world market in Africa full of noise and smells and stimuli and are suddenly transported back to a racial memory of the Shtetl as they discover for the first time what it's like to have their minds fully occupied so they don't have to be alone in the quiet with their anxiety-ridden thoughts.

embrace the retardation because once the zones are empty they stay empty forever

[Stack of Turtles]

He's right. Overpopulation in MMOs is a non-issue that fixes itself within hours. Gimping the game permanently to solve a very temporary issue is dumb. And it is fun to experience.

This is like that thing that happens to **** when they go to some ****** third-world market in Africa full of noise and smells and stimuli and are suddenly transported back to a racial memory of the Shtetl as they discover for the first time what it's like to have their minds fully occupied so they don't have to be alone in the quiet with their anxiety-ridden thoughts.

embrace the retardation because once the zones are empty they stay empty forever

I prefer them that way! It's fun for me to walk through the ruins of the high places and for the occasional sighting of another player to be a rare and interesting event.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Looking through my notes, I think I have covered most of the main points. I have a couple sections left on having factions and faction conflict to get people to define their identity and more invested in the game and encourage socialization, make the world feel more real with the enemy (as represented by players) on the prowl out there. And the economy which makes the game feel more real if you have to go trade with other players to get gear or supplies. Etc. But I don't think those are hot takes and seem to be a rather common sentiment.

The only other major thing off of the top of my head is mounts and fast travel, namely 1. whether or not it is timegated and 2. if the game has events in the open world that can be spawned by the players at will and then just as quickly completed. GW2 has a major problem where the game started off with no mounts, so everybody had to run on foot. The game really centers around meta events, which are time limited events happening in the world. People can join into this event and get rewards without being in a party. But players doing stuff in the event fills up a bar and completes it makes the event go away, preventing latecomers from participating. And in some cases. But GW2 wound up adding mounts in the second expansion which give mounted players tremendous traversal capability, and then much later flying mounts which made them even faster. This has created an issue where a player still going through the base game or the first expansion does not have a mount yet and is unable to reach a meta event before it gets completed by all of these other people zooming by on mounts, and is a constant point of contention in that games' community. Other games have timegated access to mounts (ie FF11 and Vanilla WoW) where you don't obtain one right away, but those games typically do not have lucrative events in the open world that can be preemptively spawned and completed by fast players.

[7Trickster]

Sorry Val, late reply

How would you tune the mobs and the combat so that players don't feel like a weak noodle because the mob/boss was designed to be live for X amount of time while being whacked by Y amount of players attacking every Z seconds?

Scaling. Which is already done in WoW, if I remember correctly. As soon as a player enters the fight : may it be by damaging the mob or healing/buffing a player fighting the mob, its health increases. I think I heard of games that have bosses change their behavior too.
Honestly it's not that much of a complex issue. You'll never get THE perfect solution to make everyone happy but scaling and behavior changes to fit the number of players sound more reasonable.

If people can't type during combat because they need to be pressing WASD or pushing abilities, then what about the effect on socialization this would have since people would be talking to each other a lot less? Any ideas to remedy that?

Why would you type during combat ? I'm pretty sure nobody does that in Guild Wars 2, maybe Guild Wars 1 since it's slower paced. At best you'd get a few words like "go here" or "do that" to instruct people how to deal with an enemy.

If you need to type walls of texts in every fight, you might be better off with an automated afk-game.
You can type during action combat, just know when to do it. I did it a lot in Mordhau or Chivalry. Just don't do it while in the heat of combat or you'll die.

You don't "socialize" during combat. You do that before or after.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Scaling. Which is already done in WoW, if I remember correctly. As soon as a player enters the fight : may it be by damaging the mob or healing/buffing a player fighting the mob, its health increases. I think I heard of games that have bosses change their behavior too.
Honestly it's not that much of a complex issue. You'll never get THE perfect solution to make everyone happy but scaling and behavior changes to fit the number of players sound more reasonable.

I think I misunderstand. WoW HP scaling per added player when fighting world bosses or raids feels really bad. You get into the problem I listed of the more players, the weaker you feel.

Why would you type during combat ? I'm pretty sure nobody does that in Guild Wars 2, maybe Guild Wars 1 since it's slower paced. At best you'd get a few words like "go here" or "do that" to instruct people how to deal with an enemy.

In MMOs like FF11 (not pseudo action games like GW2). The long combats with a low APM led to you shooting the breeze with people while fighting the mobs. It was where the social element of the game happened (just as much in the downtime resting in between pulls).