Why did MMOs turn out so utterly boring...

Publishers discovered there was more money to be made in selling single player games with a subscription and an MMO grind rather than trying to sell niche games for weirdos who actually like to socialize

So people are to blame, ultimately. Thank you democracy.

social media watered down the excitement of meeting new people from various lands. turns out a connected world is very boring.

You find out how retarded other players are

>turns out a connected world is very boring.
It's only boring because programmers are bores and the average person can't think for themselves

I miss when early MMOs were idealistic and dreamed of connecting people from other counties even though more often then not they HATED each other inside the game. Every once in a while you'd make a bond that surpassed a language barrier and it was special. Even if realistically all players of the same language just kept to themselves it least they TRIED to make us interact. Sometimes it would work.

>Why did MMOs turn out so utterly boring?
No Action.
Dark Age of Camelot started out with the Fighter classes able to get a final blow WITH AN ANIMATED HIT. 1 year after release, they patched it out for game optimizations.

In WoW, this is not so simple as watching Blizzard make the game less Action over a year. Instead, you have PvE Dungeons already in the game taking people out of the world. Eventually the World became taken over with Instanced PvE and PvP.
Blizzard then simplified classes, and nerfed multiclass stuff. So no more do you have things like Shamans able to offtank in case the tank dies during a raid, BECAUSE IT DOESN'T WORK... > BECAUSE BLIZZARD DESIGNED IT TO NOT WORK... > BECAUSE BLIZZARD IS FUCKING STUPID
So that's how you get two of the West's best MMORPGs to turn into shit. It's because it's all a bunch of Who's E-Penis is biggest and they forgot that if your E-Penis size is only on pen and paper, then it's only a micro penis in practice because your fucking Orc and Human you are playingis the size of an action figure for monopoly game board that's why. You fucking retard. If you wanted it to be life sized then you needed to have designed it more like Doom Returnal to at least make a first person action game reference that is recent.

I would've agreed with you 3 or so years ago, but from the few weeks I tried out Rs3 last year, it has so much engaging and interesting stuff comparatively.

Even your post misses the point.

MMOs aren't about gameplay, the gameplay is a secondary force. What they're about are second-life esque features and creating a world that players can literally live in.

Its the "MMO fantasy"

Think about shit like SAO, .hack, ready player one. These "fictional" MMOs don't talk or even think about gameplay at all. They don't present it as important. What they care about is taking a virtual world and putting the players inside of that.

The idea that MMOs need
>raids
>gear
>progression
>races
>classes
>etc
Is just a stereotype built by wow, which people are realizing sucks.

Gameplay in an MMO should revolve around timesinks. Core content should be stuff that feeds the MMO fantasy and feeds the desire to treat the MMO as a second life.

A big part of this is the "action-ization" as I call it of RPGs. The RPGs of today have way more superfluous button presses in order to trick the masses into thinking the game is more action oriented. So you get people complaining if they aren't hitting a button every 1.5 seconds, even though the actual effect of those buttons makes far less of an impact than your slower buttons on an older game. So following that, you have people who only want to be connected with players in their immediate region, because if you have to connect over different countries then you can't make the buttons be press-able as often.

Read it in Japanese

.hack// never talked about gameplay because everyone knew it was just Phantasy Star Online with the numbers filed off. I agree with you to some extent but I think you're a little off the extreme end, you need some form of progression and race/class differences to build a believable world. Even in real life you have Students and you have CEOs. Not everyone can be a CEO in the real world, and not everyone can be the Archmage in an MMO, but the fantasy is that in the MMO you hypothetically COULD be the Archmage if you just devote enough time to the game, wheras in reality there is almost nothing you can do to be the CEO depending on the circumstances of your birth.

>rather than going on challenging adventures with friends and strangers? Why was there no real co-op element to these games?
Because neither of these require the game to be an MMO. There are dedicated coop games that are just better at doing this. And if you actually wanted this but for some reason feel like it NEEDS to be attached to an MMO then there is nothing stopping you from downloading Rift or something and just playing that. You'll run out of desire to play it long before you run out of content.

I feel like every online game now, MMO or just casual, takes for granted that you are meeting new people outside of the game on social media or discord, and then you go into the game to play. Old online games had the conceit that the GAME is where you met people, and had structure around that. Even very action oriented games like FPS's had a slower pace in the old days of online to give you time to socialize. Plus you had to find your own servers and communities instead of getting matched with random people constantly.

>you had to find your own servers
MMOs had like 2 or 3 servers per continent what are you talking about

he means old online FPS games with dedicated servers that you had to manually sift through/search for and join