MMORPGs all stopped being about massive multiplayer and role playing and turned into skinnerbox leaderboard grinds for...

What do you mean by actual control?

>implying
This is just creating a game that is unwelcoming for new players and causes any casual players (like, less than 8 hours a day) from continuing to play.

What I'm assuming he means is basically how Ultima handled it, which is also lambasted by the writer of that thinkpiece for giving way too much control to the players. Ultimately it's a video game and if you're forced to make your own game within its confines you will have nothing to do in very short order.

Or you get Spiral Knights where you have an impenetrable wall of autism from the elite and longest-subscribed players, who you can never hope to join. Whether because it would take way too goddamned long, or because the longest-subscribed players have a vested interest in you not getting up to their level.

In a game like EVE online (which by the way really only took baby steps in this direction) I went on tons of bonafide adventures, this was all possible thanks to players having a certain degree of agency over the game world.

Koreans becoming the primary demographic for MMORPGs other than ERPing furries.

Isn't EVE still an incredibly grindy peon simulator though?

to most players yeah
all the Something Awful goon stories you hear are because the game does allow networking and formation of factions and whatnot, but to most players they're also basically irrelevant, the elephant in the room or the giant that's too big to be noticed. it very quickly gets so hopelessly complex that you're never going to keep track of it unless you spend every waking moment keeping track of it

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No, to the degree that they have enabled player control has delivered anti peon results. Of course it still has peon elements since they haven't fully embraced the design.

>EQ and then WoW got popular while Asheron’s Call and others didn’t.
this. the everquest "end game" model, which is garbage, got put into wow, and destroyed the genre.

ultima online, asherons call, anarchy online, star wars galaxies, dark age of camelot, and all the pre-WOW mmorpgs before it were trying to be actual, living online worlds each with drastically different kinds of systems and concepts.

mmorpg genre didnt just die because of wow/blizzard, but because online gaming itself became the norm instead of some cool rarity. really hard to justify paying an mmorpg sub when 9/10ths of every game that comes out now has online play and features for free.

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>ultima online, asherons call, anarchy online, star wars galaxies, dark age of camelot, and all the pre-WOW mmorpgs before it were trying to be actual, living online worlds each with drastically different kinds of systems and concepts.
So basically you want VRchat or Second Life with a fantasy veneer

>So basically you want VRchat or Second Life with a fantasy veneer
yikes. spoken like a zoomer who obviously never played a real mmorpg outside of his WOW skinnerbox.

No, because just like in real life, it would be totally pointless for you as a single human being to try and hoard all the resources because you simply wouldn't be able to leverage them to do anything useful. So it naturally leads to cooperation with other players and combat with people who get in your way.

What am I even looking at there? Doesn't look like any role-playing is going on there.

No, it doesn't, it leads to a cabal of faggots hoarding resources.

Go play Spiral Knights. I don't recommend it for this exact reason.

Honestly? WoW and Everquest 2.

I haven't played Spiral Knights so I can't comment on designs of the game.

second life is pretty firmly in "boomer" old internet territory as something that came out in 2003 and it's also exactly what everybody complaining they want an immersive, vivid, breathing, dynamic world wants, it is exactly what you make out of it and you get exactly out of it what you put into it

which is why it sucks and why the only people that use it nowadays have either been there a very long time, are too weird for vrchat, or have a much easier time acting out their fetishes with other freaks than they would in other programs

>second life is pretty firmly in "boomer" old internet territory as something that came out in 2003 and it's also exactly what everybody complaining they want an immersive, vivid, breathing, dynamic world wants
oh i see, you're just fucking retarded - if you actually believe "second life is what everybody wants!"

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that's my fucking point, it fits all the criteria these self-professed MMO boomers claim to want out of an MMORPG, so why does nobody want to play it? obviously they're a minority in the first place since MMOs did not drift towards them in design philosophy, it actually went completely in the opposite direction from what they wanted. "hurr nobody wants that durka durka durr" no fucking shit way to repeat what i said except smug and condescending

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None of those games he listed were anything like VRchat or second life. SWG out of all of those games probably came the closest to having what I would call a living world due to the nature of the professions relying upon one another to get things done. All of the rest just created systems in which you *had* to socialize to do anything. Auction houses weren't a thing so you had to actually barter with people and run your own shops, some classes had buffs that significantly changed how other combat classes perform leading to those buffs and therefore the class in high demand. That's only naming a few things that forced the players to interact in such a way that it creating a "living" world. Nowadays every game has the same system: Global auction house, all classes can do everything, gear progression always goes: Grey, white, green, blue, purple, orange with only stat increases, everything up until raiding is filler braindead story so you can never get satisfying gameplay without having to commit to voice chat and a group which inevitably sucks all the socialization out from the game into a third party such as discord now. That's just a few example too, the genre isn't "dead" but it's changed so much that it may as well have died.

source?

I don't see Second Life offering adventure and the ability to role-play something other than a peon.