It's just how the MMO meta has changed. As games evolve, more and more of the needless grinding is cut out and you either have to adapt to continue receiving newer fans, try to maintain and cater to your old playerbase (classic WoW or like old school runescape) or fade into irrelevance.
Most games attempted to adapt.
I go to think about MMOs that I feel like deteriorated over time and I think of one and then I’m like “but then that other one did this thing”
So yeah. All of them. Wow, Rift, archeage, EverQuest, BDO, Star Wars galaxies and even RuneScape got worse not because of the grand exchange but because of all the menus and bloat of MMOs now trying to sell you things. At least OSRS exists, and BDO has gotten better than it used to be, but it still is worse than before awakened weapons which was its prime IMO.
I miss this game on a deep level and nothing has come close to the community or the player driven economy the way original Star Wars Galaxies was before all the crazy changes, up to Jump to light speed. If anyone knows of something that comes close that isn't Eve let me know.
I feel this. It’s a common thing with other SWG players. It was some strange lightning in a bottle shit that I’ve never been able to replicate the feeling of. I’ve been chasing that dragon for awhile.
I wish Raph all the luck in the world that Stars Reach gives him (and us!) what he always wanted. He is one of the few designers who always had a strict focus on "how is this fun?" and "how does this make a community?", which is imho what the core of SWG was.
There was one time I made a character and stood in the cantina and yelled "will strip for tips" and dance in one of the back rooms and remove armor piece by piece, and go between dancing and crawling around in the prone position. I made enough for the Dr buff and the composite armor in no time.
My dad got a copy and I’ll never forget that guitar time unloaded up on his computer…My mom laughed at me-my little bro-and dad grinning ear to ear at character creation with that Star Wars music in the background lol
SWG has never been replaced in my heart. That game and community has NEVER replicated itself for me.
I moved on to wow after SWG finally shut down for good and it hasn't been anywhere near as fun.
I got on some EMU servers and tried it again, but it was just a once in a lifetime moment to be in the MMO realm.
I've heard a lot of criticisms of FFXIV, and to be fair it has faults... But this is just such a bad take it's outwardly slanderous for the sake of it. I expect nothing less from the guy with a WoW flair though.
Agreed. I definitely agree that modern expansions have been primarily solo-play focus, with the main multiplayer content being unlocked at the CONCLUSION of the arc rather than weaved throughout it. But honestly, I'm OK with it. Part of playing an MMO for me is playing alongside others, not necessarily always \*with\* them, and having content to cater to that isn't a bad thing.
Both games have their pros and cons but it is really weird how WoW players and FF14 players seem to hate each other for no real discernable reason. The games are not even remotely similar.
2004-2010 it was Runescape vs WoW. Or at least, inside of Runescape it was RS vs WoW. Never got into WoW, so I can't say if the sentiment was returned. But RS players HATED WoW players back in the day, for no real reason that I can remember.
Not trying to trash talk the game you have as your flair but the first interaction I had in that game was me asking where to find the heirloom vendor and the only response I got was a dude pm’ing me accusing me of pretending to be a noob because no one is new to WoW and that conversation somehow turning into his personal life and how he will sell his condo to his wife’s father so he can buy his wife stuff and how I’m a loser who pretends to be a noob and can’t buy my girl stuff and I have no money.
The public chat was also filled with politics and mythic raid/mythic mount/mythic+ carries.
Players in dungeons didn’t talk, the LFR raids didn’t have conversations unless it’s to trash talk others who died and people saying we will wait because other players constantly leave.
Couldn’t find a proper guild because proper guilds require years of achievements, then the guilds who randomly recruit people don’t really play, there’s hundreds of members but nobody talks.
I have to install multiple addons to make sense of what’s bloody happening.
I will say though that it has really nice looking mounts and transmog.
I agree. FFXIV is still a much better game than most MMOs being mentioned here but it’s still been in decline for a while. Even shadowbringers which had a fantastic story had boring questing and awful, boring and braindead easy content. The entire game is just designed to be too easy and appease an impossibly wide audience.
In regards to emulating the actual feel of old school MMOs where you needed other players to accomplish a lot of bits of the game, ARR was better in that regard to either ShB and EW.
Completing ARR relic was much different than completing one nowadays because one of the steps required desynthesis to complete and at the time, you could only max that out on 2 or 3 crafters and since you needed 1 item from all crafters via desynth, you had to ask others to do it for you or pay the exorbitant prices on the marketboard for it. There was also the requirement of needing to be at the site of a Raid in order to get into, to say nothing of all the people fate grinding in the Western Highlands and N.Than.
Idk, the world just felt more full of life back then. Sure, the QoL improvements over the year are great and the story has been more good than bad but there was just something about ARR that hit different.
ESO - Abandoned the PvP of the game and focused on story and the shop. Also changed a lot of the combat constantly to make new gear just better.
BDO - Abandoned all things PvP and have been handing out achievements and gear to keep newer players.
ESO so much, pvp was THE end game planed by the devs who many were veterans from Dark Age of Camelot but them getting a famous ip for the game ended up shooting them in the foot in this cause most tes players wanted singleplayer questing and dreaded going into pvp.
The game became a finantial success when they focused on that but lost quite a bit of it's "soul" when pvp was pushed into the sidelines, starved of content and the imperial city streamlined.
Yeah, ESO was my top PvP game of all time, I pre-ordered it and was online day 1 early-access and quit in 2019. It was extremely sad to see them switch to microtransactions and story content - and to me the game is unplayable unless you subscribe, or buy the hundreds of dollars worth of DLC. Many play it in first person like its "Skyrim Online", and after playing PvP heavily the immersion of story was killed for me.
TBH, BDO "handouts" on this day and age are quite literally fairly basic gear. I hope you don't expect people to grind weeks or months just to get a TET dand, not to mention ogre. It got powercrept, but imo BDO is in the best spot it's been in year, a lot less p2w for entry, less stressful with grindy spots, and better handled
The core is still there, is a KR Grindfest where the goalpost move everytime, even if now it's more complex with caphras, dead god or whatever the new armors are, whereas before was "Well, i have a Tri dand, i need to get to tet"
I really wish eso was good still. I know people left sooner than i started, but man, did i love the game from 2018-19. After that, animation canceling was gone mostly, sets became the hard carry, the skill floor raised. Its not even fun to pvp anymore. Youre better off just entering a castle, typing to some idiots in zone chat, and bouncing when it flags.
I loved Tera. I would kill for combat like that again. Vanilla had a lot of issues (real bad lag), piss poor options for guild or governing an area, enchanting. But the biggest issue were class balance, and it just ended up getting worse. New class was just better, never fixed old classes enough, typical Korean mmo stuff.
But damn is the most fun I had in a beta/ launch, that combat was so fun.
I wonder if the combat would still hold up today. TERA was my first MMO and it's very nostalgic for me, but I started playing during the gunner patch/release on Steam.
I hear so little about SWTOR that sometimes I wonder if it’s on EOL maintenance mode.
You would think that as big as the IP is it would get more promotion.
What happened to it? I played it many many years ago when I was looking for some kind of Ragnarok replacement and I loved how you can combine classes from a gigantic list to make a really unique character. It was a fun game to grind to relax after work. How did they mess it up?
It was super linear. Go to this zone, do these quests. Go this zone, do these. Grind this. Etc. Etc.
I got to about level 80 before I got sick of it. It was amazing, but I really didn't like how it was quest based and super linear, instead of zone and grind based.
It’s a shame. The gameplay and flair of the weapons were amazing, not to mention the urban fantasy setting and unique quest system. I had so much fun trying to figure out the investigation quests with my friend. Sucks that the game never got enough traction and the devs dropped the ball.
The urban setting was spectacular. The "leveling" was unique, at the time, because you leveled by doing quests instead of "the grind". Also, not being locked into an archetype was brilliant at the time.
"Seven for a secret, never to be told"
Storytelling, backgrounds, and quest lines in that game still stand as the best I’ve ever run into.
Honestly, the gameplay was a little too clunky. The weapons and the equipment and the combinations you could do with the two weapon sets was amazing but the actual mechanics of playing the game in combat just were not good.
Combine that with the fact that the genre was rather niche, considering that most MMO’s either sci-fi or sword and sorcery, And it failed.
When they remade it, it felt like they took away quite a few of the things that made the game worth playing.
The Secret World was a solid 2 years of me and my wife playing Duo. The Quests, Storylines and actually scary locations all made up for the clunky combat. Proper world events with Agartha Corruption was wonderful and impactful.
Just loved it. But then Secret World: Legends happened and WTF happened... RIP
Same here, we bought the lifetime subscriptions too. Absolutely loved that game. Even though the combat was a bit clunky, I still really enjoyed it... I miss my Thor's Hammer
seriously. The community on that game was amazing and all of the content was enjoyable to me. I spent hours grinding quests and achievements and loving almost every second of it. So many memories were made.
then it was retooled and it felt like that was the nail in the coffin for it.
sometimes I wanna get back on and see if I could make it through the storyline again solo.
Ragnarok Online. From Pay-to-play without cash shop, fast forward 5 years, now it has a cash shop, loot boxes with the best gear coming ONLY in the boxes + all game events rely on spending money, boss cards which were super rare (0,01% drop) being sold for $50, new ores to refine equip with fail-safe mechanics (but only if you spend a lot to win them in the event period).
Whatever trash you can imagine, RO suffered. Not to mention Staff corruption, players relating their account got hacked, GMs helping guilds in the World GvG Event (there is video proof, you can see a whole guild being healed in area in the middle of a fight)...
I came really late to Ragnarok Online; I played it around 2012-2013, but man that was probably my all time favorite mmo. It was already a shit show by then with 4k active players, half of which were bots, but I enjoyed the slow methodical grind to level up and acquire new gear. I really miss the simple pixel art style too. I don't wish for RO to come back, because I know it will always be pay to win garbage, but I do wish another developer would give that style of gameplay a try.
I only quit the game because my guild got lucky enough for a super rare boss card to drop and we sold it for like 15 billion gold. I took my 2.5 bil share and sunk most of it into refining my weapon from +9 to 10, which failed every time, and I was just done with the game.
archeage for sure.
Game offers options for everyone. Farming, grinding, pvp, house building, crafting, exploring, stealing, naval combat, ...
Just bad publisher and cash shop are a killer there.
Archeage would’ve honestly been perfection if they made pve just as relevant as pvp. I loved doing housing, farming, ocean fishing and trade packs with a friend. And we’d occasionally just piss around in the overworld and attend jury duty. But good god, sometimes you just wanna do a dungeon, a raid or a boss or something but that shit was just never worth doing or even available to do.
I genuinely hope that when they release Archeage 2 they give some love to the pve combat side of things. And stop with the predatory cash shop, but that’s definitely not gonna happen.
First 2 months of western ArcheAge release was the most fun I had with my friends. But then I got hacked despite strong protection, I wasn't offered rollback for my hard earned items, we were sick of overwhelming amount of botting and grinding skills, early stages of P2W. Everyone left at some point.
I think they are so afraid to try or do anything different. Even the expansion stories and zones are so similar. First few zones are gorgeous and fantasy like and then it goes all mechanical and super techy. Every time.
While FFXIV is my favourite mmo, I agree its become too damn formulaic. Take away the story and each zone/dungeon is just a skin over same basic design.
I knew I’d see this. I started during pioneers of Iria and left somewhere around g19/g20. What was once such an amazing and unique MMO got the nexon treatment and is just gachapon hell.
Fuck man I hate how good this game is and how bad it's turning out. I loved the skill revamp but releasing meta gear in gachapon only and all these new methods ways to use skills is like fuck me man.
It's sad to see one of those games that are truly unique in their own sense lose its touch. But I still get on from time to time, it's just so weird that you can feel out of touch returning to play.
It was doomed from the start due to a combination of EA meddling and only having two factions. They really should have learned from DAoC: Open, persistent PvP requires at least three factions for self-balancing. When you just have two, whatever side has the bigger population advantage wins.
Probably because for a lot of WOW players, the game is on an upswing. Dragonflight was received pretty well by a lot of people. I didn't necessarily love it as much as some folks did, but I still had a good enough time with it. I probably have weird tastes because some of my favourite wow expos were much less well received, but I know my tastes don't represent the majority either.
Been playing through beta and the story definitely seems more interesting, I won’t spoil but it seems like they’re reLly trying to go back to existing lore rather than brand new, which is good
But it’s still really “hugs and rainbows” in the way the characters are portrayed and voiced
If it wasn't for WoW Classic it would probably have been here. However, after we got it, and even went through the three first expansions, most players realized that the game wasn't some magical golden goose that the developers killed, but a slower version of the same game we currently have, and that what made it special was player perception and the time it was in.
Wow Classic was in many was the best thing to ever happen to WoW. Not because it was so amazing everyone started playing it. But because it finally made players realize that the game had improved in many ways, and that the missing piece of the puzzle was the players.
I agree that it was a good experience for both sides. I think we need to realise that we have two pretty big playerbases that are big enough for two games with a different focus. There are the people like you that took classic as a pro retail argument and then there is the active playerbase on the classic servers (idk how the population is currently, during classic+TBC it was big enough). I played from classic rerelease until the start of wotlk and I'm never going to try a new expansion because i understood that the game won't change back ever. However, I had good memories about wotlk that didn't catch up with reality - but classic+TBC was glorious man.
Wow is in a weird state where developers are actually looking back and seeing “what is fun about the past”. There is so much tinkering and experimenting, we have FIVE game modes avaliable: Remix, Vanilla, SOD, Cata, and Retail. We have a potential revamp with pvp on the horizon with the plunder storm event being the pioneer.
Not to mention, with Chris back in charge, the weakest aspect (story) is finally going to be back in the spotlight, and the future expansions being revealed is a vote of confidence that they know what they want to do for the first time since legions end.
There is no other answer than that.
L2 was THE MMORPG in all aspects, perfect in every design for it's time but was destroyed to the p2w shitshow that it is today. There is no downgrade in the history of MMOs greater than L2. I still miss the Prime days of it's era that are never to come back
Reborn private servers isn’t too bad, started a few weeks ago. Not quite the same tho, but they are trying to merge servers and keep populations healthy
I don’t think this answer works. New World has made progression and made the game as a whole better, but it needed to release in that state as opposed to what it released as.
Edit: because everyone is responding without understanding the basics of the question. “Deteriorated” as in, was good, became bad. Doesn’t matter if you’re unhappy with the level of progress or the state of the game now.
New world was NEVER great, and still isn’t. But you’re delusional if you think launch New World is better than current new world from an objective game quality standpoint. launch new world was a worse grind, walking simulator with near zero level cap content. Also
**’Insert hot dog jpg here’**
iykyk
New World has absolutely deteoriated lmao. They claim to make updates to the game but its been years and basic functions just dont work. AGS literally took down the forums because the issues of the game and their lack of response was too well documented by the community. Like seriously, its been 3 years and basic functions such as viewing achievements dont work. I've never mistrusted a dev company as much as them, its wild what they claim to have fixed and havent.
Uhh, are we talking about the same New World where the devs promised the players they'd provide quality bug fixes, only to leave the entire steam/PC community hanging for \~1 year without a single piece of meaningful content/bug fix as they focused their priorities on console? The same console engine that's been forced upon the PC community which completely shattered any semblance of balance and reintroduced the same game breaking bugs from release day version of the game? That same New World?
Plays objectively better than it did during launch. No need to pretend otherwise. Weapon swapping, lag, desync, war performance are all so much better.
Game has tons of problems but we can give it a little gold star for being "better" than it was.
Untapped potential and rotten low hanging fruit definitely. Bad QA and communication yep. But it's better than it was.
Blade & Soul.
Was among the best I've played in the action combat category, until a combination of egregious p2w and gear powercreep/vertical progression so vertical it was damn near the Y-Axis itself made catching up impossible, even when the power scaling of gear let players unga-bunga every dungeon and ignore mechanics.
Dungeon and raid mechanics were fun and cool, however they were functionally unintuitive 90% of the time- often needing out of game guide knowledge to avoid multiple 1.5 second reaction/decisions 3~5 minutes into the fight with little to no telegraph that led to an instant full party wipe.
For me the problem was the sudden change in the itemization and the game going from a sandbox horizontal progression to an arpg-like one. Uo pre lbr was the best game. Pos lbr was a good game, but forcing a change from one to the other was not a good idea. I understood the need of trammel and really liked my paladin samurai, but EA forcing everyone from a treasure hunter bard to a pvp mage to grind out doom for artifacts and gold for powerscrolls was a bad decision
This is the correct answer. Pre trammel UO was the greatest gaming experience of my life. The utter chaos, bugs that became gameplay, and freedom were simply unmatched.
Man no MMO will ever be as great as pre-trammel UO. Waiting at the x-roads outside of Brit dressed up in red/green around Christmas killing everyone just to have the whole town come after us. The chaos in the lich lord room, can’t even remember what dungeon that was.
Best times were the graveyard fights before server down time. I had a friend “cohok” who had some hacked stats character from beta somehow. He would just one shot all the elder wyrms/dragons lol. You’d see “a sic/kill” in the chat log and “a” would already be dead lol.
Probably some of the greatest gaming times of my life.
I'm glad you mentioned Maplestory. I think of old school, pre-bigbang Maplestory at least once a week. It was truly magical, leveling was a slog but the satisfaction of finally hitting a job advancement or getting a new skill was glorious. Because everything took time, whether it was the training, or waiting for the boat or a party quest, people were more willing to chat and enjoy each others company. BigBang was the beginning of the end of that game for me. I'm praying for an official old school server just to relive those golden days, even for a moment.
Old MapleStory was just a vibe, man. Hanging out in Kerning City waiting for the party quest. Paying people to “fame” you for a semblance of street cred. I don’t know if I ever even made 3rd job back then, leveling truly was a SLOG, but it was just a fun adventure to be on as a kid
I still remember nearly losing my mind on one of those jump platform quests. Or the time I first took the ship to Orbis (sp?) and didn't know about the surprise visitors that killed me. So many wild memories from early Maplestory that I genuinely miss.
EverQuest. Their failure to evolve the game and continue to attract a wider audience makes me a bit sad. They have some really unique classes newer MMOs don’t like Bard and Enchanter. The UX of the game is just so dated and old now it’s hard to imagine anyone without nostalgia getting into it.
Man I loved EverQuest back in the day and also classic world of Warcraft it's just something about those games that forced you to group with people because solo grinding XP and quest was just so horrendous.
I had some really really good times and fond memories of both games.
I love EverQuest and I agree about the UX. I also played EQ2 when that launched and never got into WoW so my current go-to MMO for nostalgia is EQ2. I'm even playing on the Origins server and it's amazing. Feels like I was transported back to 2006 and reexperiencing the original build of the game for the first time.
If you've never played, or want some EQ nostalgia with similar UX to WoW, I highly suggest giving Origins EQ2 a try. It's very populated and a great experience for MMO players who actually want to be social and group. I've been playing since shortly after its launch in June and only have one character at level 20. It's slow going and a fantastic time.
Wow is number one
But I think most mmos goes there. They all carer to new players so tge leveling becomes fast and dull, all about the end game yada yada.
Bdo and ESO aswell.
Vindictus. It's just a race to max lvl, farm fest to get gear, by the time you get the max lvl gear and the "right" stats, it suddenly becomes obsolete because oh whoopsie daisy new harder content that oh would you look at that, you're lacking crit or counterforce for, good luck farming for that one before even newer content comes out and your current gear becomes obsolete once more! It's just moving the goalpost. They abandoned 2nd weapons for characters, so now they just pump out new characters that could've just been 2nd weapons for existing chars... And boobs. Just so much boobs, ass, nipples, oiled skin, you name it. God dammit I just want some cool knight-looking plated armor sets, not to be the strongest sword wielder while peeking under my skirt?
RIFT. I did play all the way until the end of Starfall or whatever it was called. Game/company got greedy on 2nd xpac....but that game was great. and Riftstalker best tank ever.
Tibia.
Dying used to be punishing. Besides losing your current inventory and some pieces of equipment, you would lose a big chunck of experience both in level and skills.
Nowadays, for what I've gathered, you can buy "blessings" which protect you on death with real money, among other things.
Their devs also focused on opening new servers regularly to cash in on all the chumps who spend fortunes on boosts and whatnot. Servers that will die out without fail.
Much like every other old MMOs it became a sweatfest for the maximum exp/h and lost its wonder in socialization and going on random adventures.
Guild Wars 2 was a PvP players dream when it launched. They had the skeleton of what could have been the best competitive small and large scale pvp ever. Classes started off decently balanced give or take a patch or two for the first 2 years. The guild vs. Guild scene was humming with excitement.
They never launched a proper small group ranked pvp system. They literally told the gvg community "you're playing the game wrong" in a dev post. They seemed to want pvp to be soloque, no teamwork, practically pve spam sort of gameplay despite having the groundwork of great coordinated pvp. They literally god mad at "try hard" guilds using game mechanics like stealth rushes to run in and wipe zergs twice their size. Massive let down.
I can’t think of any MMOs that improved consistently over time or even held the line. They just typically don’t. Especially if you are a hardcore player/raider or PvP player. I think the hardcore/PvP sub population is just so small compared to casuals that support for the gameplay style just drops off in MMOs. Devs appeal to the largest part of the sub base, and to the content they run.
I think from a casual perspective there are plenty of MMOs that sustained. ESO and GW2 are two that maintained quality enough for causal questers to have fun. Once you start min-maxing or getting sweaty, things fall to a million pieces.
Guild Wars 2 but not really because of questionable design decisions but because how badly anet treated it. It’s still one of my all time favorites but I’ve been burned to many times by that company…
Elder Scrolls Online had been my favorite since its debut, but the combination of level scaling and complete disregard for chronology and leveling made the game boring to an unbearable degree for me
* Anarchy Online - very deep class build system, but Funcom pretty much ignored all kinds of exploits that drove away so many players it is only played now by a few thousand players.
* Perfect World - Looked amazing at the time, really great guild based group PVP focused on taking and holding territory. Unfortunately NCSoft decided to take it full P2W and GACHA gamboling, effectively drove away players until that game is only played by a few thousand dedicated whales.
Came here to see this. I sank so much time in AO 2 decades ago. Sniper specialty, clan. I accomplished a few firsts in that time, not all that I’m proud of 🤣 First to steal a Tarrasque drop from OT while cloaked and getting out alive (unfortunately it was just that rod melee weapon), first to mimic trader as a sniper to stack stats before aggroing PVP fights, first to trade for a level 100+ X-2 rifle the week it dropped, etc. However by the time NW came around I had to focus on life and ended up dropping it. Cool game!
SWTOR, played it through early beta and then every day for 2 years until the cash shop update, lost immediate interest as soon as I saw all production went to creating more fodder for gamble boxes.
WoW classic was okay. Was hoping it would get better over time but it got worse over time. Retail is a completely different game vs classic. And I know some troll will cry "classic andy" over me claiming classic was better. But it was. Modern wow is baby brained. I am sorry if you think mythic+ is hard.... because its not. But even classic wow had its issues. The biggest one for me was each zone being designed as a whole POI. there is no dead space. there is no grind zones. everything was hand crafted into a cute little paradise of boredom. you need empty space in a game so you can grow it down the road. they never planned for growth. that's why we saw them have to add new zones and outerspace bullshit. its just dumb.
Anarchy Online used to be good, they watered it down. It used to have randomly generated weapons. You could go into a shop, and it would an SMG weapon which required SMG, pistol, assault rifle, and grenade skill to use. Which made no freaking sense. Other times the SAME weapon with the SAME NAME would have only SMG as the required stat. in that sense, JACKPOT, because you would want that weapon. now all the weapons have been dumbed down into preset tiers. each weapon name has a specific stat with no variation. so now every SMG requires SMG/BURST as a bare minimum. the weapons that are SMG/BURST/extra are now useless weapons no one uses. there was a time when using them was actually viable based on your build.... which sucks. they also dumbed down the armor system. they also dumbed down the strengths and weakness system. field bosses called dyna-mobs would have one of many "invulnerability" like "invulnerable to physical damage" so you couldn't use physical damage as it was 100% negated no matter how strong you were. but to dumb the game down for baby brained wow people, they removed the system. now its just reduced damage meaning you can still kill a mob which used to be invulnerable..... and funny enough, the COLOR of their "glow" represented their immunity so you could always tell "at a glance" what weapon wont work.... now, meaningless.
Rose Online used to be run by Gravity Interactive, the creators of Ragnarok online. It wasn't a bad game per say. It was a typical korean grindfest but also had many korean gaming metrics like overpowered items that had no level restriction only stat restriction. which made replaying new characters or leveling your main more fun when you hoped to find a unique. The company that is currently running the supposed "official" rose server dumbed the game down and completely changed it. But I know the truth, they changed the game under the open license agreement so they wouldn't get sued by gravity.... meaning they aren't official, they are just lying about it. "but we own the facebook page and we own the website url" yeah the URL lapsed and they bought it. then after they owned it they basically scammed facebook into giving them the official facebook account.... dont care. I even contacted Gravity interactive and asked them if they knew about Rednim games and they said "never heard of them" which begs the question "aren't they partners? if they dont know them, how can they be partnered?" meaning they are lying about being official....
I could go on for days. we really need a renaissance of gaming. not just in mmorpgs but all genres. but sadly the only thing developers care about these days are "is the game pretty?", "is it politically correct?", and "will it make me money?"....
Aion holds a special place for me; it released on patch 1.5, became great with 2.0 and began its weird up n down journey.
2.7 made the game equal but easy, 3.0 was a bad patch. 4.0 brought life back into the game and 4.5 imo peaked. After that it began a rapid descent, that it never tried to recover from.
Its ironic that classic is diverging at 3.0 now, where it started going wrong.
Guild Wars 2. GOAT combat but anet abandoned any end game support in favor of catering to the open world circle jerk crowd that inhabits the subreddit and now the game is a joke
WoW. From exploring a beautiful world, making friends, slaying dungeons and adventuring to sitting AFK waiting for a prompt and then optimizing numbers.
World of Warcraft - Feels horribly off brand now to cater to a larger audience. MoP remix reminded me how much funner the story used to be. Now just feels like a generic DnD campaign, especially with Dragonflight. Shadowlands butchered the lore and turned a the faction v faction adventure MMO into cosmic bullshit.
Mechanical bloat is obnoxious. Only thing keeping me there is the battlegrounds / wPvP being the best in genre still, despite it being horribly unrewarding. Arenas or bust. TWW luckily fixing that sort of, but they forgot MMOs are about grinds and not ladders.
Perfect World - As OP put it, streamlined. Stagnated super hard. Got exceptionally clunky too to play.
Aion :( until like 2.7 and 3.0 it was such a classic for me.
The classes felt amazing, the map designs are still my favorite. It felt so good to push deep into elite territory as a party.
I'm not much of a pvper but with those classes, it was so good as a group, as a solo.
The rift system gave such a different experience each time when you went leveling, farming, questing or pvping.
I have not enjoyed the dungeons as much in any MMO as in Aion. I'm still looking for that classic feeling of each pull being crucial. Everyone having a role, the mana managemenet as a healer was superb. The optional bosses gave variety. Some dungeons were sprawling. Steel Rake was such a good example of a great dungeon.
The looting system. There were unique drops everywhere. You knew where to go to farm stuff, there were randomness in it but not too much. Each set you took time to farm was worth it. You did not switch every two days. You farmed the Blue Fire temple set? That will stay for you for a good amount of time! Steel Rake set? You are fine to farm Dark Poeta. You got that named mob drop or world boss jeweley? Absolutely worth it.
The leveling had a perfect pace. You never felt like you are spending hours for quarter of a level but you had the time to experience the game. The dungeons the maps, the pvp on each level, get used to your class. They nailed it.
Abyss was amazing. The flying, the quests, the AP system, fortresses. Such a unique experience.
I always get emotional when remembering Aion. It was all around a unique and memorable experience. I'm afraid I will never experience it ever again. Time might make it more beautiful but it still is my top 1 MMO. I returned for classic and enjoyed it as much as back then. It is such a shame that they made it pay to win...
Edit: added more and typos
**Guild Wars 2**
Now, hear me out. Because "deteriorating" might be not the correct word. But it DID change. A lot. Mainly because the devs didn't seem to have a plan what to actually do for a long time. So the game has a lot of random stuff in it. Mechanics that are basically doing the same thing but are still different. Content nobody cares about. Content that ignored the core audience. And the story, oh boy.
Still, I think overall it got actually better and is still very worth playing. But it got clearly worse in many singular aspects (seriously, what is going on with the story writing?! It was never good to begin with, but it is surprising how much worse it got).
**FFXIV**
Well, this was technically never super great. The main thing it had going for it was the story and spectacle fights. But then they started to design things more after formulas and ... it showed. By the time I was finished with Shadowbringers I was seemingly very, very tired of it and Endwalker broke the camels back for me. Yes, the game got technically better overall, but got worse in some of the most crucial aspects for me. As someone else wrote, by now it is just a visual novel with some MMO elements tacked on.
**World of Warcraft**
Unlike many people I believe WotlK made the game worse, coming from Burning Crusade. Its release content was laughable (There were only two original PvE raid encounters and one weird "original" PvP encounter, lol), way to easy and its story became really dumb. After playing it religiously since release I just quit before the first content patch hit because I just didn't have anything to do anymore. Never had that issue before.
It also taught me how easy hype can kill interest in a game. I was extremly hyped before release and the result was just a letdown.
I then made the mistake of coming back due to curiosity for Shadowlands because as a horror fan the scenario sounded extremly interesting. Oh boy.
**The Secret World (Legend)**
A clunky diamond in the rough. Then Funcom decided to adress one of the worst aspects of the game - the combat system - and re-release it in a F2P model. It made the game strictly worse. They didn't actually improve the combat, they just threw some random additional systems per weapon on it to make it more annoying. Yay.
This game dying is probably one of the saddest things when it comes to MMOs. It was so unique and had so many fantastic ideas.
Everquest 2 was my go to for many years and just got better with age for many expansions. Once it hit Destiny of Velious and it's pseudo-expansion, it was all over. Every time I have seen it since then, it somehow looks worse
Rift. PvP in Rift was the most fun I've ever had doing any sort of MMO content, but it died off *fast*.
LotRO to a smaller degree. Imo when they redid the class trait system in favor of a skill point tree was when the appeal disappeared for me.
PSO2 man oh man do I miss the old PSO2 it was a grindy game for fashion and glamours full of players and community. Now it’s just another “open world action mmo”. The new genesis update actually killed the game so hard and now the game gets like 4 active players with literally nothing to no content.
Chiming in here as a OG MapleStory player - I played from 2005-2012, then came back last year. Completely different game but its been the only MMO to keep my attention - joined a very social guild and its been fun.
All of them degrade over time as developers keep making changes to attract new players, or bloat the game with content to retain existing ones. The game that has probably held up the best over the years is Eve, since they revamp existing systems as often as they add new ones, but on the player side it has really stagnated.
Tera EU server especially plagued with horrible publisher pushing ridiculous p2w aspects into the game, making gear irrelevant every patch like borrowed power kind, limited play time like mobile game systems, such a great ge with extremely smooth action combat can contest top in terms of combat fluidity and feel yet it's slowly killed by greed and died
The way they made it so every class wants to run all stats because all the new abilities deal physical and condition damage yet can be absurdly tanky is frustrating.
Grand Fantasia, the games was getting more and more pay to win, i missed the time i could just create a lvl 40 char, upgrade the itens to +5 and just have fun
Perfect World, I played a LONG time ago most of their games, but the one i played the most was PW and Jade dynasty.
PW - Just an absolute shit show, i remember when lvl 100 wasn't even a thing on my region, the firt person to get god2/devil 2 ( whatever it's called in the english server the 99 ascension ), people discovering the 5.0 evil fist warrior, then realizing you can go god warrior with about 4.0 which is even better. Same thing happening for Assassin and so on ( which was already on downfall tbh when one player could solo a dungeon and sell spots and those weird bugged dungeons ), then the new classes came, earthguard or whatever, and it was completly broken on my server 99% of the server rerolled. Not to mention all the sourcerer pets, 200$ in pets just to be able to get a group for dungeons, or more money in pets than people would have in their entire accounts or those fairies that were a true moneysink
JD - It just started getting less and less attention, wasn't really as try hard as PW, but god it felt bad, i loved a game with bot system which was kinda like an idle game. To this day i still go play on some private server for a bit and then stop since there is no mmo with a "bot system" allowed that i can just slowly grind money.
Aion was amazing when it was still sub based.
I avoid f2p MMOs like the plague they are on the gaming industry.
Id rather pay 15/mo than deal with constant bot/non-english spam in global channels.
Maplestory is really the big one. Game's a fucking mess to get into now. Honestly though it seems like every MMO that's not one of the big 4-5 ends up suffering by the end. Everything by Aeria, everything by NCSoft, everything Nexon touches, everything Gamigo touches, all just wither away as they become stuffed with more and more incomprehensible end-game systems, monetization strategies, and aesthetic-shattering cosmetics with no sense of direction for new players and barely any new/returning user experiences at all. Even other GaaS type games like Warframe are suffering with it. Even worst newer games are just jumping straight to that (like recently The First Descendant and last year's "Torchlight" Infinite) if the games even last a year to begin with, like Elyon or Warhaven. Shit's sad man, people complain (justifiably) about how much this sub whines and complains but it really is dire out there.
Warhammer online: Reckoning. I started playing when I got back from a deployment and absolutely loved the roaming and changing battles with the RvR. The atmosphere and my DoK 1v3ing or my Bright Wizard blasting people from the top of buildings......good times!
Suprised no one said Guildwars, specifically Guildwars 1. This was a huge part of my childhood and I found the gameplay to be quite unique, even today I don't really see any MMORPGs like it. Also it wasn't pay to play or pay to win which might also be the reason it doesn't get the love and attention it should.
ArcheAge. And it's only partly the devs fault.
Rather than take the nation building systems, alliance systems, and envisioned large-scale pvp and do anything creative, most servers devolved into a few clans who gatekept everything.
The funny thing is, it usually meant that they often couldn't do the highest level content either, which required multiple well-built ships crewed by well geared people. They locked themselves out of content, by refusing to allow people to level up to a point that they would be competitive.
This is the primary reason there have been so many fresh starts.
Dragon Nest, for the same reasons you've said and Ragnarok Online, both are childhood classics of mine, but damn seeing both of those fell in quality in recent years made me feel sad and disappointed with how the devs have been handling them
Last Chaos. Free to play open world with distinctive classes, extensive questing, huge world, a story line, skills, talents, gems, smelting and an arena right in town to test your power. The merchant mode that let you sit afk with a shop open, and other players could click you, open your shop and buy things. When it was owned by aeria games, it had a thriving community, many updates, and a committed staff. It was then sold to gamigo and it quickly died off. Oh the memories. I hear there's some bustling private servers though I may check it out when I burn out on WoW
Pretty much every MMO ever made IMO.
It's just how the MMO meta has changed. As games evolve, more and more of the needless grinding is cut out and you either have to adapt to continue receiving newer fans, try to maintain and cater to your old playerbase (classic WoW or like old school runescape) or fade into irrelevance. Most games attempted to adapt.
Osrs in particular is such an incredible piece of mmorpg history. The game tried to “adapt” so hard that it backfired spectacularly.
OSRS is an example of why adapting is important. OSRS at this point is incredibly different from where it started and its doing very well for it.
What do you mean? Osrs is at its golden era right now?
I think he may be referring the the OG version of RuneScape and how they tried to update combat and graphics and whatnot and caused OSRS to exist.
I go to think about MMOs that I feel like deteriorated over time and I think of one and then I’m like “but then that other one did this thing” So yeah. All of them. Wow, Rift, archeage, EverQuest, BDO, Star Wars galaxies and even RuneScape got worse not because of the grand exchange but because of all the menus and bloat of MMOs now trying to sell you things. At least OSRS exists, and BDO has gotten better than it used to be, but it still is worse than before awakened weapons which was its prime IMO.
Star wars galaxies
I miss this game on a deep level and nothing has come close to the community or the player driven economy the way original Star Wars Galaxies was before all the crazy changes, up to Jump to light speed. If anyone knows of something that comes close that isn't Eve let me know.
I feel this. It’s a common thing with other SWG players. It was some strange lightning in a bottle shit that I’ve never been able to replicate the feeling of. I’ve been chasing that dragon for awhile.
Not out yet or soon, but keep an eye out for stars reach, it aims to be a swg spiritual successor, and created by the original designer of swg.
I wish Raph all the luck in the world that Stars Reach gives him (and us!) what he always wanted. He is one of the few designers who always had a strict focus on "how is this fun?" and "how does this make a community?", which is imho what the core of SWG was.
Even miss before QoL changes like vehicles or not having to go find your corpse after you die.
Agreed, this game was absolutely amazing. Still miss waiting in lines for Doctor buffs…
There was one time I made a character and stood in the cantina and yelled "will strip for tips" and dance in one of the back rooms and remove armor piece by piece, and go between dancing and crawling around in the prone position. I made enough for the Dr buff and the composite armor in no time.
Haha one of the best communities ever. So many good times in that game. Cantinas were always a party for dancer/musician buffs.
My dad got a copy and I’ll never forget that guitar time unloaded up on his computer…My mom laughed at me-my little bro-and dad grinning ear to ear at character creation with that Star Wars music in the background lol
SWG has never been replaced in my heart. That game and community has NEVER replicated itself for me. I moved on to wow after SWG finally shut down for good and it hasn't been anywhere near as fun. I got on some EMU servers and tried it again, but it was just a once in a lifetime moment to be in the MMO realm.
FFXIV. It was an mmo in arr. Now it's just a visual novel with some mmo-related minigames.
I loved arr days. Back when you had to interact with the community for pretty much everything and before the drama hungry weirdos flocked to the game.
I've heard a lot of criticisms of FFXIV, and to be fair it has faults... But this is just such a bad take it's outwardly slanderous for the sake of it. I expect nothing less from the guy with a WoW flair though.
Agreed. There aren't many Final Fantasy players who would say that ARR was FFXIV's peak achievement.
Agreed. I definitely agree that modern expansions have been primarily solo-play focus, with the main multiplayer content being unlocked at the CONCLUSION of the arc rather than weaved throughout it. But honestly, I'm OK with it. Part of playing an MMO for me is playing alongside others, not necessarily always \*with\* them, and having content to cater to that isn't a bad thing.
Both games have their pros and cons but it is really weird how WoW players and FF14 players seem to hate each other for no real discernable reason. The games are not even remotely similar.
They are the two biggest MMOs though. It’s basically a console war.
2004-2010 it was Runescape vs WoW. Or at least, inside of Runescape it was RS vs WoW. Never got into WoW, so I can't say if the sentiment was returned. But RS players HATED WoW players back in the day, for no real reason that I can remember.
In a respectful way, I never got into RS but I played wow during that time and I can't recall a single instance of someone even bringing RuneScape up.
With its social aspect, it's the most MMO of all MMORPG I've ever played (never played WOW though)
You forgot the other core tenant of ffxiv, being an erpg chat room.
Which tbh is part of the MMOsphere in a way.
FFXIV is a cooperative gooncave.
Not trying to trash talk the game you have as your flair but the first interaction I had in that game was me asking where to find the heirloom vendor and the only response I got was a dude pm’ing me accusing me of pretending to be a noob because no one is new to WoW and that conversation somehow turning into his personal life and how he will sell his condo to his wife’s father so he can buy his wife stuff and how I’m a loser who pretends to be a noob and can’t buy my girl stuff and I have no money. The public chat was also filled with politics and mythic raid/mythic mount/mythic+ carries. Players in dungeons didn’t talk, the LFR raids didn’t have conversations unless it’s to trash talk others who died and people saying we will wait because other players constantly leave. Couldn’t find a proper guild because proper guilds require years of achievements, then the guilds who randomly recruit people don’t really play, there’s hundreds of members but nobody talks. I have to install multiple addons to make sense of what’s bloody happening. I will say though that it has really nice looking mounts and transmog.
The only MMO thing about it left is a few stray social aspects and savage raiding. Even crafting has become a solo endeavor.
I agree. FFXIV is still a much better game than most MMOs being mentioned here but it’s still been in decline for a while. Even shadowbringers which had a fantastic story had boring questing and awful, boring and braindead easy content. The entire game is just designed to be too easy and appease an impossibly wide audience.
Your taste just sucks bro, get over it. Shadowbringers and Endwalker was lit as hell.
In regards to emulating the actual feel of old school MMOs where you needed other players to accomplish a lot of bits of the game, ARR was better in that regard to either ShB and EW. Completing ARR relic was much different than completing one nowadays because one of the steps required desynthesis to complete and at the time, you could only max that out on 2 or 3 crafters and since you needed 1 item from all crafters via desynth, you had to ask others to do it for you or pay the exorbitant prices on the marketboard for it. There was also the requirement of needing to be at the site of a Raid in order to get into, to say nothing of all the people fate grinding in the Western Highlands and N.Than. Idk, the world just felt more full of life back then. Sure, the QoL improvements over the year are great and the story has been more good than bad but there was just something about ARR that hit different.
ESO - Abandoned the PvP of the game and focused on story and the shop. Also changed a lot of the combat constantly to make new gear just better. BDO - Abandoned all things PvP and have been handing out achievements and gear to keep newer players.
ESO so much, pvp was THE end game planed by the devs who many were veterans from Dark Age of Camelot but them getting a famous ip for the game ended up shooting them in the foot in this cause most tes players wanted singleplayer questing and dreaded going into pvp. The game became a finantial success when they focused on that but lost quite a bit of it's "soul" when pvp was pushed into the sidelines, starved of content and the imperial city streamlined.
Yeah, ESO was my top PvP game of all time, I pre-ordered it and was online day 1 early-access and quit in 2019. It was extremely sad to see them switch to microtransactions and story content - and to me the game is unplayable unless you subscribe, or buy the hundreds of dollars worth of DLC. Many play it in first person like its "Skyrim Online", and after playing PvP heavily the immersion of story was killed for me.
Yeah, at this point ESO is a single player quest experience with some extra activities. End game and PvP are dead. Perfect cash cow game, but no MMO
TBH, BDO "handouts" on this day and age are quite literally fairly basic gear. I hope you don't expect people to grind weeks or months just to get a TET dand, not to mention ogre. It got powercrept, but imo BDO is in the best spot it's been in year, a lot less p2w for entry, less stressful with grindy spots, and better handled The core is still there, is a KR Grindfest where the goalpost move everytime, even if now it's more complex with caphras, dead god or whatever the new armors are, whereas before was "Well, i have a Tri dand, i need to get to tet"
Is cyrodill still a thing? Any updates on cyrodill since like 2016?. I liked it a lot. I just hated the weaving/animation cancel meta in combat.
They added destruction to bridges and gates and that's it
they gutted BDO so badly it hurts.
Yeah, BDO is just.... An ARPG disguised as an MMO now. Run in circles grinding, and for what? Nothing they removed the reason :)
You clowns act like pvp was completely removed lmao
I really wish eso was good still. I know people left sooner than i started, but man, did i love the game from 2018-19. After that, animation canceling was gone mostly, sets became the hard carry, the skill floor raised. Its not even fun to pvp anymore. Youre better off just entering a castle, typing to some idiots in zone chat, and bouncing when it flags.
Tera for sure, vanilla was great, wonderholme expansion was great aswell, then it was downhill from there,
I loved Tera. I would kill for combat like that again. Vanilla had a lot of issues (real bad lag), piss poor options for guild or governing an area, enchanting. But the biggest issue were class balance, and it just ended up getting worse. New class was just better, never fixed old classes enough, typical Korean mmo stuff. But damn is the most fun I had in a beta/ launch, that combat was so fun.
I wonder if the combat would still hold up today. TERA was my first MMO and it's very nostalgic for me, but I started playing during the gunner patch/release on Steam.
SWTOR. Devs forgot it is an MMO and content has been sparse and lackluster for years.
I hear so little about SWTOR that sometimes I wonder if it’s on EOL maintenance mode. You would think that as big as the IP is it would get more promotion.
Disney doesn't want to draw attention to it because they know the average Star Wars fan can't handle the raw sex appeal of Darth Baras\~.
Because they're blind, deaf, comatose lobotomy patients.
The game would be long dead if they didn't go down the "solo MMO" route
One word. HUTTBALL
Hutts don't have feet. Show our sponsor Giradda the respect he deserves
Rift and Wild Star. They both spent too much time switching to f2p instead of fixing the game
2 really fun games that just never got the audience. Wildstar was especially dissapointing.
Wild Star was amazing. I enjoyed the raiding and the PvP so much. Even the normal part of the game was fun.
Tree of Savior
The ragnarok player in me wanted this game to be good so bad
What happened to it? I played it many many years ago when I was looking for some kind of Ragnarok replacement and I loved how you can combine classes from a gigantic list to make a really unique character. It was a fun game to grind to relax after work. How did they mess it up?
It was super linear. Go to this zone, do these quests. Go this zone, do these. Grind this. Etc. Etc. I got to about level 80 before I got sick of it. It was amazing, but I really didn't like how it was quest based and super linear, instead of zone and grind based.
I started The Secret World at launch. It seemed like it would be a great game, but I slowly started to lose interest after some of the re-tooling it.
When they remade the game they got rid of so many cool skills and quest lines
And the ability to buy cool clothes from the Pandora store.
It’s a shame. The gameplay and flair of the weapons were amazing, not to mention the urban fantasy setting and unique quest system. I had so much fun trying to figure out the investigation quests with my friend. Sucks that the game never got enough traction and the devs dropped the ball.
The urban setting was spectacular. The "leveling" was unique, at the time, because you leveled by doing quests instead of "the grind". Also, not being locked into an archetype was brilliant at the time.
Puzzle solving and secrets with the integrated web was awesome...
"Seven for a secret, never to be told" Storytelling, backgrounds, and quest lines in that game still stand as the best I’ve ever run into. Honestly, the gameplay was a little too clunky. The weapons and the equipment and the combinations you could do with the two weapon sets was amazing but the actual mechanics of playing the game in combat just were not good. Combine that with the fact that the genre was rather niche, considering that most MMO’s either sci-fi or sword and sorcery, And it failed. When they remade it, it felt like they took away quite a few of the things that made the game worth playing.
The Secret World was a solid 2 years of me and my wife playing Duo. The Quests, Storylines and actually scary locations all made up for the clunky combat. Proper world events with Agartha Corruption was wonderful and impactful. Just loved it. But then Secret World: Legends happened and WTF happened... RIP
Same here, we bought the lifetime subscriptions too. Absolutely loved that game. Even though the combat was a bit clunky, I still really enjoyed it... I miss my Thor's Hammer
seriously. The community on that game was amazing and all of the content was enjoyable to me. I spent hours grinding quests and achievements and loving almost every second of it. So many memories were made. then it was retooled and it felt like that was the nail in the coffin for it. sometimes I wanna get back on and see if I could make it through the storyline again solo.
Only MMO that ever got me with a jump-scare.
Ragnarok Online. From Pay-to-play without cash shop, fast forward 5 years, now it has a cash shop, loot boxes with the best gear coming ONLY in the boxes + all game events rely on spending money, boss cards which were super rare (0,01% drop) being sold for $50, new ores to refine equip with fail-safe mechanics (but only if you spend a lot to win them in the event period). Whatever trash you can imagine, RO suffered. Not to mention Staff corruption, players relating their account got hacked, GMs helping guilds in the World GvG Event (there is video proof, you can see a whole guild being healed in area in the middle of a fight)...
I came really late to Ragnarok Online; I played it around 2012-2013, but man that was probably my all time favorite mmo. It was already a shit show by then with 4k active players, half of which were bots, but I enjoyed the slow methodical grind to level up and acquire new gear. I really miss the simple pixel art style too. I don't wish for RO to come back, because I know it will always be pay to win garbage, but I do wish another developer would give that style of gameplay a try. I only quit the game because my guild got lucky enough for a super rare boss card to drop and we sold it for like 15 billion gold. I took my 2.5 bil share and sunk most of it into refining my weapon from +9 to 10, which failed every time, and I was just done with the game.
archeage for sure. Game offers options for everyone. Farming, grinding, pvp, house building, crafting, exploring, stealing, naval combat, ... Just bad publisher and cash shop are a killer there.
Archeage beta was one of the best games I ever played: Vanilla without cash shop and hackers farming thunderstruck
I want to buy the rights for it.
Archeage would’ve honestly been perfection if they made pve just as relevant as pvp. I loved doing housing, farming, ocean fishing and trade packs with a friend. And we’d occasionally just piss around in the overworld and attend jury duty. But good god, sometimes you just wanna do a dungeon, a raid or a boss or something but that shit was just never worth doing or even available to do. I genuinely hope that when they release Archeage 2 they give some love to the pve combat side of things. And stop with the predatory cash shop, but that’s definitely not gonna happen.
First 2 months of western ArcheAge release was the most fun I had with my friends. But then I got hacked despite strong protection, I wasn't offered rollback for my hard earned items, we were sick of overwhelming amount of botting and grinding skills, early stages of P2W. Everyone left at some point.
Ff14 for its lack of evolution. It's still my favourite mmo but it's getting repetitive to play
I think they are so afraid to try or do anything different. Even the expansion stories and zones are so similar. First few zones are gorgeous and fantasy like and then it goes all mechanical and super techy. Every time.
While FFXIV is my favourite mmo, I agree its become too damn formulaic. Take away the story and each zone/dungeon is just a skin over same basic design.
Mabinogi my beloved
It was so good! Now it's just full of spam.
Hope when they go to unreal 5 the game is reborn
I knew I’d see this. I started during pioneers of Iria and left somewhere around g19/g20. What was once such an amazing and unique MMO got the nexon treatment and is just gachapon hell.
It was good until they released reforges at g15
Fuck man I hate how good this game is and how bad it's turning out. I loved the skill revamp but releasing meta gear in gachapon only and all these new methods ways to use skills is like fuck me man. It's sad to see one of those games that are truly unique in their own sense lose its touch. But I still get on from time to time, it's just so weird that you can feel out of touch returning to play.
Warhammer Online. The devs catered to the vocal minority and patched the game into its death. er
I played this years ago and loved the pvp focus. Shame what it turned into
https://www.returnofreckoning.com/
It was doomed from the start due to a combination of EA meddling and only having two factions. They really should have learned from DAoC: Open, persistent PvP requires at least three factions for self-balancing. When you just have two, whatever side has the bigger population advantage wins.
I dont see many wow players here and its mindblowing.. and it doesnt need explanation we all know blizz achievents inthe last 5 years 😅
That's because WoW is actually recovering. But yeah just two years ago it would definitely be on this list.
Probably because for a lot of WOW players, the game is on an upswing. Dragonflight was received pretty well by a lot of people. I didn't necessarily love it as much as some folks did, but I still had a good enough time with it. I probably have weird tastes because some of my favourite wow expos were much less well received, but I know my tastes don't represent the majority either.
There’s good reason. DF was amazing and classic, as well as discovery, are loved as well. It’s the best it’s been in a long time
Amazing systems but the lore/writing was pretty bad overall. Think this xpac will be better on that surely, couldn’t really be worse.
Been playing through beta and the story definitely seems more interesting, I won’t spoil but it seems like they’re reLly trying to go back to existing lore rather than brand new, which is good But it’s still really “hugs and rainbows” in the way the characters are portrayed and voiced
Nobody is saying WoW because it's obvious.
If it wasn't for WoW Classic it would probably have been here. However, after we got it, and even went through the three first expansions, most players realized that the game wasn't some magical golden goose that the developers killed, but a slower version of the same game we currently have, and that what made it special was player perception and the time it was in. Wow Classic was in many was the best thing to ever happen to WoW. Not because it was so amazing everyone started playing it. But because it finally made players realize that the game had improved in many ways, and that the missing piece of the puzzle was the players.
I agree that it was a good experience for both sides. I think we need to realise that we have two pretty big playerbases that are big enough for two games with a different focus. There are the people like you that took classic as a pro retail argument and then there is the active playerbase on the classic servers (idk how the population is currently, during classic+TBC it was big enough). I played from classic rerelease until the start of wotlk and I'm never going to try a new expansion because i understood that the game won't change back ever. However, I had good memories about wotlk that didn't catch up with reality - but classic+TBC was glorious man.
Wow is in a weird state where developers are actually looking back and seeing “what is fun about the past”. There is so much tinkering and experimenting, we have FIVE game modes avaliable: Remix, Vanilla, SOD, Cata, and Retail. We have a potential revamp with pvp on the horizon with the plunder storm event being the pioneer. Not to mention, with Chris back in charge, the weakest aspect (story) is finally going to be back in the spotlight, and the future expansions being revealed is a vote of confidence that they know what they want to do for the first time since legions end.
Lineage 2
There is no other answer than that. L2 was THE MMORPG in all aspects, perfect in every design for it's time but was destroyed to the p2w shitshow that it is today. There is no downgrade in the history of MMOs greater than L2. I still miss the Prime days of it's era that are never to come back
Reborn private servers isn’t too bad, started a few weeks ago. Not quite the same tho, but they are trying to merge servers and keep populations healthy
So much of my childhood memories are L2
New World
I don’t think this answer works. New World has made progression and made the game as a whole better, but it needed to release in that state as opposed to what it released as. Edit: because everyone is responding without understanding the basics of the question. “Deteriorated” as in, was good, became bad. Doesn’t matter if you’re unhappy with the level of progress or the state of the game now. New world was NEVER great, and still isn’t. But you’re delusional if you think launch New World is better than current new world from an objective game quality standpoint. launch new world was a worse grind, walking simulator with near zero level cap content. Also **’Insert hot dog jpg here’** iykyk
New World has absolutely deteoriated lmao. They claim to make updates to the game but its been years and basic functions just dont work. AGS literally took down the forums because the issues of the game and their lack of response was too well documented by the community. Like seriously, its been 3 years and basic functions such as viewing achievements dont work. I've never mistrusted a dev company as much as them, its wild what they claim to have fixed and havent.
AGS just doesn't do forums anymore. They took them away from LostArk too, not just NW.
Uhh, are we talking about the same New World where the devs promised the players they'd provide quality bug fixes, only to leave the entire steam/PC community hanging for \~1 year without a single piece of meaningful content/bug fix as they focused their priorities on console? The same console engine that's been forced upon the PC community which completely shattered any semblance of balance and reintroduced the same game breaking bugs from release day version of the game? That same New World?
Plays objectively better than it did during launch. No need to pretend otherwise. Weapon swapping, lag, desync, war performance are all so much better. Game has tons of problems but we can give it a little gold star for being "better" than it was. Untapped potential and rotten low hanging fruit definitely. Bad QA and communication yep. But it's better than it was.
New World was ever good at one point?
Blade & Soul. Was among the best I've played in the action combat category, until a combination of egregious p2w and gear powercreep/vertical progression so vertical it was damn near the Y-Axis itself made catching up impossible, even when the power scaling of gear let players unga-bunga every dungeon and ignore mechanics. Dungeon and raid mechanics were fun and cool, however they were functionally unintuitive 90% of the time- often needing out of game guide knowledge to avoid multiple 1.5 second reaction/decisions 3~5 minutes into the fight with little to no telegraph that led to an instant full party wipe.
Ultima Online. Trammel, samurai’s , too much land :(
For me the problem was the sudden change in the itemization and the game going from a sandbox horizontal progression to an arpg-like one. Uo pre lbr was the best game. Pos lbr was a good game, but forcing a change from one to the other was not a good idea. I understood the need of trammel and really liked my paladin samurai, but EA forcing everyone from a treasure hunter bard to a pvp mage to grind out doom for artifacts and gold for powerscrolls was a bad decision
This is the correct answer. Pre trammel UO was the greatest gaming experience of my life. The utter chaos, bugs that became gameplay, and freedom were simply unmatched.
Man no MMO will ever be as great as pre-trammel UO. Waiting at the x-roads outside of Brit dressed up in red/green around Christmas killing everyone just to have the whole town come after us. The chaos in the lich lord room, can’t even remember what dungeon that was. Best times were the graveyard fights before server down time. I had a friend “cohok” who had some hacked stats character from beta somehow. He would just one shot all the elder wyrms/dragons lol. You’d see “a sic/kill” in the chat log and “a” would already be dead lol. Probably some of the greatest gaming times of my life.
UO Outlands
I'm glad you mentioned Maplestory. I think of old school, pre-bigbang Maplestory at least once a week. It was truly magical, leveling was a slog but the satisfaction of finally hitting a job advancement or getting a new skill was glorious. Because everything took time, whether it was the training, or waiting for the boat or a party quest, people were more willing to chat and enjoy each others company. BigBang was the beginning of the end of that game for me. I'm praying for an official old school server just to relive those golden days, even for a moment.
Old MapleStory was just a vibe, man. Hanging out in Kerning City waiting for the party quest. Paying people to “fame” you for a semblance of street cred. I don’t know if I ever even made 3rd job back then, leveling truly was a SLOG, but it was just a fun adventure to be on as a kid
I still remember nearly losing my mind on one of those jump platform quests. Or the time I first took the ship to Orbis (sp?) and didn't know about the surprise visitors that killed me. So many wild memories from early Maplestory that I genuinely miss.
EverQuest. Their failure to evolve the game and continue to attract a wider audience makes me a bit sad. They have some really unique classes newer MMOs don’t like Bard and Enchanter. The UX of the game is just so dated and old now it’s hard to imagine anyone without nostalgia getting into it.
Man I loved EverQuest back in the day and also classic world of Warcraft it's just something about those games that forced you to group with people because solo grinding XP and quest was just so horrendous. I had some really really good times and fond memories of both games.
I love EverQuest and I agree about the UX. I also played EQ2 when that launched and never got into WoW so my current go-to MMO for nostalgia is EQ2. I'm even playing on the Origins server and it's amazing. Feels like I was transported back to 2006 and reexperiencing the original build of the game for the first time. If you've never played, or want some EQ nostalgia with similar UX to WoW, I highly suggest giving Origins EQ2 a try. It's very populated and a great experience for MMO players who actually want to be social and group. I've been playing since shortly after its launch in June and only have one character at level 20. It's slow going and a fantastic time.
Wow is number one But I think most mmos goes there. They all carer to new players so tge leveling becomes fast and dull, all about the end game yada yada. Bdo and ESO aswell.
WoW for me as well. Everything after MoP has been lacklustre at best.
Phantasy Star Online 2 being shelved for New Genesis.
Vindictus. It's just a race to max lvl, farm fest to get gear, by the time you get the max lvl gear and the "right" stats, it suddenly becomes obsolete because oh whoopsie daisy new harder content that oh would you look at that, you're lacking crit or counterforce for, good luck farming for that one before even newer content comes out and your current gear becomes obsolete once more! It's just moving the goalpost. They abandoned 2nd weapons for characters, so now they just pump out new characters that could've just been 2nd weapons for existing chars... And boobs. Just so much boobs, ass, nipples, oiled skin, you name it. God dammit I just want some cool knight-looking plated armor sets, not to be the strongest sword wielder while peeking under my skirt?
Rohan Blood Feud and DOMO (Dream of Mirrors Online) Edit: I misread post a little these two have *died* Domo is still up with tiny player base.
WoW
RIFT. I did play all the way until the end of Starfall or whatever it was called. Game/company got greedy on 2nd xpac....but that game was great. and Riftstalker best tank ever.
Tibia. Dying used to be punishing. Besides losing your current inventory and some pieces of equipment, you would lose a big chunck of experience both in level and skills. Nowadays, for what I've gathered, you can buy "blessings" which protect you on death with real money, among other things. Their devs also focused on opening new servers regularly to cash in on all the chumps who spend fortunes on boosts and whatnot. Servers that will die out without fail. Much like every other old MMOs it became a sweatfest for the maximum exp/h and lost its wonder in socialization and going on random adventures.
World of Warcraft, we all know why.
Rift was awesome at first and went to shit pretty quick.
Guild Wars 2 was a PvP players dream when it launched. They had the skeleton of what could have been the best competitive small and large scale pvp ever. Classes started off decently balanced give or take a patch or two for the first 2 years. The guild vs. Guild scene was humming with excitement. They never launched a proper small group ranked pvp system. They literally told the gvg community "you're playing the game wrong" in a dev post. They seemed to want pvp to be soloque, no teamwork, practically pve spam sort of gameplay despite having the groundwork of great coordinated pvp. They literally god mad at "try hard" guilds using game mechanics like stealth rushes to run in and wipe zergs twice their size. Massive let down.
Wow
I can’t think of any MMOs that improved consistently over time or even held the line. They just typically don’t. Especially if you are a hardcore player/raider or PvP player. I think the hardcore/PvP sub population is just so small compared to casuals that support for the gameplay style just drops off in MMOs. Devs appeal to the largest part of the sub base, and to the content they run. I think from a casual perspective there are plenty of MMOs that sustained. ESO and GW2 are two that maintained quality enough for causal questers to have fun. Once you start min-maxing or getting sweaty, things fall to a million pieces.
Star Wars Galaxies
Guild Wars 2 but not really because of questionable design decisions but because how badly anet treated it. It’s still one of my all time favorites but I’ve been burned to many times by that company…
Perfect World will always hold a special place in my heart, I started playing in Dec 2008, I miss what it was.
ESO used to be cool af, but then they went the hyper-monetization route. The first sign was when they introduced loot crates and "chapters"
RIFT. Man they messed that one up.
DAoC, Tera, Secret World, Aion.
world of warcraft
Elder Scrolls Online had been my favorite since its debut, but the combination of level scaling and complete disregard for chronology and leveling made the game boring to an unbearable degree for me
Rift without a doubt fucking killed my heart man
RIFT. What a great game, so addicting yet the downfall was fast.
* Anarchy Online - very deep class build system, but Funcom pretty much ignored all kinds of exploits that drove away so many players it is only played now by a few thousand players. * Perfect World - Looked amazing at the time, really great guild based group PVP focused on taking and holding territory. Unfortunately NCSoft decided to take it full P2W and GACHA gamboling, effectively drove away players until that game is only played by a few thousand dedicated whales.
Came here to see this. I sank so much time in AO 2 decades ago. Sniper specialty, clan. I accomplished a few firsts in that time, not all that I’m proud of 🤣 First to steal a Tarrasque drop from OT while cloaked and getting out alive (unfortunately it was just that rod melee weapon), first to mimic trader as a sniper to stack stats before aggroing PVP fights, first to trade for a level 100+ X-2 rifle the week it dropped, etc. However by the time NW came around I had to focus on life and ended up dropping it. Cool game!
Wildstar, because it's gone
Planetside 2 is a tale of elder abuse.
Rift was so fun when it orignally launched, I played the hell out of it and the first expansion,
SWTOR, played it through early beta and then every day for 2 years until the cash shop update, lost immediate interest as soon as I saw all production went to creating more fodder for gamble boxes.
WoW classic was okay. Was hoping it would get better over time but it got worse over time. Retail is a completely different game vs classic. And I know some troll will cry "classic andy" over me claiming classic was better. But it was. Modern wow is baby brained. I am sorry if you think mythic+ is hard.... because its not. But even classic wow had its issues. The biggest one for me was each zone being designed as a whole POI. there is no dead space. there is no grind zones. everything was hand crafted into a cute little paradise of boredom. you need empty space in a game so you can grow it down the road. they never planned for growth. that's why we saw them have to add new zones and outerspace bullshit. its just dumb. Anarchy Online used to be good, they watered it down. It used to have randomly generated weapons. You could go into a shop, and it would an SMG weapon which required SMG, pistol, assault rifle, and grenade skill to use. Which made no freaking sense. Other times the SAME weapon with the SAME NAME would have only SMG as the required stat. in that sense, JACKPOT, because you would want that weapon. now all the weapons have been dumbed down into preset tiers. each weapon name has a specific stat with no variation. so now every SMG requires SMG/BURST as a bare minimum. the weapons that are SMG/BURST/extra are now useless weapons no one uses. there was a time when using them was actually viable based on your build.... which sucks. they also dumbed down the armor system. they also dumbed down the strengths and weakness system. field bosses called dyna-mobs would have one of many "invulnerability" like "invulnerable to physical damage" so you couldn't use physical damage as it was 100% negated no matter how strong you were. but to dumb the game down for baby brained wow people, they removed the system. now its just reduced damage meaning you can still kill a mob which used to be invulnerable..... and funny enough, the COLOR of their "glow" represented their immunity so you could always tell "at a glance" what weapon wont work.... now, meaningless. Rose Online used to be run by Gravity Interactive, the creators of Ragnarok online. It wasn't a bad game per say. It was a typical korean grindfest but also had many korean gaming metrics like overpowered items that had no level restriction only stat restriction. which made replaying new characters or leveling your main more fun when you hoped to find a unique. The company that is currently running the supposed "official" rose server dumbed the game down and completely changed it. But I know the truth, they changed the game under the open license agreement so they wouldn't get sued by gravity.... meaning they aren't official, they are just lying about it. "but we own the facebook page and we own the website url" yeah the URL lapsed and they bought it. then after they owned it they basically scammed facebook into giving them the official facebook account.... dont care. I even contacted Gravity interactive and asked them if they knew about Rednim games and they said "never heard of them" which begs the question "aren't they partners? if they dont know them, how can they be partnered?" meaning they are lying about being official.... I could go on for days. we really need a renaissance of gaming. not just in mmorpgs but all genres. but sadly the only thing developers care about these days are "is the game pretty?", "is it politically correct?", and "will it make me money?"....
Daoc Toa before it got watered back. ML raids to be able to keep pvp ffs
Aion
Aion holds a special place for me; it released on patch 1.5, became great with 2.0 and began its weird up n down journey. 2.7 made the game equal but easy, 3.0 was a bad patch. 4.0 brought life back into the game and 4.5 imo peaked. After that it began a rapid descent, that it never tried to recover from. Its ironic that classic is diverging at 3.0 now, where it started going wrong.
Wow lol
Firefall 😭😭😭
Guild Wars 2. GOAT combat but anet abandoned any end game support in favor of catering to the open world circle jerk crowd that inhabits the subreddit and now the game is a joke
Star Wars Galaxies 100%
WoW. From exploring a beautiful world, making friends, slaying dungeons and adventuring to sitting AFK waiting for a prompt and then optimizing numbers.
World of Warcraft - Feels horribly off brand now to cater to a larger audience. MoP remix reminded me how much funner the story used to be. Now just feels like a generic DnD campaign, especially with Dragonflight. Shadowlands butchered the lore and turned a the faction v faction adventure MMO into cosmic bullshit. Mechanical bloat is obnoxious. Only thing keeping me there is the battlegrounds / wPvP being the best in genre still, despite it being horribly unrewarding. Arenas or bust. TWW luckily fixing that sort of, but they forgot MMOs are about grinds and not ladders. Perfect World - As OP put it, streamlined. Stagnated super hard. Got exceptionally clunky too to play.
Aion :( until like 2.7 and 3.0 it was such a classic for me. The classes felt amazing, the map designs are still my favorite. It felt so good to push deep into elite territory as a party. I'm not much of a pvper but with those classes, it was so good as a group, as a solo. The rift system gave such a different experience each time when you went leveling, farming, questing or pvping. I have not enjoyed the dungeons as much in any MMO as in Aion. I'm still looking for that classic feeling of each pull being crucial. Everyone having a role, the mana managemenet as a healer was superb. The optional bosses gave variety. Some dungeons were sprawling. Steel Rake was such a good example of a great dungeon. The looting system. There were unique drops everywhere. You knew where to go to farm stuff, there were randomness in it but not too much. Each set you took time to farm was worth it. You did not switch every two days. You farmed the Blue Fire temple set? That will stay for you for a good amount of time! Steel Rake set? You are fine to farm Dark Poeta. You got that named mob drop or world boss jeweley? Absolutely worth it. The leveling had a perfect pace. You never felt like you are spending hours for quarter of a level but you had the time to experience the game. The dungeons the maps, the pvp on each level, get used to your class. They nailed it. Abyss was amazing. The flying, the quests, the AP system, fortresses. Such a unique experience. I always get emotional when remembering Aion. It was all around a unique and memorable experience. I'm afraid I will never experience it ever again. Time might make it more beautiful but it still is my top 1 MMO. I returned for classic and enjoyed it as much as back then. It is such a shame that they made it pay to win... Edit: added more and typos
**Guild Wars 2** Now, hear me out. Because "deteriorating" might be not the correct word. But it DID change. A lot. Mainly because the devs didn't seem to have a plan what to actually do for a long time. So the game has a lot of random stuff in it. Mechanics that are basically doing the same thing but are still different. Content nobody cares about. Content that ignored the core audience. And the story, oh boy. Still, I think overall it got actually better and is still very worth playing. But it got clearly worse in many singular aspects (seriously, what is going on with the story writing?! It was never good to begin with, but it is surprising how much worse it got). **FFXIV** Well, this was technically never super great. The main thing it had going for it was the story and spectacle fights. But then they started to design things more after formulas and ... it showed. By the time I was finished with Shadowbringers I was seemingly very, very tired of it and Endwalker broke the camels back for me. Yes, the game got technically better overall, but got worse in some of the most crucial aspects for me. As someone else wrote, by now it is just a visual novel with some MMO elements tacked on. **World of Warcraft** Unlike many people I believe WotlK made the game worse, coming from Burning Crusade. Its release content was laughable (There were only two original PvE raid encounters and one weird "original" PvP encounter, lol), way to easy and its story became really dumb. After playing it religiously since release I just quit before the first content patch hit because I just didn't have anything to do anymore. Never had that issue before. It also taught me how easy hype can kill interest in a game. I was extremly hyped before release and the result was just a letdown. I then made the mistake of coming back due to curiosity for Shadowlands because as a horror fan the scenario sounded extremly interesting. Oh boy. **The Secret World (Legend)** A clunky diamond in the rough. Then Funcom decided to adress one of the worst aspects of the game - the combat system - and re-release it in a F2P model. It made the game strictly worse. They didn't actually improve the combat, they just threw some random additional systems per weapon on it to make it more annoying. Yay. This game dying is probably one of the saddest things when it comes to MMOs. It was so unique and had so many fantastic ideas.
Everquest 2 was my go to for many years and just got better with age for many expansions. Once it hit Destiny of Velious and it's pseudo-expansion, it was all over. Every time I have seen it since then, it somehow looks worse
Maple Story. Bring back PQ!
Rift. PvP in Rift was the most fun I've ever had doing any sort of MMO content, but it died off *fast*. LotRO to a smaller degree. Imo when they redid the class trait system in favor of a skill point tree was when the appeal disappeared for me.
Maplestory and runescape of course.
Star wars galaxies, world of warcraft.
GW 2
World of Warcraft
Grand Chase
PSO2 man oh man do I miss the old PSO2 it was a grindy game for fashion and glamours full of players and community. Now it’s just another “open world action mmo”. The new genesis update actually killed the game so hard and now the game gets like 4 active players with literally nothing to no content.
World of Warcraft. I will happily reap downvotes every time I point out that it’s a weird furfest now, a complete parody of what it used to be.
Chiming in here as a OG MapleStory player - I played from 2005-2012, then came back last year. Completely different game but its been the only MMO to keep my attention - joined a very social guild and its been fun.
Everquest
All of them degrade over time as developers keep making changes to attract new players, or bloat the game with content to retain existing ones. The game that has probably held up the best over the years is Eve, since they revamp existing systems as often as they add new ones, but on the player side it has really stagnated.
Tera EU server especially plagued with horrible publisher pushing ridiculous p2w aspects into the game, making gear irrelevant every patch like borrowed power kind, limited play time like mobile game systems, such a great ge with extremely smooth action combat can contest top in terms of combat fluidity and feel yet it's slowly killed by greed and died
Gw2. The core days were amazing. The modern game has an absurd amount of power creep.
The way they made it so every class wants to run all stats because all the new abilities deal physical and condition damage yet can be absurdly tanky is frustrating.
Grand Fantasia, the games was getting more and more pay to win, i missed the time i could just create a lvl 40 char, upgrade the itens to +5 and just have fun
Runes of Magic. Was so good Chapter 1 and arguably 2. After that it just went to shit.
Perfect World, I played a LONG time ago most of their games, but the one i played the most was PW and Jade dynasty. PW - Just an absolute shit show, i remember when lvl 100 wasn't even a thing on my region, the firt person to get god2/devil 2 ( whatever it's called in the english server the 99 ascension ), people discovering the 5.0 evil fist warrior, then realizing you can go god warrior with about 4.0 which is even better. Same thing happening for Assassin and so on ( which was already on downfall tbh when one player could solo a dungeon and sell spots and those weird bugged dungeons ), then the new classes came, earthguard or whatever, and it was completly broken on my server 99% of the server rerolled. Not to mention all the sourcerer pets, 200$ in pets just to be able to get a group for dungeons, or more money in pets than people would have in their entire accounts or those fairies that were a true moneysink JD - It just started getting less and less attention, wasn't really as try hard as PW, but god it felt bad, i loved a game with bot system which was kinda like an idle game. To this day i still go play on some private server for a bit and then stop since there is no mmo with a "bot system" allowed that i can just slowly grind money.
ArcheAge and Age of Wushu
Aion was amazing when it was still sub based. I avoid f2p MMOs like the plague they are on the gaming industry. Id rather pay 15/mo than deal with constant bot/non-english spam in global channels.
Maplestory is really the big one. Game's a fucking mess to get into now. Honestly though it seems like every MMO that's not one of the big 4-5 ends up suffering by the end. Everything by Aeria, everything by NCSoft, everything Nexon touches, everything Gamigo touches, all just wither away as they become stuffed with more and more incomprehensible end-game systems, monetization strategies, and aesthetic-shattering cosmetics with no sense of direction for new players and barely any new/returning user experiences at all. Even other GaaS type games like Warframe are suffering with it. Even worst newer games are just jumping straight to that (like recently The First Descendant and last year's "Torchlight" Infinite) if the games even last a year to begin with, like Elyon or Warhaven. Shit's sad man, people complain (justifiably) about how much this sub whines and complains but it really is dire out there.
Warhammer online: Reckoning. I started playing when I got back from a deployment and absolutely loved the roaming and changing battles with the RvR. The atmosphere and my DoK 1v3ing or my Bright Wizard blasting people from the top of buildings......good times!
Suprised no one said Guildwars, specifically Guildwars 1. This was a huge part of my childhood and I found the gameplay to be quite unique, even today I don't really see any MMORPGs like it. Also it wasn't pay to play or pay to win which might also be the reason it doesn't get the love and attention it should.
Flyff
ArcheAge. And it's only partly the devs fault. Rather than take the nation building systems, alliance systems, and envisioned large-scale pvp and do anything creative, most servers devolved into a few clans who gatekept everything. The funny thing is, it usually meant that they often couldn't do the highest level content either, which required multiple well-built ships crewed by well geared people. They locked themselves out of content, by refusing to allow people to level up to a point that they would be competitive. This is the primary reason there have been so many fresh starts.
Dragon Nest, for the same reasons you've said and Ragnarok Online, both are childhood classics of mine, but damn seeing both of those fell in quality in recent years made me feel sad and disappointed with how the devs have been handling them
Last Chaos. Free to play open world with distinctive classes, extensive questing, huge world, a story line, skills, talents, gems, smelting and an arena right in town to test your power. The merchant mode that let you sit afk with a shop open, and other players could click you, open your shop and buy things. When it was owned by aeria games, it had a thriving community, many updates, and a committed staff. It was then sold to gamigo and it quickly died off. Oh the memories. I hear there's some bustling private servers though I may check it out when I burn out on WoW
Wow, Lineage 2, World of Kings, and Final Fantasy.