WHAT MUST MMORPGS DO TO REINVENT THEMSELVES?

The best part of MMOs is playing with your friends. An MMO should focus its effort on facilitating that.

I think WoW had it right during the last part of WoW Vanilla to be honest. They hadn't yet "standardized" gear, or added resilience, which segregated PvE and PvP. What I mean by "standardized" is, you kinda sorta still had to figure out what works best for you. You didn't have a pre-set laundry list of gear that was optimized specifically, by blizzard, for your class. You had to do the work yourself, which was fun.

Wow has had some great modernizations since then, but it has become too silly, too "casual" feeling, too much like a grindy gear treadmill.

author=slashphoenix
I think GW2 made some great strides in this as well - you no longer have to be the same level as your friend to play with them. In addition, you automatically team up with everyone nearby, meaning you don't have to fight over experience/loot or who completes a quest first.

Little tweaks like these encourage the player to be social in a genre that's supposed to be focused on multiplayer. You should be excited to see other people, not irritated.

I really disagree about this! I don't think you should be able to bypass challenges by having other people do them for you. Especially because it's a multiplayer game, and thus has a much bigger sense of competition, you should have to earn everything you get. The emphasis on riding on other people's success instead of getting to play the game myself is what has pushed me away from playing MMORPGs seriously any more and dropping down to casual mode.

By no means do I think other players replace the challenge. What I like about GW2 is it compensates for more players by increasing enemy difficulty, but you can overcome that effect with teamwork & coordination. You are never discouraged by the sight of other players (unless PVPing). It encourages cooperation.

My problem with WoW is that the game can't decide if it likes or dislikes cooperation. If you're not grouped and you see another player questing where you are, the best solution is often to tag every mob before that other player can, even if that player is on your faction. Manually grouping up can be a pain in the ass, and even then you have to fight over loot.

I wish I didn't have such major problems with GW2's combat controls, because it's made some brilliant decisions otherwise.

WoW never makes you compete for anything, except maybe outdoor quests, for which the enemies respawn ten times faster if there are ten people nearby than if there's one nearby. But you only spend like 25% of the game doing that, and there are never any other people around to actually get in the way. That part of the game is essentially single player, except for the first couple weeks after it's released. The multiplayer part of the game is dungeons, wherein the game has started giving people more and more substantial rewards for doing things that are way below their skill/power level, presumably in an effort to make the game easier. If you do a dungeon, no matter how easy it is, you get a pile of gold and a small chunk of valor points, which can be used to buy the best gear in the game. As a result, I can't do a dungeon without being stuck in a group with people who are way too strong to make the game any fun.

MMORPGs should be all about competition. The emphasis on cooperation is what killed competitive WoW. When I was really into WoW, it was never because I had friends I wanted to play with. I did, but that didn't keep me playing. It was because I wanted to be really good at something in a type of game where other people could see that I was good. In a realm with thousands of players, I wanted to be recognized as one of the best. I wanted to be the hero. That's kind of a stupid, childish, self-centered reason to do something. But if you're gonna do something for stupid, childish, self-centered reasons, it should be a video game.

Co-operation is a means to win a competition, whether it be against another team or the environment.

Man, if you turn auto-battle mode on, and then complain that the game's too automated, I don't have too much sympathy. I mean, I have some, because the game is totally pushing you to do auto-battle and giving you upgrades to its effectiveness and stuff, so you feel like it's a thing you're supposed to do. But still, it's not like FF12 where the reason they included autobattle is because it's nothing but button-mashing even without it. The game's infinitely more fun without it.

That said, I was never able to create any tactics that could successfully kill anything between the intro levels and the time I was level ten billion, and am kind of curious how you did it. Auto-battle is utterly incapable of using area of effect attacks without commiting suicide, moving your characters into spots where they can hit the maximum number of targets, setting traps, or intelligently deciding which enemies to stun and freeze. I don't think I'd have been able to survive if you took even one of those things away from me, let alone all of them. How'd you keep your shit from getting wrecked?

Gotta be honest here. Dragon Age: Online would be an MMORPG I would fucking play.

Although, sigh. To be honest, a lot of days, I don't even want better MMORPGs, I just want single-player WoW. I love its combat and enjoy most of its reward scheme, but fear and despise human interaction. I wish more MMORPGs had single-player modes where other players were replaced by NPCs. I would dig that. Sort of like henchmen in Diablo, where you can customize them and get new gear for them the same way you can for yourself. It's like that insurance commercial, or whatever company it is, with the 24/7 call center: "People for when you want them, computers for when you don't."