WHY MMOS ALL SUCK!

That happens in MOBAs as well.

People will be people I guess.

But it pains me that devs will make their games around these mentalities and enforce them.

I get that it's easier to enforce it than to fix the game so that more than 1 build is viable.

I think League handles it fairly well. And so yeah .. pretty much agreed. The potential is there, the playerbase can be salty sometimes.
Meta is pretty overrated for most of the players - when it comes to champion picks, that is - because skill and comfort with champions will help a lot more than a small potential stronger champion kit. And playing lesser common champs makes them harder to play against, because there's less experience (if any) to draw from. LCS n stuff will capitalize those things, but that's not the average player.

A lot of the off-meta builds for any of such champions can be high-risk high-reward kind of things. Good for certain situations, but often not a reliable to-go-to choice. And often not well-practiced, either (for some of them, anyway, gotta love mid Braum)

It's a weird environment to play in, though. And I always prefer to play with a few relaxed pals. At the end of the day, it's best and most effective to play something fun and comfy. Whatever that then is.

author=kentona
Can we make a game that takes the concepts of multiplayer raids but making it streamlined and fun, like MOBAs did with PvP? Have a huge stable of varied heroes that you can select, join a lobby, form a 4-person/8-person/XX-person group, then go on a raid? Skip the PvE grind of an MMO and jump right to raids.

How would a game like that work? Is there a game out there right now that works like that?

There is an entire genre of games that work mostly like that, they're called... JRPGs. The only difference is that most of them are single player. Not all of them though! There are a few with cooperative multiplayer. Secret of Mana. Tales of Whatevria. One of the Kingdom Hearts games I think. It's almost never online though. Let's explore why.

What you want, I think, is a JRPG with cooperative multiplayer, and some kind of matchmaking system for casual players, plus some kind of guild system for dedicated players.

But then, when the player logs on and wants to join a raid... what should they do while they're waiting? In a MOBA or FPS, the matches are short, maybe 15 minutes, so the queues are also really short, usually less than three minutes, so waiting isn't a big deal. In an RTS game the matches are a little longer and you might be waiting five or more minutes sometimes, which is sort of a problem, but if you like the game you can deal with it. In an MMORPG, the raids last three to four hours each, and in addition to needing to find people of the right strength and class, you also need to find people who want to do the same raid as you, so the queue times will often be twenty minutes or more. If you're doing a less popular raid it might take hours to find a group.

MMORPGs solve this by adding lots of other stuff for you to do in between dungeons. Lots of story questlines and repeatable quests and gathering/crafting systems that you can do while you wait. Because these things are all low-effort solo content, it's fine if you're in the middle of doing them and suddenly your raid queue pops up and tells you that it's found a group. It's important that they be non-challenging and solo, so that you never feel bad about quitting them to do the raid. These solo tasks such as repeatable quests are also designed to be kind of addicting - not just to abuse you into wanting to pay your subscription next month, but also much more importantly to keep you playing long enough for your raid to actually pop up and tell you it's ready.

This in-between-raids content HAS to "hook in players without actually engaging them" as Ratty called it, because if it didn't hook them in they wouldn't stick around long enough for the raid to start, and if it engaged them they would sometimes feel bad about quitting it to start the raid. Either problem would result in queue times being EVEN LONGER, probably by a factor of several times.

The only other good way to solve this problem that I can think of would be to completely get rid of the progression system, so that instead of choosing a specific raid you wanted to do, you'd just choose your character and the game would pick a random raid. This would drastically shorten queue times, at the expense of also removing the primary goal of the game, which is to get stronger and reach the final boss. I'm not sure that's a good trade-off. MMORPG developers certainly don't seem to think it is. Maybe you could get away with it though. I guess the new primary goal would be to top the leaderboards? That would be fun to a much smaller subset of people, who are just as able to compete on the leaderboards in a game like WoW.

@LockeZ: excellent points.

but I mean, there has to be a better way to kill time between raids than playing a MMO solo? I don't know - just seems like an idea worth exploring...if I had a cool half-mil and free time.

author=XoeisCooI
Maplestorys cool man you have no idea!

I don't know what's changed but last time I played Maplestory I got bored of it quickly and got KO'd by treestumps that apparently can still dodge attacks without visibly moving and hit you for bullshit reasons. It's just about everything you could possibly hate in an MMO with 2D platforming mechanics tacked in.