There's been a very strong homogenization of MMOs ever since World of Warcraft, towards mostly mindless loot grinds. Early pioneers ranging from Ultima Online to A Tale in the Desert have effectively been completely forgotten.

It's wild because if you discard your preconceived notions, the possibilities of what you can do with a massively multiplayer persistent world are absolutely vast. There's this huge unexplored territory and 99% of MMOs are stuck in this one tiny corner.

Isn't this what this whole Metaverse business is about? Recapturing the goal of the '90s of net personas and virtual worlds?

> It’s also become much more normal to pay significant sums of money for in-game currency that is then used to buy high end competitive content runs from other well geared players for gear and achievements

What does this mean? Like paying people in game gold to carry you?

Yes that’s exactly what I’m talking about. It’s always been a thing in MMORPGs, but prior to MMO companies selling in-game currency themselves it was a lot less common and carried a stigma because those buying carries often bought illicit currency to do so because carries are expensive.

Now that there’s no friction on the path between a player’s wallet and those offering carry services, carry purchases have exploded in popularity.

That's super weird. It really recontextualizes the term pay to win. Traditionally it's meant "pay to get an unfair advantage", but now it's quite literally pay to become a winner of a non competitive experience. What mental gymnastics are required to make this seem rewarding? Would it be perceived differently if you were unable to pay other players but could pay NPCs to accommodate the same task; in which case it is a direct 1:1 exchange with the game company? Or if you could pay to just auto complete it, sans the experience of being carried? Bizarre.

It's at least partly because in WoW you oftentimes can't get into a raid unless you've already beat the raid. People can lookup your achievements online and/or ask you to link them before allowing you in. So for some it might simply be "pay (more) to play" rather than pay to win.

At least in WoW, I think a big part of it is that there are tons of spammers blasting out ads to escort you through dungeons and raids. It’s hard to find actual groups of normal people with all the noise

Particularly if you’re just one guy applying to random groups, the last few slots get applications from tons of insanely-powerful characters. You can sit there trying to join a group as a new player for hours and not get anywhere unless you apply to mostly-empty groups or start your own with a friend or two

If you don’t know that, it’s easy to think you’ll need to pay for achievements and loot in order to have a shot at getting a group

Hey, so long as I’m mentioning WoW here: That game is still taking in 200 million dollars a year or more, but it’s only getting a small fraction of that reinvested. I think the market is ripe for an actual WoW-killer. Gather a team, make a polished AAA version of WoW, and rake in the dough

I have a theory that wiki sites are what killed the WoW MMO formula, rather than mechanics fatigue.

Players descend like locusts, then optimize and share their builds until they discover some emergent tug of war or rock paper scissors meta.

What remains is a cat & mouse game between players and developers, to find the reductive meta and then patch the game to shake it up. The players are highly coordinated thanks to wikis, and they consume content quicker than devs can create it. So the business model is no longer viable.

I think that's probably correct. Perhaps the only way to combat such an effect is some combination of reducing the game's competitiveness (so being optimized isn't as important to begin with) and elements of nondeterminism in the game's combat systems, making it much more difficult or impossible to pin down a "most correct" build.

Players tend to hate randomness in PvP; they use the pejorative 'RNG'. PvE games increasingly monetize with social proofing, but this can create a sense of PvP even in PvE content. E.g. players get mad that the wizard class isn't as viable as the rogue class.

Your first strategy might explain the emerging success of sandbox games and battle royale games.

Of course, this is just an anecdotal observation, but I think what changed weren't the games, but the players.

I was playing Dark Age of Camelot back in the day and we'd spend hours just waiting around, chatting, meeting new people, trying to group up and try to clear a dungeon. Of course, our compositions were less than ideal but we'd try to make it work. Hey we have no one durable but if we take little Timmy's mercenary here and put some high armor gear on him and dual wield shields maybe it would work. Of course someone would go to bed or to dinner and then off to find a new player we go. Trying to make it work was the name of the game. With time, you'd amass a big friend list of reliable people you know you could call on a moment's need if they were online and most of the time they would be happy to help.

Modern players are borderline obsessed with time. No one wants to waste time experimenting with content so they look for guides to clear as fast as possible. Getting wiped immediately results in remarks of "you're wasting my time". The human aspect of the MMO has been stripped away by bots, fast travel, people generally being rude and the mumble/teamspeak server or discord group chat. Somehow, it feels like the MMO is a reflection of our current society.