Imagine coming home from work and hopping online to go do your second job. A virtual economy implies work. And unless there’s something to hook people in, no one wants to do that work.
Hence you end up with the quest grind and the dopamine trail.
If you can find a way out, I imagine it would be very lucrative. But it’s not really a technology problem.
For example, a group of players might establish a small town with its own laws. The benefits of joining this group would include protection of your self and your stuff from bandits, access to resources, and potentially a place to train in your character's skills. You might in return be required to allocate a certain amount of your characters' combined time to boring scriptable work like tending crops or patrolling the borders of the town.
You would have to design the game so that most players would feel naturally inclined to join some kind of group, whether to avoid being picked off by other players in the wilderness, advance their characters, trade, or just to have something to do.
It might not be made super-obvious to other players which characters are linked to the same player, but I think there would have to be a way to discover it in-game, or too many players would end up as double-agents. Maybe some ritual to discover a player's "soul bonds", and if they don't consent to it when applying to join your township then you would probably treat them as super-suspicious. :)
In my thoughts, my hesitation is that I think I might have a bias for unit management, which is a new "thing" typical MMO players would need to start doing and optimizing in order to keep up.
So I wasnt convinced it would stick.
I think the new V Rising game has a well thought out and related mechanic along these lines in that you still have 1 character, but you can get "servants" which you send out on missions to collect / farm materials from areas you've surpassed
The capitalist in me says "oh goodie, people will give me more money to get more power in the game", but the part of me that cares about making a game that's actually good thinks that outcome would be pretty gross.
I wonder if there are some other things you could do to mitigate it, like only allowing characters to operate autonomously for a time that is proportional to how long they are controlled for. It's a half-baked idea, but my hope would be that it prevents the "pay-to-win" model from scaling.
a game called foxhole has attempted this by making Logistics a real portion of the game (as many wars are). Players semi cooperate to collect salvage, build armaments/supplies/bases, and supply the front line. Clans/Guilds self organize to produce pushes into key fronts, provide roving security (people can sneak behind lines and attack logi) .
It's actually mostly fun. Until you see a newb drive a tank that took you hours to procure wildly into the enemy and you rethink how you're living your whole life.
Wow, this is depressing ... they actually managed to recreate one of things that I hate most about work in real life (that a lot of our hard work goes to waste because of stupidity of others).
Almost every current MMORPG is oriented on getting that virtual cash or other currency up in virtual economy, to make some linear progression for pre-defined ending.
An MMO without experience points or levels. Everything powered by puzzle games. Ships operate by people playing the sailing game, the bilging game, the carpentry game, the gunning game and the navigation game. On a tiny ship a good player can do it on their own by switching rapidly, but almost always, you need a crew of people working together, up to 100+ people on very large ships.
Your skill in the game decides how much you contribute to the ship's performance. To improve, you must actually improve.
Ships can fight other ships (in two minigames, one before boarding and one after), a whole fleet can fight another fleet for control over an island, with 1000+ people involved, in another game.
And the in game economy was really elaborate, and worked well. Again, based on people doing games in jobs.
Of course, people got immensely rich and could buy things you could not. Namely, some colors for clothes and ship paint were much rarer and more expensive than other colors; black came from kraken blood and was most expensive. So you could see who was rich, but it didn't affect gameplay. Of course being able to supply a fleet of ships and thousands of cannon balls to threaten an island did, but only if you could also get hundreds of people working those ships for you.
Similar to D3 removing the auction house years back
Some people want that experience. You grow close to people when you talk to them every day for over a year. Comradery is formed etc;
You couldn't level up without 6 players to a party. Needed a healer, tank, DD. Everyone had a purpose, everyone had a job. If one person died, we all died. They just don't make MMO's like they used to unfortunately. Everyone gets a trophy is new style of play. It's bad for the integrity/soul of the MMO's but money talks so it is what it is.
That runs contrary to the sort of on the rails, guided narrative that modern mmos embrace (like FFXI and WoW but maybe not Eve online).
Or am I misunderstanding FF? I didn’t think PvP was a big factor.
Let me set my character up to run in circles mining ores or chopping down trees or killing whatever enemies it sees in an area until your character dies. I'll farm easier areas than I could when at my computer, but feel delighted when I log on to a full bag of loot (loot filters please!) and a 1.5 levels of XP.
In an MMO that behaves like a true virtual world, characters shouldn’t just disappear just because you log off. They should carry on in virtual lives making progress for you so you can log in during the interesting bits of their lives and do fun stuff.
There is a multi-player browser-based version of Mike Singleton's Lords of Midnight that takes everything great about the original and pitted you against real opponents.
addendum: also infinite dendrogram
Doubt.
I've seen hordes of online players grinding for anything. People spending years and years to get useless achievements on WoW or years and years of Stratholme runs to drop the mount from Baron Geddon.
Don't even get me started on more farmy mmos, or games like Stardew Valley and the countless job simulators.
I don’t really know what Second Life is doing now. It damn near ruined my real life so I don’t care to check in on it.
I remember that game being really fascinating, and yeah a bit of a chore sometimes. I get how those types of games might not appeal to the masses in the way that the dopamine trail games do, but is there not still a niche for sandbox type games?
Free market economy, free looting (anyone can get anything) with random distribution, and people could pass on them so the one who needs an item can get it. Everyone could exchange anything person-to-person. It's what made the "mmo" part for me.
There were tons of mechanics that allowed a medium geared person to outdo people with the best gear available - if you invested in crafting, for example, you could craft things that were otherwise unavailable (unless you bought them from someone) and if you used them properly you could smash anyone in PVP and single handedly do 5-7 person dungeons. One mistake and you were dead, though.
I loved the interactions with people. Some of the first moments were one guy who asked to resurrect him, he was just killed by a monster and was like "bro, pls, I don't want to walk all the way here again". So I ressed him, he added me to the friend list, we later went on a lot of hunts and dungeons.
Another time I was sneaking through pvp territory collecting some shit from enemy bases and I got killed by two randoms. They were surprised at my shit gear and said "yo, come back, we'll give you this stuff, we kinda feel bad :D". Went there thinking I'd get killed, but no, they helped and we also became friends.
At some point I was rich and bored and was just running PVP tournaments with my own virtual wealth. People fight, the winner gets 5,000 gold (decent sum) or some gear I had in storage.
Helped a lot of new people gear up, and they helped me.
Dungeons were fun when anyone could enter and re-enter. If someone died, we'd have to be very careful and kite/heal until they come back, and it was a thrill, we liked it. People were thankful for not being called dumb and being kicked. We even gave materials that they needed because they needed it more.
But people have changed these days. The playerbases seem to hate the above mentioned free trade. "oooh, what about real money trading?" "why does he get free gear from his guildmates?" "he gets help, I don't".
You needed to be friendly and work together, and the newcomers just didn't want that. They wanted a single player game with other players in it.
Not to "log in at 7pm EST so we can do X and Y". It wasn't even mandatory in most groups, just log in if you can, apologize if you can't.
But no, people wanted to just log in whenever and work on their own whatever.
Which is exactly what modern MMOs have become. Single player, heavily developer controlled games with a chat.
They’ve just changed to a new system where you have to get both high placement and kills in order to rank up. That means relying heavily on your team to win the fights or strategizing rotation around the map. And some people are still complaining about being forced to play as a team in a team based game.
BTW, did you ever made it to exarch[1] in the alliance? I only made it as far as commander during my time.
Probably could've when the game started dying, but I lost interest by then. The mass PVP was really fun with hundreds of people, though often laggy.
The combat system (still haven't seen anything like it, the initial devs were brilliant), the scenery (Seeliewoods was fantastic), the decently balanced, prolonged PVP at the time, all the crafting stuff and absolutely free market, plus the early playerbase made the game great even if it did have a repetitive endgame. Oh and there was no region lock so people from all over the world could play, like Guild Wars.
Spent most money on that MMO, ever. But I guess milking people is overall more profitable.
I lost my account when Enmasse migrated them to Gameforge or something, I just didn't bother. They're shutting it down for good next month.
Kinda why I hate MMOs nowadays, I'd rather have it all on my computer even if I won't play it :D
I couldn't agree more if I wanted to, TERA's combat system and ambiance was unmatchable. You spoke of Seeliewoods; me and my boyfriend at the time got "married" in the Seeliewoods chapel, it was a blast. I have such fond memories of the place, it always saddens me knowing that I can't go back.
>I lost my account when Enmasse migrated them to Gameforge or something, I just didn't bother. They're shutting it down for good next month.
Same here, at the time of the migration the game already felt like a shadow of its former self. And even though, just like you, I had spent a sizable amount of money on it, I didn't really bother migrating.
I deeply wish to be able to have a similar experience again. I have tried so many MMOs since TERA and none have ever offered what it did.