How to save the MMO genre once and for all

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My biggest thing is getting players and publishers to realize an MMO with 200k daily active users is not a failed game with a dead community. Hell MMOs with less than 100k active players tend to still be fairly lively if you get on the right server.

The issue with MMO social features as you describe them weirdly mirror the way suburban sprawl has traded individual convenience for social connection, but also mirror the way that urban life can lead to a sense of being alone in a sea of people. Not sure what to make of that connection, but it seems like something to consider when it comes to considering solutions.

I think there's something to be said about making it easier to be social while playing alone, as opposed to just discounting solo play and saying everything should be social. As an introvert myself, I used to love how in gw2 you could find a dynamic event with other players fighting off some monster or something and I could jump right in and join without saying a word. If I found someone knocked out on the ground I would raise them back up, they'd drop a little ty in the chat and we'd be on our way. Maybe we'd exchange some waves a bow or whatever, but you didn't feel socially obligated to make a party and alter your play style to fit them in. Being able to see people and interact immediately and then move on was great.

I saw a major shift when Warcraft killed the region channels in chat. These local chats not only segmented chat (so that conversations could actually happen without being a fire hydrant of random text), they also contributed to a sense of community. You could be passing through a region, see someone call for help with a quest, and easily pop over to help them. This simple social dynamic vanished once you were chatting to people all over the world.

I'm just gonna pause 30 minutes in to get this off my chest - social media has definitely shaped the way I play MMOs. I hate joining a Discord server, but a lot of Guilds/Clans/Whatevers require it. It breaks down that barrier between my identity, and my character identity in the game. I want a certain level of anonymity, and, with regard to a clan of strangers, I don't want to be bothered when I'm not logged into the game in question. It's essentially frozen me out of those social interactions with strangers that I used to enjoy. On top of that, having access to more people to chat with than I can give my time to all day every day does take some of the magic out of those random conversations with strangers in online games, MMOs being the biggest facilitator for me in the mid to late 2000s. If anything, that sweet spot between when I didn't have to wade through chat all the time to get basic chores done and the time when Discord became ubiquitous was the best time for social interactions in MMOs from my perspective. Now I'm just a solo player in ESO who can't easily sell their master-crafter doodads because I don't have the energy for a guild with social media integration (right to sell at traders is tied to guilds bidding on traders in that game). That being said, I think there are some good arguments here, but I also think there are games, like ESO, that have walked that tightrope with intention. They've solved the problem of players needing to play with their friends while maintaining what are essentially PvP servers, with 3 factions on each server. So when you hop into the large-group PvP zone late at night, you often run into the same people coordinating battle tactics and taking territory. They've straddled the line with "auction houses" (guild traders) in that anyone can purchase things, but you're pushed into being social if you want to sell. It also creates recognizable guild names at the traders you frequent, and you can tell who's doing well or not based on which guilds take over the prime traders at your favourite town. There are group-finding tools for the basic "chore" of dungeon delving, but then there's harder content that you're forced to be social with in order to find a group (i.e. no raid finder tools). They have weekly and all-time leaderboards to track scored solo/group content to see who's on top of their game and get familiar with those names. There's definitely more than that in there that's been designed from the start, or retroactively updated, to walk the tightrope of a modern experience without sacrificing all social interaction like WoW did. That's why ESO is the MMO I still play (well, that and it respects my time by keeping my gear and level grind relevant between breaks). Even with all that, though, I don't know that it's enough. I really do think that discounting the real-world changes, changes that I think have at least equal weight to game design changes, is as much misleading as doing the opposite.

An important design mantra for the last part: Listen to the users on the problems, not on the solutions. As players, we know better about what makes a game less enjoyable, less relatable or less whatever we look for in it. As designers, the developers know better how to solve those shortcomings, since players will be the first ones to ignore the negative effects of their proposed solutions.

I think you've explained in a nutshell exactly why I find most modern MMO's so frustrating. Of the three strategies for limiting the players consumption of content, namely difficulty, grinding, and time gating, I've always found difficulty to be the only rewarding solution where the other two are basically the equivalent of taking a delicious hamburger and sticking it in between 6 layers of stale bread. Defeating a difficult dungeon makes you feel excited and accomplished. Getting a rare drop after doing the same uninspired slog of a dungeon for the 62nd time, just makes you feel relieved that you can finally stop.

Damn, I never really thought about how the locked down nature of servers created insulated communities where people weren't total pieces of shit because social reputation was a thing that mattered. Playing on a medium pop wow server back in the day, you knew the people you played with, you knew the guilds and their reputations, everything you covered in the vid. I remember specifically a troll who spent all his time in trade chat and who everyone on the server knew by name. He was absolutely toxic to be associated with, and in modern wow he could have done what he did and suffered zero consequences because the supply of people is limitless. I always knew that something was lost in wow and it wasn't only the loss of servers, but that was the one thing I couldn't put my finger on.

what I loved about original Ultima Online was that I would come back from work and just log in to live, sometimes all I'd do is hang out at my little hut on the shores of Yew , a friend would come by and maybe we'd jump in a ship and go exploring, or play chess, go into the woods on an adventure, or whatever. No other MMO since really captured that live in another life experience, I searched for many years after and eventually gave up on the mmo genre, which turned into an amusement park ride rather then an rpg. I needed something more then levels and grinds and "endgame".

Thinking back when WOW launched it's amazing to think how different my life would be if I hadn't chosen Archimonde. The friends I made then are still great friends and a few I still talk to almost daily. One of those friends introduced me to my now wife and recently we had our first child. One seemingly insignificant choice has had so much impact on my life.

Back when I played WoW I had a ton of alts, which led me to notice something interesting. Because I played my many characters in parallell rather than serially, I'd notice a surge of new characters every so often, as people had reached max level with their previous character and then started over. Once daily quests were introduced, as well as Heroic Dungeons I believe, there was plenty for max level characters to keep busy with aside from the more exclusive raids and more niche pvp battlefields. So those waves of new characters running through the earlier zones diminished, greatly, and the greater world became much emptier as a result.

For the social problem part of the video - I think another big factor is that the internet was still in its early days when MMOs like WoW were at their peak. Back then, you had to actually talk to people to see if they had the answer to your question. You explored things and tested out your own builds because no one knew "the answer". We live in a time where every new MMO has guides, YouTube videos, and websites listing every single answer and location to whatever you need BEFORE the game even launches or day one of launch. Just look at what happened to New World (even though that game had its own separate issues). There is no sense of wonder and exploration anymore because other people have already figured out the answer and that information spreads like wildfire. I think there is something to be said about the hyper-optimization of gaming ("meta gaming") as well, as the "locusts" as you put it have optimized the fun out of everything. Other players see them "ahead" of them in level and gear and feel like they are missing out and become one of the locusts as well.

It's so crazy to think just how different the world was 15-20 years ago playing things like WoW and RuneScape. Smart phones didn't exist, social media basically didn't exist (MySpace), most people didn't use computers never mind play PC games. You cannot overstate the seismic changes society has gone through since those times. The demographics that MMOs have to appeal to now are black and white different.

The server thing is so true. I played FFXI for many years (I think when I was between ages 14 and 20 in the 75 era) and I remember being genuinely concerned about my rep on the server. Always wanted to be nice to people, play well and have good gear so I got a good rep and got invited back to parties etc. Great video. If I remember correctly FFXI used to assign a server to you randomly back in the day and you needed a code from someone on a specific server if you waned to join them.

Your social problems section was almost perfect, right on with my experience as someone who started with MUDs at the library and whose first visual MMO was EQ right in it's 1999 inception. I watched those changes in real time, and you nailed it. I am commenting to add one bit to the server section, though. Your server would have a culture, its own heroes and villains, but also, your TIME ZONE did, too. Even on a purely american server, someone who played in the early evening EST experienced a very different group of people than a late night PST player. If you played at a quieter time, you friended anyone you ever grouped with that seemed like a solid potential colleague even if they hadn't caught up to your level yet!

I disagree a bit on whether or not social media has negatively impacted the MMO experience. I agree that the existence of social media hasn't "replaced" social interaction in MMOs, but I think you're underestimating the impact external platforms have on player interaction. I've played plenty of games where the in-game experience is basically dead. Finding someone to play with is a chore, because the overwhelming majority of players are completely focused on increasingly insular communities built on external platforms. In-game chat is something that's turned off, never even looked at. And, unless you're part of those communities, your chances for player interaction are massively reduced. This kind of thing has always been a problem with MMOs, with things like guilds often creating those insular communities, but I think external platforms like discord have massively exacerbated the issue.

Counter argument: Eve used to (I quit years ago so I can't speak about it currently) have this same sense of community in a single world. They solved the problem by making travel slow and semi-pointless. You formed a sense of community with your neighbors in much the same way as you did with servers in other games.

Aside from your dreamy voice, you do have great ideas lol. I don't consider myself a MMO fan because I don't especially enjoy PVP or grindy, endless repetitive content. Yet I loved SWTOR, playing solo or not, chatting, grinding even a bit. I'm just surprised at most MMO fans, they seem to love "working " to endgame and then keep working while I enjoy taking all my time and immersing myself in the atmosphere and lore. To each his own but that can get misunderstandings. SWTOR content seems oceanic to me yet most MMO fans consider it has no content because they do everything in a rush. And even while rushing I don't get how you can consider such a giant content rich game empty, with all these chapters, side quests, activities and replayability. Am I that slow or are they ignoring stuff ?