Over the years of gaming I’ve come across numerous problems (intentional or not) in MMOs that have caused me to lose interest and stopy playing them:
Content difficulty shifts: It’s a rare occurance, but on a few occaisons I have played games that shift in difficulty during the levels. It may start out solo, and the first fourth of the game will be so, but then it suddenly shifts to nearly all group content for a range of levels before moving back. It may seem a minor gripe, but in many of these games the early levels set a mood for playing. If you’re used to solo’ing, and others are used to solo’ing, grouping will typically be harder to do.
Dead Zones: Since leveling is the primary form of character advancement these days having level ranges that lack in content is very, very annoying. I remember in Asheron’s Call 2 the 30′s range where content was severly lacking — it was horrible to go through. It wasn’t that there was nothing to kill, there was, but grinding mobs was not as efficient – solo-wise – as questing, and there simply were not that many quests available. Advancing your character should be a fairly smooth journey, climbing in difficulty and effort as you rise higher — not bogging down in certain section, then speeding back up.
Lack of content: This could go along with the leveling dead zones, but at times there are games that will still allow for smooth character advancement, yet lack content. I’d say this happens most often in the end game, where players have gone through the leveling treadmill and face the question ‘what now?’ Typically, developers will try and counter this by releasing a stream (or burst) of content for end-game players. Everquest and its horde of expansions is a prime example. The best counter to this that I’ve seen is Eve Online and its practically non-existant end game and seemingly endless player created content.
Major class/skill changes: These are dramatic changes that severly effect a way a character is played. One of the early examples I can think of was the Pinion skill in Horizons. This was a skill that scout-type characters could get to slow down mobs and kite them. Honestly, this was pretty much the only way TO kill many things as a scout (things that other adventure-types could kill), but with some whining by the playerbase this got nerfed to uselessness — and so did the scout-type. (solo-wise, at least) Making dramatic changes to classes and skills is something that should not be taken lightly, especially when it changes the playstyle or purpose of that class entirely. There are a few cases where this could be appropriate, but the classes and skills would have to be horribly broken in the first place. Which does happen, and is another pitfall.
Promises: Games often have chaotic development. Features are added, changed, removed… And this is fine, it is expected. However, developers that begin making promises, that say ‘this WILL be a part of our game and be a major feature’ and then remove said feature just before release… Well, that is simply not good. I’m all for being open on the development of a game, I want all the info possible just like the next gamer, but please be realistic. Taking away promises can seriously harm a game’s and developer’s reputation.
Performance: This is usually not an issue, but can be. My most recent example would be Runes of Magic. The game is pretty solid — content-wise — for a free MMO, but the performance is simply terrible for me. My computer can run Age of Conan, FEAR 2, Dawn of War 2, Everquest 2, etc. all very well — a game with graphics like World of Warcraft should not run slower or more poorly than those. RoM isn’t the only one, Requiem wasn’t the best either. So far I mainly find these performance issues with F2P titles.
Copy Cat: MMOs have the potential to be a very diverse lot of games. So, why do we see so many take after one ‘traditional’ style? We all know it, it’s come to be called the ‘WoW’ style, though its roots are a bit deeper than that. The MMO genre is slowly dying for me as every ‘new’ release has that ‘been there, done that’ feel to it. While so many companies have been jumping on the WoW bandwagon, few have realised that they could potentially make more by standing out from the pack. We need a shift to originality if the MMO market is to continue thriving and from the look of what’s coming — I’m hopeful we’ll be seeing some new breeds of MMO.
