I am honestly dumb founded that people here didn't know that 4e ripped off ("inspired by") MMOs.
What's Wrong With MMOs? D&D 4th ed. Has Answers
D&D 4th Edition - Learning from MMOs
Was 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons meant to be a MMORPG?
The roles established by Everquest was tank, support, damage, and controller. WoW removed controller and folded it into other classes to simplify the game.
Heh, you're going to need to try a
lot harder than this.
The first two are nothing more than random opinion blogs that don't even make a good argument. I'm not sure the first even addresses the issue. The third is just taking a quote out of context. Yes, there is no doubt that WotC looked at MMO design a bit in their effort to apply advances in RPG game design to D&D with 4E. That doesn't
at all imply that the end result resembles MMOs, let alone a specific MMO.
Also, you've got your MMO history a bit wrong. Everquest did not establish roles. The
players of Everquest established roles. Everquest, particularly in its original form, was a monument of bad game design. It was a game built around "camping" monsters, where the designers not only never intended the game to play like that, they didn't even acknowledge that playstyle for years. Different character roles were built up based on players developing strategies to use classes that were quite bluntly not built with roles in mind. The entire control role originally came from a single spell from the Enchanter class, called Mesmerize (which brought forth the often heard "don't break mez!" line on chat). Tanking was rather poorly implemented and only really worked for one of the twelve classes. There was also the whole solo "kiting" role embodied by the Druid class. These roles were only formalized in the game long after players distilled them from the game's eccentricities.
Things were pretty much the same for WoW. It was a much better designed game from the beginning, but even in it the idea of roles was an emergent one. The main reason it doesn't have a controller role is because it didn't provide the mechanics for one back during that emergent period. Formal recognition of roles and design built around them only came later.
Roles were not invented for MMOs. They were discovered in MMOs. They are something that naturally emerges from RPG rules and cooperative play. Players create roles out of tactical necessity whether designers intend for them or not. MMOs merely forced the world of game design to recognize that fact, and start thinking about them from the beginning rather than ignore them until it is too late.
Of course, the entire implementation of roles in WoW is conceptually different from roles in 4E. Roles in WoW are merely a description of what a class does, and characters are forced to heavily specialize and create builds in order to be functional in that role. Roles in 4E are a skillset a class is naturally good at, so that a character can be customized in a wide variety of ways without compromising their ability to functionally serve in a role. They are totally opposite approaches to the idea.
