All I'm saying is, a lot of people thought there was too much MMORPG influence in 4th Edition. I can neither confirm nor deny, since I don't play them. But I always thought it was a weird thing to complain about: even if it was, why did that have to be an automatic negative?
Oh I don't deny lots of people
said it. Lots of people say a lot of things. But in a simple factual sense, it was not a valid claim. There was virtually no "MMORPG influence" in 4E. I asked people at the time to point out what they thought was WoW-influence or MMORPG-influence, because I was an active WoW player at the time, and someone who played MMOs since 1999 with EQ, I couldn't work out what the heck they meant.
And whilst I got a lot of angry, hate-filled responses, no-one ever specified anything except "WoW has roles, and 4E has roles, so 4E's roles are derived from WoW and like WoW are bad and dumb". Literally not a single other part of 4E's design was pointed to as WoW/MMORPG-influenced. Nor was anyone able to explain this further than "Well Defenders are exactly the same as Tanks..." or the like, which is patently false. They operate in completely different ways.
And that's it - roles. That's all they ever said.
And that's a ridiculous assertion, because roles had been around in wargames for decades. Fitting different kinds of troops into broad categories, or sometimes quite narrow categories, had been going on for years. It had also go on in other games, video and otherwise. Dividing ships or troops or classes into general categories has long been a thing. And in fact in RPGs it had happened before a ton in superhero RPGs (Brick, Blaster, Speedster, etc. - you could be a Brick in a million different ways - the key thing was just to be hard to kill and hit hard, for example). Hell, in 2E AD&D, in 1989, Warrior, Priest, Rogue, and Wizard were basically roles.
WoW had actually only relatively recently developed roles - in vanilla, the approach was that only Warriors were "real tanks", only Priests were "real healers" (notice what those match up exactly to? Yes it's 2E AD&D), and everything else was just kind of there (DPS as a role was a sort of vague concept). TBC, in 2007, changed this up so there were several classes which had "tank specs", and "healer specs", and "DPS specs". That's when roles actually started to be a thing. It wasn't until Cataclysm, in 2010, that they were clearly separated, too (they sorted of blended into each other prior to that). Cataclysm made them distinct "specs" - you were a Tank Warrior OR you were a DPS Warrior, instead of having points spread between the two, for example.
When 4E was in development, WoW didn't really have roles, except in a vague notional/theoretical way. 4E came out, what, six months after WoW acquired them (in a basic sense), and this caused people to link them, because these two big RPGs both had roles.
But 4E's roles didn't actually match up to those of WoW or other MMOs. 4E had Defender, Striker, Controller and Leader. People got as far as saying "Defender = Tank, Striker = DPS..." and then just sort of petered off. Some of them tried "Er.... Leader = Healer?" but even they could sense that was dubious at best. And Controller just didn't match at all.
Defenders actually didn't work like MMO Tanks of that era at all (or any earlier one).
In MMOs, Tanks stick enemies to them by making a magic number go up (originally referred to as "aggro"). Generally this is accompanied by hitting them for paltry amounts of damage that create inexplicably large amounts of threat, or using quasi-magical abilities that do likewise. The enemies just get sort of superglued to the tank in a very implausible way. My personal favourite for hilarity was the Paladin in Dark Age of Camelot, who healed the entire party for tiny amounts (imagine a Paladin who healed everyone within 30' for 1HP every other round), and the animation was a holy grail pouring golden sparks on the Paladin, so said the monsters were attracted to "Pally Butter Sauce".
Defenders, on the other hand, focused on preventing enemies from doing things, or threatening them with consequences if they did. It was a totally different paradigm, and one familiar to people who played tactical CRPGs/JRPGs. They also did good damage (something unheard of in MMO tanks of that era). There was no magical "aggro", and it played totally differently.
Strikers being DPS is kinda valid bit also meaningless, because the idea of a character who is "good at killing people" is hardly an original one.
Leaders being Healers was not terribly accurate - I saw a lot of people uncomfortable when they made this claim. They knew that 4E Leaders did a hell of a lot more than heal, and indeed, a lot of them didn't heal very much at all. In an MMO of that era (2007-2010, let's say), a healer did basically nothing in a normal party other than cast heals and maybe cure poisons/disease/similar on party members. They didn't typically fight at all, and generally out of, say, 60 seconds, 50 of them would spent either casting a heal, or waiting for mana to regen so they could cast more heals. Whereas in 4E, most healing had been pushed off on to Healing Surges, and every class had "Second Wind". Combat healing was rare and precise, and usually a mark that something had gone wrong. A Leader typically used 0-2 real healing abilities in a fight. Most of what leaders did was fight and buff - and by buff I include stuff like making others make extra attacks and so on.
Controllers were particularly interesting because they didn't match up to any extant role in MMOs of that era. Back in the very early days of MMOs, there were a number of classes referred to as "CC" (Crowd Control). In EQ, their job was to use abilities or spells on monsters to prevent them from acting for long periods of time. Usually a solid "mezz" or the like (mesmerize - equivalent to Hold Person in AD&D, but very long duration). However, by the time even original WoW rolled around in 2004, there were no "CC" classes any more - all classes had some "CC" abilities.
D&D 4E's controllers were a different take from either the original or later CC classes. They controlled by short-term stuff like area denial, area damage (wiping out minions particularly), difficult terrain, short-duration stuns, and a lot of movement stuff that no MMORPG had any truck for (but again, games like FF Tactics, used a huge amount). In MMO terms they were actually more like someone spec'd to be a massive jerk in PvP than anything else!
One game that genuinely did have some similar ideas to D&D 4E was the original Guild Wars, a weird hybrid game, which was single or small-scale multiplayer, and about managing a party with quite complex abilities (it was clearly inspired by M:tG in some ways), but I literally never heard anyone talk or complain about that.
So I mean, that's a lot of words, but it clears that up - there was no reasonable claim that 4E was "WoW-inspired". It was just a cheap insult, a meme that people repeated because people repeat memes (especially they did back then, when people were less savvy re: memes)..
As for your point re "How was that even an insult?", well, quite. But it was. And the reason was essentially that MMORPGs were seen as in competition with pen and paper RPGs. Here, in 2020, we can see that was drivel - that if anything, both feed each other. But at the time, everyone and their brother had a story of how WoW stole one of their players. And that's probably true, too! But what people saying that didn't realize was that was happening in every hobby practiced by younger people. Amateur sports players were disappearing into WoW. Other non-MMO video games were losing people to WoW. And so on. Why? Because was ridiculously time-consuming at that time, and could feel extremely addictive. I mean, I barely played pen and paper RPGs 2003-2004 because of them myself. And there was a hilarious perception that they were "dumbed down" versions of TT RPGs, which was nonsense on a variety of levels. So that's how that insult functioned.
Btw I keep saying "of that era" because it's pretty clear 4E did influence later MMOs a bit (Western ones, anyway - particularly Guild Wars 2).
