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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Haltherrion" data-source="post: 5384725" data-attributes="member: 18253">Not advocating you try them again (they have other faults these days) but one reason WoW succeeded was it addressed some of the shortfalls of the earlier systems. I tried EQ about the same time and after four hours of killing bats so I could get to a level where I could do something useful, I quit. Very stupid way to start you off in the game. WoW has a bunch of nice starting areas and a fair amount of effort into early quests (some of the better ones in the game actually) and makes leveling a character much more fun. It has loads of other problems, though. Without rehashing the other WoW issues, the general problem I see with WoW and many other systems is that they were actually designed, at least initially, around the experience of leveling your characters and seem to have been essentially surprised when everyone got to max level and demanded more things to do. Thus the creation of raids and gear that is far more determinant of what your character can do than the character itself (a naked level 80 WoW character is essentially useless; a well geared 80 might do 10x the damage of the naked character.) I think MMOs might become interesting when they focus on characters exploring a huge world and not characters maxing out their level and gear. The only way to really get huge is to allow players to create content. It would require a method of identifying trusted content creatores and trusted content raters/screeners but it is do-able. Coupled with that, it would probably need a gear system that has stuff wear out so that rather than being focused on getting the next even better thing, you are focused on maintaining your gear, sometimes getting something really cool but knowing that cool thing will go away sooner or later. This will move the player focus from "I gots the coolest gear" (in WoW-land this translates into "my gearscore is higher than your gearscore", I kid you not; there are add-ons to show you gear score) to enjoying the setting and building up credit/contacts with PCs, NPCs, and organizations. I'm sure MMOs will get there some day and then I really fear for tabletop gaming because the boundaries will be very blurred.</blockquote>

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