My only problem with this 'bad design' is the grinding by design. They are also set up like a form of gambling.

I've put HUNDREDS of hours into Skyrim, and none of it was grinding. That number may be 500 too. It was all fun and exploring.

I've put 100 hours into Dark Souls, and some of it was grinding, but that grinding was never required, and it was fun in the form of helping other players kill bosses.

In a commercial MMO, you have to grind for a ages to get anything.

Skyrim (for all it's faults) could teach these MMOs a thing or two. Open the whole world up and let players have missions that span the world. Make them take time to do.

When you take a mission in an MMO, you enter a small area where everything is close by, and your quest amounts to walking across the street from the NPC and killing ten of something. Repeat * 1000 until you are leveled enough to do the same thing in the next area.

Why not get a randomly generated mission in one town, that leads to someone in another town all together. The town is a few day's walk away. While you're walking you get distracted by wild life, maybe do some hunting, people trying to rob merchant carts, strange noises in the woods. Gather food (maybe from the hunt), and set up camp for the night, then continue until you reach the town and talk to your target who then gives you something to do in a cave that is half a day's walk away, etc...

Depending on your actions with that merchant cart, maybe you made a new player friend when you saved his shipment. Maybe you looted it and now the players in the thieve's guild are angry at you for infringing on their 'turf', and they take it up with the players in the bounty hunters guild. Maybe there are wanted posters with your face on them in whatever town was expecting that cart? There is so much potential to really simulate a little fantasy world and it's inner workings.

But instead everyone just does their zones bs and make people pay to grind endlessly for a 10,000th of a chance to get that rare drop. Just like people who keep putting money in casinos hoping against hope that they beat the odds and win money, even though it's all rigged to begin with. Paying to grind is like walking into McDonalds and giving them 15$ a month for the pleasure of scrubbing their toilets in the hopes that maybe you'll get a free big-mac.

You don't need to stagger things to keep people playing. People play other games for years on end. People still still play all the Elder Scrolls games, Left 4 Dead, Team Fortress 2, etc... They have fun mechanics and the player base takes on a life of it's own.

All in all, my impression is that the vast majority of people doesn't really have too much interest in rich RPG and in fact enjoys a theme-park style of game, and even "grinding" (even while complaining, they enjoy it). I couldn't explain otherwise why such games are so massively successful.

I don't think that the success will hold on. WoW is loosing subscriptions for years now, lotro was forced into F2P and StarWars, well, it is more or less a flop and this with such a setting from bioware ! What about all the other games, DnDO, Rift, Aoen, Secret World, AoC, all have been beaten by WoW a 7 year old game. I think that WoW is still attracting new, more casual gamers, whereas core gamers keep away from new MMORPGs.

Skyrim (for all it's faults) could teach these MMOs a thing or two. Open the whole world up and let players have missions that span the world. Make them take time to do.

With elder scroll online we will see if an other top single player developer is able to pull it off.

The risk of developing a MMORPG is very high and many developers have tried to get their own MMORPG on its way, but many failed the desired goals. So, why do all try to make their own MMORPG ? Well, it is like always cash, which is greed, which is a bad base for good game design. The latter is reaching its climax in F2P MMORPGs:
grind as long as you want, but you need to pay to have fun

So I have an idea or scenario that might be interesting...

Say you have an MMO where the player creates some of the content.

We task the player with controlling their own plane of existence or something like that. We give them an area to make their dream dungeon/castle/base/whatever and they need loot and experience to unlock all the goodies they can to make their base. That means they need to adventure into other players bases to get gold and gear. When the player is online, they could possibly fight with their minions to help fight adventures or multiple adventures or even parties can be running through copies of your base at the same time. Going through the base will give the base owner and the adventuring team experience, but the base owner doesn't get as much. As the player develops their bases, they are creating higher level dungeons which helps to maintain content for the player base. Of course, this model would also be strong for microtransactions as a player could buy special monsters for their base to help boost their gold collection or adventures could buy checkpoints or gear that will make it easier to go through the base.

Just like how players enjoy making levels and maps and all that goodness, in this game we hand that to the players themselves with only a handful of developer created levels. Only thing that really needs to be developed content wise is a fair sized library of parts, weapon assets, and characters. Sure, good game-play, a hub world, and a level-creator will need to be developed, but that doesn't seem so bad with letting the players essentially create, build, and maintain their own expansion of your game.

...dang, I like this idea a lot now...

Edit to make sense: A game where the players create levels for players to explore. A vicious cycle of game-play where the player plays to create content for other players to play... inception?

Easier said than done. MMO's have to be great and realistic games, but have to be the same game for each player. That means that the questgivers will stand in the same spot 24/7 and the quests will have to be text-based, and there are lots of queues.

Say you have an MMO where the player creates some of the content.

Player created content is potentially a great idea -- and it worked well in the afore-mentioned Real of The Mad God -- but it isn't without problems:

• Players can game the system by creating ridiculously easy challenges to give each other rewards.
  
• Trolls can work to try creating scenarios that are impossible to win.
  
• Some players are just unimaginative or unskilled and will create bland and boring content, or a lot of the same generic content.
  
• It can be hard to find and highlight the really good content in a manageable way.
  
  These are all problems that can be solved in different ways, but they definitely mean that player created content is non-trivial to implement.
  
  

  
  but have to be the same game for each player
  

  
  Do they?
  
  This is something that players are used to from existing games, and no one wants to miss out on any experiences or opportunities that others get to experience, but maybe this is an assumption that could be challenged: is there a way we could make it acceptable to not present the same content to each player?

Easier said than done. MMO's have to be great and realistic games, but have to be the same game for each player. That means that the questgivers will stand in the same spot 24/7 and the quests will have to be text-based, and there are lots of queues.

It is only hard as long as you keep thinking in the boundaries of existing MMO's.

The game experience should be the same, but the way to accomplish it could be different. E.g. a mine quest could be started by a rumor. A rumor could be told by X different people in a town. A miner which goes into a tavern telling stories about the old mine (only accessable in the evening), a widow you met in the morning at the market, telling you that her husband died from a mysteriously illness from the mines. A child playing in the yard fearing to get near the mine. A blackboard seeking Y new miners.

As long as you think in term of quest-grinding, kill-X-rats-quests, loot-siege etc. you will not come up with new ideas.

A game where the players create levels for players to explore. A vicious cycle of game-play where the player plays to create content for other players to play... inception?

This is a goal of my game, but it is not yet fully available to test it out (though you can build your own dungeon level and it can be imported). I'm curious about if it works, I think it depends a lot on the available building tools. We will see

We task the player with controlling their own plane of existence or something like that. We give them an area to make their dream dungeon/castle/base/whatever and they need loot and experience to unlock all the goodies they can to make their base. That means they need to adventure into other players bases to get gold and gear. When the player is online, they could possibly fight with their minions to help fight adventures or multiple adventures or even parties can be running through copies of your base at the same time. Going through the base will give the base owner and the adventuring team experience, but the base owner doesn't get as much. As the player develops their bases, they are creating higher level dungeons which helps to maintain content for the player base. Of course, this model would also be strong for microtransactions as a player could buy special monsters for their base to help boost their gold collection or adventures could buy checkpoints or gear that will make it easier to go through the base.

This is something sort of like what we are doing with our game, and I'm glad you mentioned it, Dave. Here is how ours works. It might help to mention that our game is a zombie apocalypse MMO, kind of made like dayZ: You can really "shape" your environment, because you can build things such as walls, forts, anything. So really, you as a player can restore humanity. Do you want to build a town? Heck, if you have the equipment go for it! If people trust you enough, you could rebuild a civilization. Of course, with our zombies, the could still break in, and that's your job to stop them from doing so. With this feature, I think people will be excited. Of course, this is survival, so you will still have to find food, water, medicine, etc. for your town. I think this would be great for other MMOs, as well.

Say you have an MMO where the player creates some of the content.

Another vein of thinking is in terms of emergent gameplay i.e. ways to play the game devised by the players that weren't initially scripted or intended by the developer. Most of the time this is trivial (or game-breaking) stuff like MMO players throwing parties or holding reward-based contests (speed runs, guild activities, "beat this dungeon equipped with naught but a haddock", etc). If the game is instead designed as an emergence-promoting sandbox (give players tools or abilities to create contextually-recognizable goals), you can get all kinds of results:

Placing bounties on other players
Posting quests/jobs on in-game boards that have specific controls on how rewards can be applied ("I need N [link item required], paying [select from algorithm-derived currency amt or available owned items within a quality range]")
Creating unintended fabrication or resource-gathering industries (Logger's guild started up because enough people want crafting resources, build a warehouse to sell from)
Creating player cities by allowing the construction (and subsequent zoning) of structures
Make various stats and activities trackable by the game server so you leave room for granting experience or rewards for previously unplanned activities

It's really hard, actually, to list potentials, because the best part of emergent play is that it's organic and unexpected, it grows out of how people decide to play. Minecraft is the perfect example, but a bit too non-directional. People have devised all kinds of ways to play, but there's no good metric for progress or achievement (aside from the "ooo" factor of a structure or the number of diamonds you've found).

Emergent play is likely the direction a few popular games will go in the next decade. They can't just be empty sandboxes, you need to plant a few seeds of desired progress or achievement, and nurture it through a game system that supports a wide range of activities on some level, and it's not an easy balancing act to do. But someone's going to stumble across the right mix of direction and freedom.

After reading all of this, figured I would put in my two cents worth! ( fyi this is the second edit of this because the first one was so long it wouldnt let me post it, and then it lost it... so.... this is kinda a sum up of a 50 page previous post! lmao )

Background:

I have played almost every mmo since Everquest. I have alpha/beta tested so many clients I have no clue the numbers at this point. I had a number 1 ranked guild in Lineage 2 ( grind crazy game, specially for guild leaders ) and I have had successful guilds in many other games. In fact, the main reason my gaming community got started was because of an MMO. Suffice to say, I have some time "wasted" on thousands of hours with each and every attempt at an MMO.

Design Flaws:

As many have already mentioned there are some inherent issues with the design of any MMO. Many companies, including the giant Blizzard, have found that the easiest form of combating these inherent issues is to throw content at the player. This does not really answer the problem it simply quells it, and as my friend Ashaman has already stated this business model is on of fortitude, eventually they will run out of the ability to create content fast enough and their lifespan will dwindle. So lets get out some of the basic issues, some already stated:

Hero complex:
This is more true than one could imagine. The core of gaming is to experience something that you, yourself, would be unable to do in real life. To be something bigger, better, stronger, faster, and more powerful than humanly imaginable. ( not all games have this concept but when you are dealing with RPG's this is very much a staple point ) To accomplish this you must put the player in an epic story where they are the key factor in the resolution of the conflict. Where this gets to be a problem is when you have 5mil subscribers who expect and demand the same thing. How can you deliver such a thing to each player, the simple answer is you cant. In todays business model they simply throw more quests at you and questing zones in hopes that players will adventure out and do the other quest lines. Good in theory, bad in practice, since most players simply want to max out their characters so they can get to the end game content. ( what many mmo players call the REAL game )
If we take a moment to look at what this really means we see that the only purpose for the gamer to go through lvl 1 - 100 would be for the developer to draw out the payments the player must make. I mean lets get down to the brass tax here, the reason the level model existed previously was for some form of progression, but in an MMO it has a dual purpose. Create progression and game development while extending the time needed to play to ensure the consumer is consuming. The only logical method to attack this would be to throw more content at the player to ensure they are leveling longer and without worry, sadly the players are smarter than the developer gives them credit for and they begin to min/max their characters. This creates leveling guides and fastest leveling builds; defeating the purpose of the progression system and destroying any hope of the developer being able to control the rate at which the gamer will progress. In doing this, the developer is presented with yet another problem... do we modify the core game to restrict those that attempt to min/max thus making it harder for the casual player or do we simply make it easier overall and appeal only to the casual gamer? The answer, much like the problem, is very problematic and any choice you make fucks with the 5mil other players that are playing. This is one of the pitfalls of designing a game meant for millions of gamers rather than for one person at a time. So what can be done?

Hero Complex Solution:
The simple answer is we must look at how we attack the idea of delivering content to the player. Rather than give them 50 fetch quests ( cause it is easy to code ) we need to look into skill driven quests that the player can complete. Each quest could have level of skills defined and the player ( upon accepting the quest ) would choose what skill level to do the quest at. The higher the skill level the more reward the player would gain from completing it and the more difficult the adventure/quest would be. We also need to learn better ways to present quests to the playerbase. Many games are attacking this now such as Firefall. Instead of an NPC that simply gives anybody who talks to him/her a quest have some story driven content that provides quests to the entire world and as players complete aspects of the quest the entire world is updated. This type of system is complex to do and is by no means the answer to all but it can go a long way to help look at the problem of fetch and turn in quest method. This also opens the door for players to challenge other players to do quests better or faster which in turn gives them incentives to do them more than once! Netting more rewards and more gains. How many times did you play a COD map over because you wanted the 3 gold stars, or in the iPhone app you wanted to get the full perfect score for the level you were on... we must learn to capture that desire and need and harness that with enjoyment and fun.

What other problems exist for the MMO Genre?

To many, the field of possible issues is insurmountable; I believe this is the main reason as to why thousands of companies dream but fail. The genre limits creativity and hampers the designer’s abilities because of our lack in technology. If developers were to spend more time advancing the technology to support new and innovative methods for delivering story and content than perhaps the field would be viable again… until such a time it is just going to be a content burn.