I'm tired of MMO's. They are supposed to be super social games, but I find myself "soloing" for the most part and not giving a flip about anyone else out there. This got me thinking: no player in-game is special. They all get the same content. They all beat the same bosses and the outcome is the same for every story. I can do that in a single player game and feel like my character is the only one that matters. No so for an MMO.

So this got me thinking... (no, this isn't a rant) what can be done to change this feeling of not being special in a game world full of "heroes"? My answer: deal with the overpopulation of heroes. Limit their numbers to something reasonable. Also: make situations the players deal with have real consequences. Events should resolve for better or for worse and stay that way until the hero does something about it. If there's a Lich in a cave nearby and your character kills it, then the guy 5 minutes behind you can't kill it again for his quest because it's already dead!

How can this be executed? Well... I'm thinking that the first thing that needs changed is the meaning of the first "M" in MMO. Make it Moderate Multiplayer Online. Limit the number of players to anything from 1 to 100 depending on the size of in-game real estate and make the quests "complete-able" only once per server. I know I'm being unreasonable now, but I think it's the future of cooperative gaming. I point to RDR, GTA V, and Farcry 3 as examples of ModMO experiences where everyone is having fun. Granted, they add the final piece of the puzzle: randomly generated quests. Then it doesn't matter if the quests are lost forever if botched. We'll make more! And cities, outposts, and zones can be continuously conquered by opposing factions to extend gameplay.

Servers can be rented by the players on them. Some prepaid predetermined amount divided over the number of intended players (character creation would have to happen in advance of server creation) would fund the creation of a new server for a fixed amount of time (which can be extended at any point with more $$$). Interestingly enough, this would also deal with the overseas gold-farming industry as each server would be a closed economy. That is, unless you wanted a gold-farmer on your server and hired one as an extra player...

So here's the elevator pitch for the game I have neither the time or resources to make: WoW-like servers with very small numbers of players and instances that are closed when beaten making a real server timeline of significant events leading to a final climatic battle after which players can compete amongst themselves to maintain control of the game world map's resources for their own purposes.

I suppose once it's all over on a server, the character can be transferred to a new server with a higher difficulty setting. I don't know, I'm just rambling now. It's just that playing with complete strangers all the time sucks.

Thanks for listening...

MMO:s are pretty expensive to make. Adding any form of restrictions on how and when the player may play limit player influx and probably make them bounce away before they get stuck.

I think player content is one way forward. Let players set up challenges/minigames for other players and have some form of mutual award system. People like to be creative and a small tournament in the shape of a minigame can bring people together.

Ugh, not this thread again. Why do people keep thinking the "solution" to MMOs is different content for different players? It's not. T_T What players are really satisfied by is feeling that the game is telling them a story focused on them, but that isn't actually related to whether the player is given different random stimulus than another player, and is absolutely not helped by limiting later players' opportunities because earlier players have already used them up. If anything it should be the other way around, players need protection against other players screwing up the story the game is telling them about their character's adventures.

Ugh, not this thread again.

Now hold on... I don't think you are hearing my point.

Why do people keep thinking the "solution" to MMOs is different content for different players? It's not.

I whole heartily agree... because that's not what I'm saying.

What players are really satisfied by is feeling that the game is telling them a story focused on them

Exactly right! And that can't happen in a traditional MMO where the story isn't unique to that player no matter how much they want to kid themselves about it.

If anything it should be the other way around, players need protection against other players screwing up the story the game is telling them about their character's adventures.

Aaaaaand that's what I'm trying to solve with the small-population server idea. Don't get all hung up on the quest-locking idea I had earlier. It was just a tangential thought passing through my mind at the time. I was writing that post as a somewhat continuous stream of thought (a la Finding Forrester). The small-pop server is really where my inspiration for writing that post came from.

I'm going to make a wild assumption here that everyone is still assuming that the ModMO idea I'm posing still means playing with random strangers. Well... it can if that's your thing, but for me, I'd rather play something like this with friends and acquaintances. It's not that content would be locked for my play experience, but that I could and would work with others that I actually know and give a crap about to make a real impact on the game world. That, and the story can be dynamic, even rogue-like. Like the games I mentioned, my ideal game would be like a ModMO sandbox without all the annoying real-world strangers screwing things up for me. If anyone's going to screw things up, I'd like it to at least be someone I know...

TL;DR: I want a big game with a small population so I can feel like my character actually matters. (Like the Elder Scrolls + a few friends!)

Well, personally I think the "answer" is more interactive storytelling in MMOs. And good interactive storytelling pretty much requires there to be no randomness in the base game given to players - instead the only difference in players' experience is a side effect of the game responding to their choices and actions. Randomly generated quests are the root of all evil as far as interactive storytelling goes. Well, other than budget limitations for creating interactive content and bugs in the game's ability to track and respond to what the player has and hasn't done (I'm looking at you Skyrim).

Personally I've found that playing MMOs with people I know in real life doesn't work at all; we don't like the same kind of MMO or the same type of play within an MMO, we can't stay synchronized as far as leveling goes, and it puts unnecessary burdens on a friendship to try to synchronize our schedules for crap like dungeon runs. I like soloing, I like doing an activity within sight range of someone else doing the same activity, I like having someone to chat to about the activities of the game and someone to trade with in the marketplace; other people make the game feel real, but I don't really want to play co-op with them for more than 15% of the time I'm playing. I don't like sandboxes, and my ideal MMO would have a more or less linear core, with the sandboxy part limited to personal property development and pet breeding and such. That's just me; I just figured I'd explain where I'm coming from.

This totally breaks the model of the MMO though. It is by and large an "endless repetition" genre of game, and "completing" the game by finishing everything in a given server destroys that. And you lose a lot of scope to do things like be a merchant, show off rare equipment, etc. Plus, what happens when Player A doesn't log on for a week and returns to find that the server has been cleared? What content remains for him or her then? If the total server population is only 100 players, wouldn't the world seem desolate and empty unless every single player was online then too?

From what you've written I think you might be coming at this from the wrong angle. You don't want a pared-down MMO, you want an MO (multiplayer online), which is really just single-player++ deluxe. If Skyrim had a co-op mode it sounds like that would be most of what you want.

it seems to me that the current MMO model is pretty successful. Maybe you should frame this discussion less as a way to "fix" MMOs and more as a different type of multiplayer game from MMOs.

For instance, I'm a big fan of the Arma "Wasteland" game mode, where a server with a population from a handful of players up to 80 or more, organized into factions and teams, will present them with both persistent content and emergent "Missions" that can be cleared or failed only once per server. There are cars and rifles and "base parts" (walls, ramps, bunkers, gun emplacement) that can be collected and placed. Some players spend all their time playing house and building fortresses out of sandbags and planks, then hoarding crates of guns and hoping someone flies past their anti-aircraft battery so they can shoot at them. The missions are usually item-based, like a disbled tank spawning in a field with a platoon of NPC soldiers defending it. When it drops in, everyone gets a notification and a marker is placed on the map. Sometimes it's a race to collect the goods, other times it can be a real battle, with different teams duking it out to see who can hold the field long enough to repair the tank and drive it away before they get killed or someone hits the tank with a bazooka.

Good times, and somewhat in line with what you discuss here. I'll log on, recognize a few names from previous sessions, get together with my allies and watch out for my enemies while we compete and cooperate with strangers to get loot or k/d ratios or a really awesome base set up. It could be ten minutes, it could be two hours, but it's almost always fun, even though the content is finite and you eventually see it all, doing the same mission with different friends and enemies, perhaps in a different location or with different starting conditions, provides endless challenge and reward.

I'm sure there are other examples of that sort of play, but it's the first one that came to my mind.

The thing is, in order for players to feel like they did something nobody else did, everyone else on the server has to be denied the opportunity to do that. Wasteland does this through competition, so if someone else gets that chopper in the air, it's because you failed to stop them and take it for yourself. In a PvE game, wouldn't that Lich Cave burn a lot of butts when a gang of heroes gallops to the entrance just as my mates and I are trotting away with a full set of Lich Bone Armor tucked in our saddlebags? Wasted trip, wasted prep, wasted buffs. They call us some mean names and go back to camping the bulletin board waiting for another Lich to populate.

Couldn't you do it like PayDay 2? There's no shortage of jobs to do, you just get your crew out there and do them. You want a bank heist? Wait twelve seconds and you'll get one. You want a bank heist with bold in the vault and maximum police resistance? Wait three or four minutes or just make a custom mission for a small fee and hope you can clear enough lucre to recoup your investment. You don't bump into random bank thieves at the safe house, but that's fine by me, because I don't want to get the feeling that D.C. is chock-a-block full of hardened burglars with racist nicknames.

I'm saying the satisfaction of being an elite and significant individual/team can be had rather easily in a non-MMO setting. You get it in Diablo, you get it in Gears of War, you get it in a thousand games with co-operative play that don't feature massive populations and central hubs where fifty guys are walking around in the same Eternal Wrath Pauldrons that you earned by slaying a living demon in the heart of a volcano, asking if you want to trade a stack of sasquatch hairs for two full sets of Johnny Knoxville's teeth.

This totally breaks the model of the MMO though. It is by and large an "endless repetition" genre of game, and "completing" the game by finishing everything in a given server destroys that.

There are some existing MMOs which are cyclical. Whenever a server is completed a new one is opened (or in some cases a new one is opened on a regular schedule every month or two) and players race to be the first to accomplish various things in the new server. In some cases the player's customized personal property or appearance is saved when the rest of the server resets. Some parts of the new server have been randomized and must be rediscovered.

Agreed (with Iron Chef) this could be a fun new take on the MMO structure.

MMOs are quest based, some quests being quite meaningful and other which are worthless tasks. Player's follow the HUD or map and carry out their quest to drive the narrative forward. Instead of having important heroes doing pointless tasks it might be fun to explore more pointless characters... Maybe the idea of a paired down MMO is reasonable by playing out a branched chapter of a branched story allowing players to drop into the roles of the existing characters written to play out the adventure of a chapter in the story (be it a major character or a minor characters). By the end any branched outcome of a chapter is driven by the actions of players. If no player jumps into the positions the whole chapter can be played out by the NPCs as it's written, the player driven actions will have meaningful consequences to the stories outcome.

The outcome could drive and trigger parts of up coming quests and tasks like any branching RPG. I don't play a lot of MMO RPGs but this would really enable the episodic content structure for players, since each chapter could be populated with hundreds if not thousands of characters both meaningful and filler to flesh out the chapter's world. Allowing players to enjoy serious(primary characters) or casual(tertiary characters) gameplay when they choose which character to jump into for a chapter. Players could start chapter's they've purchased and play in private or public games choosing the characters they'd like to explore. The tasks, adventures and quests could be driven more by the internal decisions of the character (like internal monologue) still prompted by character socialization but more so as a decision made by the character to go get something done.

To handle trolls and other grief, each quest can have multiple outcomes all triggering the plot to drive towards one of a few major outcomes. This would be a dizzyign exercize to try and write with even a small cast of characters but I still think it would be a lot of fun and it could still enable a lot of MMO staples like rare items custom leveling and etc. These elements could enable players to unlock certain quest endings they hadn't experienced before. So instead of just multiple endings you have multiple endings based on prerequisites. Many of which that could encourage cooperation and more socialization (which I get the feeling is the root cause for this topic). I want to play this game. How about you?

If Skyrim had a co-op mode it sounds like that would be most of what you want.

That's probably closest to the truth, right there. I'm not even going to give Elder Scrolls Online a fair chance because of the "Massive" portion of its multiplayer aspect.

I don't like sandboxes, and my ideal MMO would have a more or less linear core, with the sandboxy part limited to personal property development and pet breeding and such. That's just me; I just figured I'd explain where I'm coming from.

To each their own, right? My favorite MMO to date was Star Wars Galaxies (Pre NGE. The CU didn't bother me so much). Very sandboxy, randomly generated missions, and a core storyline if you chose to follow it. You'd think I'd like Minecraft, but I don't. Too much sand, not enough box. I don't want to build EVERYTHING I own from the ground up...

EDIT: Also, I don't care for modern day settings. I live in modern day. I want to escape from modern day. So my ideal settings are Futuristic Sci-Fi or Mythological Fantasy.