I've been playing video games quite a while. Nearly 30 years. My first gaming experience was on an NES, but I've also had the opportunity to play on even older systems since. Suffice to say, I've spent tens of thousands of hours on hundreds (thousands?) of video games. I've dabbled at least a bit in every genre and subgenre you can think of. But the one that really grabbed me and for the most part spoiled the rest for me is MMORPGs.
People say MMORPGs as a genre have gone downhill lately. They're correct. (Others vehemently argue against it. They're deluded or lying.) It's not so much the number of players that's drastically gone downhill (though that has, somewhat). It's not the revenue, per se (more on that later). It's the quality of the games. But it's also a lot more than that.
Yes, I know what the common argument is here. No, it's not "rose-colored glasses". MMORPGs were better 7-15 years ago. We can know this because we can play some of the more popular ones on private servers. These private servers, despite having various extra issues that retail servers never had, are nevertheless extremely popular and, for the most part, better than any current MMORPG released in the last 5-7 years. The only exception to this is graphics quality. Really. In every other way, MMORPGs have become worse. So if graphics is the end-all, be-all, single most important aspect of a game for you, maybe you'll find the newer fare an improvement. Otherwise, I highly recommend trying a private server for yourself.
The first big problem I'm looking at is the motive of the companies making MMORPGs. This, however, is not just a problem with MMORPGs, but with many videogame genres. Videogaming in general started out and became popular because it provided many hours of fun entertainment. But the bigger the industry became, the more the focus shifted from "providing fun, because fun sells" to "how much money can we squeeze from our potential consumer base". Granted, there are exceptions at both ends of the spectrum, but that's been the overall trend. This alone, however, is far from sufficient to cause the issues we currently have in the MMORPG genre, because there's always going to be companies that at least try to focus on fun first, even if most don't.
The second big problem is defining the genre in the first place, and this is another area where deceptive developers and publishers have really caused problems. It's shocking how many people don't actually even know what the words in the acronym "MMO" are, never-mind understand what they mean. So before we can go on, we have to take care of this right now.
MMO is an acronym, and the words in it are "Massively Multiplayer Online". Of course, the "Online" portion is largely irrelevant now, because all multiplayer video games these days are online. Even console games. So that leaves us with the "MM" part to understand.
The second M, obviously, stands for "Multiplayer", and everyone seems to get this part. But that's where the understanding ends. Gamers in general do seem to understand the definition of multiplayer: "A multiplayer video game is a video game in which more than one person can play in the same game environment at the same time."
The real problem is that people don't understand the first M. The first M stands for "Massively". Not "Massive". (This is an important distinction, first because using Massive in this context tells you nothing useful at all, but more importantly, because that's simply what the acronym is, and always has been.)
"Massively" is an adverb, describing the adjective "Multiplayer" which describes something about the game. The dictionary definition of "Massive" that applies here is "large in scale, amount, or degree". Therefore, the full definition of "MMO" is: "A video game in which a large (massive) number of players can play in the same game environment at the same time, online."
"MMO" is not a genre. There's no such thing as "MMO-like", or "MMO-features". Because, you see, "MMO" is simply a vague term describing the scale of the multiplayer. It's exactly the same kind of term as "4-player co-op", or "1 vs 1 head-to-head", or "15 vs 15 team battles". No more, no less.
This is actually a very significant issue, because it makes it increasingly difficult for veteran players looking for a new MMO to sort through the mess and find the games that actually are MMOs, but even worse, it makes it difficult or impossible for new gamers to understand what an MMO is, and whether or not they're actually interested in them.
This also ties in directly with the perception that "MMOs are fine, because they make as much money as ever". I believe that to be false, primarily because in recent trends, many many games that are not MMOs at all get lumped in with them. World of Tanks, for example, is extremely financially successful, and if you look on their website, you'll see they call it an MMO. But it isn't, not even remotely. It's 15 vs 15 team battles, in its largest scale. The bottom line is, once you strip away all the games that are falsely called MMOs, you don't have a whole lot of financial success left.
WoW, as a prime example, is a shadow of itself. It has only a little over 50% of the subscribers it had just 4 years ago, and many of those are people who bought 1-year subs at a substantial discount just because it got them something else for free, and many more are players paying with in-game gold (apparently that's a thing now). Those players who quit WoW, for the most part, have not moved on to other MMORPGs. This is fairly self -evident, because there's only a few million active players in all other MMORPGs put together. (And that's not even looking at the fact that the number of successful MMORPGs right now is roughly similar to the number 4 years ago. For every new one that's successful, there's an old one that used to be successful and has since shut down. These other MMORPGs collectively do not have significantly more players than they did 4 years ago.)
The third - and possibly largest - problem is the gamers themselves. Very few gamers truly understand what makes a good and successful game. Most gamers don't even fully understand what they themselves want from a video game. This becomes evident, as you see many video game developers continuously changing their games with updates to give players what they ask for - yet somehow, even the players asking for it, often end up quitting because of it.
The core problem here is that what people are often asking for (and get) is more instant gratification. The "unwanted time-wasters" get cut out, and only thing things players think they want is left. This is problematic for two reasons: first, when you immediately get what you want, you quickly get bored with it and want something else. And second, when you immediately get what you want with no time and/or effort investment, it's never as satisfying.
This has never been more evident than in World of Warcraft, though most fail to realize or understand it. This is largely due to the fact that WoW still retains a relatively large player base. WoW, however, while being the largest success story in MMOs, also introduced the largest problems, and caused its own imminent (if slow) demise.
People look at the current number of players still remaining in WoW, and all they see is that it's still got one of the largest player-bases in MMOs. That's true. But the far more significant number is how many people have quit WoW.
It's probably impossible to get any actual hard data on this (Blizzard should have the numbers, but would never release them for obvious reasons) but simply by observing a few things such as the wane of WoW's popularity in general society, as well as all the people every gamer personally knows who quit WoW, we can make a safe, educated guess that the number of players who once subbed to WoW but no longer do, is in the tens, if not hundreds of millions. To put it bluntly, it is extremely likely that more people have quit WoW than currently play all MMORPGs put together.
Yet this entire time, people have been saying what they want in WoW, and Blizzard has been trying to put those things in (or take things out). Even as early as beta before vanilla release some of this started happening, but it wasn't until the end of TBC that things really started taking a turn for the worse. People complained that they didn't get to see all the end-game content, so in the big pre-Wrath patch, Blizzard drastically nerfed all raid bosses. In that final month, more people got to see that content than the entire rest of the expansion. Did most of those people stick around? Obviously not, since only about 7 million people are currently subbed to WoW, and very few of those were playing during TBC.
By then, players in general had also decided that end-game was the only part of the game that really matters, and want quicker leveling time to cap. No problem, says Blizzard! Wrath comes out, and leveling 1 to 80 now takes less time than leveling 1 to 70 took in TBC. People complained about heroics being too difficult in TBC. No problem, says Blizzard! All 5-player instances in Wrath were, for the most part, trivially easy. Especially once you did them once or twice. As soon as you knew how to do it, no challenge whatsoever. (TBC 5-player content, by comparison, was significantly more difficult regardless of how well you knew it, until you heavily out-geared it.)
But this trend was far from over in WoW. "Raids have too much trash," players said. Blizzard added ToC. "Forming groups for dungeons takes too long", players said. Blizzard added possibly the worst feature ever: the LFD queue. Suddenly players no longer had to spend any time looking for a group, or worrying about socializing, or even being a decent human being to other players. Who cares, you're never gonna see those assholes again anyway, right? Suddenly, no one had to travel to a dungeon. Ever. Instant gratification at its finest.
But even that wasn't enough. (I quit early in Cataclysm, so the rest I only know by what I've read elsewhere.) The next big change was in the talent trees, making them far more simplistic and less flexible. Apparently they were too difficult to figure out. Players still complained about raids taking too long to set up, so they took the LFD queue a step further and added a LFR. By this time, even most of the die-hard fans were starting to realize WoW had really gone off the rails.
But it still wasn't enough, apparently. Next step was to eliminate any need to go exploring at all, by adding garrisons. And that's where we are now: you log in to sit in your own private instance doing shit by yourself while you wait for a queue to pop to go do content with randomly-selected players you never saw before and have no reason to give any fucks about. I don't know exactly what you call a game like that, but it's certainly not an MMO any more, and ever fewer players are willing to put up with it now.
But all these changes are based on what players thought they wanted. And that brings us to the crux of this problem, because developers do need to listen to players to determine what changes need to be made. The difficulty is in being able to distinguish between the insightful players who actually understand what makes a game good, and the hopelessly clueless who don't even understand what they really want themselves. Since the former are an exceedingly small percentage of the player-base, their input is often missed or ignored, while the vocal majority of the clueless gets changes pushed through. The end result is a mess of garbage that only a very small percentage of MMORPG players even tolerates, nevermind actually enjoys
So what's it going to take to get a good quality MMORPG developed again?
The first key, obviously, is that it's going to have to be developed by a company that focuses on fun first, and lets profit result because the game is good, instead of focusing on profit above all else.
The second key is, somehow, someone has to stop deceptive game developers and publishers from peddling all manner of other games as "MMOs". Right now, an obscure developer could make the best MMORPG ever, and it could easily fall through the cracks unnoticed in the midst of the massive mess of other crap that is falsely called MMOs. It would take hours to sort through all that junk just on Steam and determine what's actually an MMO. Gamers certainly don't have the patience for that, and probably not the time, nor should they.
The third key is, developers need to learn how to distinguish between the loud ignorant clamoring of the very vocal majority that don't even know what they want themselves, and the reliable input of rare insightful gamers who actually understand what makes an MMORPG good and successful. Along with this, developers probably need to go back and revisit older MMORPGs (or in the case of WoW, older expansions) to see and understand what made them better and kept more players playing them longer.
None of this is particularly easy, and is probably beyond the capabilities of most developing houses. If it weren't, we'd have progress instead of regress in the genre overall.
