For those of you who play MMOs (any of them), what do you like about them and what don't you like about them? What sort of MMOs do you think should be made in the future, if any?

I must state first that I've never owned an MMO of my own and have only played WoW and City of Heroes/Villains for all of 5 minutes, but have watched friends play both a lot.

Having said that, there's not much I can say about either. As far as MMORPGs, where an RPG is supposed to be story-focused, there could be an inherent flaw in the traditional MMORPG structure. Personally, I find it has the same problem most RPGs have in their dependence on showing numbers, which I've ranted about before.

As for the future of MMORPGS, I'd like to see genres/themes that are not traditional fantasy/sci-fi motifs (I think, on principle, both City of Heroes/Villains and The Matrix Online would have lend themselves to rather ideal traditional MMOs). I'd also like to see them changing up the general structure, such as players creating antagonists together that their own weaker characters can challenge, or an MMO that's not strictly an RPG as we know it (which is beginning to happen now it seems).

PRO: If you can play it with a friend, or group of friends, they're really fun and can easily pass a few hours.
CON: Repetitiveness. In WoW, every mission is "Go and kill 'X' number of 'MONSTER'", "Find 'X' number of 'ITEM'", or escort missions.

I think the biggest problem is that there's not enough content development time vs actual play time. An inherent flaw. Attempts at automating this process dynamically, up to this point, have pretty much failed. Giving players an MMOE, like Second Life (where they create their own content) is probably the way to go. However, I think it should have one theme and stick to it.

What do you think of Massively Multiplayer Online Dwarf Fortress?

I think my life just ended in a flash of brilliance. There are not enough hours between now and eternity in which to satiate my unerring desire to play such a game.

Pros:
There is something intrinsically appealing about the idea of playing in a persistent world with many other players that makes other games seem lonely in comparison. Your actions have an effect not just on what you experience, but on what other people experience, and it makes you feel more connected.

Cons:
The gameplay is almost always just a treadmill. The aim is to keep you hooked for as long as possible, while keeping satisfaction just out of reach, like a pork chop dangling from a string in front of an obese, ursine glutton.
There is very little potential for any truly involving narrative.

I'll let you know when I have the development server up.

Con: when you get to the end, there's nothing to do.

Pro:
Some offer beautiful graphics and locations
Some can provide hours of entertainment with friends.

Cons:
Grinding
Repetitiveness
Plot, or lack thereof
The mass idiot festival of people going up to you saying "PVP?" all the ****ing time.
Servers with naturally low rates
Unexplanative NPC's who speak engrish
Unspecific quest instructions. (ex. "Kill the flaming ghost until you receive the medallion of truth." OK theres five different types of flaming ghosts wtf do I kill?)
Leveling alone because unlike your friends you actually have a life outside of the screen and you can't level for 6 hours on end, so while they're level 120+ your still level 25.

One of the pitfalls of MMO's, in my opinion, is that the company can be caught between playing good designer and good business owner. Item X that might cause unbalancing and is potentially bad for the game in the long run, might also make a lot of people happy and keep them playing longer. Another example is slow skill gains--a slightly faster skill increase is probably possible without hurting gameplay, but slower gains mean a person is likely to play longer. Ultima Online had both of these issues back in the day (and I would imagine still does) and were reasons why I quit playing.

A couple of other personal pet peeves of mine include: the almost inherent grind factor of MMO's (although obviously enough people enjoy this sort of thing), and needing a mule character.

One of the things I'm slowly starting to hate about WoW is the inflation of the ingame economy.

With the latest expansions it's EASY to make gold, gold just get thrown at you by NPC vendors and people spend it like no tomorrow on the auction houses. Blizzard has added money sinks into the game, such as epic flying mounts and in the next expansion an epic ring that can teleport you to the new capital city.

But in a whole, the economy sucks and unless you find a good guild to support you at the lower levers if your a brand new player or have a high lever char to feed you money you are forced to pick up two gathering professions to sell and make money so you can afford things, the price on the auction house goes up and up and up for items that are junk for high levels and the low levels that need them can't afford them.

Any long-running MMO's run into this I think.

Cons: They destroy your life & all that is holy.
Pros: They destroy your life & all that is holy.

What about all that which is unholy?

Anyways, MMO's cost money.

Private servers FTMFW

Yea but there's no real reason to have money as a lower level character. Anything you buy at low level is going to be completely obsolete in a few levels. So it's best just not to buy anything at all.

Unless you are going in the lower level battlegrounds etc.
Twink wars are heaps of fun.

Pfft. At level 19 it's just a rogue/hunter fest running around ruining everyone elses' fun. Everyone who twinks should die.

What? No.
I had a shadow priest twink and it was immense fun.
The point of twinking is that you are fighting in a more restricted environment, it's more of a challenge, simpler, yet in it's way more complicated.
If you think it's just about rogues/hunters ganking people then you have no clue.

level 19. Shadow priest is not even possible yet. The only viable low-level twinks are rogues and hunters.

Like I said, you have no clue.
(and by shadow priest I did not mean someone who has shadowform, obviously)

Pros:

They're fun for like a month

Cons:

Your girlfriend will leave you, if you don't have one you won't get one
You don't realize it yet, but pretty much all MMO's suck and are the same thing.

Pros: They're fun, they're definitely more engaging than normal games, and you form friendships and working relationships like you can never with any other genre

Con: They can become repetitive, they can begin to take over large sections of your life if you let it (And there's no reason to), your actions have little to no result on the world as a whole.

I think one of the best examples of that is the migration of Naxxramas in WoW. In Vanilla WoW, Naxxramas was the final raid instance. It was pushed out the door only 2 or 3 months before The Burning Crusade came out, and not many guilds completed it, although mine did (Kel'Thuzad = ezmode) about 4 days before BC came out.

In Wrath of the Lich King, they migrated Naxxramas to Northrend, and are keeping many of the same bosses in there. Which leaves me in a rare situation: What did I do any of that for? We killed the monsters, liberated those inside, got rid of the evil... only for it to simply move 2 years later? Whatever.

Also, this idea that MMOs take over your life and suck you in, etc, etc, is all bollocks. I'm in one of the best raiding guilds on my server, in the top 5% worldwide, and I play maybe 6-8 hours a week? Most of which is our long raid on Sunday Night, where I'm not doing anything anyway. My guild doesn't ask us to put in much time at all outside our raiding duty, has no time requirements, and has numerous backups that allow people to take off 1 or 2 of our three raid days (Especially for farmed content) if they want.

stuff like this, mainly

and this

Also

Addicted to grinding?

fishstickz, you might be fine with just a few hours, but that doesn't make that the norm.
WoW is extremely addictive

EQ was more addictive than wow. Namely because it was better.

But I don't like it when people blame killings and such on it. As for the baby that suffocated, it wasn't due to WoW, just bad parenting. Real bad parenting.

Just because people get addicted to them doesn't make them bad. People get addicted to all sorts of things.

Like cigarettes..... or cocaine!

Pro: My girlfriend, her father and (soon to be I think) step mother, 2 cousins, 2 uncles 1 aunt all play wow, when we can't get together due to work/school or just plain life, we can enjoy a few hours leveling together in WOW until we get a chance to see each other in our busy adult lives.

Con: your attempt at generalization failed hardcore. EVERYONE I know in person that plays WoW or other MMO's has an active social and work life, many of us get together on weekends and hit the bar or have a game of poker, all of them have girlfriends and one of them is engaged, his bride to be ALSO plays WoW.

Yes, it can be addiction, but I HATE that gernalization about gamers and about MMO's players as well.

In high school the people who played WoW would talk about it every chance they got.

I thought it was pretty weird

whats Mmo?

if(getThingFlags(source) & 0x8){
  do her}
elseif(getThingFlags(source) & 0x4){
  do other babe}
else{
  do a dude}

This.

Mamorphagors

On second thought, don't kill the bot, keep it around. I kind of like its sense of humor.

What the?

Deadman I check Microsoft Word and "What the?" is considered a Fragment.

What does Microsoft Word consider erroneously-capitalized common nouns and tense-mixing?

And water.

After my ex and I broke up I was looking for something to take up the massive amount of free time I suddenly had. I tried Eve and WoW for a couple of days each. Eve was just profoundly boring. I understand that it's the kind of thing you need a good group of people to play with, and you really have to get into it, but it just didn't seem like my kind of game. WoW was alright, but seemed like it would get old fast. I ended up getting another girlfriend and didn't subscribe to either.

I do kind of want to check out Age of Conan, though. Waiting for a trial on that.

Bet they're all fat and out of shape too!

PS, learn to spell.