I’ve recently posted this. I think I should put it into my sticky notes, I post it so often. A lot of people just don’t understand what an MMO or RPG is, let alone an MMORPG. Here we go:
An MMORPG consists of two parts: MMO - Massively Multiplayer Online, and RPG - RolePlaying Game.
The MMO part stipulates that you should, as often as possible, be in a massive world with thousands of people around you, which in turn implies that the map should be absolutely colossal so as to not overfill it and lag the server.
The RPG implies that you should select a role and build a character, identify yourself with that character and take actions as that character. The levelling up and the gear is that “build a character” part.
Good MMORPG’s cross these over, using the RPG aspects to give everyone a unique signature that can be recognised by other players in the MMO consistently and repeatedly, then turning that consistent MMO community around and using it to reinforce the player’s immersion by having other players getting to know their character and repeatedly refer to the player as his/her character, thus making it easier to ground your perspective in your character, causing you to roleplay even more without even realising.
This creates a beautiful circular reinforcement mechanism that can almost entirely overtake you. It becomes another life in another world. A chance to reset and make new friendships and relationships. These relationships, in turn, make the game unreasonably sticky. You just can’t put it down . And it’s the best kind of addiction ever; you literally become addicted to being social and friendly.
There are precious few people in the world who understand what an MMORPG is and how to design it. Indeed, you will find that a lot of the same people worked on Everquest and World of Warcraft, as did the same work on Dark Age of Camelot and The Elder Scrolls Online, and then there’s Square, the makers of Final Fantasy. And that’s… basically it. Everyone else are failing.
The best way to truly understand the genre is to listen to some of these people, but most of them won’t give the secret up. World of Warcraft, however, has recently become a notable exception to this. Mark Kern, John Staats, Allan Adham, and Kevin Jordan. Find some clips from those guys.
The problem that we’ve got, is somehow some of this information got lost along the way. World of Warcraft is still a good game in many ways, but as an MMORPG, it is a miserable failure.
More specifically to your sub-points: Arenas, BG’s, M+, etc. are distinctly not MMO features. They feature queue systems, and causes your character to appear and disappear to other players at random.
The open world uses a lot of dynamic sharding tech (aka CRZ) which means that you never encounter the same person twice in the open world. This causes a further breakdown of the MMO community. Most game modes now also scale or modify your gear, or they scale themselves to fit your gear, thus annihilating gear progression other than “numbers get bigger whee”, and since nobody recognises you because of the MMO part breaking down, you are not encourages to start identifying with your character, because nobody refers to your character as really you, and the RPG aspects go down with it.
WoW is no longer an MMORPG.
