Jandau said:
Endgame content can never be good. If they make it hard, then people complain about it being only for hardcore players. If it's easier, then people complain it's catering to casuals. If it's short, then the designers are lazy and there's too little content. But if it's any longer, then it must be too grindy.
As for the Golden Grail of PvP engame, I personally find it gets boring. Fast.
But that's just because MMO designers make things in those terms. MMO quests ARE grindy, all of them, so making more isn't going to help. Making less just makes less content as well.
This is the main reason I tend to quit any MMO I try pretty quickly. It's just the same thing over and over. The only MMO that has kept me interested has been Puzzle pirates, because there was always more to do, you could always go higher.
End-game in that game is siegeing and taking over islands, and then governing them. Not ideal, but it's something to do for a long time, and it's a valid goal.
Personally, I don't see how end-game of an MMO can be made really appealing, for a long while, if MMOs keep their current shape.
What I'd do is remove respawning, first off (or at the very least add permanent death, perhaps under certain conditions). Then I'd put players in charge of different nations, or factions.
Each faction would have to be balanced in such a way that they each have something that the others need, so that diplomacy, or war is needed in some way, between the factions. That way we have longevity. PvE works only for a short time, because it's based on the amount of work the developers are able to put in there.
I'd probably remove a level cap as well, and instead put a damper on the amount of power an individual player can attain.
The thing is, for a game to really be interesting you have to be able to discover new things. In most MMOs people know exactly what the most powerful items are, and how to get there, and how to become the most powerful of each class. If we have that we lose the whole exploration aspect of a game, since static content made by developers also has a realistic limit, we can't base the game on that either, if we want players to keep playing. There we lose another nice pillar. Left we have grinding/advancement and pvp, and in an rpg, those two don't really hold infinite charm.
In the same way as that goes for a regular game, it goes for an mmo. A game is only at it's best as long as you can discover new things, and be challenged in new ways. The late game in an mmo has to have so much more to do than a regular game, because we want the player to keep playing, for far longer than in a regular game. We can't just add more items, more quests, and more experience, we need to add more exploration, more to discover. More and different gameplay. And even more than that, we have to make it dynamic and if possible, infinite (by which I mean "not bound by what we've created".)
We'd have to create a world that makes sense if it's in part locked up. Perhaps explain it by using something like in Spellforce. Small islands, with portals connecting them. To get to a another world, you'd have to get through the gate, guarded by enemies. The next world is randomly generated, from a specified terrain type and filled with randomly generated enemies, a few levels higher than the players that first broke through. This would keep on indefinitely, allowing players to form factions, and take over forts, and castles, to take out tolls for passing through their portals, and there'd always be more exploring to do for high-level players, the world wouldn't end. The portals can of course be exchanged for anything. Valleys overlooked by castles, mountain passes, harbours, space stations, whatever fits the setting.
We would of course have a problem with overpopulation. It'd be impossible to find your way to where you wanted to go. We'd have to figure out a way to limit, or remove unnecessary worlds from the equation. Perhaps have older worlds randomly taken over by enemies.
We also should have a random mission generator that creates the sort of quests usualy associated with MMOs, and call them chores or something. Keeping down the population count of enemy being, gathering of materials and such. And then we add a few real quests, as often as we can, with a dedicated team.
Since players are in charge of towns and such, and killable, we include them in our quests. You don't get a mission to kill a random npc, you get a mission to assasinate the player that has taken over town. You can try to bribe or threaten that players guild members, or sneak inside.
Eh, I'm rambling. Perhaps one day I'll be able to make an MMO though, hopefully I can think of something.
