What's with the MMO hate, you hateful haters?

[Flames66]

It's a pretty observable trend that a sizable portion of this community hates Massively Multiplayer games, or specifically MMORPGS, in the vein of WoW, and TOR, etc. And when I say "hate", I mean ya'll just LOATHE them. As though they were some form of gaming herpes. You can feel the lips curling in disgust through the screen.

What hate is this? I haven't seen it at all.

 

[ElPatron]

Is it the subscription fee? You know that most MMOs are designed to be played for hundreds of hours, yeah? On an hour per dollar basis, they're arguably one of the cheapest forms of entertainment in existence.

You best be joking.

What I don't like about MMOs is that they are a second job. I don't loathe them and I have tried many.

But I have some kind of OCD when it comes to RPG so I can't play them. At all. I want to play Fallout 3. I can't because I would play 400 hours without even going to the bathroom. Same with Skyrim, and that game actually generates more quests randomly.


But an MMO is waaaaay beyond that. If I tried to make those 12? actually be worth it, I'd have to play it like a second job, and I hate working.

 

[Nouw]

I don't hate Korean MMOs but I've learnt to avoid them because they're a dull grind if you have no one else to play with.

On the subject of those MMOs, I have similar thoughts minus the grind. They would have been more fun for me if I had a friend to play with. But that's not really a legitimate complaint, just my own experience.

 

[AD-Stu]

I tried WoW. It. Bored. Me. To. Tears.

Dull combat. Endless fetch quests. Characters I couldn't care less about, including my own character. I enjoy RPGs, but my experience with WoW was that it was inferior to pretty much every single player RPG I've played in the past 10 years in terms of gameplay, story and visuals. Without any of those things, why am I bothering? All that's left is e-peen waving, and I don't care about that either. Seriously - I intensely disliked The Witcher, but even it still trumped WoW in every category.

And I don't care if it proves to be fantastic value in terms of dollars per hour played if I'd rather have spent ever single one of those hours slapping myself in the face instead of playing the game.

When an MMO comes along that's interesting and plays well I'll probably give it a shot. But until then I don't see the point of being charged every month for an inferior gaming experience.

 

[Jdb]

The grind. People don't like to feel their time is being wasted, which is what grinds can do. They would rather play the game instead of preparing to play it.

I hear that, but you need to define "grinding". The term grind gets thrown around a lot, and the definition is, to say the least, nebulous.

What makes something "playing" instead of "grinding"?

That's half of my definition - Preparing to play the game instead of playing it. The other half is 'success doesn't mean advancement.'

Preparation - Required power ups and skill levels are obtained in locations with little or nothing to do with the current mission or story.

Advancement - Completing an objective doesn't guarantee advancement to the next one. In example, the player needs equipment from Boss One to defeat Boss Two. However, Boss One doesn't always drop his equipment upon defeat.

 

[2xDouble]

A number of factors. Stale formula, charging me rental fees for the opportunity to get what I paid for, the people who play them [http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/3/19/], the press [http://massively.joystiq.com/2012/01/17/the-soapbox-on-mmo-negativity/], but mostly because MMOs aren't.

 

[omega 616]

It's kind of the money thing, I played oblivion for 300+ hours and only payed £30 for it.

The other thing is the lack of end game story, I don't care about PVP at all and it seems that once the story is finished it just seems to be well now you fight other players.

The problem with that is there is one or a few optimum builds, which instantly sucks the fun out of games. It's either you stick with your original build, which is never going to be optimum (unless you arrive late to the game and follow a guide) and so you are at a massive disadvantage when you reach the PVP bit or you ditch your build and start all over again, with no exploration or using the more fun/awesome sounding abilities.

Also there tends to be a lot of grind in MMO's and I just enjoy doing things constantly, although saying that I did enjoy runescape when I was a little younger and I still sometimes go back to it.

(don't mock, the graphics have improved greatly over the years. The combat is still basic but it's rather relaxing than having to time each ability so you can reach your optimum DPS. In runescape there is no DPS really, it's just more relaxed and I like that from time to time, as much as I like turn based combat)

 

[harvz]

I used to like MMO's, then i took an arrow to the knee (hur hur hur), or it might be that i realized that they all end up the same. you walk up to some guy with an exclamation mark above his head, get a text dump, get told to kill N of X or collect N of Y, grind till you've done this and return for a reward, rinse and repeat.

The current system of MMORPG's need to die for me to actually want to play them. I would also say that money does play a part, you may see it as great value but think, would you pay for a movie ticket to see a movie that you would completely despise? would you go to see it if they gave you half price? How bout free? You would need them to pay you before you would really consider it.

 

[devotedsniper]

I don't hate them, i dislike the majority of them, i have yet to find a single mmo which competes with my first love (and pretty much only) and that was Final Fantasy 11, i find the majority of them have the horrible point and click style gameplay (i much prefer being able to control my character with a controller or wasd).

In fact the only propper mmo i've been able to get into is FF11, i mean i regularly play world of tanks and APB but neither of those have much content in them apart from the skirmishes. I do keep going to ff14 but with the amount of players and lack of friends on there i soon lose interest only to go back to it a few months later.

 

[RJ 17]

Well that's odd, my quote button isn't appearing in this topic. Oh well. Anyways, at least in my case, I just grew out of MMOs. I put in a good 4 years or so with WoW, right up until the final content for Burning Crusade was released and, like I said, I just grew out of it. I could no longer justify paying the subscription fee to play a game that seemed much more like a job at that point than an actual game. Everything became one big routine. "Do dailies, do dailies, do dailies, raid night, do dailies, do dailies, raid night, rinse and repeat." Just the monotony of it all got to me, even all the boss fights were beginning to blurr together. Every boss fight was either a "watch your aggro" fight, a "deal with the adds" fight, a "special gimmick" fight (i.e. Shade of Aran in Karazhan in which you had to dodge the blizzard and such...god that was a LONG time ago), or just a straight-up beat-down.

When it all begins to feel like Raids are just a lottery in which you're hoping for a chance at having a chance of getting the item(s) you need, the game just gets exceedingly dull.

Do I personally HATE MMO's? No, I just feel that, like every other type of game, they're not meant to be played forever.

 

[Zhukov]

I don't hate them.

I'm just not interested in them.

Part of it is the subscription fee. Call me set in my ways, but I'm just not quite down with the notion of making continuous payments so I can play something I already paid for. Although if they dropped the initial purchase price then I would be a lot more open to the idea.

The rest of my disinterest just has to do with the style of game, the nature of the beast if you will. I like a nice focused game with a story, setting and cast of characters that sucks me in and gets me invested (Yo, Mass Effect series, sup?). That, or gameplay that makes me giggle with childish glee (Hey there, Bulletstorm). Ideally, a combination of the two (*nods in the general direction of Half Life 2*).

MMOs... don't really provide any of that. There's nothing worth dignifying with the term "story" and the gameplay is a rather hands-off affair. It's all just a long repetitive slog in the name of watching one's personal list of numbers get bigger. More power to the people who are into that, but I'm not one of them.

On a vaguely related note, recently I've been making suggestive glances in The old Republic direction. I've heard interesting things about it. A lot of the people who like other MMOs don't like it, which can only be a good thing. If nothing else, it will give me fix of Bioware-written dialogue.

 

[kabooz18]

normally sucks either story, gameplay or both the only MMOs which come close are for me ragnarok online and vindictus

 

[ckam]

What's with all the hating on the MMO haters?! Huh? Huh?! HUH?!

In all seriousness, it just seems more like work than fun. And free-to-play MMOs tend to suck or give only sucky options.

 

[Canadamus Prime]

Mostly the subscription fees and this:

Spoiler: Greater Internet F*ckwad Theory

EDIT: That and that it seems like every game and their dog these days seems to be an MMO. Either an MMO or a clone of Gears of War or Call of Duty, neither of which particularly floats my boat.

 

[Hitchmeister]

It's cool to hate anything popular, so when Blizzard announced 12 million WoW subscriptions it became super-cool to hate WoW. The haters still haven't gotten over that.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

On a vaguely related note, recently I've been making suggestive glances in The old Republic direction. I've heard interesting things about it. A lot of the people who like other MMOs don't like it, which can only be a good thing. If nothing else, it will give me fix of Bioware-written dialogue.

Be cautious. While TOR does have, by order of magnitude, more story than any of its fellows, that story is still bound and constrained within a traditional MMO framework. Rock Paper Shotgun said it best:

In the end, no matter what makes The Old Republic different from the MMOs before it, what you?re doing eventually comes down to killing ten rats. But here?s the thing: you care about why you?re killing ten rats. And that, above anything else, is what makes TOR different enough to be properly interesting. It?s impossible not to appreciate the difference voicing a game makes. It?s extraordinary to appreciate the difference being able to answer back makes. The Old Republic is unquestionably a BioWare game.

Of course, it?s a BioWare game in an MMO. Which never stops feeling like a bear trying to wear a centipede costume. Undeniably WOW-like in its approach to structure, the more I play of TOR, the more I feel like I?m embroiled in the developers? struggle to squeeze their sort of game into someone else?s mould. And to a decent extent, it?s working.

That?s the point I want to get across with this: the story works, if the format feels strange. It?s enormously frustrating that you have to kill things on the way back out of supposedly shutting down some nefarious group?s activities. It?s daft to see 50 other people doing the same. But as awkward as the bear may seem in that centipede costume, it?s still a bear.

 

[inFAMOUSCowZ]

Part of it is the monthly fees. I don't play a game that much to warrant money every month. Maybe the first month but by the second I'm also playing other things. So it isn't MMOs it's just monthly fees that get me.

 

[albinoterrorist]

It's a pretty observable trend that a sizable portion of this community hates Massively Multiplayer games, or specifically MMORPGS, in the vein of WoW, and TOR, etc. And when I say "hate", I mean ya'll just LOATHE them. As though they were some form of gaming herpes. You can feel the lips curling in disgust through the screen.

What's going on with that?

Why pay for a game AFTER i've bought it in the store?
If I like a game, i'll play it for ages - logged up hundreds of hours on each Pokemon game alone, without counting ENDLESS days in Strategies or ARMA/Operation Flashpoint.

Making me pay to keep playing just implies you're afraid I won't play for long, and want to milk cash from me for as long as I do.
And if I won't play very long, it's not good value for money - I may as well invest elsewhere.

I suppose i'm just not a massive fan of RPG's. I liked Deus Ex, I like Pokemon. I like Persona and i'll probably get around to FF sooner or later, but i'm hardly the kind to play for months on end.

Like I said, I can just invest my money better elsewhere.

Oh, as for TOR, that's just 'cause it's hilarious.
Seriously, releasing a patch which allows a faction to spawn-camp an ENTIRE PLANET?
Titanic ahoy!

 

[Risingblade]

First of all only an idiot pays for porn on the internet.


Now back on topic, I wouldn't say I loath them I just haven't found one that I can enjoy for a long period of time. It's kinda hard to find a good one actually :/