What's the worst MMO design decision of all time?

[Morreion]

Leaderboard: What's the worst MMO design decision of all time? (Massively)

Leaderboard: What's the worst MMO design decision of all time?

FFXIV - FC housing prices (9.0%)
Ultima Online - Trammel (3.9%)
Star Wars Galaxies - The NGE (49.4%)
Star Wars Galaxies - The CU (5.1%)
EVE Online - Captain's Quarters (4.6%)
Age of Conan's combat revamp (2.7%)
Sparkle ponies! (12.5%)
Zomg how dare you omit my pet peeve! I'll tell you about it in the comments! (12.9%)


Not a surprise here- the Star Wars Galaxies New Game Experience got half of the votes. This was the decision to change SWG from an open-form skill-based sandbox into a generic class-based theme park with a lot less options. People still curse SOE for this many years later.

Comments:

I haven't played a lot of the games up there, and barely played Star Wars Galaxies, but the one listed that I heard the most about was the NGE for Star Wars Galaxies, which almost every SWG player I know said is what made them leave the game and was responsible for killing it.

Literally every person I met in any other MMO that said they were a SWG "Refugee" said they were fleeing it because of the NGE, and that they thought the NGE would probably kill the game.

Worst "mechanic": The idea to never take away something from a player.

If you do not have any loss or decay in an MMO (however it may be implemented, gear decay, upkeep cost, gear damage/loss upon death, etc.) you will never have a meaningful in-game economy.

"The problem with having no trinity - or, more succintly - no tank and no proper aggro mechanics means you lose a huge chunk of strategy. If you can't predict who the boss will attack, you cannot control their movements nor can devs then design an encounter where such careful movement and steering would be integral. That's not meaningful teamplay."

Open world instances. I understand dungeon, raid and arena/BG instances and different servers of course but any mechanic that separates players from the same shard and produces multiple instances of the same land in the open world (e.g. TOR, CO) really turn me off a game. If EVE and WoW can have one persistent world, why cant all of them? I know WoW has mutliple servers but they are in effect individually persistent and not interchangeable creating sever world and communities.

I'd like to give an honorable mention to DAoC's Trials of Atlantis for fragmenting the player population into doing any of 100 trials plus many artifact scrolls to work on. Players used to play together gaining experience or RvRing, after ToA they had hundreds of highly specific things to do and that fragmented the player base and lessened the community, unfortunately. The trials themselves were cool.

[Regolyth]

The Trammel one is funny. While it was great to have PvP everywhere, all the time, I think that Trammel actually kept more people playing the game, and brought new ones in. There are just way more people who don't like getting killed on their way back from the bank than those who do.

Jul 7, 2014 17:06:34 GMT -5 Morreion said:

I'd like to give an honorable mention to DAoC's Trials of Atlantis for fragmenting the player population into doing any of 100 trials plus many artifact scrolls to work on. Players used to play together gaining experience or RvRing, after ToA they had hundreds of highly specific things to do and that fragmented the player base and lessened the community, unfortunately. The trials themselves were cool.

Unfortunately, I'll have to agree. While I actually loved the trials, the mythology and leading the raids, I think ToA was one of the worst things to happen to DAoC. It changed an PvP game into a PvE game. Now if ToA didn't have an effect on RvR, as was originally stated by the devs, then there wouldn't have been an issue. But you had to get drops and artifacts from ToA (PvE heavy) to compete in PvP.

[Laethaka]

any of the few dozen Tribes Ascend updates that ignored awful bugs/exploits and turned the combat from Tribes' signature projectile vector/opportunity mind/reflex game into pay-to-win submachine gun spam

[Laethaka]

oh also the whole latter-day campaign of new items for TF2. The first few updates were great and I appreciate trying to keep a great non-MMO fresh & profitable without destroying balance, but Yahtzee was right- it's a bag of jelly beans on a wedding cake.

I wanna play again when I get back (and some guy just offered me $100 for some discontinued TF2 stuff I crafted years ago??), but I know that if I can't find a classic vanilla server I'm gonna be dealing with hundreds of wacky, annoying new items.