The issue I have with many MMO's is that the social elements are tacked rather than being integral to the game. Meeting another player in game should add to and not detract from your experience.
So if you are soloing and see another player having a fight, you should be rewarded for aiding that player (even if its just something like a reputation system).
The game should go out of its way to help you make friends/allies/enemies and make everyone feel like part of the community whether you prefer to solo, co-op or pvp.
D&D irl was only ever fun if you had other people to play with.
Your Next: Playing to Strengths - GLHF 3
LockSixTime discusses the spike and fail culture of MMOs.
Dungeons and Dragons was a real watershed moment for role-playing games, and I don't think it's unreasonable to assume it has had an effect on every MMO we've ever played.
It offers a system of tools that encouraged collaborative, emergent storytelling while making interesting choices. Sometimes you have to write a sentence like that, just to show the other nerds you mean business.
When RPGs moved off the tabletop and onto the desktop, the technology being used to replicate the experiences possible with pen and paper was very limited. Design compromises had to be made, but the ultimate goal was to replicate the feeling of being part of a group of friends on an epic adventure.
I believe we have totally lost sight of that goal.
As success was found with some of these models, the focus changed. Instead of trying to replicate what a good role-playing experience should be, designers instead attempted to refine the successful models. Before we knew it, people would be on forums actively defending the notion of trinity based combat or static mob spawns.
I'm not trying to say that any particular MMO is bad, or that any particular team was wrong for taking this route—it made sense and there were good reasons to do so. I'm saying this approach has led to the stagnation of the genre; all of the development effort is being put in the wrong areas.
Surely there have been enough embarrassments now for this to be clear? The spike and fail culture, and a sense that the bulk of the MMO playerbase is in a holding pattern on the hype train, is so ubiquitous people have come to accept it as the norm.
Lucky for us, something had to give sooner or later, and I believe it came with the decision to go back to the drawing board for EverQuest Next in 2011. When this decision was revealed in 2012 SOE President John Smedley said, “We saw all these games that we knew were in development and very high-quality, but we saw what was going to happen; this big spike and then it goes down. That's the truth of what's been happening with MMOs. The fans need to realize that if you don't change the nature of what these games are, you're not going to change that core behavior.”
After we as players have spent years exasperated with this cycle, a company was finally willing and able to realign its perception to the point where it could see where we were coming from. Many believe this is just lip service, or another marketing ploy. I would like to remind those people that SOE took a hit right in the development budget when it made this decision. It cost them money to go back to the drawing board, and why would they throw it away just to reheat the leftovers?
That's what sold me on EverQuest Next. We have to wait and see how well the pieces come together, but at least they are trying to do what many others were unwilling or unable to do: create a world for us and our friends to go on an epic adventure in.
LockSixTime