AAAAARRRGGGHH stop giving me new and nifty links to click! Bad! Bad bad bad!
Hehe, we've got soooooo far on Tragena I just can't even look at another game without feeling guilty all over again. Dragonfire has the map and statics nearly 100% complete. Says he's just got one small town to decorate and a couple of the dungeons to spiffy up and it's finished. Guess I'm behind on the scripting now ;(
I think the problem with MMO's today (oh no, you did get me started) isn't so much the lack of stuff to do, it's the reasons for wanting to do them (or having to do them).
Take Lineage 2 for example, the crafting system in that game alone could keep someone busy for years. It's pretty full featured. Unfortunately, in order to craft increasingly better stuff, you have to kill mobs for a year on end to increase your level. You also have to ebay some starting capital or get lucky on 60% crafts in order to get the money to start your next crafting project. Most people in that game went the ebay route. You could also create a secondary harvesting type char to not only endlessly kill those same mobs for levels, but also for materials to craft with on your crafting character. By endlessly, I really really really mean endlessly.
That game is supposed to be all about the pvp, but in order to pvp you need levels. So you grind for a year to get a decent level, then find losing in pvp is DECREASING your xp and/or levels, since the majority of the pvp is won by whoever can amass the largest zerg.. you will lose eventually. So in order to continue to pvp, you have to continue to pve grind. I wouldn't mind the mob grind so much if it weren't required to play the purpose of the game (while not being the purpose itself).
I like challenging games, and L2 is definitely challenging. But somewhere along the line they lost the point of the challenge, and made the difficulty itself the point.. if that makes sense. It's hard for the sake of being hard. There's really no fun in it. I can't be proud to have gotten to level 74 when there's 90 people around me that did it by botting or ebaying themselves a high level acct. I can't be proud to have scraped, hunted, bartered, and fought my way to having finally crafted an A grade weapon, when everyone around me just ebayed the adena to buy theres off a farmer.
I think the game would have been more fun without the farmers and ebayers, but the game mechanics themselves full-out encourage ebaying and farmers. If you die to a mob, you could lose your equipped weapon. It's not like in UO where if you lose 100% of your gear on death you can just go buy it back or grab it from your bank box. In L2 if you lose your equipped weapon (or even armor for that matter) you can either reroll, borrow from a rich friend, ebay, or quit the game.
All the games out nowadays I've seen, especially all korean games, are all about the grind. They wanna keep you there for years trying to get the max level (which is increased every 6 months or so) or the max gear (also increased) so that you keep paying to play. They don't realize if they'd just make the game fun (WITHOUT being horrendously hard or painful or punishing to the player), ala UO, that people would stay even after they maxed it out.
/gets off soap box
ps - Thanks for the warm wb everyone