There are still tons of bias in many MMOS. Much of it is practically hard coded into some of the most basic design features.
Take the dicotomy between hero classes and support/pet classes.
Hero classes are damage dealers (melee, ranged or nukes) who in addition to having the most damage, often are blessed with best solo self heals and other self buffs. They are often the easyest to play, use two or three combos, self heal, rinse repeat.
Support classes like healers typically have the most to do and the most responsiblity for a teams success in hard instances, yet they typically are penalized when rewards are based on damage output. Healers often have weak and slow damage capabilities. Like pet classes they are often nerfed so that they may not be equal or better than hero classes.
Pet classes who's success depends on nurturing, training, building, and maintaining pets, bots, etc. are always nerfed so they may not out shine hero classes. Some games like Perfect World even restrict pet classes to female only avatars. Pet pathing is often very poor and low on the list of priorities of developers to fix. Dev's typically put things like more and better spell animations for damage dealers ahead of prosaic things like decent pet pathing.
Damage dealers are first class citizens, support and pet classes go to the back of the bus.
The pet pathing thing is harder to fix than additional pretty pixels for the "hero" classes, but yes, it is a big issue. I agree with you otherwise from my experience in RPGs as a general rule.
In the case of the pet classes, I think developers are not sure what to do with them. Since UO and EQ1 though, it is clear they have been a popular choice but with the potential to be vastly more powerful than any other class type. So though developers seem to like giving a pet class as a choice to players of their game, they are worried about them becoming too powerful. I am sure the pet pathing issues are unintentional though.
Though you mention healers getting the nerf, which does seem to be the case in MMOs recently (WAR, ToR and WoW Cata for example), I think the support group that seems to get the most shaft are the crowd controllers and the much rarer debuffers. It seems like crowd control is really the big issue for developers to balance correctly whether in PvE or PvP. The way to balance them for most devs is to make certain mobs (bosses usually) completely immune to their effects. If you enjoy playing a character that can control the direction a fight goes, you pretty much just have to expect that you will be useless in boss fights. I think it is a completely cop out. Debuffs run similarly to crowd control, though finding a debuffing class is pretty rare these days.
I think the hero/support and pet bias is because direct damage is perceived to be far easier to balance. Even tanks have problems with being balanced, either being too powerful to being virtually useless especially for melee tanks.
I don't play RPGs often where classes are gender-locked, but I have noticed that in ToR, for example, the healing partners were usually female, the heavy damagers were male. Magic types, assassin types, and healers are usually female in most games. The high-ranked female "Paladin" type is pretty common (NWN1, Rift, ToR). Male characters are usually tanks, other non-rogue melee damage and quite often non-arcane ranged types and tend to be the higher up non-arcane or holy military. The character that becomes "redeemed" from the evil side is usually a non-human.
Comments
The pet pathing thing is harder to fix than additional pretty pixels for the "hero" classes, but yes, it is a big issue. I agree with you otherwise from my experience in RPGs as a general rule.
In the case of the pet classes, I think developers are not sure what to do with them. Since UO and EQ1 though, it is clear they have been a popular choice but with the potential to be vastly more powerful than any other class type. So though developers seem to like giving a pet class as a choice to players of their game, they are worried about them becoming too powerful. I am sure the pet pathing issues are unintentional though.
Though you mention healers getting the nerf, which does seem to be the case in MMOs recently (WAR, ToR and WoW Cata for example), I think the support group that seems to get the most shaft are the crowd controllers and the much rarer debuffers. It seems like crowd control is really the big issue for developers to balance correctly whether in PvE or PvP. The way to balance them for most devs is to make certain mobs (bosses usually) completely immune to their effects. If you enjoy playing a character that can control the direction a fight goes, you pretty much just have to expect that you will be useless in boss fights. I think it is a completely cop out. Debuffs run similarly to crowd control, though finding a debuffing class is pretty rare these days.
I think the hero/support and pet bias is because direct damage is perceived to be far easier to balance. Even tanks have problems with being balanced, either being too powerful to being virtually useless especially for melee tanks.
I don't play RPGs often where classes are gender-locked, but I have noticed that in ToR, for example, the healing partners were usually female, the heavy damagers were male. Magic types, assassin types, and healers are usually female in most games. The high-ranked female "Paladin" type is pretty common (NWN1, Rift, ToR). Male characters are usually tanks, other non-rogue melee damage and quite often non-arcane ranged types and tend to be the higher up non-arcane or holy military. The character that becomes "redeemed" from the evil side is usually a non-human.
Playing MUDs and MMOs since 1994.