For sure the WoW era - Warhammer Online the most! The battles were epic though unbalanced sometimes but it was pure fun for the PvP lovers! No one can deny that. WoW itself was really fun but the expansions after WOTLK pushed me back.
Usings Wow as the anchor isn't fair. I'd say 2003-2008. Right as companies saw how much money WoW was making, they all committed product suicide trying to replicate and never recovered.
Well at the start of pre wow era i was 3 years old so i cannot comment baout it but i can say wow gave me somereally nice memories and some really amazing friendships also i met my fiance through the game but as much as i love it i cannot hide form the fact that although WoW was the first love the game that really swept me off my feet is GW2...... well that might also be because thats also how i proposed to my girl and through some help form the DEV team `it was an epic one at that so post wow era for me just beacuse of a game known as GW2
I DONT KNOW KARATE BUT I KNOW CRAZY AND IM NOT AFRAID TO USE IT
Can't chose. Mine is overlapping pre and WoW era. It is a combination of Anarchy Online, SWG (pre and post NGE) and GW1 PVP. GW1 is b2p, Anarchy Online has one of the longest running F2P options in MMO land and it was perfectly fine to play it as f2p.
Might be the reason why I don't care about the payment method like some others mentioned in this thread. Sub based definately does not guarantee a good game or lack of trolls/goldsellers.
The best years will always be when you first entered the fray of MMOs. That is when connectivity of people and gaming neatly focused the genre and the social need. This question is like asking what Saturday night live season was the best (in some ways), very generationally dependent. WOW/EQ2 was the apex for a majority of people. This in no means denigrates the eras before but truly we found our path during this monolithic epoch of MMO gaming. The future is much less certain but this is not to be feared but understood
The best years will always be when you first entered the fray of MMOs. That is when connectivity of people and gaming neatly focused the genre and the social need. This question is like asking what Saturday night live season was the best (in some ways), very generationally dependent. WOW/EQ2 was the apex for a majority of people. This in no means denigrates the eras before but truly we found our path during this monolithic epoch of MMO gaming. The future is much less certain but this is not to be feared but understood
Do you really think ten years from now there's going to be a generation of people who claim this was the golden era of MMO's ? God i hope not !! O.o
I started with World of Warcraft in early 2005, didn't get internet till 2001 and didn't really know what MMO was while I seen games like Everquest and thought the box for it looked dumb. I really wish I would of been able to play FF:XI while it was in it's prime.
Pre-WoW ERA was better. People actually talked to each other in groups. It wasn't just about running dungeons as fast as possible and doing the quests for the same gear everybody else had. You actually built a reputation in game and that is what got you into groups by being a good player. Dying was actually very frightening at times as you had an experience penalty and you had to find your corpse to get your gear back. Although I disliked some of these things when I played, it made the game exciting and I built friendships with people I still talk to today.
Definitely pre-WoW, but can we really call 2012 to present post-WoW? All of the current big games during the last 5 years are still largely emulating WoW's design in all the ways that matter most.
The real post-WoW era won't begin until all of the niche games currently in development launch in the coming years. The post-WoW era begins in 2018.
Voted pre-WOW. While there are countless MMOs to choose from now, they seem to lack the diversity of the pre-WOW MMOs. I had written a bit on that here, so here's the abridged version:
No Predisposition as to What an MMO ‘Should Be’
Asheron’s Call, Ultima Online, Everquest and Dark Age of Camelot paved the initial road for persistent state worlds with rather varied approaches to advancement, game design and community structure. There was no One True Path yet as each was exploring new approaches to creating these incredible new online worlds. An MMO at the time was not measured by the restrictive and unrealistic standard that MMOs today are held to. I want to stress that I’m not speaking about quality, stability and polish as those should be expectations regardless of when or how the product is released.
Over the past 6-8 years, most MMOs have become so similar and followed the same high fantasy, class-restricted, level-based, gear-dependent design and the surrounding common mechanics, that when an MMO deviates from that, the developers have to spend an inordinate amount of time trying to sell the new direction or mechanic and why the path was chosen over the tried and true method.
A More Defined Target Audience
These MMOs were not trying to be everything to everyone. Their core audience was obvious to everyone from the start. From ToonTown’s publisher and artwork to Shadowbane’s Play to Crush mantra, the games were clearly being made for specific groups and the advertisement made it clear which groups they were for. They weren’t trying to mix and match unlike playstyles and conflicting communities within a single game world. This allowed the developers to attract a strong core group for their game and to focus current and future development for that audience.
The Forgotten Trinity
MMOs are made up of scripted content (themepark), player-driven content (sandbox) and social content (coffee house). Each exists as part of the virtual world to one degree or another. Most modern MMOs weigh heavily toward one or the other of the first two. Also, most modern MMOs seem to relegate the last one to an IRC-style chat box and a system or need for grouping with other players to kill stuff. In many cases there is more functionality to support social interaction on a modern MMO's forums than there are in or around the game itself.
-- Whammy - a 64x64 miniRPG - RPG Quiz - can you get all 25 right? - FPS Quiz - how well do you know your shooters?
I wonder how much nostalgia et al distorted the results of this poll. If someone gave you a game that played like EQ or UO today, would you?
Yea I'm probably going to go back to SWG emulators since the repopulation seems to be a disaster. Divergence online went poofed and I guess that will too RIP. I do have survival games with great crafting systems for my SWG fix though.
The acronym MMORPG use to mean Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game.
But the acronym MMMORPG now currently means Microscopic Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game. Kappa.
Definitely pre-WoW, but can we really call 2012 to present post-WoW? All of the current big games during the last 5 years are still largely emulating WoW's design in all the ways that matter most.
The real post-WoW era won't begin until all of the niche games currently in development launch in the coming years. The post-WoW era begins in 2018.
The later game are as close to vanilla Wow as it was to EQ. Games like GW2 and ESO are way further away from Wow then the games launching 2005-2011 even if they still have a lot in common. It is true that the MMOs will move even further away in the next few years but the move did begin somewhere around '12.
But it is still impossible to correctly name the current period since we don't know where it is going yet. I think it leads up to something but if it is something new or a return closer towards the first era is anybodies guess. And depending on that the exact time the new era began can't really be correctly measured yet.
Many call the 1920s and 30s "between the wars" today but someone living at the time would have called it something else, like "post war" or something.
Pre-WoW era.. The games were more fun and the community was interesting and (mostly) polite.. Nowadays (wow that sounded old), everything is pretty and polished but way too rush-rush.. Hurry up and do everything!! Zero levels of patience from tons of people.. Attitudes just getting more and more toxic as time goes on..
WoW and afterwards, we got all the advances that technology could bring to the party, but we lost the heart of why the games were being played..
..because we're gamers, damn it!! - William Massachusetts (Log Horizon)
Where's the option for the Near-Term Generation (2018 - 2023) or the Generation After That (2024-2031) or the Proto-Future-Alpha Era (2032-2039)? What if the best is still ahead of us, not behind us?
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
In the older games before WoW communities felt closer and friendlier, roleplaying was still a thing, pvp was more polite and 'honorable'... The games themselves were not actually 'better' but the way people acted in them was.
The WoW era was good-ish too. It did open up the genre to the masses. However, the quality of in-game societies were degrading during this time leading into what we see now.
The current era has nearly no positive, meaningful social interaction among players (with few rare exceptions).
From a social aspect, mmorpgs seem to have entered a dark age. Perhaps that will change in the next era? We will have to wait and see.
Comments
Exploration would've had been flourishing at its most.
A lot of things were new to a generation so exploring was physical and universal.
I suppose I started in the pre-WoW era defined here but AC2 I view as a gateway between what was then and what was to come.
It was still my first and still hard for me to let go.
AC2 Player RIP Final Death Jan 31st 2017
Refugee of Auberean
Refugee of Dereth
Might be the reason why I don't care about the payment method like some others mentioned in this thread. Sub based definately does not guarantee a good game or lack of trolls/goldsellers.
God i hope not !! O.o
The real post-WoW era won't begin until all of the niche games currently in development launch in the coming years. The post-WoW era begins in 2018.
No Predisposition as to What an MMO ‘Should Be’
Asheron’s Call, Ultima Online, Everquest and Dark Age of Camelot paved the initial road for persistent state worlds with rather varied approaches to advancement, game design and community structure. There was no One True Path yet as each was exploring new approaches to creating these incredible new online worlds. An MMO at the time was not measured by the restrictive and unrealistic standard that MMOs today are held to. I want to stress that I’m not speaking about quality, stability and polish as those should be expectations regardless of when or how the product is released.
Over the past 6-8 years, most MMOs have become so similar and followed the same high fantasy, class-restricted, level-based, gear-dependent design and the surrounding common mechanics, that when an MMO deviates from that, the developers have to spend an inordinate amount of time trying to sell the new direction or mechanic and why the path was chosen over the tried and true method.
A More Defined Target Audience
These MMOs were not trying to be everything to everyone. Their core audience was obvious to everyone from the start. From ToonTown’s publisher and artwork to Shadowbane’s Play to Crush mantra, the games were clearly being made for specific groups and the advertisement made it clear which groups they were for. They weren’t trying to mix and match unlike playstyles and conflicting communities within a single game world. This allowed the developers to attract a strong core group for their game and to focus current and future development for that audience.
The Forgotten Trinity
MMOs are made up of scripted content (themepark), player-driven content (sandbox) and social content (coffee house). Each exists as part of the virtual world to one degree or another. Most modern MMOs weigh heavily toward one or the other of the first two. Also, most modern MMOs seem to relegate the last one to an IRC-style chat box and a system or need for grouping with other players to kill stuff. In many cases there is more functionality to support social interaction on a modern MMO's forums than there are in or around the game itself.
- RPG Quiz - can you get all 25 right?
- FPS Quiz - how well do you know your shooters?
But the acronym MMMORPG now currently means Microscopic Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game. Kappa.
But it is still impossible to correctly name the current period since we don't know where it is going yet. I think it leads up to something but if it is something new or a return closer towards the first era is anybodies guess. And depending on that the exact time the new era began can't really be correctly measured yet.
Many call the 1920s and 30s "between the wars" today but someone living at the time would have called it something else, like "post war" or something.
WoW and afterwards, we got all the advances that technology could bring to the party, but we lost the heart of why the games were being played..
..because we're gamers, damn it!! - William Massachusetts (Log Horizon)
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
The WoW era was good-ish too. It did open up the genre to the masses. However, the quality of in-game societies were degrading during this time leading into what we see now.
The current era has nearly no positive, meaningful social interaction among players (with few rare exceptions).
From a social aspect, mmorpgs seem to have entered a dark age. Perhaps that will change in the next era? We will have to wait and see.
I used to dream of what MMORPG's could be back pre-WoW.
Today I dread what overall, the genre has become.
The survival genre is moving in a direction that I find appealing.
Big Open Virtual World RPG played with many others
Maybe one day they'll morph back into an MMORPG.
I guess I still dream
"Be water my friend" - Bruce Lee