Are ther any mmmorpgs lef tthat have....Follow

Im looking for MMORPGs that arent F2P (those are terrible) that have "useless" non combat skills... like "listening" (allows you to do things like hear through walls/doors for eavesdropping. Or being able o set and disarm traps, or have traps out in the open world which are triggered by certain actions (one game for example had a trap that was triggered by talking.. so everytime you talked using "say" the trap blasted you (talking in party chat or through private chat didnt set it off though), though a good thief or rogue could detect and disarm traps, as well as pick locks (since said game came from s time where treasures chests needed keys to be opened and werent as simple and just walking up and clicking on it... a thief on the other hand with the right skills leveled could bypass finding a key altogether and just pick the lock (this worked on locked doors too not just chests).

But the MAIN feature Im looking for in open world PKing, it could be either ANYWHERE outside of town or just specific areas scattered all over the world (though these areas would be areas youd have to venture to or at least through at some point so avoiding them altogether wasnt an option) and possibly being able to loot players after you kill them (though that part isnt mandatory for what Im looking for but it would be a nice bonus), I miss the thrill of exploring an unknown area, or doing a qust in an area while constantly looking over my shoulder knowing that at any moment another player could come out of nowhere and start attacking me. MMOs seem to have gotten so care bear as of late, where the stuff for those of us who are still looking for a rush?

Soo any MMOs out there liek that these days? It doesnt even have to be new one, I would prefer the newest game closest to it but if such a game doesnt exist this day and age and we have to go back to 1995 then so be it, Id play that too, I can name a million text based MUDs that fit the description Im looking for but I wanna play a graphical game thats the same or at least similar

Yeah, F2P has proven to be a viable business model for MMO's, so there's no reason to assume a f2p mmo will be better, worse or the same as a monthly sub one.

MMOs are dead.

Im not looking at EVE cause while it is an MMO its not an RPG.

As for F2P games I dont like them because they lack content, might get updated every 6+ months, and their idea of "new content" is usually just adding more areas, with higher level monsters to grind on and raising the level cap thats not content thats called "more tedious grinding."


Also leveling in those games is HORRIBLE, so much so they have to have double exp weekends every week because they know its horrible (and even still i doesnt help much). I mean for example in some games of the game sI played you have to get 100% exp to level... monster give you 1% at lower levels so thats, 100 kils to level, ok I can do that, then itll go to .75 a kill, ok thats fine too, then .50%, ok thats fine too, then .25%, getting worse but thats 4 kills for 1% so 400 kills to level, ok I can do that, eventually you get to the point where you get .01% per kill, thats 100 kills for 1%, so 10000 kills to level, and then it goes even further to the point where you have to kill 4-6 m,obs just to get that .1%, and this is before youre even HALFWAY to level cap, im sorry but i dont wanna play a game 3 years and still feel like im not gonna hit max level for another 7 years.

At least sub based MMOs give you HUGE new content updates every 2-3 months.. why? because they need you to keep giving them 15 bucks every month so theyre gonna do whatever it takes to keep you paying.. free to play doesnt do that because well its free, so you might go 6 month before theres any REAL content that isnt just increasing level cap and higher level mobs to grind on.

So name me some F2P mmorpgs that dont play like what I describe above and Ill HAPPILY go play them... the ones Ive played are:

DC Universe online (which isnt like above but i consider that more of a button mashing action game than an RPG)
2Moons
Last Chaos
9 Dragons

and they all played just like what I described

Try a WoW PvP server, if you find the right one there will be plenty of open world PvP. Of course it doesn't have any pointless skills like "listening" to train in or gimmicky traps like you described because almost nobody cares about that kind of **** and it adds nothing to a game.

Yeah, that's a conception that exists. I was having the same argument with people on the FFXIV board two months ago, because they were INSISTING that a F2P game had to get less content than a sub game. I eventually gave up; it was like talking to gbaji. Except it was a board of gbajis. And one of them was an admin.

At the end of the day, it all comes down to whether or not a company thinks designing content for the game will be profitable (and one would hope they did, or you probably want to drop it now). Sub or no sub, they make money by keeping people playing the game. They keep people playing the game by delivering content.

There have been some interesting articles and talks on the problem of combat in games recently.

The extreme simplification is that the focus on combat is part of an industry-wide misconception in demographics that is only just now being made apparent. Essentially, of the various demographic ranges, the only group that cares a ton about content is the teenage male group. Which is unsurprising, really.

But most people tend to think this group actually makes up a big portion of the market, when they actually don't. They're definitely the most representative population relative to the size of the original pool (as in, a higher percentage of males 13-19 play video games than males 20-35, or whatever the actual ranges are). But they're only something like 8-12% of the total market of players.

They're also not the group with the most money to spend on gaming.

So studies are suggesting that more moderate gains in a wider base of demographics will lead to more profits overall. That means a reduced emphasis on combat and an increased emphasis on alternate progression systems. Progression being the key. "Casual" content is tossed around to mean anything non-combat, but non-combat systems can still be deep and interesting.

There are plenty of gamers out there who are really interested in operating shops/farms/towns, for instance. And there's plenty there to make those systems deep and interesting, with extensive progression.

There will still be plenty of games that are designed with the idea of getting 100% of the teenage male market and 40% of the 20s male market (AKA, Call of Duty). But games that aren't guaranteed success are learning that targeting a smaller demographic with established brand allegiance and little spending money is probably not the most profitable endeavor.

The diplomacy game in Vanguard was the most unique and interesting alternate progressions I've run into in MMO's. It was basically a board game - you had parley matches. You'd win faction and material stuff, area buffs and the ability to parley with ever more important peoples. You'd lose faction and end up in a fight if your faction dipped too low for your surroundings. It was a good game but limited originally when I played.

It's not sane.

It all comes down to the design, really.

When all your content sources are completely independent of one another, that's a problem. But when they organically bleed into one another, it's far less likely that players will exhaust content they're interested in, because you remove the access hurdle. But when all your alternative content sources are being implemented as amusing side things to compliment combat (as in, the main rewards are combat oriented, and the content can't stand on its own), it doesn't work.

Using WoW as an example, right now the tradeskills have one purpose - better combat stats. Essentially, you level the craft all the way to cap for one or two specific recipes and then you sort of stop caring, except to make that one recipe that can make money/be used by you.

But that's because the only real content line in WoW is combat.

But if there were more content lines distinct from combat/raiding, tradeskills could naturally become much fuller, and the economy would expand and get more diverse. And they could further expand tradeskills in ways a lot of players would probably be interested in, such as working towards getting their own alchemy lab, say, so they could get higher efficiency on their distillations. Etc.

But the thing is, none of those expansions work until the content is integrated in a way it makes sense. As long as it's combat first, everything else second, it just won't work.

This is kind of the root of why I've said RP gets mocked and never really leads to anything in other similar conversations, too. There's no really meaningful carrot tied to it other than some warm and fuzzy feelings. Thus, it will indeed get bashed and labeled useless by the "teen male" demographic and then some.

That said, I still care about combat, but I can't really say I like the MMO norm. GW2 and Tera tried to spice things up a bit, but the former suffered from underwhelming skills and selection for me. The latter had a bit of that, too, but I feel like it squandered the potential of glyphs. As a common theme, both required "aiming" alongside positioning. Tab targeting and just watch your missile home in wasn't really a thing, and that's an obvious advantage for ranged attackers if such is present in the PvP sphere.

But call me silly, I'd love to see an MMO, or at least a multiplayer game, use some variant of Tales of Vesperia's combat. Let the players put together those insane infinite combos, be able to dodge/block attacks, and all that jazz. There series has even generally tied move sets to weapons and on occasion has even had skill leveling, too. Give it the FF treatment so you can swap classes with a weapon swap and bam, some longevity there in leveling alone. Take the rest further with meaningful crafting, some land development systems, etc. and perhaps we finally could have a world and not just blocked off locations with combat dummies of specific level ranges.

This.

It seems anime does better at making MMORPGs than MMORPGs do (Sword art online isnt the only on, .hack was pretty good to), what happened to the days when an mmo player could do whatever they wanted, some cared about raiding and endgame and they did that, others just wanted to be merchants and spent their day hunting monsters and selling loot to players, others spent their time making armor/weapons to sell to players, some were cooks that hunted the ingredient and cooked food to sell and keep players fed, others in guilds worked as spies to spy on rival guilds to get intel (i.e something an technique like listening would be good for) etc etc. With stuff like that it made the world seem more alive, you didnt really need NPCs at all because players could (and in most cases did) provide/supply all the things an NPC would have done).

I've been playing MMORPGs since '99 and don't remember a time like that. Maybe in the MUDs (which I didn't play) but not in the "modern" 3D MMO era. Yeah, you had some people who liked tradeskills and stuff but the best way to excel at tradeskills was still to be a high level character with access to the best components and +Stat gear to increase your chances at success. Likewise, the best way to play the markets was always to be able to go out and get the stuff that people wanted to buy. Which meant high levels which meant killing things which meant combat. Some people would play the "buy low/sell high" game but 95% of the guys yelling "Sword for sale" had just pulled that sword off some dead monster's corpse.