Best MMORPG Out There Now

[Hulkein]

Well, what's the best current MMORPG going now? Any ones that are highly hyped coming on the horizon?

[Androidpk]

I always cringe when I see best and MMORPG in the same sentence. As for ones coming out in the future, supposedly both Valve and Blizzard are working on their own space/science fiction MMO.

[Whirlin]

My favorite recent one that I've played has been Tera. Best combat system of any MMO I've played. Grinding up to max level took a while, but with an enjoyable combat system, it wasn't really repetitive. I ran out of time to play it, but when I was playing, the endgame scene was still a bit lacking. But, it was very new at the time.

The Elder scrolls MMO is around the corner... but that other thread about that made it look not that enticing.

The old MMOs are still going strong... WOW of course, FFXI still exists too, but is as unfriendly to newcomers as Gemstone.
WOW is constantly nerfed to make the game easier, and attracts a lot of BAD players. If you have no interest in endgame raiding, I have no idea what you'd do with your time in WOW.
FFXI has actually seen a lot of development in the last 3 years, entertainingly, ever since FFXIV was released, FFXI has been getting very constant upgrades. However, with the aging player base, and so many people leaving, you get a lot of multi-accounters, and an environment that isn't very helpful of new players.
LOTRO went F2P, but quickly degraded into a Pay-2-win structure... You can basically pay for stat increases, from what I've been told.
No idea what happened with Age of Conan.

[AnticorRifling]

WOW is constantly nerfed to make the game easier, and attracts a lot of BAD players. If you have no interest in endgame raiding, I have no idea what you'd do with your time in WOW.
PvP, achievements, pet battles, etc.

[SHAFT]

Wow end game raiding is still a blast. Time consuming but fun.

I'm stoked about elder scrolls online. Really hope I get picked for beta testing

[TheEschaton]

GW2 is good for casuals. You can basically play it as a single player, or as part of a mindless zerg. The thing in the middle, organized group play, is pretty lacking.

[Whirlin]

Wow end game raiding is still a blast. Time consuming but fun.

I'm stoked about elder scrolls online. Really hope I get picked for beta testing

Ehh... I dunno if I could ever go back to being a raider... I was raid leader for about a year at the end of Wrath, beginning of Cata. It was great, I kept everyone focused, and had record time on some raids... but I'd need to get in with a good group of gemstone-esque min-maxing people... and I'd need to be raid leader again.

My raid leadership style was simple: If you're not actively killing something, you're wasting 9 or 24 other people's time. If you take a break outside of pre-determined break times, it's not just the 30 seconds you're wasting of your own time, it's the 5 minutes / 12.5 minutes of life forever lost while having people wait for you. Let alone time used for flask farming and preparation pre-guild levels. I ended up leading one of the top raiding guilds on the shitty backwater server we were on... Good times... Can't go back though.

[SHAFT]

I know, I don't think I can go back to raiding either. Being committed to 4 nights a week for 3+ hours is too much. I was in a sold HM group and I just can't do it. Too much shit going on. I really wish I could because I love raiding .

[Fallen]

Defiance looks good.

[subzero]

I know, I don't think I can go back to raiding either. Being committed to 4 nights a week for 3+ hours is too much. I was in a sold HM group and I just can't do it. Too much shit going on. I really wish I could because I love raiding .

I'm in the same boat. Kinda gave up on things shortly after Wrath, but I like what they did with Mists so I figured I'd give 'casual' raiding a shot. I've since learned that casual raiding isn't my thing. I've either got to do it all the way or not at all.

edit: Also learned I'm not a fan of 10s, especially if you're going to have 2-3 groups raiding, which is by far more common these days than 25s.

[SHAFT]

Casual raiding means wiping on bs bosses and getting nothing done

[RichardCranium]

WOW is constantly nerfed to make the game easier, and attracts a lot of BAD players. If you have no interest in endgame raiding, I have no idea what you'd do with your time in WOW.

Dailies.

[Whirlin]

edit: Also learned I'm not a fan of 10s, especially if you're going to have 2-3 groups raiding, which is by far more common these days than 25s.

Urgh, that was one of the bigger problems that caused me to ragequit.

We had 3 10-mans going... consolidated them to a 25, and then people just stopped showing up, and lost a TON of personal accountability for each of the participants. Just easier to keep 10 idiots clusterfucking a watermelon than 25 idiots doing it.

Then the other leaders wanted to go back to 10 mans... fought over people... never fully recovered.

[subzero]

Urgh, that was one of the bigger problems that caused me to ragequit.

We had 3 10-mans going... consolidated them to a 25, and then people just stopped showing up, and lost a TON of personal accountability for each of the participants. Just easier to keep 10 idiots clusterfucking a watermelon than 25 idiots doing it.

Then the other leaders wanted to go back to 10 mans... fought over people... never fully recovered.

They really fucked things up when they moved to the 10/25 model. I understand their reasoning for it, but I feel it's been a failure for the most part. If a guild is not set up to just do a single 10 group, it seems counter-productive in terms of maintaining a healthy, cohesive guild atmosphere by breaking into 2-3 raid groups. Even if a good rotation is used, it has to be damn near impossible to maintain a good guild atmosphere. Cliques are inevitably going to be formed and eventually problems will surface as a result.

Like in your example, you had 30 people broken into three groups. I'm sure each of those groups had people they thought were bad or otherwise not who they wanted in their group and had people in the other groups they would like to replace them with. It worked for a while, but then you guys changed things up, brought them all together, and decided it wasn't working for whatever reasons. What happens after that is obvious for anyone that has been around a while; those cliques that may not have been very noticeable before start to cause problems. It's just the way it seems to go in my experience when guilds run into issues. If there is too much division within a guild, stress will eventually fracture it. Having multiple raid groups is just asking for a split at best.

Another problem is one I had with my last guild. I simply didn't have much, if any, interaction with people outside my raid group. The guild was supposed to be 'serious' but 'casual', which is fine, except that outside of raids, there just wasn't much activity outside of yet another group of people that did 5s and pvp or whatever together. This was a result of having more than one raid group and it's no coincidence that they were in the same group. Their familiarity with one another and the fact that raid groups don't just quit at the same time further fostered a little separation from the rest of the guild. This guild was in the process of recruiting for a third group, too, most of whom I'd likely have had a similar level of contact with.

Just seems like asking for trouble when you intentionally create divisions within a guild. In fact, while I was out dealing with family stuff, most of the group I raided with broke off and made their own guild. Some of them posted why they were leaving on the guild forums and the main reason they said they were leaving was because the other people they had been raiding with were leaving. These people ranged from long-time (year+) members of the guild to those who were there for a few weeks.

Same sort of thing happened with a guild I was in during early BC. There was a larger guild that had two or three groups, including one which ran later in the evening that matched our (there were a couple people that transferred servers with me and a few more we picked up after a guild implosion as vanilla was wrapping up, probably 5-6 total) schedule. At the time, there weren't many guilds starting raids at 10PM, so I talked to the guys about joining this other guild and we did. Before we did, though, I told them the most likely scenario was that within a month or two, the people who were serious about raiding would break away and make a new guild. I went into that guild with the intention of finding competent raiders and bailing. I think it took a whole two weeks before the 'night' group was tired of the failures (lot of casual, bad players and poor management) from the other groups, which we quickly passed in progression, and everyone realized we'd be better off just doing our own thing and not having to deal with the leaders of the other guild wanting to spread our group out more to the others to help them along. I never once brought up splitting off into another guild with anyone in that guild; they came to us.

The raid model was different then, sure, but you can bet your ass that having to have multiple groups do Kara hurt that guild when we came in and the third group started suddenly making better progress than the rest. On the other hand, it did actually help our cause since there weren't enough of us to pull off 25s right at the split. I think we left with 13-14, which was enough to continue farming Kara and left us a good base to plug in to a second group for the short time we needed to keep doing so. Who knows, maybe without the fact that guilds were forced to run multiple Kara groups before being able to do 25 content we wouldn't have been able to pull off what we did (worked for me, but obviously it was at the expense of other people who didn't enjoy what happened to their guild when we took a chunk of their good players).

While the 10/25 model makes sense from certain perspectives, I think it would have been better for the game overall had they left/made 10-15s (stuff like ZG/ZA or LFR raids of any size) for the casuals and had a different 'tier' for 25s. Maybe I'm wrong, but I feel the 10/25 model hurt the game by devaluing guild community/atmosphere. It's certainly not the only thing that factored into that, but it did result in a larger number of guilds raiding endgame content. Couple that with being able to transfer servers damn near on a whim and there isn't much reason for people to be loyal to a guild to the point that they're willing to work through problems to keep things running rather than jumping ship. Guild levels, rep, and rewards were a massive failure on that front.

[TheEschaton]

Easy solution: don't be in a guild with more than one raid group, unless there's a distinct hierarchy of groups. We have I'd say about 35 active players, and 13 people on our 10 man roster. The other 22 are free to do what they want, if they want to, but that's about it. There's an understanding that our group is the one which represents the guild in terms of progress and on the server, and that we may freely poach some of their players on nights when we may be short, or if someone needs to quit for awhile. Some of us do an alt run and anyone is welcome to that on their mains if they want, but it's like 2 hours on one night.

That way you get the best players in one group, and the next tier in the next. It's like they're our farm team. It only really works when you're 1) the best guild on the server, and they have nowhere else to go, and they have a sense of accomplishment by association, or 2) you're not the best guild on the server but like still Top 500 in the world or something, but that doesn't happen much with the reduction of serious raiding in WoW. Maybe in the EU. Those bastards probably have 450 of the top 500 spots.

[Latrinsorm]

DDO is pretty fun. It's a little disconcerting how uneven the development is, both in terms of quality and schedule, so it's just like home. The combat is 1000x more fun, the visual customization is 1000x worse. Little to no RP, grouping mechanics actually exist. Nowhere near the time investment WoW apparently is for serious faces.

[Drakefang]

I'm not going to sit here and claim STO is the best mmorpg out there. Far from it. I am only curious if anyone here still plays, even sometimes. I used to play and since it went f2p, I have considered trying it again.

[Drew]

I just started playing Eve again, but it's kind of an acquired taste.

[Methais]

I hear that there's this really cool game called Gemstone where you RP and learn how to type.

[RichardCranium]

I hear that there's this really cool game called Gemstone where you RP and learn how to type.

I heard the same thing from some dude named Hevinsbane.

[Gizmo]

I heard the same thing from some dude named Hevinsbane.

lol