First off I am not telling you how to feel this is my opinion based solely on my own experiences. I'm 33 and been gaming my entire live, my online experience dates back to BBS's and Muds right through every big release to date.
What does my title mean? Well basically mmorpgs were a fantastic genre back before they truly became massive multiplayers, back when it was a niche group of players.
Why was less more? Well back before games became so massive you were by no means just an anonymous player ripping through content, think of it more like a small town. Everyone knew everyone at least in the upper tiers of players and you were held accountable for your actions in game via other players in the world. This fact alone made on
I agree with you to a certain degree...
I found myself enjoying games with freedom (FFA, kill anyone you wish, makes friends with whoever you wish). Truth was, though, as the market got larger, this hardcore style of play (which wasn't really hardcore in some cases... just different) didn't attract enough people to be profitable :/ I saw this in every FFA game I played that eventually got shut down.
And now, I can't find one new game that is what I'm looking for, that has that freedom of play with player control. I'm kind of glad to have found someone that feels the same way and know that I'm not the only one.
I quit reading after the dumbed down remark and skimmed through the rest, because that remark struck me as ignorant. Things aren't REALLY dumbed down, developers just learned from past mistakes. I'll use WoW as an example (as it IS the prime example for this, seeing as most people that gripe about these things came straight out of WoW previously.) Vanilla wasn't hard because it had difficult encounters, it was hard because it had difficult mechanics that were just plain bad. As things became more mainstream, massive amounts of knowledge became publicly available, such as guides and strategies for fights/leveling/etc. I've met/personally know some of the hardcore vanilla raiders that were in the top guilds once upon a time, and most of them will unanimously agree Blizzard were improving the game as time went by rather than putting handicaps on everything. Sure, they made it more accessible, but where is the problem in that? There isn't one, other than player backlash (although you could start up the gripe about dungeon finder, which I will partly agree too - that helped ruin the community feeling of servers), which I will get to in a bit.
Ulduar was one of the most difficult instances, ICC kept the hard difficulty of that and from what I've heard, Cataclysm is giving plenty of hard times to the players raiding the content. Back to my comment on player backlash. The amount of knowledge available thanks to the userbase has crippled the skills of a lot of people. Used to, you'd learn things by trial and error. Now, people just follow a cookie-cutter formula, ignore everything about it and just spam what they think looks cool. Is this a fault of the developers? Completely. Wait, did I just contradict myself? No, I didn't. The reason why it is their fault is that they created a game loved by many people, loved enough to create a large wealth of knowledge. With every bit of knowledge, there is someone there sleeping through "class" and failing on their "exams". The user base is at fault for this, but with every good thing comes a bad effect somewhere down the line.
Sorry for the rant, it just irks me when people pull this "slap in the face" bullshit when it has nothing to do with the game and everything to do with the community, aside from that "they changed things to suit the mass appeal more rather than the way I originally played it which was obviously better!".
Even though I might not be as old as you, aswell as into gaming, I can sort of understand how appealing small communities are.
The first "real" MMORPG I played was Ragnarok Online, since I didn't have any money for the monthly subscription I had no choice but to try my luck on private servers.
There I found a really nice bunch of people, people you would at some point refer to as internet friends.
You would know most of the guys that PvP and with time learn their behaviour and tactics and hopefully beat them. It's also nice how people respect you if you're good in PvP. On MMORPGs with thousands if not millions of players, being "good" isn't enough. You have to be the BEST or atleast top10 to be respected.
Now about the games and their userfriendlyness/easy mode:
I don't think that userfriendlyness is a bad thing, if its the UI part only.
If userfriendlyness involves the fully automatic stat points distribution, then please, remove it. I'd like to have more freedom over my character.
I guess I always mix "beginnerfriendly" and "userfriendly".
For the difficulty of games... let me say this: If I want a challenge, I go PvP.
There is a difference between being user-friendly/well designed, to being dumbed down.
I think a lot of what developers are focusing on is more on reducing the barrier to fun. Having to remake your character and grind just to try out a new build is not fun. Guild Wars realised this, and with their rich system of classes and skills capitalised on that, to allow fun, varied experimentation in terms of combat and player interaction. Guild Wars 2 hopes to expand on that, in a more constant MMORPG setting, we'll see how it works out.
MMO's were awsome until they really became MMO's
