Five Reasons MMOs Are Broken

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Written by BuckGB on January 29th, 2009

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So you kill a boss and then three minutes later he's respawned and walking around waiting for the next guy to kill him. Heck, he might just attack you again if you don't hurry out of there and turn the quest in. At which point the quest giver thanks you and delivers some text implying that something has changed, only to turn around and talk to the next guy as if nothing had ever happened. Unlike single-player games, MMOs are baldly frozen in a static state. Princesses are never rescued, villains are never slain, evil is never vanquished. The thousands of players on any given server are all heroes, each unable to effect any sort of meaningful change in the world, forever unable to save it because that would just screw up everything for the next guy to do the quest.

What needs to be done to fix it: Beats me. You can't very well have evil get vanquished by the first hero to come along. Is this just an innate problem by virtue of the word "massively" in the genre?

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