Making an article on WoW and MMORPGs, need your opinion.

[CrashLemon]

Hey guys, I've been working on a small article on that states of WoW/MMORPGs and I wanted to share what I've done so far so I can correct and improve on it.

[B]How WoW’s expansions killed the MMORPG.
[/B]
Let me introduce myself, I’ve been playing games my whole life, more than casualy, and my background of games is mostly varied, ranging from CS 1.6, C&Cs (Renegade, Red Alert, etc) Warcraft, Starcraft, HoN, WoW and lots of indie games. Much of my time was also spent making maps, scripting mods and the like. Anyway, the whole point is how World of Warcraft killed the MMO genre and how it became a singleplayer game.

First let’s take a look at what an MMO is, it is a massively multiplayer online game, which means that massive amounts of people are playing together to achieve goals, different or alike, and they interacts which each others in order to create a social gaming experience, a massive online society, or world. Interaction was the key, in WoW, you had to travel to locations, which implied that you could encounter anything along your path thus interacting with your environment, npcs, items, etc, you also had to find groups, implying that you had to socialize and make connections with other people or you could also join guilds, for even harder challenges like raids and PvP. Most of it worked, friends were made, things were found throughout the lands and huge guilds were created with systems like dragon kill points. A gaming network was born where massive amount of people played their role and socialized.

WoW became a worldwide phenomenon and was bound to evolve, and that’s where everything failed. Innovation was needed, people were getting bored and casual players were starting to play. Systems like BG queues in town (Vanilla), Meeting stone to summon players (TBC), Flying Mounts (TBC), Dungeon Finder (WotLK), Remake of the Old world (Cata) and the Raid Finder (Cata) were all systems developed that removed one aspect of the game, interaction. No longer did you have to walk your way to one point and risk finding stuff or getting ganked, no longer did you have to wait for your group or just plainly walk to your dungeon, no longer did you have to find quests and make groups to complete them and no longer did you have to manually find players to join your groups. You didn’t need interaction anymore, the game was doing it for you.

Of course, there’s many other reasons why WoW alone is losing players (especially veterans) but that’s not the point of the topic. Most MMORPGs that were released to date were copies of older, proven ones using their game mechanics as their foundations. This is where the whole genre starts to die. WoW has always been this gargantuan beast, the game to beat, and most MMORPGs released to date wanted to be classified as “WoW-Killers” and the like. Improving on the concept is the philosophy here, but when the concept is wrong, there’s no point in improving it. Why is it wrong? As stated earlier, interaction is gone, it is just a matter of queuing, finding servers (instances) and being matched with players in order to progress. You might want to call Azeroth a lobby now, most players are just AFK in their city hubs and are waiting in queues for raids, battlegrounds, arenas and instances.