Poll of the Day > What would you say is the worst mmo of all time?

(+) Yeah! (+)

Don't go into 'errrrrr, WoW destroyed my son's life and he doesn't get action any more'.... I mean from technical, social and gameplay mechanics.

The bar I'm setting is it's gotta be at LEAST as bad as Wizard 101 or DK Online

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I don't know enough to make that kind of judgment

ReggieTheReckless posted...

I don't know enough to make that kind of judgment

weird, I thought most people played at least maybe 3 MMOs... but I guess that's fair, they are kinda niche

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There are countless popup MMOs from the early to mid 2000s that could qualify. Used to be just about anybody could make an MMO.

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ItsKaljinyuTime posted...

There are countless popup MMOs from the early to mid 2000s that could qualify. Used to be just about anybody could make an MMO.

Indeed. During WoW's heyday, MMO's were the genre of choice for low-effort cash grabs. Most of the worst ones, we probably haven't even heard of because they were never good enough to show up on anyone's radar.

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Maplestory 2

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The neat looking Chinese one on Steam that said 'we will try to translate it to English if enough people buy it', then shut down their Steam servers and left it as Chinese only non Steam client.

>:(
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Does Graal count? Because that was pretty lousy half the time.

Although for mainstream MMOs, you also had some glorified chat rooms with massive amounts of mtx like Habbo Hotel.

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Lokarin posted...

weird, I thought most people played at least maybe 3 MMOs... but I guess that's fair, they are kinda niche

I've played 2 ever. FFXI, which I still play and have on and off since Jan '04, and WoW which I've only played for the "level to 20 free trial" a few times to try out classes and that was when the burning crusade expansion was the new one

Couldn't say. I've thoroughly enjoyed every MMO I've played.

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Some Chinese MMO with great graphics and flashy combat but every single other aspect of it is terrible

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DeltaBladeX posted...

The neat looking Chinese one on Steam that said 'we will try to translate it to English if enough people buy it', then shut down their Steam servers and left it as Chinese only non Steam client.

>:(

And now that I'm out of bed, I looked it up in my hidden games list. Here we go for those wondering.
https://steamcommunity.com/app/614860/discussions/0/1745594817426484297/
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I haven't played any "bad" mmos. From a technical standpoint Runescape was the "weakest" one I played? But it was a browser game from.. what over 20 years ago? I played it when I was in middle school and loved it.

If I'm to do an evaluation... I tried playing age of conan and had issues with billing since they weren't based in the US, my bank really didn't like sending my money out of the country.

I played rift and lost interest before the early access ended because the balance was so fucking bad. I remember trying to play a necromancer and people on the forums bitching that mages were really weak or something? I don't recall the specifics.

I actually played SWTOR quite a bit but it was a single player game in a mmo setting so it didn't keep me engaged.

Wildstar was more of a meme than a game, the absolutely massive picture explaining how attunement worked is still in my memory. The active combat got old really quick in a genre where you generally mindlessly farm while watching something on your second monitor.

FF14 is actually really good. Definitely the second best mmo I've played.

Definitely not the worst technically, but I kind of resent we never got KOTOR 3 at the expense of SWTOR.

There are mountains of garbage Chinese and Korean diablo looking mmo in the pre WoW days. Then after WoW came out, they switched to WoW clones that are still shit. If we are talking about ones that people have actually heard about then probably Lineage or FF11.

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this guys got a whole channel full of videos reviewing the worst mmos he can find

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRWyPm7MrfotIYF8A8MGV3g

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WoW in the sense that its success lobotomized the industry until this day; nobody tries to make anything but "WoW-killer" theme park MMOs and there's never anything new or interesting. A lot of good franchises cloned it and nothing became of those games and the cool setting goes unused. There's no innovation in the genre which is dead now because you can trick people into perpetually paying for your game with DLC, microtransactions, and battle passes, why attempt to build a virtual world?

Actiblizzard kills genres like MMOs and hero shooters. Did it kill the card game too, or did that split off into the roguelike card genre?

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I like the idea of decentraland for the future. Big open world controlled by users.

https://decentraland.org/

*edit* also if this counts as an MMO, it's still pretty rough technically, so I submit this.

Rotpar posted...

WoW in the sense that its success lobotomized the industry until this day;

I mean, you can't really call WoW the worst MMO for being the best MMO (oversimplifying the assessment a bit, but the underlying logic works). WoW was, by and large, a very good game. That's why it was successful. The fact that everyone attempting to enter the genre since then has been too lazy to come up with their own thing is a reflection on them, not on WoW.

Rotpar posted...

There's no innovation in the genre which is dead now because you can trick people into perpetually paying for your game with DLC, microtransactions, and battle passes, why attempt to build a virtual world?

This is the main reason MMO's have died out. Companies with the resources to create persistent virtual worlds have found that they can take the most lucrative parts out of MMO's and use them to turn other, cheaper genres into "live services." The investment that a proper MMO takes isn't likely to see much of a return compared to chasing after the current flavour of the month live service.

That said, I know PSO2 at least has been quite successful as an actual MMO that definitely does not follow in WoW's footsteps in any way. The game's from 2012 (though only released outside of Japan a year ago), so it's not exactly a super-recent example, but it's at least one example of bucking that trend. Bonus points where, despite being F2P, its monetization is quite reasonable and you can quite easily go hundreds of hours without paying a cent.

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