But it definitely did not keep up with me, and I feel not TOO OLD with 32 years! It is about time that someone thinks about the mmo addicted kids that have grown up and designs a MMO for elderly people for them. Not so much kidding, I am dead serious.

The x-th deviation of the EQ formula just does not do it for me anymore.

I’ve always been boggled by complainers who make no secret that they HATE a particular game, but refuse to leave, and/or only want to play an exact clone of it. Ten years ago, I had friends on a diku-type SMAUG mud who loathed it, but wouldn’t branch out to try other types of MUDs – no, they only wanted to play other SMAUG muds, and then sulked when it wasn’t as good as the original. Present day is no different. If you’re tired of the “holy trinity” sort of MMO, then why are you running around whining that you can’t be a “pure healer” in some other game?

The more things change, the more people stay the same. Guess it’s fear of change.

“It’s not the game that sucks…it’s you.”

And that’s what you’re saying here in a nutshell. While that’s not always true, and games do suck sometimes, a game is, as you say, what it is.

Most power gamers…a group from which I’m retired as made evident by my early exit from AoC…learn to play a game for what it is. We learn the rules that are stated and unstated, and we play the game.

We don’t sit back and wish a game to be a certain way. While others are doing that, we’re studying the way a game is and learning how to make due. That’s the fun for us. Serious game issues aside, of course.

About the post, I agree, for the most part, though I wish it weren’t so. I’ve recently given up on classic MMO’s, simply because they take too much of my time when I play them. I’ve found others like http://www.ogame.us– web-based MMO’s — can be a good deal more fun per minute spent playing.

All that time in EQ, DAOC, EQ again, WoW… it just seems silly to have to spend so much time to get to the “fun” parts of these games. I used to tell people, “if it’s not fun, why are you playing?” I finally took my own advice.

A logical WoW-graduation game would be something like going from Harry Potter (J.K. Rowling) to The Dark Elf Trilogy (R.A. Salvatore). Then graduating from Drizzt, you might find yourself reading Elric of Melniboné (Michael Moorcock), though the line there is less clearly defined than the former example.

What you’d really need for a true graduation MMO from World of Warcraft would be a more complex and “all growed up” fantasy game — not boobs and blood like Age of Conan, but something deeper both in theme (content) and gameplay (mechanics).