Let's complain! Everyone loves to complain!

So what's your most despised feature or game mechanic in MMORPGs that makes you rage more than anything else? Everyone's got a favorite game mechanic they love to hate, let loose and complain! We can all complain together! Hahaha!

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It's hard for me to decide... But I think my biggest pet peeve in MMORPGs is the fact that everyone looks the same. I mean, honestly, with thousands of people playing together in a single persistent world, shouldn't looking different be especially important? Oblivion has a far better character creation system than pretty well any MMORPG, and it's a single-player game. I just rage when I walk down some path and see a dozen people who look nearly identical to me in a 10 minute time-frame. If nothing else, there should always be clothing and armor dyes available, am I right?

Kudos to City of Heroes/Villains for their character customization system. Also a thumbs-up for Mabinogi for it's multitude of item and clothing colors available. Looking forward to seeing how Champions Online improves on City of Heroes' customization!

I agree with you, but it's not usually just that everyone looks alike, it's that everyone *IS* alike. Most character classes in most MMOs are very generic. You get your tank character, your healer, your mage, yadda yadda and all of them are functionally identical depending on what gear they're carrying. It's very difficult to roleplay any of these characters because they're nothing special.

Oh, for sure. In some games even the equipment people have is the same. Look at FFXI for example... All the armor sets are tiered according to level, so you'll basically always have the same armor as everyone else who shares your class and level. Pretty sad...

Lodeclaw wrote:Oh, for sure. In some games even the equipment people have is the same. Look at FFXI for example... All the armor sets are tiered according to level, so you'll basically always have the same armor as everyone else who shares your class and level. Pretty sad...

I couldn't agree more! Seen this in a lot of free MMORPGs. The worst one was probably Last Chaos. Not only was the choice of equipment very poor, but the customization options were -extremely- limited. It looked like each class had a lot of clones running around.

That being said, I'm generally very disappointed with the character customization options in MMORPGs. No matter how advanced combat system it has or how lovely the environment is, I can't play it if the character customization options are too limited. The game developers seem to forget this little point though... Every time a new MMORPG is released, I check out genre and character customization options first. Every time, I end up getting disappointed.

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It's not just that characters all start generic, it's that they all stay generic. Compare any 5 warriors at level 1 and they all look the same. Compare them again at level 10 and level 20 and they STILL look the same! I wouldn't mind everyone starting out the same if you could make dramatic changes as time goes on. Most MMOs don't allow you to do that because as far as they're concerned, a character is just a chess piece pushed around the board that means nothing.

Cephus wrote:Most MMOs don't allow you to do that because as far as they're concerned, a character is just a chess piece pushed around the board that means nothing.

Well, that's what makes my blood boil. For me, a character is a puzzle. One that I like to "build up" or develop, which is why character customization is hugely important. Also, in RP, I value individual characters. This is why I loathe specific hair-styles (braids, crowns, ponytails) and costumes when I have to create a character. The aesthetic aspect related to individuality is totally taken out of MMORPGs on the market. It is as you say, the characters function as "tools" to gain petty rewards for slaying X number of monsters or do repetitive quests. Reaching the highest level as fast as possible is all that matters...

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That's because most players and pretty much all MMOs treat characters as tools. The character exists to carry the gear and swing the sword, it has no purpose or meaning beyond that. MMO developers don't realize, or care, that roleplayers value the character as a goal unto itself. A character is much more important than what it carries or what it kills, just having a character and watching it grow and develop and have a fully-formed life of it's own is the entire purpose of roleplaying.

MMOs only care about gear grinding and leveling up, the character is wholly unimportant.