Well the static world is really a quest design issue not a world issue at heart.
Quests, by and large, are ported directly from single player games with no transferrence involved.
NPC to Player: Go, kill this evil guy and the world will be saved.
This is basically the concept behind a scarily large percentage of MMO quests. Even Ryzom's RoS is guilty of this.
This quest model is simply inappropriate for an MMO.
Quests built around providing food for a village a a lot better - villages always need food and there's no obvious contradiction in lots of players doing this.
Large public quests, or events (e.g.temple building event in ryzom) where people work togethre, or against each other towards a goal work well too.
We need to get away from the idea that every player character is a hero - in an MMO that simply makes no sense.
I think his comments about the subscription model are poorly thought out however - there's nothing that prevents people sampling subscription based games as long as there is some sort of free trial mechanism (which most games have).
As for the social aspect - I think that's just fundamentally wrong. SPeaking for myself I and my closest in-game freind play together constantly - whatever MMO we are playing we will be grouped. Therefore if required we choose classes based not only on what we like the look of, but what will fit well together. We have lots of other friends too, who we will often group with, but we level up together so are always on the same part of the content.
Moreover, excepting high-end endgame content it mostly doesn't matter if everyone isn't at the same place in the game. If some lower level freinds want to join us that's fine - they come along too and we try to keep them alive as best we can
For him it seems to be that it's all about the game - he wants to be doing the best he possibly can be in the game, witht he perfect group, and finds that his freinds don't always fit into that. That's skewed thinking IMO.
Button watching? Dunno about that. I just learn where the buttons are so I don't have to look at them. I know what the cooldowns are on my skills (if playing a game with CDs on skills), and rarely have to do more than an occasional glace at the button bar. Never been an issue for me, or my closest freinds, I do admit that the concept of buttons to perform pre-scripted actions isn't the best idea for a UI. Maybe a more 'heads-up' interface perhaps even including mouse guestures would help? Not sure it's a real priority for me, however.
Aggro is something I do agree with - up to a point. The reason that tank,cc,dps,heal is used so widely is that it forces cooperation between players playing very different classes, and this is a good requirement for hard content. Cooperation *should* be the goal in MMOs - that's really the point of them. I don't like the aggro radius - so that you can walk right by an enemy and it will just stare at you, but in order to get around that you have to accept a lot of compromises in the gameplay area, which I am not concerned are worthwhile.
Everyone these days is writing articles that claim to have the problems of MMOs spelt out. Most of them are wrong. This is no exception.
The real issue with MMOs (it's present in first person games too, but gets amplified to a far larger degree in MMOs) is that basically, people don't know what they want.
They want a living, breathing and challenging world full of danger where they, a not especially talented person, can be a special and unique hero, without too much effort or hardship. A game can't be both hard *and* easy. It can't require both lots of time and hardly any time at all. It can't require both lots of knowledge and almost none. And most people, lots of the time, aren't even sure which of those they want.
In the end, although people will generally tell you they want a hard game - when they actually play it there will be so many complaints that it actually *is* hard, and this means that they can't actually do what they want to do all the time that it gets watered down, and stops being hard. So then they complain that it's easy.
The problem isn't the games, it's the players and thus the market. Games are made for the market - the market isn't created around the games.
P.S. This ended up being almost as long as the original article. Damn.
