Greatest MMO features that somehow never got copied

[Darkivy]

EQ1

Cybering away the downtime while medding.

SWG

Shopping !

[Ardbeg of AB]

CoH:
Some one mentioned the COH character creations system wich was awesome, didnt play COH for long but think I spent more time in char creation than in the game

EQ:
Havent seen it in any other game but the option to set up a trader to buy things was pretty cool and something I wouldnt mind seeing in WoW. How it worked was that you specified that you wanted X quantity of item Y and you paid Z ammount of money for it.

Fabled months where old content is spiced up for a mont to celebrate the anniversary of the game. Nostalgia trip fro some, the opportunity to see a old raid dungeon for others.

Diablo:
Random dungeon creation, bosses where the same but the layout and there placement varies. Much harder to do in full 3D but it would be an added spice if the instance didnt look the same and the pulls where identical all the time.

/Ardbeg

[Agraza]

Originally Posted by Zehn - Vhex

I look at it this way, in 15 years we'll all be fucking Alyson Hannigan in our VR machines anyways and this won't mean dick.

The future looks good.

[Draegan]

I stopped having chat discussions a while ago with the people I play with. With my group of friends we hang out on vent while we're doing shit, whether grouped together or not. No need to type and we can actually play the game and talk at the same time.

Now I don't think I could get into a game the moves slow. Pull, kill then wait for respawn. No thanks. But I can see why you want that, or remember it fondly. You were able to get farther in a game (which we all like to do) without really doing much, kind of like AFKing in battlegrounds.

[Grizzlebeard]

Originally Posted by Ardbeg of AB

EQ:
Havent seen it in any other game but the option to set up a trader to buy things was pretty cool and something I wouldnt mind seeing in WoW. How it worked was that you specified that you wanted X quantity of item Y and you paid Z ammount of money for it.

They used this in FFXI as well. In one of their many failed attempts to combat RMT, S-E introduced a tax on items sold at the Auction Houses. What then happened is almost every player, including RMT, stood outside the city entrances and turned on trader mode when they went to bed for the night as there is no tax on items sold outside the city boundaries. Still, I suppose it helps S-E claim they have a higher round the clock playerbase than they actually do.

[Burf]

Originally Posted by Needless

EQ1. Dye system.

WRU armor dyes.

DAOC

[Tenks]

Hasn't the widespread use of Ventrillo kind of squashed the "I need downtime to socialize" aspect? If you can't do your job in an MMORPG while talking on a microphone you should probably get Brain Age or something.

[Zehn - Vhex]

Don't go down that road man. The "vent vs. chat" thing is a no-win situation.

[Draegan]

Originally Posted by Zehn - Vhex

Don't go down that road man. The "vent vs. chat" thing is a no-win situation.

We just had that derail like last week.

[Hatorade]

I am going to with set a filter and you auto loot everything you kill when you walk over it.

[Wash]

Originally Posted by Duppin

I know you're trying to be flippant here, but for some of us anyway, there is a LOT to be said for a little bit slower-paced game where you can shoot the shit with people while you play, rather than having to bash keys as fast as possible to get anything done.

It's one of the main reasons I didn't stick with EQ2, it always felt like every split second that I wasn't mashing one of my four hotkey banks worth of buttons was precious time lost.

Yes. This is one of the main reasons I could never really get into WoW. On my own it was fine, but groups were always pull-kill-pull-kill-pull-kill and after an hour of that I'm like shit, my arm hurts. And the whole time no one has said anything to each other because they're so busy pull-kill-pull-killing.

Oh, and Re: Allyson Hannigan:

FCC Okays Nudity On TV If It's Alyson Hannigan

[Duppin]

Originally Posted by Tenks

Hasn't the widespread use of Ventrillo kind of squashed the "I need downtime to socialize" aspect? If you can't do your job in an MMORPG while talking on a microphone you should probably get Brain Age or something.

I don't like using voice in these games; I'll try to explain and hope my explanation makes sense. It'd help, though, if people would actually try to respect the viewpoints and gameplay styles of others rather than being so quick to say "lol u sux go play brain age!" but I guess that's a lot to ask for online.

Anyway, I digress, here's my main point.

With text, I can do a few things that I just can't with voice:

1) I can pay attention to WHO is talking much more easily, and mentally vet the information's importance based on that. Yes, you can get to recognize a certain person's voice most of the time, but with a piece of text with a character name attached to it, I can tell EVERY time. With voice it can be challenging to pick out, say, the person calling the main assist from the person who wants to bitch about their day at work, depending on how many people are talking at once, connection/microphone issues, etc.

2) I can refer back to it. It's hard to adequately explain this one, but I find it to be really helpful, particularly if I have group/raid/other chat all going at once. With voice, if I miss what someone said, it's gone; I either have to ask them to repeat themselves, or go without the information.

3) I can filter it into different places; for instance when playing Vanguard, I have one window where important chat goes (group/guild), another for "regular" chat like OOC and /say, and another for combat results. That way, the input I get from people is sorted how I want and I can look where I need to look without having to sort through irrelevant things.

4) Quite frankly, I don't want to bother with voice chat for random pickup groups; this is less of a concern for games that incorporate voice into the game client, but I'm not going to try to set up on someone's Ventrilo server to spend a few hours going through a dungeon with them.

Now, you can just reply "lrn2play lol" to all of this, and that's honestly the sort of reply I'm expecting; but voice isn't a universal answer for everyone in games of this type, and saying "lrn2play" isn't going to change that. So text chat is going to continue to be an important part of MMOs, and it's good for developers to take that into account when determining their combat pacing.

[Draegan]

I have no desire to use voice with puts, only with friends and guildmates so I agree with you there in any case.

[Vorph]

I agree with the vent part as well, but I also agree with Zehn that I have no interest in anything slower-paced than WoW. In my heroic groups the only time pulls stop are when I'm dead/totally out of mana, the healer is dead/afk, or more than one of the dps are dead/afk. So chatting about the weather, what you're having for dinner, that rash you've got that just won't go away, etc. pretty much doesn't happen. And I'm ok with that.

[Grave]

I think it should be an option though, not by slowing down gameplay, but by providing environments where slower paced combat and lengthier stays are accepted. I.e. dungeon camps that are actually rewarding to sit and exp in. You could still have your normal instances to run too, but no reason they can't create some old school style dungeons as well for people who want that experience.