Blame Wow, it stole all the cake that developers and cheap RuneScape gold investors copy the version and got much achievement. If wow didn't have such a major subscriber count we would see more programmers risk, OSRS and Tibia are a exception to this since they're so old and predate wow. Id state Albion is a exception but it is not my cup of tea and I have zero expectations that we'll ever receive a game as mmo players are much too use to the wow progression model. It is successful because core gameplay and it is combat in times of game design was the very best in the genre and it is not going away.
And to be honest, I can not see how developers can't risk due to WoW. There was no danger in that, although yeah they can not create afk grinders that OP discusses in this thread. Daily an MMO with fluid battle would still get financed, programmers have to show a demo with combat. Rather in the genre for its moment, it's only it piggybacked on the hype caused by being associated to the warcraft collection that is favorite. That coupled with the simple fact that most of its characteristics were compact enough to cater to a broader audience i.e. no punishment upon death, straightforward leveling only through quests, essentially all the groundwork for what we now know as themepark MMOs.
Hype is just an incentive. Would be bad folks wouldn't endure for long. Just like in any mmo which was becoming hype and fame of”wowkiller” after that. The genre was stuck in a limbo between rpg and action genres, but never providing on any of it. Sure mmos in 2003 were fine if you are a fan of dumb grind with no challenge to your ability, but at precisely the exact same time single player games with deep, satisfying and only very good gameplay to this day were releasing at the time. No shit MMOs were a market. WoW simply broke the cycle allowing to emerge.
In the majority of the west MMOs have been a niche but over here where shittons of people and they played with in pc bangs/cybercafes/internet cafes or whatever you call them into america. These internet cafes didnt catch on in most areas outside asia and eastern europe because having private PCs for gaming wasn't actually something here back then, but in the regions where they caught on, mmorpgs were already booming and single player games were popular because it was far simpler to set up an MMO while people would pay for playtime through prepaid game cards than getting a bunch of copies of singleplayer games lawfully (so you would have mostly illegal copies of warcraft/starcraft/GTA/half of life so much as single player games proceed ).
Where I live, the occurrence of pc bangs created it that almost everyone I know from back then then played mmos i.e. lineage and ragnarok being two big ones that are nearly unknown in the west. At some stage warcraft III got pretty popular as a result of habit maps such as dota, td, etc which was pretty much one of the chief reasons why people must understand world of warcraft over here. Wow had simple compact features but still had reasonable depth when it came into it though I wouldn't discredit everything else which existed alongside and rs gold 2007 before wow as”catastrophic game design”.
