Two Things I Hate About Most MMOs

By, Omer Altay

Awesome… another lame item shop

Every time I download a new MMO, I’m usually disappointed to learn that
the game’s store only has a handful of items for sale. After I finished
racing through a few games of Outspark’s exciting new snowboarding MMO,
Project Powder,
I was excited about the game because the gameplay was incredibly fun
and it had a fairly sized community. After I learned that the game’s
store only had a handful of t-shirts and pants for sale, my earlier
enthusiasm had quickly died down. How on earth could the developers of
Project Powder spend so much time and effort creating a marvelously
addicting and fun snowboarding game, but fail to create more virtual
t-shirts and accessories? I mean come on, how difficult could it be to
add more t-shirts and pants to the game? What’s the point of spending
countless hours playing a game and earning virtual money that can only
be spent on five different t-shirts and 3 pants? If I play a game for
hours on end, I want to at least buy some stylish clothes and snazzy
accessories.

No Excuse.

There’s simply no excuse for Project Powder or any other MMO
to offer anything less than a hundred articles of clothing /
accessories at the game’s store, because if they don’t, players are
going to starting quitting and moving onto games with more
customization and things to do, like Exteel.
That game really nailed the concept of having a lot of things to
purchase in the game’s store, as it literally has hundreds of different
items to buy. 5Street
did the same thing, as the store has countless different t-shirts,
pants, hats and goodies to purchase. I shouldn’t be picking solely on
Project Powder, because even other games like Tales Runner and Project Torque
also have this same issue, in fact almost every MMO game does. 
Developers and publishers need to get their acts together, as the free
MMORPG and MMO genre is starting to get competitive, so they’ll need to
start appeasing players if they want to stay in business.

Hurrah! Playing housing… oh wait….. This sucks.

A lot of newer games are starting to include the very basics of player
housing, where everyone gets to own their very own home in the game’s
virtual world. The concept itself has limitless potential, but so far
I’ve yet to see any free MMORPG really put any effort into developing the concept. Games like Runes of Magic, Pi Story, Nostale
and 5Street all have player housing, but players can’t really do
anything with their homes, as customization is usually extremely
limited. So what SHOULD player housing have to make it better? Well,
here’s a freebie for all you game developers out there, player housing
should have almost limitless ‘upgrades’. When I say almost limitless
upgrades, I don’t mean an elaborate system of complex customization; I
mean a boatload of house size upgrades. Imagine playing a game like
Runes of Magic, but instead of having nothing to spend your money on,
you every let’s say 100k gold makes your house physically bigger, and
after a thousand or so upgrades, your house transforms into a
multi-story flying castle with huge cannons and tons of awesome
cosmetics. This may sound pretty ‘useless’, as it wouldn’t affect the
actual gameplay, but simply having another way to spend money in an
MMORPG would only enhance the enjoyment of that game and add a whole
lot more playability to it.

Source:

http://mmohut.com/editorials/two-things-i-hate-about-most-mmos