>>445732Well, the big issue here is that Developers are trying to divorce what makes RPGs good in the first place, which is being able to Role-play through systems(which inevitably create PVE/PVP environments) and what makes MMOs good, which is the biggest achievement of WoW. WoW was practically facebook before facebook was a thing. A virtual world, you could be many races, you could live in a virtual world.
We can discuss whether or not the focus on PVE/PVP made it worse for these games but it's clear that WoW had a community focus in mind when it came to its designs.
Battle.net allowed you to even see people playing other games before launchers were a thing and people were whispers away from jumping into your party.
And we then get to jump back to the idea of Accessibility. Despite the massive growth of the MMORPG genre, people were hungry for money and thinking: "Alright, how do we get this to as many people as possible?" And then forgot that MMORPGs were a niche market in the first place. Hard to make, hard to execute and so on.
When it comes to Metas and min-maxing, these have always existed no matter what. It's how humans conduct themselves but I'd argue that the subject is irrelevant to the MMORPGs we're playing nowadays.
You used to be able to figure out through experimentation( can sort of still do this in WoW) what your rotation is, mix and match talents, change specs around, put on different legendaries, swap gems. And then bam, almost different character, all on your own. And class design back then allowed you to fulfill even more specific roles that were created by players themselves.
Fast forward to now and look at a game like Final fantasy XIV where the devs make the rotation and take away customization options and make all the jobs homogenized while clinging to the very last bastion of hope they have, the trinity.
Now, the trinity isn't bad either.
