Speaking of old MMOs, I'm currently playing on a private, custom WoW server.
It's Vanilla but with added community content and a largely roleplay ambitions. And it's pretty cool! There's a large upcoming "expansion" too, that will probably be the time to share more about it then.
What I find very interesting is how different it feels to other servers, private or official.
I saw one guy making a very dubious joke about Jews, and he got slammed by the entire world chat and the GMs. It's refreshing to have a community that will not tolerate any bullshit, because damn if it doesn't get bad elsewhere...
Fluffynov
There's going to be a bounty hunter system, which players can join, that will incentivize them to hunt for corrupt players, balancing this system. I also don't agree that OWPvP is the death of every MMO because clearly games like Lineage II have lived for ages now and are still being played.
Bounty hunting will do absolutely nothing. Very casual PvErs will not even set foot in the game, casual PvErs will leave after being killed twice. And then the rest of the more mixed players will leave once they've been harassed long enough.
Open world PvP is the death of any MMO.
I mean this is no opinion, this
is fact: all PvP games are ridiculously small... and the dozens of them released over the years, including all those more recent ones are dead.
Lineage 2 is effectively dead in the West, with a player base in the thousands... including a vast majority of bots.
WoW didn't reach 12M by being a PvP game.
All the survivors like FFXIV, ESO, GW2 or SWTOR certainly don't survive because of PvP. If they even did anything with it in years, GW2 has
dozens of active PvP players and was probably the only one that even tried.... before giving up inf avor of solo PvE content.
MMOs are not made for PvP. Gear and progression is anathema for PvP, except for people that don't want a test of skill.
Plainly a fact given by statistics: there are more active players in MOBAs and battle royales than there have been MMO players in the last 30 years. People do NOT want to PvP in an MMO. Or else they would have been playing them, not leaving for the options that allowed players to avoid it; Ultima Online proved as much when the PvE server took 95% of the population.