Hey guys, as we are almost done with our virtual worlds class and I assume you guys have been playing your particular MMO for a couple of months now and have been very thorough and familiar with it by now. I was just wondering what the single thing you guys most enjoyed and disliked from the game. It can be anything from an in game experience, mechanic, feature technical aspect and so forth. I played World of Warcraft as my MMO and personally my favorite thing about the world and experience is the artistically created world. Blizzard knew while they created the game that they could not compete with single player rpg games in the pure graphical/polygons horsepower race as WOW is run on a server for multilayer, so they clever instead used a cartoon aesthetic surrounded by a beautiful lush world. The single most thing I hated about WOW was the fighting game mechanics. Coming from console/PC gaming and having played a lot of rpg and action adventure games, the point and click structure of WOW really felt uninspiring and really turned of to the game. I also disliked the questing structure of the game, where all it was was go collect this many things of something and bring it back.

So what about you guys what was the thing you most hate and like about your MMO and how would you want the devs to change them?

Some of you actually are archaeologists, I presume, so it may interest you to know that the columns at sites like massively.com aren’t all about what’s ‘new’.  In fact, we really can’t understand any media or technology if we only concentrate on the ‘new’ (almost always with the embedded nonsensical presupposition that anything newer is also better, that all new media or technology have more affordances than the old ones, that progress is inevitable, adapt or die, etc.), that’s just part of a mythology of media or technology, if those are the questions you are asking, you are just regurgitating that mythology and calling it an analysis.  One question is how things come to seem new, and others old, by comparison.  More generally it’s worth looking at how the things that have become old look now.  Enter the game archaeologist:

http://www.massively.com/category/the-game-archaeologist/