If there is no carry over of progression really, and no real reason to do anything in a given expansion because the gear will be totally wiped out by just world quests. Then you add on top of it massive over the top sharding…is this really an MMO, or is it just Diablo with a subscription?
edit: for clarification I should have said is it an mmorpg anymore, not just an mmo. I was thinking that but messed up on what I said. It’s really that it is still an mmo, but a lot of the RPG has gone away in favor of ease of new players jumping in, and I think that hurts the feel.
You’d be a bit late asking whether WoW’s an MMO anymore based on stuff being ‘reset’ with expansions, considering that’s been a thing ever since the very first one nearly 20 years ago.
You used to have to level crafting, and characters through the last expansion though. It had more meaning to have a maxed out character because you had to work on it. Not to mention seasons were not a thing so only expansions reset gear. Now crafting doesn’t matter, gathering doesn’t matter, leveling pretty much doesn’t matter, and the gear resets mid expansion multiple times and even mid .# ie 10.3.7 well we just reset the gear but added no content.
If you define an MMO by having loot from many patches/years ago being relevant to your character today? Than no, it’s not an MMO.
If you define an MMO by gameplay completing dungeons and raids in organized groups with other players, and progressing your character by earning loot? Then yes, it’s an MMO.
I lean towards the second definition, so I think it’s an MMO.
I dunno, I think professions are more relevant now in DF than they have been for quite a while. Or at least, I think they improved a lot with all the changes DF brought. It’s true that professions are self-contained in each expansion now rather than stretching across all of them, but I don’t think removing a lot of what’d essentially be pointless tedium to allow players more time to focus on what matters is necessarily a bad thing.
I’m also not really sure I’d count new seasons as a ‘gear reset’, or at least not any differently from something as simple as a new raid coming out, which is still something that’s been done pretty much since the start.
That’s an incredibly easy thing to say, however the time to develop content vs consuming it ratio is like 10:1.
This is the way the game has always been, pretty much. The only difference is that more of the content in the game is relevant. This is what people wanted, for world content to be more rewarding and to have a vested interest in actually going out into the world.
I can often get at least halfway through levelling on mostly previous expansion gear. If I was reasonably well geared in the old expansion, the new stuff that drops isn’t nearly as good. Compare that to back in BC where Hellfire greens were much better, I think we have more carryover now than we did in the past.
The only thing that’s changed is that people got older and realized what kind of game they were playing. Then they either moved on with that knowledge or fell into the spiral of regretting their life choices and wailing about it on the forums pining for a return to their childhood simplicity or release from the shackles of their own creating.
Every new raid tier and especially every new expansion has new gear to get that invalidates your old existing gear. This is not new, it’s how the game has always been.