In the last 15 years I have been a part in the launch of a lot of new and ambitious MMOs as a player . Some good ( EVE , SWG , EQ2 , WoW , Rift ) but most sad multimillion dollar traiwrecks.

I am not gonna try to give advice to what to do or avoid , since developers never listen to players , since they themselves have figured out the new cool thing we gonna love .

Instead I will tell you what we MMORPG players like . ( and nope its not storyline , public quests , dig. speech or whatever else some braniac thought we did . )

1. We like combat to make sense . We like to figure out casting orders , aoe timers , tank positioning , coordination and strategy to win a fight . We don't like buckets of hit points that lemmings can defeat . We like little buttons we can put in order and press while we autoattack big dragons . We don't like action combat . Give us action combat and have the game burn faster than you can say Tabula Rasa or The Secret World.

2. We like itemasation to make sense . We are loot [censored]s . We like mobs to drop stuff , harder mobs to drop better stuff and we like to have better stuff than anyone else around us . If everyone else around us has the same stuff as us we get pissed . Cancel game pissed .

3. We like the massive multiplayer online role playing game to be ...well a massive multiplayer online role playing game . If you think that you can give us enough solo quests, storylines , or whatever to get us to pay 15 $ a month in subscriptions we are gonna pull an Old Republic on you . We like great instances , with great involved fights and enough downtime between the action so we can socialize and get to know each other in group . 20 min rush zones lead us back to our old games and the people we used to hang around with .

4. We hate kill X mobs or go to Z npc quests but what we hate even more is getting hit by walls of text for crit damage or having to wait for bad voice acting to finish before we can go on with our quest to get an item . You will spent lots of money for voice actors ...we dont really care . We are just there for the loot ! In 15 years of online gaming I have met ONE person that really enjoyed doing quests and I think he was sleeping with his cat .

5. We like endgame . Start the game with no endgame and see what happens when the first month ends. By the way we WILL burn through the content you have made at 4x the speed you thought we would . So if you think you can launch the game and THEN add endgame , be prepared for a lot of [censored]slapping.

6. We like to matter. We like our actions to have an impact on the group so we can either gloat when we succed or grief when our fellow groupmembers fail .

7. We like to get stuff that 1. it takes effort to get and 2. they are so hard to get that other people want them and are jelous we have them ( we are shallow that way ) .

Here are some of the things we like . Anyone care to add ?

This post would only make any sense if you replaced all the "we"s with "I"s.

Not every MMORPG player thinks the same way.