The fact that players rarely have to inhabit the same space to interact is one of many reasons that the virtual world feeling of MMOs is really decaying.

Except, modern MMO design doesn’t actually *end*, it just peters off into droning, mindless treadmill exercise. Devs can’t keep making content for the endgame, it’s too expensive. Players either need to move on at some point or accept the treadmill.

I’d also add customizable UI to your list, including key remapping, mouselook and axis reversing options. It’s OK to have a nonstandard basic UI, but players who are used to how some *other* game plays will want to shuffle things around before they feel at home.

Other than those minor additions, I heartily agree! I most especially agree with the respec stand, and I’d go so far as to say that they should be cheap (preferably free), easy and as complete as possible. Let players change as much as possible, even down to the class, as far as I’m concerned. Grinding up alts sucks when you just want to *get on* with the game. (And those who love alts will play them anyway.)

I think that both MMO development and product develoment are very similiar. For example the growing list of features that automobiles have seems to parallel MMOs. I remember features like power steering, power brakes, air conditioning — all standard equipment on cars today used to be upgrades.

You hit the nail on the head with features like mail systems, auction house and guild support. Every MMO will have to have them as MMO players expect them.

It makes me wonder why a software company has not yet released a standard MMO development platform with these various modules available to developers. It seems like a big waste of time to essentially reinvent the wheel each time a new MMO is made by creating all of these features from scratch.

Interestingly enough all of the features you outlined all seem to have one thing in common: they free the player from doing mundane tasks so they can persue the more enjoyable things like adventuring and dungeon crawling.

Honestly, with the WoW auction system — and yeah, I feel a little evil saying this — but, as an enchanter, I used to buy every single item in the bazaar from other competing enchanters if they sold those items below my standard price points (and I put a lot up in the AH, because I pretty much bought any reasonably priced item on auction possible)… and I’d just sell their own stuff, even if I bought bags and bags full. Doing that, my enchanter, at level 29, had about a gazillion times more money than my main character, who was roughly twice as high in levels. My level 29 alt could have paid to twink my main if I wasn’t equally as obsessed with BGs, getting my main all PVP gear =p

I only say this to point out the flaws in the AH system. It’s more convenient in some ways, but not necessarily more convenient insofar as getting people good deals. You couldn’t manipulate the market so easily in the bazaar, because people were constantly popping in and out and it just took longer to keep up with it, especially since you had to physically go find the vendors to buy the item.

Yes, you could absolutely still do it, but it just wasn’t ever quite as effective as instantly being able to click “buy now” on all people who would otherwise undercut reasonable prices (and, honestly, I never really price gouged when I played the market… there are just so many people who don’t really care what they sell something for, jumping to undercut the competition *even when there’s more demand than supply*).

Some people may complain that your character had to actually sit there in the bazaar for things to be sold, but you could do it while AFK without being bumped, and you could always get great deals you wouldn’t see in the AH, because sometimes people just wanted to sell things *very quickly*, much more quickly than even giving a ‘buy now’ option in the AH. Plus, while characters had to be there in the bazaar to sell stuff, players didn’t. AFK couldn’t bump you in trader mode. So I’d just leave my bazaar mule up all night and in between classes while I was in college.