It often happens that the games we enjoy the most are the same ones that we complain about the most. This seems to be particularly true when it comes to massively mmorpgs such as EverQuest, Star Wars Galaxies, and World of Warcraft. We've all heard people claim that they no longer really enjoy the game, but continue to play only because they already have spent too much on the game, and they have become addicted. Having thousands of players in a game world that is constantly evolving has created a number of problems that single-player games don't have.
Playing some MMORPGs can be fairly expensive because of monthly fees to play the game. You also have to purchase the game and it's not hard to spend a couple hundred dollars a year playing a premium online game. It may seem inexpensive to some, but considering that one can purchase four or five computer games that have no subscription fee for a similar price.
One of the few problems that MMORPGs seem to have are servers going down. They always seem to go down just before you complete a huge quest that you had been working on for hours. If you're fighting your way through an instance, this can result in the loss of an entire game session. Similarly, if your own system crashes, your Net connection goes dead, or you get a bad dose of lag, gameplay can deteriorate rapidly. While simply switching servers can solve a lot of problems when playing an online action game like Counter-Strike, this is usually not an option with MMORPGs. Even if a MMORPG offers numerous servers to play on, moving a character from one server to another is never a simple matter, assuming it's allowed at all.
No game is without problems, and when people are paying to play, they want issues resolved promptly. The more popular the game is, the more difficult this task becomes. Although developers who can afford it inevitably respond by hiring more support staff, it's rarely enough to satisfy the entire game community. It may be that gamers are very demanding in this regard, but it is also likely that developers need to pursue more efficient ways of providing customer support.
Most MMORPGs do not lend themselves well to a casual hour or two of gameplay. In a lot of games it can take take very long just to find a group and get to where the action is. MMORPGs essentially go on forever and you can never really win. The abilities your game character has are almost always determined by how much time you have spent playing. Someone who can only put a few hours per week into the game will not progress at anywhere near the rate of someone playing a few hours per day. Worse yet, certain quests and missions seem to serve little purpose other than to slow down players and their progress.
Many consider it a good thing if a game demands a lot of time. It's always difficult to judge a game based on the amount of time it requires. MMORPGs are unique in that because when players lose interest, the money stops flowing. It's no accident that some of these titles are so time consuming. Developers want to keep people in the game, and hardcore players, as they race through every corner of the world, are continually demanding more content.
Although patches and expansion packs are a way of life in the gaming industry, in a MMORPG they can also cause problems. Players constantly complain about having had classes, abilities, and items "nerfed," referring to when an update has changed the attributes of something in the game. Players have to get used to the idea that the rules are going to change as they go, often with little or no explanation. On occasion these changes turn out to be mistakes and will have to be changed back. Perhaps worse, retail expansion packs frequently add new, more powerful gear to the game which makes it very difficult for anyone without the expansion to compete. An optional expansion for a game with no subscription fee is one thing, but a "must have" expansion when you're already paying to play is quite another.Another problem is the other players in the game world. There are always those that will cheat, exploit, harrass, or simply make it inconvenient for other players any way they can. Players can cause game disrupting like camping valuable item drops to "training" large groups of monsters into other players. Efforts are sometimes made to deal with these problems as they arise, as no developer could have imagined how many ways people would find to bend and abuse the rules.
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