As for the worst MMO?
Well, WOW for what it has done to the industry. In my opinion, WOW's real fault is not that it made MMO's generic, but that it has focused more on what was wrong with EQ, with out keeping what was right. It focuses, like soooo many MMO's today, on requiring huge time investments to both progress and become "successful."
EQ for starting off the industry with the distructive precident that "time = difficulty/reward," especially with the AA system added in.
One thing EQ did very, very well was giving the players a challenging game, I think most people will agree that eq got the challenge pretty good in most areas, especially since it was the first of its kind.
Shadowbane, because while it has some REALLY interesting ideas, it just was very.... bland? I know its not a very good description, it just feels like they could have done a lot more with it, considering it had some cool things going for it: Player driven world, player conquests, guild politics systems, resource control with the mines, and rather (too) customizable class system, though I also understand people who also like the 100% skill-based progression rather than classes/levels. I personally feel that SB's class system was a little too convoluted, and from what i remember, you could "screw up" bad if you didnt have a plan for what your character would "be" well before you started leveling. Also, the idea of "buff bot" characters on separate accounts was just a bad player-driven standard derived from a bad mechanic, at least to me it was.
An idea I've been playing with lately, which I'm going to make another post on later when I have more time, but basically I wonder if it would be well received if a game was really, really hard, but the leveling pace was fast, as long as you didn't die constantly.
I think that would be closer with what the original eq's concept was, difficult fights, faster leveling, rather than relatively easy fights in which you have to fight a lot to progress.
My idea of a "fun" dungeon would not be filled to the brim with trash mobs, but rather strategically placed mob encounters that were difficult to beat, meaning progression through the area would be almost just as slow, or slower, than the contemporary "wade through and decimate" approach.
Would be nice if the game actually assume that players would not always come out of the combat alive. If a game was designed with really difficult encounters, I would hope it would have a system in which no player receives experience loss until the entire group dies. I personally am a huge fan of the "everyone giving it their all" and striving to get through the fight at all costs, even including self-sacrifice and such.
So, I would have harsh death penalties if no one is able to revive the player with in 10 minutes after they die, no experience loss if revived by someone who was in your group during the time you died, and only 25% of the normal experience loss if someone outside of your group revives you after a fight, and 50% of the lost experience returned if you can recover your corpse with in 30 minutes.
That would hopefully accomplish a few things:
1.) Make it so players with high risk (lightly armored healers/casters), or players who are expected to "take one for the team," such as tanks, are not advancing slower and disproportionately to players who are relatively safer and less likely to die during combat, because all players would not lose any life so long as at least one group member is alive and all foes are dead. (healers would pass out revive stones, healers would have a no-cost group-wide revive spell, both usable out of combat only)
Since exp loss would be huge, if a tank is more likely to have multiple deaths per night vs say a rogue, then that tank is disadvantaged. But, provided the whole group does not die and the tank can get a ress with in 10 minutes after dieing, then no harm no foul, no experience lost.
2.) It would make self-sacrifice a strategy in some cases, as classes like Berserkers or Mages could deal significant damage at the cost of their life. When you take experience loss out of the equation, provided the group ends up surviving that is. This makes the decision to use the "potentially fatal" abilities a choice between "should I go all out and risk dieing, so that we could win" or "should I keep fighting like normal, so I dont die early, and not contribute as much as I could have?"
I think that would be fun, especially for people who love the glass-cannon nukers, they could go all out, pull hate, and die, but as long as the group lives, the only thing they lose is their potential to have dealt more total damage by staying alive, which would be a decision for the player to make, or say a paladin who self-sacrifices to completely heal the group instantly or something of the sort.
3.) It provides harsh punishment, but with methods of recovering, such as getting help from others, or at worst, returning to where you died to cut off half of the penalty. I think thats something I missed from EQ, harsh penalties but able to recover from them if you knew the right people. I think the only flaw was that it was predominantly in the domain of one class, the cleric, and later the paladin, and the real 96% ress was limited to clerics with their epic, which made it even more difficult.
I think a system like I described, with the player receiving 75% of their experience back if ressed by a player not participating in the encounter, or 100% returned if ressed by a player within the encounter, I think that would bring back a lot of the intent with EQ's original system. Add in the 50% experience returned if you simply manage to get back to your corpse before the 30 minute timer is up, then you have a good system for rewarding players for not giving up.
Also, I feel that leaving equipment on the corpse is a bad idea. Non-essential items from your inventory, sure, money, sure, but the equipment necessary to fight BACK to the corpse? Nope, so the concept of the soul-bound equipment and key items is, in my opinion, very much required.
Plenty of things I love from past games, I just wish some old rich dude with a lot of money would just fund some MMO project that would take the best parts of other games and make a kick ass game, a real successer to what EQ originally started as
