March 30 marks my birthday. This year I’ll be an age that’s relatively unimportant, but the milestone is 12 straight years of playing MMOs. I get asked by blokes in some circles what my utter fascination is with the genre, whether it be some of the horrid F2P games down to the more epic P2P ones, and the answer is pretty simple. Much like Brisco County Jr., I’ve been searching for the next big thing. I’ve been seeking this game for the past couple of years, but it has eluded me. Don’t get me wrong, World of Warcraft is a pretty amazing game. It did what a lot of previous MMOs failed to do. It augmented the genre as we know it, making it something more than massive. Every game that has followed has pretty much gone down the same road, some with their own spins and some complete copy cats.

If any of you developing an MMO happen to stumble on this blog, what I’d like is the group environment to be brought back. I don’t mean for an instance, which will last upwards of an hour, or even a raid that could go on for longer. The ease of leveling solo, barely ever needing another body to complete a quest or defeat a random monster, has become terribly boring. It almost feels like developers have purposely made games of the genre effortless just to gain those extra 15 bucks a month or that cash-shop purchase. I want to have to earn levels, respect and fortune again, not just repetitively click a mouse. I want to feel that I need each player in my party while traveling through your worlds.

Sure, you might just be thinking right about now, “Oh, it’s just the angry ginger kid venting again.” But in all seriousness, when was the last time you actually had to find a group to get a level? Does anyone else in the world miss the interaction with other players outside of a guild? I’m not saying make a game that’s so difficult no one will want to subscribe, but don’t make it as easy as it has been. I can count at least 14 games in which I’ve never needed a party, including Lineage II as an alternate character, which was a complete test to see how far I could go on my own. The result was pretty far.

My father told me a great story when I was a kid, about his time spent on a swim team as a teenager. His team had a meet coming up against an opponent that they really wanted to beat. Know what they did that was so different to win? They wore black armbands with their opponents’ initials on them. To increase their morale and hunger for the win, their coach (RIP) had them drag a coffin with the names of each of the opposing team members’ names on it. This kind of moxie is something you would almost find in a sitcom. When I find myself repeating this story, a lot of people ask me if his team won. The point I always gathered from the story was more important than whether they won or not, which they did. The point was that they did it because they wanted to beat the other team.

What I want for my birthday this year, more than anything, is for someone out there to read that story and take something from it. Wear that black armband and want to beat your opponents. Do something different. Challenge players like us who look forward to your new games, don’t make them a simple cake walk. Make us want to learn, don’t cheat your genius and use a regurgitated idea from the games of yesterday. On top of all that, please give me something that can keep me occupied for longer than five minutes.