Recently there has been quite a few posts about the MMORPG industry coming to an end, and I think that there are more than one reasons for the industry to end... if it ever does. Let’s imagine for a moment that the MMORPG genre is a drug, one that is now showing its first side effects. The studies about the effects of this new drug are now coming out to the surface, and the result is a mixed combination between death, passion, and server maintenance. In the past year, the MMORPG News were very diverse. From online players marrying their raiding partner to younger ones killing each other over a virtual item, the News kept coming in one even more amazing than the other. And apparently even pornstars play online; you never know who you might run into.

Players

    Players will contribute to the end of virtual days, by providing a new player hell for every newbie that logs in. By raising the prices of their stores and continuously attempting to scam other players they will successfully create an economy imbalance regardless of Game Master efforts to avoid this by modifying the drop rates. They will publish about their sour experiences about every single online game ever made, and overwhelm with objections anybody that dares contradict them.

    Gold farmers will continue to expand and an underground industry of gold farmers will plague the virtual realms, taking the hunting fields away from everyone else's hands. The farmers will turn into mafias that will target specific players that bear remarkable weapons; and then they will organize ambushes to steal all the valuables they can from high level players.

Developers

    Game creators will continue to make redundant and mindless games that will generate the same boring reviews over and over again. The already known popular races will be recycled until the virtual avatars themselves will make a union and go on strike. The minimalistic GUI makers will collide with the super multifunctional GUI ones and the middle balanced point will be lost.

     Developers will continue to ignore the community's needs and will blurt out game after game that make them happy instead of the end-consumers. Game Masters will be younger and more inexperienced until they become teenagers and random toddlers coordinating server events. Great games will be ruined with unnecessary patches. Hackers will be ignored and will become the second virtual world plague.

Operating Systems

     A problem not even considered by elite players will erase the heart of the online games. The MMORPG will suffer when Vista tries to make its final move to replace XP from the world’s computers. Windows Vista can't seem to handle an animated cursor, will it be able to handle all the beloved games that hardcore players crave and enjoy? Will we all be forced to change to the penguin operating system to play decent games? Will we be condemned to mourn our Windows games and adopt the self-adoring iCulture? The third plague will be a shortage of playable games in the operating system owned by the majority.

Justice

     The justice system will respond to multiple accounts of crimes that emerged from the virtual world by banning more and more games to keep the angry parents appeased. All online games will be required to have a time control limit that will upset western players. Parents with small children that play online will be required to have special monitoring software on their computer to regulate their gaming time.

    Playing online games that are targeted to minors will constitute a felony and you will be charged with being a child molester. The fourth plague will be a limitation of game variety because of the continuous game banning.

Solutions

    Can we stop a potential End of Days for our online games? I believe that yes we can. It would be easier to just click Exit and turn your console on, but that would just be running away from the problem.

     There hasn't been any type of game that can exceed the diversity and complexity of playing online. In the virtual worlds, the game doesn't stop. When I first started playing I looked for a "Game Pause" button then I realized the idea of Online is more than just a regular game. You meet real people, you can’t emulate that, single player games will always be based on a storyline that you must follow. MMORPGs are something else, here you write the story. There are good people as well as bad people. I feel that just like in the TV News, bad news sell better. Just because bad things happen because of people that can't control their gaming it doesn't mean that there are no good stories out there. The problem is they were talked inside the game, they are posted in private forums, they are in the hearts and minds of the people who play.

    The human factor in MMORPGs is an independent variable in the development of online games. You won't find a "Friendly players guaranteed" seal on any game on the market with a real massive player population. Finding people that share ideals with you is a task left entirely up to you. In any decent game you will find the necessary social tools you might need, but friends won't make themselves.

    As a community, we set the standard on the complex social interactions that take place. If we decide to ignore or reinforce negative behaviors, then new players will know that it is acceptable. Understanding that we are all different, we speak different languages, we have a different culture, and a different mindset; might help us understand that even though we login into a game were every character looks alike, there is a different person controlling every single virtual character, each person is a different world, waiting to be discovered.

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good people do nothing