It takes no small amount of audacity to look at the most commercially successful genre of videogaming and call it "broken". But that's exactly what I'm doing. Assuming the first priority of game design is to create a good game, massively multiplayer online role-playing games like World of Warcraft have failed spectacularly, opting for commercial success instead of creative integrity, entertainment value, or compelling game design. If I were a shareholder, I'd be elated. Instead, as a guy who plays videogames, I'm continually disappointed.

After the jump, read five reasons MMOs are broken.

5) The problem: subscription fees

The business model behind MMOs drives the content, much like magazines (big glossy pictures!), episodic TV (tune in next week!), and blogs (5 reasons that [insert controversial statement]!). The main reason you won't get a better game design in an MMO is that it's created for the primary purpose of getting you to play regularly and therefore pay regularly. Every element of an MMO needs to prevent you from canceling the regular charge to your credit card. MMOs that attempt that other business model - the dreaded micropayments beloved by Koreans and Electronic Arts - are even worse for how transparent they are.

A subscription fee imposes creative limitations. It also carries a lot of psychological baggage. Signing up for a recurring fee keeps players from sampling - and certainly committing to - more than one or two MMOs. Paying a one-time cost for a videogame is much more friendly to those of us who want to sample lots of games, and therefore much more friendly to the industry at large. It's much easier to pick up a few games at a time, or even to make an impulse purchase, when you can just leave a game lying around until you're ready to try it. But subscription fees shut out alternatives. There's even an element of guilt that comes with a subscription fee. Like having cable, you might feel compelled to play because you're paying and not because you're actually enjoying it.

What needs to be done to fix it: The subscription fee is brilliant, insidious, and tremendously effective. It is single-handedly responsible for the immense success of MMOs. I have no idea how to overcome that sort of fiscal momentum. I have no answers here.

4) The problem: aggro

There is no analog for this in real videogames. It's a clunky contrivance, presumably created to keep life interesting for the poor schmucks who get stuck playing the cleric. But this awkward concept is the source of many of the gameplay tropes that keep MMOs from being interesting. Consider how the classes for an MMO are designed around the concept of a tank holding aggro while a DPS class attacks the target, a mezzer holds back adds, and a healer heals the tank, all while the players manage some invisible under-the-hood aggro values that determine which player gets attacked. None of this was in Lord of the Rings, Dungeons & Dragons, or Ladyhawke with Matthew Broderick? Why is this the starting point for every single MMO battle?

This artifice plays a large part in building game worlds. How often have you sidled through some enemy camp hoping to skirt the aggro radius for a monster? If you weren't so conditioned to navigating aggro, you'd feel pretty stupid walking around, hidden in plain sight, while orcs shuffle through their idle animations twenty feet to your right and left. Remember when you were unsullied enough that it occurred to you how retarded this was? Those were the days.

What needs to be done to fix it: Search me. Someone hurry and invent a new gameplay model that doesn't rely on aggro.

3) The problem: button lock

Skills, levels, gear, talents, and blah blah blah are required to add depth to MMOs, but they're based on such razor-thin margins of where you're allowed to go and what monsters you should be fighting at any given time that the gameplay comes down to wanking around with numbers for hit points, damage, refresh rate, mana, and so on. Apartheid by math. As a result, the typical battle in an MMO is a matter of staring at an icon that indicates when your skill will refresh. Stare, wait, press. Stare, wait, press. Stare, wait, press. Okay, now loot. Next! All that wondrous combat animation gone to waste, unwatched. All that potential immersion and world building, reduced to a row of tiny buttons.

I like detail. It keeps me interested. I just don't want it shoved in my face during what should be the most exciting part of a game.

What needs to be done to fix it: Can someone replace all the math with action? Is there some way to do this? Is it even possible? Or should I just stick to Diablo?

2) The problem: static worlds

So you kill a boss and then three minutes later he's respawned and walking around waiting for the next guy to kill him. Heck, he might just attack you again if you don't hurry out of there and turn the quest in. At which point the quest giver thanks you and delivers some text implying that something has changed, only to turn around and talk to the next guy as if nothing had ever happened. Unlike single-player games, MMOs are baldly frozen in a static state. Princesses are never rescued, villains are never slain, evil is never vanquished. The thousands of players on any given server are all heroes, each unable to effect any sort of meaningful change in the world, forever unable to save it because that would just screw up everything for the next guy to do the quest.

What needs to be done to fix it: Beats me. You can't very well have evil get vanquished by the first hero to come along. Is this just an innate problem by virtue of the word "massively" in the genre?

1) The problem: you can't play with the people you want to play with

This is the single biggest failing of MMOs. For all the talk of community and social gaming and massively multiplayer, the average MMO makes very specific demands in terms of whom you can play with. Grouping depends heavily on what level you are and where you are in a quest chain and sometimes even your skill level. It's difficult to build an MMO community around people you know if - as is most likely the case - they have different playing habits.

And yet there is no better reason to play an MMO. As with almost any game, an MMO is better in a group, and it's even better if you know the group, and it's best of all if they're your real world friends. But here is the irony: there is no genre of videogaming more hostile to gathering with the people you know than MMOs. For shame.

What needs to be done to fix it: Something. Anything. For pete's sake, if I can't play with my friends, I'm just going to go mess around with horde mode in Gears of War 2.

So as you can see, there's a common thread in my proposed fixes. I'm obviously not the guy to fix MMOs. Instead, I'm just the guy who doesn't play them because they're broken. MMOs have failed me and I have no idea how they can get me back into their good graces. With so many of you playing (and - more importantly - paying), I doubt MMOs even care. But as soon as someone tries to fix any of these problems, I'll be there, with a few friends in tow.