I'm sorry but you guys are completely missing the point about what indie can bring. The advantage of indie games is that they can think outside of the box, they can push to different limits than a typical game does. Publishers generally want safe, proven titles. And the result is, well we have about a zillion WOW clones out there right now. Indie developers can think outside the box and come up with something, as they are generally self funded.

MMOGs in this day and age consist of 50-200 man teams who use those huge volumes in an effort to try to keep fresh content to players, but fail to build it fast enough for most of the harder core players. They spend tons of time meticulously crafting quest storylines that players will click right by and pay no attention to, or go to sites like mmodb.com to find a quick spoiler. They hand craft dungeons that will become old after the second time through. They create bosses that everyone after the first guild will just go to a strategy site and execute the same strategy as the last guy. Yet the next game that comes out, will fall into those same traps.

I've been working on an Indie MMOG for over two years, which we will finally be announcing this summer. And the advantages I've seen from that vs. working with a publisher is that we've been able to try a lot of new things without worry about big brother looking over our shoulder at every step of development. It's allowed us to step outside of the normal boundaries and create things like a template based quest generation system that can allow for complex quests with storylines to be generated. We have a 19 step generated quest template in our current alpha test. Our dungeons feature generated bosses, traps, and monsters based on quest criteria, and it changes every time you enter. Our bosses feature random special effects so that guilds can't just execute a pre-determined strategy and must adjust on the fly. We've been able to try some different things with combat, and integrate some RTS like management systems into our regional PVP system, as well as being able to put a number of other "games inside the game" elements. Unfortunately not all indie games take advantage of their ability to think outside the box, but some like the aforementioned Love do just that. And that's what makes them notable.

If we had sought funding earlier in our development cycle, we'd more than likely have had to trimmed features, made things more like wow, and would probably see ourselves rushed to market because some marketing type thinks that we need to fall within a certain a launch window. There are some advantages to being indie.