The Daily Grind: What are your top 5 MMO must-haves?

My top 5, in no order:

1) Real-time control. I cannot stand point and click MMO's, though I will tolerate "traditional" one-click combat.

2) No more hotkeys! I hate how every MMO uses the whole "hotkey bar menu" with powers that cost some resource, and do more damage than regular attacks, or heal, etc. SOMEONE needs to revise this whole system.

3) No more fantasy, or at least, stop with the fantasy domination. Thankfully, many of the new top MMO's being developed arn't fantasy.

4) Solo/Group content evenly balanced. I HATE being stuck on a group quest, unable to get a group together. I was once stuck on a quest in LOTRO for THREE months, to the point that I actually was willing to PAY people to group with me to complete it. You should always have ample solo stuff to do while waiting for groups to form. Inf act, Anarchy Online's quest-on-demand model is fantastic, if a little brutish storytelling-wise.

5) No power creep with expansions. Sell your expansions by adding stuff to the game that would have fit there originally, don't make things obsolete with an expansion.

Gonna be hard to narrow it down to just five or to put them in any coherent order. I'll give it a shot.

1) Player set goals - Eve has this. Rather than just filling up a progress bar (which I love to do also) you can set a goal and reach it that is unique for you and what you want to do.

2) An art style more than just good graphics - This more than anything I think. WoW has an art style that has kept it in good stead despite having rather old graphical horsepower. Too much realism ends up hitting that weird curve where you reject the artificial for being too close to the real. This is one reason I'm keen for SW:TOR.

3) Unique animations - If each race and class swings a sword (or whatever) using the exact same animation it gets boring. This is one reason I like playing my Monk in DDO. His combat animations are different from the others.

4) Actual monsters/villains rather than giant rodents/insects - This is isn't one of those pathetic Sy Fy Original movies (Sy Fy is still a stupid name btw) with radioactive spiders or whatever. I don't want to be killing boars or rats or spiders or anything that is just gorram pathetic. Bring on a monster twice the size of my character or better that looks like he was just digested by Cthulu. I'm a damn hero. Oversize rats is what the town militia is for.

5) Fast travel that got as much dev time as everything else - If we're talking fantasy then we're talking horses or something roughly akin to the function of a horse. I don't know what it is about me but I love riding virtual horses. WoW did OK for their day (I loved my Paladin Charger). LOTRO, however, did awful. Horses in LOTRO are pathetic. Anyone that can say the horse mechanic in LOTRO is great is a liar. It's very close to not even being passable. The LOTRO horse animations are awkward, the riding mechanic itself is awkward. Ultimately you don't feel like you're on a horse you feel like you're on one of those rides outside the grocery store. LOTRO horses are cheap and they should be embarrassed.

Age of Conan, for all its many faults, did horses absolutely brilliantly. I'd be fine with every game from here out just ripping off everything that FUNCOM did regarding horses.

OK, that's my list. I know, I went a little ape-shit with the horses but someone had to say it. You're on the blasted things for hours at a time and they often can be the only companion your character has so damn it, make them great.

1./ NO LOOT DRAMA OR POLITICS. Loot is only acceptable if it is random, personal, private, and transferrable - preferably, infinitely so. Situations where you must persuade team leaders and guild leaders to allow you a useful drop, because once it is awarded it is stuck to your charcter, lead to drama and conflict of a kind I prefer to avoid.

2./ Customizable characters, preferably independent of gear and class.

3./ Absence of the healer / tank / DPS trinity. Games that rely on this mechanic tend to penalize the healers and tanks strongly in soloability, which in turn leads to political inequality between players, and adds drama - see #1. Any team should be able to complete any content playing the characters they want to play.

4./ Easy to make teams and get going. Relates to #3. No one should have to wait for hours for a PuG to get going because we don't have a tank or healer.

5./ Easy to solo - even tank and healing classes ought to be able to solo.

I'm pretty open to MMO designs in general, as long as the idea is to have a game and not a social gathering.

1) Fun. Duh. Gameplay has to have some sort of catch to it that makes you want to keep going. That catch can be any number of things. Flashy graphics, spirit of competition, and (depending on the system, relative) big numbers are examples.
2) Something unique or somewhat unique. Flight in Aion is a big example. FFXI is unique in today's market because it's group based.
3) Some sort of solid leveling system. I can't stand skill based systems like in EVE. Classes are a requirement. Some degree of customization, is needed, though. I think if someone did something like FFXI, with Level Sync and a (more balanced) merit point system at max level, I'd be hooked.
4) WoW-based wasd + mouse controls. I don't think you can do it any better than that on a PC. Controllers are ok, I used one in FF, but I still prefer wasd.
5) Highly customizable interface. This is my only pet peeve about Aion, is they're not allowing addons (or at least not yet). I enjoy making the game look exactly how I want it to look, and showing it off in screenshots. :)

1. Fun crafting mechanics
2. Auction house
3. Servers with rules to appeal to the various PVP preferences of players. e.g. PVP servers, PVE, servers, etc.
PVP that is relevant to the story of the world and should be relegated to specific zones. I really liked how WoW PVE servers worked, but would in fact, have been fine with some zones closer to 'enemy' territory auto-flagging players for PVP. I also like how WoW implemented PVP flagging on PVE servers.

=- PVP body-looting should not be forced onto all of the population - perhaps relegate that to specific servers to cater to that niche crowd. Body looting is a deal-breaker for many people.

1. Seamless Virtual World: One that feels real and massive.
2. Tons of Grouping Content: These are MMO's not singleplayer games.
3. Good chatting and UI system: A lot of the newer games don't put much effort in their chat and UI systems and many people are stopping socializing in games.
4. PvP: A PvP system that the game is designed around, not an afterthought PvP system.
5. Meaningful Classes: Enough with the boring hybrids, make classes useful so players feel like they have a role in a large group.

There are a lot of great ideas out there, that's for sure. One thing I feel is a "most" in an MMO is that there has to be a dynamic environment, a game world the players can influence in some way otherwise all we are doing is harvesting points in static worlds.
EVE probably best exemplifies this. (again, I'm no EVE fan but I can appreciate it's design) You can have the best classes and best mechanics out there but it's meaningless if you play in a static unchanging environment which is were most MMO's fall into.
Vanguard is a classic example of this. A rich mechanic system (technical issues aside) but a dead static world making progressing a pointless exorcise.

That's why so many of us hop from game to game. We tire of the static unchanging worlds. We get bored with whacking the same 10 rats in the fields outside of town for farmer Bob.

The "best" MMO's I have played have given the player a stake in the world. A way to make an impact be it PvE or PvP (which can co-exist peacefully, it will take some time and THOUGHT and not just slapping one or the other on at the end as an afterthought to appease the players).

1. No Bugs. How hard is this?

2. Full dry loot for everyone. if you die, you DIE. I hate this fairytale B.S.

3. real PvP sieges or mass battles that have real world consequences like losing your town and months of work

4. 3rd Person and Smooth. Sorry if Failcom can do this, no one else has an excuse

5. Skill based character progression

1. No endgame grind. It makes no sense at all. Kill 1000 boars to get better at swinging your sword? Ok, I'll buy that. Kill 1000 "King Tedious" to get enough dkp or whatever to attain an item? Idiotic. Stop it.

2. Meaningful PvP. Stop it with the battlegrounds/Arenas, it's lazy.
2a. Guild/Alliance size caps. If you played Shadowbane, you were either in the server crashing 5000 man steamroller, or you got steamrolled. Lame and easily fixed.

3. Crowd control in PvP - stop it. It's awful, and you know it.

4. Massive group bonuses. Let people solo, but make sure they're progressing more slowly than the people who took the time to create a well balanced group.

5. Bring back 'the world.' In Everquest (pre PoP) you knew where everything was, how everything fit. You knew how far Halas was from Freeport, and what dangers were in between. Games where you fast travel/teleport from location to location make you feel like you're advancing to the next stage, not traveling across the landscape, and a ton of immersion is lost.

1. Ability to impact on the game world. That is, if I can't change the world just a tiny bit through my own efforts, I see it as an autistic game. Players should exert some manner of control over the environment.

2. Risk vs Reward relation. While I understand the pains of losing something that costed me time and effort, it's all the more rewarding when I risk something and end up in the winning side.

3. Minimum restrains on game-play options. I was taken aback when I read SE had restricted a certain job and outright bannished people for USING and not abusing game mechanics. Any sort of artificial control is bad as it hampers players' cretivity.

4. Interface has to acomodate to may play-style. Either a comprehensible interface or one that can be customized through the use of ad-ons.

5. Some sort of casual-compatible evolution. Either offline leveling such as EvE or rest-time such as WoW will do, though I'm sure designers can think of something else. While I understand the relation between effort and reward, I think skill should be a part of the game and punishing people who can't raid for 5 hours a day is a serious turn off for me.

This might sounds stupid, but nothing will make me delete a game faster than if its click to move only, and has no jump.

1) Meaningful World. Player actions should impact the world.
2) Meaningful PvP. There must be a point to fighting - PvP for the sake of collecting tokens is no go. PvP should also impact the world - areas should be conquerable permanently (until someone comes and takes them away).
3) A lot of group content - both for large groups (50-> people) and for smaller (2->50 people). No or very little solo content. Game should be designed around grouping and playing together with others - hence removing all silly things that limit playing with others (levels, "gear checks" etc.) is a must.
4) Strong storytelling that binds the Sandbox world together.
5) User interface that was designed with usability in mind.

Nobody has seems to mention the economy, but for me this is has been one of the most important features of the MMOs I have played and stayed with for long periods of time.

Having a good economy to me doesn't mean just having an auction house in the game, or having a crafting system where people want to buy what you produce. Having a good economy means players depend on other players to trade with and you can amass wealth if you know the right things to supply.

Not much to add to the long lists in the comments but I wish they did remove PVP all together so many mmo releases gone the pvp route and mostly all of them got no end game other them pvp or get really little endgame.

A bit late in the thread... Forgive me... But to say that MMO's are off the table for a casual gamer is a bit harsh IMO.... Casual Gamer = someone with 3 or less hours per gaming session. I personally consider myself a casual gamer but do probably play 20+ hours a week total. So to make something that I can hop into and get something done or at least partly done in about 2-3 hours is a big bonus for me.

1. remove the practice of endgame content
2. skill based system instead of the level grind
3. eliminate the institution of the grind
4. a system balanced economy so new players can participate
5. true player determinism

In no particular order

- Player-driven economy (e.g. EVE, PotBS and the old SWG)
- Immersion and ability to tell my own story (this may or may not include traditional RP)
- Modern social networking tools and data visibility (EVE, Free Realms, and WoW are getting better)
- Science fiction or at least non-fantasy
- Character customization (CoX, SWG, etc.)

While I do most certainly play MMOs that do not follow this to perfection, if a MMO contains 2-3 or more of the following, it most certainly has my attention. Therefore, these might be slightly contradictory:

1. Immersive dungeon crawls, ala DDO and Meridian 59(/Might and Magic VI-IX), instead of the boring formulaic predictability that is WoW instances.
2. An interesting, customizable character progression, for example skill-based systems (old SWG, Meridian, UO), a "soft" class system (DDO) or something as simple as tactics and abilities that scale with levels (WAR)
3. Tied in with previous, a non-WoW class system, whereby you are not just simply a single class from level 1 through 99.
4. Interesting classes, either in term of mechanics (WAR, LOTRO, post WotLK WoW, Vanguard) or flavor.
5. Beautiful vistas