The Daily Grind: What do you find the most fun in MMOs?

I enjoy to feel far from reality through amazing landscape, immersive story and worlds.But what I enjoy the most is to create a community and see it becoming succesful. I love to see how team work can be efficient and how we can feel fullfiled in good company.

This is incredibly tough to summarize for me... I can tell you what i find the least fun, the feeling that the game is playing me rather than vice versa, which is a feeling i get with a lot of modern games. I love the feeling of awe and wonder in a big world, i love being able to just mess around without feeling that i wasted an hour for doing so. I love PUGs with friendly talkative people, doing dungeons and tough quests with them like some rag tag team of heroes brought together by the strange paths of life. I hate the dungeon finder for completely negating that and i hate to think that it's going to find it's way into most other games. I love freedom and randomness.

I don't know, i cant think harder than that. :)

Well designed, lore-filled questing is my cup of tea. It's great to read and experience lore while out questing to learn more about the world I'm in. Quests can be a lot of fun to do if implemented right. Plus, it's nice to know I'm getting something out of it; usually experience, gold and gear. It doesn't hurt that a lot of questing is solo content so if I have to stop or want to take a break, it's no problem at all. :)

I love adventuring. I want to see a world that looks real and actually breathes. This includes story lines and main quests that have actual purpose. Games like Guild Wars and Final Fantasy XI certainly hit these benchmarks and are my favorite games of all time.

PUGs, I love how suboptimal random people can join together and conquer something.

Doing group content and having fun while we're at it. I know people that always complain about everything if the group's less than absolutely perfect, but I enjoy those unexpected moments and epic failures, e.g. a healer kiting 2 raid bosses because the tanks just went down and everyone's rez skills were on a cooldown. These are the moments that keep me playing.

Story and Exploration...

I have this thing for no matter how terrible the writing may be, to read every letter that every NPC, sign, quest say, even to the point of slowing down my entire party while they wait for me to read it....hehe {one reason why I enjoy playing healer the most, cause they have to wait for me...ROFL}

As for exploring, its the same thing, and I'll travel to every corner of the world map in each game to see it all! More of less hoping to find something off or different that the devs forgot about or placed there on purpose for us to find. Or take LOTRO and FFXI for example ~ their entire worlds are quite unique, where everywhere you go buildings and ruins and caves are all different. I love is best when a deve takes the time to do that instead of using the same original design over and over everywhere with a different color scheme {....glares at WoW....},

RvR, theres nothing like banding together with your allies and venturing out into the lakes to do some serious damage and capture some stuff for your faction.

No, i dont mean open pvp where a lvl 50 can come corpse camp a lvl 2 for 6 hours straight, that isn't pvp, that's greifing.

Exploring and killing mobs.

Housing and customization! I know, I should give up and just go play The Sims...

But other than that, I have a lot of fun when quest lines and the world is so good that I can't feel the grind.

Eh, I'm a pretty open-ended gamer. Tried and enjoyed most any genre.

Now, what I don't find fun in any MMO, or game in general, is lack of customization. So to the inverse, and thus answer the question, I LOVE customization. Oblivion and Aions character creator, yadda yadda...

Also, this is in advance of its release but I'm interested in Wizardy Online. Why? It's like Demon's Souls or Dark Souls, turned into an MMO... that's enough to make me want it.

Killing and exploring first, EQ2 housing second.

Its a hard question bcs sometimes things be fun that another day be only consuming some time a way that is quite satisfactory.

My playstlye is not combat focussed, but i apreciate good combat, i am a
Mainchar-Player not making Alts for the reason of having Alts but for storage and grouping reason.

I dont care for balance as long the gameplay is reasonable in context to the setting.

So lets add fun + entertainment + satisfaction together:
Combat is in any mmo a big focus - i like fights that be not mass slaughtering. Less npc mobs with more abilities that give higher reward please than Diablo hack n slay.

I like when the pve encounter has opponents placed like a real opponent would do that instead of spread out mobs that await their death.

Tracking of opponents, searching rare mobs.

PvP like Daoc!

Crafting like SWG!

Economy like SWG!

Socializing like SWG!

Housing like SWG!

A pet class that can tame or summon anything in the game and grow it up to a mighty servant as sort of a minigame itself.

A developer side implemented overarching story with voice overs and cinematics and also a class and personal epic quest chain of the same style - probabnly SWTOR will deliver that.

Grouping with friends to play the game in the pace we have got used too!
I dont look so much for new friends but occasionaly you make some ;)

World shaping like in Minecraft.

To me i have fun, entertainment, satisfaction when the mmo is pretty much a big virtual world i can do many different things when i feel its time for and have some of my friends play the same mmo.

A world is more than a sandbox or themepark or ffa pvp area or pve area.
A virtual world is the framework in which you can place any of the game mechanics at the same or at different locations in this world offering the many different groups and tastes of players a place they can live up to their needs.
Something like a big social hub or many hubs that be interconnected from which you can actually move in any thinkable direction finding something that fits you any time any mood.

Also, i will not play many mmos bcs i oly can justify ONE subscription per member of my family and so a p2p mmo better has a broad offering to us!

For me:

- Challenging solo content. Unfortunately, a rarity in MMOs.

- Controlling multiple (more than two) characters. Unfortunately, also a rarity (the only one that comes to mind is GW), apart from multiboxing (which I find too expensive and too much a hassle to be worth it).

- Good lore and questing. With two caveats: I really dislike permanently losing something with my character in a game I can't save and reload, and the fact the history often has very low replay value.

- Fun, but not overly hard, cooperative group content; I don't take well to failures while in a group with players I don't know well. Also, some way to assemble groups without shouting in chat (I WILL NOT shout in chat asking for a group; I would rather log off and play something else); and, if meant to be done daily, the content also needs to be doable in 30 minutes or less, from logging on to getting the reward.

- PvP, as long as there is no way for a character to be simply more powerful than another. If the fact I won't spend real money or in-game resources at respeccing and gearing for PvP puts me at an disadvantage, I won't try the PvP (which is why I basically play DCUO's Legend PvP for my PvP fix; pre-made characters).

- Exploration. With the caveat that, while I like wandering aimlessly from time to time, when I actually have a destination in mind I really hate travel time.

- Activities that are just mindlessly fun, as long as they are offered as an option, not as a requirement.