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I play Dungeons and Dragons Online, I've never played another MMO beyond a 2 week trial and I come from a pnp and nwn1/2 background. This is a great post which summarises a lot of my initial thoughts about PFO.

I think DDO is a really unique game and I'd like to comment on each point in relation to the game that I call home currently.

1. The new vs the tried and tested

I'm not sure that there is anything new in DDO but the unique combination of a really active combat style (almost fps) and instancing makes for a really enjoyable game. I can certainly say that a big determinant of whether I make a transition to PFO will be how active the combat feels. Click x,y,z in correct order? No thanks.

2. I want to have an impact

If you share the world with thousands of other players, how can you have an impact in any way?

This is the crux of MMOs, you can't really influence your world. Pathfinder seems to go in a bold direction here where at least groups of individuals can build something lasting and needed.

This sounds exciting about PFO. The only opportunity to have an impact on the whole of DDO is post achievements in the forums or to manipulate the AH on your server. The possibilities that are talked about for PFO so far are pretty inspiring.

3. This is an MMO - as in Massively Multiplayer

One word - instancing and auction houses. Ok, two words. And random group finders - ok, ok, three words...

The modern MMOs try to avoid MM more and more and grow into MSO, as in Multiplayer Solitaire. If you do not want it, you can play the game and never know more than maybe 5 people in it.

What sounds like a cool option is actually crippling to THE one thing the MMOs have before every other game, a community.

An MMO is only a true MMO when it has the guts to support the building of a great community aka realm pride. Even if this comes at the price of not being very solo friendly -...

This is very true. While the pug community on most servers seems to be alive and well for just about all game content in DDO there is very little incentive to socialise outside your guild once you've established yourself in a guild. However, even though I have such a guild I still enjoy puging while leveling a character as it is an opportunity to make new friends or just get a laugh out of newbs dying all the time.

4. Time is cash, time is money

A great problem that plagues all existing MMOs - how do you combine players that play 4 hours a week with players that play 12 hours a day in a game where playing time > all?

Want that cool Sword? Well, drop chance is 0.01% and each run takes about 4 hours - unless you wait till next patch when everything is nerfed down and each run takes only 15 minutes, but then the cool Sword is actually weak against the new cool Sword.

Whats epic today is worthless tomorrow and the only challenge is how often someone can stand the ordeal to do the same things over and over and over in the shortest period of time to receive the reward to show off.

This one is hard to solve. Servers, where everything takes much less time but playing excessively is impossible seems a solution.

In DDO this doesn't seem to be a big deal. Firstly, there isn't a big priority on having a capped character. The game is enjoyable through the whole leveling process and raiding is possible for more than 3/4ers of a characters leveling life. Secondly, gear isn't a massive deal. You don't need hard to get gear to participate in 99.9% of content. Of course, there is plenty of hard to get gear available and it does help but a good pilot and player skill is much more important (getting back to active style of combat).

5. Bring me 5 rat tails

Yeah, it's famous and astounding what people will do to satisfy their sense of archievement.

The basics of each and every MMO today are: go there, kill/find NPC/material x and hope you are lucky and the things you want drop/are created. If not, do it again, and again, and again, and again. End of game.

Pen and paper is (usually) so much richer than that. How do you transport this into an MMO?

Well, instead of fixed quests there could be some sort of scripted events. Maybe even a script module for third party publishers to create "adventures" with. If PFO could make something like this work, it would be a truely unique game.

I love the variation that DDO has in this respect. Just about all content is instanced and many quests have some form of puzzle involved and each quest can be solved in a variety of different ways.

6. Level > all

You found a guild and some friends to play with - but you are away for three weeks. Alas your friends are all 10th Level while you are Level 5 and thus you can't play with them any more.

Will PFO will be the game where Levels and Equipment doesn't matter that much? Where Level isn't greater all and the "real" game only starts at maximum level leaving the "low level zones" a barren wasteland after a few months?

DDO (currently) only has 20 levels like normal non-epic D&D. It is possible to quest with someone that is within 3 levels of you. That means that at your level you will likely be able to quest with 1/3 of the non-capped population. This makes it quite easy to stay in level range of friends and buddies (though in DDO you can plausibly level from 1 to 20 in 24 hours so who knows what happens on your 3 week break).

7. And finally: world (and community) death aka avoid the hype!

Many new MMOs suffer from a very strong start and a fast decline in players. This causes all sorts of problems and the biggest is empty "worlds" that need to be merged with other worlds which in turn creates all kind of imbalances and shatters the very important community on these worlds.

Will PFO be the game that avoids some, most or even all the things that plague MMOs today? Well, we'll probably see in a few years.

DDO suffered this. I believe they got as low as 5 worlds at one stage before going F2P but since then it seems to have stabilised at the current 8 worlds. I've played on underpopulated servers and overpopulated servers. I prefer the overpopulated server that I currently play on (mostly as it is the defacto home of Australian players). If PFO is a one world game like Eve then it would certainly solve the issue of world closure but it would be difficult to manage a fluctuating population.