I believe I've spotted something akin to a constant in gaming. 

1. There are presently three types of MMOs.

- Tab Targetting

- Tab Targetting with Action Combat

- Action Combat without Tab Targetting

2. Not having Tab Targetting does not mean you are a more "advanced" game. It means you are less advanced for lacking the technology and gameplay it can bring.

3. Having Tab Targettting does not improve a game. Tab Targetting is a tool. It has a use if YOU made a class that can use it without vitiating the experience you are trying to create within your game across all circumstances.

4. Having Tab Targetting allows for exactness in the execution of character-class abilities when utilized by a player.

5. Not having Tab Targetting allows for only generality of execution (area of effect) in the utilization of a character-class functionality.

- It is self-evident to any honest study of older vs. newer MMOs that the older the MMO the more complex and well crafted the worlds are as well as the vareity of encounters possible. Therefore, there is a reason for this decline. What is it?

The cause of the decline:

Simple, temporal perception errors on the part of developers and more importantly their marketing staff or overheads.

5. 45 Frames Per Second is human perception speeds. As a result of this there is a very definite "window" that humans CAN play games in. 

Resultantly this creates a very definite rule. Players can want to kill faster and 'be more powerful', without ever realizing that the thing that makes them feel 'less powerful' is that it takes longer to kill something.

This definitely creates a ranking system similar to what we see in J-RPG Isekai novels, Mangas, and Lit RPGs. 

E rank - instant kill

F rank - 6 second kill

D rank - 12 second kill

C rank - 24 seconds kill

B rank - 48 seconds kill

A rank - 96 seconds kill  =  1.6 minutes

S rank (bronze) - 192 seconds kill = 3.2 minutes

S rank  (silver) -  384 seconds kill = 6.4 minutes 

S rank (gold) - 768 seconds kill = 12.8 minutes 
S rank (platinum)  - 1536 seconds kill = 25.6 minutes 

REGARDLESS of player "progress" these Ranks CANNOT change across any game because you (nor anyone else) can alter human perception to perceive and understand faster. It is a hard limit.

This explains most of why players may not like some piece of content ahead of them. Their kill times increased for lesser or equal rewards. It is something I have tried to point out to the devs on this game since the beginning of my forum posts, but no developer have I met who wasn't born after World of Warcraft understands what I'm talking about. There's a serious issue here. 

Players perceive "progress" or their level of "cool" as being how fast they can kill something. This goes away, however, the older they get or more stable. Basically, graduate from being a teen ager. 

Why? And why is it a serious issue?

Why is obvious. They can't perceive as fast as they did earlier. Less raging hormones feeding them extra loops of data in their processing to make that instant kill "bang" feel "deep and meaningful". Later, they notice the continued extensiveness of experience in the 'drought' between kills. And that's where the older mmos shine.

So, how is this a serious issue?

Well, I think what we're going to experience very shortly in the MMO market is a drop off of players' interest in gaming strickly because developers' marketing overheads are too self-assured that what keeps players playing is their own "glory". It's "glorious" to instant kill something, but more often than not people drop out from playing a game the moment they reach this point. This leads to point six.

6. Players inevitably discover (however subliminally) that their "progress" (whatever that is in whatever game) won't let them overcome that Rank Perception of Time. Players make discover that in a party they can cause a group of creatures to shift from S rank to A rank difficulty. Therefore, they will value being in a party more so long as they are not punished for it or being artificially limited in size selection. A healthy party size deep explorable areas seems to be 8 given the successes of Dark Age of Camelot. Anything less than demands an efficiency bias. 

Likewise, players will inevitably discover that their "progress" (whatever that means or is measured with) returns them to a killing speed of one of the ranks above. And thus, they PERCEIVE themselves as having failed or fallen back. 

This is probably why Elvia flopped to an extent. People get there and notice it takes the same amount of time or longer to kill those creatures as it does somewhere else. They feel as though their gear has been "reset". Oh the other hand, they get no better loot than if they did not go to Elvia. 

- Giving the players better loot won't work 

- Giving the players faster kills won't work

Here's why. The players are coming up against a human limitation. WE, the species, cannot see faster than 45 Frames per Second. And thus, we cannot HAVE faster or slower game experiences than this. Otherwise we'll just drop out.

- This is why I think older MMOs focused on expensive world building. 

- You can get into a group and change the difficulty of a mob from Impossible-Solo to Do-able Duo. And, etc Duo-No, Tri-Yes. Tri-No, Tet-Yes, Tet-No, Pen-Yes. Etc.

The only thing YOU as a developer can change is how smart the creatures are to encounter OR how entertaining it is to watch everyone else in combat with us (expanded party encounters. 

This means that there is a limit to what Solo Play (and group play, by the way) offers. 

- One way or another the issue is human perception of time is actually pretty exact. 

Another matter similar to this you really need to understand is Kill-Count to Time-Spent Ratios.

- Players "burn out" when the player is kills a creature as though it were E rank, but receives a payout (in time) perhaps 1/6th or 1/7th less than their maximum possible payout for the same period. 

Example:

Player goes to Gyfin and receives 750,000,000 per hour (with agris and gold scroll) group

Player goes to Centaur and receives 650,000,000 per hour (with agris and gold scroll) solo

Player goes to anywhere else and receives 150,000,000 per hour. 

Why does the player burn out? 

- hint. it has nothing to do with the silver value. the silver value is masking the issue.

Answer: 

The player perceives to have KILLED considerably during Instant-Kill Sessions, but is rewarded for less.

See, when people do something ALOT their brain tells them "This took a large amount of time". 

- They cannot typically reconcile that the same time has past for the effort exerted. 4000 kills at Blood Elves FEELS very similar to 850 a Gyfin. 

- Ironically, the INVERSE of this also works out to a similar sense of failed accomplishment. When a player goes to Centaur there are very few of them. Yet, they must run and run and run. Regardless of the relative ease of the grind, the EFFORT (inputs to mouse and keyboard, the implied effort of seeing the character dash and dash and dash and dash and dash and dash... and dash and dash ...to the next kill... just to dash and dash and dash and dash.... informs them that a BIG EVENT which must have taken AN AWFULLY LONG amount of time just took place. 

So, in summary. Players perceive things in an odd way.

1. they perceive the temporal reality as being a hard limit (which it is and you can't fix this)

2. they perceive their kill-count ratio to something not well understood yet. Clearly the perception of "time spent" and "kill count" or "inputs" or "visual queues of events having transpired" roughly informs them that "this must time should have passed"

- I think there is a good hint to an answer to this laying around as well.

Our characters run at 10 meters per second.

Our characters walk at about 15 meters per second. 

If it takes me 3x2^2 second per combat per rank per 1 creature then combat takes: 6, 12, 24, 48, 96, 192, 384 etc seconds per combat per rank per 1 creature. 
If my abilities high 1 to 15 creatures per combat...

... how many creatures per combat per rank am I killing OVER the same distance in time T?

I think this is where BDO is struggling right now. We're running and running and running, but that running isn't being accounted for by the development team as a psychological factor acting on players to convince them that their time isn't valued. The distance players are covering IS being subliminally recorded and accounted by the players as they grind. Thus, even if the grind is paying adiquately so far as creatures killed it's probably 1/2 or 1/3rd as adquate to what players are actually accounting due to traveling and keyboard inputs, etc.

Makiing this even weirder... 

Players are going to have issue with this in some strange ways as well. Consider Persona 5. You're supposed to run around breaking into these "palaces" that represent people's hearts. There's no "player progression" in the game that's very meaningful. Learn a couple gimmicks and everything is a win no matter what. The game only exists to promote the replacement of religion with psychology. However, Jungian stuff is usually well structured. You've got to meander around learning the mythology presented to you which form Shadows (hidden stuff) and Complexes (things that make people automatons to whatever impulses). This creates a kind of shifting binary leading up to some manifestion of this as a boss. Meanwhile the players have a number of lesser tools (Personas) and magics (Arcana) to throw at it. In short, it's what would be Buffs and Debuffs in an MMO. Just on a very long delay. And that's what Buffs and Debuffs are. Delayed combat. Alternations in the flow of the event in progress. Inbound and outbound.

This leads to point 7.

7. Action Combat Games Invert Time 

In a classical MMO you would have a spectrum of classes ranging from Tank, DPS, Restoration, to Control. 
- World of Warcraft reduced this to Tank, DPS, and Restortion

- Guild Wars 2 reduced these further to being "traits" and "foods" with no distinctive classes 

- Later MMOs have been in a process of healing form the former two disasters ever since

Action Combat creates a situation where Tab Targetting is not preferred, become some lesser mind earlier to us decided it was "progressive" (That bad word again) to remove it from all games. Not realizing they had nothing to replace it with. Or maybe they did realize in which case they are probably a very malicious person. Persuming that they didn't... the issue because that without Tab Targetting ALL actions are an AoE. Area of Effect. 

This means that most of the Restoration and Control classes have become particulates of the two remaining Roles: Rank or DPS with a vast majority of their functions being further tossed off haphazardly into Food stuffs (where the games even have these things now).

Temporal Events (Overtime Mechanics) are thus largely ABSENT from Action Combat Games because the players lack the necessary tools (compotent Heads Up Display for monitoring stats) and Tab Targetting (the abiltiy to target team-mates independently of what their AoE abilities (everything else post-Action Combat as a genre) are doing.

Simply said... Action Combat could be compontently upgraded to have the following:

- Tab Targetting to monitor affects on teammates through use of the F1 to F8 keys.
- Typical Action Combat as BDO already does it in all else.

BDO probably doesn't need to do any of this by the way. It's just capable of it and would act as a further healing of the MMO genre for the disasterous state the Americans have left it in.

The Inverting of Time comes about in this way... As games moved away from Tab Targetting to Tab Targetting With Action Combat they were deleting two roles. Restoration and Control. Later they realized this was a profoundly stupid idea, but social engineering inside the new Soviet Union seems to be against social cohersion. So, the process of recovery is so far very stilted. In the mean time we're seeing foods act where healers and buffers used to act. And there's no DOWNTIME for anything. 

- Thus, players go and go, and go and go, and go and go, until they psychologically register that they AND you developers CANNOT give them any more instant killing or speed boosts. Because after some point along that course any "progress" just turns into speed-hacks. 

- You can really see this in the transition from Guild Wars 1 to Guild Wars 2. Guild Wars 1 has a lot of "preporation" before casting a spell. In World of Warcraft, 1.1.2 (classic) you also see this. The spells are long to cast and the attacks melee users make are also about only half as fast as the longest spell. In other words, if a fully cast-time reduced healing spell is 3.0 seconds then a warrior or rogue attack is not going to be shorter than 1.5 seconds. 1.5 seconds is also the length of the game's Global Cooldown. And so... No Action Combat can exist. There is a PERMANENT TEMPORAL GAP BUILT INTO THE GAME WHERE NO PLAYER ACTIVITY (besides movement of the avatar) IS TAKING PLACE.

The fundamental change over to Action Combat takes place when a player can run AND attack/cast at the same time.

Further advancement into Action Combat as a genre occurs when players can not only run AND attack/cast at the same time BUT ALSO followup with still more of this WITHOUT encountering a global cooldown of any kind.

Where's the time-inversion?

- right now. 

At this point the players are no longer encountering time AS IT WAS USED PREVIOUSLY.

- This means that players are experiencing a circumstance in which TIME is AHEAD OF THEM and is BEING CREATED FROM THEIR ACTIONS.

For a developer this is a giant headache. See, it becomes very hard to heal the MMO genre from this point because Time is no longer available to work with leading up to an attack. Spells have no delay. Actions are instintaneous. And so, time functionally starts to 'vanish' as part of gameplay. Instead, 'structures' emerge which have a likeness to temportal components as would previously have existed. Players don't run to an opponent. They DASH. Instantly closing ground and existing it. Combat happens in blurs and bursts. Time has INVERTED. It is no longer something we are "IN", but something we are somewhat 'creating'. 

However! The human limiter comes back now. We still can't see faster than 45 frames per second. So, even though most developers have eventually collapsed into trying to hit the fast forward key over and over as "progress" early mmos were wary to go here. And probalby because of this issue. They could see that they were scripting themselves into a corner.

So, I think there has been an art lost at this point. It shows why there were four archetypes in the past. Why BDO worked better as a PvP game before things were instant kill as the meta. And why level 49 character combat and skills feel more impactful and entertaining than our level 64s or 65s with gear cap. Progression hard caps at the Ranks listed above and there's nothing any MMO or other game-type can do about it.

What doesn't hard cap is how we use our environments and what sort of encounters are taking place inside those time ranks. 

In a weird way then, MMOS are going to have to learn to go backwards to go forwards at some point soon I think. Otherwise, we're kind of at a peak of some sort. 

How long did I spend slowly reading this I wonder. I got a chuckle about the american finger LOL. Anyways. I have never played another "MMO" outside of Black Desert except a brief run into FFXIV, but I don't think I am the target audience for this post. I enjoy the group content the most in my games, I don't really mind if my profit is lower then others, if the time I take is longer or slower, because what I chase is that time with fellow players completing a task, or doing something together as a community. or just simply sitting around playing music on a carrack in the heidel river. So for me necessarily when I look at a new addition. I more think, Can I enjoy it with others? Will it let me interact with others? Kind of mindset. So I am more of one of the rare players that enjoys party zones where I can team up with other adventurers with no penalty, and we can have fun together doing things, instead of alone. But indeed, it seems quite odd for everything role wise to be taken away, as if BDO is going more and more towards a solo player game, and the playerbase dislikes it, but also doesn't want their class or playstyles to have to rely on others. Now I am not a game dev, I have never studied this field, so the fix to this all is something beyond me. But thanks for the education from the post. Quite the interesting read.