Comments by "nexus1g" (@nexus1g) on ""MMO" Means Nothing Anymore. (Asmongold Reacts to Bellular)" video.

For me, an MMO is three things: forced shared environment for a not insignificant part of content, persistence (the world continues and things happen when you're not there), and always online. The idea you need to have to group of any size to be an MMO forgets that the first game to receive the moniker, Ultima Online, had 100% soloable content. There was nothing originally in UO that a player could not manage on their own. The idea that content has to be either instanced or easy is defeated by the original Everquest experience. Bosses in that game could two-shot your tank in a few seconds and your Clerics' heal that was absolutely required in order to keep up with the damage (Complete Heal) took 10 seconds to get off. That was not easy to manage. You'd have to have 10 clerics lined up, each ending a CH every second. And end-game bosses in Everquest were multi-raid, meaning you needed multiple raid parties just to hope to succeed. The hardest part was getting a guild big enough and cohesive enough to take on the content. I think there does exist a dichotomy between having instanced content and widely-accessible content. Instances made it so the business could better control how content is handled by the players, allowing for a flexible raid of 10 to 40 players to all have the same basic experience.
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