[size="1"]When most people talk about MMOs, they talk about Wow, Everquest, etc, and those are not achievable by a hobbyist. However, MOST AAA titles are unachievable by a hobbyist. No one is going to say that a FPS is unachievable because a hobbyist will never be able to program a Half-life 2 or a Call of Duty 2.
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Furcadia is an MMO and consisted of a team of 4 people.
Runescape was started by 3 peopole
[font="sans-serif"]Eternal Lands was started on Gamedev.net by a small group.[/font]
[font="sans-serif"]Kingdom of Loathing pushes the limits of what a MMORPG is, but with 100,000 daily players, and many of which you can directly interact and chat with, I think it qualifies.[/font]
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[/font][font="sans-serif"]If anything, recreating something at the "graphical mud" level is easier to achieve now than when these games were first produced, since more free tools are available now than in 1994 or 2003. Not that thousands of people interacting is "easy" in any sense of the word, but I would describe it as achievable.[/font]

Yes and no. It's probably a case that an indie team defines massive as a thousand?. A thousand isn't massive though, it's merely "a bit big". To me, "massive" means a million players and that's not going to fit on your pc in the corner. Especially when to get a million players you do in fact need massive content else they won't come.

But I don't want to get into a fight about it. People bend titles/headings/definitions to fit there own goals all the time and I'm quite possibly being contrarian for the hell of it...

There aren't a million players in any MMO server right now. The largest most populated NA WoW servers are still under 50,000 players. The smallest NA WoW server has less than 2,000 players.

I think anyone still in the camp of "it can be done" are missing something simple. It's been alluded to already but I'll restate it again.

Writing a game that's server based multiplayer, even if it's persistent, just adds the MO part. To get that other M, the game needs to be, er, massive. That's it. How is one guy or even a small team going to make something that anyone would look at and say "wow, that's not just big, it's massive!". Answer: None, regardless of competence levels.

Unless:
A) You leverage community created content, or...
B) You procedurally generate 99% of everything in your game, or...
C) You find some other creative way to get around your own lack of time and motivation to create the content.

[font="sans-serif"]Necessity [/font]is the mother of invention (or something like that).

A thousand isn't massive though, it's merely "a bit big". To me, "massive" means a million players and that's not going to fit on your pc in the corner.

By your definition, the only real MMORPGs are Lineage, Lineage 2, World of Warcraft, and RuneScape. Other well known "MMOs" by AAA publishers have failed to hit the million subscriber milestone.
Speaking of RuneScape... wasn't that made by a small independant team?

From Wikipedia: [article]
[font="sans-serif"]Andrew Gower[/font] [font="sans-serif"]developed[/font] [font="sans-serif"]RuneScape[/font] [font="sans-serif"]with the assistance of his brother Paul Gower.[/font][font="sans-serif"][sup][2][/sup][/font] [font="sans-serif"]It was originally conceived as a text-based[/font] [font="sans-serif"]MUD[/font][font="sans-serif"], but graphics were incorporated early in development, adding it to the ranks of what were then known as "[/font][font="sans-serif"]graphical MUDs[/font][font="sans-serif"]".[/font][font="sans-serif"][sup][39][/sup][/font][font="sans-serif"][sup][40][/sup][/font] [font="sans-serif"]The first public version of the game utilised a mixture of[/font] [font="sans-serif"]three-dimensional[/font] [font="sans-serif"]and[/font] [font="sans-serif"]two-dimensional[/font] [font="sans-serif"]sprites[/font][font="sans-serif"]. It was released as a beta version on 4 January 2001, and originally operated out of their parents' house in[/font] [font="sans-serif"]Nottingham[/font][font="sans-serif"].[/font][font="sans-serif"][sup][2][/sup][/font] [font="sans-serif"]In December 2001, the Gower brothers, along with Constant Tedder, formed[/font] [font="sans-serif"]Jagex[/font] [font="sans-serif"]to take over the business aspects of running[/font] [font="sans-serif"]RuneScape[/font][font="sans-serif"].[/font][font="sans-serif"][sup][11][/sup][/font][/quote][font="sans-serif"][sup][/sup][/font]

Also of interest: "[font="sans-serif"]Each RuneScape server allows up to 2,000 players to log in simultaneously,[sup][60][/sup] allowing a maximum capacity of more than 340,000 players."[/font]
[font="sans-serif"]What does "Massive" mean: the number of servers running, or the number of players on each server?[/font]

Especially when to get a million players you do in fact need massive content else they won't come.[/quote]
Minecraft doesn't have "massive content". It has a limited amount of content that can end up being used in a myriad of interesting ways. (Minecraft isn't a MMO, I know, but they sold over a million copies, so I thought it worth pointing out) I think more MMOs will go the 'sandbox' route as it'll allow for emergent gameplay better, which will keep people interested for longer as well as be self-advertising with people uploading their unique-ish experiences online, while requiring less hand-crafted content from the developers.

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I think a big problem with the name "MMORPG" is that it describes a goal, not a genre. If I wanted to make a FPS, and Valve Software wanted to make a FPS, they'll both be the same genre. However, "MMORPG" describes a goal: 'massive' (whether you are defining 'massive' to mean content, world size, subscribers). Since it's describing a goal, not a genre, that means a game that wasn't an MMORPG early in it's life, can become an MMO later in it's life, just by increased player count or world expansions. With the exception of World of Warcraft and Lineage 2, no game hit 1 million subscribers within it's first year of release (at least, as of 2008).
This is why ORPG is so much a better term than MMORPG. World of Warcraft is a commercially successful ORPG. Success is also relative. If I made a game, and had 1,000 subscribers, I'd consider it successful for me as an individual.

I think anyone still in the camp of "it can be done" are missing something simple. It's been alluded to already but I'll restate it again.

Writing a game that's server based multiplayer, even if it's persistent, just adds the MO part. To get that other M, the game needs to be, er, massive. That's it. How is one guy or even a small team going to make something that anyone would look at and say "wow, that's not just big, it's massive!". Answer: None, regardless of competence levels.

The fact that newbies think they can do it is laughable and only good for a fun poke. When good developers talk about doing one, they're just redefining the "M" bit to mean "minimal".

Bottom line: To make an online game that is truly massive, even if the code and assets just dropped into your lap one day, you'd still need to spend more money than you've ever earned to date in your life on servers, server staffing and customer support

This is what I've been trying to say. Creating a MO is not that big of a stretch, adding that extra 'M' is. A lot of people here seem to think that any kind of online game is a MMO. Judging by some posts a MMO is even easier to make then Pong. Of course the term MMO is high subjective but I wouldn't consider any game that runs on a single server to be a MMO.

Runescape is thrown around a lot. Yeah sure it started with three people but it sure didn't end with three people and they certainly weren't working for charity. I would sure love to see a Runescape type game that was made for free. It certainly hasn't been done through any help wanted post on this forum as far as I know.

Judging from this thread I have to assume there are a bunch of posters working on hobby MMOs just ready to burst on to the scene. Otherwise I have to take all the "MMOs are easy" and "user generated content will make it a MMO" with a grain of salt.