Sort of a weird question, I guess it belongs here as much as anywhere..
What's the hardest MMO to play a Tank in? I enjoy tanking, but I want a challenge. I feel like I capped out in skill on FFXIV relatively quickly, I want a struggle.
A challenge? Maybe some of the more action oriented games like Tera or Wildstar since you have to actively block/dodge damage and whatnot. Sorry if I can't give a more complete answer but it should get you started.
And since we're asking questions, I had something I've been thinking about more recently but kind of forgot to post it once DFO global became a thing and it strongly relates to it.
See, I've played a lot of different MMOs (Granted tons of shitty free Korean grindfests) and even games in general. I've come across a lot of different services and the one I dislike the most are the games where we're split off from the rest of the community. A few examples are needed to get a better understanding, especially if you've never experienced a more 'worldly' (for lack of a better term, for now) community.
1: PSO/ver2 for the Dreamcast
PSO, lots of people knew about this game, I remember playing it in middle school because a friend got it only because he wanted to play the Sonic Adventure demo in it and had zero interested in playing the game itsef, so I borrowed it and got 'sick' a few days later with only some orange juice and a dreamcast to keep me company. Well, it wasn't till a half a year later once another friend, who I showed it to and he fell in love with it, got Sega net to play online. The game was suddenly different, you got to pal around with people, but not just anyone, people from around the world. It was awesome playing at 10pm and still seeing lobbies full but now it was full of people with weird names talking funny moon languages and you know what? That all didn't matter because people were playing and it was cool running around with people, even if you couldn't read their name or chats. But Sega really thought about this problem and implemented one of the coolest pieces of chat technology that I still love to this day and wish more games would put it in, the auto translator. They had pre-set questions, answers and had some degree of fill-in-the-blank for asking more specific stuff. I was amazed, even when we lacked a keyboard for typing, we still had a way to quickly ask or answer people in the game and even had the ability to have some basic interaction with people outside our language, it made me feel a bit more connected to the players even with the language barrier and it was the first time I was more interested in players of the game instead of the region they were from or language they spoke.
2: Ragnarok Online
I'm having a hard remembering when I first played this but I'm sure it was end of middle school/beginning of high school because it was during the beta before the full English release. The internet was still fairly new to me and I still relied on magazines for a lot of info. So, I didn't really understand about there being a Korean version of this game and we would get updates based off the original's updates. Well, I didn't get to play RO after the beta still some time in high school once dial-up wasn't a thing and I had a real computer to run it. By then I understood the internet more and was able to read up on all the stuff I missed from the first time playing. And was it a bit of an eye opener, updates were fairly spaced apart and the stuff appearing in kRO, at best, were seen in iRO in two years time. I started to wonder why I didn't just play kRO since iRO felt like it was just 'there' and it'd get updates whenever they got around to it.
3: Final Fantasy 11
Well, well, well. I was roped into playing this game and I enjoyed it. I liked the story missions and all the side quests to get things, like the quest chain to unlock the Toraimarai Canal passage in Windurst or having to wait a few in game days for my bard AF weapon to cure in some god damn snow in the middle of nowhere. But what made this so special to use as an example? Simple, the servers were shared much like PSO. The game came out in Japan first and later North America and much later Europe, we all shared the same server and it even gave me the chance to hang out with some British web designer, that was kinda cool. This game, like PSO, had an auto-translator function built into it and there were always players on. It was like PSO for Dreamcast all over again! But this was an MMORPG instead of an action MORPG, so it carried with it a lot of different problems with communication and with how important it was to keep your party in the know about things like: pulling, TP levels, problems with a pull, setting up chain skills/magic bursts and good old fashion bullshitting with the party to reduce boredom, the auto-translator wasn't as craze awesome in FF11 as it was in PSO mainly because of the player's attitude and how much tougher it was to convey all the different things that were happening in a party with people from different languages. I was never able to use Square's version fully but I'm sure White Mages from all over did. I was only ever in one party that I had a chance to use the auto-translator in some way and I was only ever given that chance because while I was an American player, the Japanese were so much more interested in the fact I was a bard and didn't give a care, so long as I gave them those sweet ass buffs.
Actual picture of a bard,
not my bard. He was more adorable.
They did understand some basic level of English, so they asked me a few things like what ' <3 ' meant and stuff like that, I'm guessing so they'd know what the hell people in Jeuno were talking about. Even without a lot of interactions with the players from across the ocean, I still enjoyed the feeling of logging in and still seeing loads of people late into the night. Another effect of this was the fact the markets were still being used so items were always being stocked/bought and the demand for some items waned during different hours meaning you could save a lot of money (thanks whoever put up all that cheap silk threads at night time, love ya) or make a few gil from playing the market from day to night. The feeling of being more part of the player base is something that was a lot more pronounced in FF11 compared PSO for some reason and I don't know why that was to be honest. Maybe it was the players had a bigger role in the world and even if we don't admit to direct interaction, we were still playing with each other by selling items on the Auction house or getting teleports or even healing/raising parties that were nearby as you both leveled. I don't know but I did feel more together even if I knew everyone wanted to stick to their own group.
And that really got me thinking, would more games like this become common? Were we going to be able to play a game where people from all over were on the same server? New tools developed to breakdown the language barrier between the players? Well, turns out, not really. Especially now with the rise of Free-to-play games. Tera, FF14 and PSO2 have shown me that's not really gonna happen and we are still gonna be cut off from one other. And it's not even limited to MMO/MOs anymore and I'll go into detail later on in a 2nd post later on.
But all hope isn't lost, some games are still being made to connect the world in some way, even if they weren't on the scale I enjoyed in PSO1/FF11. Stick around for part 2 where I write some stuff that doesn't really matter about DLC or localized games on the PSP or PSO2 or Dungeon-Fighter-something-on-line-BETA-WHEN-NEOPLE, whenever I feel like it, later tonight most likely.