For the first time ever the hype didn't disappoint. Honestly a breath of fresh air for anime, my only complaint is I wish it was longer.
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I've been thinking about it and I sort of think you could have "training" as part of gameplay if you can make it fun and enjoyable. Perhaps a sort of arcade minigames thing? Like Maple Story 2 was doing. They're essentially Fall Guys style minigames, races, contests, memory games etc. If you came up with some fun ones you could have these as representations of the "training" your character does. Might need to be fairly varied with mmr to create added challenge and competition in this element of the game. The downside though is balancing this against what players probably want to be doing which is running dungeons... But even then I sort of think running dungeon dailies is a hyper repetitive task that people only "enjoy" because they're gaining progress points towards greater character strength. Perhaps you would offset this with harder and more challenging dungeons or other tasks set to players out adventuring outside of the cities. The issue here is that I think a lot of mmo players are playing mmos because they don't want a challenge they just want to over-level almost everything and be unstoppable gods.
Pokemon is interesting in a sense because you're not the one levelling up, the pokemon are. The levelling up in pokemon for trainers is collecting gym badges.
This isn't really relevant but I've also often wondered about more features from The Sims making their way over to mmos. Like characters engaging in conversation with nearby players of their own independence. For example let's say you go to the marketplace and you're there looking at the market boards, your character will indepently engage in conversation/actions while idle. Or just in passing out and about characters might greet one another, as you do in real life when you say good morning to a stranger in passing. These could affect social stats between characters, and could be influenced by the players in a roleplay kind of way. At the very least it could highly increase social interaction.
I think part of the problem with modern gaming is that you've got two very different cohorts of people. One group wants to escape reality entirely and play the game as much as possible. They're going to be the ones doing all your high level content and maxing out all your builds as fast as possible. Also the ones who will be doing a bunch of online discourse and YouTube reviews, etc, which is essential for promotion. But then you've got the other group that wants to log on for an hour or two a week and do something exciting in the limited time they have.
MMOs are wildly biased towards the first group. But the second group is where folks with jobs and incomes and shit actually live.
Some of the most fun I had in WoW was in doing a dungeon for the first or second time. Because its new and the challenges are fresh and unexpected, it feels like I'm getting a new slice of content, even if the dungeon is five years old for everyone else. Grinding my level until I could do the next dungeon was a pain in the ass. But the allure of the next new adventure kept me going along... until my friends outpaced me and I had nobody except randoms to play with.
I think a game that takes advantage of transferable skills, rather than a discrete in-game numeric level, might be a good way to get around some of this. Something where you interact and play through adventures and learn about the Lore, then have to solve a Captcha tied to information in the game or solve a puzzle based on things you've already seen and done up till this point, could let people adventure at their own difficulty so to speak.
You see a bit of this in Counterstrike, where the hand-eye coordination you developed in other shooters transfers fairly neatly to this shooter. And playing this game refines your skills until you pick up the next shooter. Same with DOTA-style games, where the knowledge of the character class is the underpinning of the quality of the player more than the number of mobs you smashed over your career in the game.
I like the idea of characters becoming active NPCs while players are logged out. Having a home in game and establishing some passively interactive activity creates a certain digital community without having people be online constantly. But I think it runs the risk of implementing features that keep drawing people back into the game, which some folks will find too obsessive and others too annoying.
Idk. I think there's a fundamental appeal to MMOs that's just not... great. Anything that's such a huge time sink, but whose benefits just kinda evaporate as soon as you log out, just feels fundamentally wrong to me now. Maybe its a silly feeling. All games are ultimately like that. But it just feels like a giant tease.