A feature some MMOs have that would make me not only stop playing but instantly uninstall and publically warn all my friends against ever touching it:

quests that you can't abandon once you start them, which are revealed after accepting to require a cash shop item to complete

SHUT UP

D&D Online does it

if you don't pay up then you'll literally never have a clear quest log again

for a moment i misread this as a hypothetical and was like, "that would be so awful but i sure am glad no one would be THAT scumbag"

on the other hand, here's a fun feature that DDO has:

every dungeon has narration from an unseen Dungeon Master describing the dungeon as you progress through it

I will note that DDO also provides points for said cash shop regularly based on clearing other quests... But also that the cash shop interface is "pivot out to a separate browser, in a game that doesn't play happy when you alt-tab out of it"

Like, there's stuff I liked about DDO

But good god some of the ideas

another thing that's very funny:

you can't use an email for DDO if you're already using that email for LOTR Online

Yeah this sounds about right for Standing Stone

LOTR was trying to save you from this, I guess.

I haven't played DDO in a long time, but last time I played you absolutely could abandon that quest?

if it's the one I'm thinking of

also the quest is technically completable without cash, or at least was back then

as it used the premium points which most easily were acquired by spending money, but also you got a small amount of points for doing things in the game, and the amount of points given to you for completing the starting area were also enough to complete that quest without having to spend money

it was still a little shady when it first came out because it felt like it was trying to trick you into giving them an extra dollar

as its not immediately apparent that you can do the quest without money

it wouldn't surprise me to learn that that maybe that's changed, tho

as DDO definitely is relying on whales to keep going

but DDO honestly made some great design decisions that I wish other MMOs did

like dungeons are designed to be "beat" in a variety of ways in an almost crude BotW way. You can run through killing everything or you can play it like a stealth game to get to the objective and even get a special reward for not killing anything or a small amount of enemies

ranged attacks had to be aimed instead of just clicking on an enemy far away and clicking a cooldown to auto hit like most MMOs do, which made ranged combat actually feel like a game

the game made a point of NEVER having a "kill 10 swamp rats" or "bring me 10 swamp rat rails quest" anywhere