In defense of tab-targeting: MMO devs have been trying to put dodge rolls in their games for 10+ years to avoid WoW, and it's never worked

I think a lot about trends in MMOs. Probably because I'm being paid to do just that, but also because I think the trends are just plain interesting; we've had a golden age where everyone was trying to make an MMO , tectonic shifts in the kind of things players want to do , and ever-changing social dynamics that keep this aged genre vivid and interesting.

One design shift I will never understand, however, is the bizarre affliction that struck MMO designers in the latter half of that 2010s-2020s golden age: The sudden and irrational belief that tab-targeting MMOs (or hotbar MMOs, depending on your accent) are old news, and that every MMO had to have some sort of action combat system in it.

It's similar to the strange pall that swept over RPGs, where turn-based games were believed to be poo