Bubble Bursting On the MMO Market? 162
An anonymous reader writes "An article at Ten Ton Hammer has an interesting take on the current state of the MMO genre; not too doom-and-gloomy, but it makes some good points. Ultimately, it's about how games that foster community the most will stay strong."
Hmm.. (Score:2)
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WoW may have a horrible community but it is at least a community and the game fosters it.
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WoW is a mix of many communities. Pub community is mainly the people that don't fit anywhere else - the bottom of the pile.
I raided competitively for 3 years. During this time our guild had countless real-life meets, one couple that got married (in spite of originally living on opposite sides of EU), one guildie employed several others in his business and so on.
It all depends on what comminuty within WoW you get in. If you're terrible, you'll stay with the pubs (people you meet in public chat, like trade).
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I don't think the public community is the bottom of the pile necessarily. When I was there I joined several guilds but they were all strange and weird and I left soon after. The whole attitude of "join a guild and then you can ignore everyone outside our clique" was just wrong to me. A huge number of insular groups does not make a good community as a whole. I like pick up groups but they just don't work in WoW. So they game I'm in now (lotro) is much better and PUGs are fun to do and no one ever tells
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You're missing the point by a mile and then some. When you join those "random guilds", they're essentially same people you meet in general chats - they don't know each other, there's no real community spirit. You're still essentially one of the nameless mass that everyone despises.
No one says you have to "ignore everyone outside your guild" when you get in the good one and get to stay after they check you out and find out that you're a decent person and a player. On the contrary, it opens a LOT of doors for
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The problem is that so many of these guilds change over time. But over time that casual guild changes and often the leader hits level cap and says "hey I wanna start raiding". Then he leaves or drama ensues or he "converts" the guild into a raiding guild, stuff like that. Or the guild leader leaves the game and drama ensues over the remaining officers about what to do, they split and form competing guilds, etc.
The problem with so many players in WoW was the attitude you had: that if you weren't prepared
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And the level you're talking about, the pub level is indeed horrible. Because everyone is like you, after their own fun, wanting someone else to hold their hand. And not caring about others. And so you get that cesspool.
The reason WoW has a huge following of people that keep their subs up for years is because there's a lot of people who take other people in WoW, and by extension WoW itself much more seriously. And it is that community that thrives, not the pub one.
And like in real life, such communities can
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It takes no time at all to get a trial done in a "decent guild" if your definition of "decent" does not include being raid ready. The problem here is that you're trying to associate good guilds with endgamer oriented guilds (ie, raiding, gearing up, or at least running instances very often and getting members ready for instances). What if you just want to hang out and only occasionally run some instances? Or worse, you want to run an instance without being handheld through it (ie, you want players your o
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1. Raid ready guilds are mostly shit. They're the slap-together pugs that don't know each other, and have been up for barely a few weeks/months at best. I could get a spot without trial in really shitty gear (and in fact got invites to several when I was playing on completely shitty geared alts who weren't in main guild - because a person who knows how to play in shitty gear can not only carry his weight almost as well as well geared shitty player, but can also actually help with more advanced things in the
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This thread really sums up the two approaches to the game... either "you are looking for a relaxed social environment to have fun in" or "you are looking for a strong team to progress thru the content".
I'm in the "relaxed" category. I go along with the idea that I already have a daytime job, I don't need to interview for a WoW job as well. This crystallized for me when I was in a guild raid a while back and the raid leader commented that we were "behind schedule". Screw it, this is a GAME. At work I can
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It's worth noting that if you want to be social, you can. There are many guilds and communities that are aimed toward people who just want someone with similar interests.
The problem lies in people who want to best of both worlds with cons of none. They want to keep the easygoing "I answer to no one" attitude typical in social gaming, but still get into good groups. And reality is, you can't get both - you have to pick one.
This aspect of the game probably feeds more drama in WoW then anything else, including
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WoW? Going the strongest? You mean the MMO that just lost 600,000 subscribers? That WoW?
When a subscription service of any kind loses 600k subscribers it is considered dwindling in interest.
"I play WoW and there are lots of people who still play" is not evidence that your choice of MMO is 'going the strongest'.
EVE Online has showed steady growth since it was released. Every single other RPG has had a large spike of player interest followed by a brutal decline. WoW got great press and so its initial interest
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Yes, that WoW. To other MMO's, 600k is majority of their subscriber base.
To WoW, it's about 5%. Seasonal fluctuation.
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What you dismiss completely in your convoluted attempt to take a piss on WoW is the fact that most people come when you content comes, play through it and leave until next major content update comes.
Not to even mention that most people who play WoW are adults rather then kids. Hell, most guilds have a strictly enforced age limit nowadays usually around 16-18 years old at least, often 20+. No one wants a kid who can't control the time he has to stop playing.
And finally, the last two measures taken were from
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But that's the whole point with WoW. Most WoW players never go anywhere near the cess-pit of the official forums. They simply log in and play with a bunch of friends - either people they met in game or, in a great many cases, people they know in real life.
This is why WoW was successful - when it launched, it got a kind of "watercooler momentum" that I've never seen for any other game. The only comparator from the gaming world was the launch of the Wii. I remember the office I was working in when WoW launche
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I second that. On Rift with multiple 50s, I have yet to see a single flame-fest in chat, people spamming inane crap, or other items that plague WoW's general chats. This is on the most populated PvE server in the game.
In fact, Rift tends to be too quiet. You really need to get in a guild if you want to do more than PuG invasion raids, heroic rifts, or PuG instances.
Of all the MMOs, I prefer EQ1 and EQ2. Mainly because they have an established community. It isn't perfect, but there have been lots of nig
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between the constant idiotic chuck norris jokes and people getting absolutely flamed for asking questions it was horrible. Not to mention we even had one guy on our server that got so upset in his arguments and insults that he decided to then devote his time to ensuring we lost every warfront by running shards for the other team.
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Which is one of the reasons I always liked WoW's PvP, because other then the standard emotes, there was no easy way to talk trash to the other side. (Although some people have figured out how to shout in Orcish in a way that it translates into semi-legible english for the other team. It at least required a bit of effort.)
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Kinda doubt that, given that the MMO with the worst community is going strongest at the moment
Isn't that consistent with a bubble? When quality is not correlated with success, there's usually something wrong with the economics of the situation.
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Well, in the case of WoW, quality is correlated with success. I went from Everquest, and then briefly Everquest 2, to WoW. The difference was night and day. EQ was so riddled with bugs that you just got used to the idea that the boats didn't work, that you fell thru the world, that professions were bugged, etc. And you also got used to the idea that "playing" meant yelling for an hour to get a group, then once you finally found a decent group, finding a "camp" to sit in, then sitting there as long as yo
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EQ2 could have been great and was actually a reasonable bug-free launch. But the game still suffered from trying to be hard-mode like EQ1 while being more accessible. The biggest issues with EQ2 was that it was a *tiny* world compared to EQ1, and there were zone lines everywhere. The gryphon flights in the Commonlands and the lowbie area outside of Qeynos were just horri
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Yeah, Blizzard just knows how to do things right. It was the same for me. The other thing that killed EQ for me was that I had an SOE Station Account, and I wanted to downgrade to just EQ, and customer service said that I couldn't downgrade, but I should just cancel my account, use up the rest of the month, and resubscribe next month. That was a big mistake on SOE's part.. telling your customers to go away is never a good idea.
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No, the Eve community is quite small.
A definite maybe (Score:5, Informative)
And we should believe him - why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Pretty much the whole article is about how cool Rift is, how smart he is, and how cool Rift is. Other than being an unabashed Rift fanboy - the author's qualifications are what?
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" In the later part of the 90's I was working in a high stress industry that required long hours and a good part of my soul, but it paid really well. As friends of mine started to migrate away to new internet start up firms in droves, I was tempted to follow them for the promises of a better work environment and fat stacks of quick cash. Luckily, I had a fiancee..."
Um, how old is this guy? A 30 yr old would be in his teens in the later part of the 90s, not exactly fian
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>>Um, how old is this guy? A 30 yr old would be in his teens in the later part of the 90s, not exactly fiancee age with friends joining internet firms.
The internet bubble was circa 1999ish, which could put him at 18 years old at the time (assuming you read his age literally at 30). Plenty of companies were hiring anyone they could at the time that knew how to make a webpage or code. I had plenty of friends at the time that dropped out of college to work for companies like mp3.com. Paper millionaires f
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Yes, it does. Unless he's a researcher studying teens, 38 years old makes you too old to tell what teenagers are doing. His teenage kids should have written the article, they would have better insight into what teenagers think of MMORPGs.
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I've seen what teenagers are doing today. Moreover at 33 I am still young enough to remember what I did when I was a teenager.
Conclusion: Teenagers know jack.
You want the pulse of pop culture? Find out what the 25-year-old musicians are composing, what the 30-year-old authors are writing, and what the 35-year-old directors are filming.
If you want to know what teenagers are into, just find out what the 50-year-old advertisement industry executives are churning out.
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Agreed. When I was in college in the early 2000s, my cousins (aged 13-18) were playing entirely different games than I was. I wasn't very aware of free MMOs, yet all of them could give me a list of ten popular ones, along with the pros and cons of each. They had never heard of iD software, let alone the games they make (Quake, Doom, etc).
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rofl, i have a MMORPG avatar older than one of the guys i regularly race online with :)
I know both games span pre-teen to 60-something. Pretty tough to nail down your demographics with that kind of spread. Author does seem to have a pretty narrow viewpoint. There's competitive, nerdy, social (or anti-social), etc people of all ages....
Rubbish (Score:5, Insightful)
Being just shy of 48 myself and an active MMORPG player, I should hope not.
And why would a 20-something be more believeable than a 30- or 40- something?
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Being 56 myself and a guild leader in WoW I also hope I'm not too old to play. That would be sad :(
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I can haz ISKies?
I generally make about 50mil a day, mostly through PI. If I actually tried, I could make a ton more. Heh. People who complain about making ISK in EVE are clueless - you don't have to live in Null or grind missions to make that kind of dough, either.
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Swear to me that neither you nor your corp benefit by macros. You can't. Even if your corp has a strict policy about it (which is probably doesn't) you can't say for sure that some of your members are cheating, nor can you say that outside organizations that you rely on for resources aren't
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And how much of that as a direct or indirect result of the use of macros? Absolutely none. I do use multiple accounts, and I do use multiple monitors and PC's. But I do not use bots.
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As much fun as it was to be my own little mini mission-running or mining fleet with (3) accounts, after a while it got to be too much.
And yet... I want to login and play again.
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As for your assertion that it is players the world over that are accounting for the 15k on-line number, I was in the same boat as you. My play time was typically between 4am EST and 7am (on either side of DT). It wasn't very often that I ran into ano
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I haven't ever used macros, but I find it easier to spend a little extra and sell GTC/PLEX to my Corpies for extra cash. So I suppose I am supported by macroers.
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Lets put it this way, when was the last time you were looking for the guy with the LEAST experience for advice?
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Because a 20 year old has learned all the math and other stuff needed to precisely describe the "bubble" phenomenon?
OTOH taking the concept MMO (or its variations MORGs etc) I guess there will be a hugh increase of them. And they will merge with TV and 3D and home theatre technology.
Consider in 10 years to sit in your living room watching the super bowl. All your friends and your remote family will be proj
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Anyone in their 30s and 40s is likely to be gaming less because they generally have these things called families. If they started this family thing early, their kids may be part of the serious gaming generation by now.
You can still be a gamer with kids, it just requires that most of your games have a pause button. As for the games you can't pause, work out a schedule with your significant other where each of you gets a few hours where the other handles all kid-related issues.
Skinner Boxes (Score:5, Informative)
People are getting disgusted with MMOs, it is inherently amoral business.
Eventually, player realizes what excatly is being done to him:
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/extra-credits/2487-The-Skinner-Box [escapistmagazine.com]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning_chamber [wikipedia.org]
http://www.cracked.com/article_18461_5-creepy-ways-video-games-are-trying-to-get-you-addicted.html [cracked.com]
Once you realize that, everything about MMO stops being fun, every reward is spolied because you know it is conditioning to keep you playing to get further rewards. Then you get slightly pissed at authors for abusing skinery-boxy mechanics of human psychology. And you quit for good.
Changing MMO does not help: it is just differently colored lever you have to press to get pelets. Nothing devs can do can help past this point except abandoning notion of chaining player to game.
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It's more than just that. Eventually the MMO or any other game for that matter gets dumped and you're left with nothing that you can still use for your efforts.
For example take a look at one of the longest running non-MMO series - Microsoft Flight SImulator. One day there was a financial crsis and a change of management and the next thing you know the whole series has been dumped. So all the time 3rd party developers and enthusiasts spent creating content is all for nothing. (Not to mention each version bro
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I brought a good deal away from Ultima IV as a kid - it taught me all the virtues I need and especially not to lay waste to entire towns or steal all their food and treasures.
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I hear this explanation for why MMO are a waste of time, but in reality what are you bringing away from any gaming experience? If you are playing these games to enrich your life beyond some entertainment and socialization then you should take some time for serious introspection.
Why bother? Because you enjoy it.
Playing the game is fun. You can even learn (especially from a simulator). Creating content is generally a pain in the arse. Why bother? Because then you can use what you've created and share it with others...in theory for life. Only problem is, if a the game is killed off, or the format of the content changes with every version, all that effort is wasted....unless you put in a whole lot more effort updating your content for the next version or another game.
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[[Citation Needed]]
True for you maybe. But the whole world isn't you.
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So, what you're saying is they've discovered how to make something addictive, and once you read about this technique, it's no longer fun?
But then surely everything that you enjoy in life is a bit less fun, just because you know how it works?
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The thing is that skinner box techniques are known for bringing an emotionally void kind of addiction.. not the kind of fun that most people want out of a game.
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Actually, the stuff they do to make games addictive make the game less fun, at least according to player surveys most thing players wish would change about the MMOs they play are the things that game companies do to make the games addictive.
So yeah, they make the game into shit by trying to keep people playing. Humans being as fucked up as we are, this actually turns out to be good business strategy.
Re:Skinner Boxes (Score:5, Insightful)
By that same standard, just about ANY entertainment is equally immoral. Go read a book - whups, the author MIGHT be telling you that story merely to hook you and get you to read his next book!
Seriously, you're 'discovering' the relationship between media, consumer, and producer that's existed since advertising was invented, but reached its zenith with free-broadcast TV: the programs are bait, to get your eyeballs on the screen, and your attention is being sold to the advertisers, the real customers in the transaction. When you say "there are too many commercials", that just means the bait is too small for the hook, and the fish are swimming away.
So for MMOs, they continue to entertain you with a carefully-metered trickle of rewards to keep you entertained? So what? If you're paying to be entertained, isn't that the point? I can drop $15 on a month of an MMO, and have hundreds of hours of fun, or I can spend $15 on a theater movie (and get 90 minutes of entertainment, and perhaps a pop or popcorn), or I can spend $15 on a pro sports ticket and get maybe 15 minutes of a game. Which is the best entertainment value?
For all the people complaining about being conditioned as a faux-excuse for their excessive gameplay: grow up, and either enjoy your hobby unashamedly, or (if you feel your focus on it is too excessive) just change your friggin' behavior.
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By that same standard, just about ANY entertainment is equally immoral. Go read a book - whups, the author MIGHT be telling you that story merely to hook you and get you to read his next book!
What! That's not possible!
... ] series
Excuse me, I've got to go finish this [Harry Potter | Twilight | Goosebumps | The Chronicles of Narnia | The Lord of the Rings |
(For the record, I have not read some of those on that list and likely won't ever.)
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That's okay. I'm still working my way through Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series [wikimedia.org] myself. But saying you'll never be able to get to those others... isn't that a bit hysterical? Sure, you may only be on the seventh book of the series, but the author died, there is light at the end of the tunnel!
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Distinction is whether you are being sold distinctive "entertainment unit" or continous stream as well as in array of avaiable manipulation techniques.
TV (good job catching who "customers" and what "product" is) has much weaker tools to keep you hooked to stream. Games offer proper, personalised, feedback loop that no other entertainment can. Developers are aware of this, explotiting it. That makes it amoral because it is not exactly victimless.
Point is that you start paying for being entertained, but end u
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There's more to entertainment than just filling bars.
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Maybe for you.
Maybe progress quest is fun, for me.
The point I find so interesting is - why do you CARE what I find fun?
Why do so many people get so literally angry about MMO's being like a Skinner Box.
I know it is one, I'm paying my money to be entertained, I'm entertained, I get what I want for my $. Why do you care?
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You are right ofcourse, I think calling the concept amoral is a little harsh tho. MMO running companies run the whole moral spectrum like everyone else.
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Certainly, the gaming industry is not immune to the march of 'progress'. But neither is any other. Advertising continues to become more effective as new techniques emerge that allow them to be more targeted and tantalizing. So, too, do games that want to charge you by the month instead of a lump sum up front become better at luring their players back for just one more numerical increase. And there are certainly a host of creepy psychological factors at work, being taken into account when designing new g
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Any gaming model that involves continually fleecing the player for whatever they can bear is amoral at best and if you stop to think about consequences of actions, clearly immoral. Remember when you bought a game, and then you played it, and maybe you modded it? You know, before you bought a game, and then bought it again, and again? And now, you buy the game, and then you pay for it monthly! At least a few games are now starting to catch on to the idea that a lot of us feel that's a ripoff. Charge us once
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Any gaming model that involves continually fleecing the player for whatever they can bear is amoral at best and if you stop to think about consequences of actions, clearly immoral.
I'm not sure it's quite as black and white as that. I have an "addictive personality" and often focus on one or two activities at the expense of others. In the past this was drinking, smoking and other destructive habits. Happily I've managed to fill some of the void left from quitting the nastier addictions with games (amongst other things), although I don't play MMOs nor do I feel compelled to subscribe to any of them. However, I am happy to spend £10-£30 on games and enjoy the entertainment I
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I agree that it's better to be addicted to something less harmful, but what about something that helps you break the cycle of addiction and be a complete person instead? They're taking advantage of you, plain and simple. Where I come from, apparently a lost land of some sort, we call taking advantage of someone's weakness "wrong" whether it's legal or not.
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If you have an addictive personality, you can't break the cycle of addiction and be a complete person. You only replace one vice for something else, eliminate multiple ones and eventually it concentrates on one or two, or at certain points it gets less severe for a while (but returns) due to unconscious actions--like getting so fed up, going cold turkey, and of course coming back to it, but maybe less severe.
Perfect examples. You bit your nails. You say you want to stop. So you stop. Then instead you find w
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If you have an addictive personality, you can't break the cycle of addiction and be a complete person.
If you believe you're going to be a failure, you probably are. I don't know if that's causation or correlation, but otherwise, I'm not interested in your lack of self-confidence rubbing off on me. If people can't change then why not kill everyone different from you? I guess I'm still an optimist at heart. I still live here in the real world, though.
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I have firsthand experience with friends who have it and truly make an effort.
Plus, it's the view presented by psychologists and psychiatrists the world over. Go read some psychology trade magazines sometime.
So in short: you're dead wrong.
Optimism is great. But you must have optimism tempered with reality. Being optimistic and attempting to cure your addictive personality will result in some sort of an improvement, depending on how much effort you give. But there is no cure, and certainly nothing no more th
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Like anything oft-cited you should consider who was writing Adam Smith's checks.
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So the big $15 a month makes it immoral? In other words, the same cost as going to a movie once a month and buying coke & popcorn? If that's what gets you going, what are you going to do when your credit card company hits you for 20% interest because you were a day late paying? Or your company's CEO gets a $10 million dollar golden parachute as your company tanks and you lose your job? On the grand scale of things, whether you pay $15 for perhaps 100 hours of entertainment is pretty tiny. You could
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To be fair, this is virtually true of every game. Somewhere there's a work/reward process at work. Its just a lot more obvious with MMOs. Even before the age of "achievements" (what a cynical term) we had level bosses and other things that made you think you were accomplishing something.
My problem with MMOs is how horribly stupid and dumbed down they are. Its the same old D&D/MUD mechanisms. Its so safe and balanced and kid-friendly. Everything is pretty much on a rail. Maybe EVE and others are differen
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Their full-time economist isn't all that great.
Honestly, the market is continuing to succeed in SPITE of him, not because of him.
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Which mirrors how I feel about CCP developers. EVE succeeds in spite of the best efforts of the CCP developers to torpedo it.
(Release a new feature, but it's buggy and barely works, or it's unbalanced. Instead of fixing it, they release another new shiny. Then maybe 4 release cycles later they'll finally get around to doing a small round of cosmetic bug fixes.)
I still think that the main reason that EVE is still aflo
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I think you're being pretty harsh. What I loved about WoW was exploring the world and the sites, monsters, bosses, etc. and the tactics for playing in the battlefield instances. It wasn't until hitting the higher levels that I got the sensation of repetitive reward conditioning. Not that there aren't some individual quests like that as well.
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Project much?
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Unless you know where to look.
What "Good Points"? (Score:2)
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All I knew about Rift is that on my game's forums the few annoying jerks kept saying how the game sucked and that they were going to the Rift when it opened because it was cool. No features listed, just that current game sucked and new game was going to shut everyone else down. This has been repeated over and over again; it was SW:TOR, then Conan, then War, then back to SW:TOR, then Rift, etc.
MMOs have changed, but some communities dislike the change. In particular the types who loved multi hour raids se
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Rift doesn't do that. Instead you pick an archetype, and then can pick and chose form the available souls to craft a class to fit your play style and goals. The game even lets you swap these with little pain. That really opened up the game and made it feel much more like a pen-and-paper game then most M
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In other words, their class system is a crippled version of what Ultima Online was doing back 1997, or roughly what City Of Heroes was doing back in 2004.
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Or Asheron's Call, or countless single player games and pen and paper games.
MMOs are stuck in a class and level based system. I can see why, there are just a ton of players who don't want the complexity of building up a character from scratch (even though at high level these games often have extremely byzantine build systems), and quite a lot who need levels so that they can keep score. After all, you can't prove that you're better than the other guy unless you have numbers to show it.
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Which is also one of the reasons why WoW beat EQ2.
In EQ2, you would pick a major class at level 6 (after 2-3 hours of play). Then you'd pick again at 10, and refine your choice at 20 (if you didn'
Kingdom of Loathing (Score:2)
How NOT To Treat People (Score:4, Funny)
Me: "I installed the trial and played for a session, but did not get a chance to return to the game until last night. I connected, only to find there was a wait to log in to the server. It was only 50 deep, but it was so slow that by the time I had connected I had to leave. If I could have the trial extended for another week I would appreciate it. I have not made a decision to date on whether or not to subscribe."
Them: "Thank you for contacting us regarding RIFT. I'm sorry to hear you're experiencing this issue, I realize it's frustrating and I'm happy to assist you in this matter. I have inquired with our tier 3 support team, unfortunately we can not add 7 more days to your free trial. But I have been authorized to offer you 7 extra free days added to your account if you purchase RIFT. So if you purchase RIFT from (link removed) If you have any additional questions or concerns, please don't hesitate to let us know. Thank you for your continued support of Trion Worlds and for playing RIFT.
Me: "I'm sorry to hear that. The extension was requested not because I care about 7 free days, but because I hadn't decided whether or not to subscribe. 7 days is worth about $4 and is not significant to me. Perhaps I chose a bad week for the trial, but I simply lacked the time. I'll pass on the offer. You may close the ticket."
Shortsighted pinheads.
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Sounds like you were the shortsighted one. Why get a trial when you won't have a chance to play it? Why be angry about them following the terms of the agreement? You sound like a spoiled child.
Come for the game, stay for the people? (Score:3)
Bill Cosby had a comment some time ago that's applicable. He was talking about his bafflement about why people would want to do cocaine.
(Bill's friend) "Because cocaine intensifies your personality."
(Bill) "Yeah, but what if you're an asshole?"
"Community" is fine, as long as its members are basically decent people. Communities are self-reinforcing; the dominant traits become more and more ensconced as those traits are rewarded and the opposites are pushed out. However, because there are no real consequences that follow you for NOT being a decent person, and because even if you finally get booted out of a game because the customer service people finally come to the DUH! realization that jerks cause others to unsubscribe, you can just pick up your jerkiness and go to another game to ruin another bunch of people's good times. "Community" is not just a martini-pickled marketing flack's buzzword; it defines whether you stay in a game after you've used up the leveling content. IMHO, because there are no consequences for being an asshole, and because so many MMO operators are afraid/don't give a damn/are too lazy to enforce their Codes of Conduct, there is zero incentive to not be a total asshat. And because of that self-reinforcement, many "communities" are little more than unsupervised schoolyards.
Jerks cost money. They consume GM time and salary, they cause unsubscriptions, they can even trigger lawsuits and criminal complaints. But when some VC hack on the Board of Directors spews "a griefer's money is just as green", you know what the people in the game will be like. Yes, I've heard people at that seniority actually SAY that, at Game Developer Conferences and even in communication about game policies from producer to the fans... why the hell do people like that have jobs? I wouldn't blame a community manager in such a game from becoming an alcoholic, wanting to do something about it but having a know-nothing with a title rendering you into an impotent object of mockery.
Come for the game, leave because of the people. Enjoy your playpen, Darkfall players/administators (and games like DF with similar jerk-dominated playerbases). When the lights in the server room are turned off, they will have only themselves to blame. They won't, of course. One of the defining characteristics of an asshole is a refusal to recognize or take responsibility for the consequences of what they've done.
Re:MMOs = communities (Score:4, Insightful)
It's going to burst at some point simply because many of the people who joined the genre with WoW never play anything else. When they get bored with WoW (and given how badly Cataclysm is doing in North America, they ARE getting bored with WoW) they leave the genre entirely instead of going for another game. That spirals downward the same way it spiraled upward: as your friends leave, you have less and less reason to keep playing. So you leave. That in turn gives your friends who are still there less reason to play. Almost my entire network of friends is gone from the game now, and I didn't hold out all that long without them because farming loot with strangers who don't talk just isn't very interesting.
You keep that trend going for a while and the whole genre shrinks. Which is probably a good thing. These games are a lot more fun when they're about doing stuff with friends instead of competing to get loot before some other random people. If companies don't all aim for 5 million subs we'd probably be better off.
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they leave the genre entirely instead of going for another game.
This is a good thing for those of us who play the other games.
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It's going to burst at some point simply because many of the people who joined the genre with WoW never play anything else. When they get bored with WoW (and given how badly Cataclysm is doing in North America, they ARE getting bored with WoW)
I was surprised because I had the impression Cata sold quite well. I did a bit of googling and found this:
The new expansion sold more than 3.3 million copies worldwide as of its first 24 hours of release, including digital pre-sales, eclipsing the previous first day record of 2.8 million sold for Wrath of the Lich King, released in 2008.
It may be that Cata sales haven't continued as well as WotLK, but I suspect Cata outsold most of the new free MMO's put together.
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Well... obviously the free MMOs aren't "sold"... what I mean is that more people have played Cata than the new free MMOs put together.
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I was surprised because I had the impression Cata sold quite well. I did a bit of googling and found this:
The new expansion sold more than 3.3 million copies worldwide as of its first 24 hours of release, including digital pre-sales, eclipsing the previous first day record of 2.8 million sold for Wrath of the Lich King, released in 2008.
It may be that Cata sales haven't continued as well as WotLK, but I suspect Cata outsold most of the new free MMO's put together.
A lot of players are going to pick up the expansion no matter what. What has happened is, much like he is saying about the launch of Rift, after a short amount of time the subscriptions are stopping and people are leaving the game. The subscriptions are where the money is made since just purchasing the expansion typically covers the cost of creating the content.
As someone who has played WoW off and on for a very long time, I have seen things in the last few months that are specifically tailored to fix s
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- The launch event was lackluster at best
- Cross-realm random dungeon groups are a huge turn-off
- Questing has been turned into a solo-experience through phasing and quest design
Plus Blizzard is in money-grubbing mode the past 2 years and keeps trying to find more and more things that they can charge a fee for. All of the trading card game items. The non-combat pets that can only be bought for real money, etc.
Not to mention the whole RealID fiasco from last summer.
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I agree that I don't enjoy Cata as much as WotLK, but I don't think it has to do with money grubbing. If Blizzard can get someone to pay to buy a companion or t-shirt, it has zero impact on my play experience, other than Blizzard having more money to put into the game.
For me the problem with questing is that when you combine all the helpers they have (arrows, map dots, etc) and the ability to fly anywhere, questing becomes "fly to the exclamation mark, accept it, bring up map, fly to spot, hover over mobs t