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[Stiler]

Did you even bother reading my post past the first line?

It's nonsense because it's not true.

Placing the blame on WoW is scapegoating.

There's a reason why nearly every MMO released before WoW had a massive decline in subscribers in late 2004 to early 2005.

How can you dismiss WoW and it's affect on the industry?

Because of its success it set off a domino like effect on the genre. It sold so well that many publishers took notice and thought "Hey, lets make an mmo, lets make it like world of warcraft since it's making so much money and we want some."

If WoW was never made or wasn't the huge success it was, the mmo market may have turned out quite different, more variety, more "risks" from developers and publishers who made them would have made them with the sense of understanding that mmo's aren't normally going to get 10 million subscribers.

After the first gen of mmo's came out and were considered successful enough you still had mmo's coming out that were new/varied like DAOC/WWII online/SWG. Then along comes WoW and that "variety" pretty much flies out the window (especially from AAA backed publishers).

OP, if you want to give a niche mmorpg a try, there is a game in development that is being promoted by the devs themselves as a niche game that has little interest in capturing the WoW market. Camelot Unchained. It's a faction vs faction-based game with no PvE progression, but it's doing a lot of things that could bring old-school elements into a new game via modern tech. The devs are also being EXTREMELY transparent even in alpha stages about things they can and can't do. They are offering refunds for backers (it was a KS project) if at any time those backers don't like one of the dev updates (which are abundant and detailed.) A little list of features:

/snip
Then again, if a niche mmo with no PvE progression isn't your idea of a good time, I just spent ten minutes talking about stuff I am, like, into.

I backed it on kickstarter , so yes I am keeping an eye on it.

 

[ReaperXL7]

But is that actually true?

It is from my experience

MMO communities do not participate with each other in the way they did back when I played games like UO. Some were negative about the open world pvp and corpse looting aspects but ultimately those things actually brought a lot of groups together in positive ways.

Players would put on Orc masks and take over a town in the forests and the community would interact with that in a way many wouldn't today because it's not "real content" not to mention that doing something like that isn't really possible in most modern MMOs.

 

[Kilrathi]

Remove the social interaction in a MMO then everything become boring pretty quick. When you think back to the best times you have in MMO you don't think about to the game systems self at all. It's NOT the time when I needed to farm the mats for tonight raiding, It's not the endless time spending all managing DKP or raid attendance. It's more like remember when such and such did this or remember we finally killed boss X. You don't make meaningful connection with other players in group finder content because you see those players for maybe 30-60mins tops and never develops into anymore.


MMO's aren't that fun on their own by them self, EVE you remove the players it is not fun at all. Other players make these game much more interesting to play then the game it self.

Placing the blame on WoW is scapegoating.

There's a reason why nearly every MMO released before WoW had a massive decline in subscribers in late 2004 to early 2005.

*edit* There weren't that many MMO's before wow.
Once something becomes so big there is a huge pressure to include it. *edit* After COD4 how many shooters did you see have level progression unlock system?

 

[Artdayne]

How can you dismiss WoW and it's affect on the industry?

Because of its success it set off a domino like effect on the genre. It sold so well that many publishers took notice and thought "Hey, lets make an mmo, lets make it like world of warcraft since it's making so much money and we want some."

If WoW was never made or wasn't the huge success it was, the mmo market may have turned out quite different, more variety, more "risks" from developers and publishers who made them would have made them with the sense of understanding that mmo's aren't normally going to get 10 million subscribers.

After the first gen of mmo's came out and were considered successful enough you still had mmo's coming out that were new/varied like DAOC/WWII online/SWG. Then along comes WoW and that "variety" pretty much flies out the window (especially from AAA backed publishers).



I backed it on kickstarter , so yes I am keeping an eye on it.

Games like Age of Conan, Warhammer Online, they tried to do something different from WoW but they failed to capture an audience because they were unfinished or failed in some other way.

 

[Stiler]

It is from my experience

MMO communities do not participate with each other in the way they did back when I played games like UO. Some were negative about the open world pvp and corpse looting aspects but ultimately those things actually brought a lot of groups together in positive ways.

Players would put on Orc masks and take over a town in the forests and the community would interact with that in a way many wouldn't today because it's not "real content" not to mention that doing something like that isn't really possible in most modern MMOs.

Yeah. A game like UO was built around it being a fully open game where players could do good or bad things. They built systems in place that drove players to interact with each other, even if it wasn't directly.

Because they knew people would fight, they had player crafters that would provide people with the gear they needed, which drove interact between pvp'ers/players and player crafters (many of which did not pk or pvp).

Then you had things like the banks, because of the open pvp they built a system where you could store items in a bank in towns. This promoted natural gathering spots for players to interact, from selling/trading goods, to forming parties, etc. They even put boards where you could leave messages (that's how I found my guild which I stayed with my entire time playing UO).

Things like housing (non-instanced) sprung up into actual communities, you got to know the people who lived near you, you saw familiar names/guilds once you lived somewhere for a while.

Then you had chat, being local and seeing chat bubbles above a player meant you had to actually be near people to see what they were saying. There was no /zone chat or tells. While in a guild you could use something like ICQ (and Aim) to communicate once you exchanged info the main way people did it was how it was done in game.

All of these systems, even if at the surface they didn't seem like much were mostly interconnected systems built to promote player interaction with each other.

The GM's really do deserve a lot more credit, they really helped promote the sense of community.

UO felt the most to me like what a good "D&D" group felt like, but on a much grander scale. The way people interacted really drove home the game built built to be an actual world that you made up your own stories within.

 

[gatti-man]

Yup, Eve Online seems to be the only surviving MMO that isn't a single player theme park.

It's a shame really. I too remember the period when anything was thought possible for MMOs. I want it back.

The eve style mmo could be the next big thing if someone can blizzardize it. Make it not so brutal on newcomers and soften the skill curve a bit. Game is legit amazing with its community and intricate combat.

 

[Speely]

I backed it on kickstarter , so yes I am keeping an eye on it.

Ah good. All is well.

 

[BizzyBum]

The next big evolution and revitalization in MMO's will be VR. It needs to become more mainstream and the tech needs to still improve, but once it gets there, a proper MMO within a life-like VR world would be pretty amazing.

 

[Mr_Antimatter]

The problem with a sandbox is well, if you aren't willing to put in a ton of time and have a huge community, it's difficult to do anything.

Theme park style games, however, were much more friendly to non-groups, as well as folks with much less time on their hands.

The result was the later more or less killed the former.

When I played EQOA, I really had to block off the afternoon/evening to get any sort of progress. Progress, even basic stuff, for a character could take weeks to months.

Vanilla wow was an improvement, but still a massive time sink, as dungeons were quite large and complicated. Raids even more so.

Don't get me started on loot. Nothing like spending 20 hours hunting for a particular thing, only to lose that roll. If it ever dropped at all.

 

[Unknown Soldier]

The next big evolution and revitalization in MMO's will be VR. It needs to become more mainstream and the tech needs to still improve, but once it gets there, a proper MMO within a life-like VR world would be pretty amazing.

Sword Art Online

 

[fanboi]

I just want a game where it feels I am in controll, where I can start a community with friends, build houses, do some battle without the need to play 9834759437543 hours to be competetive.

 

[ReaperXL7]

Yeah. A game like UO was built around it being a fully open game where players could do good or bad things. They built systems in place that drove players to interact with each other, even if it wasn't directly.

Because they knew people would fight, they had player crafters that would provide people with the gear they needed, which drove interact between pvp'ers/players and player crafters (many of which did not pk or pvp).

Then you had things like the banks, because of the open pvp they built a system where you could store items in a bank in towns. This promoted natural gathering spots for players to interact, from selling/trading goods, to forming parties, etc. They even put boards where you could leave messages (that's how I found my guild which I stayed with my entire time playing UO).

Things like housing (non-instanced) sprung up into actual communities, you got to know the people who lived near you, you saw familiar names/guilds once you lived somewhere for a while.

Then you had chat, being local and seeing chat bubbles above a player meant you had to actually be near people to see what they were saying. There was no /zone chat or tells. While in a guild you could use something like ICQ (and Aim) to communicate once you exchanged info the main way people did it was how it was done in game.

All of these systems, even if at the surface they didn't seem like much were mostly interconnected systems built to promote player interaction with each other.

The GM's really do deserve a lot more credit, they really helped promote the sense of community.

UO felt the most to me like what a good "D&D" group felt like, but on a much grander scale. The way people interacted really drove home the game built built to be an actual world that you made up your own stories within.

1)The way gear was handled in the early days of UO was pretty much perfect for the other systems involved. There was almost no armor out there that wasn't easily replaceable by a good crafter. Hell this character is wearing one of the most coveted pieces of loot in the entire game.

2) How the player could interact with the world is one of the reasons UO to this day holds a special place for me. I knew people that ran full bars with a staff, I knew people (as I said already) that dressed up as Orcs, made up their own language and took over an NPC town in the middle of a forest, and I knew a couple of people that had purchased castles and created entire towns of their own from scratch with their communities/guilds. It was really a wild west but it was so much fun.

3)I wonder if my ICQ information is still valid...or if I could even remember it lol.

 

[ShinMaruku]

Did the EQ strain kill mmos?

No, that genre was always niche and always had it's communities, the issue came when wow arrived and grabbed 70-45% of the market making other people think there is money in the game.

However the market was only going to grow so much, that led to a gold rush of over-saturation by some people who reached beyond their means and would fall short, add that with costs being high a high failure rate in the games, a community that generally either sits in their game or bounces from game to game trying to recapture the magic and you get a unstable genre.


Then you see the rise of other types of games taking the limelight and the attention away from MMOs like MOBAs and the minecrafts that grab the collective attention of social gamers and it then appears to be a dying genre.

However I think it's largely the same size it has always been just some of the old hands might have gotten bored with the genre or the turn over in games are such that the numbers no longer seem impressive.

In short WoW did not kill it but it did not help when it was over half the market and when it declined it hurt the genre. Nothing by it's own fault, you have copy cats and cynical cash grabs, it all built up in a perfect storm.

I don't play MMOs any more because I have more things to mess with and how MMOs have gone does not appeal to me.

 

[Austriacus]

Isn't that basically Black Desert? You do large scale PvP battles and fight for forts/bases when I played on the Korean servers. I don't know if it has changed or is different since it released in NA. It's the most "sandbox" MMO there is today that I have heard of/played. Why isn't it killing? I mean I know it is doing pretty well now, but nothing like WoW.

I am in the market for a sandbox MMO with a robust player economy, I seriously miss Star Wars Galaxies and wish there was a game that played similarly to that. But as of now there is no market for that and WoW has proven to make quite entertaining games and expansions. Whether they can ever actually keep their promise on constant content updates (I am not holding my breath) is up for debate, but they have proven consistent in comparison with their competition.

Black desert is not a sandbox in any sense of the word. It has a controlled economy for crying out loud.

The most effective way of progressing was farming too. You could be the most geared person on the game(if rng blesses you) if you farmed all day non stop.

Also territory wars are absolutely terrible, most servers have devolved into mega alliances taking turns in which the member guilds take control of the castle for a measly payout at the end and alliances rarely clash with each other and tend to stick to their territory.

Its a game that had good ideas but theres really nothing of value to do in the game.

 

[Durante]

A stealth UO thread. Great!

Indeed.

But I think the reason UO worked so well at the time and that such memorable things happened is not just found in its mechanics, but also its players. Quite simply, what the average player expected out of and put into the game was different (I'd go so far as to say fundamentally different)) in early UO compared to later "mass phenomenon" MMOs.

 

[Xiaoki]

Since you clearly can't be arsed to click a link...

Why? To read more nonsense like "everything is instanced"?

Instanced content was something that the community wanted so Blizzard gave it to them.

And since you can't be "arsed" (is that even a word) to read my post I'll say it again: everything you hate about MMOs was what the majority of players wanted.

Blizzard was able to capture the MMO market because they actually listened to the players and changed the game to suit them, which for some reason was a completely alien concept to the other MMO developers of the time.

You might not like that you are in the minority now but that's how it goes. One day you're in the majority and everything is great but then things change and now you're in the minority and things suck.

 

[Austriacus]

If you people liked UO, Albion is the closest thing u guys are gona get prob ever, currently in beta.

 

[vikkemon]

ohh that's a hard one for me. I remember my disappointment when I discovered that my most anticipated MMO Ragnarok Online 2 turned out to be a bad WoW clone. That did hurt.

I guess WoW was both the rise and fall of MMOs as we knew them: it managed to raise the popularity of the genre to the point it became a phenomenon and at the same time it became this template for future MMOs due to its success, which eventually led to the genre's exhaustion.

This plus gamers behavior changing. Grinding was considered not fun anymore, older MMO players aged, time demanding type of game that few really had time to invest, the rise of genres like MOBA and focus on competitive team-based games.

It is surely BEUCASE of Wow that MMOs changed, but I don't know if they deserve the BLAME for making a solid game that simply gave players what they wanted and what they didn't even know they wanted.

It's kinda pointless to fight over this. MMOs were niche one day, then WoW brought it to the masses and now pre-WoW style of MMO is a niche of its own. Until a new revolution (VR maybe?) comes to the genre I don't think it will change much. There are good games out there, but I feel like it's kinda stagnate.

Or maybe someday the grind heavy, community based MMOs will make a cultural comeback. Who knows right? (one can hope).

 

[anothertech]

I feel that it wasn't WoW that killed the MMO, but rather the lack of innovation from everything that came after it. If somthing absolutely better and higher quality came around afterwards, I'm sure the genre could have saved itself. But instead we had endless wow clones that were deemed failures for not dethroning WoW. It's been sad to watch honestly.

Guild Wars 2, black desert, and Blade and Soul were the most distinctive MMO iterations that came after. But gw2 had too little depth even though it had great production quality, black desert had great depth and with extremely great combat, but fell terribly short on production quality, blade and soul is a bit mediocre on both, even if it does have some great gameplay moments.

Honestly, they could reskin WoW with an updated engine and leave everything word for word and stone for stone in the game and it would still blow most of the current stuff out there away, just because of the quality and depth.

Will never forget my first PvP on Alterac Valley.

Edit: honorable mention to The secret World, that had a great quality and innovative story, but severely lacked in gameplay and combat flaws.

 

[Teknopathetic]

"But gw2 had too little depth even though it had great production quality"

I wouldn't even say it had great production quality at release. It was definitely one of the most broken MMO launches I've experienced. Second perhaps to WAR.

 

[ScatheZombie]

Why? To read more nonsense like "everything is instanced"?

Instanced content was something that the community wanted so Blizzard gave it to them.

And since you can't be "arsed" (is that even a word) to read my post I'll say it again: everything you hate about MMOs was what the majority of players wanted.

Blizzard was able to capture the MMO market because they actually listened to the players and changed the game to suit them, which for some reason was a completely alien concept to the other MMO developers of the time.

You might not like that you are in the minority now but that's how it goes. One day you're in the majority and everything is great but then things change and now you're in the minority and things suck.

So, nevermind the fact that the major point of your argument was factually wrong...

Generally, you should probably read the post you are arguing against. Because you would have seen that the issues WoW created in the MMO genre didn't really begin until Cataclysm content. And they have largely nothing to do with WoW's original design (in fact, they run directly contradictory to it) - the design that you are championing, the design that captured the MMO market, the design that grew them to +10-million subs.

That design was great. I literally point that out, multiple times, about how WoW Vanilla, most of BC and even parts of Wrath were pretty much the high point in theme-park MMOs. That has really nothing to do with the rest of the argument, but you seem really, really focused on it, so there it is. You seem to have a super hard on for trying to say "WoW was the greatest, everyone else is shit, get over it." like that's anything but fanboy drivel at best.

But I digress. Listening to your players is one thing. Actually understanding what they want, rather than exactly what they say, and implementing systems that alleviate that issue without destroying the foundation of your genre... is completely different. When WoW 'listened to their players' and fundamentally changed the way you play the game with other people, they LOST 5 million subs. Let me fucking bold that for you...

You are arguing that WoW's success is due to them listening to their players and implementing convenience features that I, personally, didn't like (despite me never actually saying that) even though the sub numbers dropped significantly immediately following the implementation of said convenience features. Once again, you literally just argued AGAINST yourself because you have no fucking clue what you are talking about.

First, you said WoW was so successful that it caused every other MMO to have a "massive decline" in player count immediately following WoW's launch. That simply isn't true. I showed you that most MMOs at the time remained relatively the same, saw growth, or saw decline that wasn't directly affect by WoW but by another obvious source. That should have pretty much been the end of tales from your ass.

But now you say that WoW's success is because they listened to the players and implemented the features I listed in my last post - features that I explain, in detail, how they are fundamentally detrimental to the game and genre at large - yet, the reality is that they declined in popularity immediately after implementing those very same features.

Like... I can't make this any clearer at this point. You don't know what you are talking about.

 

[Stiler]

Indeed.

But I think the reason UO worked so well at the time and that such memorable things happened is not just found in its mechanics, but also its players. Quite simply, what the average player expected out of and put into the game was different (I'd go so far as to say fundamentally different)) in early UO compared to later "mass phenomenon" MMOs.

You bring up a good point.

A lot of those early mmorpg players (at least from my experience) were made up of die hard rpgers, people who played tabletops and Muds and would put their imagination and a sense of role play into the game (not every single person, but a good chunk of them). it helped foster a sense of community, even if you weren't an rper when you'd come across like a little gathering of people or something going on you were intrigued and might even find yourself pulled into that world even more.

Those types of players seem few and far between these days (even on rp servers) with the mmo market so bigger and with so many more mmo's it seems like they are spread thin, whereas in the early days with uo/eq/ac a good chunk of the playerbase was made up of these types of players.

 

[Mulgrok]

Facebook games/mobile killed mmos. They started to cram skinner box features into them because of the money those games were making at the time. Facebook bubble burst and mobile became too volatile, and the features taken from them cause WoW subs to drop... Tone down that crap.

 

[anothertech]

"But gw2 had too little depth even though it had great production quality"

I wouldn't even say it had great production quality at release. It was definitely one of the most broken MMO launches I've experienced. Second perhaps to WAR.

I played GW2 at launch, I don't remember it being extremely broken to be honest, definitely glitchy. Especially in some of the open world quests and the Dragons, but it was definitely not what I would call broken.

Now Age of Conan... That was a fcking broken game at launch back in the day. My first 2 characters couldn't leave the dam tutorial zone lolol. The first 6 months were a clusterfck of glitch fest and imbalance

 

[Zepp Twofist]

Now Age of Conan... That was a fcking broken game at launch back in the day. My first 2 characters couldn't leave the dam tutorial zone lolol. The first 6 months were a clusterfck of glitch fest and imbalance

First three years were ever changing clusterfucks of bugs and imbalance. I stuck with the game for that long though, mostly due to a truly kick ass community and the fact that PVP in that game felt better than any other MMO I've played in spite of devs hardly ever putting a thought into PVP.

Towards the end (I guess the game isn't over yet, but it is for me) they did one great thing though. They released a free for all PVP server with no guard NPCs and player looting (not full loot, but still). It was unfortunately too late in the game for it to gain traction, but it was pretty much everything the people who had come for the PVP years earlier would have wanted. The few months I played on that server were probably the best I had in terms of gameplay.

 

[SlickShoes]

This reads as the same tired old nonsense I have been reading on MMO forums for well over a decade now. The usual "I played games that were "harder" than this theme park therefor my opinion is worth more than yours".

It's a sleight at WoW and Blizzard for creating a game that appealed to the masses, which then almost killed off a genre because everyone in that genre was so keen to get a piece of that mass market pie.

The best MMO's aside from WoW that still exist are ones that tried to be different and the ones that came before it that people stuck with, everything else is either dead or on life support.

As much as people moan about changes to WoW it only changed because it's mostly guided by the players, not the hardcore players that spam forums but the majority players that still play the game. If WoW had stayed vanilla it'd be on life support now as well.

It's the usual stuff, people moan about WoW being simple or too easy. The quest waypoint/info system is the best example of this, people say it makes the game too easy, ruins the adventure. This feature was only added because ACTUAL MILLIONS of players were using the questhelper addon to streamline their questing.

Greedy studios and bad developers are the problem with MMO's. The genre has always been niche, you do not need 5 million players to be successful. The MMO genre is not dying, but the genre shouldn't be defined by WoW alone, there are other good games out there.

 

[Daante]

Interesting discussion.

With society and media doing its absolute finest in promoting and telling us that quick fixes and instant gratification is the right way, i think this somewhat has had an impact on the genre. Furthermore access to information now compared to 10-15 years ago, is totally different, and i think the core audience for Wow, who is growing up now are quite different to when i was playing that game the most (tbc).

 

[Teknopathetic]

"I played GW2 at launch, I don't remember it being extremely broken to be honest, definitely glitchy. Especially in some of the open world quests and the Dragons, but it was definitely not what I would call broken. "

The last 30 levels worth of zones were full of non-functioning/spawning dynamic events and Orr was a total cluster. That's probably one of the main reasons (if you were on a strong enough server) that people just camped dolyaks or crafted for those last 20-30 levels. I suppose by having a few alternate ways of leveling you still had some options to reach max level, but it wasn't particularly great.

AoC was pretty fucked up, though, I will admit.

 

[Nere]

Oh an article from Mr Ken. If he is such an expert at MMOs can you explain me this then http://store.steampowered.com/app/227700/?l=english ?

This reads like another thread about casual vs hardcore tbh. The genre became saturated by WoW clones that is true but it isn't WoW's fault as much as it is call of duty's fault and the endless clones that game spawned. The industry should learn that just because you copy the genre leader doesn't mean people will flock on your game. Because if you make a game that is similar to WoW why would people play your game instead of WoW? I never understood that mentality.

 

[Squishy3]

The last 30 levels worth of zones were full of non-functioning/spawning dynamic events and Orr was a total cluster.

Can confirm, on Orr none of the temple events worked until maintenance happened and the servers were rebooted and then it was a ticking time bomb until they stopped working again.

 

[elyetis]

I still need to try Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues, backed it but didn't want to play the early betas. Steam reviews are far from stellar so I won't expect too much.
Couldn't compare it to a game like Ultima Online which I never played, it was really more because I wanted to try a more old school mmo since the closest I got to play was ffxi and RO.

Now to be honest I'm not sure if I can invest enough time again to play games which require that much of you, I mean I loved ff11, but god was it a timesink, sometime for very little result ( simply trying to find a party as a dragoon at some point, or finding people to do promathia missions could be soul crushing ).

 

[Sesuadra]

Absolutely. In fact, it's the only MMO that can really hold a solid subscription model and not have to chase Free to Play, it's basically "second place" behind World of Warcraft. But that was only after a catastrophic failure of a launch followed by a Cinderella story about remaking the game and making it go from shit to great.

you know, as someone who played FFXIV since the beta for 1.0 I've to say that, as bad as 1.0 was in some areas, it was at least it's own thing. I kind of miss it, especially after patch 1.21...wish I could still play it sometimes


No MMO grabbed me like FFXI and FFXIV with patch 1.21 did. Not FFXIV ARR, not WoW..nothing. It was the community, the graphics at the time and how it was it's own thing imho. that kept me playing.

Interesting discussion.

With society and media doing its absolute finest in promoting and telling us that quick fixes and instant gratification is the right way, i think this somewhat has had an impact on the genre. Furthermore access to information now compared to 10-15 years ago, is totally different, and i think the core audience for Wow, who is growing up now are quite different to when i was playing that game the most (tbc).

this is probably true. MMOs today usually have a map that shows you the exact way to your quest goal or even have a auto-navigation feature to it (like Black Desert). When I started vanilla WoW IIRC you had to find the goal of the quest without any map points, just from reading the quest instructions. please correct me if I'm wrong..it's been a long time

 

[E-flux]

I have been telling my friends for the longest time that the quality of life improvements killed the mmo's for me, ie the group finders, server chats and stuff like that. I personally hate finding groups but in the old mmo's where you had to go where the other people were and talk to other people to get into the group was just better in every way even though i always dreaded to do that.

 

[His Majesty]

I miss the social aspect. I recently played a bit of TESO again and I enjoyed it but that MMO goes out of its way to deliver you a single-player experience. Just follow the yellow brick road and you'll arrive at end game.

What I loved most about Runescape, the first MMO I played, was the sense of community and the necessity of social interaction. There was an unofficial server for trading where everyone would meet up to trade in and around Falador Park. Gatherers would sell their resources to crafters, merchants would look for the best deals and you had to be constantly aware of scammers. Sadly this was replaced by the Grand Exchange, a centralized trading post that took away all this social interaction.

This is a recurring theme in most MMO's which feel more like single-player games with a few multi-player elements nowadays.

Want to play a game a game with a great story? Uncharted 4, Borderlands 2, Witcher 3. It sure isn't an MMO.

fyi The Secret World has a better story than all of those games but I agree with your point. Most MMO's are shifting towards the single-player spectrum but quality-wise can't compete with them.

 

[Maledict]

"I played GW2 at launch, I don't remember it being extremely broken to be honest, definitely glitchy. Especially in some of the open world quests and the Dragons, but it was definitely not what I would call broken. "

The last 30 levels worth of zones were full of non-functioning/spawning dynamic events and Orr was a total cluster. That's probably one of the main reasons (if you were on a strong enough server) that people just camped dolyaks or crafted for those last 20-30 levels. I suppose by having a few alternate ways of leveling you still had some options to reach max level, but it wasn't particularly great.

AoC was pretty fucked up, though, I will admit.

Not only was it completely broken, it was also the most un-fun, bullshit content I have ever experienced in an MMO - and I used to play EQ hardcore. Who on earth thought that three zones of overpowered, undead mobs who would aggro from a mile away, respawn practically instantly and where the crowd density was three times that of anywhere else was a good idea is beyond me. Orr was easily amongst the most badly designed, poorly thought out design ideas I've ever had the mispleasure to "enjoy".

 

[SlickShoes]

Automated group finders actually kill every online game for me, you need to connect with other players to truly enjoy the online experience but every game now, even MMO's, has matchmaking. Fire in play a game/dungeon/raid/whatever then never see any of those people ever again.

The glory days were when you formed your own groups or hosted your own servers, communities grew organically. Maybe I am just old but I have no idea how to make that connection with people any more.

I played MMO's back in the day and you had to interact to get things done, when I played SOCOM on PS2 you had to enter a lobby and talk to people, connections were made.

Now I'm into playing R6:Siege but I never make any connections with the people I am shoved into a game with because they are instantly gone at the end of it. Just a revolving door of weird names. The same happens in WoW with Dungeon/raid finder, I think adding it was necessary for the quality of life improvement to actually finding groups in a reasonable time but it all goes towards dismantling community.

It's technologies fault.

 

[Xiaoki]

But I digress. Listening to your players is one thing. Actually understanding what they want, rather than exactly what they say, and implementing systems that alleviate that issue without destroying the foundation of your genre... is completely different. When WoW 'listened to their players' and fundamentally changed the way you play the game with other people, they LOST 5 million subs. Let me fucking bold that for you...

You are arguing that WoW's success is due to them listening to their players and implementing convenience features that I, personally, didn't like (despite me never actually saying that) even though the sub numbers dropped significantly immediately following the implementation of said convenience features. Once again, you literally just argued AGAINST yourself because you have no fucking clue what you are talking about.

You can bold it you like, it won't make it true.

I guess to people that hate WoW causation equals correlation.

WoWs decline in subscribers since Cataclysm definitely couldn't be because of 1000 other factors all of which have absolutely nothing to do with convenience features.

It definitely couldn't be because of increased competition in the Asian markets(especially China) from Free to play MMOs, rise in similar genres like MOBAs, or attrition from age.

It definitely couldn't be stuff like that.

Obviously, WoW lost 5 million subscribers because of LFR.

Seriously, there isn't an eye roll GIF worthy of every single one of your nonsense posts.

 

[SlickShoes]

When I started vanilla WoW IIRC you had to find the goal of the quest without any map points, just from reading the quest instructions. please correct me if I'm wrong..it's been a long time

This is correct but Blizzard only implemented the "improved" questing system because millions of players were downloading and using the questhelper add-on, it was far and away the most popular add-on at that time and people were glad blizzard implemented it in to the game.

When you look back with rose tinted specs, you completely forget what a chore it was to ride about aimlessly in a zone because you can't find the right mob to kill for a stupid "kill 10" quest that should take you about 5 minutes.

 

[RoninChaos]

How can you dismiss WoW and it's affect on the industry?

Because of its success it set off a domino like effect on the genre. It sold so well that many publishers took notice and thought "Hey, lets make an mmo, lets make it like world of warcraft since it's making so much money and we want some."

If WoW was never made or wasn't the huge success it was, the mmo market may have turned out quite different, more variety, more "risks" from developers and publishers who made them would have made them with the sense of understanding that mmo's aren't normally going to get 10 million subscribers.

After the first gen of mmo's came out and were considered successful enough you still had mmo's coming out that were new/varied like DAOC/WWII online/SWG. Then along comes WoW and that "variety" pretty much flies out the window (especially from AAA backed publishers).



I backed it on kickstarter , so yes I am keeping an eye on it.

The concept of wow not coming along and leading to a diverse genre where companies took a lot of risk is naive. Wow worked in a lot of the same ways that the Wii did. It captured people who wouldn't have been playing an MMO and it kept them for a long time. The same way the Wii pulled in folks that didn't play games.

If you look at the trajectory of the industry risk gets your company shut down. It's a hell of a leap to act as if wow is the reason the MMO market stagnated and without it we would be in some MMO utopia FULL of diverse ideas, all games doing well. The industry just doesn't work that way and Yu won't see MMOs try and truly crazy shit these days because of risk.

And to the other poster, who thinks wow lost 5 million subs because of LFR. LOL wtf. Multiple difficulty levels are good for everyone. Cata was a shit expansion with very little cohesion and a fanfic plot. It was a stealth excuse to redo the world, and a lot of those changes weren't good. Yeah the questing is better but the world, arguably, isn't. And when you fundamentally change the world that people have gotten used to over 4-5 years, there's going to be backlash. Couple that with uninteresting new zones, removals of class quests, class homogenization, and it's very easy to see why Cata failed and it wasn't because of LFR or LFG. If you still want to do any meaningful raid content you don't do it via LFR.

 

[Trickster]

wow set a bar that other mmos had to meet to be of interest. unfortunately what every developer with decent resources did was go "let's make a wow clone". wows success indirectly killed the genre yes. but it was all the copy cat games that made the genre turn stale and dull.

 

[Vetro]

Guess i wrote it already a couple of times.
I loved WoW from Classic to BC and played it all way through Lich King. Then Blizzard fucked it totally up, but they had no choice.

And no they don't messed it up. They made a mass market out of it, but hey they already had a huge fanbase even before start - because Warcraft.
And they had to casualize it because of this stupid law cases in the US afair. This was the point were it changed.

They created their own monster. MMORPGs could still be successful but on the scale in comparsion to 12M subs. If devs would think in a smaller picture they still can do it. See FF XIV.

 

[Staab]

What are you talking about ?
EverQuest opened up the MMOG market unlike any other game.
World of Warcraft brought MMOG to the masses and went down a road of simplifying the core game for accessibility (can be argued negative or positive).

The real problem with MMOGs now is that shareholders/investors have been trying to reach that mass market appeal to rake in the cash, meaning we got shittons of WoW-likes and nobody is going to beat blizzard at that kind of game.

What we need now is a return to MMO niche markets, which cater to specific types of people, like Pantheon for hardcore EQ fans, Camelot Unchained for the PvP DAOC crowd, Crowfall for tactical PvP and so on.

Once developers get that right, they will have a success on their hand, just not never on a WoW level.

Look at FF14, it caters to a certain crowd and despite a horrible start now has more than a million subs, it can and will be done again, we just need to be patient and wait for all those horrible copycats to burn in flames.

 

[TheContact]

I played UO up until DAoC came out. I tried Everquest when I was playing UO but I couldn't get into it. I think I was too young to wrap my head around it. I remember getting stuck in some water pit in a city and not seeing a way out. I remember paging a GM and he told me to figure it out.

UO was amazing. No one is ever going to replicate those experiences ever. I still remember having a gray robe from dying, buying a paint bucket and dyes, and dying my grey robe my favorite blue and thinking that was the most awesome thing ever. And the music was FANTASTIC.

Daoc was amazing as well. I played a bard mostly. Watched the sun come up many many times during long gaming sessions, not wanting to leave the group and miss good XP (there were wait lists for groups to get in to get in the good spots)

Then I played daoc up until WoW came out. My first char was a 60 night elf Hunter and it took me 32 days /played to get him to 60. I dinged 60 in EPL grinding ghouls. Ended up making a priest and raiding. In vanilla I didn't get too far; our guild broke up bc of vaelstrasz. I found another guild and cthun broke that guild up. I ended up making a shaman when BC came out, found a good guild called Premonition. We got a couple US firsts in Sunwell (my favorite raid) after some long raiding nights. I miss old WoW. The current game is just an extremely dumbed down version of its former self. Come on legacy servers !

 

[Vigilant Walrus]

*Disjointed Rant*

This entire thing sounds like another version of in a reductionist way, of just blaming what is popular. You don't like where the popular thing was headed, and so you blame it, because nobody else could craft something that speaks to your little snowflake sensibilities. Be it Call of Duty, Pop Music, or whatever else, the line of thinking always seems to be the same. Blame what is popular, for the competitions inadequacies. It's a childish hypothisis as it is ignorant and not well-thoughtout.
Everyone knew MMORPGs were destined for great things. Everyone always saw the potential. I played SWG which was the market leader before WoW. At its highest point it attained 450,000 subscribers, and was a massive investment for SOE and LucasArts, banking on its sandbox style gameplay. That game didn't fail because WoW became popular. That game failed because the developers failed at making their own game work on their own terms, so they doubled down and tried to make it a WoW clone.
Had it been some other game the result would have been the same. All EQ/WoW did was bringing some new streamlined gameplay to the tables that made it easier for non-gamers and non-MMORPGers to get into. If you look at objectively, UO, M59, AC and SWGs great things all come from the MMO technology- Not because they had great gameplay design with tight balanced mechanics, smooth combat systems, great UIs and so on. They were barren worlds, the games were hard to get into, they were stagnant, there was little room for casual gamers, and the games had uninspired world building, usually bad lore, poor controls, sluggish performance. WoW did a whole of a lot with its simplistic approach which makes it deserve its accolades. As a video game, taken out of a MMO context its just a much better crafted game. That came at the cost of some social MMO features, but like everything else there is a tradeoff.
For more than 10 years MMORPGs have gone in a direction that has little to do with WoW. Games have gone free-to-play, and many MMOs are embracing hybrid models. Lobby based MMOs, that take the persistence character building on the game servers of games like Warframe is extremely popular, and you see these new sub genres of sandbox and survival games with MMO features on Steam. And why not? MMOs were not known for their combat systems, their great stories or any of that sort. It was the technology of being able to connect a mass amount of people in a multiplayer verse that make the world feel more alive, and now you are seeing a transition of developers taking those technologies into other genres, regardless if its a shared universe in Star Citizen, a mountain range in Steep or whatever else.

The entire gaming genre is based on fads, like all of entertainment. You're mad about change because nothing has come out that suits your needs specifically. EVE is a great fucking game. And a game that has persisted over time. Planetside 2 is a great game. Warframe is a great game. Guild Wars 2 is a great game. Black Desert is a great game. And none of these games are anything like WoW. They bring other combat systems and other game philosophies to the mix.
And if you take of your nostalgia glasses and realize, that the first time you play something or experience something its a lot more amazing because its new and novel. Its not just going to create the same feeling the other times. People who started with DAOC say the same thing. People who started with WoW say the same thing. It's always the same honeymoon based story. The first thing that they specifically played and got really sucked into is amazing, and everything that followed couldn't hold up. That's just another way of being an old man yelling at what the kids like.

 

[blurredvision]

First let me preface this thread with this article that I came across while googling some info before I made this post:

http://www.mmorpg.com/showFeature.cfm/feature/7540/Mark-Kern-Have-MMOs-Become-Too-Easy.html

A good read from Mark Kern, who was a team leader at blizzard during WoW's development.

It was a good read, up until you realized he was just saying all of that in order to hype whatever game he was developing at the time. He's wrong, vanilla WoW leveling and quests are exactly the same as its following expansions, it was just on a much slower scale. If anything, the quests are more dumb and got better as the expansions came out.

When I first stepped into WoW I experienced something, it wasn't a sense of wonderment or "unknown" like I experienced when I first stepped foot into UO/EQ/AC, instead it was a sense of "Deja Vu."

Well sure it was deja vu. WoW didn't necessarily bring a revolution to the gameplay. It improved in presentation and story over the other games you had spent years on, nothing more.

If WoW did kill the MMO genre, it wasn't because of the reasons you think. Blizzard made an awesomely accessible MMO game, as evidenced by it's crazy good subscriber numbers. Very early on in WoW's run, it pretty much doomed the genre because any other MMO created was instantly going to be judged by WoW's numbers.

500k subscribers in Everquest was considered amazing at one time. Once WoW came out and had well over a million users in just a few months, Everquest was considered a bomb. How do you think any other upcoming MMO is judged? Against WoW numbers, which is nearly impossible to do without an established and praised fictional world already in place (like Warcraft had).

The game mechanics didn't kill the genre, WoW's success did.

 

[Artdayne]

So, nevermind the fact that the major point of your argument was factually wrong...

Generally, you should probably read the post you are arguing against. Because you would have seen that the issues WoW created in the MMO genre didn't really begin until Cataclysm content. And they have largely nothing to do with WoW's original design (in fact, they run directly contradictory to it) - the design that you are championing, the design that captured the MMO market, the design that grew them to +10-million subs.

That design was great. I literally point that out, multiple times, about how WoW Vanilla, most of BC and even parts of Wrath were pretty much the high point in theme-park MMOs. That has really nothing to do with the rest of the argument, but you seem really, really focused on it, so there it is. You seem to have a super hard on for trying to say "WoW was the greatest, everyone else is shit, get over it." like that's anything but fanboy drivel at best.

But I digress. Listening to your players is one thing. Actually understanding what they want, rather than exactly what they say, and implementing systems that alleviate that issue without destroying the foundation of your genre... is completely different. When WoW 'listened to their players' and fundamentally changed the way you play the game with other people, they LOST 5 million subs. Let me fucking bold that for you...

You are arguing that WoW's success is due to them listening to their players and implementing convenience features that I, personally, didn't like (despite me never actually saying that) even though the sub numbers dropped significantly immediately following the implementation of said convenience features. Once again, you literally just argued AGAINST yourself because you have no fucking clue what you are talking about.

First, you said WoW was so successful that it caused every other MMO to have a "massive decline" in player count immediately following WoW's launch. That simply isn't true. I showed you that most MMOs at the time remained relatively the same, saw growth, or saw decline that wasn't directly affect by WoW but by another obvious source. That should have pretty much been the end of tales from your ass.

But now you say that WoW's success is because they listened to the players and implemented the features I listed in my last post - features that I explain, in detail, how they are fundamentally detrimental to the game and genre at large - yet, the reality is that they declined in popularity immediately after implementing those very same features.

Like... I can't make this any clearer at this point. You don't know what you are talking about.

You are making a lot of assumptions about why WoW lost its subs but the fact is you don't really have any direct evidence that the "convenience features" are the reason why they lost their subs. I could just as easily state that after Wrath, WoW was getting old, people were moving on from the game. Some people were adults now and didn't have the time to play MMOs anymore and they didn't manage to attract enough of the next group of young people. Wrath was also a very recognizable lore expansion. A lot of people knew who Arthas was and were interested in that character.

There actually were some very nice changes after wrath, I think boss design was better, though Ulduar was an amazing raid, and class design was much improved, at least until Chadd Nervig took over class design.

 

[OnimaruXLR]

I kinda wonder if economics didn't kill MMOs.

Of all the "games as a service" genres that exist, MMOs seem the most costly to maintain. That's a lot of risk, and a huge burden to take on. It doesn't surprise me the last major one that launched (to my knowledge) has a crazy huge IP like Star Wars attached.

 

[ScatheZombie]

You can bold it you like, it won't make it true.

I guess to people that hate WoW causation equals correlation.

WoWs decline in subscribers since Cataclysm definitely couldn't be because of 1000 other factors all of which have absolutely nothing to do with convenience features.

It definitely couldn't be because of increased competition in the Asian markets(especially China) from Free to play MMOs, rise in similar genres like MOBAs, or attrition from age.

It definitely couldn't be stuff like that.

Obviously, WoW lost 5 million subscribers because of LFR.

Seriously, there isn't an eye roll GIF worthy of every single one of your nonsense posts.

What part isn't true?
The part where you were wrong about every other MMO tanking immediately following WoW's release? Because that didn't actually happen. 2 out of like 8 existing MMOs had a decline in subscriptions around WoW's launch that might be correlated to it. The rest didn't.

Or the part where you were wrong about the convenience features of Cataclysm and Pandaria contributing to their pre-Wrath success? You started this nonsense by saying their success can be directly contributed to them 'listening to the players'; specifically about the convenience features of my post. Except, those features weren't implemented in Vanilla, BC, and only really started halfway through Wrath. You know, when they had 12 million peak subscribers. They really took hold in Cata and Pandaria, the two expansions they lost 5 million subs. You were attempting to correlate their success directly to the implementation of those features - yet there's fuck-all evidence to suggest they had any positive impact whatsoever. They lost subs. Everyone did. The western MMO market shrunk considerably after other games started implementing them. You're trying to argue that without cross-realm LFG, PvP, LFR, and zones, without Brawl'gar, Scenarios, Garrisons and all the new types of instanced content, without the removal of pretty much all open-world group PvE and PvP content - without all of that garbage, they would have lost more subs than they did. Ok, how?

Or how about the new part where you say that competition from China resulting in their decline - despite, you know, China being their largest actual market for current subscribers right now. Competition from China? WoW's very successful in China and Chinese MMOs haven't broken out in NA/EU - the market where WoW lost the vast majority of their subscribers from.

Literally every time you open your mouth, something inaccurate spews forth. And you have the fucking balls to roll your eyes at me.

You are making a lot of assumptions about why WoW lost its subs but the fact is you don't really have any direct evidence that the "convenience features" are the reason why they lost their subs. I could just as easily state that after Wrath, WoW was getting old, people were moving on from the game. Some people were adults now and didn't have the time to play MMOs anymore and they didn't manage to attract enough of the next group of young people. Wrath was also a very recognizable lore expansion. A lot of people knew who Arthas was and were interested in that character.

There actually were some very nice changes after wrath, I think boss design was better, though Ulduar was an amazing raid, and class design was much improved, at least until Chadd Nervig took over class design.

I think you missed the part where I'm arguing with someone who's saying that WoW's pre-Wrath success is because of their post-Cata convenience features. I'm not saying they were the only and definitive source of WoW's massive, sharp decline - I'm saying that they were largely responsible for the death of WoW's server communities (which absolutely contributed heavily to their decline) and that everyone copying them, because 'the players want it', is what homogenized the genre and removed one of the biggest reasons to actually play MMOs over other games.

It's not really that hard, or crazy, to say those features had fuck-all nothing to do with their initial success since those features didn't even fucking exist at the time.

 

[Lucumo]

Eve Online killed other MMOs for me. Want an MMO that has some of the same rules and freedom of Eve but there really isn't anything like it. Im tired of theme park MMOs.

Yep, I would love something like Eve Online in a fantasy setting since I'm not too much into the sci-fi genre.

 

[ZombieSupaStar]

Matt Barton interviewed Richard Bartle (co creator of MUD) and he said some nice things about The Secret World. I should try that game again. Seems to try things differently than other recent mmos.