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Has WoW spoiled the community, and made devs push back their games?
Baseline
Member Posts: 503
When you think about it, WoW has really spoiled the MMO community. For a lot of people, WoW is the default game when the current newer game they are trying fails. Now, everyone looks at new games coming out with such a high standard. MMO developers today are pushing their game launches back to polish them up more (look at Warhammer), because there no longer is that 1-3 month buffer after the game comes out where people stick through the tough times and wait for the game to get better. People instantly say "this game sucks" and they all quit, then go back to wow or whatever.
Just look at Vanguard. Now, that game might've been doomed just because it did have an exceptionally sloppy launch, but, I think the majority of the player base would've stuck around another few months if it had been before the WoW era of everything being so neat and tidy and comfortable. Just look at all of the other MMO's before WoW that had a really rough first 1-3 months. Nowadays, it's like the community as a whole makes a verdict a week into the games launch and the exodus happens.
I'm thinking this might also be the reason MMO developers today are straying away from having official forums, so that people are more disintegrated, and there aren't 500-page threads with tens of thousands of replies saying "screw this game" after the first week.
It seems like the insane level of polish that WoW has right now has set the bar so high that companies are pushing back their MMO's until they feel like they have a game that has already been out for a few months and has no major problems.
***EDIT***: Also, as a supplemental to this post, I'd like to say that WoW has also hurt the community in a way that it's given the current-day MMO player the mentality that leveling a character is a job, and every possible shortcut must be taken to max level ASAP. Perhaps it's because end-game raid and pvp has been the only real focus of WoW and their promotions for the majority of the game, but I remember back in the early days of SWG and other games where people were running around at half the level of some other guy and didn't really care. They were just having fun. WoW has made todays gamer feel the fun doesn't start until you're max level, and I think no matter what future MMO developers try to do to change that mentality, it's going to stay set in stone.
And that sucks.
Comments
spoiled is to light of word. It ruined the community. It let people into mmo genre who sjhouldn't be here. The area is over flowing with noobs who just because they p[played WoW and only WoW they are the end all be all on mmo discussion. I played a lot of mmos and I would never grant myself the obscenity of telling other that my words are god, and I find most WoW players attitude is that they are the word when it comes to mmos.
I look at companies who devote there entire development process on creating mmos, and aren''t simply looking for a cash cow, the cash cow is something blizzard thrives on now, and they have only one focus on there mind and that is dominating every edge of the gaming market with commercialized crap.
I was a huge fan of WC 1 and love the brutalness of the game, when W2 came out they left that brutalness for some cheesey sytle just to sell more boxes leaving fans of the orginal work to hang.
Blizzard is the there own worst enemy , granted with a talent, but only using it to aappeal to box sales and not getting down to the gamers level anymore. Everything Blizzard does has to be a big and grand event instead of trying to communicate on more personal realm to gamers. The final nail imo the way blizzard has evolved into "the imperial Empire" is sickning to me and would love to see them step back and actually look at the damage they did to the entire mmo ccommunity just for a few bucks that you can't carry to the grave.
Sony Online Entertainment Steals Customers Money
WoW has definitely been the benchmark on how other games are judged due to its mass market appeal. It didn't help Vanguard at all launching so close to LoTRO which was polished and a game that clearly was ready for release, where Vangaurd still was in early beta state.
The 'leaked' screenshot of me fighting a salamander in alpha in the Temple of Vol Tuniel circa May 2003
That was the Vanguard i wanted to play
Sony Online Entertainment Steals Customers Money
wow whasnt exatly, what i would call "finished" at lunch eather, but after years of changes.. it seems to appeal more to the majority (but i really think they ruined it, going from already being a cheese game, to become butter with a big red "i win button")
but on the outher hand, i havent seen many games that is promoted so mutch as wow eather..
that "promoting" is called commercialization / selling out . Yes Developers should get rewarded for there work, but when it becomes at the destruction of a gaming genre, it is just not respectable in my honest opinion. I knew since WC2 , when the cheese began , they where in it for the money. Not the fans, not gamers but money. Add more pastel coloring to make it all appeal to everyone. cut down the command list to make it easier to play, ect, total disregard for the fans from WC1 who put them on the map. Personally haven't touched a Blizzard product since 1998,, I will never buy another game from them.
Sony Online Entertainment Steals Customers Money
Yes, players who pay money for their games are being totally unreasonable in expecting the game to at least work and have some quality put into it. Take Vanguard for example, everyone should just resub and be patient while they finish it.
You are making 2 completely different points here into one. The leveling "supplement" has nothing to do with the technical quality issues you initially bring up. However I pretty much agree with on that point, at least moreso then on the first point.
Customers should expect a high level of quality in these games. Not only do you pay for a retail box like all other PC/Console genres but you are expected to pay a MONTHLY fee on top of. For that kind of money..........well...........never mind, if you don't mind paying monthly for half finished buggy and broken garbage, more power to you. Would you pay your monthly phone bill if only half your services worked and the connection was hit or miss? Or only half your cable stations where availible at any time? But you still got billed the full amount? When you called the CS they said "be patient we are working on it"? I seriously doubt it.
Do you think people are walking away from paying 49.99 for Vanguard and a few months of 14.99 payments thinking "gee, I didn't give this game enough of a chance"? No they are pissed because its a hardly playable PoS and they just burned about 100 bucks PLUS their time and whatever hardware upgrades they may have done in good faith that it would help them.
Yes, players who pay money for their games are being totally unreasonable in expecting the game to at least work and have some quality put into it. Take Vanguard for example, everyone should just resub and be patient while they finish it.
You are making 2 completely different points here into one. The leveling "supplement" has nothing to do with the technical quality issues you initially bring up. However I pretty much agree with on that point, at least moreso then on the first point.
Customers should expect a high level of quality in these games. Not only do you pay for a retail box like all other PC/Console genres but you are expected to pay a MONTHLY fee on top of. For that kind of money..........well...........never mind, if you don't mind paying monthly for half finished buggy and broken garbage, more power to you. Would you pay your monthly phone bill if only half your services worked and the connection was hit or miss? Or only half your cable stations where availible at any time? But you still got billed the full amount? When you called the CS they said "be patient we are working on it"? I seriously doubt it.
I agree, but with mmo's there is always some cushion for bugs and ect. Blizzard had the tools already written from wc3, a few modifications and they had an mmo engine .
Sony Online Entertainment Steals Customers Money
Yes, players who pay money for their games are being totally unreasonable in expecting the game to at least work and have some quality put into it. Take Vanguard for example, everyone should just resub and be patient while they finish it.
You are making 2 completely different points here into one. The leveling "supplement" has nothing to do with the technical quality issues you initially bring up. However I pretty much agree with on that point, at least moreso then on the first point.
Customers should expect a high level of quality in these games. Not only do you pay for a retail box like all other PC/Console genres but you are expected to pay a MONTHLY fee on top of. For that kind of money..........well...........never mind, if you don't mind paying monthly for half finished buggy and broken garbage, more power to you. Would you pay your monthly phone bill if only half your services worked and the connection was hit or miss? Or only half your cable stations where availible at any time? But you still got billed the full amount? When you called the CS they said "be patient we are working on it"? I seriously doubt it.
Do you think people are walking away from paying 49.99 for Vanguard and a few months of 14.99 payments thinking "gee, I didn't give this game enough of a chance"? No they are pissed because its a hardly playable PoS and they just burned about 100 bucks PLUS their time and whatever hardware upgrades they may have done in good faith that it would help them.
I thought my supplemental edit about players looking at leveling as a job 'till they hit max was completely in-line with the subject, as were talking about the community being spoiled.
And I did go as far as to imply that Vanguard might not have been the best example here in saying that it "might've been doomed just because it did have an exceptionally sloppy launch". No offense, but I feel as you are one of the spoiled members of a community, that picks up a new game the day it launches, and compares it to WoW and says "well this is missing, that's missing, this isn't how I want it", never looks at the fun aspects and doesn't play past the first month because it's not as matured.
It's this robotic attitude that people have today to judge every new game like they are a quality assurance tester looking for the fine cracks in the foundation that kills new games communities. That is the primary point of this thread.
No offense taken
Its true, I do have a level quality expectations when it comes to the goods and services I purchase. I am not about to advocate that the community should be more "tolerant" of crappy MMO devs and their shady release practices of making the customer pay for incomplete products, they are more akin to used car salesmen then computer industry professionals.
The last 3 years have been disaster after disaster. It has NOTHING to do with comparing it to WoW and very thing to do with expecting some basic level of quality attached to it. If you want to pay for and play lower quality produced games, go for it, its not like there is a shortage of them. The old days of "we will put up with the problems because of the potential good game" are long over. 10 years is long enough to figure out the basics of how to make these games. Vanguard was an inexcusible fumble by people who were suppost to know better.
Go play Dark and Light for a month or Vanguard or Roma Victor, Irith online, Auto Assault, Horizons, RF online, DDO or any number of past release and then come back and tell us we are expecting to much for the money we pay.
It would be different if MMOs had a strong track record in high quality production and people were still unhappy but that is not the case. They do not, these guys have issues.
Beep, beep....this is an automated robotic response.....zzzz.......beep.
Your completely right in what you say about what WoW has done and the damage it may have caused to the mmorpg genre, but to criticise a company for trying to make the most money it can so its employees can feed their families is a little rich.
Face it, gaming is BIG BUSINESS even bigger than music and film put together, and the reality we have to live with, is that as the more computer literate generations grow older and buy computers we are going to see more WoW clones and even MORE players playing
What you say is true, but don't forget to look at the bigger picture
The excuse that the games industry is a business can only go so far and the companies I feel have taken it too far are SOE and Blizzard, games are supposed to be designed for people to play and have fun they are not designed to be second jobs or to get companies lots of cash. This is where everything has started to go downhill and something that quite a lot of people in the industry have forgotten, of course, companies must make a profit from games in order to survive, but they shouldn't do so at the expense of other people, the employees or the fan base. Look at Star Wars Galaxies, look at Vanguard, they all failed because someone got too greedy for their own good and sold out, unless Blizzard can get their act together which I highly doubt they will, World of Warcraft will soon follow suit and with the new games coming out as I've seen others say, I'm pretty sure that they will bleed the game of their subscribers.
Quoting people doesn't make you clever, in fact, it makes you all the more stupid for not bothering to read the quotes you post in the first place.
Blizzard didn't do SH&% to the industry. It has always been like it is. The only thing blizzard did was release a game that worked. Blizzard was probably about the last developer to do so, I can't think of any game after them that released smoothly.
WoW isn't shaping the industry, or causing anyone to model their games after them. WoW took all of its ideas from already successful games, ie EQ, DAOC, etc and rolled them into one generic cartoony photocopy of what was already out there.
WoW was put together nicely, and Blizz did a great job with it(except for missing the whole entire point of their own game...pvp)
For the entire history of MMO's, games have been delayed, devs mouths make checks their arses can't cash, beta dates get pushed back...publishers squeeze devs by the short hairs to make them release games unfinished because they don't want to spend anymore money on them, etc and so on.
This is nothing new, its only new to people who entered the mmo genre with WoW.
D.
Wow it self isn't really problem, but how it affected the all other comming mmorpgs will be. WoW is good game for it's target customers. Now the problem is that other mmorpgs developers starts to copy WoW features without even understanding that those features aren't good for everyone, just customers like WoW players. So what we get now is just WoW clones and all other players are left without mmorpgs totally. This how ever isn't WoW fault, but mmorpg developers.
MMORPG.COM has worst forum editor ever exists
So true.
You can hardly blame Blizzard for the woes of the MMO industry. They did wrong by making a quality game? Hardly.
No one forced SOE to gut SWG with the NGE's attempt to make it more like WoW (class / quest driven) No one forced Turbine to water down LotRs with a painfully generic copy class system and a copy of the WoW crafting system and so much more.
As long as the community keeps taking it, the longer it will go on.
Here is an interesting thing I ran across. A few months ago (March?) on "gamespot" they did their normal weekly survey. The question was to WoW players about other MMO's. There were over 25,000 replies and over 80% of them said they only played WoW and had no intention of trying another MMO. How does this tie in? LotR and its apparent lack of growth. You see, emulating WoW isn't the answer. LotRs is a pretty high quality game but its the same crap. Its not the quality that is the problem but the lack of inovation. The MMO community isn't "spoiled" they are tired of A) low quality games and
the same games with different skins.
So is there a light at the end of the tunnel for MMO players? I think so. The community has demonstrated their intolerance of low quality crap. We win on that front, companies have taken notice of this and release philosophies are changing. Games are getting pushed back until they can be delivered in a presentable state. This is good for us, the paying community.
Is copying WoW all that its cracked up to be? I think LotRs is demonstrating that its NOT. Although its doing pretty good, its hardly the mass hit they were hoping for. WoW players have already pretty much said they are not all that interested in more MMO's as demonstrated by just about every other games shrinking player base, especially MMO that are the same or similar to the one they are already playing. The vast majority of the WoW player base are not MMO vets. They came from the battlenet ranks and other gaming genres who are a totally different kind of player. I also think you are going to see a similar result with Tabula Rasa. Its not the quality that will kill this one either, its the lack of anything new and the limitations its going to have thats going to be the issue.
So I believe MMOs are at a point were its "evolve or die". This next wave of games that is near release that its to late to change, IMHO will play out my theory. They will fail because of Quality issues or because they are no different then anything else on the market.
So to sum up my rant...
MMO players are not interested in more WoW's, WoW players are not interested in more MMO's and neither are interested in low qualtiy, unfinished, broken crap.
I find it amusing that people think WoW grew the genre, WoW players will just stick with WoW or quit.
It's even more hilarious when dev companies try to grab that audience and fail horribly.
Your completely right in what you say about what WoW has done and the damage it may have caused to the mmorpg genre, but to criticise a company for trying to make the most money it can so its employees can feed their families is a little rich.
Face it, gaming is BIG BUSINESS even bigger than music and film put together, and the reality we have to live with, is that as the more computer literate generations grow older and buy computers we are going to see more WoW clones and even MORE players playing
What you say is true, but don't forget to look at the bigger picture
I will never support Blizzard , and will never support compaanies that aren't mmo development compnies. I will support the f2p market more so then ever now , and will give more and more f2p titles a try , as a boycott to the capitalist reign that certain companies think they have acquired .
Sony Online Entertainment Steals Customers Money
Very well said. They haven't ruined the community, they have just introduced a lot of people who shouldn't be playing MMO's to the genre. On top of that, it's spoiling people's minds into looking for every WoW post and defending it like it's a sacred artifact.
Let me see if I get this,, you are saying that because Blizzard created a game with mass appel that has some how spoiled all the gamers because now they insist on only getting quality games because they will no longer settle for less than what they pay for?
Bahahaha.... (/wipes tear from eye)
Thats like saying that if you go to a restraunt and order food, and they give cold half cooked food you sould continue to come back until they finely get your food right....
If anything ,blizzard is guilty of it's proving that players should expect a quality product for their hard earned money. Now if the game is free to play then sure it can be crap as you get what you pay for. And a game that cost $5 a month can be expected to be not as good as a gamne you pay $15 a month for. All Bliizard did was to set the standard for quailty , not game play but quality, but the min level of quality for any modern game charging the same Sub.
An so it begins
Take the Magic: The Gathering 'What Color Are You?' Quiz.[/CENTER]
Companies push back their games simply because they aren't ready for release. It has nothing to do with WOW whatsoever.
agreed.
<Mod edit>Reading your posts in this thread, I've noted that you just have a general dislike for Blizzard, because they are "letting noobs in". And, you're "boycotting" their multibillion company by not paying for their goods? If you've managed to do that, I give you a bow.
Also, you say that "all WoW players are noobs that shouldn't have been let into the community". And, that Blizzard have spoilt the community with those players?
Really? Because they managed to churn out a truly polished and well-released title that has brought needed revenue into the MMO industry? Because they've managed to set a STANDARD that no other game has managed to achieve?
Now, I'm not saying WoW is a brilliant game, but it is a good one. It has a flair and a style that other games can't really hope to achieve, without an amazing effort and lore put into them - note that this includes WAR, Age of Conan and pre-NGE SWG.
Now, if you people would stop being so presumptive of WoW being a game for "noobs" and instead noted it's flaws and pluses, then maybe we'd have a decent, reasonable community for the general player to enter into.
- Devour
EDIT:- What did the mod-edit actually change? =/
As someone who played WOW and ENJOYED my time there I hold no ill will towards Blizz.. That being said i also hold no illusions to it's depth or place in MMO history other than being the subscriptions champ.
This isn't rocket science, Blizz put their energy into solid gameplay and passed on depth, customization & graphics. So enough with this strawman playability arguement because that's the LEAST we should expect. Since when did we start giving high marks to titles just for being playable anyway.
To answer the initial post... YES.. Players have been spoiled by WOW's gameplay. They now expect every title to run like silk on 5 year old CPU's whine about having to buy a decent GFX card and cry when any title actually makes you think before just zerging. Due to WOW's huge succes it's quite possible companies will dumb down their titles in hopes of cashing in on Blizz's formula.
That would be a HUGE mistake.
Many people are ready for the next level..WOW is what's now.
The question is who's going to deliver what's next?
Dutchess Zarraa Voltayre
Reborn/Zero Sum/Ancient Legacy/Jagged Legion/Feared/Nuke & Pave.
Although, the depth and customization thing? I agree wholeheartedly.
i completely agree with you. everyone just gotta get out of wow and start looking at new ideas. wow isnt the "best" way to do mmo's. i am sure there are tons of ways to do mmo's other than constant level up and thats it. we just gotta open our minds up a little.
I agree that WoW's polish and success at release has forced other companies to hopefully push their games back.
Vanguard suffered for many reasons including lack of polish but more so poor performance and high hardware requirements. Also completely redoing the game 1 year before release almost always spells failure. Sigil had no choice to release Vanguard as they had a baloon payment due to MS in April and releasing the game in January was their only hope of survival.
WoW should be the role model for all companies release a finished polished product at release and people will love it. LOTR followed this model is reaping the success. LOTR could have released last August but chose to continue development. EQ2 shows what happens when a game is released unfinished and unpolished while a more complete game now it is still losing subscibers and is down to 90k. Dead game.