U know, I would really like to agree with Rooster Nash about what he is trying to say...but he is wrong. I admit I'm a wow basher but not because of the game but because of the ppl that run the game. I love the exploration! I love the quests! (Many are repeditive but I've not seen any better overall.) The game play is heads above the rest. The GMs are the best I've ever seen!!! Kudo's to the GMs! And thnx for all the help u gave this lost soul. The social aspect of the game, however, has declined heavily since I started playing several years ago "unfortunately !" Also leveling has gotten rediculously easy and corruption has become rampant. But I got to admit...If I was just some caveman turning on a computer for the first time today and took a liking to mmorpgs...I would play wow.
Played Wow, D and L, AOC, GW, Eve, Rift and many more insignificant games.
EQ content was just as outdated as other games with each new expansions. The only reason anyone played previous expansion content is because they had to wait until the big guilds moved on to new content just so they could get a chance see a boss spawn live for more than 5 minutes. It was a pretty terrible design when 1 or 2 guilds would dominate the majority of a servers endgame content and then having small groups of those players kill much of the entry level bosses on off nights just to have something to do. Yes, I have been a guild that dominated a server and another guild that was on the other side of the fence. In all honesty most of early EQ was spent not being able to enjoy the content, because limited content on stupid long respawn timers that were dominated by a very small percentage of the games population. Planes of power is a perfect example of that terrible design with gated content, flagging system from hell and ridiculous raid sizes. Once those restrictions were removed, suddenly everyone could kill everything and having a guild full of early time zone players wasn't the key to success on patch days. Still have a lot of good memories though, but an equal number of frustrating experiences to go right along with it.
No, the content was NOT outdated. How many guilds, during the time of OoW, were still doing progression raiding in PoP?
How many guilds in WoW are doing vanilla raiding, let alone BC raiding?
You could argue for the top 5% of people EQs expansions outdated themselves, but in WoW its outdated for both those top 5% and the other 95% as well.
[1] Do I see "any" wow players trying other games right now, yes plenty. Do they end up staying, for the most part no they do not.
That is actually rather weird, most Wow players I know quit more often than smokers but start again after a month or two.
If they would think Wow was truly great they shouldn't have quited in the first place but on the other hand they get back in all the time.
A few of them plain sucks and get killed in most other games but others are high end raiders so player skills are not the issue here in most cases.
Every single Wow player I know have quit at least once (even the fanatics) and some over 15 times. I wonder why?
Very good observation. Everyone drop a game here or there for different reasons, I chip in my share
(1) I left WoW once because of call of duties, real life, for a long duration, in a location I am blocked from outside contact.
(2) I left WoW once due to family duties, having to take care of elders and simply not able to spare the time or mood for online game, thank you solo RPGs, where I can press esc and go afk. Mobs will wait.
(3) I left WoW once because of a change in credit card, and I took the occasion to try out other games, and enjoyed a couple of them for months. But here is the key answer to Loke, there are many fun games, I love superjump in CoH, nothing in WoW comes close. However each of these other games are narrow, lacking variety, the kind of variety WoW offers. WoW offers so much, that if you care to try out everything, it will kill enough time for months. Not all are fun if you play only that aspect everyday, but dabbing into this and that and you have an evening spent on different things.
Levelling in WoW maybe boring, but at least there are lots of things to do alongside. I will be gathering as I do quests, and I will be crafting as I gather. Quests are boring usually. but not all. Quests in WoW are well planned. As I moved to a coast line, I run into fisherman NPCs who give me quests to fish and explore the coast and award me with fishing poles and lures. As I explore some towns, I got tailor quests, or miner quests. As I level up, shaman characters get shaman quests awarding totems. As I enter icecrown, I got epic long story arcs, that finally show me how Lady Silv's first lieutenant betrayed her, and ruined the first big assault against icecrown. The epic story brings me back to undercity where the big bosses fight each other and I got to take part. It also changes undercity for me forever, as well as part of icecrown.
Endgame in WoW maybe boring, but at least there are variety. I can fish (once a day at least for a daily), I can craft (cooking again is a daily), I can go collect some materials, do some dailies, go a random heroic, do a small raid VoA, RS (typically done in 10 minutes after 20 minutes formation). I can do a big raid, and leave anytime and have a replacement summoned in to replace me within a minute). I can queue up for pvp. Come on, the list is long, and best of all, I can do them all together. Join a raid, at the same time queue up for pvp, and while waiting, I can farm mats. Join a random queue, and while the queue is being formed, I can do fishing/cooking quest. The combinations are many, and smoothly implemented in WoW.
Look at the other games, old EQ have you sit outside a zone, yelling for group openings, and essentially sitting there for hours. PVP grinders have you bugging the system to grind skills and then zerg each other and win by hacking or latency or exploitation of game mechanics.
There are good games apart from WoW, the PVP of DAoC is peerless, best ever. Open world exploration and the sense of being there is unrivalled during the early SWG days. Fun fast action and eye candies marked CoH off the rest of the pack. Every good game has its strength, but taking overall, none comes to match WoW, at least for now.
So after enjoying the strength of DAoC, SWG and so on, many come back to WoW because of the wholesome package. A package that is constantly patched, enhanced, and adding new contents. There is bound to be something somewhat interesting, during different parts of a month, depending on your mood.
EQ content was just as outdated as other games with each new expansions. The only reason anyone played previous expansion content is because they had to wait until the big guilds moved on to new content just so they could get a chance see a boss spawn live for more than 5 minutes. It was a pretty terrible design when 1 or 2 guilds would dominate the majority of a servers endgame content and then having small groups of those players kill much of the entry level bosses on off nights just to have something to do. Yes, I have been a guild that dominated a server and another guild that was on the other side of the fence.
In all honesty most of early EQ was spent not being able to enjoy the content, because limited content on stupid long respawn timers that were dominated by a very small percentage of the games population. Planes of power is a perfect example of that terrible design with gated content, flagging system from hell and ridiculous raid sizes.
Once those restrictions were removed, suddenly everyone could kill everything and having a guild full of early time zone players wasn't the key to success on patch days.
Still have a lot of good memories though, but an equal number of frustrating experiences to go right along with it.
No, the content was NOT outdated. How many guilds, during the time of OoW, were still doing progression raiding in PoP?
How many guilds in WoW are doing vanilla raiding, let alone BC raiding?
You could argue for the top 5% of people EQs expansions outdated themselves, but in WoW its outdated for both those top 5% and the other 95% as well.
That I objected, I was among the first batch of EQ players, and my friend still plays EQ now on and off.
People play old content in EQ because there is nothing better to do for then. People focus on the new content in WoW because at maxed level, there is still much to do in the high end zones, and they interact a lot more there. Trouble is, in many games like EQ, only a few guilds play in the end game stuffs, and they simply make it impossible for the others to even try. WoW makes it possible for practically everyone to at least dab in the tougher stuffs and won't be shutdown by the few elitist snobs.
If you are not in the top guilds in EQ, go play the "older" content. Oh I remember my EQ days, when a few guilds created a common web site to share the planes. Each spawn phase of each plane is allocated among the few guilds. No one else can expect to see a living mob. If you are not in one of these guilds, would you be playing the lesser content? Does that means the lesser contents are really good?
The basic problem with the OPs original thoughts is that he is simply equating success and popularity as the same thing. The scope issue is one WoW doesn't dominate in at all as many of the older games such as EQ, EQ2, Eve, and LotRO just to name a few have as much if not more scope both in content and in game play. Professionalism is a bit harder to quantify but most of the other developers have done well there too. The amazing thing isn't that Blizzard has been professional but that they didn't crack under the load of users though they did creak a bit a times.
Most of the world is not a zero sum game and by that I mean you can have more than one winner and that the definition of winning or more accurately succeeding is based on a lot of things not just simple and isolated comparisons to other companies.
None of this takes away from Blizzard and their dedication to their game. They made it fun and they made it accessible and they promoted the hell out of it and as such they have lifted the expectations of both what the market expects from a game and what they expect from a company. Sure, there is room for smaller companies to succeed in a smaller area and still be a success. LotRO and Eve based on simple numbers and marketing expectations would both be considered failures but the reality is quite the opposite and both of these games easily match WoW in all areas except mass appeal.
McDonald's is a success for a reason and as much as people like to put it and their food down what they do they do very well. But, there is still room in the market for a small French Bistro to not only exist but to thrive.
Again, to the OP. Your question simply misses the point.
No, the content was NOT outdated. How many guilds, during the time of OoW, were still doing progression raiding in PoP?
How many guilds in WoW are doing vanilla raiding, let alone BC raiding?
You could argue for the top 5% of people EQs expansions outdated themselves, but in WoW its outdated for both those top 5% and the other 95% as well.
How many people can currently enjoy the endgame content in the current wow expansion: 100%
How many people could enjoy the endgame content of the old school EQ expansions: about 15%
Just because eq forced people to slum in the old expansion, because all of the endgame content in the current expansion was never available to them, doesn't mean the previous expansion is relevant. If players actually had a choice I bet you every single one of them would prefer to be playing the end game in the current expansion and only mucked around in the previous expansion for giggles.
As far as content is concerned, you are correct, EQ has a whole lot more than WoW (I would hope so after 14 expansions). But I'll flip it around and ask how much of that 'content' is being utilized compared to how much content is utilized in WoW? Cataclysm will up the ante even more, because it will allow the old world to be more utilized than it is now.
6 years into EQs lifespan quite a bit of it was still being used. And Kunark and Velious were actually bigger expansions than BC and WotLK, and they came MUCH faster. PoP stayed relevant for an astonishing length of time, and even now is likely still being used.
And how much content IS still utilized in WoW? Vanilla raids are soloed/duoed by people bored or looking for useless legendaries/mounts. BC raids are almost never visited by anyone. BC heroics are used occasionally for rep runs, but thats about it. Most people do Hellfire > Zangarmarsh > Nagrand or some brief 3 zone stop because they are *FORCED* to go to outlands.
WoWs second expansion rendered its ENTIRE first expansion irrelevant with the exception of being forced to level there for a bit.
EQs content stayed relevant for many years after it was released. WoW content does not.
A lot of stuff stayed relevent longer in EQ due to it's game mechanics, namely backflagging. I will call straight up BS on Kunark and Velious though. I was still playing EQ in early 2004 and a majority of those zones were ghost towns. Guilds weren't raiding Avatar of War and Dain by then.
Also, when I was talking about content, I was talking about the whole thing (leveling, instances, raids) . As a matter of fact, the dungeon finder has allowed those old world instances to be more utilized than they were before (for example, my current character ran BRD at least 4 times via dungeon finder where my other character pre-dungeon finder only ran it once). Once Everquest put in hot zones, it really made a lot of it's content obsolete.
I have to say, I think the original OP makes many great points and asked tough questions. Several posters have come close to answering them (I think) such as the "perfect storm" the "snowball" effect. WOW is quite the anomaly. A once in a lifetime occurrence that I am happy to have participated in.
To me, Blizzard seems to listen to it's player base and is able to adjust on the fly. Granted the whiners get more than their share of attention but still, it proves Blizzard listens and reacts. People who pay each month like to know they aren't just howling at the moon.
The game is very social. We humans are after all a social creature. But there is amble room for the lone wolf player. With WoW, Blizzard has hit the mark in being all things to it's players.
I have played WoW since it's original release and have no plans to quit. I take my occasional break to try other games, both massive player and single player but I keep going back to WoW. For me, it's the friends I have made, it's the social aspect of it that keeps me playing.
Why is WOW still holding it's subscriber base? Who knows but I do know that when they release the next expansion, those numbers will only go up.
If 100% of the player base is enjoying the "end game" of WoW... then don't you think that indicates that WoW is easy? Or, that the "end game" you speak of, be considered trivial.... since everyone is enjoying it, even the 12 year old girl's soccer team..?
Nope. Your logic fails because there are MULTIPLE difficulties at the end game of WOW. If only a few percentage of the players can do hard mode, do you think that is easy?
If 100% of the player base is enjoying the "end game" of WoW... then don't you think that indicates that WoW is easy? Or, that the "end game" you speak of, be considered trivial.... since everyone is enjoying it, even the 12 year old girl's soccer team..?
Nope. Your logic fails because there are MULTIPLE difficulties at the end game of WOW. If only a few percentage of the players can do hard mode, do you think that is easy?
If you follow that logic, just think how easy football, golf or hockey are. Considering how popular football (soccer) is, the World Cup must have been filled with drooling idiots:)
In order for a person to adopt something new and drop what is comfortable and familiar, it doesn't just take an incremental upgrade or feature. Oh no, it takes a whole new order of magnitude upgrade. It needs to revolutionize something, and basically *create* a feature that suddently becomes must-have. The problem with WoW is that nobody has the budget to do everything WoW does, and then also revolutionize and innovate in 3-4 areas. So until the time where MMOs are no longer coded in C++ with a custom project-specific codebase, the successes in the industry will be WoW, and niche MMOs with under 1 million subs. Unless someone has about 500+ million to throw at an MMO.
There are a lot of big-budget games that I think stand up fine to "launch WoW," but I don't anything can stand up to launch-WoW + half a decade of continuing investment.
I think the old timer EQ addict was one who wanted dearly to have friends, family, lovers or anyone at all to play the game with them because the more the merrier. When WoW and EQ2 came out wow went with the cartoon effect, why, everyone likes cartoons. eq2 went updated eq so it kept what I call first gen mmo peeps. WoW promised first gen peeps an improved ride and the first gen peeps found that the previously un recruitable people were interested. Looks, ease of play, lake of vertigo, lake of confusion, just a great looking game that the second gen mmo players didnt need to understand, it just looked fun.
A new player was born and the old player was in heaven with more loved ones playing. Fast forward, the first gen has been ripped with no continual immersion and the second gen mmo'er is still just as happy "playing a game" as ever so the old timer just continue's to play with an ever increasing dread and mortal hatred for the position the non evolving world of warcraft has put them in. The old gamer longs for the old days and the new gamer knows no better and they co exsist in the "so called king of mmo's"
The house of cards that Blizzard has built will fall eventually because the player base will divide or a game will come out that will cater to both better than WoW. The industry went for big subs and stopped expanding on the old UO,EQ model. THERE WILL BE AN UPRISING,some day soon an old timer will have grown up, made lotsa money, and will develop the true mmorpg that the world needs for the love of the experience and not the profit!!!!!
WoW had no "magical formula" that nobody else found before. Blizzard just had a few things that nobody else had, and they knew how to do a few things right.
1. Great IP: Warcraft was already a well known franchise before WoW started. Of course this did not attract any of the people we now call "casual gamers", people who play WoW because it's a nice pastime, but it gave them an initial following that liked the Warcraft games and who also sticked out during those hard first weeks with downtimes, server queues, bugs and glitches. Also, Blizzard is a name in the business, known for good quality and "releasing when it's done". And that leads me to
2. WoW was "finished". Of course it had its problems and of course it had bugs, broken quests, balance issues, you name it. But it was not a half baked beta that got turned upside down in the middle of the first year. It had a rich, HUGE world to explore and quest in, it had no "level gaps" where you could not do anything sensibly to progress (many MMOs have those at release, where you either do not have enough quests to progress or where there are only a handful of mobs compared to the hundreds of players HAVING to farm them to progress). One could say it was at least "design finished", something many other MMOs lack sorely at release. A big world, a lot of different and interesting mobs, instances for virtually every level and enough to do for everyone leveling.
3. No "we're done, cash in" mentality. With many MMOs you can feel how about 80% of the staff is either laid off or rerouted to other projects as soon as the game gets released. I have no idea why, but it seems too many game companies did not realize yet that the real revenue in MMOs is not the initial sale but the recurring subscription, and to make people sub, you have to show them that the game progresses, gets more stable, gets new content, you name it. Blizzard kept working on WoW, they kept tweaking the balance, kept changing the talent trees (the original trees were simply ... crap in most cases). In a nutshell, the gamer had the feeling that they "cared" about their game. There were no "really soon now" promises for bugfixes and balance tweaks, you could actually see how the problems got fixed, and that's something that convinces people it's worth it to stay and see it unfold. If you keep waiting for months for your class to get patched so some of your main skills finally do what they're supposed to do, you don't just reroll some other class, do you? I, for one, simply leave.
It's no magical formula. Or maybe it is because many others were too dumb to copy what made WoW the success it is: Build an IP to found it on, release the game when it is done and keep developing it.
Comments
U know, I would really like to agree with Rooster Nash about what he is trying to say...but he is wrong. I admit I'm a wow basher but not because of the game but because of the ppl that run the game. I love the exploration! I love the quests! (Many are repeditive but I've not seen any better overall.) The game play is heads above the rest. The GMs are the best I've ever seen!!! Kudo's to the GMs! And thnx for all the help u gave this lost soul. The social aspect of the game, however, has declined heavily since I started playing several years ago "unfortunately !" Also leveling has gotten rediculously easy and corruption has become rampant. But I got to admit...If I was just some caveman turning on a computer for the first time today and took a liking to mmorpgs...I would play wow.
Played Wow, D and L, AOC, GW, Eve, Rift and many more insignificant games.
No, the content was NOT outdated. How many guilds, during the time of OoW, were still doing progression raiding in PoP? How many guilds in WoW are doing vanilla raiding, let alone BC raiding? You could argue for the top 5% of people EQs expansions outdated themselves, but in WoW its outdated for both those top 5% and the other 95% as well.Very good observation. Everyone drop a game here or there for different reasons, I chip in my share
(1) I left WoW once because of call of duties, real life, for a long duration, in a location I am blocked from outside contact.
(2) I left WoW once due to family duties, having to take care of elders and simply not able to spare the time or mood for online game, thank you solo RPGs, where I can press esc and go afk. Mobs will wait.
(3) I left WoW once because of a change in credit card, and I took the occasion to try out other games, and enjoyed a couple of them for months. But here is the key answer to Loke, there are many fun games, I love superjump in CoH, nothing in WoW comes close. However each of these other games are narrow, lacking variety, the kind of variety WoW offers. WoW offers so much, that if you care to try out everything, it will kill enough time for months. Not all are fun if you play only that aspect everyday, but dabbing into this and that and you have an evening spent on different things.
Levelling in WoW maybe boring, but at least there are lots of things to do alongside. I will be gathering as I do quests, and I will be crafting as I gather. Quests are boring usually. but not all. Quests in WoW are well planned. As I moved to a coast line, I run into fisherman NPCs who give me quests to fish and explore the coast and award me with fishing poles and lures. As I explore some towns, I got tailor quests, or miner quests. As I level up, shaman characters get shaman quests awarding totems. As I enter icecrown, I got epic long story arcs, that finally show me how Lady Silv's first lieutenant betrayed her, and ruined the first big assault against icecrown. The epic story brings me back to undercity where the big bosses fight each other and I got to take part. It also changes undercity for me forever, as well as part of icecrown.
Endgame in WoW maybe boring, but at least there are variety. I can fish (once a day at least for a daily), I can craft (cooking again is a daily), I can go collect some materials, do some dailies, go a random heroic, do a small raid VoA, RS (typically done in 10 minutes after 20 minutes formation). I can do a big raid, and leave anytime and have a replacement summoned in to replace me within a minute). I can queue up for pvp. Come on, the list is long, and best of all, I can do them all together. Join a raid, at the same time queue up for pvp, and while waiting, I can farm mats. Join a random queue, and while the queue is being formed, I can do fishing/cooking quest. The combinations are many, and smoothly implemented in WoW.
Look at the other games, old EQ have you sit outside a zone, yelling for group openings, and essentially sitting there for hours. PVP grinders have you bugging the system to grind skills and then zerg each other and win by hacking or latency or exploitation of game mechanics.
There are good games apart from WoW, the PVP of DAoC is peerless, best ever. Open world exploration and the sense of being there is unrivalled during the early SWG days. Fun fast action and eye candies marked CoH off the rest of the pack. Every good game has its strength, but taking overall, none comes to match WoW, at least for now.
So after enjoying the strength of DAoC, SWG and so on, many come back to WoW because of the wholesome package. A package that is constantly patched, enhanced, and adding new contents. There is bound to be something somewhat interesting, during different parts of a month, depending on your mood.
Enough rants.
That I objected, I was among the first batch of EQ players, and my friend still plays EQ now on and off.
People play old content in EQ because there is nothing better to do for then. People focus on the new content in WoW because at maxed level, there is still much to do in the high end zones, and they interact a lot more there. Trouble is, in many games like EQ, only a few guilds play in the end game stuffs, and they simply make it impossible for the others to even try. WoW makes it possible for practically everyone to at least dab in the tougher stuffs and won't be shutdown by the few elitist snobs.
If you are not in the top guilds in EQ, go play the "older" content. Oh I remember my EQ days, when a few guilds created a common web site to share the planes. Each spawn phase of each plane is allocated among the few guilds. No one else can expect to see a living mob. If you are not in one of these guilds, would you be playing the lesser content? Does that means the lesser contents are really good?
The basic problem with the OPs original thoughts is that he is simply equating success and popularity as the same thing. The scope issue is one WoW doesn't dominate in at all as many of the older games such as EQ, EQ2, Eve, and LotRO just to name a few have as much if not more scope both in content and in game play. Professionalism is a bit harder to quantify but most of the other developers have done well there too. The amazing thing isn't that Blizzard has been professional but that they didn't crack under the load of users though they did creak a bit a times.
Most of the world is not a zero sum game and by that I mean you can have more than one winner and that the definition of winning or more accurately succeeding is based on a lot of things not just simple and isolated comparisons to other companies.
None of this takes away from Blizzard and their dedication to their game. They made it fun and they made it accessible and they promoted the hell out of it and as such they have lifted the expectations of both what the market expects from a game and what they expect from a company. Sure, there is room for smaller companies to succeed in a smaller area and still be a success. LotRO and Eve based on simple numbers and marketing expectations would both be considered failures but the reality is quite the opposite and both of these games easily match WoW in all areas except mass appeal.
McDonald's is a success for a reason and as much as people like to put it and their food down what they do they do very well. But, there is still room in the market for a small French Bistro to not only exist but to thrive.
Again, to the OP. Your question simply misses the point.
How many people can currently enjoy the endgame content in the current wow expansion: 100%
How many people could enjoy the endgame content of the old school EQ expansions: about 15%
Just because eq forced people to slum in the old expansion, because all of the endgame content in the current expansion was never available to them, doesn't mean the previous expansion is relevant. If players actually had a choice I bet you every single one of them would prefer to be playing the end game in the current expansion and only mucked around in the previous expansion for giggles.
I have to say, I think the original OP makes many great points and asked tough questions. Several posters have come close to answering them (I think) such as the "perfect storm" the "snowball" effect. WOW is quite the anomaly. A once in a lifetime occurrence that I am happy to have participated in.
To me, Blizzard seems to listen to it's player base and is able to adjust on the fly. Granted the whiners get more than their share of attention but still, it proves Blizzard listens and reacts. People who pay each month like to know they aren't just howling at the moon.
The game is very social. We humans are after all a social creature. But there is amble room for the lone wolf player. With WoW, Blizzard has hit the mark in being all things to it's players.
I have played WoW since it's original release and have no plans to quit. I take my occasional break to try other games, both massive player and single player but I keep going back to WoW. For me, it's the friends I have made, it's the social aspect of it that keeps me playing.
Why is WOW still holding it's subscriber base? Who knows but I do know that when they release the next expansion, those numbers will only go up.
But EQ is the Grandmother of the themepark mmorpg, its the one that started it all.
It was just a themepeark for the "hardcore" lot.
March on! - Lets Invade Pekopon
If 100% of the player base is enjoying the "end game" of WoW... then don't you think that indicates that WoW is easy? Or, that the "end game" you speak of, be considered trivial.... since everyone is enjoying it, even the 12 year old girl's soccer team..?
Nope. Your logic fails because there are MULTIPLE difficulties at the end game of WOW. If only a few percentage of the players can do hard mode, do you think that is easy?
If you follow that logic, just think how easy football, golf or hockey are. Considering how popular football (soccer) is, the World Cup must have been filled with drooling idiots:)
MMOs are an investment - time, money, skill.
In order for a person to adopt something new and drop what is comfortable and familiar, it doesn't just take an incremental upgrade or feature. Oh no, it takes a whole new order of magnitude upgrade. It needs to revolutionize something, and basically *create* a feature that suddently becomes must-have. The problem with WoW is that nobody has the budget to do everything WoW does, and then also revolutionize and innovate in 3-4 areas. So until the time where MMOs are no longer coded in C++ with a custom project-specific codebase, the successes in the industry will be WoW, and niche MMOs with under 1 million subs. Unless someone has about 500+ million to throw at an MMO.
There are a lot of big-budget games that I think stand up fine to "launch WoW," but I don't anything can stand up to launch-WoW + half a decade of continuing investment.
Well Mike B told me to report this thread as Trolling.. since it's purpose is to bait people to respond to an opinion.. Lets see what happens
How is it trolling?
MikeB told you F-All or he would have jsut closed it himself.
March on! - Lets Invade Pekopon
I think the old timer EQ addict was one who wanted dearly to have friends, family, lovers or anyone at all to play the game with them because the more the merrier. When WoW and EQ2 came out wow went with the cartoon effect, why, everyone likes cartoons. eq2 went updated eq so it kept what I call first gen mmo peeps. WoW promised first gen peeps an improved ride and the first gen peeps found that the previously un recruitable people were interested. Looks, ease of play, lake of vertigo, lake of confusion, just a great looking game that the second gen mmo players didnt need to understand, it just looked fun.
A new player was born and the old player was in heaven with more loved ones playing. Fast forward, the first gen has been ripped with no continual immersion and the second gen mmo'er is still just as happy "playing a game" as ever so the old timer just continue's to play with an ever increasing dread and mortal hatred for the position the non evolving world of warcraft has put them in. The old gamer longs for the old days and the new gamer knows no better and they co exsist in the "so called king of mmo's"
The house of cards that Blizzard has built will fall eventually because the player base will divide or a game will come out that will cater to both better than WoW. The industry went for big subs and stopped expanding on the old UO,EQ model. THERE WILL BE AN UPRISING,some day soon an old timer will have grown up, made lotsa money, and will develop the true mmorpg that the world needs for the love of the experience and not the profit!!!!!
Wow had the scope at the time because Noone else was in competition. They had the backing of Microsoft! Enough said.
Played Wow, D and L, AOC, GW, Eve, Rift and many more insignificant games.
WoW had no "magical formula" that nobody else found before. Blizzard just had a few things that nobody else had, and they knew how to do a few things right.
1. Great IP: Warcraft was already a well known franchise before WoW started. Of course this did not attract any of the people we now call "casual gamers", people who play WoW because it's a nice pastime, but it gave them an initial following that liked the Warcraft games and who also sticked out during those hard first weeks with downtimes, server queues, bugs and glitches. Also, Blizzard is a name in the business, known for good quality and "releasing when it's done". And that leads me to
2. WoW was "finished". Of course it had its problems and of course it had bugs, broken quests, balance issues, you name it. But it was not a half baked beta that got turned upside down in the middle of the first year. It had a rich, HUGE world to explore and quest in, it had no "level gaps" where you could not do anything sensibly to progress (many MMOs have those at release, where you either do not have enough quests to progress or where there are only a handful of mobs compared to the hundreds of players HAVING to farm them to progress). One could say it was at least "design finished", something many other MMOs lack sorely at release. A big world, a lot of different and interesting mobs, instances for virtually every level and enough to do for everyone leveling.
3. No "we're done, cash in" mentality. With many MMOs you can feel how about 80% of the staff is either laid off or rerouted to other projects as soon as the game gets released. I have no idea why, but it seems too many game companies did not realize yet that the real revenue in MMOs is not the initial sale but the recurring subscription, and to make people sub, you have to show them that the game progresses, gets more stable, gets new content, you name it. Blizzard kept working on WoW, they kept tweaking the balance, kept changing the talent trees (the original trees were simply ... crap in most cases). In a nutshell, the gamer had the feeling that they "cared" about their game. There were no "really soon now" promises for bugfixes and balance tweaks, you could actually see how the problems got fixed, and that's something that convinces people it's worth it to stay and see it unfold. If you keep waiting for months for your class to get patched so some of your main skills finally do what they're supposed to do, you don't just reroll some other class, do you? I, for one, simply leave.
It's no magical formula. Or maybe it is because many others were too dumb to copy what made WoW the success it is: Build an IP to found it on, release the game when it is done and keep developing it.