You know what's funy now that I think about that? Even considering TOA DAOC had something to play for past the grind, yet people left it to to go grind in games that didn't.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
It's not a problem of people it is a problem of how the brain works.
The brain has a representation bias on memories. Memories that cause pleasure are more memorable than those that cause pain. So if you are having an experience and you remember it being pleasurable you will have a fond memory of it and seek to get a similar experience.
As an example my girlfriend often tells people how much she loves camping and hiking.
On the last camping trip we took together (3 years ago) she complained every single night about bugs, she was afraid of the fire, she didn't want to eat anything cooked on the fire, and the altitude of our hikes gave her shortness of breaths. Every single day she had nothing but complaints.
Since then every single time I go camping with the guys she tells me about how much she loved our last camping trip and how we should do it again soon.
Look at my space. It still has millions of users. Does anyone say that? No. Friendster still has millions of users. Do they say that? no. Because their "millions of users" are nothing compared to facebooks billions.
Not that I don't understand or agree with your point but facebook doesn't even have a billion users ;P
As far as the old games being great the only thing I really enjoyed in them was the community. There were some really unique games in the past but they still had bugs and weren't loved by everyone just like the games today.
I still check up on Istaria from time to time. Some of the old games are still around and some have changed. They were never as popular as WoW, but you gotta remember this forums is for the minority. The thousands here not satisfied are nothing compared to the millions still playing and enjoying their games. The people that still enjoy those old games are still playing them.
I'd probably still be playing EQ1 if the game wasn't dead, player wise, and didn't resemble an ancient artifact graphically.
This. Plus the totally dull hit auto attack and wait for the random rolls to see if you hit, or miss, or get hit to see if you win or have to run and try not to die.
If EQ came out again with today's polish standards, combat systems, and slick UI's...I'd be all over it like Rothelisberger on a collge co-ed in a club restroom and be a lifetime subber. Wouldn't even bat an eye at another MMORPG.
People can play wow forever. People can play lineage forever.
That's the fundamental problem right?
Not all old games are great... some are.
And those games that are great are still not better than a good game that is new, because people enjoy change.
However, when the new game grows old and the enjoyment of discovery fades, it gets down to core values, and then in some cases, the old games are better.
But what core values are better? That very much depends on the person playing it.
Sometimes there are no new games that gets me interested, so then I go back to the old games and play them.
For many people WoW is a good game to return to apparently... For me.. not so much... I love DAoC, I love Istaria, I love DDO.... I hate Guild Wars, I hate WoW, I hate Lineage II, I hate Everquest, I hate Everquest II, I hate City of Heroes. I can put up with Rift, and I can put up with LotRO, and I can put up with WAR, and I can put up with Aion.
These values are also somewhat in motion. When they were released I loved them all to some degree (well not GW which I despised from the start). But in the end, some games are more appealing than others to return to.
Why people return to lineage and WoW in a great degree, I do not know... Maybe it means they are better than older games for many people. Maybe it is an indication that those games brought many new players to the MMO genre who have precious few games to fall back to.
People can play wow forever. People can play lineage forever.
That's the fundamental problem right?
Honestly, its because new tech ruined me for it.
After playing newer games, I tried going back to DAOC. Here is what I found.
The game mechanics are excellent.
The graphics aren't terrible, although they are really dated.
The ui is so dated and unresponsive that it is pretty much unplayable.
The thing is, I didn't love DAOC because of the ui. How many people do you hear going "OH yeah, man! You have to play this game! The UI is just fantastic." The game still has some of the best mechanics, pvp, etc... and compared to other games of its generation it is responsive and great... but we are several generations later already. I could say that if they would bring the graphics and UI up into the modern age(maybe put them in the same engine they used for warhammer) I would sub in a second(or less), but you don't even need to go that far. Screw the "enhanced graphics", how about just bringing the UI in to line with current games? If they did that, they would have my money again, right now.
Why aren't I still playing? I had to quit for real life obligations. Friends got me back in playing other games a year or two later, and now I can't go back to that one... It just feels too dated and unresponsive.
You know what's funy now that I think about that? Even considering TOA DAOC had something to play for past the grind, yet people left it to to go grind in games that didn't.
People left because they didn't want to grind. The glory of DAoC was that it had some of the hardest, most well thought out raids in the entire genre, but they were entirely optional and you could do them in any order.
ToA made them mandatory. So instead of having PvE and PvP coexisting, you made PvE a gate to the PvP.
I left DAoC because of
a) ToA
b) Instancing
c) /level 20
Those three things together killed the game hard. B and C combined to make it so that there were no vets around at lowbie zones to teach newbs how to play, and so no one new ever joined. A made it so that vets quit. So, the game died.
I didn't leave DAoC to grind in other games, I left DAoC and I am STILL waiting for a decent MMO, but I haven't found one since.
Also, I don't get all the people bitching about the UI... the UI in DAoC was completely functional and fully moddable. You could make any UI you want, how is it dated? Everything you need is right in the open.
It's not a problem of people it is a problem of how the brain works.
The brain has a representation bias on memories. Memories that cause pleasure are more memorable than those that cause pain.
That's completely false. Animals learn a lot faster through negative reinforcement than through positive. So please don't try the "its just nostalgia" bs.
I loved Crystalis on NES ... Breath if Fire on SNES... they are amungst my alltime favorite games. Doesn't mean I'd pay 50-60 bucks for a copy of them today. Ultima Online is one of the deepest games in the MMO genre but its dated now visually and some mechanics that would put most people off. We live as a race of people who are saturated in technological evolution... when you have so much new thrown in your face it's hard to be interested in things that are dated.
Everything I say is my opinion or personal preference. You may or may not find it useful to your cause but regardless I am entitled to it.
The sad truth is none of the good games remained untarnished by WoWs 'everyone wins - every time' approach. The good games were retroactively altered to attempt to appeal to WoWs audience, stupidly enough.
The pre-WoW games that actually had some merit have all been 'WoW-ified' to the point of being almost unrecognizable.
If, for example, the current EverQuest experience resembled anything of its '99-'04 self I would sub without hesitation, but that game is gone. What's left is a mish-mash of ideas and a world that, like EQ2, is incohesive.
This same question seems to pop up a hell of a lot, there are pages and pages of this discussion you could look into if you're genuinely interested.
I loved Crystalis on NES ... Breath if Fire on SNES... they are amungst my alltime favorite games. Doesn't mean I'd pay 50-60 bucks for a copy of them today. Ultima Online is one of the deepest games in the MMO genre but its dated now visually and some mechanics that would put most people off. We live as a race of people who are saturated in technological evolution... when you have so much new thrown in your face it's hard to be interested in things that are dated.
Well, sure, you're absolutely right. The problem I'm still coming to grips with errs on the side of mechanics, and the depth that you've pointed to in games like Ultima Online. When you're playing something that's released somewhere between 2010 or 2012, you expect baseline design to, at the very least, be as competent as a game within the genre in which can be linked to as a predecessor. This is the reason why games like Mortal Online and Darkfall didn't fare as well as their creators may have desired, largely because baseline functionality and gameplay put forth by the proverbial forebearer(s) was either missing and promised, half-assed, or entirely forgotten.
When attempting to compare the generations of MMO's, however, I'm met with a fairly difficult obstacle to overcome; that is to say, I still don't give a fuck about graphics or visuals. Maybe to some of you this is extremely important, and maybe this is one of the largest factors in the reasoning behind why I enjoy sandboxes so much, or one of the largest differences between the new audience of MMO gamers and the old, but what we should request from our game designers and creators is attention to mechanics first, and attention to detail such as presentation, audio design, or CGI movies to be the last thing they're worried about. In direct comparison, presentation wasn't something we had to worry about fifteen years ago during the birth of MMO's, and ultimately the games were far more interesting (read: deep, complex, intricate, challenging, etc).
The reason I mention this is because it's been made very clear by the vast majority of development studios: you get one or the other, flash or substance. And what's the big difference between the making of MMORPG's we play today compared to fiffteen years ago, you may wonder? Presentation and advertising (flash), taking away from what actually matters when it comes to the longevity of play in an MMO (substance). That's about it.
"This is life! We suffer and slave and expire. That's it!" -Bernard Black (Dylan Moran)
It's not a problem of people it is a problem of how the brain works.
The brain has a representation bias on memories. Memories that cause pleasure are more memorable than those that cause pain.
That's completely false. Animals learn a lot faster through negative reinforcement than through positive. So please don't try the "its just nostalgia" bs.
Agreed, I can't believe how long people have been pulling the old 'rose-colored glasses' routine no matter what evidence is offered to clearly debunk it as the go-to phenomenon, because clearly we're not capable of determining which aspects we like and dislike in MMOs.
I played EQ, I loved it , but it's simply just not the same game anymore. Same with DAoC, even EQ2 is vastly different than what it was at launch, still I had a lot of good times in those games and made a lot of friends. I remember my times there very fondly. I also played WoW, made friends and had fun, and now think it's a steaming pile - why don't the rose colored glasses work on that? Surely if it's a game I played in the past I simply must remember it fondly provided I at one time enjoyed it (or even if I didn't according to the camping post).
Huh, maybe it's not that after all? I mean, I clearly remember all the things about the games I loved that annoyed the hell out of me, shouldn't that be covered over by the rosey tint? Why can I still see the flaws? What's going on? They're not appearing rosey but rather a shade of...large collection of mechanics and elements I enjoy, amidst some things that could have been altered for the better!
It's almost as bad as that 'No game will ever compare to your first!' BS. My first wasn't that great, but then loved my second (EQ) passionately. DAoC came along and I had an amazing time, absolutely loved it - it compared to my 'first' in every way. Years passed, a lot of games that even with 'rose colored glasses' I didn't love but gave a fair try and had some fun with, meh, they were OK I guess (FFXI, SWG, CoH). Then Vanguard beta came and I was absolutely in love again, and enjoyed it as much as I ever enjoyed EQ and DAoC.
Let's retire that one maybe? It's been kicking around for almost a decade now and is only proven more and more wrong with time. Sure stupid people will always arrive at stupid conclusions (see the Dunning-Kruger effect for example), but the truth is most people capable of thinking are capable of forming unbiased opinions of their experiences if they're honestly evaluating.
If there was some hypothetical way I could go back in time and play the Pre-cu version of SWG, then I would do so, and I guarantee I would be having fun.
What was "EArning well" pre WoW becomes "Earning nothing" post wow regardless on the effect on the actual playerbase in the previous game.
Look at my space. It still has millions of users. Does anyone say that? No. Friendster still has millions of users. Do they say that? no. Because their "millions of users" are nothing compared to facebooks billions.
Pre WoW they were "earning well enough" but after WoW, everyone will think "theyre nothing" and this prompted the devs to want to have more marketshare from WoW which then ended up with those games displacing their own playerbase.
Another reason is that if they did try WoW, they probably saw some noticeably better things in WoW like maybe controls or responsiveness or somefing which makes it hard to go back to their old game.
TLDR :
Those old games got too intimidated and forced itself to grow in the wrong way.
Edit : Lineage didnt get intimidated. IT stuck to its guns and didnt displace their playerbase. Look at UO now. Completely different. EQ completely different, etc.
I posted this as a reply to your post in the other thread
Actually it took awhile but Lineage II has finally submitted to the WoWifacation craze with the latest expansion Goddess of Destruction. What used to take months of hardcore play can now be done in a day.
You know what's funy now that I think about that? Even considering TOA DAOC had something to play for past the grind, yet people left it to to go grind in games that didn't.
What really killed the game, wasn't just how ToA altered the gameplay directly, it was also what happened to the community because of it, and how badly Mythic fumbled their attempts to do anything about it.
I tried going back, but my entire guild was gone. It was one of the largest guilds on my server, and it just disappeared. and then so did my whole server. To make matters worse, Mythic started instancing the game, and rearranging the PvE in aways that completely killed the early game, as if they had no hope of getting new players ever again.
They've also never updated the UI (and I don't just mean the skin) as another poster mentioned, it's almost unplayable, and instead of working on that, they wasted what little resources they had making the game worse and worse. Catacombs was a joke, Darkness Rising was even worse. Maybe they could have recovered if ToA was all that went wrong, but it was like they'd just stopped trying.
WoW's release hurt a lot of MMOs, but if they'd stayed their course, polishing up what they had, I think they'd have seen people coming back to them eventually. Instead, they destroyed their games in some sort of panic, so people had nothing to go back to.
When I want a single-player story, I'll play a single-player game. When I play an MMO, I want a massively multiplayer world.
the community moved on for whatever reason, so people went with the community.
if my friends tried aion, i tried aion, they tried rift, i tried rift, etc etc..
each person has thier own reason for moving but the majority of older mmo players moved simply because they wanted to remain with friends
the problem with us mmo vets boils down to a few factors:
1) we want to experience the same feelings we had during our first mmo's with the newer ones. But these feelings probably wont happen again. i dont think ill ever feel the same as i did during my first pvp kill in shadowbane.
2) GAMES ARE NOW MADE FOR MONEY! older games followed this model it FELT like
EVERQUEST!
a) the devs decided to creat a world where they can enjoy themselves and forget about the burdens of real life
b) they poured thier heart and soul into the game so that others would enjoy the game just as much as them
c) when they finally finished the world, they invited a few friends to play them game with them and get thier opinions.
d) once they actually had everything ready to go, they decided to charge people to play the game to help maintain server costs.
e) even if they only had 5000 people play thier game, they were still happy at what they created.
SWTOR!
a) HOW much can we make using the starwars ip
b) lets cater to a broad spectrum demographic to maximize profits. even if they only buy the game and sub for one month, we still recieve a profit on that.
c) The casual player will be who we cater to after release because they are likely the ones to stay subbed.
d) lets make it easy so people can play by themselves.
e) lets follow world of warcrafts model because it was extremly profitable. lets add voice acting!
f) lets spend 300million on advertisements, and only 50 million on game developement. saying we spent 350 million will make people think that this will be the next big thing.
sure i might ahve made some numbers up, but this is the difference i feel between games like EQ and Shadowbane,FFXI, DAOC, SWG vs SWTOR, WAR,LOTRO, AION
I think hype and the allure of new games and new technology will allways errode the playerbase of games. The problem with older games is that its harder to get people to try it to bring in new people to fill the gap, the smaller the playerbase the more likely more players will leave. I know there are exceptions but i assume even they will have this happen eventually with competition.
Most old games were fundamentally changed by their developers which caused their core base to leave. Instead of fixing these mistakes, those devs used their massive profits to create a new MMO, in the style of WoW, which didn't do so well.
So, the games we loved, don't exist anymore. It's really simple. This has happened with SOE, Turbine, Mythic, Funcom, it happened in SWG most famously. It happened in Ultima Online.
We can't go back because those games are NOT THERE.
This sums it up. However I did think WoW was a decent came when in launched, but not as it stands now.
Comments
You know what's funy now that I think about that? Even considering TOA DAOC had something to play for past the grind, yet people left it to to go grind in games that didn't.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
Thats me too, what a disappointment.
It's not a problem of people it is a problem of how the brain works.
The brain has a representation bias on memories. Memories that cause pleasure are more memorable than those that cause pain. So if you are having an experience and you remember it being pleasurable you will have a fond memory of it and seek to get a similar experience.
As an example my girlfriend often tells people how much she loves camping and hiking.
On the last camping trip we took together (3 years ago) she complained every single night about bugs, she was afraid of the fire, she didn't want to eat anything cooked on the fire, and the altitude of our hikes gave her shortness of breaths. Every single day she had nothing but complaints.
Since then every single time I go camping with the guys she tells me about how much she loved our last camping trip and how we should do it again soon.
Website: http://www.thegameguru.me / YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/users/thetroublmaker
Not that I don't understand or agree with your point but facebook doesn't even have a billion users ;P
As far as the old games being great the only thing I really enjoyed in them was the community. There were some really unique games in the past but they still had bugs and weren't loved by everyone just like the games today.
I still check up on Istaria from time to time. Some of the old games are still around and some have changed. They were never as popular as WoW, but you gotta remember this forums is for the minority. The thousands here not satisfied are nothing compared to the millions still playing and enjoying their games. The people that still enjoy those old games are still playing them.
Make games you want to play.
http://www.youtube.com/user/RavikAztar
This. Plus the totally dull hit auto attack and wait for the random rolls to see if you hit, or miss, or get hit to see if you win or have to run and try not to die.
If EQ came out again with today's polish standards, combat systems, and slick UI's...I'd be all over it like Rothelisberger on a collge co-ed in a club restroom and be a lifetime subber. Wouldn't even bat an eye at another MMORPG.
Same reason people go see new movies even though they have favorite movies...
I will not play a game with a cash shop ever again. A dev job should be to make the game better not make me pay so it sucks less.
Not all old games are great... some are.
And those games that are great are still not better than a good game that is new, because people enjoy change.
However, when the new game grows old and the enjoyment of discovery fades, it gets down to core values, and then in some cases, the old games are better.
But what core values are better? That very much depends on the person playing it.
Sometimes there are no new games that gets me interested, so then I go back to the old games and play them.
For many people WoW is a good game to return to apparently... For me.. not so much... I love DAoC, I love Istaria, I love DDO.... I hate Guild Wars, I hate WoW, I hate Lineage II, I hate Everquest, I hate Everquest II, I hate City of Heroes. I can put up with Rift, and I can put up with LotRO, and I can put up with WAR, and I can put up with Aion.
These values are also somewhat in motion. When they were released I loved them all to some degree (well not GW which I despised from the start). But in the end, some games are more appealing than others to return to.
Why people return to lineage and WoW in a great degree, I do not know... Maybe it means they are better than older games for many people. Maybe it is an indication that those games brought many new players to the MMO genre who have precious few games to fall back to.
Honestly, its because new tech ruined me for it.
After playing newer games, I tried going back to DAOC. Here is what I found.
The game mechanics are excellent.
The graphics aren't terrible, although they are really dated.
The ui is so dated and unresponsive that it is pretty much unplayable.
The thing is, I didn't love DAOC because of the ui. How many people do you hear going "OH yeah, man! You have to play this game! The UI is just fantastic." The game still has some of the best mechanics, pvp, etc... and compared to other games of its generation it is responsive and great... but we are several generations later already. I could say that if they would bring the graphics and UI up into the modern age(maybe put them in the same engine they used for warhammer) I would sub in a second(or less), but you don't even need to go that far. Screw the "enhanced graphics", how about just bringing the UI in to line with current games? If they did that, they would have my money again, right now.
Why aren't I still playing? I had to quit for real life obligations. Friends got me back in playing other games a year or two later, and now I can't go back to that one... It just feels too dated and unresponsive.
People left because they didn't want to grind. The glory of DAoC was that it had some of the hardest, most well thought out raids in the entire genre, but they were entirely optional and you could do them in any order.
ToA made them mandatory. So instead of having PvE and PvP coexisting, you made PvE a gate to the PvP.
I left DAoC because of
a) ToA
b) Instancing
c) /level 20
Those three things together killed the game hard. B and C combined to make it so that there were no vets around at lowbie zones to teach newbs how to play, and so no one new ever joined. A made it so that vets quit. So, the game died.
I didn't leave DAoC to grind in other games, I left DAoC and I am STILL waiting for a decent MMO, but I haven't found one since.
Also, I don't get all the people bitching about the UI... the UI in DAoC was completely functional and fully moddable. You could make any UI you want, how is it dated? Everything you need is right in the open.
That's completely false. Animals learn a lot faster through negative reinforcement than through positive. So please don't try the "its just nostalgia" bs.
Uh, yeah. OP? I'm still playing UO. Have been over fifteen years.
Thanks.
"This is life! We suffer and slave and expire. That's it!" -Bernard Black (Dylan Moran)
Everything I say is my opinion or personal preference. You may or may not find it useful to your cause but regardless I am entitled to it.
EQ now is a completely different game from 1999-2001, when it was a great MMO.
WoW now is a completely different game from 2004-2007, when it was a great MMO.
An honest review of SW:TOR 6/10 (Danny Wojcicki)
The sad truth is none of the good games remained untarnished by WoWs 'everyone wins - every time' approach. The good games were retroactively altered to attempt to appeal to WoWs audience, stupidly enough.
The pre-WoW games that actually had some merit have all been 'WoW-ified' to the point of being almost unrecognizable.
If, for example, the current EverQuest experience resembled anything of its '99-'04 self I would sub without hesitation, but that game is gone. What's left is a mish-mash of ideas and a world that, like EQ2, is incohesive.
This same question seems to pop up a hell of a lot, there are pages and pages of this discussion you could look into if you're genuinely interested.
Well, sure, you're absolutely right. The problem I'm still coming to grips with errs on the side of mechanics, and the depth that you've pointed to in games like Ultima Online. When you're playing something that's released somewhere between 2010 or 2012, you expect baseline design to, at the very least, be as competent as a game within the genre in which can be linked to as a predecessor. This is the reason why games like Mortal Online and Darkfall didn't fare as well as their creators may have desired, largely because baseline functionality and gameplay put forth by the proverbial forebearer(s) was either missing and promised, half-assed, or entirely forgotten.
When attempting to compare the generations of MMO's, however, I'm met with a fairly difficult obstacle to overcome; that is to say, I still don't give a fuck about graphics or visuals. Maybe to some of you this is extremely important, and maybe this is one of the largest factors in the reasoning behind why I enjoy sandboxes so much, or one of the largest differences between the new audience of MMO gamers and the old, but what we should request from our game designers and creators is attention to mechanics first, and attention to detail such as presentation, audio design, or CGI movies to be the last thing they're worried about. In direct comparison, presentation wasn't something we had to worry about fifteen years ago during the birth of MMO's, and ultimately the games were far more interesting (read: deep, complex, intricate, challenging, etc).
The reason I mention this is because it's been made very clear by the vast majority of development studios: you get one or the other, flash or substance. And what's the big difference between the making of MMORPG's we play today compared to fiffteen years ago, you may wonder? Presentation and advertising (flash), taking away from what actually matters when it comes to the longevity of play in an MMO (substance). That's about it.
"This is life! We suffer and slave and expire. That's it!" -Bernard Black (Dylan Moran)
I wouldn't say WoW was ever great. Average, maybe slightly above.
Agreed, I can't believe how long people have been pulling the old 'rose-colored glasses' routine no matter what evidence is offered to clearly debunk it as the go-to phenomenon, because clearly we're not capable of determining which aspects we like and dislike in MMOs.
I played EQ, I loved it , but it's simply just not the same game anymore. Same with DAoC, even EQ2 is vastly different than what it was at launch, still I had a lot of good times in those games and made a lot of friends. I remember my times there very fondly. I also played WoW, made friends and had fun, and now think it's a steaming pile - why don't the rose colored glasses work on that? Surely if it's a game I played in the past I simply must remember it fondly provided I at one time enjoyed it (or even if I didn't according to the camping post).
Huh, maybe it's not that after all? I mean, I clearly remember all the things about the games I loved that annoyed the hell out of me, shouldn't that be covered over by the rosey tint? Why can I still see the flaws? What's going on? They're not appearing rosey but rather a shade of...large collection of mechanics and elements I enjoy, amidst some things that could have been altered for the better!
It's almost as bad as that 'No game will ever compare to your first!' BS. My first wasn't that great, but then loved my second (EQ) passionately. DAoC came along and I had an amazing time, absolutely loved it - it compared to my 'first' in every way. Years passed, a lot of games that even with 'rose colored glasses' I didn't love but gave a fair try and had some fun with, meh, they were OK I guess (FFXI, SWG, CoH). Then Vanguard beta came and I was absolutely in love again, and enjoyed it as much as I ever enjoyed EQ and DAoC.
Let's retire that one maybe? It's been kicking around for almost a decade now and is only proven more and more wrong with time. Sure stupid people will always arrive at stupid conclusions (see the Dunning-Kruger effect for example), but the truth is most people capable of thinking are capable of forming unbiased opinions of their experiences if they're honestly evaluating.
Actually it took awhile but Lineage II has finally submitted to the WoWifacation craze with the latest expansion Goddess of Destruction. What used to take months of hardcore play can now be done in a day.
Bren
while(horse==dead)
{
beat();
}
What really killed the game, wasn't just how ToA altered the gameplay directly, it was also what happened to the community because of it, and how badly Mythic fumbled their attempts to do anything about it.
I tried going back, but my entire guild was gone. It was one of the largest guilds on my server, and it just disappeared. and then so did my whole server. To make matters worse, Mythic started instancing the game, and rearranging the PvE in aways that completely killed the early game, as if they had no hope of getting new players ever again.
They've also never updated the UI (and I don't just mean the skin) as another poster mentioned, it's almost unplayable, and instead of working on that, they wasted what little resources they had making the game worse and worse. Catacombs was a joke, Darkness Rising was even worse. Maybe they could have recovered if ToA was all that went wrong, but it was like they'd just stopped trying.
WoW's release hurt a lot of MMOs, but if they'd stayed their course, polishing up what they had, I think they'd have seen people coming back to them eventually. Instead, they destroyed their games in some sort of panic, so people had nothing to go back to.
When I want a single-player story, I'll play a single-player game. When I play an MMO, I want a massively multiplayer world.
nuff said
People got bored and moved on to other boring games!
the community moved on for whatever reason, so people went with the community.
if my friends tried aion, i tried aion, they tried rift, i tried rift, etc etc..
each person has thier own reason for moving but the majority of older mmo players moved simply because they wanted to remain with friends
the problem with us mmo vets boils down to a few factors:
1) we want to experience the same feelings we had during our first mmo's with the newer ones. But these feelings probably wont happen again. i dont think ill ever feel the same as i did during my first pvp kill in shadowbane.
2) GAMES ARE NOW MADE FOR MONEY! older games followed this model it FELT like
EVERQUEST!
a) the devs decided to creat a world where they can enjoy themselves and forget about the burdens of real life
b) they poured thier heart and soul into the game so that others would enjoy the game just as much as them
c) when they finally finished the world, they invited a few friends to play them game with them and get thier opinions.
d) once they actually had everything ready to go, they decided to charge people to play the game to help maintain server costs.
e) even if they only had 5000 people play thier game, they were still happy at what they created.
SWTOR!
a) HOW much can we make using the starwars ip
b) lets cater to a broad spectrum demographic to maximize profits. even if they only buy the game and sub for one month, we still recieve a profit on that.
c) The casual player will be who we cater to after release because they are likely the ones to stay subbed.
d) lets make it easy so people can play by themselves.
e) lets follow world of warcrafts model because it was extremly profitable. lets add voice acting!
f) lets spend 300million on advertisements, and only 50 million on game developement. saying we spent 350 million will make people think that this will be the next big thing.
sure i might ahve made some numbers up, but this is the difference i feel between games like EQ and Shadowbane,FFXI, DAOC, SWG vs SWTOR, WAR,LOTRO, AION
I think hype and the allure of new games and new technology will allways errode the playerbase of games. The problem with older games is that its harder to get people to try it to bring in new people to fill the gap, the smaller the playerbase the more likely more players will leave. I know there are exceptions but i assume even they will have this happen eventually with competition.
Own, Mine, Defend, Attack, 24/7
This sums it up. However I did think WoW was a decent came when in launched, but not as it stands now.