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X Killed Y - MMO Pseudo Deaths?
Stormakov
Member UncommonPosts: 200
Trammel killed Ultima Online
Shadows of Luclin killed EverQuest
Trials of Atlantis killed Dark Age of Camelot
NGE killed Starwars Galaxies
Wrath of the Lich King killed WoW...
It seems like Every MMO I've ever thoroughly enjoyed had a point in its existence when an outcry of people (I won't say the majority because lets be honest sometimes the loudest don't fit into the majority) said that some sort of major change ruined the game for them - and incidentally after every one of these moments, the games in question DID start to see a decline in popularity some more prevalent than others, of course.
My question to those of you who read this is; Do you buy into the idea that developers sometimes go way overboard with changes to their games without consulting their playerbase or is all these instances of X killed Y just a fabrication of loud and whiny twats of the forum communities, etc?
Comments
Oh absolutely.
Star Wars and DAoC being the best examples. DAoC built itself on being a PvP(RVR) game, while its competitor at the time was the PvE giant (Everquest). Well, DAoC decided to try and out-PVE EQ to take some of their subscribers. It back fired horribly. The PVE was awful, and it just made people quit DAoC, since their players weren't PvE players anyway.
Warcraft on the other hand... They have always been a PVE centric game. When it launched, we didn't even have BG's. All we had were PVP servers, duels, and the old-school FFA PVP arenas. The focus was clearly on "progression". Obtaining "keys" and clearing "content". The amazing PvP was a side-quest, never really the focus sadly.
With Burning Crusade, they tried to focus on both. But they realized how difficult it would be to pump resources into PVE, and balancing their newly crowned E-sport, "5v5/3v3/2v2 Structured Arena". The cracks began to show under the spotlight of this highly controlled environment, and the developers were in a constant class/racial arms-race, trying to balance classes for the E-sport Arena, and the raids. With Wrath of the Lich King (And a whole new class added to the fray), balance was completely thrown out of wack again.
So after Wrath, to me, it seems like they decided to throw their arms up and say "F*** it" when it comes to PvP, especially Arena.
This seems the major reason people point to post BC as the "falling off point" for Warcraft. Granted, it still has many more subcribers than any other MMO. Probably 10x the amount of people playing it than newly release subscriptionless Guild Wars 2. But to many hardcores, like myself, the game is dead.
well for me personally, I didnt give a shit about Class Balance like that in Arena.
What bothered me in regarding TBC and Onwards, was the fact that ARENAS became the MAIN FORMAT OF PVP!
Arenas couldnt be pugged queued. It was all premades. So this meant, if you were not playing a class/spec that was strong, aka a bottom of the barrel kind of class, you likely wont get a chance to play on an Arena Team,,,,
IF YOU CANT PLAY ON AN ARENA TEAM
YOU CANT GET BEST PVP GEAR NO MATTER HOW MUCH PVPING YOU DO!!!
This meant, the Arena players could jump into BG and stump the rest of us PvPers that dont have access to Arena.
I played a Ret/Prot Paladin back then in TBC, and I know from experience how it felt to play the bottom of the barrel class/spec.
Paladins were worst healers (although I stop playing healer paladins during TBC)
Paladins were the worst Tanks (and dont hand me that AoE tanking bullshit. that was clearly a gimmick and you know it!!)
Paladins were the worst DPS (Lolret even coined a term on UrbanDictionary!!!)
I had to always work harder than other classes any anything I did in terms of PvP as a Ret Paladin.
Most the time when you do find a Arena team, you would get blamed for anything that went wrong since you were the Ret Paladin, lol. my my my johnny gil.
I hated Arenas in MMOs ever since. it just showed me that in a MMO, LARGE SCALE PvP is just more balanced than SMALL SCALE PVP.
Problem came with what Blizard did during TBC and onward.
the continuted to nerf the battlegrounds to the point were they were only a shell of what they once were. Look at the evolution of AV for example. would be nice if somebody could write a well detailed evolution of AV article so new people can see what they missed out on. Greatest PvP I had in WoW ever. Even my experiences in World PvP dont hold up to Old AV.
total nonstop hours long large scale battling.
Philosophy of MMO Game Design
Season 3, I hit Gladiator with a Retribution Paladin on my 5's team.
Arms Warrior
Ret Paladin
Frost Mage
Restoration Shaman
Discipline Priest
But yes, you further proved my point. Blizzard had to choose between two types of gamers. The dedicated PVP player, and the casual who whines and can't seem to get out of his scrubby habbit of making excuses for his own failures. (You.)
This choice also had to be made in PvE, with Blizzard making everything much easier, adding a raid finder/auto-join dungeon finder, and moving to a pure token system for 100% viable pre-raid loot.
So, we're in agreement, the game could not be developed for both types of player in mind, and they made their choice. I hope you all are enjoying your Pandas.
Hell yes. It's around the 5 or 6 year mark usually.
The old guard starts looking to do something other than what they've done for the past 6-8 years, and the new guard coming in is more than likely trained on the procedure far more than the history and the original vision of the game. It's consistent with most of the MMOs that make it 6+ years into their post-release cycle. Losing touch with the playerbase isn't the result of an immediate shift, but rather the first outward evidence to the players of how much the devs have drifted.
BTW, for UO, it wasn't Trammel. It was Age of Shadows.
It's not that these things kill the game, but often they do significant enough damage to prompt a series of updates and expansions focused on finxing the damage they had done to either the game mechanics or the player population.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
lol the tournament only had one ,,, ONE ret Paladin.
even Shamans were in better shape. And that was in 5v5. lol
you are on some BS if you believe TBC Ret paladins could carry their own in Arena.
Didnt even have PvP stat on gear! Didnt even have a interrupt... lol.
and SoV was a joke unless you were exploiting the auto attack....
Philosophy of MMO Game Design
Many of the good players didn't bother with the tournament servers.
We were too busy cleaning house on the live servers, with our actual characters.
It wasn't just about the single character, like you seem to think. This is where the scrub mentality comes into play.
A retribution paladin was powerful with the proper team composition. Freedom on himself or the warrior, combined with dispels from the priest made our two melee DPS pretty hard to peel. Combined with the burst and lockdown from having windfury totem...
It was a powerful comp. It was essentially a 2345 set-up, with the Paladin and Shaman switching roles.
This part, yes. However, consulting the community shouldn't be needed. If the dev was adequately in touch with their own game, they'd know "too much" and wouldn't do it.
My way of thinking is: If the playerbase likes the game, add to it (more) not change it (different).
More simply stated: Don't piss off the fans who pay your salary.
The bottomline to all this is "MONEY"
The saturation of the market and the competition of titles all trying to get YOU as a potential customer is what drives most of the X kills Y segments of gameplay.
15 years ago we didn't have many choices....as more and more access became readily available the Games evolved which was natural, a new type of player also evolved, we started to see the more casual player, one that also seemed to have a short attention span.
So in essence the game titles that succeed are the ones that can evolve with their playerbase. Sadly the market is so saturated across the board, there is no longer any identity.
Just ask yourself why F2P is the preferred method that games go towards....
It's a cash grab, what harm is it to a publisher to attempt to get as many customers as possible in the shortest amount of time?
What makes ANGRY BIRDS so popular? it's braindead easy to see that it's a simplistic game.
Gamers in general should realize we are a dying breed.... Why should a developer want to make a game that is against the norm? Today's X kills Y segment is not persay the actual gameplay but it's the MIND of today's gamer.
Instant gratification in the least amount of time is what the world is today...
All gamer's should wake up and understand that.
I think, honestly, that the problem with MMO design is that its not prepared to handle its own sunset with any dignity. This is a normal business issue, really. You have to have an idea that makes money, then you work out the details to get people to make the idea a reality and pay them for it. Then, as time goes on, inevitably the idea will wane so you must either have a new idea or be prepared to rework the process to keep the first idea on life support knowing it cannot grow. Growth is the bottom line in all business.
Growth is how a company stabilizes. You want good people to work for you, so that the quality of product you create is high. These good people want growth for themselves, higher pay, promotions, better benefits. So the company must always be in a state of growth to compensate for that. Then they have to acknowledge that a sunset will come, and they need to grow financially to accomodate driving new creative things to make money from. Take Wal-mart. There is a point where an individual store really cannot make much more in terms of raising profit higher. There are set numbers of potential customers in an area. So they have to make new stores, to raise that profit potential again. This must all happen pretty quickly, before the initial stores plateu. Then they have to micromanage the growth from those combined stores to find ways to increase profit in individual ones. Like buying out suppliers to cut out middle men from their overhead.
For an MMO, this is much simpler, yet much different too. You can see the most MMO companies that have made any money are always pushing new material and new games in future projects. Blizzard has had their secret MMO in works for years and years. SOE buys new property and moves it onto their all access platform to encourage it. NCSoft is restructuring their affairs to relocate resources into new projects instead of floating old ones. This is all because an MMO will die. It cannot live forever anymore than any other game can. We play them, and tire of them. Single player games do not suffer this, as they are designed for one-time consumption and one time pay off. MMO design is so much larger, and needs constant money. The programmer working on WoW in vanilla won't be there today. Why would he? What career man in his right mind would stay at the same position for a decade? He went to school, worked hard, and wants success. He wants forward motion. So do his team members. Over time they move up, or move on to new jobs. WoW has done well with its subscribers to keep this motion as long as it has. Other games are falling faster, because its painfully hard to manage finances in a market that can drop overnight.
So, I do not think that, outside of SWG for obvious reasons, that these games are making content in a bad way. I think that players have no clue what goes on in the real world, and that the businessmen in MMO gaming cannot plan ahead well enough to allow a game to reach its peak, while releasing a new game near that same time. Thats the real goal here. To hit the mountaintop and then stop, let the game float on life support and get rare, if any, new content, while bringing something new and awesome to the table to take over for its losses. This is actually an area that SOE is taking a neat approach. Station Pass with a giant library of games is a great deal. If those games get a barebones dev crew, slow updates, but stead users paying for station passes...they can float a dead game for years and keep it alive longer than other companies will. Hell, thats the only reason SWG lived for as long as it did anyway. Vanguard players should be thanking SOE everyday for the fact they have that game at all. NCSoft would have killed it, and moved those servers to a new game and its crew to other projects.
Maybe if the world were different, maybe if things were cheaper, maybe if programming and business management weren't so costly or hard. Maybe maybe maybe. But in the real world these factors weigh heavy on the dreams and hopes of game developers. They have to make you happy, make their team happy, make their investors happy. None of those three groups are happy about the same things the others are. In fact, most times, what makes one group happy will take away from the joy of another.
Life
Sucks
But wasn't SWG losing subs even before NGE?
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
Developers consult their marketing department, which doesn't always get it right, in fact in the MMO market they usually get it wrong.
Generally the release of a dodgy expansion starts the death of a successful MMO, and it is not a personal view, the subscription numbers speaks volumes, more than thousands words.
I agree devs often go overboard with changes, not just with expansions / updates, but sometimes in development / alpha / beta stages also.
It's a common problem usually having to do with a mix of things like:
a) devs just being completely out of touch with their fanbase
b) devs not being able to discern between well thought out suggestions & requests that will make the entire game better vs needless whining by people who want the game to be catered to them
c) decisions being made based on short sighted easy profit goals vs longevity and better overall success
d) changes in staff which wind up replacing the original devs who were very in touch witht heir playerbase and created the games we love with people who dont have 1/4 the talent, vision, or common sense of said original devs
e) being developed & published by a group of people with no real vision / goal and who are just kind of like "hey lets make this awesome MMO with no solid foundation and well thought out design. We will just kind of wing it and change things as we see fit depending on how we feel or how much pople complain at the time"