Over the past few months, the advice / things I've seen are that more businesses accept that most players will leave their MMO wihtin 6 months after launch.
Make the investment back on box sales and any subs after that is mostly profit. If the game has staying power, great! Expansion packs for more $$$.
People are treating MMOs like what they are, an entertainment product.
Players certainly do so why can't game makers?
My question is, why is this a 'bad' thing?
Game makers make more MMOs, more players play them and after awhile players / game makers move on to their next game.
I bought every Civilization / SimCity game that came out. I don't play the previous ones once I buy the current one though. Why can't MMOs be treated this way?
As long as the game makers make smart business decisions, I don't see a down side.
More MMOs for players to play and more game makers make money.
Someone may want an MMO that they'll play for years, but they are the minority.
We may be in the minority, but our numbers aren't nearly as small as you seem to believe. Besides, if we all thought like you, there'd be no reason for a top end in anything, all restuarants would be cheap fast food, all cars small economy models, and all games on consoles instead of PC's because that is what was most popular and desired by the masses.
But it's true, if you treat MMORPG's as simple games (which most Dev's seem to do now days), your supposition of play and toss away makes sense.
However, if you are trying to create a virtual world for players to inhabit, then the design choices are quite different and longevity becomes one of the chief considerations when deciding how to build your MMORPG.
We have enough toss away games, time is right for a few good new worlds to inhabit and explore.
This guy is my new favorite person.
It used to be a days excursion getting your party together, heading out on a journey accross the world and into the depths of a dungeon.
Now it's a queue, some trolling, a load screen, zergfest, repeat.
WoW players ruined the genre. They drove their game into a mindless themepark through forum QQing, now they expect every MMO they play to be the same garbage and they'll cry if they don't get it. Still waiting for a dev to decide that they don't care about people they can't please, and that they can continue to improve their craft and expand the limits of the genre, rather than devolve it one release at a time.
Carebear/casual/12yearolds/WoW kids: Please go console game, play your CoD...and leave the MMO industry alone. I'm begging you.
the real problem with a content locust is they are exessively vocal... they burn up the content too fast, then QQ for months about how they have nothing to do while the developer is struggling to finish new content and put out patches.
if they didnt burn up the content of a game over night then bitch about it until the world implodes there wouldnt be such an issue with it. but they expect to complete all content and have brand new stuff the next day...
rather then playing the game and enjoying it they play it just to beat it.. making the whole game production system pointless.
hense why so many games are repeating basicly Pong..
I get more content from Skyrim on the PC (with mods) in a year, than I would with a MMO that would only last 4-6 months content wise...AND Skyrim would be a lot cheaper.
My Skyrim, Fallout 4, Starbound and WoW + other game mods at MODDB:
Originally posted by Skooma2 I am not trolling. What is "content locust?" It seems that something there is misspelled or subject to a typo, but, I can't figure it out.
People who intensely play a game when it first comes out then leave once they have consumed the main story arc (contributing to the population crash a few months after the game has been released).
Locusts are insects that can, under the right conditions, form enormous swarms that descend upon farm fields, eat entire crops in a quick frenzy, then fly off leaving a barren wasteland.
OP I cant believe anyone would promote making 3 month max mmos, although you just did. Do you really like buying a new mmo every three months?? Speeding up the cycle is the exact opposite thing devs need to do. I am also confident that the majority of mmo players don't like buying game after game...we aren't console gamers for a reason.
Over the past few months, the advice / things I've seen are that more businesses accept that most players will leave their MMO wihtin 6 months after launch.
Make the investment back on box sales and any subs after that is mostly profit. If the game has staying power, great! Expansion packs for more $$$.
People are treating MMOs like what they are, an entertainment product.
Players certainly do so why can't game makers?
My question is, why is this a 'bad' thing?
Game makers make more MMOs, more players play them and after awhile players / game makers move on to their next game.
I bought every Civilization / SimCity game that came out. I don't play the previous ones once I buy the current one though. Why can't MMOs be treated this way?
As long as the game makers make smart business decisions, I don't see a down side.
More MMOs for players to play and more game makers make money.
Someone may want an MMO that they'll play for years, but they are the minority.
By itself there is nothing wrong with being a content locust. However IMO there is something inherently wrong (at least with the persons cognitive processes) if they act as a content locust, chewing it up as fast as possible and then complain there is nothing to do.
Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it is bad.
Originally posted by Skooma2 I am not trolling. What is "content locust?" It seems that something there is misspelled or subject to a typo, but, I can't figure it out.
People who intensely play a game when it first comes out then leave once they have consumed the main story arc (contributing to the population crash a few months after the game has been released).
Locusts are insects that can, under the right conditions, form enormous swarms that descend upon farm fields, eat entire crops in a quick frenzy, then fly off leaving a barren wasteland.
Thank you.
Hedonismbot: Your latest performance was as delectable as dipping my bottom over and over into a bath of the silkiest oils and creams.
Are the players to blame for blowing through the content too quickly? Or is it the developers fault for making the games too easy?
Or maybe, just maybe, the MMO genre as a whole hasn't blossomed into its full potential yet.
The devs are the ones responsible. They rushed out some half finished games over the last few years and pissed off the players and community. It's a vicious cycle at this point because players are hesitant to invest time and money into new MMO's and afterwards will murder them in the forums if they're let down. This is making it extremely difficult to get proper financing behind new MMO projects, which leads to more crappy games, which leads to more pissed off, sceptical players...and it goes and goes.
I'd like to think the genre hasn't reached it's full potential, but judging that earlier MMOs were more advanced than most modern ones; I don't think it's the case.
Are the players to blame for blowing through the content too quickly? Or is it the developers fault for making the games too easy?
Or maybe, just maybe, the MMO genre as a whole hasn't blossomed into its full potential yet.
The devs are the ones responsible. They rushed out some half finished games over the last few years and pissed off the players and community. It's a vicious cycle at this point because players are hesitant to invest time and money into new MMO's and afterwards will murder them in the forums if they're let down. This is making it extremely difficult to get proper financing behind new MMO projects, which leads to more crappy games, which leads to more pissed off, sceptical players...and it goes and goes.
I'd like to think the genre hasn't reached it's full potential, but judging that earlier MMOs were more advanced than most modern ones; I don't think it's the case.
Hmm I don't actually think so. I think most of the MMO releases in the past 5-6 years have had more content at release than really any of the original MMO's and most of the ones preceding them (them being any MMO since basically WoW).
I also don't believe that the old MMO's were more advanced. A couple games had more features but not most of them. Most of them IMO have less features than current ones.
I just think the mindset of the community as a whole has changed. There is just a much greater percentage of people looking for fast paced content and end-game type play while the ones that want to do things slower are either fading out or being drowned out.
.
Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it is bad.
Are the players to blame for blowing through the content too quickly? Or is it the developers fault for making the games too easy?
Or maybe, just maybe, the MMO genre as a whole hasn't blossomed into its full potential yet.
The devs are the ones responsible. They rushed out some half finished games over the last few years and pissed off the players and community. It's a vicious cycle at this point because players are hesitant to invest time and money into new MMO's and afterwards will murder them in the forums if they're let down. This is making it extremely difficult to get proper financing behind new MMO projects, which leads to more crappy games, which leads to more pissed off, sceptical players...and it goes and goes.
I'd like to think the genre hasn't reached it's full potential, but judging that earlier MMOs were more advanced than most modern ones; I don't think it's the case.
I see your point. But a big portion of "content" in past MMO's was the rep/gear grind. After players got vocal about how long the grind was, the devs did away with most of it. That significantly reduced the longetivity of the game
My point is, there is yet to be an MMO with the longetivity of Vanilla WoW without the grind. The idea of an online virtual world was way ahead of its time.
I'm curious -- at what point was there an influx of FPS and console gamers to MMOs? What percentage of the MMO population today are also heavy console gamers? Are console gamers more vocal than average? I know that there's kind of a culture of powering through console games quickly, and wondering how much that has affected PC and MMO gaming. Are console gamers being targeted by designers more today than they were in the past? Or is there no correlation at all, and it's just something that's occurred as everything has become more fast-paced?
Are the players to blame for blowing through the content too quickly? Or is it the developers fault for making the games too easy?
Or maybe, just maybe, the MMO genre as a whole hasn't blossomed into its full potential yet.
The devs are the ones responsible. They rushed out some half finished games over the last few years and pissed off the players and community. It's a vicious cycle at this point because players are hesitant to invest time and money into new MMO's and afterwards will murder them in the forums if they're let down. This is making it extremely difficult to get proper financing behind new MMO projects, which leads to more crappy games, which leads to more pissed off, sceptical players...and it goes and goes.
I'd like to think the genre hasn't reached it's full potential, but judging that earlier MMOs were more advanced than most modern ones; I don't think it's the case.
Hmm I don't actually think so. I think most of the MMO releases in the past 5-6 years have had more content at release than really any of the original MMO's and most of the ones preceding them.
I also don't believe that the old MMO's were more advanced. A couple games had more features but not most of them. Most of them IMO have less features than current ones.
I just think the mindset of the community as a whole has changed. There is just a much greater percentage of people looking for fast paced content and end-game type play while the ones that want to do things slower are either fading out or being drowned out.
.
Debatable, the way we define content nowadays takes only the sheer numbers into account, how many dungeons, how many raids, how many quests, how many craftables, but in reality it is not even half the content timewise or impactwise of older mmos, most of the quests are one-time, most of the dungeons are unimaginative and forgettable, most craftables useless, just to not endanger the "endgame balance", whatever that is, we have no confirmed sightings so far
Only the outside game worlds are unarguably smaller, wow, l2 even rs feature huge worlds.
As for advanced, they were certainly technically inferior (even if we might get into a argument over the overuse of gcd recently), but they are inferiors in, due to lack of words on my part, the "social" part, which might be due to the newer games being more streamlined, we cannot forget that one of the strongest drives to both group up AND leave the game is the sense of victory (or lack of) over the game system as a whole, which recently d3 devs parodied as "we want players breaking the system", and there are much more ways to break a imperfect and/or less constrictive system.
As for the mindset of the community, depends once again on definitions (and maybe i will just repeat the same thing you were saying), the new generation overall is not that different to the older ones, we just have less "nerdy" people playing mainstream mmos these days, but more of the arcade and console guys, which does not mean they dont exist, just visit some kind of free server of a older mmo and you will predominantly see teens having similar experiences, failures and successes as we had back in the day, thousands of them, not 40+ year old nostalgic people.
They are just not the target group these days, making games for the angry german kid is much easier
Originally posted by funyahns They won't make games this way for long. Why bother spending all that money on building the game and systems just to be abandoned. Pretty soon you will just get a room where you can purchase crafts and wait in que for a dungeon without anything else to do. because the design of empty space is a waste
We have these sorts of MMOs already, they are called MOBAs and appeal to a large population players. (not that I understand the appeal)
Here is a question for you.... we have had defined genres for so many years now.
Multiplayer pretty much covered 8+ players, maybe ended around 64, perhaps a bit higher (all at the same time)
Co-op, that is 2-4 players (all at the same time).
Massive, which used to mean hundreds of characters (all at the same time).
But now massive means 10 players?
So what do I use to describe hundreds of players now that MMO stands for 2 to infinity?
I see your point. But a big portion of "content" in past MMO's was the rep/gear grind. After players got vocal about how long the grind was, the devs did away with most of it. That significantly reduced the longetivity of the game
My point is, there is yet to be an MMO with the longetivity of Vanilla WoW without the grind. The idea of an online virtual world was way ahead of its time.
It boils down to this .. creating a locale with appropriate graphics is expensive. Creating mob animation is expensive. So players are asked to repeat. And too much repetition will make ANYTHING boring.
So true longetivity is a pipe dream. A better way is to plan to have a much shorter life span (say a few month), and then move onto the next game.
If people stick with an MMO for years, that means less MMO comes out and less people to make MMOs.
I rather people rotate / churn through more MMOs.
Like I said, majority of players treat MMOs like an entertainment product / single player game where they only play for >6 months. Game makers are realizing that and making adjustments to that behaviour.
Gdemami - Informing people about your thoughts and impressions is not a review, it's a blog.
In either of the above two options, the offering could be anything from static modules to user-generated content to an option interface where you check off exactly what you want. Let's see... I want medium difficulty, tundra setting, four player, melee oriented, swarm rooms, hard boss.
*click* *click**click* *click* *click* *click*
Generating world environment...
Creating scenario and script...
Your party is entering the campaign.
So a 8-year-old CoH purely random instance, but placed in an outdoor setting?
Sure it's doable. Make it scale, and turn the level cap into a "high score" rating and you've generated a perpetual game.
Eventually people are going to start to grouse over the lack of new abilities, of course. And your basic 20 boss abilities (scalable or no) won't be terribly interesting forever.
But yes, for the type of player impressed by the biggest numbers, should do the trick.
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
If people stick with an MMO for years, that means less MMO comes out and less people to make MMOs.
I rather people rotate / churn through more MMOs.
Like I said, majority of players treat MMOs like an entertainment product / single player game where they only play for >6 months. Game makers are realizing that and making adjustments to that behaviour.
That sure seems to be the case anymore.. Not sure of the reasoning why players only stay for 6 mo. I played EQ and WoW for years, but gave up on both when their product turned into tier grind.. The last 2 major titles that I left were Rift and SWTOR..I didn't last past 4 months before I was bored to death.. End game in both those titles was "the end".. I think the silent majority are people like me.. We enjoy the journey until you have to make the choice of "cancel" or treadmill.. The average linear themepark seems to run out of content between 3-6 months..
The average linear themepark seems to run out of content between 3-6 months..
Well, content consumption is enormously variable. WoW survives with a massive player base clinging on through periods of intense boredom until the next major patch/expansion delivers some new content.
But the essential problem, first expressed well before 1997, remains unanswered:
What do we do to keep capped and bored players entertained and paying a sub for a while longer?
Players continue demanding a solution based on the original answers. But the locust effect? One of the two answers (Raiding) is inadequate alone. The other answer (PvP) isn't for everyone. And they've always let player uninterested in either slip through the cracks.
Waiting on a third answer. Still. Solutions based on the original two answers? Well, the traditional themepark idea seems to be pretty well exhausted of possibility.
Sandboxes are the marketing tagline du jour currently; we'll see how well that survives a few releases. If not, looks like cell phone apps instead of mmos.
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
I always talked about MMO getting away from the linear storyline game.. That just leads to one thing, and one thing only.. End game treadmill burnout.. Some are more tollerant of that than others.. I have advocated that devs think about making a game more of a spider web, then a train ride.. The way I view it, each starting city would be the center of their web.. Games like EQ1 would have 12+ spider webs all inacting with each other.. Each connection giving you paths upon paths to take to develop your character.. I'm also dead set against zone progression that makes old zones obsolete as you level.. You're basically burning bridges.. lol
I want games that evolve and characters that evolve over time.. Let the worlds be dynamic and ever changing.. From what I understand Defiance is thinking of something down this path, tied in with the TV show.. but we'll see..
This thread is not really about content locust. Those are the players we all know who play 16 hours a day and reach the level cap a week after release.
What you're actually discussing is the different modern trend of game hopping. Something that was unknown back in the days when the choices were just UO, EQ and AC. People like to look at those first MMOs through rosé colored glasses and attribute magical qualities to the content... A type of grindy content few would tolerate today. You think games had more variety and less repetitive end-game content back then? That's not the way I remember it.
The main reason players didn't game-hop as much back then is obvious: there wasn't anything new to hop to. So we stuck around with the same people for a long time and made better friends and/or enemies. IMHO, continuing with a game because you have a lot of friends or rivals there is a much more powerful reason to stick with it than the content itself.
A lot of us who played those early games miss the stable communities we had there but the majority of current players never experienced it. They have always played in a time when we have literally hundreds of MMOS to choose from and where short-term communities with guilds that fall appart in a month or two are the norm. There is threa after thread here blaming the new games for this when the main reason we all game hop more now is that our friends are scattered all over the place.
Just look at the website for most large guilds these days. You'll see subsections for the 6 or 7 MMOs the guild members currently play. 10 years ago that just wasn't the case. One guild... One MMO.
So stop asking for MMOs that give you 2 years worth of content instead of 3 month's... You're going to leave in 3 months anyway when the next new shiny MMO is released and your friends go there.
"Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community ... but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It's the invasion of the idiots”
― Umberto Eco
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?” ― CD PROJEKT RED
Just look at the website for most large guilds these days. You'll see subsections for the 6 or 7 MMOs the guild members currently play. 10 years ago that just wasn't the case. One guild... One MMO.
So stop asking for MMOs that give you 2 years worth of content instead of 3 month's... You're going to leave in 3 months anyway when the next new shiny MMO is released and your friends go there.
Exactly. I think it is small thinking to restrict oneself to one game or one world. I don't see a problem playing with the same friends cross servers, and cross game. That, in fact, expand the community you can interact with, and it is a great thing in my view.
Comments
Hedonismbot: Your latest performance was as delectable as dipping my bottom over and over into a bath of the silkiest oils and creams.
This guy is my new favorite person.
It used to be a days excursion getting your party together, heading out on a journey accross the world and into the depths of a dungeon.
Now it's a queue, some trolling, a load screen, zergfest, repeat.
WoW players ruined the genre. They drove their game into a mindless themepark through forum QQing, now they expect every MMO they play to be the same garbage and they'll cry if they don't get it. Still waiting for a dev to decide that they don't care about people they can't please, and that they can continue to improve their craft and expand the limits of the genre, rather than devolve it one release at a time.
Carebear/casual/12yearolds/WoW kids: Please go console game, play your CoD...and leave the MMO industry alone. I'm begging you.
http://thewordiz.wordpress.com/
the real problem with a content locust is they are exessively vocal... they burn up the content too fast, then QQ for months about how they have nothing to do while the developer is struggling to finish new content and put out patches.
if they didnt burn up the content of a game over night then bitch about it until the world implodes there wouldnt be such an issue with it. but they expect to complete all content and have brand new stuff the next day...
rather then playing the game and enjoying it they play it just to beat it.. making the whole game production system pointless.
hense why so many games are repeating basicly Pong..
Are the players to blame for blowing through the content too quickly? Or is it the developers fault for making the games too easy?
Or maybe, just maybe, the MMO genre as a whole hasn't blossomed into its full potential yet.
I get more content from Skyrim on the PC (with mods) in a year, than I would with a MMO that would only last 4-6 months content wise...AND Skyrim would be a lot cheaper.
My Skyrim, Fallout 4, Starbound and WoW + other game mods at MODDB:
https://www.moddb.com/mods/skyrim-anime-overhaul
People who intensely play a game when it first comes out then leave once they have consumed the main story arc (contributing to the population crash a few months after the game has been released).
Locusts are insects that can, under the right conditions, form enormous swarms that descend upon farm fields, eat entire crops in a quick frenzy, then fly off leaving a barren wasteland.
By itself there is nothing wrong with being a content locust. However IMO there is something inherently wrong (at least with the persons cognitive processes) if they act as a content locust, chewing it up as fast as possible and then complain there is nothing to do.
Thank you.
Hedonismbot: Your latest performance was as delectable as dipping my bottom over and over into a bath of the silkiest oils and creams.
The devs are the ones responsible. They rushed out some half finished games over the last few years and pissed off the players and community. It's a vicious cycle at this point because players are hesitant to invest time and money into new MMO's and afterwards will murder them in the forums if they're let down. This is making it extremely difficult to get proper financing behind new MMO projects, which leads to more crappy games, which leads to more pissed off, sceptical players...and it goes and goes.
I'd like to think the genre hasn't reached it's full potential, but judging that earlier MMOs were more advanced than most modern ones; I don't think it's the case.
http://thewordiz.wordpress.com/
Hmm I don't actually think so. I think most of the MMO releases in the past 5-6 years have had more content at release than really any of the original MMO's and most of the ones preceding them (them being any MMO since basically WoW).
I also don't believe that the old MMO's were more advanced. A couple games had more features but not most of them. Most of them IMO have less features than current ones.
I just think the mindset of the community as a whole has changed. There is just a much greater percentage of people looking for fast paced content and end-game type play while the ones that want to do things slower are either fading out or being drowned out.
.
I see your point. But a big portion of "content" in past MMO's was the rep/gear grind. After players got vocal about how long the grind was, the devs did away with most of it. That significantly reduced the longetivity of the game
My point is, there is yet to be an MMO with the longetivity of Vanilla WoW without the grind. The idea of an online virtual world was way ahead of its time.
Debatable, the way we define content nowadays takes only the sheer numbers into account, how many dungeons, how many raids, how many quests, how many craftables, but in reality it is not even half the content timewise or impactwise of older mmos, most of the quests are one-time, most of the dungeons are unimaginative and forgettable, most craftables useless, just to not endanger the "endgame balance", whatever that is, we have no confirmed sightings so far
Only the outside game worlds are unarguably smaller, wow, l2 even rs feature huge worlds.
As for advanced, they were certainly technically inferior (even if we might get into a argument over the overuse of gcd recently), but they are inferiors in, due to lack of words on my part, the "social" part, which might be due to the newer games being more streamlined, we cannot forget that one of the strongest drives to both group up AND leave the game is the sense of victory (or lack of) over the game system as a whole, which recently d3 devs parodied as "we want players breaking the system", and there are much more ways to break a imperfect and/or less constrictive system.
As for the mindset of the community, depends once again on definitions (and maybe i will just repeat the same thing you were saying), the new generation overall is not that different to the older ones, we just have less "nerdy" people playing mainstream mmos these days, but more of the arcade and console guys, which does not mean they dont exist, just visit some kind of free server of a older mmo and you will predominantly see teens having similar experiences, failures and successes as we had back in the day, thousands of them, not 40+ year old nostalgic people.
They are just not the target group these days, making games for the angry german kid is much easier
Flame on!
Here is a question for you.... we have had defined genres for so many years now.
Multiplayer pretty much covered 8+ players, maybe ended around 64, perhaps a bit higher (all at the same time)
Co-op, that is 2-4 players (all at the same time).
Massive, which used to mean hundreds of characters (all at the same time).
But now massive means 10 players?
So what do I use to describe hundreds of players now that MMO stands for 2 to infinity?
It boils down to this .. creating a locale with appropriate graphics is expensive. Creating mob animation is expensive. So players are asked to repeat. And too much repetition will make ANYTHING boring.
So true longetivity is a pipe dream. A better way is to plan to have a much shorter life span (say a few month), and then move onto the next game.
There are only so many MMO players in the world.
If people stick with an MMO for years, that means less MMO comes out and less people to make MMOs.
I rather people rotate / churn through more MMOs.
Like I said, majority of players treat MMOs like an entertainment product / single player game where they only play for >6 months. Game makers are realizing that and making adjustments to that behaviour.
Gdemami -
Informing people about your thoughts and impressions is not a review, it's a blog.
So a 8-year-old CoH purely random instance, but placed in an outdoor setting?
Sure it's doable. Make it scale, and turn the level cap into a "high score" rating and you've generated a perpetual game.
Eventually people are going to start to grouse over the lack of new abilities, of course. And your basic 20 boss abilities (scalable or no) won't be terribly interesting forever.
But yes, for the type of player impressed by the biggest numbers, should do the trick.
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
That sure seems to be the case anymore.. Not sure of the reasoning why players only stay for 6 mo. I played EQ and WoW for years, but gave up on both when their product turned into tier grind.. The last 2 major titles that I left were Rift and SWTOR..I didn't last past 4 months before I was bored to death.. End game in both those titles was "the end".. I think the silent majority are people like me.. We enjoy the journey until you have to make the choice of "cancel" or treadmill.. The average linear themepark seems to run out of content between 3-6 months..
Well, content consumption is enormously variable. WoW survives with a massive player base clinging on through periods of intense boredom until the next major patch/expansion delivers some new content.
But the essential problem, first expressed well before 1997, remains unanswered:
What do we do to keep capped and bored players entertained and paying a sub for a while longer?
Players continue demanding a solution based on the original answers. But the locust effect? One of the two answers (Raiding) is inadequate alone. The other answer (PvP) isn't for everyone. And they've always let player uninterested in either slip through the cracks.
Waiting on a third answer. Still. Solutions based on the original two answers? Well, the traditional themepark idea seems to be pretty well exhausted of possibility.
Sandboxes are the marketing tagline du jour currently; we'll see how well that survives a few releases. If not, looks like cell phone apps instead of mmos.
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
I always talked about MMO getting away from the linear storyline game.. That just leads to one thing, and one thing only.. End game treadmill burnout.. Some are more tollerant of that than others.. I have advocated that devs think about making a game more of a spider web, then a train ride.. The way I view it, each starting city would be the center of their web.. Games like EQ1 would have 12+ spider webs all inacting with each other.. Each connection giving you paths upon paths to take to develop your character.. I'm also dead set against zone progression that makes old zones obsolete as you level.. You're basically burning bridges.. lol
I want games that evolve and characters that evolve over time.. Let the worlds be dynamic and ever changing.. From what I understand Defiance is thinking of something down this path, tied in with the TV show.. but we'll see..
Regarding the OP, I concur. Finally, we might get some perma-death action.
P.S. - MMORPG.com, more RipperX videos, please. That guy is too much great.
This thread is not really about content locust. Those are the players we all know who play 16 hours a day and reach the level cap a week after release.
What you're actually discussing is the different modern trend of game hopping. Something that was unknown back in the days when the choices were just UO, EQ and AC. People like to look at those first MMOs through rosé colored glasses and attribute magical qualities to the content... A type of grindy content few would tolerate today. You think games had more variety and less repetitive end-game content back then? That's not the way I remember it.
The main reason players didn't game-hop as much back then is obvious: there wasn't anything new to hop to. So we stuck around with the same people for a long time and made better friends and/or enemies. IMHO, continuing with a game because you have a lot of friends or rivals there is a much more powerful reason to stick with it than the content itself.
A lot of us who played those early games miss the stable communities we had there but the majority of current players never experienced it. They have always played in a time when we have literally hundreds of MMOS to choose from and where short-term communities with guilds that fall appart in a month or two are the norm. There is threa after thread here blaming the new games for this when the main reason we all game hop more now is that our friends are scattered all over the place.
Just look at the website for most large guilds these days. You'll see subsections for the 6 or 7 MMOs the guild members currently play. 10 years ago that just wasn't the case. One guild... One MMO.
So stop asking for MMOs that give you 2 years worth of content instead of 3 month's... You're going to leave in 3 months anyway when the next new shiny MMO is released and your friends go there.
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
Exactly. I think it is small thinking to restrict oneself to one game or one world. I don't see a problem playing with the same friends cross servers, and cross game. That, in fact, expand the community you can interact with, and it is a great thing in my view.