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WoW eats your games population until only the 1337 are left
gargantroo
Member Posts: 1,477
On every forum, I am hearing the repeating of "lack of new players". This is very true. I returned to Ultima Online and at Britain bank, there was not a single "young" player or any non-gm artifact-laden person in it, and I played on the Atlantic server.
DAOC has the same problem, few new players, 100s of 1337 people.
I just got World of Warcraft and I am enjoying it very much, but I miss the classic games that it's destroying by consuming the players.
Maybe WoW and EQ2 will be the only MMORPGs left within the next few years.
i play on australian servers because racism is acceptable there
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Well, fortunately the MMO business has higher churn than Wal-mart, and I have to believe WoW is going to have a fairly low retention rate. The endgame is all about hardcore instance runs that consume massive chunks of time. That, and pvp. There's a pretty large segment of the gaming population that lacks the time for the former and the desire for the latter, and those people are all going to be moving on once they reach level 60. For those people, the WoW slogan is essentially "World of Warcraft: a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there." It's terrific at what it does, but it's only a long-term solution for one or two segments of the gaming world.
That's why I can't go back to DAoC. As tempting as it is from time to time, I couldn't stand playing with the obnoxious know-it-alls that would critique my spec down to every point. As you more or less said, most of the losers that've invested a good 1/10th of their life to the game are too afraid to leave it.
(I'm not criticising hardcore gamers, I'm criticising that creepy "next step". For instance, those people that have a strict playing schedule of 8PM - 10AM just so they won't miss an alarm clock raid).
Opposite experience, WoW ate our 1337's and left the more mature players and the better players are coming back _FROM_ WoW to Ryzom.
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WoW will be strong now but in time it is going to fall. Half of the population there is already at the max level with the best gear available, with some people even claiming to have a max level character in every class. Eventually people are going to get tired of the PvP where nearly every class uses 2-3 powers at most during group combat. Being a mage, I thought PvP would be great, and it was for a while until casting fireball after fireball just got boring.
Also WoW will be losing alot of players due to balancing issues. My friends and I left for a same reason. We were mostly mages/paladins. My paladin friends first wanted to leave basically because they are nearly useless in PvP combat whether it be 1v1 or group, and with the continuing changes to the game, my mage class was becoming useless as well. In time you will see alot of the spell casters just quit due to the constant increase of health boosts from armor and new weapons turning tanks into huge dmg dealers, while casters are getting little to no bonus for their spells. Myself, as a LvL 60 mage, I just couldnt stand the fact that there were several classes able to compete with me damage wise while my class by far has the lowest health and armor. And no I wasn't just some noob mage because I was ranked in the top 10 on my server while barely playing. The main problem is the Honor system which they developed all around the amount of damage done. WoW is attempting to balance the game by equaling the damage ability of each class to balance the rankings but their forgetting the fact that a 4000hp 3000 armor hunter cant be dealing as much damage as a 2800hp 500 armor mage for the game to be balanced. The game is just waiting to collapse and the major expansions are much to far away to keep people playing. At the very least most of the game will just suspend their accounts until northrend and Quel'Thelas are introduced.
I hope WoW keeps the haxxor kids away when the next GOOD mmorpg comes around
I think there is a basic misunderstanding here:
EQ's population consists mainly of players who are longterm players. I guess over half of the current EQ players (in a year the same goes for EQ2) are players that played it for years and will continue to do so.
WoW's population has and will have much more fluctuation. I would think WoW will keep being populated very high but mainly by drawing ever new players to it.
You might say that's why WoW is worse but then in EQ it makes sense to have a lot of knowledgeable people around while in WoW this is not needed for the game to be fun. WoW is now around for over half a year and it has not even begun to shrink in subscribers. In fact it still has the largest gain in population of all MMORPGs (with the exception of Guildwars which is not a direct challenger).
I too thought that WoW did not have a staying power but I was probably wrong. The playerbase of WoW might not consist of always the same people but it will be huge for years. I bet the amount of new players joining WoW once an expansion is released will be more than the current total subscribers of EQ2...
don't underestimate the masses of casual and half-casual gamers. Compared to those, the hardcore players (namely students and fanatics) are so very few that they don't even show on a statistic
WoW hasn't drained other mmorpgs nearly as much as it has drawn new people in to genre as WoW is extremely easy to approach.
WoW is good for a new gamers but its appeal to powergamers are limited because of its casual-friendliness and these powergamers will get tired in a while and start look for another game.
Bingo.
Carebear
*WoW = Level 60 Priest*
*EQ2 = Level 25 Druid*
Then why did SOE have to close half their servers after WoW came out?
I do agree that WoW will keep drawing in newbies because they did a very good job of making the game accessible to new players. But after playing WoW it's really tough to go back to these older MMO's that relied on pure addiction and community to cover up for patchwork game design.
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By SOE you must mean EverQuest. EverQuest had been seeing a gradual decline in active population for many, many months prior to WoW or EQ2 being released. Since EQ depends very heavily on grouping it's critical to keep active populations relatively high, and thus a good idea.
The interesting thing about server populations and subscriptions is that while populations might dwindle, sub rates seem to remain fairly static.
Then why did SOE have to close half their servers after WoW came out?
I do agree that WoW will keep drawing in newbies because they did a very good job of making the game accessible to new players. But after playing WoW it's really tough to go back to these older MMO's that relied on pure addiction and community to cover up for patchwork game design.
From what I understand, they closed them down because the population had gotten lower because of the people that had gotten tired of EQ. A lot of the people were still playing EQ because there was nothing better out. One of my friends has already returned to EQ from WoW, so EQ's not gonna die anytime soon.
Carebear
*WoW = Level 60 Priest*
*EQ2 = Level 25 Druid*
By SOE you must mean EverQuest. EverQuest had been seeing a gradual decline in active population for many, many months prior to WoW or EQ2 being released. Since EQ depends very heavily on grouping it's critical to keep active populations relatively high, and thus a good idea.
The interesting thing about server populations and subscriptions is that while populations might dwindle, sub rates seem to remain fairly static.
I don't buy that. Shutting down half your servers all at once doesn't point to a gradual decline. That's more indicative of a very steep dropoff in a short period of time. That also says they don't expect most of those players to ever come back--and god knows they've been trying with the veteran rewards and complete revamp of caster damage spells.
By the way they actually have been offering a lower subscription rate too, the catch is you have to buy a year's worth of it to get the value.
My youtube MMO gaming channel
I personally don't care whether you believe it or not. Ask the people who have played it for years.
And how is this different from nearly every MMOG on the market today? They all do this.
I personally don't care whether you believe it or not. Ask the people who have played it for years.
And how is this different from nearly every MMOG on the market today? They all do this.
I played it from September of 98 to fall of last year. So I don't think I'll need to be asking anyone about the game's population pre-WoW. My server was the fourth or fifth oldest in the game and it was merged with another earlier this year. For that to happen there must have been a dramatic loss of players on both servers because Tribunal was pretty full when I quit in October.
You tried to say they upped the subscription rates as if that meant they weren't losing players by the thousands, when in fact it they're now offering a better bulk deal than ever.
My youtube MMO gaming channel
EQ2's population seems to be rising steadily, with a nice consistant flow of new players.
I'm a n00b to that game myself, (lvl 16) and I'm having NO problems getting groups....usually get an invite within seconds of announcing LFG.
And many, many of these people I meet are new players, often just having left WoW.
I believe someone above me called WoW a "Training mmorpg", and I agree. It's a good way to get introduced to the mmorpg game scene, but it has little longevity. EQ2 on the other hand seems to be virtually bottomless inasfar as content goes, much like Anarchy Online in it's day.
I think that before we are faced with the mighty giants of the future (D&D and LoTR mainly) that EQ2 may be where a lot of these WoW graduates end up, simply because it seems to be the next logical step.
Who knows....it will be interesting to see.