What I talk about is preserving the very process that allows for new ideas to grow and for those ideas to persist. The current publishing landscape however kills these ideas and concepts. It corrupts them through maximizing profit by broadening the scope of the target audience and finding ways to pull in more cash once that audience reaches it's limit. This is what we should worry about because it WILL happen to the product you once loved which the entire point of this entire thread with specific relation to Wow.
It flabbergasts me to hear responses that brush off this topic as paranoia when this very industry progression has impacted nearly every mmo on the market today. These changes can be the smallest integration of the model through major conversions that all but change the original game.
If you headed back 10 years (evidently far too long a time for many here to grasp or such ignorance would not formulate into text) would you even have dreamt the following:
- You could play an entire end game of an mmo simply by standing in one spot and queuing for instanced mini-games?
- You could pay cash for a max level character?
- You could pay cash for gear, mounts and nearly anything in game.
- You could level faster than others by throwing money above and beyond a sub fee at the developers?
- Entire game worlds that were created for the soul purpose of emulating realism could be bypassed by instant travel, instant group making, complete solo paths to leveling and every convenience that makes the game completely unreal rather than real?
- Cash shops, real money gambling, in game currency converted from real world cash.
I will tell you that every single player of 1st gen mmorpgs would shit a brick knowing what the future held for them and their games. You see and experience all of this and STILL have the nerve to say this trend is not happening? Are you out of your fucking minds?
Such an amazing post. Sobering in the midst of such insanity.
Insanity is believing those didnt exist back then and that MMOs were made for sole purpose of emulating realism.
That's the legacy of WoW. CHOICE. You can be utterly casual, or utterly hardcore, instead of being forced into hardcore to experience all the content you pay for as a subscriber.
WoW was the least hardcore game on the market. There was no choice. Either you did linear solo quest grinding, or you did nothing.
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Insanity is believing those didnt exist back then and that MMOs were made for sole purpose of emulating realism.
WoW was the least hardcore game on the market. There was no choice. Either you did linear solo quest grinding, or you did nothing.