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Is MMORPG a useful gaming site?
MmoFan2012
Member UncommonPosts: 23
this site is only useful for tracking lists of MMOs. sadly there are many websites now that provide this feature.
mmorpg surveys, articles, and news are nothing special anymore and have been poor quality for awhile.
the website layout is in need of update. the section for forum activity should be a tab. the section for game rating should be removed (my guess is that a group of fanbois and/or marketing reps are fixing the numbers).
please clean up mmorpg before we take it off our favorites list.
mmorpg surveys, articles, and news are nothing special anymore and have been poor quality for awhile.
the website layout is in need of update. the section for forum activity should be a tab. the section for game rating should be removed (my guess is that a group of fanbois and/or marketing reps are fixing the numbers).
please clean up mmorpg before we take it off our favorites list.
Post edited by BillMurphy on
This discussion has been closed.
Comments
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
Looking forward to: Crowfall / Lost Ark / Black Desert Mobile
MAGA
One problem which I think is common to all sites is that reviews can't be trusted in any way. Slamming a new release or a game in development would be suicide for any site these days. The Publishers would just refuse to deal with them any more and they'd have nothing to report until games released.
The same thing applies with review embargo's which say you can't put out a review until the day the game releases. You might break it once but you'd never get a chance to do it a second time.
Honest reviews take second place to profits, sad but that's the world we live in.
If MMORPG.COM only had wall-to-wall coverage of Korean MMO's, I'd take it off my favourites list immediately.
Layout, menu type, and effects could give a go for some reforms, but it also costs time and money
Content amount and community presence is just about right, and that is the core of the site.
Still game list rating is kind of shady, since we know not how it is determined, and if players actually influence on it and how. In times like these, rating could mean a world to some titles, and wrong numbers would cause confusion.
Now, we do monitor the votes cast and the way scores fluctuate and are weighted. When we see something shady, we step in and actively tell companies that if they try to influence the score or scores of other games, we'll lock voting and remove their score altogether.
As for the new site layout, yep. It's coming. On track for early this year. Was hoping for last year, but moving a site this old and full of content to a whole new database and content management system takes time, not to mention the effort put forth in the new design.
For starters? The mobile site will no longer be total crap, so there's that. Literally everything else about the site is being redesigned as well. It won't look the same, except the logo. Plus you'll be able to pick white or black layouts, it'll have a more readable and parse-able front page where content is king, and there will still be things like the hype meter and forum activity on the front page. It's really shaping up nicely, and I can't wait to show you all. But these things take time.
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EvE for example, the only real complaint about that game (other than the learning curve) is the griefing. Yet its community score is an 8.0, and its graphics score is an 8.8? Really? So either that rating is extremely dated or falsified. Similar to AoC, which at the time did have the best graphics ever, they still sit at 9.9, while ESO (the game with currently the best graphics and 6 years newer) has a 9.3 graphics rating.
Hype is hype and to claim it cant be bought or manipulated is disingenuous at best.
The site is doing its best in a desert but the point is that if its your actual PROFESSION to do this (and not a side hobby) then you go the extra little bit to go indepth on stuff. Puff pieces and advertising are great ways to make a buck and keep people happy, theyre certainly no way to actually REPORT on the issues going on right now with gaming in general.
But anyone who visits this site see where some games/developers/studios definitely get treated differently and almost protected, while some worthwhile projects go completely unmentioned.
Lotro released an expansion in Oct and not one single mention of it was made. The excuse was "they didnt release a press package'. Big F-ing deal. Lotro is a staple right now (for better or worse) of the old MMO guard. To not at least have some scrub intern post a blog about it is a joke. Yes Lotro and turbine are basically coasting along right now and nothing special is being done, so write that in the article/blog. But the expansion WAS Minas Tirith after all a pretty important area of the story.
I am sure there are other things that go unmentioned in other games (I dont play, and I dont play Lotro like I used to either) THAT is where the failures of this site are truly noticeable. But theyre too busy hyping all the other shit that is basically preying on gamers desperation for a new great game to come out they forget to write about stuff that you can actually log into and play if you choose to.
No site is perfect but I believe the staff here over the years have engaged in this endeavor mainly because they are fans of the genre. I doubt any of them are driving Porsches.
Edit: And yes, the drama and nerd fights tickle me. But there are also some very insightful posters I have come to enjoy.
I would like to see more in depth analysis of MMOs on this site. For example, analysis of game features like best questing design, or different types of raids. The vast majority of people I've ever spoken to about MMOs (and who play mmos) really know very little about the genre beyond the game they are playing. It would be good to explore different options for features in MMOs, e.g. quest hubs vs chains vs random vs gw2 style.
What I'd like to see less of is promotion of non-MMO games. I know its probably needed to keep up marketing revenue and the like, but the features and discussions of non-mmos make it harder to find something worthwhile to read.
As for the forums, yeh, its mostly just a way to kill time whilst I'm at work. I've been floating about here for 10 years but only really started posting in the last 6 months or so. Its just the same 50-100 people posting the same ideas over and over, nobody giving an inch and nobody really learning anything. Its amusing to see some of the stupidity from some posters.