"The MMO genre lost its way somewhere". Yes it did but repeatedly, from prioritising soloing to cash shops it eventually became a different genre. The Hiveleader seems recognise this and then he says its down to us. Hmm you can see how that does not stack up.
To say it was us would work much better as an argument if MMORPG's were being played by only the same people they were back when EQ launched. But they are not, a whole new player base has been repeatedly sought by MMOs and each time they moved away from the gameplay they were founded on. Today we see MMOs pandering to the expectations of mobile players, who are not gamers to my mind, and so it is not surprising that their influence leads to substandard MMOs.
Who were all the players back then questioning subscriptions? I don't remember that happening do you? I remember when F2P came in we had posters telling us how wonderful it was. But before companies introduced F2P I don't remember it being asked for. Indeed from what the Hiveleader is saying we were asking for a cash shop with monetarization before such a system existed. Those who wanted a free game must be clairvoyant then. What the Hiveleader is doing here is taking arguments that were used to defend F2P after it came out and saying they were being put forward before it came out. They weren't.
Who back then was saying "we want more rewards faster"? Again I don't remember that happening do you? You did and do get players wanting to level more quickly but that's about it. Even today how many posters do you see wanting dailies to be "faster" some but that many?
"We did not want to waste our time trying to put together groups." Now this was discussed a lot in the early days but supposedly according to the HL this resulted in MMOs becoming solo orientated. I dispute that, MMOs were seeking out the solo player audience, they shifted gameplay to soloing to draw those players in and it worked. I am sure there were those among us who preferred the new solo orientation, but this was done to grab a larger player base, make no mistake. He goes on to mention this opinion "suddenly millions of non-MMO gamers were demanding things changed". Well they had already been changed to draw those players in, who then what a surprise wanted MMOs to even more suit their playstyle. Apparently these players "were still us guys", no they were not HL, by your own definition they were casual solo players coming into MMOs, so how could they be "us"? He even goes on to say "you can listen to the masses, listen to the hard cores" so presumably he realises the newcomers were not us, I hope so. That was the gaming studios choice not ours.
Oh and btw the gaming companies decided they know best based on metrics, not on what we said. He asks the question what would you do but then does not finish it by telling us what happened, that's what happened.
I do not think that "everyone is getting to see what we used to love about the genre" but some are, from vanilla and so on. Not sure that's enough to change the direction MMOs have been in for over a decade.
Where I do agree is if we want too many things from our new MMOs they will fail, we can't have everything we want, there will have to be sacrifices.
One thing I should point out, I feel many of these changes are driven by executives, not the devs themselves. It is not the devs who are showing the board how much more money they will make from loot boxes.
Spend you money wisely, don't put in until launch. Spend your time wisely, don't play a demo of a game until after launch and you are thinking of buying it. Well that's my take anyway.
Unfortunately I think saying going back to old school MMO's to find their greatness is a bit like saying, lets go back to distributing movies on beta and vhs cos movies were better back then.
I don't think the current 20-something has the time or interest in MMO's. They want the dopamine hits and the fun with friends, but assuming they have to do it the same way their parents did is a bit far fetched.
We just need to move on.
MMOS worked from 1997 - 2007, not so much now.
. The problem is that companies used analytical data to push out products to a base of users who like myself came from the boom of FPS and the RTS era. As FPS and RTS both in the late 90's had internet access which dominated most of the growth for online gaming.
As much as nostalgia feels like EQ , AC, Lineage broke throw the wall , they weren't even measured as anything more then niche compared to HL , CS , Quake Arena , Unreal. I remember when Unreal came out, it was one of the best games. Single player has always pushed forward the online gaming genre.
EQ comapred to NCSofts offering of Lineage in 2004, was small. Lineage 2 at launch had roughful 1.5 millions players that grew over 3 years. Lineage 2 was the beginning of mainstream mmo that had components and mechanics that catered to both to single player and multiplayer.
I remember to this day in 2005, the guild leader and some players said "if wow sucks , we will be back in a few weeks" they never came back, and the syphoning took hundreds of thousands of player away from Lineage 2. I would image 10's of thousands from every mmo during that time.
I would've never started into mmos if it was for exposure to them from g4tv and Dave's Portal . PC Gamer rarely covered them in a way that made popular until Eve online.
Really need to open the visors up a bit and see the actual transcript of online gaming history. I agree with some points, but I disagree about the level of buzz early mmo's created in trhe evolution of the market. As amazing as they seemed, first generation of mmos were the hypothesis of what we have now.
If I understand you see the earliest MMORPG's as a testing
ground for the genre which was formulated by WoW into what was best. There is
something in that, it was a testing ground, I just think we could have more
than one model today on what was best, WoW blew that away.
I dispute that single player has always pushed online gaming, they weren't
there in the beginning, so not sure how that would even be possible. There were
some solo inclined players for sure but they were a small minority. But once
they got their shoe into WOW they wanted not just WOW but all MMOS to be remodelled for them more and
more, indeed even today we still have players saying levelling is too hard and
wanting to remove any grouping activity such as raids.
I actually don’t think we disagree that much so not sure
what I need to open my visor to? Of course this has more reasons than we can
cover in a few posts or on an 8 minute video, but I think we all know that.
We are left with a genre too concentrated on one template;
where is the sandbox, the realm versus realm, the open world pvp? Now you may
say we don’t have those in a major way because the WoW template is somehow
better. I just see it as one of the ways MMOs could have gone forward, actually
there are plenty of elements I admire in that template, just not all, all the
time.
"like my nephews who can do things with an xbox controller in fornite that is just awe inspiring. "
Thats BS i watch my nephews and other under 16 age kids play fortnite, they die, respawn and emote dance for hours. havent seen one with a positive kill ratio yet.
"like my nephews who can do things with an xbox controller in fornite that is just awe inspiring. "
Thats BS i watch my nephews and other under 16 age kids play fortnite, they die, respawn and emote dance for hours. havent seen one with a positive kill ratio yet.
my nephew is anomaly of epicness in fornite . Granted both my brother and I are huge gamers from way back, so all of his knowledge is flowing through his kids, making them one with the xbox
everyones kid is genius and a future pro athlete, i know i know..
Which goes back to HiveLeaders point. They only release stuff into cash shops because people buy it. If no one spent any money on the mounts and other fluff in cash shops they wouldn't exist. So yes, it is our fault. These companies keep doing this like this because as a whole we keep rewarding them for it.
What killed the MMORPG was the devaluation of rewards.
Time.
Time destroys all
You sound like Adam from Dark lol.
"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
Which goes back to HiveLeaders point. They only release stuff into cash shops because people buy it. If no one spent any money on the mounts and other fluff in cash shops they wouldn't exist. So yes, it is our fault. These companies keep doing this like this because as a whole we keep rewarding them for it.
Well when less than 1% of people are buying in the cash shops that entire "us" blame point is an absolute crock.
If they add QoL that takes away important gameplay, and don't replace that gameplay in other ways, the game will eventually look like a thin piece of swiss cheese...
If they add accessibility that takes away important gameplay, and don't replace that gameplay in other ways, the game will eventually look like a thin piece of swiss cheese...
If they add P2W that takes away important gameplay, and don't replace that gameplay in other ways, the game will eventually look like a thin piece of swiss cheese...
Game play, game play, g4m3pl47, 01000111 01000001 01001101 01000101 01010000 01001100 01000001 01011001
They get rid of it. They don't find interesting ways to replace it. They get "our" money either way.
We are the problem in general.
The players.
We are also dumb as hell to buy the same type game over and over again seeking something new.
That's goddamned insanity right there.
The genre as a whole has always been on a suicide run. Multiplayer communities in massive forms do not sustain they implode like a bunch of angry shit birds over the smallest of things and then go to war over it...for like 20 years plus...looking at you EQ classic guys here.
It's the same cycle new decade.
I just play simple shit now. PSO2 etc. Because expecting anything new from this genre now after it's been around 30+ years..I think that would be just be dumb.
Like a wheel is a wheel man, doesn't matter what's it made of.
Visors = I'm saying to look at the online gaming progression as a whole, I would imagine Unreal and Quake sold more copies then Everquest and other mmos of that era. THen add in the people who slowly went from fps online play and migrated into into mmo style games.
That is really what PC Gaming has become, migration into the next "thing" it takes real anomalies like Fortnite, to bring in new players under the age of 18 like my nephews who can do things with an xbox controller in fornite that is just awe inspiring.
Later as this new generation of gamers get older they too will migrate into something else.
I agree about your take on the likes of Unreal and Quake, that was part of the player base Blizzard was looking to, as I mentioned there were a lot of solo players out there and MMO companies wanted them in their games. Blizzard showed a bit of leg and soloers flocked in, they became the majority of MMO players and the rest is history.
What killed the MMORPG was the devaluation of rewards.
Time.
Time destroys all
People really ignore this. When I was younger I could spend a lot of time playing, but now I'm almost in my 30s and I can't reliably spend so much time playing. Mmorpgs are very time consuming and that is where "devaluation of rewards" came from.
Do I like things being so easy? Hell no! Am I part of the "problem"? Eventually yes.
When you grow older you'll understand.
(Ps. I haven't played an mmorpg/mmo in months. There aren't any that interest me, so I'm sticking to single player games and co-op games with friends like monster hunter world until something interesting pops out)
Sorry but i got to call call shenanigans on this post, i played a lot of mmorpgs, maybe not as much as some, But i never seen the Dev's change the core play of any MMORPG
PS: Stop the We We i am not french, and i always payed for subs. if i didnt like the game i moved on.
Wait, wut? DAOC when they added mandatory PVE raiding in TOA to an RVR centric game, SWG and the infamous NGE, WOW when it decided 40 man raids were too much and its continual simplification to the point millions are clamoring for a classic version all immediately come to mind.
The Secret World closed and relaunched in a slimmed down version, same for FFXIV, one of the most successful (perhaps only?) revamps. Darkfall closed and relaunched as DFO...and closed again, and both versions relaunched again by different owners.
ESO introduced One Tameril, a far cry different from its original level based, zone approach.
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
Sorry but i got to call call shenanigans on this post, i played a lot of mmorpgs, maybe not as much as some, But i never seen the Dev's change the core play of any MMORPG
PS: Stop the We We i am not french, and i always payed for subs. if i didnt like the game i moved on.
Wait, wut? DAOC when they added mandatory PVE raiding in TOA to an RVR centric game, SWG and the infamous NGE, WOW when it decided 40 man raids were too much and its continual simplification to the point millions are clamoring for a classic version all immediately come to mind.
The Secret World closed and relaunched in a slimmed down version, same for FFXIV, one of the most successful (perhaps only?) revamps. Darkfall closed and relaunched as DFO...and closed again, and both versions relaunched again by different owners.
ESO introduced One Tameril, a far cry different from its original level based, zone approach.
I can go through point by point and argue but i wont.
Sorry but i got to call call shenanigans on this post, i played a lot of mmorpgs, maybe not as much as some, But i never seen the Dev's change the core play of any MMORPG
PS: Stop the We We i am not french, and i always payed for subs. if i didnt like the game i moved on.
Wait, wut? DAOC when they added mandatory PVE raiding in TOA to an RVR centric game, SWG and the infamous NGE, WOW when it decided 40 man raids were too much and its continual simplification to the point millions are clamoring for a classic version all immediately come to mind.
The Secret World closed and relaunched in a slimmed down version, same for FFXIV, one of the most successful (perhaps only?) revamps. Darkfall closed and relaunched as DFO...and closed again, and both versions relaunched again by different owners.
ESO introduced One Tameril, a far cry different from its original level based, zone approach.
I can go through point by point and argue but i wont.
Thanks, would be useless to argue against the facts
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
Sorry but i got to call call shenanigans on this post, i played a lot of mmorpgs, maybe not as much as some, But i never seen the Dev's change the core play of any MMORPG
PS: Stop the We We i am not french, and i always payed for subs. if i didnt like the game i moved on.
Wait, wut? DAOC when they added mandatory PVE raiding in TOA to an RVR centric game, SWG and the infamous NGE, WOW when it decided 40 man raids were too much and its continual simplification to the point millions are clamoring for a classic version all immediately come to mind.
The Secret World closed and relaunched in a slimmed down version, same for FFXIV, one of the most successful (perhaps only?) revamps. Darkfall closed and relaunched as DFO...and closed again, and both versions relaunched again by different owners.
ESO introduced One Tameril, a far cry different from its original level based, zone approach.
First they tell us it is all our fault MMORPG's have changed, now they tell us they haven't changed; this thread is getting better and better.
Comments
To say it was us would work much better as an argument if MMORPG's were being played by only the same people they were back when EQ launched. But they are not, a whole new player base has been repeatedly sought by MMOs and each time they moved away from the gameplay they were founded on. Today we see MMOs pandering to the expectations of mobile players, who are not gamers to my mind, and so it is not surprising that their influence leads to substandard MMOs.
Who were all the players back then questioning subscriptions? I don't remember that happening do you? I remember when F2P came in we had posters telling us how wonderful it was. But before companies introduced F2P I don't remember it being asked for. Indeed from what the Hiveleader is saying we were asking for a cash shop with monetarization before such a system existed. Those who wanted a free game must be clairvoyant then. What the Hiveleader is doing here is taking arguments that were used to defend F2P after it came out and saying they were being put forward before it came out. They weren't.
Who back then was saying "we want more rewards faster"? Again I don't remember that happening do you? You did and do get players wanting to level more quickly but that's about it. Even today how many posters do you see wanting dailies to be "faster" some but that many?
"We did not want to waste our time trying to put together groups." Now this was discussed a lot in the early days but supposedly according to the HL this resulted in MMOs becoming solo orientated. I dispute that, MMOs were seeking out the solo player audience, they shifted gameplay to soloing to draw those players in and it worked. I am sure there were those among us who preferred the new solo orientation, but this was done to grab a larger player base, make no mistake. He goes on to mention this opinion "suddenly millions of non-MMO gamers were demanding things changed". Well they had already been changed to draw those players in, who then what a surprise wanted MMOs to even more suit their playstyle. Apparently these players "were still us guys", no they were not HL, by your own definition they were casual solo players coming into MMOs, so how could they be "us"? He even goes on to say "you can listen to the masses, listen to the hard cores" so presumably he realises the newcomers were not us, I hope so. That was the gaming studios choice not ours.
Oh and btw the gaming companies decided they know best based on metrics, not on what we said. He asks the question what would you do but then does not finish it by telling us what happened, that's what happened.
I do not think that "everyone is getting to see what we used to love about the genre" but some are, from vanilla and so on. Not sure that's enough to change the direction MMOs have been in for over a decade.
Where I do agree is if we want too many things from our new MMOs they will fail, we can't have everything we want, there will have to be sacrifices.
One thing I should point out, I feel many of these changes are driven by executives, not the devs themselves. It is not the devs who are showing the board how much more money they will make from loot boxes.
Spend you money wisely, don't put in until launch. Spend your time wisely, don't play a demo of a game until after launch and you are thinking of buying it. Well that's my take anyway.
I don't think the current 20-something has the time or interest in MMO's.
They want the dopamine hits and the fun with friends, but assuming they have to do it the same way their parents did is a bit far fetched.
We just need to move on.
MMOS worked from 1997 - 2007, not so much now.
If I understand you see the earliest MMORPG's as a testing ground for the genre which was formulated by WoW into what was best. There is something in that, it was a testing ground, I just think we could have more than one model today on what was best, WoW blew that away.
I dispute that single player has always pushed online gaming, they weren't there in the beginning, so not sure how that would even be possible. There were some solo inclined players for sure but they were a small minority. But once they got their shoe into WOW they wanted not just WOW but all MMOS to be remodelled for them more and more, indeed even today we still have players saying levelling is too hard and wanting to remove any grouping activity such as raids.
I actually don’t think we disagree that much so not sure what I need to open my visor to? Of course this has more reasons than we can cover in a few posts or on an 8 minute video, but I think we all know that.
We are left with a genre too concentrated on one template; where is the sandbox, the realm versus realm, the open world pvp? Now you may say we don’t have those in a major way because the WoW template is somehow better. I just see it as one of the ways MMOs could have gone forward, actually there are plenty of elements I admire in that template, just not all, all the time.
Joined 2004 - I can't believe I've been a MMORPG.com member for 20 years! Get off my lawn!
Thats BS i watch my nephews and other under 16 age kids play fortnite, they die, respawn and emote dance for hours. havent seen one with a positive kill ratio yet.
Read more at https://www.mmorpg.com/#IkI6P3IvjdRBceOV.99.......LOL
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
"classification of games into MMOs is not by rational reasoning" - nariusseldon
Love Minecraft. And check out my Youtube channel OhCanadaGamer
Try a MUD today at http://www.mudconnect.com/If they add accessibility that takes away important gameplay, and don't replace that gameplay in other ways, the game will eventually look like a thin piece of swiss cheese...
If they add P2W that takes away important gameplay, and don't replace that gameplay in other ways, the game will eventually look like a thin piece of swiss cheese...
Game play, game play, g4m3pl47, 01000111 01000001 01001101 01000101 01010000 01001100 01000001 01011001
They get rid of it. They don't find interesting ways to replace it. They get "our" money either way.
Gut Out!
What, me worry?
The players.
We are also dumb as hell to buy the same type game over and over again seeking something new.
That's goddamned insanity right there.
The genre as a whole has always been on a suicide run. Multiplayer communities in massive forms do not sustain they implode like a bunch of angry shit birds over the smallest of things and then go to war over it...for like 20 years plus...looking at you EQ classic guys here.
It's the same cycle new decade.
I just play simple shit now. PSO2 etc. Because expecting anything new from this genre now after it's been around 30+ years..I think that would be just be dumb.
Like a wheel is a wheel man, doesn't matter what's it made of.
Do I like things being so easy? Hell no!
Am I part of the "problem"? Eventually yes.
When you grow older you'll understand.
(Ps. I haven't played an mmorpg/mmo in months. There aren't any that interest me, so I'm sticking to single player games and co-op games with friends like monster hunter world until something interesting pops out)
The Secret World closed and relaunched in a slimmed down version, same for FFXIV, one of the most successful (perhaps only?) revamps. Darkfall closed and relaunched as DFO...and closed again, and both versions relaunched again by different owners.
ESO introduced One Tameril, a far cry different from its original level based, zone approach.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon