Originally posted by DamonVile MMO's aren't dieing. The burn outs are just gathering in the same place.
That's probably true. But it's equally true (in my opinion) that the burnouts are now outnumbering the newer, fresher gamers. It's bound to happen when the state of products become stagnant, generally speaking. Once the numbers of burnouts outnumber the fresh new players that come in each year, and for every new player a new burnout is born, then that's the tipping point.
Every MMO forum I go to. I see every other game been called dying off. So what is a dying MMO? I remember some MMOS that been called off by a lot of people dying. Been years later it still gets updates and expansions and people still play.
So why is it that there so many people saying that this MMO is dying, but really its not? The thing that makes me kinda of angry that people say a MMO is dying when really its not. It brings the message to new players that this MMO is dying. He or she going to think that why would I want to play a dying MMO. It discourages new players from coming in.
To give you my opinion. I can only say I'm not playing an mmog atm...and haven't been playing one regularly for a long time.Companys aren't making games I want to play.I have been flim -flammed SOOOOO many times..it's made me extremely skeptical and negative.
The only mmo that's not dying in any form way or capacity is Eve Online, it's the only mmo that's getting more subs/players compared to every mmo in existance which is losing players/subs.
Lineage 1 is doing fine too
Lineage 1 died in the US long ago.
I believe EQ1 is pretty stable, and EQ1 is the perfect example of why WoW will never 'die' and will probably always be relevant. When a game is that popular for that long it attracts a certain amount of lifers. turns out about 10% of EQ1's peak players probably arent going anywhere. So that will leave WoW with 500k subs western and over 1 million worldwide for as long as Blizzard chooses to keep it open.
Some people can't leave a game without their Dramatic Announcement™.
It's a mild form of forum drama addiction.
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.
When posters say a MMO is dying what they are referring to is all the game hoppers leaving after two or three months. As they do this with every MMO we have a lot of undead MMOs around.
The important population figure is that of what makes a viable player base number. That depends on the MMO, solo-centric MMOs need fewer players for example.
What a successful population means has also changed due to the increasing commercialization of MMOs. Originally MMOs were not expected to pull in as many players as the big solo games, now they are. Yet another example of MMOs being expected to perform like solo games.
"On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero."
There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own. -- Herman Melville
Originally posted by DamonVile MMO's aren't dieing. The burn outs are just gathering in the same place.
That's probably true. But it's equally true (in my opinion) that the burnouts are now outnumbering the newer, fresher gamers. It's bound to happen when the state of products become stagnant, generally speaking. Once the numbers of burnouts outnumber the fresh new players that come in each year, and for every new player a new burnout is born, then that's the tipping point.
Yea I mentioned in another thread somewhere )forgot witch) that the shear untapped market share in the mmo sphere these days is insane. Problem being it's spread across varying play styles and devs stupidly try gather them all up under one roof then watch them fade away again like a sandcastle on the beech.
Yes EA/BW made some really dumb decisions that hurt SWTOR and yes inexperience in mmo's on the BW side prob had an impact as well. However One of the biggest contributing factors imho a lot of those design decisions were made due trying to cater to a plethora of divergent play styles with a limited budget, time line and personnel. $100-200M sounds like a lot; 5 yrs sounds like a lot; 300 sounds like a lot...until you attempt a project that probably isn't feasible with 10x those resources.
By marketing at everybody pvers, casuals, raiders, soloers, groupers, make it easier, make it harder, content locusts, lets smell the flowers, theme parkers, sandboxers(this one mainly due to IP) crafters, F*** crafters, Storyliners, questers, rprs, grinders, I hate grinders, Love voiceovers, hate voiceovers, pvpers, openWpvpers. Battlegroundpvpers, RVRs, gear matters, skill matters. tracked scoring, stop scoring, griefers, gankers, campers, stop doing thaters
^ this by it's very nature is an impossible demographic set to target most being mutually exclusive play styles. If they had picked a few complimentary ones and narrowly focused on them, they might have actually been able to design and implement working feature sets around core playstyles. Hell they might even have had time to design a real engine instead of an unfinished HE alpha.
This mode of design by the numbers also virtually guarantees your dev team will sooner or later be designing content/features for play styles they could give a rats *** about...seeing how good development and creativity are so interdependent designing purely by spreadsheet and checklist instead of what one actually thinks is fun seems counter-intuitive to me. Lets take an example the whole round table hoopla with EQN. Disregarding whether it's intelligent to design by committee the fact that 1/2 the dev team says they personally prefer a particular play style opposite of the one they are designing just screams I'm doing this cause I have too not because I want too and my personal investment to this particular feature set begins and ends at my paycheck.
The mmo version of TPS reports
And then of course there is metrics data; an awesome tool for telling the what and the when, without context however it tells you F*** all about the why. More than a few bad decisions have resulted from blindly following the numbers.
Being a dreamer is great, having a rational and practical way to meet parts of that dream is even better.
There was a time when MMO's were flourishing and were considered the future of gaming, then WoW's popularity spawned clone after clone after clone because developers saw dollar signs and wanted to cash in, and over time this became the "MMO standard". Now, If something doesn't follow the MMO standard then it really has no chance at this point in time because the community will tear it apart, look at the hate that EQNext is getting because it's different. FFXI was a brilliant game but some people couldn't play it because it didn't play like every other MMO and they didn't want to learn something different.
We are doomed to play the whack-a-mole standard of MMO's for many reasons. This standard in my opinion will die eventually, but not until we have 100 more MMO's that are exactly like the last 100.
MMOs aren't dying, but developers have learned that to keep them relevant over a long period of time requires most of them to have an evolving payment model, especially if they choose to start them off as sub only model.
Now, the sub only payment model, that's something that is almost dead.
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
I know that I can be paranoid but I sincerely always thought that it was negative marketing by the competition whenever I heard someone say something about a game being dead. Now I've definitely been in some games where the ability to find a group has slowed down to a crawl. Where no one is talking in OOC, and where there hasn't been an update in umpteen months, but even then I have managed to find my way into some kind of trouble, so I usually don't pay attention to peoples opinions on that topic. In my opinion, a game isn't dying until it has been announced, see Warhammer.
I think the problem is that most MMOs are 'shooting stars' (AKA one trick ponies). Just about every MMO I've played has left me wanting more and eventually I just get tired of playing them. Sure, the more popular MMOs will release patches and expansions, but it's always just 'more of the same' and the content is easy to blow through.
I can't complain though, the AAA MMOs usually give me my money's worth. I think people are disappointed with MMOs in general because we see the huge potential they have to entertain us, but we're always just spoonfed some generic WoW clone or whatever.
Hopefully we'll see something different in the next decade or so.
If a game has been running for over 10 years and has a steady player base it's not dying. Tabula Rasa and The Matrix Online are examples of dying.
Don't be terrorized! You're more likely to die of a car accident, drowning, fire, or murder! More people die every year from prescription drugs than terrorism LOL!
Originally posted by neosapience I think the problem is that most MMOs are 'shooting stars' (AKA one trick ponies). Just about every MMO I've played has left me wanting more and eventually I just get tired of playing them.
So?
Every game eventually becomes boring. Just finish one, and move onto another.
Every MMO forum I go to. I see every other game been called dying off. So what is a dying MMO? I remember some MMOS that been called off by a lot of people dying. Been years later it still gets updates and expansions and people still play.
So why is it that there so many people saying that this MMO is dying, but really its not? The thing that makes me kinda of angry that people say a MMO is dying when really its not. It brings the message to new players that this MMO is dying. He or she going to think that why would I want to play a dying MMO. It discourages new players from coming in.
1) Don't listen to other people. If you're going to avoid any game because people say it is dying or bash it without logical well reasoned lengthy arguments backed with facts, well then you're never going to play anything because the internet is full of trolls who say everything is dying or sucks. They are the inverse of infomercials. They lie and lie to get you to NOT buy something.
2) MMO populations shrink over time, it is the natural way of things. But, think about how many people you really need in an MMO to find stuff to do and have fun. If an MMO went down to 1 server that regularly had 500-1000 players on it, you would probably always be able to find something to do. A game would need less than 8k players to keep that kind of server activity on 1 server. People say that a game is dying when it has multiple servers that constantly have thousands of people on them and they say an MMO is dead when it is below 100k subscribers. In others words, people are morons.
2) MMO populations shrink over time, it is the natural way of things. But, think about how many people you really need in an MMO to find stuff to do and have fun.
Yeh. If you just solo and enjoy the content, you don't need anyone else.
Originally posted by neosapience I think the problem is that most MMOs are 'shooting stars' (AKA one trick ponies). Just about every MMO I've played has left me wanting more and eventually I just get tired of playing them.
So?
Every game eventually becomes boring. Just finish one, and move onto another.
Good point, whether 1 month or 5 years, eventually for almost every person and game out there the end eventually comes and you move on to the next one.
Some folks go back as well, when new content is released or what not, which is also working as intended.
Good thing this happens too, or we'd never get to play any other games. (well, those of us who tend to stick to one at a time)
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
Originally posted by neosapience I think the problem is that most MMOs are 'shooting stars' (AKA one trick ponies). Just about every MMO I've played has left me wanting more and eventually I just get tired of playing them.
So?
Every game eventually becomes boring. Just finish one, and move onto another.
Good point, whether 1 month or 5 years, eventually for almost every person and game out there the end eventually comes and you move on to the next one.
Some folks go back as well, when new content is released or what not, which is also working as intended.
Good thing this happens too, or we'd never get to play any other games. (well, those of us who tend to stick to one at a time)
Yeh. A game can sometimes be fresh again (at least to some extent) if I take a hiatus.
The only mmo that's not dying in any form way or capacity is Eve Online, it's the only mmo that's getting more subs/players compared to every mmo in existance which is losing players/subs.
Lineage 1 is doing fine too
Wushu is growing across the world.
Pretty steady growth in wot as well, HKO is growing too
No matter how cynical you become, its never enough to keep up - Lily Tomlin
2) MMO populations shrink over time, it is the natural way of things. But, think about how many people you really need in an MMO to find stuff to do and have fun.
Yeh. If you just solo and enjoy the content, you don't need anyone else.
Way to randomly cut out the part you thought you could make a sarcastic remark to and not the whole quote which actually discussed player numbers needed online at a time to have a good time and how few players it takes to reach that on a singular server.
Not sure how you don't get pinged by this site more often for trolling when it is almost all you do.
Originally posted by neosapience I think the problem is that most MMOs are 'shooting stars' (AKA one trick ponies). Just about every MMO I've played has left me wanting more and eventually I just get tired of playing them.
So?
Every game eventually becomes boring. Just finish one, and move onto another.
Good point, whether 1 month or 5 years, eventually for almost every person and game out there the end eventually comes and you move on to the next one.
Some folks go back as well, when new content is released or what not, which is also working as intended.
Good thing this happens too, or we'd never get to play any other games. (well, those of us who tend to stick to one at a time)
Yeh. A game can sometimes be fresh again (at least to some extent) if I take a hiatus.
Games that could use a serious game expansion to bring back players, the first 2 that spring to mind are GW2 and WoW, both games are in serious decline, but if they release an expansion adding new areas/dungeons/races etc. Then i can imagine a significant number of lapsed players would return, i think most MMO's need that 'injection' of 'new' to revitalise them, its just a shame that so many of these MMO's charge for expansions, i think Eve Online definitely has the right idea here, although with GW2 being B2P, then that makes paid expansions acceptable.
Comments
That's probably true. But it's equally true (in my opinion) that the burnouts are now outnumbering the newer, fresher gamers. It's bound to happen when the state of products become stagnant, generally speaking. Once the numbers of burnouts outnumber the fresh new players that come in each year, and for every new player a new burnout is born, then that's the tipping point.
Once upon a time....
Eh I've always looked at it as the MMO equivalent of "going out of style", hipster been there done that BS.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
To give you my opinion. I can only say I'm not playing an mmog atm...and haven't been playing one regularly for a long time.Companys aren't making games I want to play.I have been flim -flammed SOOOOO many times..it's made me extremely skeptical and negative.
But...I keep looking and hoping.
Lineage 1 died in the US long ago.
I believe EQ1 is pretty stable, and EQ1 is the perfect example of why WoW will never 'die' and will probably always be relevant. When a game is that popular for that long it attracts a certain amount of lifers. turns out about 10% of EQ1's peak players probably arent going anywhere. So that will leave WoW with 500k subs western and over 1 million worldwide for as long as Blizzard chooses to keep it open.
Some people can't leave a game without their Dramatic Announcement™.
It's a mild form of forum drama addiction.
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.
When posters say a MMO is dying what they are referring to is all the game hoppers leaving after two or three months. As they do this with every MMO we have a lot of undead MMOs around.
The important population figure is that of what makes a viable player base number. That depends on the MMO, solo-centric MMOs need fewer players for example.
What a successful population means has also changed due to the increasing commercialization of MMOs. Originally MMOs were not expected to pull in as many players as the big solo games, now they are. Yet another example of MMOs being expected to perform like solo games.
"On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero."
There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own.
-- Herman Melville
Yea I mentioned in another thread somewhere )forgot witch) that the shear untapped market share in the mmo sphere these days is insane. Problem being it's spread across varying play styles and devs stupidly try gather them all up under one roof then watch them fade away again like a sandcastle on the beech.
Yes EA/BW made some really dumb decisions that hurt SWTOR and yes inexperience in mmo's on the BW side prob had an impact as well. However One of the biggest contributing factors imho a lot of those design decisions were made due trying to cater to a plethora of divergent play styles with a limited budget, time line and personnel. $100-200M sounds like a lot; 5 yrs sounds like a lot; 300 sounds like a lot...until you attempt a project that probably isn't feasible with 10x those resources.
By marketing at everybody pvers, casuals, raiders, soloers, groupers, make it easier, make it harder, content locusts, lets smell the flowers, theme parkers, sandboxers(this one mainly due to IP) crafters, F*** crafters, Storyliners, questers, rprs, grinders, I hate grinders, Love voiceovers, hate voiceovers, pvpers, openWpvpers. Battlegroundpvpers, RVRs, gear matters, skill matters. tracked scoring, stop scoring, griefers, gankers, campers, stop doing thaters
^ this by it's very nature is an impossible demographic set to target most being mutually exclusive play styles. If they had picked a few complimentary ones and narrowly focused on them, they might have actually been able to design and implement working feature sets around core playstyles. Hell they might even have had time to design a real engine instead of an unfinished HE alpha.
This mode of design by the numbers also virtually guarantees your dev team will sooner or later be designing content/features for play styles they could give a rats *** about...seeing how good development and creativity are so interdependent designing purely by spreadsheet and checklist instead of what one actually thinks is fun seems counter-intuitive to me. Lets take an example the whole round table hoopla with EQN. Disregarding whether it's intelligent to design by committee the fact that 1/2 the dev team says they personally prefer a particular play style opposite of the one they are designing just screams I'm doing this cause I have too not because I want too and my personal investment to this particular feature set begins and ends at my paycheck.
The mmo version of TPS reports
And then of course there is metrics data; an awesome tool for telling the what and the when, without context however it tells you F*** all about the why. More than a few bad decisions have resulted from blindly following the numbers.
Being a dreamer is great, having a rational and practical way to meet parts of that dream is even better.
There was a time when MMO's were flourishing and were considered the future of gaming, then WoW's popularity spawned clone after clone after clone because developers saw dollar signs and wanted to cash in, and over time this became the "MMO standard". Now, If something doesn't follow the MMO standard then it really has no chance at this point in time because the community will tear it apart, look at the hate that EQNext is getting because it's different. FFXI was a brilliant game but some people couldn't play it because it didn't play like every other MMO and they didn't want to learn something different.
We are doomed to play the whack-a-mole standard of MMO's for many reasons. This standard in my opinion will die eventually, but not until we have 100 more MMO's that are exactly like the last 100.
Now, the sub only payment model, that's something that is almost dead.
"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
I can't complain though, the AAA MMOs usually give me my money's worth. I think people are disappointed with MMOs in general because we see the huge potential they have to entertain us, but we're always just spoonfed some generic WoW clone or whatever.
Hopefully we'll see something different in the next decade or so.
Just the WoW clones.
Which is just about every AAA MMO of the last 8 years.
I think its mostly the attitude of the players.
If you always want the newest stuff, you wont get the main benefit of MMOs: longtime fun.
Don't be terrorized! You're more likely to die of a car accident, drowning, fire, or murder! More people die every year from prescription drugs than terrorism LOL!
So?
Every game eventually becomes boring. Just finish one, and move onto another.
1) Don't listen to other people. If you're going to avoid any game because people say it is dying or bash it without logical well reasoned lengthy arguments backed with facts, well then you're never going to play anything because the internet is full of trolls who say everything is dying or sucks. They are the inverse of infomercials. They lie and lie to get you to NOT buy something.
2) MMO populations shrink over time, it is the natural way of things. But, think about how many people you really need in an MMO to find stuff to do and have fun. If an MMO went down to 1 server that regularly had 500-1000 players on it, you would probably always be able to find something to do. A game would need less than 8k players to keep that kind of server activity on 1 server. People say that a game is dying when it has multiple servers that constantly have thousands of people on them and they say an MMO is dead when it is below 100k subscribers. In others words, people are morons.
Yeh. If you just solo and enjoy the content, you don't need anyone else.
Good point, whether 1 month or 5 years, eventually for almost every person and game out there the end eventually comes and you move on to the next one.
Some folks go back as well, when new content is released or what not, which is also working as intended.
Good thing this happens too, or we'd never get to play any other games. (well, those of us who tend to stick to one at a time)
"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
Yeh. A game can sometimes be fresh again (at least to some extent) if I take a hiatus.
Pretty steady growth in wot as well, HKO is growing too
No matter how cynical you become, its never enough to keep up - Lily Tomlin
Way to randomly cut out the part you thought you could make a sarcastic remark to and not the whole quote which actually discussed player numbers needed online at a time to have a good time and how few players it takes to reach that on a singular server.
Not sure how you don't get pinged by this site more often for trolling when it is almost all you do.
Games that could use a serious game expansion to bring back players, the first 2 that spring to mind are GW2 and WoW, both games are in serious decline, but if they release an expansion adding new areas/dungeons/races etc. Then i can imagine a significant number of lapsed players would return, i think most MMO's need that 'injection' of 'new' to revitalise them, its just a shame that so many of these MMO's charge for expansions, i think Eve Online definitely has the right idea here, although with GW2 being B2P, then that makes paid expansions acceptable.