"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." - Albert Einstein
Perhaps the issue is not with the players/customers. Perhaps the issue is with the developers/publishers. The seem to not be in touch with reality, and the fact that the community calls them on this should not be seen as a problem.
No, its also the fault of the customer, there are usually beta weekends, open betas, tons of chances to try the game before launch, beta previews, beta reviews, beta videos, and people STILL buy the games knowing they're sick of themeparks.
Derros is correct....until consumers stop buying this stuff, they won't stop making it...
+1 I've never understood why people think it's never their own fault when there is so many ways to try before you buy nowadays. I was looking forward to ESO until I played it at pax. It was a real wtf moment....and then.... I didn't buy it.
The pay and complain system funds the next generation of shit.
So if a product or service is crap in our opinion, we are as customers to support them for charity?
Using your ESO example Ms. Gonzalez here is a quick "issue" list from what I seen during Pre-Orders, Beta and reading the MMO gaming news:
Starting area is/was substandard.
Entire race in a subscription based game locked behind a Collectors Edition paywall.
Duplicate bug.
Phased questing in an MMO.
Keep in mind I do not play ESO because it's not for me, as is the hundreds of other MMORPG's I do not play because in my opinion they ARE NOT worth my money, time and effort.
Develop a good/great game and you will get my $ developers, oh and read my signature too.
The problem here are not expectations, or over criticism. It's not the good or bad quality of games, or products. The problem here is the inmense amount of assholes who have as their life dedicated to tell everyone what they need to play, what they have to think or say, or even how they have to feel.
Sometimes, I say (because I'm very brave, you know) that I'm enjoying TESO. And then, a ton of imbecils who yell to me "You're ruining the game industry playing shit like that!" Came for every direction. And not only in videogames. Every single review of everything on the latest years has become a "How you have to live" or "You have to love this and have to hate this". So, it's fine, I can have an opinion, but only if you are agree with me. Because if not, You're a hater, or a fanboy.
That's the reason why, I don't even care the critics anymore. I trust only in one opinion: Mine. And I place every single review from everyone else in the "SPAM mailbox" and just ignore it. So, for me, who has to recover my trust is not the game industry, it's actually the reviewers, and yeah, the players. Well, the people, in general.
And one more time MMORPG.com attempts to defend a major advertiser...
...by blaming the customers for the poor quality of the product? Again?
I suspect most of us are less concerned about how feature rich a new MMORPG may be than we are concerned that the "promised" features actually work. Consider: Who sets up players' expectations?
--The developers.
--The marketers.
--Their advertisements (aka paid reviews).
--Their shils in the forums.
--Their promises of great and wonderful things that are new and unique so we should spend our money on their product and not on someone else's product.
Do the players force these "expectations" onto the developers? No. So, when the players experience something that doesn't meet expectations, whose fault is it?
MMORPG.com continues to lose what little credibility it has left with these repeated attempts to rationalize a bad product. ESO could have been a great game, but it isn't. ZOS didn't listen to its testers. ZOS didn't get a clue from the massive cancellation of pre-orders after the open Beta sessions. ZOS hasn't gotten a clue from the massive cancellation of subscriptions.
ZOS built up player expectations with a whole lot of marketing hype and then didn't deliver on the product they promised.
FACT: That is not their customers' fault.
Very solid post.
Actually over all a very weak post.
Day one developer announces a new featue being added to the game winged horses. Their intention is this would allow a gliding feature allowing the players access to certain terrain and locations and they thought it would be cool. They are excited about this and wanted their playerbase to know a bit about it.
Day Two playerbase receive the news immediately the fans cry hurrah and spread far and wide singing its praises,
Day three The fanbase start guessing what else this could mean chats develop on the possibility of flying castles. Some people note the word used had been glide not fly. A small percentage start a campaign to get that changed they want to fly not glide. Fly means no limits, Gliding limits them
Day four The fans leap in defense of the glide mechanic they start stating reasons for it and claim how awesome it will be they start building it up soon the world in their minds eye is full of possibiliites mounts gliding gracefully in the air floating islands , strongholds. Their imagination reaches higher and higher at the possibilities. Dark mutterings are heard from a small group of ay sayers who proclaim its a pointless gimmick wont mean anything really its not "flying" its gliding so basically only a longer jump mechanic so nothing new most games have jump mechanics.
Day 5 the dreamers and the nayers clash things start to turn ugly as they start poisoning each others threads. Meanwhile the developers start to get worried they can't give away tom many details on their new mechanic its early days yet and the more they tell the more likely someone else might steal the idea also they are still ironing out the details how far players can glide etc etc.
Day 6 War erupts battlelines are drawn what was to the developers a fun aspect of their game suddenly becomes a central point in the players eyes. To them this is what defines the game.
Day 7 game released the gliding mounts allow players to glide distances depending on height its used to cross chasms the higher you get the further you glide. It is a travel mechanic that allows for interesting exploration. It is fun.
BUtT.... It is not flying, there are no player strongholds in the sky..... it is not the focus of the game ....
The people who built it up as something wonderful beyond words are crushed. The nayers who claim it is nothing special are smug. The ordinary person who had no real expectations but did a wait and see approach has fun with it.
But all the forums see is the two extremes as the wait a see players voices are usually ignored and missed in the great forum battles innocent bystanders whoses voices are constantly silenced. The casual observer will only see the fanatic and the doomspeaker when checking the forums usually in direct confrontation. As every aspect is ripped apart and built up usually with nothing but opinion and dreams to back it.
OPINION : We the playerbase need to accept some responsibility
And one more time MMORPG.com attempts to defend a major advertiser...
...by blaming the customers for the poor quality of the product? Again?
I suspect most of us are less concerned about how feature rich a new MMORPG may be than we are concerned that the "promised" features actually work. Consider: Who sets up players' expectations?
--The developers.
--The marketers.
--Their advertisements (aka paid reviews).
--Their shils in the forums.
--Their promises of great and wonderful things that are new and unique so we should spend our money on their product and not on someone else's product.
Do the players force these "expectations" onto the developers? No. So, when the players experience something that doesn't meet expectations, whose fault is it?
MMORPG.com continues to lose what little credibility it has left with these repeated attempts to rationalize a bad product. ESO could have been a great game, but it isn't. ZOS didn't listen to its testers. ZOS didn't get a clue from the massive cancellation of pre-orders after the open Beta sessions. ZOS hasn't gotten a clue from the massive cancellation of subscriptions.
ZOS built up player expectations with a whole lot of marketing hype and then didn't deliver on the product they promised.
FACT: That is not their customers' fault.
Very solid post.
I second that. Awesome post!
No, this is mostly a load of shit.
Because people see what they want to see.
Here are some examples: "SoE never listens to it customers" and "SoE ruined EQ"
In Everquest, SoE introduced many things that were a DIRECT result of player requests. Things such as portal stones to be able to better play with friends. And PoK was what killed EQ some players will tell you. however, EQ's peak popularity was actually the years after PoP.
"SWTOR is the least social MMORPG"
Yet its the only MMORPG since LOTRO to launch with lots of multiplayer quests and you can frequently see LFG cries in the chat channels of every planet.
People want someone other themselves to lay the blame on. the simple fact is our expectations mainly come from within. Shills on forums? Thats what, 1% of the posts? Marketers? People actually dont know to take marketing with a grain of salt? Its not like its any different than any marketing anywhere. No, people have this idea of what they want the game to be. like the people that try to twist around developer words on PvP in EQ Next, they will be disappointed when EQN isnt ffa PvP and say they were misled, when it was never said EQN will be FFA PvP and it would be ridiculous to think it will be.
I couldn't agree with you more syrinx. You bring up a great point.
There is a disconnect between the actual product and expectations. It is insane to complain about a game's theme park features when it was designed to be a theme park. If the game is a theme park then don't expect it to be a sandbox. I know this is stating the obvious, but a huge segment of this site's community doesn't understand this concept.
And one more time MMORPG.com attempts to defend a major advertiser...
...by blaming the customers for the poor quality of the product? Again?
I suspect most of us are less concerned about how feature rich a new MMORPG may be than we are concerned that the "promised" features actually work. Consider: Who sets up players' expectations?
--The developers.
--The marketers.
--Their advertisements (aka paid reviews).
--Their shils in the forums.
--Their promises of great and wonderful things that are new and unique so we should spend our money on their product and not on someone else's product.
Do the players force these "expectations" onto the developers? No. So, when the players experience something that doesn't meet expectations, whose fault is it?
MMORPG.com continues to lose what little credibility it has left with these repeated attempts to rationalize a bad product. ESO could have been a great game, but it isn't. ZOS didn't listen to its testers. ZOS didn't get a clue from the massive cancellation of pre-orders after the open Beta sessions. ZOS hasn't gotten a clue from the massive cancellation of subscriptions.
ZOS built up player expectations with a whole lot of marketing hype and then didn't deliver on the product they promised.
FACT: That is not their customers' fault.
Very solid post.
I second that. Awesome post!
No, this is mostly a load of shit.
Because people see what they want to see.
Here are some examples: "SoE never listens to it customers" and "SoE ruined EQ"
In Everquest, SoE introduced many things that were a DIRECT result of player requests. Things such as portal stones to be able to better play with friends. And PoK was what killed EQ some players will tell you. however, EQ's peak popularity was actually the years after PoP.
"SWTOR is the least social MMORPG"
Yet its the only MMORPG since LOTRO to launch with lots of multiplayer quests and you can frequently see LFG cries in the chat channels of every planet.
People want someone other themselves to lay the blame on. the simple fact is our expectations mainly come from within. Shills on forums? Thats what, 1% of the posts? Marketers? People actually dont know to take marketing with a grain of salt? Its not like its any different than any marketing anywhere. No, people have this idea of what they want the game to be. like the people that try to twist around developer words on PvP in EQ Next, they will be disappointed when EQN isnt ffa PvP and say they were misled, when it was never said EQN will be FFA PvP and it would be ridiculous to think it will be.
I couldn't agree with you more syrinx. You bring up a great point.
There is a disconnect between the actual product and expectations. It is insane to complain about a game's theme park features when it was designed to be a theme park. If the game is a theme park then don't expect it to be a sandbox. I know this is stating the obvious, but a huge segment of this site's community doesn't understand this concept.
Just because it's a themepark doesn't mean it has to be easy as dung.
I think that MMORPGs deserve to be critically judged.
Let's say I hear about a new MMORPG, and they proudly announce that they have a warrior with the awesome ability "mighty slash", a founders pack for 200$ where you get a mount that gives you +400% movement speed (in game you have to farm about 10 days straight to get a mount) and a whooping two starting zones, then I won't be friendly with the game.
MMORPGs cost in nearly all cases far far more money than a regular game. And so they should be, in theory, much much better. But most are not.
And one more time MMORPG.com attempts to defend a major advertiser...
...by blaming the customers for the poor quality of the product? Again?
I suspect most of us are less concerned about how feature rich a new MMORPG may be than we are concerned that the "promised" features actually work. Consider: Who sets up players' expectations?
--The developers.
--The marketers.
--Their advertisements (aka paid reviews).
--Their shils in the forums.
--Their promises of great and wonderful things that are new and unique so we should spend our money on their product and not on someone else's product.
Do the players force these "expectations" onto the developers? No. So, when the players experience something that doesn't meet expectations, whose fault is it?
MMORPG.com continues to lose what little credibility it has left with these repeated attempts to rationalize a bad product. ESO could have been a great game, but it isn't. ZOS didn't listen to its testers. ZOS didn't get a clue from the massive cancellation of pre-orders after the open Beta sessions. ZOS hasn't gotten a clue from the massive cancellation of subscriptions.
ZOS built up player expectations with a whole lot of marketing hype and then didn't deliver on the product they promised.
FACT: That is not their customers' fault.
Very solid post.
exactly this, a month ago i got email (from moderators on this forum) for trolling on this forum cause i typed that this game has too many issues and needs already an overhaul (PCgamer's review was to take care before you go and buy this game..!), not even something abusive or bad language ...
i dont have a problem with the developers and i dont wanna see people losing their job, but i cant accept the publisher's behaviour ... if on the street there are 2 shops and one of them is expensive and has mediocre products of course you wont go there and you will advise the people next to you to avoid it ... the same happens with ESO, its an expensive and at the same time mediocre product ...
Originally posted by Yoda_Clone And one more time MMORPG.com attempts to defend a major advertiser... ...by blaming the customers for the poor quality of the product? Again? I suspect most of us are less concerned about how feature rich a new MMORPG may be than we are concerned that the "promised" features actually work. Consider: Who sets up players' expectations? --The developers.--The marketers.--Their advertisements (aka paid reviews).--Their shils in the forums. --Their promises of great and wonderful things that are new and unique so we should spend our money on their product and not on someone else's product. Do the players force these "expectations" onto the developers? No. So, when the players experience something that doesn't meet expectations, whose fault is it? MMORPG.com continues to lose what little credibility it has left with these repeated attempts to rationalize a bad product. ESO could have been a great game, but it isn't. ZOS didn't listen to its testers. ZOS didn't get a clue from the massive cancellation of pre-orders after the open Beta sessions. ZOS hasn't gotten a clue from the massive cancellation of subscriptions. ZOS built up player expectations with a whole lot of marketing hype and then didn't deliver on the product they promised.FACT: That is not their customers' fault.
Very solid post.
I second that. Awesome post!
Have a beer my friend ! +10
ESO trailers + ESO intervieuws shows a totaly diffrent kind of image then when you play the game. There is no freedom of how want to play the game, its a horrible 250 hours solo quest grinder. Exxtremely hard to play with friends or wife or guild when leveling or nigh imposible due to this weird phasing.
i tought level 50 was my endgame opening, boy was i wrong.... Paul Sage said - At level 50 the game real opens up, heroic raids ! Cyrodiil pvp ! dungeons ! Adventure zones ! It was a lie......2 other factions needed to be grinded out with harder mobs and minibosses if you ding 50 you havent even completed 30% of the quest grind....
Was this advertised ? nope Was this zenimax intention ? yes they needed more time to get their 1st adventure zone out. I was lied to...... Props if you dig that long solo play, here have a beer my friend i am happy for you.
But this isnt what was told in their intervieuw or trailers.... Marketing is poluted and stinks... Its mostly a gimmick to gain hype and sell their crap to the people.
ESO is not even half the mmo i expected....but that marketing......oh did they do a good job or what... And due to this feeling of disapointment people rage and lost trust to devs and studio's and even game revieuwer forums as MMORPG....Massivly...tentonhammer....
Thats why Angryjoe is so popular and get 500k hits a day and mmorpg gets 5k. its ridiculous that these site's still continue to protect false marketeers who try to sell shit as gold.
People want someone other themselves to lay the blame on. the simple fact is our expectations mainly come from within. Shills on forums? Thats what, 1% of the posts? Marketers? People actually dont know to take marketing with a grain of salt?
nope, if they did we wouldnt be seeing so many people paying ridiculous amounts of money for alpha and beta access after hearing/reading/watching some sweet marketing swindling.
The guys you quoted have a point but not all the blame falls on the company, it also falls on the fanatics, fanboys and anyone who supports bad practices which is the reason why companies keep doing the wrong thing.
And one more time MMORPG.com attempts to defend a major advertiser...
...by blaming the customers for the poor quality of the product? Again?
I suspect most of us are less concerned about how feature rich a new MMORPG may be than we are concerned that the "promised" features actually work. Consider: Who sets up players' expectations?
--The developers.
--The marketers.
--Their advertisements (aka paid reviews).
--Their shils in the forums.
--Their promises of great and wonderful things that are new and unique so we should spend our money on their product and not on someone else's product.
Do the players force these "expectations" onto the developers? No. So, when the players experience something that doesn't meet expectations, whose fault is it?
MMORPG.com continues to lose what little credibility it has left with these repeated attempts to rationalize a bad product. ESO could have been a great game, but it isn't. ZOS didn't listen to its testers. ZOS didn't get a clue from the massive cancellation of pre-orders after the open Beta sessions. ZOS hasn't gotten a clue from the massive cancellation of subscriptions.
ZOS built up player expectations with a whole lot of marketing hype and then didn't deliver on the product they promised.
FACT: That is not their customers' fault.
Very solid post.
I second that. Awesome post!
No, this is mostly a load of shit.
Because people see what they want to see.
And then you go on bringing examples from totally different games which have no bearing on this one?
The dupe exploit was known and when a represantative of a developer, ANY developer throws out statements, that dupe exploits were low on priority because he couldn't imagine that this could in any way affect the ingame economy....
Well, then it is time to call names. People like this should NOT run online games and fail on that scale is also a sure sign that the rest of the game is plagued with faults.
To bring you an example from a completely different angle, since you like this: Cleaning toilets is easy compared to cleaning kitchens. So when a restaurant doesn't even manage to keep the bathrooms clean you can bet on some very interesting fauna and flory in their kitchen.
The problem is simple and is not high expectations.Developers have not advanced the genre one bit,they have remained entirely stagnant.
I think that's definitely part of it. MMOs are products, and we're consumers. We expect each iteration of a product to be better than the last, especially in technology. No one's interested in replacing their current CPU with a slower CPU, even if it's newer than what they already have. If you're going to bring something to market, you'd better make sure that you have something to set you apart from the competition. Unfortunately, that rarely seems to be the case in MMOs, or really gaming in general. Once a particular formula hits it big, it just gets repeated over and over again.
MMO studios aren't entirely to blame for this, though; they're victims of their own success. They've become so expensive to create that only large companies can make them, and large companies are, by their very nature, risk-averse. Until costs come down, I'm not sure we'll see significant variation in the formula. Failure of a 50- million-dollar product that takes up to 4 years to create just isn't something any publicly-owned business is going to play around with. We need game design's version of what the Canon 5D was for independent film.
The people who make the games have only themselves to blame for all the negativity. Too many times we have had this and that promise thrown our way only for none of them to be delivered. Some MMO's didn't even release feature complete, in fact these days most of them are not feature complete. Remember Horizon that didn't even have the features that it advertised ON THE BOX?
Well, to the developers and suits around game creation. Don't cry about spilt milk when you are the ones that kicked over the bottle.
Well now, that's a bit rich. MMORPG writers slagging off their site members for criticizing some of the products. Maybe if the reviews you give these games reflected their quality and not just how much advertisement revenue they pay, their wouldn't be so many vitriolic posts. Bit of a conflict of interest here. You might want to check out this sites reviews on review centre - not good.
I cancelled my sub to ESO because it is boring and a tedious quest fest amongst many other reasons. Not because of posters slagging the game off. I had spent £39 pounds on a product which in my view was not the one they promised or advertised.
If I had listened to some of these nasty posters you talk about, I might have saved myself a wasted £39. Because their views were far more accurate than your self interest reviews on this site... which differ somewhat from other sites not relying on the companies advertising revenue.
Wow has made blizzard a lot of money. Many companies are trying to jump on the bandwagon; it doesn't really work out well. Huge numbers of gamers are crying out for innovation and something to push the genre forward. They are not getting it.
If you don't like some of the critical posts on your site... there really is no point in having the site.
Expectations are stage managed by the industry so don't go blaming us, the punters, when we find once again we have been taken for mugs.
Sorry, but we keep getting ads about these MMO's that are suppose to be "the thing" and they end up being garbage at release. Main reason this is happening is because devs are announcing their games 3-4+ years in advance. I remember clearly how ArcheAge was suppose to be 4 years ago, a load of features, no cash shop and P2P. Now they changed the game so much in the past 2 years that it ain't even worth the time to bother with it since the game will be another P2W money sink like Atlantica Online. You want another example? Take TESO, how many months before release did we say that the game was going to be aimed for a console audience and not the PC audience, and now people start crying that the game is no where as great as Skyrim. Of course TESO sucks at the moment, the game ain't even finished yet, once it is, Zenimax / Bethesda will release it on console.
Carbine / NCSoft did a pretty good job up to now on Wildstar as far as drama goes, and I'm surprised, I'm still against the open beta where people can get exclusive gear / loot for when the game launches, but besides that I got nothing bad to say about it.
In conclusion, it really doesn't take a degree in plasma reactors to predict how bad or how decent a new MMO will end up being, they're all easily predictable.
I think most veteran MMO players can read between the lines in what people post. MMO's like ESO get heavily scrutinized because they are a game using an archaic model of monetization with sub par features and functionality. Now if it were a B2P game I doubt it would get as much bad publicity and even less if it were a F2P game. It is all about value and MMO players that have been drug under the bus by games that start out as subscription and then move to F2P inside a year or two are tired of poor quality being charged at a premium.
Unfortunately that is also the problem is that people still toss their money at these sub par games. If people would stop tossing them a bone "just because" it would go much further in making a statement about the quality of the game.
Well now, that's a bit rich. MMORPG writers slagging off their site members for criticizing some of the products. Maybe if the reviews you give these games reflected their quality and not just how much advertisement revenue they pay, their wouldn't be so many vitriolic posts. Bit of a conflict of interest here. You might want to check out this sites reviews on review centre - not good.
I cancelled my sub to ESO because it is boring and a tedious quest fest amongst many other reasons. Not because of posters slagging the game off. I had spent £39 pounds on a product which in my view was not the one they promised or advertised.
If I had listened to some of these nasty posters you talk about, I might have saved myself a wasted £39. Because their views were far more accurate than your self interest reviews on this site... which differ somewhat from other sites not relying on the companies advertising revenue.
Wow has made blizzard a lot of money. Many companies are trying to jump on the bandwagon; it doesn't really work out well. Huge numbers of gamers are crying out for innovation and something to push the genre forward. They are not getting it.
If you don't like some of the critical posts on your site... there really is no point in having the site.
Expectations are stage managed by the industry so don't go blaming us, the punters, when we find once again we have been taken for mugs.
Well spoken coulnt have said it better myself.
Altough ESO for example in beta was strangely alot better then launch when they started all kinds of exp nerfs to force you trough quests, and quests only.
No EU servers that were promised 2 weeks post launch.
Now i understand why.......the subs are plummeting so hard they prolly need to booth up plan B. free to play.
Wish i could upvote on this site like on Reddit -_- but anyway a +10 for you sir.
The people who make the games have only themselves to blame for all the negativity. Too many times we have had this and that promise thrown our way only for none of them to be delivered. Some MMO's didn't even release feature complete, in fact these days most of them are not feature complete. Remember Horizon that didn't even have the features that it advertised ON THE BOX?
Well, to the developers and suits around game creation. Don't cry about spilt milk when you are the ones that kicked over the bottle.
Have to agree, the poo and dead bodies are already in the well and it wasn't us that put it there, sadly it is only getting worse.....
Brenics ~ Just to point out I do believe Chris Roberts is going down as the man who cheated backers and took down crowdfunding for gaming.
This is the Snake Oil Salesmen getting angry because his reputation is starting to get quite bad. Back in the old days he was welcomed in Town by a crowd of raging believers holding fistfulls of dollars. He was given free lodging and even offered some of the townsfolks sisters for bringing his miraculous potions and treatments for "Everything that ails you."
Now when he rolls into a new town there are still the raging fanatics ready to part with their dollars and give away their first born- However, there are also those standing on the sidelines and asking tough questions, demanding some proof and in some cases even running the Snake Oil Salesmen from Town.
So the Snake Oil Salesmen (who is very clever BTW and invented modern marketing even so far as to making "brands") started taking out full page advertisments in the local Newspapers of the day. Suddenly even Editors were having cures for whatever ails them by using the product- Even the point of writing fullpage editorials about "Dr Smiths Silver Cure-All" cured his sick aunt of consumption (she lives in Denver) and these nay-sayers are honestly hurting the townsfolk by causing a disruption and sewing the seeds of discontent against this product that REALLY WORKS.
-True Story.
Read "The Coke Machine" about how Coca Cola even came to be. Interesting stuff...Marketing.
EDIT- We also ended up with some Consumer Law based on this practice. It just has not reached the MMO world yet. Do Payola and Plugola laws apply to online journalism ?
I've begun 4 new MMO's in the last 12 months, all of them have sparked, then fizzled very quickly.
Boring games incestuously feeding off other boring games. Nothing new.
WoW might be an aged trope, but when a game comes out that costs more than WoW, offers nothing more in terms of gameplay than WoW then you have to ask "Why not just play WoW - or, if you hate WoW - why not just give up and do something else"
Poison this well. Destroy it. It's full of games feeding off each other. Developers looking for a cash cow but doing so by repeating the same old mistakes that have been being made for the best part of a decade.
WE NEED A NEW WELL - IT'S NOT THE PLAYERS WHO HAVE POISONED THIS ONE - ITS THE DEVELOPERS LACK OF IMAGINATION
Comments
+1 I've never understood why people think it's never their own fault when there is so many ways to try before you buy nowadays. I was looking forward to ESO until I played it at pax. It was a real wtf moment....and then.... I didn't buy it.
The pay and complain system funds the next generation of shit.
So if a product or service is crap in our opinion, we are as customers to support them for charity?
Using your ESO example Ms. Gonzalez here is a quick "issue" list from what I seen during Pre-Orders, Beta and reading the MMO gaming news:
The problem here are not expectations, or over criticism. It's not the good or bad quality of games, or products. The problem here is the inmense amount of assholes who have as their life dedicated to tell everyone what they need to play, what they have to think or say, or even how they have to feel.
Sometimes, I say (because I'm very brave, you know) that I'm enjoying TESO. And then, a ton of imbecils who yell to me "You're ruining the game industry playing shit like that!" Came for every direction. And not only in videogames. Every single review of everything on the latest years has become a "How you have to live" or "You have to love this and have to hate this". So, it's fine, I can have an opinion, but only if you are agree with me. Because if not, You're a hater, or a fanboy.
That's the reason why, I don't even care the critics anymore. I trust only in one opinion: Mine. And I place every single review from everyone else in the "SPAM mailbox" and just ignore it. So, for me, who has to recover my trust is not the game industry, it's actually the reviewers, and yeah, the players. Well, the people, in general.
Actually over all a very weak post.
Day one developer announces a new featue being added to the game winged horses. Their intention is this would allow a gliding feature allowing the players access to certain terrain and locations and they thought it would be cool. They are excited about this and wanted their playerbase to know a bit about it.
Day Two playerbase receive the news immediately the fans cry hurrah and spread far and wide singing its praises,
Day three The fanbase start guessing what else this could mean chats develop on the possibility of flying castles. Some people note the word used had been glide not fly. A small percentage start a campaign to get that changed they want to fly not glide. Fly means no limits, Gliding limits them
Day four The fans leap in defense of the glide mechanic they start stating reasons for it and claim how awesome it will be they start building it up soon the world in their minds eye is full of possibiliites mounts gliding gracefully in the air floating islands , strongholds. Their imagination reaches higher and higher at the possibilities. Dark mutterings are heard from a small group of ay sayers who proclaim its a pointless gimmick wont mean anything really its not "flying" its gliding so basically only a longer jump mechanic so nothing new most games have jump mechanics.
Day 5 the dreamers and the nayers clash things start to turn ugly as they start poisoning each others threads. Meanwhile the developers start to get worried they can't give away tom many details on their new mechanic its early days yet and the more they tell the more likely someone else might steal the idea also they are still ironing out the details how far players can glide etc etc.
Day 6 War erupts battlelines are drawn what was to the developers a fun aspect of their game suddenly becomes a central point in the players eyes. To them this is what defines the game.
Day 7 game released the gliding mounts allow players to glide distances depending on height its used to cross chasms the higher you get the further you glide. It is a travel mechanic that allows for interesting exploration. It is fun.
BUtT.... It is not flying, there are no player strongholds in the sky..... it is not the focus of the game ....
The people who built it up as something wonderful beyond words are crushed. The nayers who claim it is nothing special are smug. The ordinary person who had no real expectations but did a wait and see approach has fun with it.
But all the forums see is the two extremes as the wait a see players voices are usually ignored and missed in the great forum battles innocent bystanders whoses voices are constantly silenced. The casual observer will only see the fanatic and the doomspeaker when checking the forums usually in direct confrontation. As every aspect is ripped apart and built up usually with nothing but opinion and dreams to back it.
OPINION : We the playerbase need to accept some responsibility
Just my 2 cents
Gadareth
I couldn't agree with you more syrinx. You bring up a great point.
There is a disconnect between the actual product and expectations. It is insane to complain about a game's theme park features when it was designed to be a theme park. If the game is a theme park then don't expect it to be a sandbox. I know this is stating the obvious, but a huge segment of this site's community doesn't understand this concept.
Just because it's a themepark doesn't mean it has to be easy as dung.
Let the poison flow.
Oh look! A column criticizing the player base for criticizing ESO published by MMORPG.COM. Didn't we just have one of these?
Yeah, but there must be more advertising money in the pipeline.
I think that MMORPGs deserve to be critically judged.
Let's say I hear about a new MMORPG, and they proudly announce that they have a warrior with the awesome ability "mighty slash", a founders pack for 200$ where you get a mount that gives you +400% movement speed (in game you have to farm about 10 days straight to get a mount) and a whooping two starting zones, then I won't be friendly with the game.
MMORPGs cost in nearly all cases far far more money than a regular game. And so they should be, in theory, much much better. But most are not.
Let's play Fallen Earth (blind, 300 episodes)
Let's play Guild Wars 2 (blind, 45 episodes)
exactly this, a month ago i got email (from moderators on this forum) for trolling on this forum cause i typed that this game has too many issues and needs already an overhaul (PCgamer's review was to take care before you go and buy this game..!), not even something abusive or bad language ...
i dont have a problem with the developers and i dont wanna see people losing their job, but i cant accept the publisher's behaviour ... if on the street there are 2 shops and one of them is expensive and has mediocre products of course you wont go there and you will advise the people next to you to avoid it ... the same happens with ESO, its an expensive and at the same time mediocre product ...
Have a beer my friend ! +10
ESO trailers + ESO intervieuws shows a totaly diffrent kind of image then when you play the game.
There is no freedom of how want to play the game, its a horrible 250 hours solo quest grinder.
Exxtremely hard to play with friends or wife or guild when leveling or nigh imposible due to this weird phasing.
i tought level 50 was my endgame opening, boy was i wrong.... Paul Sage said - At level 50 the game real opens up, heroic raids ! Cyrodiil pvp ! dungeons ! Adventure zones !
It was a lie......2 other factions needed to be grinded out with harder mobs and minibosses if you ding 50 you havent even completed 30% of the quest grind....
Was this advertised ? nope
Was this zenimax intention ? yes they needed more time to get their 1st adventure zone out.
I was lied to......
Props if you dig that long solo play, here have a beer my friend i am happy for you.
But this isnt what was told in their intervieuw or trailers....
Marketing is poluted and stinks...
Its mostly a gimmick to gain hype and sell their crap to the people.
ESO is not even half the mmo i expected....but that marketing......oh did they do a good job or what...
And due to this feeling of disapointment people rage and lost trust to devs and studio's and even game revieuwer forums as MMORPG....Massivly...tentonhammer....
Thats why Angryjoe is so popular and get 500k hits a day and mmorpg gets 5k.
its ridiculous that these site's still continue to protect false marketeers who try to sell shit as gold.
nope, if they did we wouldnt be seeing so many people paying ridiculous amounts of money for alpha and beta access after hearing/reading/watching some sweet marketing swindling.
The guys you quoted have a point but not all the blame falls on the company, it also falls on the fanatics, fanboys and anyone who supports bad practices which is the reason why companies keep doing the wrong thing.
And then you go on bringing examples from totally different games which have no bearing on this one?
The dupe exploit was known and when a represantative of a developer, ANY developer throws out statements, that dupe exploits were low on priority because he couldn't imagine that this could in any way affect the ingame economy....
Well, then it is time to call names. People like this should NOT run online games and fail on that scale is also a sure sign that the rest of the game is plagued with faults.
To bring you an example from a completely different angle, since you like this: Cleaning toilets is easy compared to cleaning kitchens. So when a restaurant doesn't even manage to keep the bathrooms clean you can bet on some very interesting fauna and flory in their kitchen.
I think that's definitely part of it. MMOs are products, and we're consumers. We expect each iteration of a product to be better than the last, especially in technology. No one's interested in replacing their current CPU with a slower CPU, even if it's newer than what they already have. If you're going to bring something to market, you'd better make sure that you have something to set you apart from the competition. Unfortunately, that rarely seems to be the case in MMOs, or really gaming in general. Once a particular formula hits it big, it just gets repeated over and over again.
MMO studios aren't entirely to blame for this, though; they're victims of their own success. They've become so expensive to create that only large companies can make them, and large companies are, by their very nature, risk-averse. Until costs come down, I'm not sure we'll see significant variation in the formula. Failure of a 50- million-dollar product that takes up to 4 years to create just isn't something any publicly-owned business is going to play around with. We need game design's version of what the Canon 5D was for independent film.
The people who make the games have only themselves to blame for all the negativity. Too many times we have had this and that promise thrown our way only for none of them to be delivered. Some MMO's didn't even release feature complete, in fact these days most of them are not feature complete. Remember Horizon that didn't even have the features that it advertised ON THE BOX?
Well, to the developers and suits around game creation. Don't cry about spilt milk when you are the ones that kicked over the bottle.
Another horrible, pro-industry, anti-gamers, lecturing and teaching article telling us how to look at things and what to think - again by Gonzales.
At least the author has consistency in her articles.
Well now, that's a bit rich. MMORPG writers slagging off their site members for criticizing some of the products. Maybe if the reviews you give these games reflected their quality and not just how much advertisement revenue they pay, their wouldn't be so many vitriolic posts. Bit of a conflict of interest here. You might want to check out this sites reviews on review centre - not good.
I cancelled my sub to ESO because it is boring and a tedious quest fest amongst many other reasons. Not because of posters slagging the game off. I had spent £39 pounds on a product which in my view was not the one they promised or advertised.
If I had listened to some of these nasty posters you talk about, I might have saved myself a wasted £39. Because their views were far more accurate than your self interest reviews on this site... which differ somewhat from other sites not relying on the companies advertising revenue.
Wow has made blizzard a lot of money. Many companies are trying to jump on the bandwagon; it doesn't really work out well. Huge numbers of gamers are crying out for innovation and something to push the genre forward. They are not getting it.
If you don't like some of the critical posts on your site... there really is no point in having the site.
Expectations are stage managed by the industry so don't go blaming us, the punters, when we find once again we have been taken for mugs.
Sorry, but we keep getting ads about these MMO's that are suppose to be "the thing" and they end up being garbage at release. Main reason this is happening is because devs are announcing their games 3-4+ years in advance. I remember clearly how ArcheAge was suppose to be 4 years ago, a load of features, no cash shop and P2P. Now they changed the game so much in the past 2 years that it ain't even worth the time to bother with it since the game will be another P2W money sink like Atlantica Online. You want another example? Take TESO, how many months before release did we say that the game was going to be aimed for a console audience and not the PC audience, and now people start crying that the game is no where as great as Skyrim. Of course TESO sucks at the moment, the game ain't even finished yet, once it is, Zenimax / Bethesda will release it on console.
Carbine / NCSoft did a pretty good job up to now on Wildstar as far as drama goes, and I'm surprised, I'm still against the open beta where people can get exclusive gear / loot for when the game launches, but besides that I got nothing bad to say about it.
In conclusion, it really doesn't take a degree in plasma reactors to predict how bad or how decent a new MMO will end up being, they're all easily predictable.
I think most veteran MMO players can read between the lines in what people post. MMO's like ESO get heavily scrutinized because they are a game using an archaic model of monetization with sub par features and functionality. Now if it were a B2P game I doubt it would get as much bad publicity and even less if it were a F2P game. It is all about value and MMO players that have been drug under the bus by games that start out as subscription and then move to F2P inside a year or two are tired of poor quality being charged at a premium.
Unfortunately that is also the problem is that people still toss their money at these sub par games. If people would stop tossing them a bone "just because" it would go much further in making a statement about the quality of the game.
Well spoken coulnt have said it better myself.
Altough ESO for example in beta was strangely alot better then launch when they started all kinds of exp nerfs to force you trough quests, and quests only.
No EU servers that were promised 2 weeks post launch.
Now i understand why.......the subs are plummeting so hard they prolly need to booth up plan B. free to play.
Wish i could upvote on this site like on Reddit -_- but anyway a +10 for you sir.
Have to agree, the poo and dead bodies are already in the well and it wasn't us that put it there, sadly it is only getting worse.....
Brenics ~ Just to point out I do believe Chris Roberts is going down as the man who cheated backers and took down crowdfunding for gaming.
This is the Snake Oil Salesmen getting angry because his reputation is starting to get quite bad. Back in the old days he was welcomed in Town by a crowd of raging believers holding fistfulls of dollars. He was given free lodging and even offered some of the townsfolks sisters for bringing his miraculous potions and treatments for "Everything that ails you."
Now when he rolls into a new town there are still the raging fanatics ready to part with their dollars and give away their first born- However, there are also those standing on the sidelines and asking tough questions, demanding some proof and in some cases even running the Snake Oil Salesmen from Town.
So the Snake Oil Salesmen (who is very clever BTW and invented modern marketing even so far as to making "brands") started taking out full page advertisments in the local Newspapers of the day. Suddenly even Editors were having cures for whatever ails them by using the product- Even the point of writing fullpage editorials about "Dr Smiths Silver Cure-All" cured his sick aunt of consumption (she lives in Denver) and these nay-sayers are honestly hurting the townsfolk by causing a disruption and sewing the seeds of discontent against this product that REALLY WORKS.
-True Story.
Read "The Coke Machine" about how Coca Cola even came to be. Interesting stuff...Marketing.
EDIT- We also ended up with some Consumer Law based on this practice. It just has not reached the MMO world yet. Do Payola and Plugola laws apply to online journalism ?
I disagree completely here.
Poison that well.
I've begun 4 new MMO's in the last 12 months, all of them have sparked, then fizzled very quickly.
Boring games incestuously feeding off other boring games. Nothing new.
WoW might be an aged trope, but when a game comes out that costs more than WoW, offers nothing more in terms of gameplay than WoW then you have to ask "Why not just play WoW - or, if you hate WoW - why not just give up and do something else"
Poison this well. Destroy it. It's full of games feeding off each other. Developers looking for a cash cow but doing so by repeating the same old mistakes that have been being made for the best part of a decade.
WE NEED A NEW WELL - IT'S NOT THE PLAYERS WHO HAVE POISONED THIS ONE - ITS THE DEVELOPERS LACK OF IMAGINATION