A lot of good points here and the technological side is touched on.
Seems Bartle addresses the "Acts" & "Appreciates" but doesn't fully address the "Acknowledge"
I realize the "Achiever" & "Socializer" is 2 great camps but it seems to me he goes right into the spirit of what's wrong. (20k can sustain instead of 20 mil) by forgoing mention of the "Explorer".
Thank goodness the roleplayer was mentioned and yes I know he wrote types of players.
I still however think companies in general do not "Acknowledge" the customer.
For MMORPGs recently I think the controlling management only acknowledge the customer as a source of Benjamins, Bread, Bucks, Cabbage, Cheddar, Clams, Dead presidents, Dough, Greenbacks, Moola, Scratch, Wad and oh yeah, money.
Shoko_Lied said: This is why I don't play MMO's anymore, even though I miss them. It's true people don't really stick with a single MMO as long anymore. I fancied the days where a good portion of the community going into an MMO would invest close to a year, or easily more in their favorite world. The MMO was in essence a Hub you could always fall back on, but these days most MMO's barely retain the same faces for the amount of time most progression based single player games do.
Ditto.
It seems like as time marches on every MMO I invest myself into retains me for shorter and shorter periods of time. It's probably a little unfair of me but I did start the genre in SWG at launch. I also played a lot of Planetside.
I kept up both games for years and made it past the NGE for awhile in SWG. I gave up on SWG when Tabula Rasa came out but TR was a small game and after only a year development dried up and it just went into maintenance mode. I quit well before it was shutdown after that but I still got about 18 months out of it.
Jumped into Fallen Earth next which was excellent in a lot of ways but the devs seemed very conflicted about the combat. It was shooter controls with WoW-like hotbars. The macros I made for that game... boy was the gameplay god awful. But that game world, man, that game world was something else. Still the best I've ever experienced. Faction system was really cool in it. But, for whatever reason, the devs never budged on player buildings which seemed so natural in a post-apoc game.
Then I tried out Defiance, loved it, but that game very quickly fell into maintenance mode as well and when I finally left it there was just one guy working on it. Trion completely gave up on it. Think I made it six months in Defiance.
Have played SWTOR off and on for years but, aside from launch, I've never been able to stomach more than a few weeks at a time. It's the antithesis of everything I actually like in MMOs. I hate linear content, I hate SWTOR's gameplay with a passion, and now the expansions aren't even multiplayer, lol.
Between Episode VII, Rogue One, and Rebels I need a Star Wars fix.
Even after all these years, fourteen now in fact, I still find myself reminiscing about all of the interesting and amazing people I met in the Theed cantina. All of the rebels I slaughtered in Anchorhead. All of the bombing runs my TIE Bomber survived, the fun crew stuff on the multi-passenger ships, the insane amount of roleplaying, and more. It boggles me to think that, in a game, you could find 70+ people just socializing in a virtual bar.
When I think of extrapolating that to SWTOR I laugh out loud and roll my eyes. Could you even imagine such a thing in a modern MMO? Non-combat stuff as a main play style; and plenty of it?
I think I've made peace with the fact that I love the idea of the MMO but will probably always hate the execution. There are a few games I'm looking forward to, however. The Repopulation if they ever get it on UE4, Project Genom shows some promise, haven't seen much about it but I'm ready for a post-apoc sandbox and there's some random indie game called Edengrad, and perhaps the game I'm most excited for is Dual Universe.
We'll see if anything manages to interest me for more than a few months. I hope so. I really wanna get past this WoW-retread casual shit, y'know?
Sure... We had a MMO bubble for a while when everyone and their grandmother wanted to fund the next great MMO... (this then shifted to MOBA´s, but that busted at a much more rapid rate).
Beyond that things are looking up and up... But we have absolutely reached a point where we can talk about eras... (much like how some people still hold up classic DOOM as the purest of shooters) and the "classic" era has passed and the market is now moving forward trying new things (this includes how to maximize profits and minimize costs) but that is something that happens in all genres.
At least that is my analysis of the genre.
TL:DR The passing of a era, realigning goals, experimentation,
One person's manifesto doesn't make it so. Sounds more like fake news.
Oh but just like fake news those whose agenda (this case the bitter old vets) it pushes will believe it and call it fact. There is no reasoning with these people their new mmo is coming to forums like this to cry about mmos.
One person's manifesto doesn't make it so. Sounds more like fake news.
Oh but just like fake news those whose agenda (this case the bitter old vets) it pushes will believe it and call it fact. There is no reasoning with these people their new mmo is coming to forums like this to cry about mmos.
I don't know how an opinion article can be fake, unless you happen to know that he doesn't believe what he wrote! I thought it made sense for the most part.
One person's manifesto doesn't make it so. Sounds more like fake news.
Oh but just like fake news those whose agenda (this case the bitter old vets) it pushes will believe it and call it fact. There is no reasoning with these people their new mmo is coming to forums like this to cry about mmos.
I don't know how an opinion article can be fake, unless you happen to know that he doesn't believe what he wrote! I thought it made sense for the most part.
When you lump in an opinion piece, blame a particular segment, in this case the entirely imaginary 'bitter old vets' then you get 'fake news' even better if someone disagrees with you, then you can label them as the 'bitter old vets' its a neat stratagem that can be used to avoid actually having to give citations to back up any statements made, while denouncing any who disagree as being irrelevant.
If I run mythic raids, I will for sure have better gear than people just farming LFR. So you can still be "elite". Maybe you're just not playing the right games.
No, they can just run Mythic+ and get amazing gear. The set bonuses are not as game breaking as they used to be. WoW's future lies in eSports and Greater Rifts...
I meant Mythic+...
Raiding is largely vestigial at this point in time, and the add-ons basically think for you, anyways.
I don't think people are being very honest when they talk about MMO decline. MMOs are a subgenera of a gaming. Gaming companies make games to make money, and MMOs are no exception. Player population no longer is the deciding factor in the success of an MMO. Micro transactions are king. Is the genera making more money than it did 10 years ago.......5 years ago?
How much money "MMOs" pull in is going to be limited to how you define MMOs. My guess is that, if you loosely define the genera, there is an incredible amount more money being spent on it in 2016 as opposed to 2006 or even 2011.
MMOs are making money. They have changed, but those changes are market driven. People in particular may not like the direction, but as a group they are driving it forward.
I myself if getting very tired of the gaming industry nickel and diming me, not releasing fully fledged games and having DLC day 1. I speak with my wallet. I have not been spending money on games and doing other things.
The above post is a prime example of attempting to assign the term "decline" to the MMO industry. While I agree in part with the above post, the poster posits as good an argument for a "decline" in the MMO industry as he does for a successful, or positively progressing industry, particularly in the area of the quality as opposed to the quantity of games in the MMO industry.
My opinion seeks to simplify that subjectivity. The problem with the MMO industry is not the games, because unquestionably they are bigger and better than they have ever been. Even the greatest of the old school MMOs have benefitted greatly by updating their games with the improved technology that MMO games offer today. So that the problem isn't the games. The problem is us people. Yes, us! We, the gamers, with our incessant needs as they pertain to our individual preferences and expectations, are the problem.
So next time you want to apply blame, look in the mirror. For the problem lies within, and not with the plethora of games are being developed for your entertainment value, yet lie unappreciated by the entitled gaming demographic of today.
I guess that depends on your perspective. In EQ having no maps or auction house made the game more enjoyable IMO. I think we are being conditioned to reply upon maps to much now. It detracts from the exploration and adventure. The issue is that we are so used to being able to look something up if we can't then it's frustration. That frustration wouldn't be there if most games didn't have a map to begin with. You would just live with it and learn the area. That is just one of the mechanics that has change in EQ I don't like. I think the game is a mishmash of new and old ideals that does't work well. There are even some zones that are new art design and some that are old art design. Another big detractor is that everyone starts in the same place instead of different areas. I don't believe it has benefited from new ideas.
Maps are fine. Auction house is fine. Having to be online all the time is a waste of power and you never know when Windows decides to reboot itself while you're asleep.
I have a much bigger issue with the sophisticated extensibility added to the current crop of games. It really takes a lot of the thinking out and it causes too much friction.
Damage Parsers, Deadly Boss MODs (and it's ilk), etc. It's too much. People don't really have to learn much to play an MMORPG (or their characters) these days. Just get the right macros and do your rotation like a robot while dodging fire. Mission accomplished.
The raiding in EQ was a lot more thrilling because we didn't have this stuff. Raiding didn't seem so pre-scripted and players were a lot more involved in the entire process of devising a strat to down a boss.
Now, most guilds go to YouTube for Beta Strats and the content gets downed in record time.
And then they complain about having one raid tier for a year...
This was never an issue in EQ. Most guilds were still trying to beat the content 6+ months into the expansion back then.
Elemental Planes, Plane of Time, Uqua, Tacvi, Citadel of Anguish, etc.
These were not "release it so we can beat it" content additions. It took months for guilds to down all of the bosses in there.
Nowadays, every guild wants to call themselves a progresson guild, and most members barely log in outside of raid times.
The big casualty in the MMO market isn't the genre itself, but how massively the player communities have degenerated since back then.
I would say one big reason is RoI. To make a modern mmo requires a huge investment in time, resources and money. You aren't likely to see a return on investment until 2 or 3 years after launch, possibly not at all.
It's much cheaper to make a game for mobile devices that can reach a much larger audience . Which is why many developers have started to move their development to those platforms.
Computers themselves are expensive, which limits your market substantially.
Another is the time investment for the players. Players have to be willing to sacrifice significant parts of their real life for a virtual one.
Other games can be played casually on their phones from work or travelling.
About computers... it's rare for people in the first world to not have a computer these days. So expensive or not, it's much more necessary to own a computer than a television, especially since you can accomplish so much with a computer. And the way game makers make computers these days, they make them so that cheap computers can run them too. It's no longer "you have to buy the best hardware just to play".
Time investment is what all gamers are willing to invest. Even if they are playing silly facebook games, they are still wasting their time playing a game. That's life. You could also say the same thing about pretty much anything else.
Those games are crap. Just because they can be played casually doesn't make them good games, it makes them easy time wasters. I'd rather have quality. And my husband and I both will replay games many times. I've played the Dragon Age series 4 times, my husband has played 13.
Saying that it's ok for games to all go the level of facebook games only degrades the gaming genre. Things need to get better, not lazier and cheaper.
Comments
It seems like as time marches on every MMO I invest myself into retains me for shorter and shorter periods of time. It's probably a little unfair of me but I did start the genre in SWG at launch. I also played a lot of Planetside.
I kept up both games for years and made it past the NGE for awhile in SWG. I gave up on SWG when Tabula Rasa came out but TR was a small game and after only a year development dried up and it just went into maintenance mode. I quit well before it was shutdown after that but I still got about 18 months out of it.
Jumped into Fallen Earth next which was excellent in a lot of ways but the devs seemed very conflicted about the combat. It was shooter controls with WoW-like hotbars. The macros I made for that game... boy was the gameplay god awful. But that game world, man, that game world was something else. Still the best I've ever experienced. Faction system was really cool in it. But, for whatever reason, the devs never budged on player buildings which seemed so natural in a post-apoc game.
Then I tried out Defiance, loved it, but that game very quickly fell into maintenance mode as well and when I finally left it there was just one guy working on it. Trion completely gave up on it. Think I made it six months in Defiance.
Have played SWTOR off and on for years but, aside from launch, I've never been able to stomach more than a few weeks at a time. It's the antithesis of everything I actually like in MMOs. I hate linear content, I hate SWTOR's gameplay with a passion, and now the expansions aren't even multiplayer, lol.
Between Episode VII, Rogue One, and Rebels I need a Star Wars fix.
Even after all these years, fourteen now in fact, I still find myself reminiscing about all of the interesting and amazing people I met in the Theed cantina. All of the rebels I slaughtered in Anchorhead. All of the bombing runs my TIE Bomber survived, the fun crew stuff on the multi-passenger ships, the insane amount of roleplaying, and more. It boggles me to think that, in a game, you could find 70+ people just socializing in a virtual bar.
When I think of extrapolating that to SWTOR I laugh out loud and roll my eyes. Could you even imagine such a thing in a modern MMO? Non-combat stuff as a main play style; and plenty of it?
I think I've made peace with the fact that I love the idea of the MMO but will probably always hate the execution. There are a few games I'm looking forward to, however. The Repopulation if they ever get it on UE4, Project Genom shows some promise, haven't seen much about it but I'm ready for a post-apoc sandbox and there's some random indie game called Edengrad, and perhaps the game I'm most excited for is Dual Universe.
We'll see if anything manages to interest me for more than a few months. I hope so. I really wanna get past this WoW-retread casual shit, y'know?
Sure... We had a MMO bubble for a while when everyone and their grandmother wanted to fund the next great MMO... (this then shifted to MOBA´s, but that busted at a much more rapid rate).
Beyond that things are looking up and up... But we have absolutely reached a point where we can talk about eras... (much like how some people still hold up classic DOOM as the purest of shooters) and the "classic" era has passed and the market is now moving forward trying new things (this includes how to maximize profits and minimize costs) but that is something that happens in all genres.
At least that is my analysis of the genre.
TL:DR The passing of a era, realigning goals, experimentation,
This have been a good conversation
I meant Mythic+...
Raiding is largely vestigial at this point in time, and the add-ons basically think for you, anyways.
Maps are fine. Auction house is fine. Having to be online all the time is a waste of power and you never know when Windows decides to reboot itself while you're asleep.
I have a much bigger issue with the sophisticated extensibility added to the current crop of games. It really takes a lot of the thinking out and it causes too much friction.
Time investment is what all gamers are willing to invest. Even if they are playing silly facebook games, they are still wasting their time playing a game. That's life. You could also say the same thing about pretty much anything else.
Those games are crap. Just because they can be played casually doesn't make them good games, it makes them easy time wasters. I'd rather have quality. And my husband and I both will replay games many times. I've played the Dragon Age series 4 times, my husband has played 13.
Saying that it's ok for games to all go the level of facebook games only degrades the gaming genre. Things need to get better, not lazier and cheaper.