It will never be about you as an individual. MMO's will always seek to appease the masses, more so than any other genre. You're a minority, which is why you're not happy. It sucks, but there are a lot more people than you that are perfectly happy with the games they play. And MMO's are designed for those people.Originally Posted by Vayne
Not always... I mean i get the "it's business" side of your argument and their is truth there. BUT, there is art involved too and when dealing with art and creation it isn't always about making something that everyone will love, it's about making what you love. A painter does not need everyone to like his painting, but if he wants to make a living he needs enough to buy it so that he can continue doing what he love's.
Everquest was a HUGE success. Compared to what had come before it was staggering. It took them soo off guard that all their servers crashed and they had to take the game down and re-release it. Then they had assumed people would being playing around 4-8 hours a week and it would take a year at least to reach end lvl (50). Their early numbers were that people were averaging 4-8 hours a day (7x their highest estimate) and people were reaching lvl 50 in months not years.
My point... They did not know that people would like their game, they hoped so because you always want people to like your creation, but mostly they just wanted enough to like it so they could keep creating. Their highest hopes were reached and surpassed VERY fast proving they did not expect that many "fans" of their work. They created it anyway. If they would have wanted to get as many fans as possible they would have copied the best selling game at the time not created something new on a wing and a prayer.
GW1 did the same thing (tried something new) and it worked.
GW2 is doing it yet again. AN is the cutting edge team in MMORPGs at the moment. They are not trying to "get the masses" they are trying to create a great game. If you build it, they will come philosophy...
WoW, to me (I admit I am no expert on WoW), is the antithesis of this. They are their to get as many subscriptions as possible and make as much money as possible. The major reasons I feel this way are...
1) The graphic style/design was far below other games of it's time frame so that more PCs could run it. (This doesn't mean you can't like that style, but it was degraded and then smudged together to make lower end machines able to run it.)
*argument against... It was their art style...
2) Subscription based.
*argument against... Everyone else was doing it...
3) They only add content (expansions) sparingly and usually only when another game is released or expansion added to a competitor. The amount of money they earned from box sales alone warranted a much more robust content addition budget (to say nothing about the millions of subscriptions).
*argument against.... They did not want to dilute the game with too much content (I know, it's all I could come up with :/ )
4) It is a major gear grind. The term "grind" and with it "gear grind" are opinion based, as has been proven in many of the threads on GW2 post the Nov. update, but to acknowledge WoW as one of the most gear grindy games, I believe, is acceptable. (again not stating what is too much or too little of a gear grind or what is fun or what is not, just that WoW IS a gear grind.) The benefit, to the company, to being a gear grind style game with a subscription means that for players to participate at the higher (not always highest) lvls of your game they are REQUIRED to commit a specific amount of time (controlled by the company) acquiring, unlocking, ect content. This insures longer sub durations and more profit while not adding enjoyment to the game. (Some may find enjoyment in grinding, but it was not the goal of the company when grindy things are added.)
*argument against.... They added gear grinds/locked content to give players something to achieve so they could differentiate themselves from their fellow gamers.
Post turned out waaay to long, sorry. I just do not feel the sole goal of every company is "get the masses".
Vain, I believe, is afraid that if the "creative" companies fail, there will be no more and all we will be left with is WoW (business model) clones.
Options are ALWAYS good.
Of course they are. Don't take it so literal. In this one instance, heavy story based MMO's are not yet profitable because the consumer base just isn't there. There is a player base that would buy into it, but it's just not as big as the others and MMO's are too expensive to only appeal to that small margin.
Creative companies don't fail. Creative companies just aren't making MMO's.
You're still not listening. There are more people avoiding MMOs than there are playing them. MMOs aren't mainstream games. Even with 10 million players spread across the world, WoW isn't mainstream. There are more people that have been driven away from the MMO space than that play them.
You use the words minority, without really thinking about what I'm saying. The stuff I want in a game won't necessarily affect the stuff other people want in a game. That's been my point all along. Rift could have made that game good for me, AND still kept everyone else. What I need from a game isn't mutually exclusive to what others need. It's just a matter of people understand.
Nor am I alone. There are a LOT of people like me. We might not be a majority but we were a force, certainly if you were on the Rift forums when I left, it would seem that way. In fact, Rift made changes based on the comments that were on the forums. It's really not that hard to provide the stuff I want in a game, as long as people understand that a percentage of people do want it. And really, is it that hard to understand that making a game better for more people is STILL better for the genre.
Rift devs simply didn't fact us in and early on it hurt them. I knew why people were leaving Rift in droves early on, and it seemed they didn't. They thought another raid was what was needed to hold people, but they released another raid and people continued to leave. Who left?
The guys who wanted an RPG. The guys who soloed. The guys who didn't want PVP in their PVe. I don't think you were on those forums, so you didn't see it but it was a relatively big movement across a whole lot of threads, but a whole lot of people. And it went on for a long time.
You think this vertical gear progression thing is a big deal, well that was part of that debate too. People didn't want it. The same people complaining here.
So yes, an MMO can be made that would work for me and still work for the masses...as long as they didn't ignore my needs in the design of a game. Because I really don't think MMO have caught the masses yet, and when they do, some company is going to make a lot of money. It's not even impossible that Guild Wars 2 will be that company in a couple of years. They have a decent start.
If Bethesda games weren't so buggy I'd put some money down on them being the next big thing, but I suspect the MMO community won't tolerate that many bugs. People thinking GW 2 is bad...I don't think the realize.
TLDR; I'm not asking for a game just for me. I'm asking for my concerns and the concerns of many like me to be addressed in game design without ruining the game for others. As you've seen me say over and over again, sometimes you have to compromise. That doesn't mean you should be okay with being ignored altogether.
Edit: Case in point, Anet MADE an MMO I want to play, presumably also for the masses. So it can be done. Remember, I'm the one not complaining about ascended gear.
It doesn't matter how many people are playing other games compared to MMO's or how many people are avoiding MMO's. Investors aren't going to fund a new MMO with the changes you want based on speculation and innovation.
When the current population playing MMO's starts to care about things like story, lore, over arching complex RPG elements instead of loot/gold/experience/raiding/endgame/pvp, then designers will make bigger steps towards them. Developers have the metrics, they know what players spend their time doing in MMO's vs what they don't spend time doing in MMOs. When the statistics show that we as RPG-lovers are in the majority of the people playing this genre and that people start to spend more time reading lore, doing quests for the sake of doing quests rather than for item/money/exp rewards, it will shift. Even if only slowly.
The interest has to be stronger. I have no doubt that it will change and we will see a higher quality of game. But it wont be until the current market has been over saturated into oblivion. WoW is doing a fantastic job of making sure that happens. And I can't wait for the majority of the population to become bored with that design model. But until that happens, blaming the industry, developers, designers, investors. Does NOTHING.
Last edited by Fey; 12-02-2012 at 07:40 PM.
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