Ad Astra

Originally Posted by Olantern

I base my theory that the new design philosophy of the game is "shiny stuff and one-off purchases to draw in new players; large-group raids to build and ensure customer loyalty" on several things:

1) First, as you note, a variety of new content has been added recently, but the most notable parts have been at the introductory (new Atlas Park/Mercy Island) or even pre-introductory (new costumes and powersets) stages or as an entirely new endgame (all the Incarnate content). To me, that suggests two different target audiences.

2) The only part of the game that requires a subscription is the endgame content. To me, that implies that to the developers, "long-term player commitment=hardcore player=primary interest is large endgame raids." Other new content is accessible piece-by-piece through the market, suggesting to me that the devs view it as "for casual players." (Here, "casual" means "likes the game but doesn't feel the need to play a monthly fee to play.") Basically, the switch from a pure subscription to a subscription/minitransaction model enabled the devs to craft sets of content for different segments of the player population.

3) Other MMO's are characterized by "raiding guilds" and other highly-organized, player-created groups. It isn't hard for me to imagine marketing studies that have determined that such player-created communities make for stronger player commitment to a game in general. As a corollary, the devs are making a new effort to capture the achiever demographic and to build a similar raid community here in hero-land.

4) The devs have stated on these fora a number of times that they want to make sure that they don't create disincentives for players to run trial Leagues.

5) I've said this dozens of times before, yet it still doesn't register with forumites: The devs are game mechanics engineers in their professional identities and "gamers" in their hobby ones. They are not, for the most part, artists, roleplayers, writers, etc. For the most part, the story is there as window dressing for mechanics, not the other way around. This issue has always been present, but it has accelerated over the life of the game, particularly with the changeover from Jack Emmert as lead developer (he had a completely different set of hangups and problems) to the more powergaming, twitch-reflexes, button-mashing, raid-oriented Matt Miller as lead developer. This is a strong, strong impression that I get every time I see Matt Miller speak; if others don't see it, I'm not sure why not.

I'm not sure how to make it any clearer. But the overwhelming impression I get from the redesign of the game over the past several issues is that someone in the development pipeline decided, "The only way to keep a subscriber base and thus keep the game community going is to create a community based on raiding guilds, like other MMO's." That doesn't meant that plenty of other kinds of content haven't been and won't be created. It just indicates to me that the developers believe that the only people who stay with an MMO for the long term are people interested in endgame raiding.

I'm not even saying that endgame raiding is bad (though there are other kinds of content I vastly prefer, personally). I'm simply saying that (1) circumstances have convinced me that the devs believe it's the primary way to sustain a static player community (as opposed to the transient pay-per-content-item Premium players) and that (2) personally, I think that endgame raiding is only one way to build a long-term, static player segment.