Anyone else get a chuckle out of this article?

There are generally several issues with why MMO's don't do as well as expected.

1. The biggest is that they get sold to investors and publishers as the next big game that will break 30 million subscribers world wide. The reality is that if they break 100K they are doing good. If they break 500K and hold it they are a major success. But because they were sold as going to bring in millions of subscribers they are all considered a failure by their investors and publishing house.

You would think that at least the publishers would have a more realistic view of things.

2. Often are very focused on some aspect that caught the developers fancy and can turn out crippled or odd because of that. This isn't to say that a development team should never stick to their guns on what they are developing, but when you get consistent feedback that there are problems with the fundamental design/goals of the game you should at least consider it.

3. Unrealistic expectations of players. Far too many players appear to expect a mature game with lots and lots of content out of a just launched product. That isn't going to happen unless a product was 5 - 10 years in development where that time was spent all on content additions and not just rebuilding the game multiple times to get it right.

There are others but those are the big ones. I left off designing to the newest latest and greatest video cards/computers for example. That by the way is one of the reasons the the mega game still does so well you can run it on pretty much any functional computer out there without needing the newest most modern machine to enjoy it.

It's a safe bet there are more MMO players now than there have ever been.
They're just playing lots of MMO's, including some which you would say "are not MMO's."

Then you take a look at other more casual online games like Farmville and League of Legends and you see that the people who were playing MMO's have simply found a game more to their liking than "grind until you raid until you die online".

In before potential threadlock.

Quote:

Originally Posted by EvilGeko And despite what everyone says, WoW isn't on top because it's the best game. It's on top because it's the first game to get enough right to hook people in. There are better games out there, but the 10 million or so subscribers have investment and friends in WoW, so WoW is where they stay. Golden Girl made a crack at TOR earlier in the thread, but WoW has had even less content than than in the same timeframe. It's ridiculous, but Blizzard has those folks hooked.

The 800 pound gorilla isn't on top just because they were the first. Before that was EQ and before that UO. What they were the first to put out a quality product a cut above everyone else to that point, and then continued to keep the quality up over the years.

TORtanic, on the other hand, is how you spend nine figures on a game that would have been truly state of the art for 2004, only now its 2012 and players expect a hell of a lot more for that initial $60 plus and the $15 a month. Not to mention that the whole experience was pretty much the home PC version of the Buzz Lightyear ride at Disneyland.

Jack had a lot of great ideas and was able to get a great game launched.

His problem developed after launch when he got locked into seeing CoH as just a mechanized version of a table-top roleplaying game where, he, as the GM, kept the players in the dark not only about content and lore (which was mostly appropriate, otherwise, massive spoilers would have ruined the fun for a lot of folk), but also in the dark with regard to mechanics.

Jack thought that knowing the mechanics would make the game less fun. The problem with that is that the mechanics had a lot of flaws and imbalances and just wrong numbers. And Jack (and the powers team at the time, excluding Castle) would purposely turn a deaf ear to the players. On top of that, the players would find all sorts of loopholes and exploits which became nearly impossible to fix since... the Dev team run by Jack weren't in dialogue with the players and the players didn't know what the real numbers were to test.

On top of that, the playerbase would change the focus of the gaming habits (hating streetsweeping and using just the instanced missions for level-appropriate foes, e.g.) and Jack was slow to respond (if he ever did) to how the players wanted to play. He tended to be inflexible to what the players were supposed to consider to be fun.

On top of that, when the playerbase became loud enough to not be ignored, he was a public relations nightmare. I won't go into all the stories of foot-in-mouthisms he was guilty of.

On top of that, while keeping players in the dark over mechanics -- else our fun would be destroyed -- he took a paycheck from a player-guides company to publish all the mechanics.

On top of that, he negotiated with other companies to create a CoH-killer alternate Supers-MMO while putting CoH on a shoestring budget.

Jack deserves credit for the initial impetus of the game. He also deserves blame for all the inflexibility, the imperious attitude, and the betrayal of the game.

Like anything else in the world that involves business, the game (So to speak) is changing. The old model of Pay-To-Play will slowly die out, then Free-to-Play will take it's place.

Will a MMO ever has as much popularity or success as WoW? Probably not, but in this economic climate anything over 100k is good. If Blizzard were smart (And I have no doubt that they are), they should seriously contemplate a F2P model.

Now, if WAR ever becomes F2P, or just popular again, i'll be leaving very swiftly