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Soon, there will be a huge exodus of the sheep out of WoW, I'm not sure to which game yet though.

I'd say Sociolotron. You can't beat sex as an attractor, and after grinding WoW for a few years I doubt they're looking for another fighting game.

Ah, I am missing something indeed. In my defense, it was well hidden by the official news site.

http://mmorpgdot.com/#46951 links to http://chronicle.ubi.com/newspost.php?id=15088, which does indeed confirm free play. Weird. I wonder why that post doesn't appear in the news index.

The article is a bit thin on the features and details and also incorrectly indicates that Jolt is the publisher. It's an independent and largely community-driven project.

Player accountability is something that older MMOG players have wanted for a very, very long time.

I wrote about it a while back. The ideal situation would be for a third party company to create a database where you could have a persistent identity across games. This idendity tag would follow you on all characters made across all games, ensuring that any stupidity on your part had actual repercussions in future online meetings. It would be a boon as well, because much like Ebay feedback good social and or adventuring interactions would be rewarded.

Up until I was hired on as the Slashdot Games editor, I was an editor over at MMORPGDot.com, where I was known as Dialogue. I also recently worked with simoniker on the Gaming Hacks book for O'Reilly Press. I do have a website, located at Randomdialogue.net. I don't keep my editor name linked to it because I'm not sure I could handle the traffic.

- World of Warcraft, simply put, is going to change everything. Subscription numbers for UO, FFXI, DAoC, AC, AC2, and EQ are going to fluctuate wildly when WoW comes out as people cancel their subscriptions to give Blizzard's game a shot. I don't know how many will stay, but I expect World of Warcraft, by the middle of next year, to be comfortably within the 250,000 - 300,000 area.

- Star Wars Galaxies will continue to hemmoraghe players until this fall, when the space expansion comes out. Regardless of how good it is, their subs are going to skyrocket as people flock to the game that has X-Wings and TIE Fighters. This influx of players will sustain them at least another 2 to 3 years as they continue to patch in new content and....(shhh) fix the game. SWG has passed the point where they could have failed. It isn't going anywhere anytime soon.

- Anarchy Online is going to be a sleeper comeback kid late this year or early next year. Their upcoming expansion sounds good, Funcom has finally managed to start to move beyond their disaster of a launch, and people are getting tired of Fantasy MMOGs.

- Lineage 2 is not going to do very well at all in the states. US gamers just don't like being ganked.

- AC and AC2, despite losses to WoW, are going to continue on quietly and happily. Jessica Mulligan is no slouch, and despite aging graphics and a tiny playerbase those games just keep getting better.

- City of Heroes is going to be a success...for a while. CoH is going to draw a whole bunch of newbie MMOGers into the fold who have never picked up a MMOG before. 6 months down the line if they don't have villains patched in they're going to start losing people as the fact that there is nothing to do besides combat starts to wear on the playerbase.

- Middle Earth Online is going to be a middling success. Their design concept is only so-so, but they'll attract enough attention via newbie MMOG players lusting after Legolas to stay afloat.

- Warhammer Online .... ?? I don't know where it's going to pull it's playerbase from. Have to wait and see on this one.

- EQ, one year from now, will no longer have such a commanding lead over all other US MMOGs.

- EQ2 is going to do "okay". It's a very different game but the branding alone will be enough to keep it going. Despite what SOE says, EQ is going to lose players to EQ2, futhering the WoW effect on the original Everquest.

- The Sims Online should be put out to pasture. That creepy melting pot of social darwinism was doomed from the get-go. EA should let it die.

- Shadowbane will continue to slowly exist as a team of dedicated and talented developers rescue a game that had almost as bad a launch as AO. People will always want to "Play to CRUSH!" so SB will always have players.

My 2 cents. I spoke a little more about this here: Quality over Quantity.

First and foremost, it is a game, not a "world". All the attempts at turning MMOGs into worlds have resulted in boring sand-box style spaces where people have nothing to do. Puzzle Pirates and A Tale in the Desert are another two excellent examples of why massively multiplayer games should be games.

The polish on this game in the Beta stage is better than Star Wars Galaxies was 4 months after launch. By the time it is released for public consumption, it will join Final Fantasy XI in rivaling Everquest for interesting content.

I don't understand why people are scoffing at WoW for not being revolutionary. Of course not! We're only at the Third Generation of MMOGs here. Hell, Everquest is still the game with the largest player population. World of Warcraft is one really big step in the right direction though.

Shameless self promotion: Check out my first Beta Journal entry at MMORPGDot.

They make it abundantly clear that the game will be running until September, but how is it a game if they're not going to be adding content for the next 6 months?

This makes no sense to me. Why not kill it now and save money on the server costs? Everyone is going to leave way before September anyway. With no future for the game, actions have no meaning and the (already stale) content will have no appeal.

Of course, they likely have a clause in the EULA that states that they have to give sufficient warning of the game closure.

Regrettably all Around.

If you dig/dug Earth and Beyond, I know some folks who like Eve Online.

I also have some commentary on this sort of thing in my editorial today on MMORPGDot, as well as at my own site.

They make it abundantly clear that the game will be running until September, but how is it a game if they're not going to be adding content for the next 6 months?

This makes no sense to me. Why not kill it now and save money on the server costs? Everyone is going to leave way before September anyway. With no future for the game, actions have no meaning and the (already stale) content will have no appeal.

Of course, they likely have a clause in the EULA that states that they have to give sufficient warning of the game closure.

Regrettably all Around.

If you dig/dug Earth and Beyond, I know some folks who like Eve Online.

I also have some commentary on this sort of thing in my editorial today on MMORPGDot, as well as at my own site.