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MMOG Subscription Winners, Losers Analyzed
Thanks to CorpNews for its recent round-up analyzing and rating the biggest PC massively multiplayer games. Along with subscription estimates similar to the SirBruce analysis graph, there's sharp-tongued comments on performance for Ultima Online ("It's really all your fault. If you weren't a big hit, would others have followed?"), EverQuest ("Say what you will... it knew its target audience and hit it hard enough to make EQ part of popular culture"), and Asheron's Call ("Talk about the little engine that could.")
Dark Nexus
"Sanity is calming, but madness is more interesting."
A lot of us on Corpnews know of puzzle pirates, but it's worth noting that this was the first in a series of articles GBob is writing. You can only cover so much at a time before tasting the bile in the back of our collective throats.
catassing is a slang term that has evolved over the past 5 years, it's from the early days of UO. There was a newspaper article regarding this guy who played UO excessively, over 100 hours a week and his friends had not seen him in months. When they went to his apartment looking for him the guy looked like shit,had trash everywhere and an overflowing litterbox. His apartment smelled like shit. It was a huge article for us MMORPG junkies to point and laugh at people who put their real life obligations behind their game time..we would say these people smelled like cat's ass. This later became known as "becoming a catass"..someone who spends too much time playing games. More recently the term catass is used to describe a playstyle. For instance "I don't want to catass for 400 hours to get this Über sword".
This is roughly translated to "I don't want spend 400 hours of tedius boredom for a stupid sword".
Ahoy mates. Thanks for the kind words.
We are indeed way too small to show up in this graph; we have just over 5,000 subscribers (announcement to be made next week).
I don't actually think that advertising in gaming magazines would do us that much good, though. TV perhaps, or maybe Woman's Own. But you're right that if we had a mountain of cash we could try it.
For now we advertise/distribute where it makes sense, like shockwave, PA (where not everyone plays yet, I assure you) and, starting this week, popcap.com.
Oh, and we do hope to do a retail release this year. That will bring some ads. Arr!
Just a note concerning Lineage 2:
I've been playing the beta and it's not a gank fest. If you pk someone who doesn't fight back you turn red and pretty much ruin your character (it's possible to work the karma off but if you've committed multiple pks you usually won't live long enough to do so). All my encounters with red named players so far have involved watching them run for their lives while being chased by a mob of other players. Reds tend to be pretty rare.
Other than that though the game is a complete flop. You may not be able to get away with pking, but griefing is another matter. Another player can follow you around stealing your kills and otherwise harassing you but you can't kill him for fear of going red.
The level grind is worse than any other game I've played, and the money requirements to keep your equipment up to date is steep. This might not be a problem if it weren't for the fact that the real conetent of the game (the guild PVP system) exists at the high end, but to get there you have to farm/grind your way through the boring and poorly developed PVE content.
Exploits, scamming and boting seem rampant, the GMs claim they're banning people, but I still see the same bots week after week.
There's no variety in the characters either, everyone has the same equipment at any given level, and the base models are severely limited, so it's attack of the clones.
They didn't even change the chat window to support english text, the word wrap often breaks words in two, making it annoying to read.
I'm sure it'll find an audience with those who actually seem to like the grind, but I can't see it becoming a major hit in the US.