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Doom Forecasted for World of Warcraft
The ever interesting Grimwell.com has commentary available forecasting doom in the near future for World of Warcraft. Commentator Geldonyetich argues that, by the very nature of the Warcraft game design, the impressive subscription numbers they currently boast are fleeting. From the article: "World of Warcraft is a tremendously successful game. Its subscriber numbers are reaching peaks that threaten even the lofty Korean Internet Café centered Lineage series. Those of you who are stuck behind overloaded servers, don't despair: I can see WoW's success as being a very temporary thing."
One of the things a lot of players who left EQ for WoW complain about is the fact that the end game appears to them to be a carbon copy of the EQ-style raid system, only now it's instanced. This very complaint, however, is what sets WoW apart from Planetside and City of Heroes. Neither of those two games has this EQ-like raid endgame, which forces the type of social interaction that EQ did. Just looking at my own server, Shattered Hand, I can see this reflected. The Alliance guilds are all large EQ-style guilds, while the Horde guilds tend to be smaller, loosely bound "FPS-clan-like" guilds. They have enough people to do everything up until the raid content, and there they fall apart.
Basically, the opportunity is there for the EQ-like guilds and systems, but WoW has managed to draw both types of gamers, the FPS-type, "flavor of the month" gamer, and the MMORPG-type "hardcore", "play the same game for 10 years" gamer.
There is room for conversion though, and while there will obviously be a dip as the "flavor of the month" gamers leave, it has yet to be seen what the conversion rate will be. A friend of mine was a FPS-type gamer, playing whatever was new for a few month or two and moving on, and when he said he was going to play WoW I didn't expect him to stay longer than a month or two. But he's still around and still interesting in new things to do in WoW. As long as there is something new for him to do, or some item he would like to aquire that is nearly in his grasp, he will probably keep playing it seems.
I believe Battle Grounds is tailor made for these types of players. The type of player who just hops on a Counter-strike public server for a few hours and shoots some people up. Once WoW is "finished", it will have something to do for both the EQ-style and FPS-style player.
Actually, what I was trying to say is that ~25-40 is a lot of fun, and 50-60 can be a lot of fun if you have a good guild. I miscommunicated that last part a bit, though; I wanted to say that 50-60 can be a lot of fun with the right guild, but if you have to solo it or do it in pickup groups, it can be quite boring and frustrating.
student of animation and the fine arts
There's no story if you just click past it, as most players do. There's plenty of stuff if you actually read it.
The article only has it half right. The real reason why MMORPGs will have subscription issues is because of http://guildwars.com/.
The "casual friendly slayers" mentioned in the article are going to love Guild Wars (GW) and since there is no subscription fee the company (ArenaNet) doesn't lose out when they stop playing after a few months.
GW also has incredible and accessible PvP which is the only content that doesn't turn into grind (given a large enough community).
Personally, I'm sick of MMORPG companies monthly milking of their customers. Stretching out 60-80 hours of content into 400 hours is akin to watching a movie that repeats each scene five times... and you have to pay to keep watching.
GW is out on April 28th, once the word spreads about the true casual friendly play, lack of griefing, combined with the best fantasy PvP available... all using a pay for new content (expansions) model instead of a monthly subscription I hope it forces it's competitors to start treating their customers less like cash cows.
Complexity Happens
EQ1 was actually cool about that, if a mob was carrying a particular item you could see, you got it 100% of the time, not that item was usually a total piece of crap, but at least you got it.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Considering that it is dialog, it is almost exactly the same as watching a movie muted with subtitles on. While more voiceovers would be nice (there are a few), I shudder to think what would happen to the size of the game, and most players would still skip past it. I'll admit that the story is not one of WoW's strong points, but to claim that there is none would require not actually caring about it.