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Slashback: MMORPG Trends
Some additional details on stories we've previously discussed. The Garriott brothers gave a talk at the DICE conference earlier this month, and while Next Generation offered the gist of the Garriot keynote, Gamespy has a detailed look at their predictions. We also talked earlier about World of Warcraft as the new golf. C|Net has a deeper look at the trend of networking in Azeroth. From that article: "With more than 5.5 million people now playing WoW and joining guilds for everything from police officers to soldiers returning from Iraq, it was bound to happen: The rich guys have carved a virtual space to call their own. In fairness, the six-month-old guild isn't just for rich folks. There are plenty of bartenders and regular workaday types in the group as well. But what sets 'We Know' apart is its concentration of movers and shakers in the technology world."
do CEO's of companies have time to sit around playing WoW?
I barely have enough time to post to slashdot these days!
I don't read your sig, why do you read mine?
We have to let you go. Having a ninja-looter like yourself on our team undercuts morale.
psmylie's dictionary: Godzillion (noun) Any number large enough to destroy Tokyo
... that even with the amount of new subscribers (more $$$) in WoW and the new servers they keep adding, I still see heavy lag and wait times to get into servers. Why when I'm paying $15 a month should I have to suffer like this?
World of Warcraft as the new golf.
That is the dumbest thing I heard all day. And I just watched an interview with Cindy Sheehan.
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
Other MMORPG trends:
Awkwardness, sexlessness.
Tell: OMFG CN U pl my job PLZ!!!111!!!
(Original version rejected by Slashdot lameness filter...sigh...)
I bet you're the type of person who goes around calling people "Care Bears".
Rock on, 10-hour day gamer! You win the contest to see whose time is the least valuable!
although true there is a business reason for that. UO, Everquest, Shadowbane all combined still dont have a fraction of the subs that a game like WoW has.
Dont get me wrong I dont like WoW all that much but I respect what they accomplished.
Bashing in all the sacred cows like death should mean something(only to hardcore players obviously), progession should be hard and slow(again hardcore niche players), etc.
They went against the norm and made a game that although viewed as "too easy" by many,
just dominated the market.
so lets see, spend 50million dollars and make a niche game that gets 150k subs, or spend 50million to make a more casual "easy" game that gets 5million subs.
when it comes to getting investors to spend that kind of money on a game you know exactly which one they want.
for the niche hardcore market your going to have to figure out how to make them a lot cheaper which probably means a lot less content on launch. figure out how to run it on super cheap hardware, and support it with minimal people. probably can be done but not much incentive to do so from a business standpoint, but there is certainly room for more niche/hardcode MMO games.
as for this article, Im not really interested in what Garriot has to say, the guy that takes reasponsibilty for UO when he didnt have anything to do with its success (he wasnt even there anymore he had already sold origin to ea). He has been working on UO2/TR for almost 7 years now and he is trying to tell us whats going to happen to MMO's..please Id rather hear from the makers of WoW, or some of the even larger MMO games that are in China then here anymore unfounded crap from the garriot team.
cos im crap at golf, but can certainly hold my own in WSG. Finally all of us un-coordinated geeks get a chance to network
--AlexC
Just because I dont agree with climate change doesnt make me a troll
Rock on, 10-hour day gamer!
::cue background music::
Announcer: Bud Light Presents: Real American Heroes
Vocalist: (real american heroes)
Today we salute you, Mr. 10-Hour Day Gamer.
(Mr. 10-Hour Day Gamer)
In a world where most people only play a few hours a day, you're not afraid to stick it out - all day long.
(playing all day now)
Aspring to new hights of simulated glory, you endure sitting at your desk for days at a time, ignoring anyone and any bodily function that could possibly get in the way.
(gotta pee like cra-zy)
Thanks to you, we know what it means to really play a game and look impressive while doing it!
(IM S0 teh Aw3s0m3!!1!)
So "Rock On!", and grab yourself an ice cold Bud Light Mr. 10-Hour Day Gamer. Because without you, there'd be nobody else to teach us what 'noob' or 'pwn' really mean.
(please speak english to me)
- Pragma
Indeed.
If you're trying to appeal to a large segment of players, you have to make it mind-numbingly easy.
People tend to play games (MMORPGs especially) to relax or escape, and they don't want to waste a lot of time 'thinking' or 'figuring out stuff'.
UO has gotten nothing but more complicated over the years, and that huge learning curve is undoubtedly intimidating to new players.
I can't say the same about WoW from what I've seen.
If you want to keep your numbers up, make it like pop music, or anything else popular: Dumb it down.
Quality does not equal popularity, and popularity is where the money is in the subscription world.
"Can I have your stuff?"
I think "massive" works, it's "multiplayer" that is questionable. Your main interaction with other players is through the commerce systems.
I posted in the other story that my workplace was crawling with WoWers. We got firewalled. Now they watch FRAPS movies and look things up on thottbot.
Unless they've added a LOT since I quit a year ago, massive wouldn't really apply either. The game was amusing for a couple months. Then it sunk in that the game had a level of tedium to make Ultima Online's worst aspects look exciting. Not only was I fighting the exact same fight over and over and over, but the thing I was fighting was actually called "Annoying series of random enemies," dropped items litterally called "Vendor Trash," and even then, combat was a one-click thing and involved no actual actions on my part aside from one click and an occasional refresh when the encounter didn't load properly.
Massive generally refers to the number of simultaneous players on a single server, not the amount of features.
As somebody who played EQ for about 5 years and WoW for about a year, I'd have to say WoW can be just as complex as EQ. Blizzard didn't "dumb it down", they took out the "camp this location for several weeks on end until blah spawn" nonsense. As far as I'm concerned, the dummies are the ones who mistake endless tedium for complexity.
There's a big difference between dumbing a game down and removing the tedium. I'm not an expert on MMORPGs by any means, but I was really turned off by the ridiculous tedium that was so prevalent in the genre pre-WoW. From what I've seen, WoW still requires plenty of strategy and thought, but it doesn't require as much time as previous MMOs.
Maybe WoW is easier than most MMOs. I don't play it, so I can't make any claims either way. However, challenge is (mostly) unrelated to the learning curve of the game. Game developers should stick to the mantra, "easy to learn, difficult to master." It appears to me that Blizzard follows that rule better than most MMO devs.
I think that blizzard could balance hardcore with casual by making competative cross server BGs. Esports is taking off in the FPS world, the MMORPG/RPG world should follow. PvPing takes a well coordinated team, with everyone knowing what they're doing. Tons of practice and experience. If Blizzard fixes WoW pvp, or makes it right in Diablo3, maybe we can see 3 blizzard games at the CPL next year.
WoW is as complex as any other MMORPG. What WoW did differently is that for the first 40 levels or so they made it so that the game wasn't a massive time sink. They realized that tedious (ie "hard") games drove casual gamers away. EQ is a perfect example of a game that was "hard" for power gamers, and utterly intolerable for casual gamers. It wasn't that EQ had superior and more complex mechanisms to master. What made EQ was the fact that it was such a horrible time sink. Your average casual gamer played it for about a month before realizing that their leveling had slowed to a crawl and that they were doing the same thing every single fucking time they logged on. The only thing "hard" about it was mustering up the will power to waste so much of one's time.
WoW took an entirely different path. They made the first 40 or so levels quick. You could log on for an hour each day and end that day feeling rewarded as you leveled up and moved onto different areas. WoW discovered what everyone else already knew with common sense. Casual gamers don't like games that require you to spend 40 hours a week on in order to get anywhere. It has nothing to do with complexity and difficulty, and everything to do with the amount of time you need to dump into a video game to get somewhere.