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How The Matrix Online Went Wrong
As the July 31st deadline for The Matrix Online's closure looms, Gamer Limit is running a story discussing the game's shortcomings, as well as some of the decisions that led to its failure. Quoting:
"I honestly thought the writers must have absolutely hated the remaining cast of The Matrix Trilogy or something, because they constantly seemed to go out of their way to phase out existing characters in favor of newer ones. The cast overall basically made me, as a player, feel distant from the main storyline and made the entire game feel like a Matrix side story instead of the continuation it was meant to be. ... When MxO first launched there was an entire team dedicated to playing the game as Agents and other key characters as a means to further in-game events and directly interact with players, giving players the feeling that they truly were making a difference. After the SOE buyout of the game the LESIG team was reduced to playing minor characters before eventually being phased out and replaced with a Live Event Team (LET) comprised purely of volunteers."
Honestly, who cares?
People may not remember, but it wasn't Sony who first designed EverQuest, it was 989 Studios. Sony is the company that BROKE the game, and as time went on, it became more and more broken due to basic mistakes that Sony made.
So, whatever SOE touches tends to turn to crap. Sony as a company may have some good products, but SOE has a proven track record of taking a good product and ruining it with stupid decisions on the design end of things.
"In my opinion, this is way too early to give up on any MMORPG title since these kinds of games usually take a bit to get going, WoW didn't start off as the juggernaut it is today either."
Sure WoW has been building for a long time, but its launch was so strong that their biggest issue was underestimating how quickly they'd have to expand their server base. There were tremendous complaints about the lag early on as servers were absolutely swamped.
If you don't have a strong opening, it's going to take something remarkable to build the base required to justify the expense of a major MMO. From what I've seen major commercial MMOs that have weak releases rarely reverse that condition. Most simply limp along. A weak release can be the kiss of death for several reasons, including low player density driving off the few players you do have, and lack of a sufficient mass of customers to generate positive buzz and drive long term growth.
Basically, you don't throw good money after bad.
"After the SOE buyout of the game the LESIG team was reduced to playing minor characters before eventually being phased out and replaced with a Live Event Team (LET) comprised purely of volunteers."
When your game isn't bringing in enough money to justify a paid team of in-game actors, of course there are going to be cuts. This is a business. How much sooner would doors have had to close if the budget had not been scaled back? Of course this costs customers, but it very much seems that there were already not enough customers to justify this level of cost. It's no secret that most MMOs already have incredibly lead customer service departments. This is, I epxect, basically like employing a second CS department.
"You could never be an equal to a storyline character."
Welcome to MMOs.
You say "films" as if there was more than one.
-dZ.
Carol vs. Ghost