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Casual Games Quickly Transforming the MMO Market
An anonymous reader writes "Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick disclosed that their forthcoming, unnamed MMOG will have 'a little more broad appeal' than its market-leading MMO World of Warcraft. This is adding to speculation that the game might be free to play, since such games now take more in digital revenue than any other genre. In his GDC Austin keynote today, Sony Online Entertainment president Jon Smedley said, 'As a company, we knew we had to evolve ... to expand [our] audience ... and to get a much wider female audience.' The article notes that SOE hasn't abandoned hardcore MMOs, but his talk focused on Free Realms, SOE's free-to-play MMO that has grown to 5 million users in 5 months. Marketed to kids, 51% of Free Realms gamers are under 13, with around 75% under 18, who pose a challenge to attract and retain. Since they only play for about 20 minutes per session and aren't focused on the mechanics of the game, SOE can get away with changes that are unfair to some players, as shown by a recent, oddly-handled item nerf in Free Realms."
Are you honestly that bitter about people doing "less work" to get "unearned" items as shiny as yours in an online game? Really?
I somewhat understand your problem. But you see my problem - I have a full time job and a life. I also want to play WoW. So should I just always suck - never able to actually complete an instance? I don't think so. Maybe Blizzard should create "I don't have a job and my parents pay my way realms" (for people like you) and "I can only spend a couple of hours a week on a computer game" servers for people like me.
Not to mention that what he's leaving out is that he's had the shiny items for 6 months, and the people doing "less work" for them are only getting them now... as they release even shinier items for those people who actually want to put the effort into raiding to get.
So the real complaint is that in order for him to continue to be "better" than everyone else, he has to continue to raid to stay ahead of other people, since now it's fairly simple for anyone to catch up to the point he's already at.
Why does it matter if someone else gets an epic-quality item? Does it somehow strip you of your earned rewards? And why is it so wrong if a 12 year old kid wants to do *exactly that* and take his Sword of OMG to the forest and kill boars? If he's enjoying it, why do you care? How does it affect *you*?
.... yup, I didn't think you did. There's no lack of challenge in the game if you want it. Many of the instances are tuned for casual play, so that nearly anyone who's interested can make reasonable progress, even if they don't fully understand the calculus involved in tank itemization (for example). On the other hand, hard modes and the new Heroic 10/25 versions of Coliseum allow those seeking extreme difficulty can have it --- and are rewarded for their efforts. As a matter of fact, at the time of this posting, there is exactly one (1) guild who has completed the "Earth, Wind, and Fire" achievement. It's *tough*, and ready for anyone who wants to meet the challenge.
You complain that it no longer takes weeks of running an instance to clear it. So I'm guessing that (prior to you quitting) you've cleared all the hard modes available to you in the first week?
Don't think I'm attacking you directly --- I'm not. I'm just tired of seeing this exact same argument passed around by forum trolls, who conveniently can't back it up with an Armory link.
I don't know about the rest of you, but i always make a point of lying through my teeth when it comes to online subscriptions to anything - especially a game. When asked, I'm a 12 year old redhaired girl living in Namibia.
Now back to their stats. How do they know 50% is 13 years or younger? Right. They ask for your birthdate. And then assume that you click the truth...
Musicians don't die. They just decompose.
I disagree that casual players are the reason that a game change was posted without notifying anyone. That sounds a lot more like unmanaged development processes. How hard could it be to have some area where you say things that all the players can read, let's call it an "official website", where you post messages like "FYI, we changed the shoe items"? Do they really think people will buy the "our customer base doesn't care" argument? I'm more inclined to think that even if none of the customers would care, certainly the development team cares that they made the change, and they'd want to tell people about it. Presumably it either fixes a bug, adds a feature, or something. If the change really was purposeless, then why make the change at all? What's worse, can you imagine a development environment where the process driving these changes was so ad-hoc that you didn't have a way to communicate the changes to the users? From some older coding positions I held, sadly I *can* imagine that.
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To turn this into a theme...
I used to play World of Warcraft back when Stratholme was considered an impossible instance. Then suddenly guilds started figuring out this "raiding thing" and all of a sudden, some dumbass healer could get better items than me, because he had 39 other people to pick up his slack. That's when the game started going downhill. I quit and everyone else I knew started quitting and the biggest complaint I heard back then was "I'm sick of seeing some dumbass decked out in epic gear because he can farm gold all day and raid all night." I think the game was ruined sometime halfway through it's first year.
"Casual" is not a misnomer. Anyone who wants to play whenever they feel like it is "casual." Anyone who adheres to a schedule where they get penalized for tardiness is working a 2nd (or 1st) job.
tl;dr "Remember when WoW was good?" "WoW was never good."
So the real complaint is that in order for him to continue to be "better" than everyone else, he has to continue to raid to stay ahead of other people, since now it's fairly simple for anyone to catch up to the point he's already at.
Well, that's an inherent property of the level cap. After you reach it, there is no real distinction between you who have been there for a year, and me, who just got there. Nothing to prevent me from getting the same stuff you have without going through the same long process you have.
On the other hand, it's in Blizzard's enlightened self-interest to make sure the newcomers can almost catch up to the veterans. It keeps both groups going.
Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick disclosed that their forthcoming, unnamed MMOG will have 'a little more broad appeal' than its market-leading MMO World of Warcraft.
Seriously? Love it or hate it, the one thing WoW has is a broad appeal. I know loads of people who play WoW who, apart from Wow, only play casual games. In fact, amongst the people I know who play WoW, over half of them are (typically) casual gamers. Hardly any of them would touch Crysis, or even Arkham Asylum, and know what the hell to do with it.
Hell, WoW has broader appeal than a casual game, because Casual and Hardcore gamers both play it! You want to expand on that? The only thing I can think of with broader appeal than that, is Pizza. Actual bread, cheese, tomato, to your door in 30 minutes or less. Are activision branching out, or going nuts?
Maybe Blizzard should just re-think item classification.
Today we have 5 item classes, 2 of which are useless:
- grey, useless
- white, useless
- green, used while leveling, or if you just dinged 80 last week.
- blue, most people who do not raid/hero have some of this. considered as 'basic' items
- purple, everything from entry-level-80 gear (reputation items, heroic instances) to the most hardcore-level gear you can find in raids
- orange, for some special vhl items only owned by a handful of people
A lot of people complain about how everybody has epic (purple gear). why not lower the classification of low-end purple and make it blue, while keeping the same stats? Similarly some blue items could become green.
If necessary, they could even make a new class between blue and purple, or between purple and orange. A character with gear from ulduar-25 hard mode would be differenciable instantly from a character with naxx-25 gear, who would be differenciable from a character with 5-man heroics / reputation gear without having to actually know each item or even look at the ilvl.
So, I've heard this before, and used to be in the same boat. It's not true anymore - you can gear up to decent raid levels without going to raids now, especially with the recent instance additions. It'll take longer than if you were raiding the whole time, but it's not that difficult. You do have to run Heroic 5 man instances though - no way around that.
With the changes they have made to the instances though they are much, much easier to run these days than they used to be in BC. Do the daily heroic each day (30-50 minutes) and you will quickly get enough badges and rewards to be running in one of the entry level raids, keep it up and you can get well beyond the 3000 DPS you mentioned. It takes some patience if you don't have hours to devote to running instances, but one instance each day you can log in should be your first priority if gearing up is what you want to do.
https://comerford.net
I found your post somewhat insightful upon first reading, though I didn't necessarily agree with all of it. But as I re-read it, something started to bother me.
If you don't have the time to run many heroics or raids to get your gear up, why do you expect to have time to run the end-game content? It's certainly not going to be any shorter. If you DO have time to do it, just not as much as the hardcore types, you can still experience it; it's just going to take longer.
For those who literally don't have the time to get to any piece of content while there are still players interested in doing it, I don't think the solution is to dumb the content down*, at least not while such content is still the highest tier of content available. I think those players are just out of luck. If that ruins their enjoyment of the game, well, there are a lot of games out there. They should find one that is less grindy so having less time for the game isn't as big of a penalty.
For what it's worth, I don't get as worked up about "ZOMG they hand out epics!" as others do. I measure my enjoyment of the game by, well, my enjoyment of the game. I just want to make forward progress, and that's independent of whether or not you or $HARDCORE_GAMER_X has made more or less progress than me.
* I do sort of like the 10 normal/10 hard mode/25 normal/25 hard mode distinctions. It seems like a relatively good compromise.
You are very much missing the point. People take pride in the smallest of things. It is all relative. I only used the Marines as an example.
"Epic" never meant anything. You're romanticizing a false indicator of personal triumph.
This is why I believe the item rarity system should never have been used to begin with. If item quality was based on comparing just the stats and benefits with no other measure (ie. name colour, level requirement) then I highly doubt so many people would have their panties in a knot over "casuals" getting similar quality gear.
~jaraxle
With all due respect, this is the case for ANY organized activity. If you join a bowling league with your friends and you guys bowl on Wednesdays from 7 to 10 then that's time you set aside. If you join a band with some friends and you guys practice Mondays and Wednesdays from 6 to 8, and that's time you have set aside. If you have a weekly poker game on Saturday evenings then that's time you set aside.
Sticking one or two nights a week, even specific times, aside to take part in your hobby is nothing new. Guys with families have been doing it for ages now, and if you think sticking "on a computer!" behind the activity changes that then you're as naive as most modern patent clerks. It is completely possible to hold down a job, actually raid in WoW (not the hardcore 6 nights a week raiding, but there are plenty of groups out there that raid twice a week for 2 hours), and have a family that you're not neglecting.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
The difference is your bowling league doesn't have twenty-five people, with the whole night a bust if two of them don't show up. Or a hard limit that only ten people can be in it, and if you have three other friends who want to come along, they're shut out in the cold.
Freedom isn't free; its price is the well-being of others.
this is too funny. I don't think I have ever heard a casual gamer complain that they had too many epics. The complainers are almost always the (self-proclaimed)hard-cores who think the size of their epeen depends on having more epics than anyone else. But guess what, we all pay the same (approx) $15 a month to play the game. Blizzard finally understands that to expend huge amounts of resources to create content that was only seen by a fraction of the player base was not a bright idea. So the obsessive player can get their leet gear and run the new content when it comes out, the less obssesed players get almost as good gear after a month or two, and they too can then see the high end content. Only a completely self-centered person would fail to understand the appeal of that process.
Maybe Blizzard should create "I don't have a job and my parents pay my way realms" (for people like you) and "I can only spend a couple of hours a week on a computer game" servers for people like me.
What's the difference between that, and you just playing something other than WoW? Seems to me that if you don't want to expend some effort to advance in the game, you don't really want to play WoW. You just want to do whatever it is all the cool kids are doing, and then complaining that it's too hard.
Think of it this way. Chess is a hard game, it takes a lot of effort to become good at it. If I decide I want to play chess, I don't ask people to change the rules so it's easier. I put in the time and effort it takes to become good at it. If I want something easy, I should play checkers instead. If WoW is too much of an investment for you, play something else.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
"Playing WoW is not actually playing, its working for some variables in Blizzard's DB."
And playing baseball on a field is working for little numbers in boxes on a scorecard. And playing golf is working for even smaller numbers on a smaller scorecard. When kids play cops and robbers, it's for... nothing.
Play is about what's fun.
He's complaining that very large parts of the game are inaccessable without an unnacceptably large, to him anyways, investment of time.
Then he should find a game to play that fits into the time he has to spend. Why try to ruin it for those who do have a large amount of time to spend in a game?
I am currently becoming enthusiastic about SHMUPs. Some of those fuckers are HARD. Yet some people can complete them with one credit. I doubt I'll ever have the time to practice that much to get that good. Do I complain that Cave should make their shooters easier so I can win too? Of course not.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
That's every MMO: they aren't predicated on skill like many other games are. They reward sheer, stupid time more than anything else.
It also levels the playing field for newer players. The fact was, back in the day, if you hit 60 say... three months before BC came out, you were NEVER, EVER going to be able to raid. Since it took weeks of working with a good guild to get to beginning raid gear, and good guilds weren't going to take n00b 60's, you weren't going to be able to catch up. Ever. BC reset progression, but within six months or so it was reestablished, and people who hadn't made 70 within the first few months and had a guild to raid with, were again locked out of the end game content. This was the beginning of the badge and heroic instance gear. Suddenly if you were willing to do enough harder 5 mans you could at least get the beginnings of something that would take you to end game. Thus you started to see some casual guilds and even PuGs doing Kara and Grull.
Everything since then has refined this policy to make it so that even casual guilds can at least see what the inside of Ulduar or Trial of the Crusader looks like even if we'll never defeat 25 man Yogg on hard mode. I'm happy. I can play a few hours a day, a bit more on weekends, take a few days off here or there, and still get to see the end game content. Being Shiny isn't a huge deal for me, except as it puts me in position to play more aspects of the game. I may never have gotten to see MC or Sunwell Plateau when they were new, but I'll probably get to fight Arthas in Ice Crown. Maybe not the day the patch is released. Maybe not on 25 man hardmode. But I'll get to see the fight, before the expansion makes it obsolete.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
Am I the only one amused at people thinking they're putting in effort and hard work by sitting at a keyboard playing one of the easiest games ever created, and only getting ahead of everyone else because they don't have anything else to do?
The whole point of WoW's success is that everyone can get to the top levels, do all the raids and get all the gear. Five years and twenty million sales later, poopsockers are still telling us how Blizzard got it all wrong.
The problem is that you reach a point in the game where it switches from:
"Just play a couple hours on weekends, or whenever you feel like"
To:
"You MUST be on and at the instance at exactly 5:45 PM PST you MUST remain on for 4 hours MINIMUM, then be free the next day at exactly 5:45 PM PST in case we don't finish the instance today. You MUST research all the bosses before entering the instance. You MUST be using one of the 2 acceptable specs for your class online, or you will have to respec, grinding gold to afford it. You MUST carry a minimum amount of healing potions, meaning you have to grind gold to buy them. You MUST install seedy chat software, and WOW add-ins, you can't participate with the default program."
There's no transition. The end-game raiding content is a complete 360 from the rest of the game, and it's an extremely jarring change that people don't expect.
Up until MAX_LEVEL, you're in a world where almost everything can be done on your own schedule, in your own way. (By yourself, if you like, and with whatever character spec you want.) You have no reason to expect that this would change when you hit MAX_LEVEL, unless you've experienced it in other games.
So you end up with games in the first category either getting slowly sucked into the second category bit-by-bit, or simply giving up and leaving the game.
Now the smartest thing WOW ever did was add end-game content *other* than raids, for example, battlegrounds and arena. The dumbest thing WOW ever did was then modify battlegrounds and arena so that only hard-core players could be successful at them, making them just as useless as raiding to the casual player.
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Christ, you play it for hours every day and more on the weekends, and think this isn't hideously excessive?!?
The problem is that you reach a point in the game where it switches from:
"Just play a couple hours on weekends, or whenever you feel like"
To:
"You MUST be on and at the instance at exactly 5:45 PM PST you MUST remain on for 4 hours MINIMUM, then be free the next day at exactly 5:45 PM PST in case we don't finish the instance today. You MUST research all the bosses before entering the instance. You MUST be using one of the 2 acceptable specs for your class online, or you will have to respec, grinding gold to afford it. You MUST carry a minimum amount of healing potions, meaning you have to grind gold to buy them. You MUST install seedy chat software, and WOW add-ins, you can't participate with the default program."
I see this sentiment a lot, but I really don't feel it has that much basis in reality. The truth isn't nearly as jarring.
There are plenty of guilds with no attendance requirements, who do what they can with the people that show up. They don't kill the latest content, typically, because they aren't organized enough and don't care enough. However, by comparing yourself as a newly-max-level character to those who are killing the latest content, you're skipping quite a few steps in the middle, which is why you see such an abrupt lack of transition.
Yes, if your performance is sub-par, people will sometimes try to get you to change the way you use your talent points (a system with unique skills for each class, by which you specialize to gain some abilities and make others stronger or faster), but it's not for no reason: it makes you better, and more efficient. It's not some evil conspiracy; other people won't want to play with you if you're not pulling your weight.
The gold you're arguing about grinding for is negligible: re-specializing costs at most 50 gold, when you can earn about 150 gold in half an hour doing a double handful of daily quests.
This is the first time I've heard of people call Ventrilo seedy software. Yes, it helps to have the equivalent of a VoIP party line going to coordinate things and chat. There are a couple of really useful add-ons that people often ask their teammates to use, and they can be a hassle, but I don't see why they themselves are such a deal-breaker. Overall, if you have no problem with Blizzard Warden, I don't know why a couple of other programs would be so odious.
I feel a little dirty for being a Blizzard apologist here. There are plenty of things to criticize about the game. But arguing that it's still necessarily "too hardcore" isn't one of them.