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Bubble Bursting On the MMO Market?
An anonymous reader writes "An article at Ten Ton Hammer has an interesting take on the current state of the MMO genre; not too doom-and-gloomy, but it makes some good points. Ultimately, it's about how games that foster community the most will stay strong."
What a disappointment. It's little more than a fluff piece promoting Rift.
Pretty much the whole article is about how cool Rift is, how smart he is, and how cool Rift is. Other than being an unabashed Rift fanboy - the author's qualifications are what?
People are getting disgusted with MMOs, it is inherently amoral business.
Eventually, player realizes what excatly is being done to him:
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/extra-credits/2487-The-Skinner-Box
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning_chamber
http://www.cracked.com/article_18461_5-creepy-ways-video-games-are-trying-to-get-you-addicted.html
Once you realize that, everything about MMO stops being fun, every reward is spolied because you know it is conditioning to keep you playing to get further rewards. Then you get slightly pissed at authors for abusing skinery-boxy mechanics of human psychology. And you quit for good.
Changing MMO does not help: it is just differently colored lever you have to press to get pelets. Nothing devs can do can help past this point except abandoning notion of chaining player to game.
-- Technology for the sake of technology is as pathetic as eschewing technology because it's technology.
Being just shy of 48 myself and an active MMORPG player, I should hope not.
And why would a 20-something be more believeable than a 30- or 40- something?
It's going to burst at some point simply because many of the people who joined the genre with WoW never play anything else. When they get bored with WoW (and given how badly Cataclysm is doing in North America, they ARE getting bored with WoW) they leave the genre entirely instead of going for another game. That spirals downward the same way it spiraled upward: as your friends leave, you have less and less reason to keep playing. So you leave. That in turn gives your friends who are still there less reason to play. Almost my entire network of friends is gone from the game now, and I didn't hold out all that long without them because farming loot with strangers who don't talk just isn't very interesting.
You keep that trend going for a while and the whole genre shrinks. Which is probably a good thing. These games are a lot more fun when they're about doing stuff with friends instead of competing to get loot before some other random people. If companies don't all aim for 5 million subs we'd probably be better off.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Cross Server battlegrounds and dungeon queues just made this worse, there is no real cohesive sense of community in WoW and it's fair to say that the majority of players if given the chance would shank each other for the smallest infraction.
KOL is an excellent example of this - they've fostered a great community interaction and have weekly back and forth with the player base over current development. They've done everything else 'wrong' but they succeed (so far) anyway. Highly recommended.
The rifts are neat, but I think it's the class system that really changed things up. In MMO's, your used to having a set number of classes/skills, and you have to fit your play style into one of them.
Rift doesn't do that. Instead you pick an archetype, and then can pick and chose form the available souls to craft a class to fit your play style and goals. The game even lets you swap these with little pain. That really opened up the game and made it feel much more like a pen-and-paper game then most MMO's.
and thanks to all the crossover souls, you don't really have to be locked into a role. i mean, you can be a debuffer/healer with AOE nukes if you wanted to, or a pet/DD/dps, etc etc. And that's just from my experience playing a mage in beta. I think I had 4 completely different sets ups, each tailored for certain activities. You don't see that kind of flexibility in say, WoW.
WoW? Going the strongest? You mean the MMO that just lost 600,000 subscribers? That WoW?
When a subscription service of any kind loses 600k subscribers it is considered dwindling in interest.
"I play WoW and there are lots of people who still play" is not evidence that your choice of MMO is 'going the strongest'.
EVE Online has showed steady growth since it was released. Every single other RPG has had a large spike of player interest followed by a brutal decline. WoW got great press and so its initial interest spike was drawn out and quite large, but it is in the throes of that inevitable decline all others have succumbed to.
I will go out on a limb here and side with CCP, no matter how big the world, a roller-coaster/on-the-rails style MMO will never survive that inevitable decline. By not giving player an opportunity to make their own game, of the construct you give them to play in, boredom will ensue and the exodus will begin.
My ticket with Trion Worlds about RIFT:
Me: "I installed the trial and played for a session, but did not get a chance to return to the game until last night. I connected, only to find there was a wait to log in to the server. It was only 50 deep, but it was so slow that by the time I had connected I had to leave. If I could have the trial extended for another week I would appreciate it. I have not made a decision to date on whether or not to subscribe."
Them: "Thank you for contacting us regarding RIFT. I'm sorry to hear you're experiencing this issue, I realize it's frustrating and I'm happy to assist you in this matter. I have inquired with our tier 3 support team, unfortunately we can not add 7 more days to your free trial. But I have been authorized to offer you 7 extra free days added to your account if you purchase RIFT. So if you purchase RIFT from (link removed) If you have any additional questions or concerns, please don't hesitate to let us know. Thank you for your continued support of Trion Worlds and for playing RIFT.
Me: "I'm sorry to hear that. The extension was requested not because I care about 7 free days, but because I hadn't decided whether or not to subscribe. 7 days is worth about $4 and is not significant to me. Perhaps I chose a bad week for the trial, but I simply lacked the time. I'll pass on the offer. You may close the ticket."
Shortsighted pinheads.
Bill Cosby had a comment some time ago that's applicable. He was talking about his bafflement about why people would want to do cocaine.
(Bill's friend) "Because cocaine intensifies your personality."
(Bill) "Yeah, but what if you're an asshole?"
"Community" is fine, as long as its members are basically decent people. Communities are self-reinforcing; the dominant traits become more and more ensconced as those traits are rewarded and the opposites are pushed out. However, because there are no real consequences that follow you for NOT being a decent person, and because even if you finally get booted out of a game because the customer service people finally come to the DUH! realization that jerks cause others to unsubscribe, you can just pick up your jerkiness and go to another game to ruin another bunch of people's good times. "Community" is not just a martini-pickled marketing flack's buzzword; it defines whether you stay in a game after you've used up the leveling content. IMHO, because there are no consequences for being an asshole, and because so many MMO operators are afraid/don't give a damn/are too lazy to enforce their Codes of Conduct, there is zero incentive to not be a total asshat. And because of that self-reinforcement, many "communities" are little more than unsupervised schoolyards.
Jerks cost money. They consume GM time and salary, they cause unsubscriptions, they can even trigger lawsuits and criminal complaints. But when some VC hack on the Board of Directors spews "a griefer's money is just as green", you know what the people in the game will be like. Yes, I've heard people at that seniority actually SAY that, at Game Developer Conferences and even in communication about game policies from producer to the fans... why the hell do people like that have jobs? I wouldn't blame a community manager in such a game from becoming an alcoholic, wanting to do something about it but having a know-nothing with a title rendering you into an impotent object of mockery.
Come for the game, leave because of the people. Enjoy your playpen, Darkfall players/administators (and games like DF with similar jerk-dominated playerbases). When the lights in the server room are turned off, they will have only themselves to blame. They won't, of course. One of the defining characteristics of an asshole is a refusal to recognize or take responsibility for the consequences of what they've done.
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
Agreed. When I was in college in the early 2000s, my cousins (aged 13-18) were playing entirely different games than I was. I wasn't very aware of free MMOs, yet all of them could give me a list of ten popular ones, along with the pros and cons of each. They had never heard of iD software, let alone the games they make (Quake, Doom, etc).
moox. for a new generation.
Yeah, Blizzard just knows how to do things right. It was the same for me. The other thing that killed EQ for me was that I had an SOE Station Account, and I wanted to downgrade to just EQ, and customer service said that I couldn't downgrade, but I should just cancel my account, use up the rest of the month, and resubscribe next month. That was a big mistake on SOE's part.. telling your customers to go away is never a good idea.