It always seems that the most vocal critics of SOE are the ones that played SWG. Since that game wasn't very good to begin with, I don't see how them taking a chance and screwing it up even further, warrants such hate. Rabid SWG players "Pre-CU" are more disinterested in taking a hard look at the game from a honest viewpoint than UO players were. The bottom line is, subscription numbers were dropping, new subscriptions weren't being picked up, and the common thread of people leaving or not joining was "this game isn't a whole lot of fun." Some people will complain about anything for eternity. I still know people that think the Planes of Power expansion for EQ1 ruined the game because travel became easier. Most folks loved it, though.
It's rare you will get a UO fanatic to admit that unless you were into a gank-fest type mindset and in a guild that were similarly minded, UO sucked for anyone interested in soloing or non-PvP combat, until it was revamped. When it was revamped, the people that would have loved that change had already left for EQ1 and weren't coming back. It was a classic case of "too little, too late". The remaining player base was mostly furious over the change, as the gankfest had ended. It's kinda funny that once they didn't have folks not interested in PvP to attack and kill easily, the PvP side of the game (the dark shard) was almost always deserted. I'm hoping they git it right in the upcomming beta for the new UO.
It was similar for SWG. Most people that really wanted to play the game (myself included) left well before the CU update. SOE was trying to stop the bleeding of customers of a game that had a title that should have rightly seen several hundreds of thousands paying and playing, but instead saw a dwindling subscription base. In doing so, they got it wrong, but they tried. They've admitted they botched it, even. But, they had to do something. SWG was dying a slow but painful death, and only the diehards that actually enjoyed the crapfest that was SWG have kept on whining. Much like UO, the change came way too late, and pissed off the majority of the remaining subscriber base.
They did a great job with EQ1. Lord knows I played it for 5.5 years straight. And so did a large number of other people. Until WoW came out, it was the biggest MMO in North America, by most people's reckoning. I stopped playing after I got into the closed beta for WoW, seeing something that would fit a more casual playstyle better than EQ1. That lasted a whole 9 months after release, and then I was bored out of my skull with the poor endgame that WoW had.
They got off to a bad start with EQ2, and it got crushed by WoW, and rightfully so. But, I'd say that today's EQ2 beats WoW. It's very solo, duo, and group friendly, with the largest raid force needed stuck at 24. After quiting WoW and going back to CoH and some CoV, I went back and tried EQ2. I haven't left since, despite several beta runs in games like LotR:O, V:SoH, and others.
And a few people have ranted about Vanguard sucking. Well, it sucked before SOE got involved with it, and it's gonna suck for a long time, unless it gets a serious revamp. You can't blame SOE for V:SOH's weaknesses and all around crappiness. Sigil did that on its own.
Maybe if Tabula Rising really pulls it off, I will slow down on EQ2. But for now, I'm very happy with this SOE game. And so are a lot of folks that come over from WoW, having burnt out on the end-game content there.
The bottom line is, SWG players need to get over it, much like UO players need to get over it. I'm sorry a game you loved got altered in a way you and most of the rest of the subscribers didn't like. But just because 1 game was altered that way, doesn't make the game company suck. There are a whole lot of other games that sucked that some people really liked, that got canned instead of the company trying to fix things. At least SOE tried, even if they did screw it up.
Just about everyone and their brother was trying to come up with the next WoW, after seeing the money that Blizzard was raking in. Heck, it started before that, with the success of EQ1.
A MMO that has more than 100,000 subscribers is basically printing money. Keep the customers happy, and you have a great revenue stream that keeps on coming. Sure, you can release some non-MMO and make xx% on those 100,000 copies, and have to patch it. Or, you can release a MMO, make that same money, and keep on making money from your monthly fee while you do those patches. Gee, I wonder what many companies tried to do?
Yep, make MMOs. LOTS of them. Look at some of the crap NCSoft is putting out. Some of them are old Korean games that are simply getting a re-skin. I liked CoH/V for simple fun, but most of their titles have been crap.
The problem lies in the fact that most of these MMOs were bad ideas that only got worse as the corruption and nepotism set in. Everyone wants to get in on that "sure thing" revenue stream that a successful MMO has. So, there was some nepotistic investor "bloat".
Brad simply had a major leg up on the competition. Simply having his name associated with Sigil and V:SoH meant that people were going to pay a LOT more attention to this game than any other new game publisher was going to get. And that extra attention, coupled with the Brad "fanboi" syndrome, meant a guarantee of a certain intial sales figure. Hello, Investors!
So, this shouldn't really surprise people THAT much. Sure, you wish Brad and Sigil had better motives and intentions, but making and running a MMO is pure business. Brad figured that out, and became just like any other business man. He did his best to ensure his own profits, and screw the guys who really got him there: the developers.
The sad part here is folks are getting bent out of shape over this, and it happens all the time in other businesses. Someone buys out company, brings in various "pet investor friends", milks the company a little, then sells it off. The employees that made the company get shit on, and the investors make a fortune.
You got one thing wrong with your otherwise nice description...
EQ2 no longer makes you go get your corpse to reduce anything. When you die, you suffer a 0.5% xp penalty, which you can either recoup by killing mobs, or if you go off-line for a few hours, it clears itself.
Even at high levels, it only takes a few mobs to erase 1 death's debt.
Finally it is also interesting that Microsoft have only banned the detected Xbox console and not the Live account. They clearly want the hackers to spend more money buying more hardware off them. An interesting way of getting some lost revenue back.
Is M$ still selling these at a loss, or barely past the break-even point? If so, how are they getting money back by making you go buy another?
I don't know that this was the first "smooth launch".
City of Heroes had a pretty smooth launch. It wasn't perfect, but nobody will every achieve that. But I had the least amount of problems with the CoH launch than any other MMO I played/beta tested.
The biggest problem for LotR:O is that it was fairly boring. Other than it being based on LotR, there wasn't anything that made me go "whoa, this game is cool!" It's one of the few (real) games I got so bored with while beta testing, that I had to force myself to play.
SWG sucked out of the box. I never understood people that thought it was the greatest MMO.
And EQ2 has gotten incredible changes, changes so good it is no wonder that SOE took a flier on fixing SWG.
Ask anyone who ever played EQ2 when it first came out, quit the game, and then gave it another try after getting baked on WoW for a year or so. Just about every one of them will tell you they were amazed at how cool the game became. Heck, most of the ones that did that wouldn't even go back to WoW for the BC expansion. They just didn't care to. Add in the fact that the EoF expansion was actually everything released to date, and you were getting into EQ2 easy.
It's a two part equation. First, a whole lot of players are not into the whole grind thing. They weren't that into it in EQ1, but it really was the only good game out at the time.
But, Brad set out to create a game for the hard-core player initially. A large majority of his early beta testers were people wanting a harder EQ1, with greater penalties and more enforced raiding. Those testers were VERY vocal, and Brad was happy to listen to them. By the time he pulled his head out of his ass and started listening to more moderate folks, too much damage had been done to be quickly undone.
You would have thought he would have looked at EQ2, and seen the revisions SOE had to make to get folks playing again. I played that game for 2 months shortly after it came out, only so I could hang with some of my EQ1 friends. The game was just plain awful. It made things difficult just to be difficult. Access quests. Corpse Recovery. Not enough solo content or small guild content. And it suffered badly. After a year or so of dropping subscriptions, SOE started to make it more palatable.
Now, I would rank EQ2 ahead of WoW for pure fun and entertainment. Sure, there is still raid content, but you can solo just about any class to 70 if you want to. My wife and I have duo'ed a paladin/warden combo to 57 with only a few groups along the way, and haven't felt like we have missed out on much. I've found EQ2 to now be very "casual friendly". Heck, two guys duo'ed a paladin/ranger combo into the 60's.
Our small guild has had 3 people recently bored with WoW come over, and their eyes are as big as saucers playing EQ2. Sure, it isn't as colorful as WoW, but there is so much more to see/do, and so many class variations to play, that they are hooked.
I think the first thing SOE is going to do is to start making things not be so hard in V:SoH. The game was broken by design by Brad. It's time for someone to fix it.
Think about it. If their goal is to "find Earth", the missing colony, how much story is there left to tell after that point?
This happens in a lot of shows, where the big point plot that always seems like a distant thing finally arrives. And once it does, there isn't much left to talk about. It becomes an entirely different show, with a different focus, and viewship will decline.
Look at some fine examples from TV's past.
Twin Peaks was a brilliant and weird show, that had a whole bunch of people talking. I still remember going to "Twin Peaks viewing parties" at friends houses, where we would all watch the episode together, and then start to dissect it over coffee and pie. (Those of you that remember the show will remember the line "damn fine pie".) But, once we knew who the killer was, there was nothing left to tell. They tried a second season, and it was a colossal flop. We all got what we wanted.
Moonlighting was another example. Once "Dave" and "Mattie" became romantically involved, instead of dancing around the subject, nobody really cared anymore. The show went into the toilet, ratings wise.
If BSG closes up shop after they find Earth and get things settled in, there is a good chance that most viewers will never say "Damn, BSG jumped the shark".
It is the reason 24 keeps on working. Every year, it reaches its ending, and the next year's season is a totally new (sorta) scenario for Jack Bauer to fix.
Personally, I like the TV show "Heroes", but I worry that it is headed for a Twin Peaks type ending. Once they save New York City, where will they go that will keep our attention? If we all end up feeling satisfied with that ending, then nobody will want to watch season 2.
It's too bad you don't really understand all the problems with healthcare. Try working in the industry, and you really begin to see the problems.
Yes, there is too much government in healthcare. And HMOs were a good idea that went bad very quickly. But look at the real factors in the rising health care costs:
A liability cap for negligence medical cases. Gross negligence shouldn't have a liability cap. Negligence, in legal terms, means you made an honest mistake, and is fairly easy to prove when it actually happens. Gross negligence meant you willfully made that mistake with the intent to harm the patient, and is extremely difficult to prove. Put a cap on liability for negligence, and you will see medical professionals have their liability insurance drop, which has a trickle-down effect of reducing the patient's cost being passed onto third party insurances. Nothing like piling up 8 years of student loans, getting your MD, and getting socked with up to several hundrends of thousands of dollars of liability insurance to make you want to scream.
Fix the generic regulations to make it so a product can go generic 5 years after it gets FDA approval, and not 17 years after it was first patented. Brand drug pricing is out of control, as you can see by major drug company profits. There could be some flexibility here, but major medical breakthrough drugs need to be more reasonably priced, so the company can make back their R&D money and make a reasonable profit, but not gouge patients.
Enforce maximum salary + benefits for HMO management personel. How many HMOs are run by people making insane amounts of money and getting crazy stock options and retirement packages? Healthcare is too important to be wasting hundreds of millions of dollars a year in fluff money for these executives.
Fix HMOs so that your primary care physician has to be able to see you in a certain number of days (like 3) for illnesses, or the HMO has to pay for you to see any doctor of your choice. This will cut down on people going to the hospital for the flu. The ambulance costs and hospital fees are so much higher than a simple doctor's office visit that this alone will save millions. Also, make specialists more available in a reasonable time-frame.
Set maximum patient/doctor ratios for GP/Internists, so that HMOs can't make 1 physician responsible for a number of patients they can't see. Remember, the HMO ideal setting is that you get preventative medical screenings by a physican often enough to off-set the cost of emergency medicine. But when you can't see your doctor often enough, this fails.
Put a family planning cap on patients in the various medical assistance programs. Parents or perspective parents that cannot obtain medical insurance on their own, or who have medical ailiments that prevent them from working/earning enough to pay for their own care so they get subsidized, should not be having 8 children on the government's piggy bank. If you can't afford to raise them and provide for them, you go on forced birth control, such as a medicated IUD, or Depo Provera.
Technology is trying to fix things, but the savings realized by most of the offerings never get passed onto the consumer. They get moved into the profits column of either the company that creates the tecnological advance, or the companies that utilize it. Nobody is really interested in passing those savings onto the patients. It's all about the profits.
Healthcare won't be fixed by what you describe. Especially those with illnesses they cannot cure.
A person born with Type I diabetes has an average out-of-pocket expense (without healthcare) of about $5K a year or more.
A person with chronic asthma is looking at similar costs, especially if they require emergency hospitalization.
A COPD patient (some of which does happen naturally, and not through smoking... chronic asthma patients come to mind) would spend double that amount in some cases, as hospital stays are common.
Add into the fact that in most areas of the country, you are charged for EMS care. (Some of the mid-Atlantic states such as Maryland, Viriginia, and I believe Pennsylvania are some of the exceptions.) You get in a simple fender bender and want to be checked out, and wham... kiss a few grand goodbye.
In your scenario, a family looking to conceive should just pay the expense out of pocket. For a vaginal delivery, say hello to about $1,500. Need a c-section? Hello, that will cost you quite a bit extra.
Gotten old? Bend over and say "Ahhhh". Many elderly end up spending $5K or more on medical stuff a year. Better have a really good nest egg built up. (And the Medicare Part D setups should be saving both the government and patients a fortune.)
No, having a $10K deductible on your medical insurance is like hanging a "kick me" sign while at a martial arts tourney. No matter what you do, you are gonna get your ass kicked.
We seem to be jumping at shadows that our various governments keep throwing out there. I'm not into the tin hat thing, but I am starting to think that they like keeping us in fear.
We were fearing that Iraq was a hotbed of WMD's and was going to attack us. Well, we showed those bastards, didn't we? We took over their country, found jack-diddly-squat as far as real WMDs go, and now we are afraid to get out. Woohoo!
I think this particular case is a slam-dunk, though. 1st Amendment should protect the kid.
Besides, if they think the kid wrote something disturbing, we better hope nobody starts to read the RIAA case files...
This is exactly why so many businesses use a T1 line.
Take the pharmacy industry as an example. The small chains and independents have to have an encrypted data transfer method to do their third party claims. Larger chains have dedicated lines to the big switches such as Relay Health. So, no encryption.
The same is true with e-prescribing.
Even before HIPAA, it was something that was already in place. After HIPAA, you simply can't do without T1's or encryption.
Can you just hear the screams of agony if students can't download their normal patch updates for WoW? They'll be looking at FilePlanet and other places to get their patches.
This could be fun if they didn't exempt Blizzard. I didn't notice any mention of their legal use of P2P torrent.
You are quite correct. My wife is a student working on her Master's degree in elementary education, and she had to sign a half dozen papers for many of her classes, giving up the rights of the papers she would turn in.
I can see the need for that, for some classes, since the universities will often need those papers for research data, since it's all about getting stuff published.
I know that when I get my lazy butt back to school, there are some classes I would flat out refuse to sign such a document for. A creative writing class, or an art class, and I won't sign it.
The hard part is that I could see how an architectual student could get burnt. Imagine having a brillant phase while in school, and having done some truly inspired work. You graduate, and you can't use those drawings for any buildings you wish to do, even though they were your own creations. Ouch!
Heck, it goes beyond just MMO style games and the like.
When was the last time you were able to buy a CD/DVD of a game that didn't require a patch to fix some rather significant bugs that "just happened" to be missed by their Q/A department? Patches that would break any ISO or other type of image for a pirated copy?
Even the so called "Collector's Edition" games that come out a year or two later than the original release tend to need a patch somewhere along the line.
I suspect Blizzard keeps on giving out patches for Diablo II and the expansion, simply to make sure that anyone that has a NOCD hack of the game has to get a new one for the latest patch. Not that much else changed. Add a few new recipes, and break a bunch of hacked copies.
It's simply the cheapest form of copy protection out there. Put some thing on the system that requires the CD/DVD to be in the system at launch only, and then release patches that break all the images people make.
So I don't think it's setting a bad precedent - the precedent was there long before Vanguard. Asheron's Call 2, Dungeons and Dragons Online, The Matrix Online, Star Wars Galaxies... all beta'd by me, and all forced out the door too soon. It's no coincidence that they're all doing poorly, with one (AC2) dead.
World of Warcraft was not forced out the door, and in fact slipped over 2 years from its initial announced release date of Winter 2002. I beta'd WoW, and while there were still a few small bugs (and their servers were underprepared for the launch) it was polished and it shows in its subscriber numbers. I beta'd most of those same games, as well as WoW. WoW wasn't completely finished, either. And the beta community was telling Blizzard loud and clear that certain things needed to be fixed. But Blizzard had delayed release too many times, and they needed to get the damn thing out the door. So, they pushed it.
But the simple fact is, no MMO is released as a full gold. They haven't been for a long time. They know that once they go past the beta, all sorts of bugs are going to turn up, and their server infrastructure is going to get a serious workout that no stress test can duplicate. WoW had 20 servers that were routinely down due to problems, and it took them quite a while to straighten them out. I remember vividly, because I was stuck on one of them.
So, a beta test eventually hits a point of diminishing returns. No matter how many people you keep adding to it, you are only going to get so much feedback, since 90% of the beta players act like all they are there for is a free look at the game, and don't spend time in the forums reporting bugs.
Competition? The prevalence of instancing in WoW basically destroyed the idea of competition. All that you have is who is first to beat new content. There's no more racing for big named mobs, which was part of the fun of EQ, imo. IMO, this was the WORST feature of EQ1.
I don't know what server you played on, but on Xegony, Time was effectively blocked by about 3 guilds that had access to it, for over a year. They killed every mob needed for planar advancement as soon as it spawned. The only way you had a chance was a random server restart that they couldn't mobilize fast enough for, and then you had to race another group of guilds/alliances that were trying to do the same thing you were. There were several times that we were almost to full raid force to take out a mob, and an uber raid guild would run right past our assemblage and take out the mob, because they heard it was up, or they knew its spawn time.
Lack on instanced content meant that one guild or a few guilds could effectively block others from content. So, I pay the same amount of money, but other players can cut me out of the top end content, just so they can keep it to themselves? No thanks!
Lack of instanced content is going to be a problem for V:SoH, if they set things up in a similar fashion. Once the tightest guilds figure out they can block high end content (and therefore, the better loot) to themselves, it will happen.
Instanced content, even for the highest end stuff, means that no one guild/group can keep others from getting to it. Uber Guild A can raid that mob its allotted once a week, and every other casual guild can hit it just as often, or as few times as they want. What's wrong with that?
Oh, yeah, you wanted to brag. Well, if you want to brag, play on a PvP server, where competition is the norm.
I was in a few guilds as we kept morphing form one to another as our alliance (A New Dawn alliance) grew. I started out in The Silent Majority, then was in Friends of Light, and finally was in The Commune. I believe many of the TC members ended up on Argent Dawn allied with the Clan MacLear folks, if memory serves me right.
To be quite honest about it, it isn't my problem any longer! I quit playing WoW.
However, while I agree that it would be painful to have to host and distribute that many files for a game with that many subscribers, other game companies do it for their scale. And they make it work. Especially when they download only the files you need to upgrade.
Smaller patches make it easier to distribute content faster. So, several small hot fixes beat one 70MB file. Instead, that file may now be 30MB, and those hot fixes solved a lot of immediate problems.
When I played, it wasn't unusual for it to take 6 or more hours to download each patch, prior to my going to a FilePlanet account or getting it from a friend who had one. With EQ2, I've only had 1 experience with that, and that was the recent EoF update, because everyone was trying to get the new Fae toons up.
Hey, you're paying what, 14.95 a month or so for service? Blizzard is making money hand over fist. Sure, it would cut into their probably huge profit margin if they went to a better patching method. But they are being cheap, and as long as they boast the subscriber numbers they have, there's no reason for them to change. Heck, I'm sure quite a few folks started to play again, just to hit 70 with older toons, and try the new races. More accounts means more $$$. Why would they change? To make customers feel more treasured? lol
But if a competitor had a game that started to really steal WoW's thunder and customers, and had a better patching method, you can see folks deciding that there is a better way.
I'd have to go back and look some of them up. I haven't played in well over 1yr.
But I do remember a hunter bug or two that were left on the test server when a patch came out, because they hadn't had time to finish testing it, and it waited until the next patch.
Talk to the warlocks that have been around since launch, and they have had some fun times, as well.
"... most class-breaking bugs are fixed pretty regularly." Yeah, at the next patch.
I've got friends that still play on Argent Dawn, and they still get login queues.
Hey, I'm not saying WoW isn't a great game. I really enjoyed my 9 months there, and then got out when I was bored out of my skull trying to obtain gear. Since PvP in Wow was, to me, just a gank fest with little meaning (and a dumb "honor" system) I quit. But I don't think anyone else is dumb for playing it.
I'm a realist about games. If something is broke, I'll complain about it. If something works, I'll give credit. Heck, I play EQ2 now, and I played it some in the early days while I was still playing WoW. When EQ2 was launched, it was really poor, and I quit after 45 days. Now? I don't know that I would enjoy WoW compared to EQ2. And I probably won't find out, because I won't buy the WoW expansion. No biggie. That doesn't mean WoW sucks. It just means I'm happy where I am.
But WoW patching is NOT frequent. Not compared to other MMOs out there. See the EQ2 forums update page, where they indicate when patches have been done. http://forums.station.sony.com/eq2/forums/show.m?f orum_id=330 And note that the last 3 hotfixes aren't listed on there. Some really small ones only show up on the Update Notes screen of the launcher.
Now compare that to this: http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/underdev/imple mented/ They don't make it easy to see the mini patch stuff there, and the support forums are a nightmare (like all MMO ones are.) If I missed it, oh well!
Staggering updates???? Are you kidding me? Unless you are talking about how freakin' slow they are, you've had too much of the WoW Kool-Aid.
Let's think about this. Let's compare EQ2 and WoW, since they came out within 2 weeks of each other.
WoW, 1 expansion (just released) and some free content added. Only hotfixes bugs that have a positive effect on a character. Took over 6 months to put a test server up. Major patch every 1-2 months (with the most recent expansion getting a little more patch activity.) Horrible patching method, login queues.
EQ2, 3 expansions and 3 adventure packs, which you had to pay for, unless you have a Sony All Access account. (The last expansion contains all game content, btw. Buy it, and you get the original plus the 3 expansions.) Hotfix on any bug that shows up and gets fixed. 31 "Live Updates" (major patches) since release. A test server from day 1. Fast patches from a direct server (only the EoF patch took a while, and that was a massive patch for a full expansion) and no login queues.
I played WoW for 9 months with a casual gameplay style, duoing with the wife and grouping for instances with guildmates. The gameplay itself I loved until 60. One of my biggest beefs with WoW, besides the total boredom of gear grinding at lvl 60, was the fact that bugs that should have been a simple fix were always held back for a full patch, unless it benefited the players. Give us a bug that made content easier, and that got fixed fast. Give us a bug that borked a whole class, and it waited a month or more. They wait because a small patch with their patching method of P2P file sharing for a small patch makes for a poor way to handle it. If the patch is over in 2 minutes, there isn't time to share it.
And, they were famous for breaking the same thing with each patch they did. They had like 3-4 patches in a row where they borked corpse looting to the point it took a full minute to get the item(s) from a corpse. They'd fix it after 2 or so weeks, and then the next patch would come out, and break it again.
WoW is a great game from 1-60 (now 70, but I haven't played that part), with just about anyone being able to solo or duo a ton of content, and now single group instances for high-end content is even better. We may never see a game hit so many people like WoW did.
But updates? I'm sorry, but game updates are Blizzard's weakest point on WoW. And the primary reason is their horrible patching method. If someone created another game just like WoW, and had a better patcher and no login queues, Blizzard could have problems.
V:SoH is still in beta. It's a paid beta, since you have to pay to play a game that isn't that close to finished, but it's not done.
And I'm not sold on the older crowd thing. The game is more designed for the more hardcore "I want things to be difficult, with a lot of raid content and lots of more difficult tradeskills" crowd.
Blizzard did a brilliant job of making WoW very casual gamer friendly, while still being able to keep a lot of those that desire a faster gameplay style happy. That's why so many people play it. V:SoH is not very casual gamer friendly, imo.
The lack of instanced dungeons is eventually going to catch up to them, I think. Instanced content means that casual gamers can pick a date with other casual playing friends, and group/raid a target without worrying if it's "up". The total lack of instances means that the big guilds will start to lock down the better targets.
That was one of EQ1's biggest drawbacks, imo. So many times on our server (Xegony), the big raid guilds would take down the mobs necessary to gain higher planer access. Sure, it had pretty nice loot on it, but they also knew that if they kept other guilds away from Time, they had less competition for it.
The whole "We've got to kill X mob to gain access to Y zone" thing bites when that X mob will only once a week for EVERYONE on that server. That roadblock became a tool for those uber raiding guilds to hold others back.
Honestly, I have no problem with what you are saying. There are many thousands of people out there that are looking for more of a challenge and/or grind than what WoW or EQ2 offers. And V:SoH will make a good portion of them happy.
I just think most casual gamers may find it to be more time consuming than they planned for. Some may be converted and will spend that extra time. Many probably won't.
There is nothing wrong with wanting a challenge. At age 35, I had a lot more free time to handle grind. It's why I was playing EQ1 at the time. I wasn't in an uber-raiding guild, and I took my time to reach 70 before retiring from the game shortly before WoW came out, but I played it for 5+ years. I hit 60 in WoW over the course of 9 months, since my wife could only play so much while working on her masters. And once we hit 60, we were looking at grind-for-gear city. And we decided to play something else.
Casual gamers can like grind. But most of them don't. They want to log in when they want, and play for however long they want to play, and be able to log out when they want. They don't generally relish the idea of 2hrs spent on CR or it taking forever for everyone to meet up. Heck, my main in EQ1 was a wizard, who always got stuck going back to pick up and port stragglers that showed up late and had no easy method of travel, prior to portal stones. Yes, it was a time sink.
Just because I think grind is boring and time sinks are a waste of my hard to come by free time, doesn't mean I FUD'd this. It means it didn't cut the mustard for me. Which is exactly how I titled my opinion.
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It always seems that the most vocal critics of SOE are the ones that played SWG. Since that game wasn't very good to begin with, I don't see how them taking a chance and screwing it up even further, warrants such hate. Rabid SWG players "Pre-CU" are more disinterested in taking a hard look at the game from a honest viewpoint than UO players were. The bottom line is, subscription numbers were dropping, new subscriptions weren't being picked up, and the common thread of people leaving or not joining was "this game isn't a whole lot of fun." Some people will complain about anything for eternity. I still know people that think the Planes of Power expansion for EQ1 ruined the game because travel became easier. Most folks loved it, though.
It's rare you will get a UO fanatic to admit that unless you were into a gank-fest type mindset and in a guild that were similarly minded, UO sucked for anyone interested in soloing or non-PvP combat, until it was revamped. When it was revamped, the people that would have loved that change had already left for EQ1 and weren't coming back. It was a classic case of "too little, too late". The remaining player base was mostly furious over the change, as the gankfest had ended. It's kinda funny that once they didn't have folks not interested in PvP to attack and kill easily, the PvP side of the game (the dark shard) was almost always deserted. I'm hoping they git it right in the upcomming beta for the new UO.
It was similar for SWG. Most people that really wanted to play the game (myself included) left well before the CU update. SOE was trying to stop the bleeding of customers of a game that had a title that should have rightly seen several hundreds of thousands paying and playing, but instead saw a dwindling subscription base. In doing so, they got it wrong, but they tried. They've admitted they botched it, even. But, they had to do something. SWG was dying a slow but painful death, and only the diehards that actually enjoyed the crapfest that was SWG have kept on whining. Much like UO, the change came way too late, and pissed off the majority of the remaining subscriber base.
They did a great job with EQ1. Lord knows I played it for 5.5 years straight. And so did a large number of other people. Until WoW came out, it was the biggest MMO in North America, by most people's reckoning. I stopped playing after I got into the closed beta for WoW, seeing something that would fit a more casual playstyle better than EQ1. That lasted a whole 9 months after release, and then I was bored out of my skull with the poor endgame that WoW had.
They got off to a bad start with EQ2, and it got crushed by WoW, and rightfully so. But, I'd say that today's EQ2 beats WoW. It's very solo, duo, and group friendly, with the largest raid force needed stuck at 24. After quiting WoW and going back to CoH and some CoV, I went back and tried EQ2. I haven't left since, despite several beta runs in games like LotR:O, V:SoH, and others.
And a few people have ranted about Vanguard sucking. Well, it sucked before SOE got involved with it, and it's gonna suck for a long time, unless it gets a serious revamp. You can't blame SOE for V:SOH's weaknesses and all around crappiness. Sigil did that on its own.
Maybe if Tabula Rising really pulls it off, I will slow down on EQ2. But for now, I'm very happy with this SOE game. And so are a lot of folks that come over from WoW, having burnt out on the end-game content there.
The bottom line is, SWG players need to get over it, much like UO players need to get over it. I'm sorry a game you loved got altered in a way you and most of the rest of the subscribers didn't like. But just because 1 game was altered that way, doesn't make the game company suck. There are a whole lot of other games that sucked that some people really liked, that got canned instead of the company trying to fix things. At least SOE tried, even if they did screw it up.
Funny, I see a lot of urban firefighters wear one on their belts. Not quite an industrial job, and they don't look like nerds...
Just about everyone and their brother was trying to come up with the next WoW, after seeing the money that Blizzard was raking in. Heck, it started before that, with the success of EQ1.
A MMO that has more than 100,000 subscribers is basically printing money. Keep the customers happy, and you have a great revenue stream that keeps on coming. Sure, you can release some non-MMO and make xx% on those 100,000 copies, and have to patch it. Or, you can release a MMO, make that same money, and keep on making money from your monthly fee while you do those patches. Gee, I wonder what many companies tried to do?
Yep, make MMOs. LOTS of them. Look at some of the crap NCSoft is putting out. Some of them are old Korean games that are simply getting a re-skin. I liked CoH/V for simple fun, but most of their titles have been crap.
The problem lies in the fact that most of these MMOs were bad ideas that only got worse as the corruption and nepotism set in. Everyone wants to get in on that "sure thing" revenue stream that a successful MMO has. So, there was some nepotistic investor "bloat".
Brad simply had a major leg up on the competition. Simply having his name associated with Sigil and V:SoH meant that people were going to pay a LOT more attention to this game than any other new game publisher was going to get. And that extra attention, coupled with the Brad "fanboi" syndrome, meant a guarantee of a certain intial sales figure. Hello, Investors!
So, this shouldn't really surprise people THAT much. Sure, you wish Brad and Sigil had better motives and intentions, but making and running a MMO is pure business. Brad figured that out, and became just like any other business man. He did his best to ensure his own profits, and screw the guys who really got him there: the developers.
The sad part here is folks are getting bent out of shape over this, and it happens all the time in other businesses. Someone buys out company, brings in various "pet investor friends", milks the company a little, then sells it off. The employees that made the company get shit on, and the investors make a fortune.
Welcome to the real world, MMOs!
You got one thing wrong with your otherwise nice description...
EQ2 no longer makes you go get your corpse to reduce anything. When you die, you suffer a 0.5% xp penalty, which you can either recoup by killing mobs, or if you go off-line for a few hours, it clears itself.
Even at high levels, it only takes a few mobs to erase 1 death's debt.
Finally it is also interesting that Microsoft have only banned the detected Xbox console and not the Live account. They clearly want the hackers to spend more money buying more hardware off them. An interesting way of getting some lost revenue back.
Is M$ still selling these at a loss, or barely past the break-even point? If so, how are they getting money back by making you go buy another?
I don't know that this was the first "smooth launch".
City of Heroes had a pretty smooth launch. It wasn't perfect, but nobody will every achieve that. But I had the least amount of problems with the CoH launch than any other MMO I played/beta tested.
The biggest problem for LotR:O is that it was fairly boring. Other than it being based on LotR, there wasn't anything that made me go "whoa, this game is cool!" It's one of the few (real) games I got so bored with while beta testing, that I had to force myself to play.
I wish I had mod points right now.
SWG sucked out of the box. I never understood people that thought it was the greatest MMO.
And EQ2 has gotten incredible changes, changes so good it is no wonder that SOE took a flier on fixing SWG.
Ask anyone who ever played EQ2 when it first came out, quit the game, and then gave it another try after getting baked on WoW for a year or so. Just about every one of them will tell you they were amazed at how cool the game became. Heck, most of the ones that did that wouldn't even go back to WoW for the BC expansion. They just didn't care to. Add in the fact that the EoF expansion was actually everything released to date, and you were getting into EQ2 easy.
I think you are partly correct.
It's a two part equation. First, a whole lot of players are not into the whole grind thing. They weren't that into it in EQ1, but it really was the only good game out at the time.
But, Brad set out to create a game for the hard-core player initially. A large majority of his early beta testers were people wanting a harder EQ1, with greater penalties and more enforced raiding. Those testers were VERY vocal, and Brad was happy to listen to them. By the time he pulled his head out of his ass and started listening to more moderate folks, too much damage had been done to be quickly undone.
You would have thought he would have looked at EQ2, and seen the revisions SOE had to make to get folks playing again. I played that game for 2 months shortly after it came out, only so I could hang with some of my EQ1 friends. The game was just plain awful. It made things difficult just to be difficult. Access quests. Corpse Recovery. Not enough solo content or small guild content. And it suffered badly. After a year or so of dropping subscriptions, SOE started to make it more palatable.
Now, I would rank EQ2 ahead of WoW for pure fun and entertainment. Sure, there is still raid content, but you can solo just about any class to 70 if you want to. My wife and I have duo'ed a paladin/warden combo to 57 with only a few groups along the way, and haven't felt like we have missed out on much. I've found EQ2 to now be very "casual friendly". Heck, two guys duo'ed a paladin/ranger combo into the 60's.
Our small guild has had 3 people recently bored with WoW come over, and their eyes are as big as saucers playing EQ2. Sure, it isn't as colorful as WoW, but there is so much more to see/do, and so many class variations to play, that they are hooked.
I think the first thing SOE is going to do is to start making things not be so hard in V:SoH. The game was broken by design by Brad. It's time for someone to fix it.
Think about it. If their goal is to "find Earth", the missing colony, how much story is there left to tell after that point?
This happens in a lot of shows, where the big point plot that always seems like a distant thing finally arrives. And once it does, there isn't much left to talk about. It becomes an entirely different show, with a different focus, and viewship will decline.
Look at some fine examples from TV's past.
Twin Peaks was a brilliant and weird show, that had a whole bunch of people talking. I still remember going to "Twin Peaks viewing parties" at friends houses, where we would all watch the episode together, and then start to dissect it over coffee and pie. (Those of you that remember the show will remember the line "damn fine pie".) But, once we knew who the killer was, there was nothing left to tell. They tried a second season, and it was a colossal flop. We all got what we wanted.
Moonlighting was another example. Once "Dave" and "Mattie" became romantically involved, instead of dancing around the subject, nobody really cared anymore. The show went into the toilet, ratings wise.
If BSG closes up shop after they find Earth and get things settled in, there is a good chance that most viewers will never say "Damn, BSG jumped the shark".
It is the reason 24 keeps on working. Every year, it reaches its ending, and the next year's season is a totally new (sorta) scenario for Jack Bauer to fix.
Personally, I like the TV show "Heroes", but I worry that it is headed for a Twin Peaks type ending. Once they save New York City, where will they go that will keep our attention? If we all end up feeling satisfied with that ending, then nobody will want to watch season 2.
It's too bad you don't really understand all the problems with healthcare. Try working in the industry, and you really begin to see the problems.
Yes, there is too much government in healthcare. And HMOs were a good idea that went bad very quickly. But look at the real factors in the rising health care costs:
A liability cap for negligence medical cases. Gross negligence shouldn't have a liability cap. Negligence, in legal terms, means you made an honest mistake, and is fairly easy to prove when it actually happens. Gross negligence meant you willfully made that mistake with the intent to harm the patient, and is extremely difficult to prove. Put a cap on liability for negligence, and you will see medical professionals have their liability insurance drop, which has a trickle-down effect of reducing the patient's cost being passed onto third party insurances. Nothing like piling up 8 years of student loans, getting your MD, and getting socked with up to several hundrends of thousands of dollars of liability insurance to make you want to scream.
Fix the generic regulations to make it so a product can go generic 5 years after it gets FDA approval, and not 17 years after it was first patented. Brand drug pricing is out of control, as you can see by major drug company profits. There could be some flexibility here, but major medical breakthrough drugs need to be more reasonably priced, so the company can make back their R&D money and make a reasonable profit, but not gouge patients.
Enforce maximum salary + benefits for HMO management personel. How many HMOs are run by people making insane amounts of money and getting crazy stock options and retirement packages? Healthcare is too important to be wasting hundreds of millions of dollars a year in fluff money for these executives.
Fix HMOs so that your primary care physician has to be able to see you in a certain number of days (like 3) for illnesses, or the HMO has to pay for you to see any doctor of your choice. This will cut down on people going to the hospital for the flu. The ambulance costs and hospital fees are so much higher than a simple doctor's office visit that this alone will save millions. Also, make specialists more available in a reasonable time-frame.
Set maximum patient/doctor ratios for GP/Internists, so that HMOs can't make 1 physician responsible for a number of patients they can't see. Remember, the HMO ideal setting is that you get preventative medical screenings by a physican often enough to off-set the cost of emergency medicine. But when you can't see your doctor often enough, this fails.
Put a family planning cap on patients in the various medical assistance programs. Parents or perspective parents that cannot obtain medical insurance on their own, or who have medical ailiments that prevent them from working/earning enough to pay for their own care so they get subsidized, should not be having 8 children on the government's piggy bank. If you can't afford to raise them and provide for them, you go on forced birth control, such as a medicated IUD, or Depo Provera.
Technology is trying to fix things, but the savings realized by most of the offerings never get passed onto the consumer. They get moved into the profits column of either the company that creates the tecnological advance, or the companies that utilize it. Nobody is really interested in passing those savings onto the patients. It's all about the profits.
Glad you weren't my parents.
Healthcare won't be fixed by what you describe. Especially those with illnesses they cannot cure.
A person born with Type I diabetes has an average out-of-pocket expense (without healthcare) of about $5K a year or more.
A person with chronic asthma is looking at similar costs, especially if they require emergency hospitalization.
A COPD patient (some of which does happen naturally, and not through smoking... chronic asthma patients come to mind) would spend double that amount in some cases, as hospital stays are common.
Add into the fact that in most areas of the country, you are charged for EMS care. (Some of the mid-Atlantic states such as Maryland, Viriginia, and I believe Pennsylvania are some of the exceptions.) You get in a simple fender bender and want to be checked out, and wham... kiss a few grand goodbye.
In your scenario, a family looking to conceive should just pay the expense out of pocket. For a vaginal delivery, say hello to about $1,500. Need a c-section? Hello, that will cost you quite a bit extra.
Gotten old? Bend over and say "Ahhhh". Many elderly end up spending $5K or more on medical stuff a year. Better have a really good nest egg built up. (And the Medicare Part D setups should be saving both the government and patients a fortune.)
No, having a $10K deductible on your medical insurance is like hanging a "kick me" sign while at a martial arts tourney. No matter what you do, you are gonna get your ass kicked.
Keep dreaming of that utopia, buddy.
Yep, I agree with you.
We seem to be jumping at shadows that our various governments keep throwing out there. I'm not into the tin hat thing, but I am starting to think that they like keeping us in fear.
We were fearing that Iraq was a hotbed of WMD's and was going to attack us. Well, we showed those bastards, didn't we? We took over their country, found jack-diddly-squat as far as real WMDs go, and now we are afraid to get out. Woohoo!
I think this particular case is a slam-dunk, though. 1st Amendment should protect the kid.
Besides, if they think the kid wrote something disturbing, we better hope nobody starts to read the RIAA case files...
This is exactly why so many businesses use a T1 line.
Take the pharmacy industry as an example. The small chains and independents have to have an encrypted data transfer method to do their third party claims. Larger chains have dedicated lines to the big switches such as Relay Health. So, no encryption.
The same is true with e-prescribing.
Even before HIPAA, it was something that was already in place. After HIPAA, you simply can't do without T1's or encryption.
Can you just hear the screams of agony if students can't download their normal patch updates for WoW? They'll be looking at FilePlanet and other places to get their patches.
This could be fun if they didn't exempt Blizzard. I didn't notice any mention of their legal use of P2P torrent.
You are quite correct. My wife is a student working on her Master's degree in elementary education, and she had to sign a half dozen papers for many of her classes, giving up the rights of the papers she would turn in.
I can see the need for that, for some classes, since the universities will often need those papers for research data, since it's all about getting stuff published.
I know that when I get my lazy butt back to school, there are some classes I would flat out refuse to sign such a document for. A creative writing class, or an art class, and I won't sign it.
The hard part is that I could see how an architectual student could get burnt. Imagine having a brillant phase while in school, and having done some truly inspired work. You graduate, and you can't use those drawings for any buildings you wish to do, even though they were your own creations. Ouch!
Heck, it goes beyond just MMO style games and the like.
When was the last time you were able to buy a CD/DVD of a game that didn't require a patch to fix some rather significant bugs that "just happened" to be missed by their Q/A department? Patches that would break any ISO or other type of image for a pirated copy?
Even the so called "Collector's Edition" games that come out a year or two later than the original release tend to need a patch somewhere along the line.
I suspect Blizzard keeps on giving out patches for Diablo II and the expansion, simply to make sure that anyone that has a NOCD hack of the game has to get a new one for the latest patch. Not that much else changed. Add a few new recipes, and break a bunch of hacked copies.
It's simply the cheapest form of copy protection out there. Put some thing on the system that requires the CD/DVD to be in the system at launch only, and then release patches that break all the images people make.
World of Warcraft was not forced out the door, and in fact slipped over 2 years from its initial announced release date of Winter 2002. I beta'd WoW, and while there were still a few small bugs (and their servers were underprepared for the launch) it was polished and it shows in its subscriber numbers. I beta'd most of those same games, as well as WoW. WoW wasn't completely finished, either. And the beta community was telling Blizzard loud and clear that certain things needed to be fixed. But Blizzard had delayed release too many times, and they needed to get the damn thing out the door. So, they pushed it.
But the simple fact is, no MMO is released as a full gold. They haven't been for a long time. They know that once they go past the beta, all sorts of bugs are going to turn up, and their server infrastructure is going to get a serious workout that no stress test can duplicate. WoW had 20 servers that were routinely down due to problems, and it took them quite a while to straighten them out. I remember vividly, because I was stuck on one of them.
So, a beta test eventually hits a point of diminishing returns. No matter how many people you keep adding to it, you are only going to get so much feedback, since 90% of the beta players act like all they are there for is a free look at the game, and don't spend time in the forums reporting bugs.
I don't know what server you played on, but on Xegony, Time was effectively blocked by about 3 guilds that had access to it, for over a year. They killed every mob needed for planar advancement as soon as it spawned. The only way you had a chance was a random server restart that they couldn't mobilize fast enough for, and then you had to race another group of guilds/alliances that were trying to do the same thing you were. There were several times that we were almost to full raid force to take out a mob, and an uber raid guild would run right past our assemblage and take out the mob, because they heard it was up, or they knew its spawn time.
Lack on instanced content meant that one guild or a few guilds could effectively block others from content. So, I pay the same amount of money, but other players can cut me out of the top end content, just so they can keep it to themselves? No thanks!
Lack of instanced content is going to be a problem for V:SoH, if they set things up in a similar fashion. Once the tightest guilds figure out they can block high end content (and therefore, the better loot) to themselves, it will happen.
Instanced content, even for the highest end stuff, means that no one guild/group can keep others from getting to it. Uber Guild A can raid that mob its allotted once a week, and every other casual guild can hit it just as often, or as few times as they want. What's wrong with that?
Oh, yeah, you wanted to brag. Well, if you want to brag, play on a PvP server, where competition is the norm.
Small world.
I was in a few guilds as we kept morphing form one to another as our alliance (A New Dawn alliance) grew. I started out in The Silent Majority, then was in Friends of Light, and finally was in The Commune. I believe many of the TC members ended up on Argent Dawn allied with the Clan MacLear folks, if memory serves me right.
To be quite honest about it, it isn't my problem any longer! I quit playing WoW.
However, while I agree that it would be painful to have to host and distribute that many files for a game with that many subscribers, other game companies do it for their scale. And they make it work. Especially when they download only the files you need to upgrade.
Smaller patches make it easier to distribute content faster. So, several small hot fixes beat one 70MB file. Instead, that file may now be 30MB, and those hot fixes solved a lot of immediate problems.
When I played, it wasn't unusual for it to take 6 or more hours to download each patch, prior to my going to a FilePlanet account or getting it from a friend who had one. With EQ2, I've only had 1 experience with that, and that was the recent EoF update, because everyone was trying to get the new Fae toons up.
Hey, you're paying what, 14.95 a month or so for service? Blizzard is making money hand over fist. Sure, it would cut into their probably huge profit margin if they went to a better patching method. But they are being cheap, and as long as they boast the subscriber numbers they have, there's no reason for them to change. Heck, I'm sure quite a few folks started to play again, just to hit 70 with older toons, and try the new races. More accounts means more $$$. Why would they change? To make customers feel more treasured? lol
But if a competitor had a game that started to really steal WoW's thunder and customers, and had a better patching method, you can see folks deciding that there is a better way.
I'd have to go back and look some of them up. I haven't played in well over 1yr.
f orum_id=330 And note that the last 3 hotfixes aren't listed on there. Some really small ones only show up on the Update Notes screen of the launcher.
e mented/ They don't make it easy to see the mini patch stuff there, and the support forums are a nightmare (like all MMO ones are.) If I missed it, oh well!
But I do remember a hunter bug or two that were left on the test server when a patch came out, because they hadn't had time to finish testing it, and it waited until the next patch.
Talk to the warlocks that have been around since launch, and they have had some fun times, as well.
"... most class-breaking bugs are fixed pretty regularly." Yeah, at the next patch.
I've got friends that still play on Argent Dawn, and they still get login queues.
Hey, I'm not saying WoW isn't a great game. I really enjoyed my 9 months there, and then got out when I was bored out of my skull trying to obtain gear. Since PvP in Wow was, to me, just a gank fest with little meaning (and a dumb "honor" system) I quit. But I don't think anyone else is dumb for playing it.
I'm a realist about games. If something is broke, I'll complain about it. If something works, I'll give credit. Heck, I play EQ2 now, and I played it some in the early days while I was still playing WoW. When EQ2 was launched, it was really poor, and I quit after 45 days. Now? I don't know that I would enjoy WoW compared to EQ2. And I probably won't find out, because I won't buy the WoW expansion. No biggie. That doesn't mean WoW sucks. It just means I'm happy where I am.
But WoW patching is NOT frequent. Not compared to other MMOs out there. See the EQ2 forums update page, where they indicate when patches have been done. http://forums.station.sony.com/eq2/forums/show.m?
Now compare that to this: http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/underdev/impl
I'm sorry, but Blizzard is not great at patching.
Staggering updates???? Are you kidding me? Unless you are talking about how freakin' slow they are, you've had too much of the WoW Kool-Aid.
Let's think about this. Let's compare EQ2 and WoW, since they came out within 2 weeks of each other.
WoW, 1 expansion (just released) and some free content added. Only hotfixes bugs that have a positive effect on a character. Took over 6 months to put a test server up. Major patch every 1-2 months (with the most recent expansion getting a little more patch activity.) Horrible patching method, login queues.
EQ2, 3 expansions and 3 adventure packs, which you had to pay for, unless you have a Sony All Access account. (The last expansion contains all game content, btw. Buy it, and you get the original plus the 3 expansions.) Hotfix on any bug that shows up and gets fixed. 31 "Live Updates" (major patches) since release. A test server from day 1. Fast patches from a direct server (only the EoF patch took a while, and that was a massive patch for a full expansion) and no login queues.
I played WoW for 9 months with a casual gameplay style, duoing with the wife and grouping for instances with guildmates. The gameplay itself I loved until 60. One of my biggest beefs with WoW, besides the total boredom of gear grinding at lvl 60, was the fact that bugs that should have been a simple fix were always held back for a full patch, unless it benefited the players. Give us a bug that made content easier, and that got fixed fast. Give us a bug that borked a whole class, and it waited a month or more. They wait because a small patch with their patching method of P2P file sharing for a small patch makes for a poor way to handle it. If the patch is over in 2 minutes, there isn't time to share it.
And, they were famous for breaking the same thing with each patch they did. They had like 3-4 patches in a row where they borked corpse looting to the point it took a full minute to get the item(s) from a corpse. They'd fix it after 2 or so weeks, and then the next patch would come out, and break it again.
WoW is a great game from 1-60 (now 70, but I haven't played that part), with just about anyone being able to solo or duo a ton of content, and now single group instances for high-end content is even better. We may never see a game hit so many people like WoW did.
But updates? I'm sorry, but game updates are Blizzard's weakest point on WoW. And the primary reason is their horrible patching method. If someone created another game just like WoW, and had a better patcher and no login queues, Blizzard could have problems.
V:SoH is still in beta. It's a paid beta, since you have to pay to play a game that isn't that close to finished, but it's not done.
And I'm not sold on the older crowd thing. The game is more designed for the more hardcore "I want things to be difficult, with a lot of raid content and lots of more difficult tradeskills" crowd.
Blizzard did a brilliant job of making WoW very casual gamer friendly, while still being able to keep a lot of those that desire a faster gameplay style happy. That's why so many people play it. V:SoH is not very casual gamer friendly, imo.
The lack of instanced dungeons is eventually going to catch up to them, I think. Instanced content means that casual gamers can pick a date with other casual playing friends, and group/raid a target without worrying if it's "up". The total lack of instances means that the big guilds will start to lock down the better targets.
That was one of EQ1's biggest drawbacks, imo. So many times on our server (Xegony), the big raid guilds would take down the mobs necessary to gain higher planer access. Sure, it had pretty nice loot on it, but they also knew that if they kept other guilds away from Time, they had less competition for it.
The whole "We've got to kill X mob to gain access to Y zone" thing bites when that X mob will only once a week for EVERYONE on that server. That roadblock became a tool for those uber raiding guilds to hold others back.
Honestly, I have no problem with what you are saying. There are many thousands of people out there that are looking for more of a challenge and/or grind than what WoW or EQ2 offers. And V:SoH will make a good portion of them happy.
I just think most casual gamers may find it to be more time consuming than they planned for. Some may be converted and will spend that extra time. Many probably won't.
What Fear, Uncertainty, or Doubt are you calling?
There is nothing wrong with wanting a challenge. At age 35, I had a lot more free time to handle grind. It's why I was playing EQ1 at the time. I wasn't in an uber-raiding guild, and I took my time to reach 70 before retiring from the game shortly before WoW came out, but I played it for 5+ years. I hit 60 in WoW over the course of 9 months, since my wife could only play so much while working on her masters. And once we hit 60, we were looking at grind-for-gear city. And we decided to play something else.
Casual gamers can like grind. But most of them don't. They want to log in when they want, and play for however long they want to play, and be able to log out when they want. They don't generally relish the idea of 2hrs spent on CR or it taking forever for everyone to meet up. Heck, my main in EQ1 was a wizard, who always got stuck going back to pick up and port stragglers that showed up late and had no easy method of travel, prior to portal stones. Yes, it was a time sink.
Just because I think grind is boring and time sinks are a waste of my hard to come by free time, doesn't mean I FUD'd this. It means it didn't cut the mustard for me. Which is exactly how I titled my opinion.