Gameloading's mmorpg blog

Before  every female gamer starts jumping me with knifes, blades, baseball bats and cooking pans I'd like to clarify the thread title first.

If you're a female gamer who enjoys playing games, enjoys talking about games then rest assured, you can sit back and enjoy this entry as this is not directed at you in any way or form. However if you're a female gamer that feels a strong urge to rant on how terrible your gaming experiences as a girl have been and if you feel a strong need to let others know that girl gamers do exists and that they can in fact compete with males in gaming then please read closely and pay attention.

If you visit gaming website frequently then you're bound to come across a few articles that either have girl gamers rant of the 'many' horrible online experiences they have encountered or to point out that there are many girls playing online games and possibly reffering to a professional girl gaming clan like Frag dolls or something like that.

Everytime I read an article like that I sigh a little and I find it difficult to even finish the article, because I already know exactly what the article is like the moment I read the first line.

"guys don't believe I'm a girl"

"guys ask me for pictures"

"guys are flirting with me"

"guys give me items and equipment just because I'm a girl".

I'm sure I left a few out, but you get the point.
I can't help but feel that many girl gamers exaggerate....a lot.

I have known many girl gamers over the years and I rarely hear complaints. Some girl gamers would like to make you believe they are being harassed all over the place, but there is little truth in that.
Yes, we know that you, girl gamers, get crap sometimes. Well guess what: We all do, male gamers included. What, you thought I never got a request to show other people my picture? You think I never had a girl hitting on me online? it just happens, get over it already.

Seriously, so what if a guy or a girl flirts with you and gives you items? I can imagine far worse thing then a person of the other sex flirting with me and give me free items (I apologize for the lack of political correctness in this sentence. If a lack of political correctness bothers you, please don't read the previous sentence)

Now to be fair I don't know of anybody who would suspect of a male character to be a female in real life while many people often question the real gender of a female character. Phrases as "Male until proven otherwise" "MMORPG: Many men online role playing Girls" and "Girl: Guy in real life" are not uncommon.

However the issue here is that there are, in fact, a lot of men who play female characters in games, I think it has little to do with the perception on girl gamers.

Yet some girls insist that there is a significant number of male gamers who believe there are no such thing as girl gamers. They seem to base this on surprising reactions from male gamers when they find out you are, in fact, a girl.

However most men do in fact, know there are female gamers, they just aren't as common as male gamers. I play Xbox live quite often and I don't encounter a lot of girls. It's less worse in MMORPG's, but..the vast majority seems to be male.

Even though I know of the existence of female gamers, I still get to read tons of articles of females who are trying to let me know there are girl gamers. I don't care about professional gaming at all, I wouldn't be able to name one professional gaming clan even if a gun was pointed towards me and yet even I know of the "Frag dolls". Why you ask? Because the Frag Dolls are a female professional gaming team which has been pushed in my face by insecure girl gamers to prove that girls can game...just in case I had second thoughts about the gaming abilities of girls.

type in the words "girl gamer" in google and you'll find tons of websites dedicated to girl gamers, there has even been a gaming show "Girls n game" about girl gamers and girl game development.

Yes girl gamers, we know that there are female gamers out there, you don't have to remind us over and over again, please stop asking for attention.

thank you

If the past few years have taught me anything, it's that there are 2 ways to get the mmo playerbase in an uproar. One is Blizzard announcing a new World of Warcraft expansion, in which half of the mmo playerbase jumps in the air of excitement, and the other half will nitpick at the expansions because these days it's cool to bash whatever is popular. The other is the mentioning of Bioware or star wars, preferably both.

Ever since Bioware announced a new MMORPG project fans have speculated what the project could be and some new rumors add a bit of extra spin to the rumor mill.

The vast majority of MMO fans are hoping for a Star Wars MMORPG developed by Bioware because apparently fans feel that the franchise hasn't been milked enough just yet.

Perhaps it's because I was never a fan of Star Wars or Bioware games that I'm not having the same religious experience everyone else is apparently having.

To me, Star Wars has always been nothing more than completely unrealistic boyish fantasy.

I personally like my sci fi movies, books and games a bit more realistic, something that gives you the idea "wow, this could actually happen!". The Matrix is a perfect example of this.
When we reach the space age I'm pretty sure that there is no way we would ever shoot red and green laser beams at each other out in space, nor would we wield glow - in - the - dark swords.
And if we were ever to get an evil person the universe, I'm pretty sure he would not be stupid enough to wear something silly like Darth Vader and his storm troopers are wearing.

Another reason I hope Bioware will come up with something unique instead of using the star wars license is because Bioware promised to do something new, something that has never been done before. Jumping on the "lets create an MMO based on an IP!" bandwagon is a bad start, and the fact a Star Wars MMORPG already exists only makes it worse. creating an MMORPG on an already existing franchise seems to be a popular trend these days. It's getting so far that we almost have more mmorpg's based on an existing franchise than MMO's who are not and it's not just happening to mainstream franchises anymore.

Nowadays there are MMO's about anything. Star Wars, The Matrix, World of Warcraft, Dungeons & Dragons, Lord of the Rings online , Warhammer, Final Fantasy, Lego, Conan, Ultima and I could go on and on and on.

Somehow I hope Bioware will be a bit more imaginative than to just rely on a popular franchise.

As you may or may not know, Sword of the New World: Granado Espada has recently gone free to play. After only a month of retail, K2 network decided that a monthly fee was not the way to go, and changed to a full micro transaction. this is really a missed opportunity, had the game been advertised as free to play from the very beginning, the game would have probably caught a lot more interest.

Now if you look around on different forums and boards, you will find a lot of "K2 network bashing". K2 network scams, has bad servers, bans posters on forums and will claim your first born child. Now after having played SotNW back in beta and retail, I found out that most of that is not true. But today I found out that K2 network made its first big mistake with Sword of the New World.

Sword of the New World is not really a social game, thats probably because there is really is no reason to socialize. I personally blame this on the lack of grouping content. There is a serious lack of group based dungeons and areas in the game. If the game had some more group focused environments in the game, players have more reason to socialize with each other. Another reason is the competive nature of the game. When you see another player walk into your hunting spot, you don't think "Ohhh, how nice, another player..maybe I should group with him?"No, you think "That bastard is taking MY mobs damnit". There are 3 things you can do. Live with it, Move to another channel (Similar to Everquest 2) or beat the living crap out of him in pvp.

K2 network noticed that the community was pretty quiet, so they decided to live things up a bit.
They thought it was a good idea to close 2 channels and jam all players in one single channel in order to socialize with each other and to establish new friendships. (Really, I'm not kidding: http://forum.swordofthenewworld.com/index.php?showtopic=9508)
Sword of the New world has a very linear world. there are a lot of maps, but each map is really small.There is only one map for each set of levels (Say, map 1 = lvl 1 - 5, map 2 = lvl 5 - 10, etc). thats right, only one. thats why the game has 3 different channels in other versions.

The reason the game is so fast paced is because there are so many monsters to kill due to the high spawn rate. the "goal" is to kill mobs as many mobs as possible with different skills and abilities. Its the fast paced gameplay that makes the game fun. But in order to keep that fast paced action, every player needs enough mobs to kill, If there are not enough mobs to kill, the pace will go down significantly. Because everyone is jammed in one channel, there simply aren't enough mobs to kill.

But as if that wasn't bad enough, K2 network made this change at the same time as the game went from pay to play to free to play. So not only is everyone stuck in one channel, there is also a huge wave of new players joining the world. And to finish the chaos, a whole load of chinese farmer bots made its way to the new world.
Yeah, I'm sure that will establish a whole lot of friendships Mr SotNW producer.

So the result is that the fast paced action is simply gone. whats left is an auto - attack afk grind fest because there is no reason to use skills. there are simply not enough monsters, its to crowded.

I mean, seriously, what were they thinking? The fact that this is done at the same time with the recent free to play change is just a horrible idea.

According to K2 network: "Also, we have currently reduced the number of channels per world to 1. This is so that we can closely monitor and encourage the growth of the in-game community."

I honnestly don't understand why you need to jam everyone in one spot to closely monitor the growth of the community, and I'm sure this change didn't help encourage the growth of the in - game community at all.

Its like K2 network is looking through pink coloured glasses.

What K2 network wants: "Oh joy! I just started playing this wonderfull new game, and oh look, the world is so populated! I can't wait to make all kinds of new friends and donate my entire paycheck to K2 network!"

What they get:"What the hell!? This place is freaking crowded, I lag like hell and I get kill stealed from left and right. you know what, fuck this, I'm out of here"

I often discuss the MMORPG market with other people. Which MMO will be the next MMO to dominate the market? Will an MMO do well or will it fail? What company will reigh supreme? Things like that. I often refer to the asian MMO market, and people often ask me "Why?". Why should we, as western gamers, care what happens on the other side of the world? Who cares which games are popular in Korea, China or Japan? Well here is why.

The most obvious answer is ofcourse, without the asian market, we would have less games to play. No Lineage 2, No Ragnarok Online, No Silkroad, etc. Now you can like or hate those games, But they do cause more competition in the western market. But there is more to it.

Lets take NCsoft for an example. Everybody knows NCsoft. NCsoft became the company it is today thanks to Lineage. Lineage is still to this day one of the most successfull MMO's in the world. NCsoft reported that, at one point, Lineage had 3 million active subscribers. To compare, Everquest peak was about 500.000 subscribers. Almost all of those subscribers are from Asia.
Its safe to say that it was Lineage that made NCsoft the biggest MMO publisher in the world.
Because of its success in Asia, NCsoft was able to publish not only asian games, but western games as well, such as Guild Wars, Auto Assault, City of Heroes. There are more companies who let asian companies publish their games. Flagship studios lets Namco publish Hellgate london in the west, while Hanbitsoft & The9 take care of the publishing in korea and china. All points bulletin will be published by Webzen. Tabula Rasa will be published by NCsoft. Gravity Corp made an investment of 8,5 million KWN in perpetual entertainment, the company behind Gods & Heroes.

The Asian market has a direct impact on our market, its that simple. Discussing the MMORPG market without the asian market is like discussing the console wars without including Nintendo.