After the dramatic sinking of SWTOR, one thing is growing bigger in me. There's just a blatant pattern of failure in MMOs, and absolutely no studio (except ANet) seems to have the will to wake up. It's like they just want to fail.

I'm fed up with this crap. Not because I'm sour, but because it's millions and millions of wasted dollars, thousands of wasted talents, short term layoffs, and moreover millions of gamers hopes hammered to the ground.

We, gamers, constantly express ourselves about what we like and what we don't like, what will work and what will not. What is saturated and what is not. The internet is flooded with gamers opinions, suggestions, analysis, and dreams of a better MMO. Some of them even being redacted better than your best corporate spec document.

It's simple : being a successful MMO designer nowadays is as easy as parsing 3 - 4 mmo news forums, juicing the most intelligent suggestions, and make a game out of it. There are so many mature, intelligent analysis over forums nowadays that there's just no need to spend a few neurons in finding a new & original gamedesign. People are simply giving great ideas for free.

Look at the WoW forums : beyond the usual trolling crap and the "how do I play my class ?", there's at least 10 intelligent suggestions per day, in one post of one thread, spread over all the different EU/US forums. But still ... Mists of Pandaria persists in bringing something WoW veterans clearly didn't want. There's actually a 200 pages thread of people arguing with Blizzard that we want progression, we don't want easy cheesy content. ( http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/4879017939?page=1 ) But guess what ? The Blizzard rep has been arguing for 200 pages that "yes, consensus is about making things easy and super accessable, we are right and you are wrong".

Look at mmorpg.com : it's not so rare to find a very well constructed thread, with intelligent people having a perfectly mature discussion about what would or would not work for a precise feature in MMOs (housing, combat, etc).

Look even at video game blogs : kotaku.com for example, is regularly posting user points of view as full articles (very much on topic, a rant from me about WOW clones for example, posted not long after swtor release : http://kotaku.com/5884948/stop-copying-world-of-warcraft-start-making-a-better-mmo ). Even their columnists are often posting rants about the state of videogame market ! Even journalists ! We're all just FED UP of mainstreaming.

+ mmo-champion.com ... + beta feedbacks ... + .... etc, etc ...

So I ask a question to mmo studios : What is so frickin hard in reading gamers opinions ? Even your own employees tell you to listen to suggestions ( http://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Employee-Review-BioWare-RVW1763761.htm ).

edit : even successful gamedesigners are giving you the secret recipe ! ( http://www.guildwars.com/events/tradeshows/gc2007/gcspeech.php ). What more do you want at this point ... ?

It's been YEARS since there's a general consensus about what gamers want or do not want anymore. The global cry is so blatant and obvious that you just have to open your frickin browser, read a bunch of frickin threads, and that's it, you have the second coming of Christ for most gamers.

So why are we still seeing so many subscription sustainment failures like SWTOR ?? TSW ?? TERA ?? AOC ?? WAR ??? Millions after Millions of dollars gone to trash ?? Why do these studios want to fail so hard, seriously ? How can they put so many efforts in baiting for gamers interest with trailers, dev blogs, etc, only to reveal at launch that the other 70% of the game is subpar ?

When will these studios seriously start playing those games they want to make ?

(I'm drunk, but it comes from the heart baby)

(edit : lol, rereading this now that I'm sober, was a bit blunt, but I'll let it as is because it looks funny, and because it really came from the heart :p )

Protecting their jobs and head growing large.

Upper management is like a clique.  Theres one feedback there that said that the marketing department was taking charge quite a bit.  IIRC Lucas Arts was in charge of marketing.

Originally posted by Castillle

Protecting their jobs and head growing large.

Upper management is like a clique

I think this is the exact reason, unfortunately.

The square suit corporation guys don't care what people on the internet say.  They see a formula which makes money, then they exploit it.  Creating a product that people will love, that they're passionate about.. that means nothing to the guys in charge. They don't care about the desires of the people.  Profit is the bottom line.

EA is a big corporation.  They're just like Disney, or the music industry.  Their products are all formulaic. 

EA gave us Justin Beiber (SWTOR) but us MMOers said no.  Now they're remarketing him.

There's a variety of reasons why MMO players generally are not sheep. It's great we're so vocal. 

  Chicken man.

Sadly when Battlefield Heroes started selling ammo for real cash and they gave big profits, I think were giving them the wrong idea.

Because there are millions of conflicting opinions on the internet?

If you read the internet, everybody hates World of Warcraft and it fails at everything. If you look at the reality, it is the most popular game around.

Every time a developer has tried to create a niche game by listening to the fans, it hasnt ended well. Some are even naive enough to think that niche concepts such as permadeath, full loot PvP and sandbox games will gain a mainstream level of subscribers.

Developers should focus on creating a game that they themselves would want to play, and let the playerbase develop around that. That is how Everquest 1 was made. If you dont find your own game fun how will thousands or millions of other players? Making games from a checklist of what people on the internet want is just a recipe for failure.

Originally posted by evilastro

Developers should focus on creating a game that they themselves would want to play, and let the playerbase develop around that. 

I completely agree with that, 200%. But having a whole passionate dev team sounds like a higher luxury than "just having a good game", hence the suggestion about simply starting to look at gamers opinions.

(it's also the gamedesigner's job to filter through good and bad suggestions)

Originally posted by QuicklyScott

There's a variety of reasons why MMO players generally are not sheep. It's great we're so vocal. 

I usually prefer more diplomatic ways to make one being heard, but yes, I feel there's really no other solution to wake the frack up of videogame industry. Just look at EA ... they've been awarded the Golden Pooh award for the worst company in America by Consumerist, their stocks are plummetting, but yet they still laugh at those results and persist to destroy everything they touch ? They've eaten nearly all of our beloved 90's game studios, and what is their plan for the future now ? Casual games !! ( http://kotaku.com/5930617/yep-this-is-modern-video-gaming )

What do we have to do to stop the global video game hemorrhagy ?

Originally posted by evilastro

Some are even naive enough to think that niche concepts such as permadeath, full loot PvP and sandbox games will gain a mainstream level of subscribers.

Most industry professionals like yourself said the same thing about the MMO genre as a whole before WoW.

Originally posted by k-damage

Originally posted by evilastro

Developers should focus on creating a game that they themselves would want to play, and let the playerbase develop around that. 

I completely agree with that, 200%. But having a whole passionate dev team sounds like a higher luxury than "just having a good game", hence the suggestion about simply starting to look at gamers opinions.

(it's also the gamedesigner's job to filter through good and bad suggestions)

Glad to see someone agreeing with that.  LAst time I said that line, I was blasted for it lol.

We won't see good MMO's again until gamers start making games...again.

UO, AC, EQ were made by people with a love of the genre, and a passion for gaming, not for profit considerations.  Thats what made them so great IMO.  The people making the worlds wanted what other gamers wanted...a virtual world to live in, explore, and be a part of.  When the suits got involved, it was game over(no pun intended).

So until the genre comes full circle and gets back to it's roots, this trend of crappy MMO's and clones will sadly continue.

Originally posted by k-damage

After the dramatic sinking of SWTOR, one thing is growing bigger in me. There's just a blatant pattern of failure in MMOs, and absolutely no studio (except ANet) seems to have the will to wake up. It's like they just want to fail.

 I would also be asking myself this question if I didnt already know the answer.

Because MMO makers go to things like the Game Developers Conference where they ask people like Raph Koster to come talk and give them advice even after 7 YEARS of being exiled for making CRAPTASTIC MMOs. Good ol Koster who tells them that its their job to TELL PLAYERS WHAT THEY LIKE AND DONT LIKE while also telling them they need to make open ended games that allow players to make their own worlds.

And the idiots soak it all up, leave, go back to their stuidos...ignore the players, and make candy coated worlds that we cant make anything in ourselves!

I mean JEBUS ON A STICK man, 6 freaking YEARS ago a wonderful man gave a speech at a GDC where he smacked everyone in the face with a code that would allow everyone to create actual, real, scaleable content in a way that would allow a game to remain 100% liable no matter what a players level is and not one of those freaking morons listened.

We could actually have, right NOW in our hands MMORPGs where every single damn piece of the games would remain playable, not old dried up content that we do a few times until we vastly outlevel it and then pretend it isnt there unless we need to farm it, or run some lowbe through it...the code had everything. Skills, stats, spells, loot as part of the code and to top it off, placed in how to make it so it also scales to GROUP not by numbers...no no no, but by CLASSES IN THE GROUP. So you could do that encounter with a group of people, then go do it again some other time with a different set of classes in the group and end up with a completley different fight!

I hate MMO companies...they are simpley the layziest bunch of programmers trapped by their own dreams that end up being based on OUTDATED ideas by the time they get the funding to even start making their games and too damn SHORTSIGHTED to realize that fact and end up not wanting to change their original plans.

/rant off, im going to go bunch a baby now.

I think they listen too much. Standard MMORPG features are what players keep asking for again and again. Really, it's painfully predictable. Read any beta boards. SWTOR is what its beta testers pushed Bioware into making.

Going for the money is almost synonymous with going for pleasing the masses, ie pleasing the potential players. Nowadays, people see it as perfectly normal. I mean, pleasing as many people as you can with your "product". The only sane thing, right? In my opinion, wrong. It's bullcrap. I'm of the old school that when you create something, you should be true to yourself, what you find to be interesting, fun, or even profound... Not some imaginary conception of "other players".

You know what listening to your audience gives you? Hollywood previews and the bland movies they produce. 

Originally posted by Charas

Originally posted by evilastro

Some are even naive enough to think that niche concepts such as permadeath, full loot PvP and sandbox games will gain a mainstream level of subscribers.

Most industry professionals like yourself said the same thing about the MMO genre as a whole before WoW.

And they were right, WoW was a fluke, it was in the right place at the right time and made it big.  No other  game before or since has even come close to WoW numbers, nor will any game in the future ever do it.

why dont they?  Because pretty much everything someone says or suggests on forums like these, is immediately attacked by another person who doesnt like what was said or suggested, they want somethings completely the oposite.

they definitely need to do a better job imo .. but reading the interweb is not some magical solution and in fact they most obviously did. they just didn't read the parts of the interweb that you agree with.

Originally posted by k-damage

After the dramatic sinking of SWTOR, one thing is growing bigger in me. There's just a blatant pattern of failure in MMOs, and absolutely no studio (except ANet) seems to have the will to wake up. It's like they just want to fail.

 

 

I'm fed up with this crap. Not because I'm sour, but because it's millions and millions of wasted dollars, thousands of wasted talents, short term layoffs, and moreover millions of gamers hopes hammered to the ground.

We, gamers, constantly express ourselves about what we like and what we don't like, what will work and what will not. What is saturated and what is not. The internet is flooded with gamers opinions, suggestions, analysis, and dreams of a better MMO. Some of them even being redacted better than your best corporate spec document.

 

 

It's simple : being a successful MMO designer nowadays is as easy as parsing 3 - 4 mmo news forums, juicing the most intelligent suggestions, and make a game out of it. There are so many mature, intelligent analysis over forums nowadays that there's just no need to spend a few neurons in finding a new & original gamedesign. People are simply giving great ideas for free.

 

Look at the WoW forums : beyond the usual trolling crap and the "how do I play my class ?", there's at least 10 intelligent suggestions per day, in one post of one thread, spread over all the different EU/US forums. But still ... Mists of Pandaria persists in bringing something WoW veterans clearly didn't want. There's actually a 200 pages thread of people arguing with Blizzard that we want progression, we don't want easy cheesy content. ( http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/4879017939?page=1 ) But guess what ? The Blizzard rep has been arguing for 200 pages that "yes, consensus is about making things easy and super accessable, we are right and you are wrong".

 

Look at mmorpg.com : it's not so rare to find a very well constructed thread, with intelligent people having a perfectly mature discussion about what would or would not work for a precise feature in MMOs (housing, combat, etc).

 

Look even at video game blogs : kotaku.com for example, is regularly posting user points of view as full articles (very much on topic, a rant from me about WOW clones for example, posted not long after swtor release : http://kotaku.com/5884948/stop-copying-world-of-warcraft-start-making-a-better-mmo ). Even their columnists are often posting rants about the state of videogame market ! Even journalists ! We're all just FED UP of mainstreaming.

+ mmo-champion.com ... + beta feedbacks ... + .... etc, etc ...

 

 

So I ask a question to mmo studios : What is so frickin hard in reading gamers opinions ? Even your own employees tell you to listen to suggestions ( http://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Employee-Review-BioWare-RVW1763761.htm ).

It's been YEARS since there's a general consensus about what gamers want or do not want anymore. The global cry is so blatant and obvious that you just have to open your frickin browser, read a bunch of frickin threads, and that's it, you have the second coming of Christ for most gamers.

 

 

So why are we still seeing so many subscription sustainment failures like SWTOR ?? TSW ?? TERA ?? AOC ?? WAR ??? Millions after Millions of dollars gone to trash ?? Why do these studios want to fail so hard, seriously ? How can they put so many efforts in baiting for gamers interest with trailers, dev blogs, etc, only to reveal at launch that the other 70% of the game is subpar ?

When will these studios seriously start playing those games they want to make ?

 

(I'm drunk, but it comes from the heart baby)

I'm sure its already been said, but the reason is because you have upper level executive types who have NO IDEA about the gaming industry and think that it operates like the music or movie industry which is patently false.

What i mean by this is in the music industry, its surefire gold profit maker to find some young girl or guy thats reasonably attractive, hype him/her up a lot, release a single that follow a format that has been known to make money for decades now, and profit.  Examples are britney spears, justin timberlake, selena gomez, whatshisname thats out right now. etc.

In the movie industry sequels are usually guranteed big time money.  Now whereas the sequel idea holds more true than the music industry's methods in the game industry, its still not quite the same.  Gamers expect something different, even in a sequel.  Whereas a movie sequel is generally just a matter of getting the same actors together and continuing the storyline in some way.

The sad port is normally the investors react quicker to these things, but for some reason as far as MMOs its like they are convinced that someone they just need to tweek the WOW formula just that little bit so and then suddenly they'll strike gold.

I've said it for years and ill repeat it.  WOW was a fluke.  No mmo will ever approach those types of numbers again.  WOW only did it because it opened up the genre to a  bunch of new players. What happened though is as those players started playing the WOW themepark, just like any real themepark, some of them discovered they liked rollercoasters (raiding) and others found they liked bumper cars (pvp) and still other founds they like exploring (haunted house), whatever, you get my point.

So now all those "new" players blizzard brought into the fold are more like the old mmo players in that they have a very specific defined idea of what they want out of an mmo and the "one mmo to rule them all" format will no longer work.

Originally posted by k-damage

we want progression, we don't want easy cheesy content.

I don't see how you can plausibly claim that WoW doesn't have progression.  WoW is drowning in progression.  Yes, it also has easy content.  But that's part of the draw:  progression that everyone and his neighbor's dog can get through if they spend enough time on it.  That's what WoW has been right from the day it launched, and it has been wildly successful.  To move away from it now would probably end up worse for Blizzard than Star Wars Galaxies' "New Game Experience" ended up for SOE, and for about the same reasons.  It would constitute chasing away the players who play your game because it offers what they want, in hopes of attracting other players who wanted something else.  Unlike SWG, WoW has no plausible hope of replacing everyone if they lose half their playerbase.

-----

For your broader point, there are several major problems.  Probably the biggest is that different people want different things.  There are a lot of people who want A, a lot of people who want B, and A and B are mutually exclusive.

To take the example I cited above, you say you want progression.  I don't.  A lot of players don't.  Much of the attraction of Guild Wars 2 (which has a lot of hype about it, as you've surely noticed) is precisely that the progression is much lighter than most other MMORPGs--including WoW.  That may make the game of zero interest to you, but it's a major selling point to a lot of other people, precisely because not everyone wants what you want.

Another problem is that it takes years to make a game.  You start making a game thinking that you're making what people will want to play, and a few years later, another game launches doing much the same as you're doing, and flops badly because it's not what people want.  Now you're six months away from launching your own game, and if you had known this three years ago, your game would be very different.  But it's too late to go back and redo everything, so you know six months before release that your game is going to flop.  What are you supposed to do?  Cancel the game?

For example, suppose that there were another game launching tomorrow where the main draw was that every single quest had a cut scene with voiceovers to introduce the quest.  A few years ago, you might reasonably have thought that this would be a major selling point.  EA sure did.  Today, having seen SWTOR flop, you'd know full well that it's not what players are after.  But you can't go recoup the money that you spent on it.  It's too late.

And then there is the problem that some things are just nastily difficult to code and get to work right.  Everyone and his neighbor's dog wants your game to be polished.  But it's not that easy to do.

The difference between Anet and all other devs is that Anet are trying to make a good game and hope for good money while all the others are trying to make money and hopeing the game is good.

Anet: 1. Make good game, 2. Make money.

Incompetent shit devs: 1. Make money, 2. Let's hope they pay for our shit.

Originally posted by Charas

Originally posted by evilastro

Some are even naive enough to think that niche concepts such as permadeath, full loot PvP and sandbox games will gain a mainstream level of subscribers.

Most industry professionals like yourself said the same thing about the MMO genre as a whole before WoW.

That is because they were looking at games like Everquest and DAOC while making those predictions. Games focused on entertaining hard core gamers. They didn't anticipate the 'dumbing down' and mainstreaming juggernaut that was World of Warcraft.

The important part of my sentance that you quoted was 'mainstream level of subscribers'. Niche games can certainly do well enough to survive, but these companies are trying to replicate the success of WoW, and are not satisfied with a player base of a few hundred thousand, which is the norm for most triple A MMOs aside from WoW.

What casual gamers want is instant gratification, which goes against the very core of older generation MMOs. But WoW found the perfect balance between instant gratification and that dangling carrot that kept people logging in. This is why it is a mainstream success. GW2 has an interesting take on the model, by making the game about instant fun and no grind, it will be interesting to see how that plays out. Yes they already did it with GW1, but that wasnt a true MMO.

All these ideas for deeper and more fulfilling MMOs are great, but if you are being honest with yourself you will realise that the vast majority of players do not want that. The people on these forums are a drop in the ocean when it comes to total players. Games like Archage will be lucky to see even half a million players, let alone 10 million.

The majority want to jump on, do something in a short period of time and feel rewarded for doing so. Which is why there are so many instant gratification WoW clones out there now trying to lure them in. The problem is that none of them have been better than WoW at its own game.

Agree but its hard to know who is worth listening to. I see gw2 posts asking for more hand holding, more typical quests, more gear grind, wrf is wrong with players? We need less less less of all control and grind and more freedom and independance to make content ourselves.