Originally posted by bunnyhopper

Originally posted by Quirhid
 

Popularity can point to quality. It cannot though be used as proof of quality which many people seem to try to do here.

Plenty of people who dislike certain games do so with zero interest in whether said game has three people playing or three million people playing.

 

I have put forward two key principles:

1. That not everyone who dislikes modern games does so because they are "hipsters" who just don't like popular stuff.

2. That whilst popularity can be an indicator of quality, unless you have managed to remove all other potential variables, then the usual popularity = quality (no that doesn't mean I want to debate stochastic differential equations with you) argument that gets bandied about on here all the time, well it doesn't hold up on it's own without further clarification, at all.

 

To prevent this becoming even more of a circle jerk, if you are going to respond, stick to those two core arguments (not an order debate what you want, just seems sensible for the sake of clarity). But I fail to see how you can disagree with them. If you don't then we have been talking around the houses for the last few posts.

See this is our main difference, you say popularity can be a sign of quality and I say popularity is a sign of quality. You imply that a poor quality game can still be popular. If we take 3 of the latest mainstream titles, Rift, TSW and GW2, do you think any of them achieved popularity through anything other than quality?

So far, popularity has been a reliable indicator of quality. Would you accept that? Good products sell themselves.

You put up there three games that have different monetary models from companies that have different reputaiton with the core mmoprg audience, different marketing campaign and so on. Not to mention that those products were aiming at different subsection of the mmorpg population.

If your argument had any merit, the best quality games would be the facebook games, by far. Do you honestly believe that?

Originally posted by Xasapis
You put up there three games that have different monetary models from companies that have different reputaiton with the core mmoprg audience, different marketing campaign and so on. Not to mention that those products were aiming at different subsection of the mmorpg population.

Those three segments are hardly separate. I'm going to hazard a guess and say most of their playerbase have played or tried all of three.

Originally posted by Xasapis

If your argument had any merit, the best quality games would be the facebook games, by far. Do you honestly believe that?

By making that conclusion you show you've misunderstood my argument.

Originally posted by Quirhid

Originally posted by fenistil

"I still play because my friends are still playing"

"I still play because of community ingame"

"I still play because I invested so much time and effort over the years"

"I still play because [developer name] I support all their games"

"I still play because [developer name] is great and will change(or revert changes) what I don't like in future surely."

-------------------

Even if you don't agree with any of the above there is one thing. There is no objective quality to games that you can measure, at least not in a sense you seem to imply. Quality is not a sum of how many people like certain game. If more people like certain game it just mean that more people like it. Not more not less. 

What could be used as measureable objective quality of a game is things like: number of bugs, number of quests or classes or races and so on, how fast bugs and exploit get fixed, how fast Consumer Support resolve problems and so on. Still even those things are not easily measureable and especially comparable between games. Most importantly though while they have impact, sometimes great impact on game success it is not absolute one. There were and are games that released polished and with good support and failed and there are games that weren't as much polished and with bad support and succeded.

All of those reasons are... I would never play a game because of that - and I'm sure some people do, but it is hardly widespread enough to make a serious impact.

Popularity is an objective measure as much as bugs per lines of code is*. And I've never said its an absolute one. Like I mentioned in a previous post, I've always formed it "popularity is evidence of some quality". If you've read anything else its just other posters misquoting / misreading my meaning.

*(BTW the number of quests, classes or races are definitely NOT a measure of quality)

Does they are widespread or not we can only speculate like we do with most of things in this forum since we don't have any data to prove it one way or another.

Obviosuly that popularity is evidence of some quality, but it cannot be used as evidence to measure amount of quality.

It is obvious that game that lack technical quality won't be popular. Best example is Vanguard.  This game had incredible amount of bugs at release, was obviously unifnished, support was scarce and unable to fix rampant players exploiting and gold selling. Additionally peformance was so obnoxious that many people that bought it could not play it even solo. 

That is definately example how bad game quality can practically ruin it. Still that does not mean you can use popularity to measure amount of quality game does have.

You cannot say that World of Warcraft is 5-10 x bigger quality than GW2 or that it has 20-30 x more quality than Swtor. It would be even harder to prove that EVE has more quality than Rift because it is more popular and so on. 

Quality is diffrent term than popularity that's why they are not synonyms.

What could be proved propably is that if something is popular then there is higher mathematical chance that this thing have some feature or part that is perceived by many people as feature of high qualitty to them.  But that's just a long way to say 'popular'.

I think it will be impossible to you to prove that popularity equal quality.  It is like trying to prove that Football (Soccer) is of higher quality than Handball because it is more popular.

Originally posted by Quirhid

See this is our main difference, you say popularity can be a sign of quality and I say popularity is a sign of quality. You imply that a poor quality game can still be popular. If we take 3 of the latest mainstream titles, Rift, TSW and GW2, do you think any of them achieved popularity through anything other than quality?

So far, popularity has been a reliable indicator of quality. Would you accept that? Good products sell themselves.

Not at all.  Popularity is a measure of quantity it doesn't relate to quality at all.    You can't measure the quality of any product by it's popularity.   Argumentum ad populum fallacy.    

Smoking is popular.  Millions of people may smoke, yet is that a sign of smoking's quality?   Good products sell themselves...

Originally posted by Quirhid

If anyone can claim any game is fine dining and by doing so makes it true, don't you think it diminishes the whole notion? Afterall, the whole idea is to set your preference above everyone else's. You see if every game is fine dining, none is.

You understand that the phrase "fine dining" is an advertising tagline, and meaningless in absolute terms, right?

Yes, for any given poster (x), the definition of what makes "fine dining", for him, is entirely subjective.  It can't be anything else.

"I think Big Mac Secret Sauce is the tastiest thing ever.  McDonald's, without a doubt, makes the best burgers."

"What?  That stirring collection of anemic ingredients, artificial beef-like substance, and wilted lettuce?  Joes Burger positively makes the best burgers around here."

"Ur wrong." "No U Are" "Commie Pinko!" "Fascist!"

Sound like a couple of forums around here?  Which one is 'wrong'?

===========

But what's most interesting here is that the labels (Commie Pinko, Fascist) are attached after the value judgements.

As opposed to the original op, which starts with the label, and works backwards to telling us what the labeled people believe, what they're like, why I hate them.  Predjudicial logic.

Originally posted by Threatlevel0

Originally posted by Quirhid

See this is our main difference, you say popularity can be a sign of quality and I say popularity is a sign of quality. You imply that a poor quality game can still be popular. If we take 3 of the latest mainstream titles, Rift, TSW and GW2, do you think any of them achieved popularity through anything other than quality?

So far, popularity has been a reliable indicator of quality. Would you accept that? Good products sell themselves.

 

Not at all.  Popularity is a measure of quantity it doesn't relate to quality at all.    You can't measure the quality of any product by it's popularity.   Argumentum ad populum fallacy.    

 

Smoking is popular.  Millions of people may smoke, yet is that a sign of smoking's quality?   Good products sell themselves...

If smoking was some form of entertainment, you might be on to something...but it clearly isn't.

Many smokers would probably tell you they wish smoking wasn't popular....

Originally posted by bossalinie

Originally posted by Threatlevel0

Originally posted by Quirhid

See this is our main difference, you say popularity can be a sign of quality and I say popularity is a sign of quality. You imply that a poor quality game can still be popular. If we take 3 of the latest mainstream titles, Rift, TSW and GW2, do you think any of them achieved popularity through anything other than quality?

So far, popularity has been a reliable indicator of quality. Would you accept that? Good products sell themselves.

 

Not at all.  Popularity is a measure of quantity it doesn't relate to quality at all.    You can't measure the quality of any product by it's popularity.   Argumentum ad populum fallacy.    

 

Smoking is popular.  Millions of people may smoke, yet is that a sign of smoking's quality?   Good products sell themselves...

If smoking was some form of entertainment, you might be on to something...but it clearly isn't.

Many smokers would probably tell you they wish smoking wasn't popular....

I'm not on to anything...   Smoking is a habit, gaming is a form of entertainment, yet claiming popularity as a sign of quality for either is a fallacy.  These are facts.     

Originally posted by bossalinie

Originally posted by Threatlevel0

Smoking is popular.  Millions of people may smoke, yet is that a sign of smoking's quality?   Good products sell themselves...

If smoking was some form of entertainment, you might be on to something...but it clearly isn't.

Many smokers would probably tell you they wish smoking wasn't popular....

Er, you may want to re-read his analogy...smoking, popularity unrelated to quality.

Lots of reading on the internet available on ad populum and ad numerum.  We really shouldn't have to explain them to MMO fans tooooo often.

Big ol scary latin words.

Originally posted by Quirhid

Originally posted by Xasapis
You put up there three games that have different monetary models from companies that have different reputaiton with the core mmoprg audience, different marketing campaign and so on. Not to mention that those products were aiming at different subsection of the mmorpg population.

Those three segments are hardly separate. I'm going to hazard a guess and say most of their playerbase have played or tried all of three.

And that's where you're wrong.

Rift basically launched in a period where it had no competition by any other subscription based mmoprg. Their marketing was quite decent, especially in the US, where they mimicked the marketing strategy of Blizzard. The company was new but the reputation of the man in charge helped them. They are still profitable and they have stabilised their population in a profitable margin. They don't have the absurd numbers of WoW, but they don't need to.

TSW launched in a period where they had heavy competition by two other heavy hitter mmorpgs. Their marketing was ... slow. The company had soiled the repution by previous releases and thus, despite the good polished and different product, it didn't reach the expected numbers. The population is stabilised atm, but at a much lower margin than Rift (comparison with GW2 population is irrelevant due to the different model). The only saving grace now is that they don't abandon their games, no matter how bad they do.

GW2 launched in a good period (a bit later than TSW & TERA and a bit earlier than the WoW expansions). Their marketing was they biggest hypestorm the mmoprg genre has seen since the pre release days of SW:TOR (probably worse in rabid fanboysm). The previous offering was solid (successful as a single player game with multiplayer, but not as an mmorpg) so that helped their absurd manifesto claims. The monetary model helped in terms of people treating it as a single player game with mulitplayer support (sort of like a Diablo in bigger scale) and were more forgiving to the numerous bugs, hacks and exploits that are still rampant.

How is quality mesured though? If you were right, GW2 would be a better quality product than TSW. The biggest problem in TSW was the unfied server chat, not more than 5 quests (out of 500 or so multilevel quests) that were not working and the only major exploit was the ability to leave the dungeon death area. Later on they were breaking stuff in the new nightmare dungeons they introduced, but the problem was not there at launch.

Compare this to the more popular GW2. Same chat channel problem, even without the cross server chat ability. Trade/mail/AH not working. Dynamic events, skill quests etc not firing in whole zones (forcing people to server swap until they found a server that worked). And too many exploit and hacks to mention both in PvE and PvP (or especially so in PvP).

Population can be an indication of quality, but it can also be misleading.

Originally posted by Xasapis

WoW is still the most popular mmorpg in the subscription market. How many of you think it offers the best quality in the market?

Irrelevant.

No really. What we think does not matter, unless we're holding Blizzard accounts.

Blizzard's interest is to keep the majority of their customers believing that, and generation of new customers.

Pretty sure they'd snicker at the hubris..."Hey boss, those guys on mmorpg.com think we care about their opinions." 'Heee heee (rolling around on stacks of cash)"

Actually what we think does matter. I'm not talking about the people of this forum, but in general.

If people are tired by the hub quest system or the quests system in general, it will change in future mmorpgs. If people are tired of raidings, then new offerings will deliver other features. If people are tired of themeparks, we may see quality sandboxes or hybrids offered.

And Blizzard is notorious about doing nothing but the minimum effort. Which in their case involves copying the best features of their competitors and incorporating them into their game, whether they fit or not. When they have no serious competition, people get the same reheated soup over and over again.

Originally posted by Xasapis

Actually what we think does matter. I'm not talking about the people of this forum, but in general.

If people are tired by the hub quest system or the quests system in general, it will change in future mmorpgs. If people are tired of raidings, then new offerings will deliver other features. If people are tired of themeparks, we may see quality sandboxes or hybrids offered.

And blizzard cares a lot about that...why?

They're noting an aging game begin the inevitable slow fade.

We may see..nearly anything.  Even inherently fine ideas like D3 and SC2 and pandas...cough.

The conflicting opinions of a herd of aging vets?  Probably matter less than the opinions of a (much bigger) herd of Smartphone owners.  And that second group has an advantage, from a new-business standpoint; no opinions already set in rock (apparently something of an issue for the MMO industry).

Originally posted by Icewhite

Originally posted by Xasapis

WoW is still the most popular mmorpg in the subscription market. How many of you think it offers the best quality in the market?

Irrelevant.

No really. What we think does not matter, unless we're holding Blizzard accounts.

Blizzard's interest is to keep the majority of their customers believing that, and generation of new customers.

Pretty sure they'd snicker at the hubris..."Hey boss, those guys on mmorpg.com think we care about their opinions." 'Heee heee (rolling around on stacks of cash)"

Yeah, same as the music producers who keep creating the next big boy band or pop female singers care about what critics think of the music that they produce. 

May not be considered high quality, but it sure brings in a butt load of cash.

Originally posted by Kyleran

Originally posted by Icewhite

Originally posted by Xasapis

WoW is still the most popular mmorpg in the subscription market. How many of you think it offers the best quality in the market?

Irrelevant.

No really. What we think does not matter, unless we're holding Blizzard accounts.

Blizzard's interest is to keep the majority of their customers believing that, and generation of new customers.

Pretty sure they'd snicker at the hubris..."Hey boss, those guys on mmorpg.com think we care about their opinions." 'Heee heee (rolling around on stacks of cash)"

Yeah, same as the music producers who keep creating the next big boy band or pop female singers care about what critics think of the music that they produce. 

May not be considered high quality, but it sure brings in a butt load of cash.

In all that example I think the smartphone owners have the largest voice because every couple of years you get a smartphone subsidy and can shift at will, but even that doesn't seem to matter to the larger companies.  Let's take Verizon, which could be analogous to Blizzard in their dominance and power.  For a long time they've not had a viable Windows smartphone.  They wouldn't take on any of the new WP models until they supported LTE/4G.  Verizaon customers screamed, moaned, threatened to leave, actually left, and still Verizon said, "Yeah, okay whatever, kthxbai."

Until the number of disatisfied become a united majority they aren't likely to be a significant voice.  As an MMO community we're a very divided disatisfied group and not likely a majority, therefore our voice is easily marginalized.

Originally posted by Quirhid

Originally posted by Paradigm68

Originally posted by Quirhid
 

Yep. Your opinion that there is no fine dining is negated as being a fact by other people's opinion that there is fine dining. Isn't that obvious?

If anyone can claim any game is fine dining and by doing so makes it true, don't you think it diminishes the whole notion? Afterall, the whole idea is to set your preference above everyone else's. You see if every game is fine dining, none is.

Not at all. As I said, its a subjective judgement. Its true for that person. What it does mean is that any claim that there isn't any any fine dining quality mmo's is demonstrably false, because somone thinks there is.

See, you're making the claim that no one can judge any current mmo's as being above a certain quality. For you to be wrong, someone just has to in fact judge a given mmo above a certain quality. That being the case, your argument is rendered invalid.

Cassette tapes become the defacto standard despite being the poorest available solution for conveying music (but the easiest for recording).  VHS wins despite not being as good as Betamax, due to market dominance and a few other factors.

Popcorn may be fluff, but you don't always want to eat a steak at the movies.  'The Best' is not a singular characteristic.      'Popularity' is much more easily manipulated.

Originally posted by Kyleran

Originally posted by colddog04

The McDonalds analogy is horrible.

 

350k people play EVE. 200k people play AoC. EVE is the McDonalds of MMORPGs.

 

It's just an ultimately stupid argument with a seriously flawed logic to it.

And AOC is the Burger King of MMO's, with LOTRO taking the place of Wendy's and Mortal online, I dunno, Jack in the box?

Probably more accurate to call WOW McDonalds however, billions served and all that you know.

Point is, among MMORPG's, just like among fast food hamburger joints, the quality is pretty much the same between all of them, and the reason for one chain's greater popularity over another is less about one really being "better" than another, but more about who's advertising has been more effective over the long haul.

Where the food analogy fails is if you try to say one MMORPG is of a higher quality than the others, that EVE for some reason is the 5 Guys/Burger 21/BurgerMonger etc of Burger joints, when in fact there's no discernable evidence that is true.

There are differences in how things taste between food at the various low end restaurant chains, but that doesn't really reflect any difference in quality, but more about consumer preferences about certain features each might have (hey, I like my burger flame broiled, McDonalds doesn' t offer that)

Yet some folks hate McDonalds just  because it's McDonalds and the most popular, and take their business elsewhere.

I think a more interesting example in the real world of this phenomenon is how many people loath Walmart, and won't even shop there despite the fact it frequently has the lowest price for the item they are shopping for.

Their distaste has nothing to do with what matters, price, or quality, and everything to do with some esoteric perceptions about corporate unfairness or in fact, they are too hip or high brow to shop at such a store.

They are being hipsters in this scenario as well.

The actual sub numbers were irrelevant to me. I was just making them up to demonstrate a point. A point that I think you made well here. It's a terrible analogy for many reasons to be honest. I think people cling to it because they need to believe whatever they are currently doing is more worthwhile than whatever other people are doing. 

I only eat steaks! I would never eat that cheap hamburger place stuff! I'm better at life than you!

From the outside looking in, both parties are wasting their life in a video game trying to prove to each other how superior their decisions have been. It's a bit sick. I think only the most insecure type of person could actually level the McDonalds comparison with a straight face.

Originally posted by Xasapis

WoW is still the most popular mmorpg in the subscription market. How many of you think it offers the best quality in the market?

 

 

Well, I don't like WoW and I think it is one of the best "quality" games on the market.