Originally posted by Onomas

Thats not a very good thread, considering all game companies started out as indie lol.

The fact that blizzards first attempt at a mmo came at the perfect time when more kids were getting online and exploring the web. When mmo's first came out not many had internet access ;)

MMO's were also designed for adults, and blizzard went after the kiddies and it killed mmo's. Newage gamers wanted mmo's to be easy, non-complex, no features, just rush to the end and whine on the forums. That is what the genre has ammounted to.

Blizzard did have a name and strong experience in game making, but for single rts and single player games.

 

There are a few sandboxes coming that are very good looking and have many aspects of a true mmo and will do well. Asians are starting to swing to sandboxes because themepark market has been beaten to death multiple times. THats why no game is doing well, they are all the same, lack 75% of features a mmo should have, and are boring. THey are no more than console rpg's and its sickening.

 

I do think The repopulation, greed monger, the black desert, and of course archeage will do well. But doesnt ahve to beat WOW, wouldnt want the bad community to ruin any new games anyways. The kiddies can stay there ;)

Huh? You clearly didn't play Vanilla WoW. 

Originally posted by Kyleran
Put the time(sinks) back into MMOs and you'll begin to retain players again. Those who don't like this set of design won't stick around no matter what you try to do. Nothing will ever entertain them over the long term. MMORPGs used to be designed for the patient and persiverent. They could be once again.

It seems there are more and more of "Those who don't like this set of design" but I tend to think it's because they know what they want and aren't getting it. I think there seems to be more and more of them because they are getting sick of the fundamental mmo design and they aren't sticking around in new games they try because they keep getting promised certain things which are misleading. Buzzwords like sandbox and dynamic are thrown around and they getted sucked into things they aren't looking for. That and new features are too little for someone who has become bored with the genre and it takes experience to understand that. I think this as someone who tries most games but stays around for very few and as someone who hears what others like me are saying.

Maybe you wouldn't be able to satisfy them on mass but for companies to ignore players who try a game but don't continue to play it would be foolish in the extreme. Failing to understand what disenfranchised MMO players want when considering funding new games or when dealing with a declining playerbase would also be foolish.

Originally posted by tank017

I disagree..

 

Rift and Guild War 2 are perfect examples of successful theme parks.

 I disagree with that, GW2 is hardly two months old and i'm noticing similar player drop-off as I did with SWTOR and TERA, there's literally a fraction of what was there before. Logged on prime time to see only 25 hot-join PvP matches with a decent amount of players, before it was 120+. WvW barely has queues anymore and i'm on #1 ranked server Stormbluff Isle.

Now on to rift, it still isn't gaining players even though Trion works harder than I could ever expect any developers to work. Storm Legion has not come out yet but from what I've seen in BETA they had what...one BETA server and it had medium population? Tripling world size, amazing player housing, adding new raids, new souls, giant interactive world bosses...nope, almost everyone was already done with Rift a month after it launched.

Nobody is willing to give games time anymore and it's showing in the industry, but this is coupled with the other thing WoW has started... X game doesn't have a million players, it's not popular so it's probably going to go F2P and it's not worth my time.

You will never see another themepark from this day onward live as long as WoW or have even half the playerbase for a fraction of the time.

MMOs are in trouble because this is the "I want it now generation".

Originally posted by Pivotelite

 

MMOs are in trouble because this is the "I want it now generation".

God i miss the older days when you actualy had to earn something and it felt so damn good. Now everything is thrown at you and the hardest thing in a mmo is waiting til level 20 to ride a mount ;) These new aged gamers ruined the mmo genre then whine about all the console style rpgs............. errr themeparks all suck and no content lol. Funny they havent figures out that player generated content owns everything. THey lost their creativity and it has hurt our community.

Actually, EVE being so far out there - you rarely see your character - makes room for a typical 'guy with sword and shield' sandbox.

not one that would estabilize eve, but one that would be fantasy - not scifi.

EVE is not a sandbox killer. even in the realm of sandboxes eve is a weird oddity.

No new mmo can compete with eve, but luckily they don't have to. add a floor and you're an entirely different game than eve. That's it.

what are the main anti-eve complaints? "i'm a ship, the UI is confusing".

take it down from 3D into 2D and the ship problem's gone, UI simplifies infinitely...and you're already doing well.

maybe no themepark can compete with wow yet, but theres room for a great ground-level sandbox in parallel with eve without needing to compete.

@Onomas: it's not their fault. They don't know any different. It's the gaming companies that tried to chase them as consumers. THEY knew better.

Originally posted by tank017

I disagree..

 

Rift and Guild War 2 are perfect examples of successful theme parks.I also think TSW has a good chance to grow its population due to how unique the game is.If Funcom does things right,they will succeed imo..

 

Sandoxes,the sky is the limit.I believe if a major company nails a high budget sandbox,it'll be a gold mine.There simply arent enough GOOD,QUALITY, sandboxes in the market,so it is ripe for the taking.

 

you have Eve and.......................?

I'm hoping EQ-Next will be the one.

First off, do you really mean 'succeed' or 'as succesful as' ?

Either way, saying NO themepark can ever succeed is a bit fantastic.

Originally posted by Robokapp

what are the main anti-eve complaints? "i'm a ship, the UI is confusing".

 

I agree with everything you said and this point the most.   I seriously don't understand why the other developers haven't cashed in on this concept. 

The biggest failure in this regard is CCP.   Why are they not trying to grab the other half of their pie?  Instead they are rolling the die on a couple of failed products.       

Well, Thinktank,

Designing a UI that does 3-D stuff is ... not easy. Although in all honesty, EVE UI is fine. there's a ton of things, a ton of options, if BLizzard ran eve online they'd delete 80% of them and fix the UI.

a simple example: The "Look at" command. Well it certainly doesnt do much. It lets me know what a Skiff 80 km from me is mining...it lets me rat from the point of view of a drone, or mine from the point of view of the asteroid. It's fun, I love it, it's useless.

yes for a trial it can be messy to learn it at first look at eve. I know, I was there...but it's intuitive after you get an idea of it.

first time on a titan...FC says "right-click an jump". I didn't know where the jump button is. but i knew it'll probably be in the command window that pops from the titan. Lo and behold there it was .

Originally posted by Onomas

God i miss the older days when you actualy had to earn something and it felt so damn good. Now everything is thrown at you and the hardest thing in a mmo is waiting til level 20 to ride a mount ;) These new aged gamers ruined the mmo genre then whine about all the console style rpgs............. errr themeparks all suck and no content lol. Funny they havent figures out that player generated content owns everything. THey lost their creativity and it has hurt our community.

Originally posted by Loktofeit

Originally posted by Onomas

God i miss the older days when you actualy had to earn something and it felt so damn good. Now everything is thrown at you and the hardest thing in a mmo is waiting til level 20 to ride a mount ;) These new aged gamers ruined the mmo genre then whine about all the console style rpgs............. errr themeparks all suck and no content lol. Funny they havent figures out that player generated content owns everything. THey lost their creativity and it has hurt our community.

 

 LOL, that's in fact exactly how it feels, and that's not a bad thing actually. 

Originally posted by Kyleran

Originally posted by Loktofeit

Originally posted by Onomas

God i miss the older days when you actualy had to earn something and it felt so damn good. Now everything is thrown at you and the hardest thing in a mmo is waiting til level 20 to ride a mount ;) These new aged gamers ruined the mmo genre then whine about all the console style rpgs............. errr themeparks all suck and no content lol. Funny they havent figures out that player generated content owns everything. THey lost their creativity and it has hurt our community.

 

 LOL, that's in fact exactly how it feels, and that's not a bad thing actually. 

 

LOL!

Wow is 8 years old, Eve 9. I dont see players moving back to them forever, and both games no longer get in new players like they used to.

So I dont agree with you, but I do think that games similar to them might be screwed. But we already seen sandboxes (UO, SWG) and themeparks (AC comes to mind) that differs from the model and once something new like that comes out Wow and Eve will loose the positions they have now.

Nothing lasts forever, not even Wow.

I do think that the time of a single MMO larger than the rest together is running short now. Wow is not exactly growing anymore. Both games had great runs though.

Originally posted by Loktofeit

Originally posted by Onomas

God i miss the older days when you actualy had to earn something and it felt so damn good. Now everything is thrown at you and the hardest thing in a mmo is waiting til level 20 to ride a mount ;) These new aged gamers ruined the mmo genre then whine about all the console style rpgs............. errr themeparks all suck and no content lol. Funny they havent figures out that player generated content owns everything. THey lost their creativity and it has hurt our community.

 

I think there is a middleway between complete elitist games that only a few people have the time and skill to be good in and games so easy that a 7 year old kid can master and give away anything for free.

It is true that the first gen MMOs were a full time work and I sadly dont have that time anymore (I dont think I ever had it but I am not willing to spend every second not sleeping or working on a MMO anymore) but things have gone way too far in the other direction instead.

I do actually believe that most players are between those 2 extremes and it is time that that groups gets their shares of the MMOs as well. I guess that is one of the reasons for Eves popularity because it is one of the few games that hits that spot. 

Originally posted by Enigmatus

Originally posted by muffins89

"People keep hoping for THE ONE MMO..but they don't give THE ONE a chance. Instead they leave within 3 months due to lack of content and go back to WoW and EVE. Doesn't matter if its a sandbox or a themepark, you need as much (and high) quality content as the two big MMOs in their genre."

that should be most people.

i tend to agree with your overall sentiment but,  a game doesnt need millions or even 1 million people to be successful. 

I can't help but feel that most people do feel that an MMO needs millions in order to be worth anything, even the people crying for a sandbox MMO.

I also get the feeling that most of them forgot about the origins of their favorite MMOs, that most of them didn't exactly start out as enormous mega giants.

I agree but I also think we need more innovation in the genre.  Every since WoW, developers have been too keen on trying to replicate what they did without realizing why they did it in the first place.

Originally posted by Kyleran
Put the time(sinks) back into MMOs and you'll begin to retain players again. Those who don't like this set of design won't stick around no matter what you try to do. Nothing will ever entertain them over the long term. MMORPGs used to be designed for the patient and persiverent. They could be once again.

Continue on with the current path and you'll retain more players. Why the hell should you settle for less? Those who don't like it can bitch in the forums. No one cares.

Originally posted by Loke666

Wow is 8 years old, Eve 9. I dont see players moving back to them forever, and both games no longer get in new players like they used to.

Can you share links to the churn and retention numbers you are basing that on? It would be interesting to see how the two compare to other games.

There is a large chunk of players who are MMO burnout without realise it, so they keep looking for that ONE game.

Originally posted by Quirhid

Originally posted by Kyleran
Put the time(sinks) back into MMOs and you'll begin to retain players again. Those who don't like this set of design won't stick around no matter what you try to do. Nothing will ever entertain them over the long term. MMORPGs used to be designed for the patient and persiverent. They could be once again.

Continue on with the current path and you'll retain more players. Why the hell should you settle for less? Those who don't like it can bitch in the forums. No one cares.

Please explain.

Cause i see stagnation and drop in wow after the "streamlining" period, i see 50+million budget titles having 200k subs, and i also see eve ever so slowly growing and the red headed english stepchild of mmos still having around 1m subs.

Flame on!

:)

Originally posted by MMOExposed
So I believe the question comes down to, Why is it that no other sandbox MMO has been more successful than Eve? Can any of you answer that?

I think it's a bit alarmist to say that there can "never" be a sandbox MMO because of EVE. Whilst I think the OP makes a good point that any direct competitor has some big hills to climb with respect to the accumulated development that has been put into EVE, I could very easily envisage a successful sandbox MMO thriving in a world where EVE has ~500k subs. Even a successful Science-fiction based MMO, if it was one which was based on avatar gameplay could do well.

EVE is bad at attracting new subscribers, but incredibly good at retaining them. One of the CCP guys mentioned in an interview this year that once a player has been in EVE for a year or so, they basically don't leave (although they often take breaks). It might be worth pondering why this is. I believe that, despite the many, many flaws in EVE, fundamentally it appeals to our strongest "monkey" drives: socialistion, status, competition, predator pressure, greed. Due to the very high degree of freedom that CCP allows the player base, the game feels incredibly "real".  I think EVE has survived and slowly grown to its current level because CCP have maintained that core element of player freedom. It's overly simplistic but not wholly unfair to say that EVE is a bad game which allows you to do great things. A sandbox run by a company with the balls to let the players interact so freely could easy do better if it also had better core gameplay mechanics.

As a thought experiment, imagine what SWG would be like now if SoE had somehow been willing and able to tell LucasArts to shove their NGE demands and SWG had then had 8 years of continuous development and polish. I'm going to go ahead and guess that the sub level would be at least as high as EVE's is now. SWG was deeply flawed even before the NGE, but so was EVE. The lesson of EVE is that even games with significant flaws can survive and eventually thrive if the publishers have the courage to stay true to the core theme of the game, because your customers will forgive you a lot if you are the only one offering something they can't get anywhere else.

As for WoW, I think the cracks are starting to show. It still has a pretty massive subscriber base, but this has been steadily declining for a long time now. And I don't agree that there haven't been any successful competitors in the last year or two either. Plenty of PvE-focused MMOs are doing quite nicely thank you very much. Just not 10 million subs nicely, because there's only room for 1 10 million sub game in MMO-land.