This is just an extension of the general fruit-fly attention span problems that young people have, in general, these days.  Most MMO players today have never experienced having to wait, for ANYTHING.  They never played pen-and-paper RPG's where you got together with friends once a week.  They never watched TV shows that had cliff-hangers that you couldn't spoil by looking it up on the internet.  They never got to enjoy the experience of being LOST in an online game, with no radar-blip map, no web pages to tell you where to go, and only your own ability to recognize landmarks to help you.  For that matter, I doubt many of them have ever been lost in real life, with their GPS-enabled smart-phones.

What all these ADD kids don't realize is... they're PAYING for it.  Taking shortcuts and trying to make everything easy-mode is the equivalent of skipping ahead to read the last chapter in the book.  You paid for the whole book, shouldn't you try to enjoy it?

The thing is... MANY of us expected (and wanted) FFXIV to be an updated FFXI.  We assumed the game would have great graphics (and it does), and some changes and refinements to the FFXI systems... changes that would make it a bit  more solo-friendly (read: carebear), and less grindy.

What we got was something else.  We got the hollow shell of a changable class system, slapped onto a totally new combat system, but with almost nothing in the way of quests, story, or flavor to support it.  Depth of play got replaced by needless complexity and after playing for about 10 hours you realized that was it.  You'd seen everything there was, and everything else will just be new names or animations atop the same mechanics.

I've been watching this one all along, and I keep hoping they'll pull more of FFXI into it, but until then, it's just not worth more than an occasional hour poking around to see how it's changed.

If you own it, play it once a month to see how it's doing.  If not, might as well wait and see.

The whole issue boils down to why you play the games in the first place.

Do you play to win?  Or do you play to play?

If you enjoy playing the game, then it shouldn't make much of a difference to you if Joe Wallet finishes all the content ahead of you, because you'll eventually get there if you care enough.  OTOH, if you enjoy winning.... be it in PvP, or in beating the content first, or whatever... then microtransactions destroy the game for the poor.  Like the real world, money replaces talent, and no matter how good you are, you can't compete with folks who buy their way to the top.

Originally posted by expresso

6. Activision has nothing at all to do with the direction or decisions Blizzard makes and vice-versa

7. You will not see any mension of Activision or Activision/Blizzard on any Blizzard game or products

8. Bobby kotick does not run/own/manage or have any say in Blizzard games.

Either you're on the payroll, or you had a big gulp of the kool-aid, my friend.

Kotick is the CEO of the Activision-Blizzard holdings company.  If you do a little research, you'll see he had a lead role in the creation of said company (a financial merger of Activision and Blizzard's holdings).  If you don't live under a socialist propoganda rock, you know that money trumps everything else in this world.

It is true that Blizzard remains an independant studio, but to say Kotick has no influence over what they develop, or how they do so, is laughable.  He who controls the purse strings, controls what ultimately gets done.

If you have any doubts, just look at the purely marketing-driven release structure of Starcraft 2.  Was there any development reason to split the game into three equal chunks and sell them for $60 each?  Couldn't they have relesed the core game as a $60 chunk and planned the other two parts as expansions, like every other RTS has done to date?  It was simple math.  $180 vs. $140.  Nobody will pay full price for expansions, but if they call them seperate games... BAM!

Blizzard will retain control as long as they continue to increase revenue.  Once their numbers slip beyond some threshold value, I'm sure Kotick put clauses in the contracts to allow Activision-Blizzard to replace key personnel and play a more active role in future development.

If you have a competitive PvP game like Age of Conan, the free-to-pay model is a horrible mistake.  People play games to escape reality, and let's face it -- the people who want to escape the most are those who are NOT wealthy.  Bringing the wallet into the game means skill no longer matters, as those who win in real life now buy their way to the top in your game world too.

In a purely PvE game, it doesn't really matter.  In those cases, I don't care if some rich kid gets all the uber gear ahead of everyone else.  The only circumstances where f2p sucks for PvE games is where items are ONLY available via the cash shop.  Last I knew, LOTRO allowed you to get everything via in-game mechanics, and the cash shop just let you get there faster or easier.

New games still use load screens, in this decade?  I don't get it.  There hasn't been a valid excuse for load screen in 10 years, unless you're trying to make it run on a tinker-toy computer (IE: a console).

Older games were written to be games.  Newer games are written to make money.

It really is that simple.  If you want money rolling in the door, you have to cater to the ADD crowd of teeagers who will "win" your game in 30 days and be gone, as well as the old timers who can only play for 5 hours a week but still want to fee like they're making progress.

That's why everything is stupidly easy in games now.  The time-challenged can still feel that they're making progress becaues even a couple hours can net you a level.  The ADD kids can blow by all the silly "content" and get to endgame where they can minmax against each other until they get bored and move on.

I don't see that changing unless a company somewhere feels content to just make a profit, rather than have to provide their investors with a 500% ROI every quarter.

QQ n00b?

Sorry, but some of us like having to actually play the game, rather than having everything spoon-fed down our throats.  WoW will never be as challenging as it was in Vanilla, but if the new Cataclysm instances are more like the Burning Crusade's than the Lich King's, many of us will be happy.

If you're not one of them, you can always go play Hello Kitty's Island Adventure. :)

If their population holds at this level, and their investors aren't too greedy, they'll do fine.  This is about where EVE-Online is, and CCP clearly has made a tidy profit from that game.

Remember, the average population is about 10% of the subscribed player base.  So, 30K people playing means about 300K subscriptions.  Not great, but it's about 4 million bucks a month in revenue.  I'm sure the costs of running it are under 1 million.

The big struggle for them will be to get the game finished and polished to the point that the player base is willing to trust them again.  That has to happen before the March PS3 launch, otherwise they won't get the box sales from the consoles to fuel new development.

The sad thing is, the real subscription numbers won't be visible until next year.  Because of the bizzaro way they did billing, many people bought game time cards rather than dealing with fly-by-night no-name credit payment companies.  So, if you got a 3 or 6 month subscription, via game time cards, you've already spent the money and will be counted as an active subscriber, even if you never log in again.

Why do males play male characters?  Easier to identify with them.

Why do males play female characters?  Well, you're gonna be staring at that pixelated butt for a long time...

It's not just SWG that SOE burned.  Look at the history of every game they've touched.  EQ1 was nerfed into oblivion after the Velios expansion.  EQ2 floundered at the start, and was quickly and radically redesigned from the group-heavy game it was advertised to be, into a mostly solo game.  Crafting went from a complex dependancy web with variable quality results, to a cookie-cutter whack-a-mole game.  Vanguard.... well, that wasn't their fault, yet they nerfed it down quite a bit more than they needed to.  SWG.  Yeah, Lucas Arts may have forced them to make changes, but SOE decided the details and chose to ignore their playerbase.  Pirates of the Burning Seas.... another game that started out promising and after SOE walked in, all the ideas just dried up and fell away.

SOE has made one thing perfectly clear.  They do NOT care about long-term players.  Their CEO believes that the future will be filled with millions of fresh faces who will buy their game, feed the microtransaction monkey for a few months, and wander off... and that's what they WANT.  They make more cash getting a constant rollover of new customers, than by keeping subscriptions active.  At least, that's their belief.  See the recent EQ2x model for their idea of the future.

I've said before, I have no problem with item malls, provided that EVERY item available in them is ALSO available by exerting effort in the game environment.  Rich people will always find ways to avoid having to wait for things, if the game doesn't give it to them directly, they'll pay farmers for it.  But I don't want to be locked out of content because I'm poor.  That makes the game NOT a game any more, and just another reflection of our real life status.

I'm reminded of real life enough by real life.  Don't drag it into my games too.

Personally, I like EVE-Online's model.

You can pay their monthly subscription fee (discounts for multiple months at a time, as usual), or you can purchase PLEX, which are in-game items that act as game time codes.  They seem to nicely solve two problems at once.  Those who have more cash than time can buy these PLEX items and put them up for sale in the in-game market, thus effectively buying gold.  Those with more time than money can spend in-game currancy to buy PLEX from other players over the market, thus making the game free-to-play.

It works well, because the developers get their money regardless, and no real currancy is added to the game economy, since it only changes hands between players.

First of all, be careful what you wish for.

People love dogging on WoW, because it's the big fat guy who hogs the MMO buffet .  But, think about what you're saying for a moment.  What if Bioware *DID* make an entirely new game, that had totally different combat mechanics, a totally different UI, and something entirely different than the typical fetch-me-a-spoon, or kill-57-wombat quests?

What, exactly, would you be most likely to do when you logged in?  I suspect 99% of you would start whining about how stupid it was, and how nothing made sense, and how it was so hard because you had to read and follow directions.

Bioware doesn't want a niche market game for the small number of us who'd enjoy something totally different.  Neither does LucasArts.  LucasArts is still smarting from Star Wars: Galaxies, so they want to be as sure as it's possible to be that their IP will be in a successful blockbuster that will last 10 years.  Bioware doesn't want their first foray into the MMO market to be a flop either.

So yes, it will have things that are familiar, so some of those 12 million WoW players might come check it out and not have the EVE-Online experience of "OMFG!  This is hard!  I hate reading and thinking!  I'm outta here!".

I have faith that they will give us a fun and entertaining game, and to be honest, by the time it launches Activision may have already screwd up Blizzard enough to make people willing to jump ship despite Cataclysm.

Nope.

I loved Vanguard during the later beta stages, and despite all the bugs, despite the unfinished systems, I probably convinced a dozen friends to buy the game at launch -- and then spent months apologizing to them after SOE ripped the heart out of it and replaced it with a gumball machine that dispensed WoW-flavored gum.

What made Vanguard awesome was the unique return to old-school ideas.  Being able to actually get LOST, because there was no radar-blip map.  Having to actually walk or ride across huge distances to get places, and thus planning your dungeon raiding by geography rather than whim.  Crafthing that was actually more than clicking a button (although the ORIGINAL EQ2 system was better).  The original combat system with counters and reactive abilities was also nerfed, although some of that happened before SOE came in (they knew it wouldn't be finished in time for launch).

Once SOE "saved" the game, they started ripping all that stuff out and giving us another easy-mode game that just didn't feel original any more.

A game lives or dies by being original.  Vanguard has lost any sense of being a unique game, and frankly I'd rather spend my money playing EQ2, as it's more polished and not all that different.

About the only thing that would save Vanguard, at this point, is converting it to a free-to-play model and hoping enough people will pay for perks to keep the servers running.

SC2 is SC1 with pretty graphics.  Very pretty graphics, but it's the same game with a few units changed to make it slightly more balanced.  They could easily have released an "upgrade" or "expansion" for SC1 and gotten the same result, except that people wouldn't pay 60 bucks for an expansion to a 10 year old game.

I'm disappointed.  I was expecting the same kind of evolution we saw from Warcraft 2 to Warcraft 3.  Instead, this feels like the Warcraft 2 to Warcraft 2 Battle.Net Edition level of change.

*yawn*

I'll wait for the "Gold Edition" with all 3 episodes bundled into a bargin-bin box for 40 bucks, three years from now.

Quest systems that assume you've done nothing before accepting the quest.

If I just waded through a mass of grunts for some other quest, and happened to kill Bob the Mega Grunt in the process, it's really stupid to go turn in the "kill 20 grunts" quest and have them go "Oh yeah, you need to kill Bob too!".  I should be able to say "Yeah, did that." and not have to go do it again.

There's no reason the game can't keep track of every single thing you do.  Many things are already tracked for various kinds of achievements.  More is tracked for the devs to use in balancing the game.  Just track it all, so if I've already met the objectives I don't have to repeat the same procedure.

Skill, in EVE, is how quick you are to respond to an unforseen encounter, how good you are at catching others unprepared, and how well you understand the game mechanics.  Unlike most MMO's, it doesn't require lightning reflexes, macros, or any other typical arcade-game skills.

You have to be able to analyze the situation and make the right tactical decisions to win.  If you don't have the optimal weapons, shields, fittings for a given encounter, your brain is what will save you.

Don't be fooled into thinking the in-game skills are what's important.  A noob could buy a character with 40 million skill points and die like a dog as soon as they launched their expensive battleship out of the station.  A good player who understands the game can kill people in cheap frigates or cruisers and bring them to tears as they realize a ship that cost 20 milliion ISK just blew away their 1 billion ISK battleship.

Mostly, though, it's about how you play with others.  It's very hard to accomplish anything solo.  If you expect a leveling game like WoW, you'll be disappointed and bored.

Just chiming in with my usual Piracy != Theft response, since nobody seems to get it.

Pirating software IS illegal (in most countries), but it's a violation of copyright law and has nothing to do with property theft.  When you steal something, you are depriving someone else of the use of the thing stolen.  When you copy something, you are depriving someone of a *potential* profit, which might or might not have become an actual profit.

The DMCA is illegal, because it violates the first sale doctrine, just like EULA's.  Unfortunately for those of us in the USA, big money pushed the law into existence, and keeps it from being overturned.  Indeed, if anything the DMCA encourages outright theft, since the punishment for petty theft of a $50 game is far less than a DMCA violation.

So, while I can't encourage anyone to steal OR pirate, I do hope Ubisoft loses a lot of money on that turd, and I hope anyone else with such draconian protection loses lots of money, so maybe it'll become obvious that what's costing them money isn't piracy... but is annoying customers so they won't buy future products.

Yep, up until WoW, a developer could get away with launching a game that was thin on content, or that still had bugs which would hinder gameplay.  That's because it was still new territory, and the online multiplayer experience was fresh enough to let them get away with it.

Console games were always held up to a higher standard, since patching them used to be almost impossible.  Early PC games also tended to be debugged and polished, because before the internet, patching them was difficult and usually not something the average gamer could do.  Newer games though, are easy to patch or expand, and the MMO (with much of the code existing on the server) is an ideal platform to patch and extend as it goes.

WoW had its share of problems, but aside from the login queue issues, it wasn't too horrible a launch.  More importantly, the nearest competition (EQ2) had much bigger problems.  That, plus the popularity of the Warcraft/Diablo franchise, let WoW leapfrog ahead.  Once it reached a certain critical mass, it became a culture.  It's hard to not be curious enough to check it out when half your co-workers are playing it.

The problem now is that WoW is a 5-year old game, with all the polish and content that comes from two full expansions and a gigantic community.  Any new MMO has to not only come up with something new and exciting, but it has to be as polished and stable as WoW, or people won't give it a chance.

A friend of mine works in the gaming industry, and says there are quite a few people who pitch ideas for smaller MMO's.  Ones that cost 3-4 million dollars to make, and will likely attract 100-200K subscribers.  They never get funding, because the greedy venture capitalists only want to fund 30 million dollar games with the expectations of millions of subscribers.  They flat out refuse to believe you can't just scale things up like that at will.

Until THOSE people get a clue, we're likely to see many more bug-riddled failures crash and burn their way through the market.