Profile: daveains
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• • Our lesson for today: Foresight

  • Originally posted by neonaka
    

    I am not going to argue, here go look at a chart of an analysis done in 2004 on the state of the top 10 MMO's of that time period.

     

    Numbers will speak for themselves.

    WoW UP UP UP and AWAY.....

    EvE online slow but steady incline ( due to being the only viable space MMO of the time)

    Runescape also had an incline, do not get me started on runescape.

    other 7 plummit to earth like meteroites.

     

    http://www.mmogchart.com/

     

    So you like to research, you go look at the analysis and come back and tell me WoW had no impression on subscriptions of the lesser games. On top of that try to tell me it still isn't affecting games subscription.

     

    The solution is very simple for Fantasy based MMO's WoW is it, it has monopolized the MMO market and does not look like it is going to be giving up it's chunk of 9 million subs anytime soon.

    Your trying to sit here and say that 9 million new gamers materialized in Nov of 2004 - Present 08 and picked up a copy of wow?? come on are you serious?

     

    I will say that, and back it up. One thing nobody has mentioned, but is the biggest single factor of WoW's success, is that Blizzard was aiming WoW at a much larger market than the existing MMO playerbase. 

    WoW was so successful not because it was a better game than the others, but because people could play it on the computer they already had, instead of having to upgrade or buy another computer.  Blizzard's intended market wasn't just the people who had "gaming machines". Their market was anyone with a midrange computer who wanted to try an online game.

    At release, WoW could run acceptably on a 32 meg graphics card, because the devs did cartoony, low-polygon-count graphics for the characters. They specifically stated this was the reason for the cartoony graphics- so that many more people could play WoW than could play the competition's games. I remember reading that in a dev chat prior to WoW's release, and thinking "Cool! Then I won't have to upgrade to play it!".

    In EQII at release, at the lowest settings, I had to look down at my chars feet when in town in order to even walk around. With a 128MB mid-range graphics card btw. I had to upgrade for 239.00 to a 7900GT before I got playable frame rates, and I never made it past medium quality settings. Ever.

    So Blizzard deliberately took full advantage of the huge mistake made over and over again by the "real MMO companies". Their devs were in a BOASTING WAR over how much power it took to play their games, so therefore, the market for existing games was limited to people who would pay the money for a serious gaming machine (and usually, also had the knowledge to know what they needed - so they had only a subset of the potential gaming market).

    So Blizzard made WoW the mass-market successor to EQ1. Where EQ1 was the first game to ever let people get together and play in an MMO game, WoW was the game that made it possible for a buttload more people to play an MMO. The other game companies took themselves out of the running for the mass market by letting their devs get crazy about how much unoptimized graphics they could shove into a game.

    And Blizzard saw their mistake, went for right for their throats and won the entire war in a single move. While I hate the really dumb way that WoW plays, I have to say Blizzard is a very smart company.

     

     

     

  • Posted: 7/15/08 10:33 PM
    Planetside
• • Our lesson for today: Foresight

  • Originally posted by JMadisonIV
    

     

    
    

    and in Tabula Rasa general chat, even the mention of Planetside evokes an hour long conversation of wistful remembrances of what PS used to be from many, many players on my server.

     

    I should have been in bed an hour ago, but I couldn't not respond to a post on the PS forums and say something about how PS used to be lol.

  • Posted: 7/15/08 10:01 PM
    Planetside
• • A Veteran Returns (Review)

  • Originally posted by Arclan
    
    

    I'm sure you know, NC have the slowest rate of fire; but do the most damage per hit. TR have the highest rate of fire but do the least damage per hit. VS I guess is in the middle.

    Except for the small matter of Tripleshot lol. NC have the most instagib of all the emps with tripleshot, Thunderer and Vanguard. And yes, since the NC are rebels, the original devs did kind of identify with them a little too much lol.

    I just don't play because the game is way old, you have to deal with SOE's moronic sub system, and the latest devs just pushed all the stuff lying on the shelves into the game so they could tell their bosses they were Doing Something lol.

    It doesn't play at all like the fast, frenetic game I remember from when I started. You could see attacking squadrons of tanks and aircraft rolling around a base, with dozens more people charging across the field from the tower blazing away as they ran, and the defenders rolling vehicles as fast as they could spawn, all turrets firing like crazy, defenders all over the walls....

    I miss those days. It was beyond awesome. Now you got constant OS's raining down making everyone afraid to be near anyone else (no more big charges or squadrons of vehicles together), you got flying superpowered aircraft that can own anything around, you got invisible aircraft that can take 3-4 tank rounds before they fall down, everyone wallhumps to killwhore instead of playing to cap, and oh yeah, you still got big overpowered 1 person magic-shielded supertanks clomping around making everyone afraid to come out and fight. I saw one guy in an outfit I joined, he routinely had over 100/1 kill ratio, and I saw his screenshot when he got a 150/1 k/d ratio. That's just bullcrap - 150 people died without a chance to have a fun fight so he could have - fun? - killing them without any risk.

    After that, I switched emps, and the last char I played was a dedicated Pounder guy just so I could blow up every BFR I saw lol. Didn't help when they brought out the Galaxy Gunships though, I hit one square on with two full Pounder clips (enough to just about kill a GV BFR) and it had less than 1/2 damage.  So the devs made a BFR with wings and a sh8load of guns. Wow, how much fun must all of the victims be having as they die helpless to fight back. 

    Sorry SOE, you may con people who never saw the game when it was really fun into subbing, but it's like a bad joke now.

  • Posted: 7/15/08 9:44 PM
    Planetside
• • Another Major IP for $OE to ruin

  • Aye, the poster you qouted is basing his post off 2 games. MXO was only purchased to help secure the rights to future WB properties (DCU). Vanguard was because Sigil had a somewhat finished game that could have been good but whole mismanaged. SOE bought them out after agreeing to a publishing contract because Sigil was headed down the toilet.
     

    As I said before, the only reason for the SOE hate was a few SWG players got burned and felt the need to share thier pain with everyone. When they realized no one really cared, they started in on any game that was mentioned in the same sentance with SOE.

     

    Actually, I have to agree with him- SOE really sucks when it comes to the whole "fun" thing. Which is kind of central to the whole GAME thing in my book lol.

    I only played SWG for about an hour before I gave up in shock and horror at the ham-fisted jamming of a fantasy RPG gameplay into the freewheeling, open-ended universe of Star Wars.

    However, I played EQ1, EQ2 and Planetside for years and years, so I have experience with 3 of the biggest games SOE has had. IMHO, SOE just messed up each and every one in the most clueless manner possible. For most of those years, playing their games really felt like I was working another job!

    It took me years to figure out why playing an SOE game feels like you're grinding your life away in a wage-slave job that fits into an overcomplicated, would-be master plan that you can only see a small piece of.

    It's because of one simple, blindingly obvious reason. All SOE Developers are ipso facto wage slaves grinding away at a corporate wage slave job. Therefore, everything they do at work involves fitting  better into an overcomplicated, would-be master plan that they only see a piece of.

    That's why everything they want players to do is like having a job in a corporate workgroup - "The Cleric will Heal the Warrior. The Wizard will Nuke the Opponent. The DPS will Do Melee Damage. The Warrior will Taunt the Mob to Keep its Attention. Any Others will do the Menial Labor to Support our Main Team. Go Team Fun." (For the record, I mainly play druids, paladins and enchanters- all hybrids, and therefore, all treated as the Menial Laborers in SOE's rigid little work teams. So I know whereof i speak.)

    Would you go to a party where you were told you would be assigned a set little pigeonhole role and have to play it in the name of Having Fun? Not me.

    But SOE devs have no options in their game design other than to have players have the same kind of rote-behavior roles in-game that the devs do at work. Then whatever happens, their suitmonkey bosses can tell THEIR bosses that Everything is Going According To The Plan. Their suitmonkey bosses do not understand what the devs are doing, nor do they care about anything but subscription numbers, which only reflect changes well after it's too late.

    So players get tired of paying SOE to work an in-game job instead of having fun, subs slide, and SOE just scratches its head and says "Couldn't be OUR fault, because we're giving them the same kind of fun WE have. Must be WoW's item-centric gameplay. Let's put more items in our games to catch up!".

    And that's how you screw up the (arguably) biggest science fiction, biggest fantasy, and only real FPS MMO's in the history of gaming. It's not some uber-complicated, larger-than-life reason. It's the simple, down-to-earth fact that SOE devs are assembly-line workers in a Modern Times environment, trying to sell dull, planned-encounter, rote-combat "Fun" to players who wanted the freedom to roam and discover new lands, new friends, new foes, new risks and rewards, and all the other elements that make an Adventure out of a game.

    I feel very sorry for them, I really do. But I feel sorrier for all of the people I see who have been trained to expect being told where to stand, what to do, and when to do it in the name of having fun.

  • Posted: 7/15/08 9:04 PM
    Star Wars Galaxies
• • Lord of the Rings Online: Jeffrey Steefel on Book 14 and Beyond

  • I wish them the best for their hard work, but they lost me when they went from engaging quests in the low levels,  like investigating the disappearance of a hobbit (he was off trying to kill a signature wolf to impress a girl hobbit, and you had to help him out) to dumb kill-x-of-this-or-that quests in the higher levels.

    Oh and the zones got really stupid with mobs every 10 feet in some places, instead of the very realistically placed ones in the lower levels (most bears were around bear dens, most bandits around bandit camps, etc.).

    Sad to say, but when they went away from realistic quests and believable world design, I went away from them.

  • Posted: 7/01/08 10:04 PM
    General Discussion