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Mustawd

Guest
1) By trying a new MMO, you're not losing anything in your old one.
If you say this, you clearly aren't familiar with how the modern MMO works. Failure to show up for the grind = loss.

Can you explain this? I don't get it.
 

abija

Prophet
Joined
May 21, 2011
Messages
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Nothing to get, he probably just imagines every day for a mmo player is 18h grinds.

Genre is in decline because it's a big investment and too many big ones failed.
 
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J1M

Arcane
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Instead of going in circles about how MMOs are garbage, let's take this topic in a slightly different direction.

"Does Blizzard entering a genre lead to its demise?"

-Hack and slash
-RTS
-MMO
-MOBA?
 

Norfleet

Moderator
Joined
Jun 3, 2005
Messages
12,250
Can you explain this? I don't get it.
Most such games around have mechanics that punish you for failure to appear. Eventually you'll have racked up so many fines that you may as well just not bother coming back at all. Since switching to a different game would quickly accrue these penalties, there is a significant barrier to doing so.

"Does Blizzard entering a genre lead to its demise?"

-Hack and slash
-RTS
-MMO
-MOBA?
No. The Decline is inevitable and inexorable. Entropy must always increase. Blizzard's involvement merely hastens the process, as does the involvement of anyone else, because as more people attempt to draw from the system, the Decline can only accelerate. Companies never add to the system, because this would be unprofitable, they must naturally draw from it. Since the only entrants into the system, which must naturally Decline over time in accordance with the Second Law, are those who withdraw energy from the system to benefit themselves, Blizzard is no different from any other company.
 

abija

Prophet
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Instead of going in circles about how MMOs are garbage, let's take this topic in a slightly different direction.

"Does Blizzard entering a genre lead to its demise?"

-Hack and slash
-RTS
-MMO
-MOBA?

- if by h&s you mean diablo clones, genre is at an all time high.
- RTS "died" because it wasn't ever popular enough to satisfy the suits looking for action games revenues, nothing to do with Blizzard. Kinda like RPG except you can't really pull a bethesda and morph a RTS into a broshooter.
- doubt they'll have any significant influence in the MOBA scene
 

Leshy

Educated
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- RTS "died" because it wasn't ever popular enough to satisfy the suits looking for action games revenues, nothing to do with Blizzard.

If anyone it was EA who killed RTS. Remember the abomination that was Command and Conquer 4? And the fiasco of Command & Conquer: Generals 2?
Makes me want to cry...
 

Declinator

Arbiter
Joined
Apr 1, 2013
Messages
542
- RTS "died" because it wasn't ever popular enough to satisfy the suits looking for action games revenues, nothing to do with Blizzard.

If anyone it was EA who killed RTS. Remember the abomination that was Command and Conquer 4? And the fiasco of Command & Conquer: Generals 2?
Makes me want to cry...

RTS was already buried long before. They just put some bells and whistles on the carcass and dumped it on the unsuspecting audience. I'd say 2007 was the last gasp of a dying breed with Supreme Commander and C&C 3.
 
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Messages
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There are projects like Crowfall and Camelot Unchained, but they are far from finish. And there is Albion Online but im afraid that developers aimed for relatively small audience and didnt count the fact that there is a huge group of players waiting for the next "big one".
There're a couple promising up and coming MMORPGs. Of course "promising" depends on what you like or want in an MMORPG:
http://chroniclesofelyria.com/
http://gloriavictisgame.com/application/index/faq

Most of the others I can think of are UO-style modern/niche sandboxes. Those're what I like. I think open PvP is unnecessarily common in them which discourages a lot of people from trying them. I like hte PvP mostly though. Eve Online is the best example of how to get a middle ground, with large safe areas and anti-griefing mechanics, but I think the interest in it is exhausted. There just aren't enough players who want even the minutest amount of open-PvP. What I think most players really want is battlegrounds-style instanced PvP which is completely optional and set aside from the main game.

Some examples of UO-style modern/niche sandboxes:
http://lifeisfeudal.com/game-info
http://www.playwildterra.com/#aboutScreen (old style grpahics)
https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/
http://planetexplorers.pathea.net/about/
http://www.reignofkings.net/
https://www.blackdesertonline.com/
http://divergence-online.wix.com/divergence-online
http://www.playark.com/

Those're all still beta or not fully released yet.

There're ungodly numbrs of mature sandbox MMO's presently. ONE (only one) example:
(this is a hybrid sandbox without all the building--reminds me of the older Ryzom MMO)
http://www.perpetuum-online.com/
 
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Drakron

Arcane
Joined
May 19, 2005
Messages
6,326
Most such games around have mechanics that punish you for failure to appear. Eventually you'll have racked up so many fines that you may as well just not bother coming back at all. Since switching to a different game would quickly accrue these penalties, there is a significant barrier to doing so.

Well this isnt new, subscription was around the sunk cost fallacy, the whole "pay for the servers" been a whole lot of BS they fed to idiots even if it might been somewhat true back in the days following the dotcom bubble burst.

The penalty on modern MMOs is they got their chain wanked by people from marketing that are of course, idiots that place too much importance on data without understanding said data so today MMOs place too much importance in events that exist solely for metrics and since its a stick there must be a carrot, failure to appear means you dont get the carrot ... its not as much as you losing anything but rather you dont get anything either.

As a example lets pick Cryptic, they have a Winter Event for both STO and Neverwinter so if you play both you are basically fucked into grind in both since STO offers a end game tier ship (that you need) as Neverwinter offers a companion and mount that are also somewhat required.

MMOs are not something they are designing so you can pick and drop, in the subscription days the incentive was just on keep paying as they would not care about you actually log-in much but today even subscription based MMO are requiring log-in participation for metrics because marketing.
 

Xor

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Codex 2014 PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Divinity: Original Sin Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Divinity: Original Sin 2
Instead of going in circles about how MMOs are garbage, let's take this topic in a slightly different direction.

"Does Blizzard entering a genre lead to its demise?"

-Hack and slash
-RTS
-MMO
-MOBA?
The hack and slash genre is doing fine, it's just lost all trappings of its RPG roots.
The RTS genre probably died out due to the decline of PC gaming in the early 2000s. Those games don't work on consoles, so companies stopped making them.
I'll give you MMOs - WoW was impossible to topple directly so companies basically created the F2P model so they wouldn't have to compete with it, and that lead to the situation we have today.
MOBAs are all shit anyway so hopefully Blizzard does destroy them.
 

J1M

Arcane
Joined
May 14, 2008
Messages
14,616
Instead of going in circles about how MMOs are garbage, let's take this topic in a slightly different direction.

"Does Blizzard entering a genre lead to its demise?"

-Hack and slash
-RTS
-MMO
-MOBA?

- if by h&s you mean diablo clones, genre is at an all time high.
- RTS "died" because it wasn't ever popular enough to satisfy the suits looking for action games revenues, nothing to do with Blizzard. Kinda like RPG except you can't really pull a bethesda and morph a RTS into a broshooter.
- doubt they'll have any significant influence in the MOBA scene
Halo was an RTS first. :smug:
 

Drakron

Arcane
Joined
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Messages
6,326
I'll give you MMOs - WoW was impossible to topple directly so companies basically created the F2P model so they wouldn't have to compete with it, and that lead to the situation we have today.

Heh, no.

People grossly overstate WoW popularity because they only look at Blizzard marketing, what happened with WoW was simply what happens with all popular games ... it gets copied, its simply put as a example because WoW boosting of large numbers and it being around the same time MMO became a fad made turned western MMOs into copying WoW usually failing to understand WoW was evolutionary and not revolutionary, their failures was causes by the same mentality when it comes to design copycat, same what happened with HALO that turned every fucking FPS into "can only hold two weapons" that come after it.

F2P is a very different beast since its origins are older, the reason why it became prevalent is rather simple, Korea allowed to buy not only subscriptions but also playing time (as in hours logged in) because a large segment played from Internet Cafes, it adopted F2P because it was a natural evolution toward on how MMOs are played in Korea, it have little to do with WoW outside WoW having pretty much killed western MMO development that would traditionally follow a subscription model.

If you want to say WoW killed the western MMO market when it was at the height of its popularity in the west you would be right but thats it, WoW been behind Lineage for quite some time in Korea.
 

Hobo Elf

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Platypus Planet
WoW didn't kill anything, it simply set the standards for what an MMO should play and feel like. Every other MMO felt clunky and antiquated compared to the smoothness of WoW. The ones who killed the genre were the hacks who wanted a piece of the MMO pie ones to caught a wiff of the money Blizzard was printing and instead of making an MMO to fill out some niche they just made straight up WoW clones. They oversaturated the market.
 

Ebonsword

Arcane
Joined
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Messages
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WoW didn't kill anything, it simply set the standards for what an MMO should play and feel like. Every other MMO felt clunky and antiquated compared to the smoothness of WoW.

Eh, I never understood praising WoW as some great game based on its mechanics. I thought that City of Heroes was for more interesting (and had way better combat).

Particularly, I liked how most of the content in CoH was instanced. It was so immersion breaking in WoW to have to wait in line behind five other people for some monster to spawn so you could kill it for a quest.
 

Metro

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WoW was the most accessible MMO. And it made itself more and more accessible (arguably to the detriment to its quality) as time went on. Even it is on its downswing and will probably never top more than four or five million subs again.
 

J1M

Arcane
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Messages
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The gameplay in WoW is also more responsive than that of other MMOs that were available at the time.
 

Scruffy

Ex-janitor
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Codex 2012 Torment: Tides of Numenera Codex USB, 2014
Some of my fondest gaming memories are from mmogs, starting from UO to the early days of Wow. However, my feeling is that dumbing down the game to make it accessible to kids eventually turns it unappealing to the kind of community that makes the game itself entertaining. In my UO days, pking was the fun part. Early wow really wanted the world pvp stuff to happen. That, to me, is what makes a game fun, not endlessly grinding for another piece of equipment. But keeping you grinding for the piece of equipment is what keeps you there to pay the subscription.

Free to play... I'm still not sure about it. But my opinion is that the upcoming VR mass accessibility will revive the genre big time. However, I'm thinking more of DayZ kind of games, where immersion is fundamental. Grinding purples in VR doesn't really make much for it. Howeve, space-sims and pvp-rich games should see a resurgence with VR, so my hopes are up for the genre.
 
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This is one of those questions that gets asked every few months, and the answer has been the same for a while now. Theme-park MMORPG design led to enormous profits for EQ then WoW, and every major mmorpg since has aimed at the same. But they keep failing, because there's no reason for people to abandon the game that they've already sunk a long-term 2nd career (that they donm't get paid for) into.

These games just don't capture the imagination like the Ultima Online style world sims did - the only thing driving them is to be the 'next WoW', and once it became clear that there was serious structural difficulties in doing that, the commercial interest evaporated. At the same time, world sim mmorpgs just don't get the kind of numbers needed to appeal commercially, or to get critical mass for a major game. People learnt that mmorpgs are also not a game you can make on the cheap - indie attempts end up like Darklands, with an awesome set of aims and solid design, but without the technical capability or the resources to implement it. After enough AAA publishers hit a wall trying to be the 'next WoW', and enough indie attempts at recreating UO petered out as well-intentioned messes, it was hard for anyone to keep getting enthused about mmorpg vapourware talk.

I suspect as well that there's a genuine unease about mmorpgs these days as well. Too many stories of gambling-like addictions, combined with the introduction of 'real money' ingame purchases making these games a fraction of a step away from being glorified pokies, and a decent chunk of the gaming market has had a period of near-addiction that they've weaned themselves off. I've never come across any other computer game genre where such a significant chunk of former players look back upon it as an overall negative experience - even where people spend way too much time playing, say competitive FPS, they don't seem to so frequently come away from it saying 'holy crap, how much of my life did I waste on that thing?'.
 

Mangoose

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WoW didn't kill anything, it simply set the standards for what an MMO should play and feel like. Every other MMO felt clunky and antiquated compared to the smoothness of WoW.

Eh, I never understood praising WoW as some great game based on its mechanics. I thought that City of Heroes was for more interesting (and had way better combat).

Particularly, I liked how most of the content in CoH was instanced. It was so immersion breaking in WoW to have to wait in line behind five other people for some monster to spawn so you could kill it for a quest.
That's easy to say when most of the instanced content consisted of the same instance.
 

Vaarna_Aarne

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I suspect as well that there's a genuine unease about mmorpgs these days as well. Too many stories of gambling-like addictions, combined with the introduction of 'real money' ingame purchases making these games a fraction of a step away from being glorified pokies, and a decent chunk of the gaming market has had a period of near-addiction that they've weaned themselves off. I've never come across any other computer game genre where such a significant chunk of former players look back upon it as an overall negative experience - even where people spend way too much time playing, say competitive FPS, they don't seem to so frequently come away from it saying 'holy crap, how much of my life did I waste on that thing?'.
Digital crack cocaine.

Though personally I'd say even that has no shit on the ultimate non-pharma cocaine substitute: Magic.
 

Mangoose

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Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity
I suspect as well that there's a genuine unease about mmorpgs these days as well. Too many stories of gambling-like addictions, combined with the introduction of 'real money' ingame purchases making these games a fraction of a step away from being glorified pokies, and a decent chunk of the gaming market has had a period of near-addiction that they've weaned themselves off. I've never come across any other computer game genre where such a significant chunk of former players look back upon it as an overall negative experience - even where people spend way too much time playing, say competitive FPS, they don't seem to so frequently come away from it saying 'holy crap, how much of my life did I waste on that thing?'.
Digital crack cocaine.

Though personally I'd say even that has no shit on the ultimate non-pharma cocaine substitute: Magic.
Well, there's one big difference:

MMO combat (these days) is tedious and repetitive. I am always in shock at people who think that figuring out a rotation is hard. Like, c'mon. There's almost no room for creativity or improvisation.

Even raids (these days) are just about copying an existing strategy, copying what items and builds you should have (and farming them). And during the raid the goal is simply not fucking up.

Incidentally the most interesting raids were when my small guild was underpowered and we would have to try crazy things after every wipe. But I will never play a theme park MMO again because the main priority is finding a guild with fun people who are willing to troll each other, but were also serious/smart enough to try hard during dungeons/raids. And MMOs that are leaned toward soloing I don't even consider MMOs (Like Neverwinter Online.. I played it because I liked the mechanics and so it was like a D&D and crappier version of Diablo 2).

Only thing I'd go for right now are PVP (RvR) focused MMOs that don't waste their time on single-player content.

Also I don't think people even play Magic at my local game shop. Their preferred TCG is Legend of the Five Rings. And as for tabletop, our main game was Infinity. :monocle:
 

J1M

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When the developers clamp down on creative solutions with things like enrage timers, mob leashes, 'correct' rotations, immunity to all utility and crowd control, etc. that's what happens.

It's just not possible to have 40+ differentiated roles in a raid. WoW would have been better off with a blog post stating that not all talent options are valid for raiding and not all talent options are competitive for pvp.

The real irony with them caving into complaints and making retribution paladins a viable raid spec is that they've never caved to the bigger ask, making everyone viable in 1v1 pvp. An odd place to draw a line in the sand for principles.
 

Lyric Suite

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Eh, I never understood praising WoW as some great game based on its mechanics. I thought that City of Heroes was for more interesting (and had way better combat).

Yeah well no, WoW was better.

Personally, i have a different theory about why MMOs are shit. WoW set the bar very high, then Blizzard systematically went on to dump down their own game and pull it in the wrong direction. When other companies started to copy WoW, they didn't try to recreate the same formula used in the vanilla experience, but actually tried to copy all the streamlining Blizzard was adding with their expansions, which is the part about WoW that nobody likes. What everybody loved was the vanilla experience, despite all the rough edges and the obviously unfinished content.
 

Lyric Suite

Converting to Islam
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It's just not possible to have 40+ differentiated roles in a raid. WoW would have been better off with a blog post stating that not all talent options are valid for raiding and not all talent options are competitive for pvp.

You could just roll a new character just for PvP or grind for the gold for the respect if you wanted to change style. It was not the end of the world either way.
 

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