The massive MMORPG collapse - MMORPG Center.com

http://www.mmorpg-center.com/the-mas...morpg-collapse

Just found this article entertaining, and wanted to share it here.

Wow, an article full of elitism, nose scrunching, blind WOW bashing, and baseless gaming industry fear mongering. I feel so much more intelligent after having read that.

Yeah, I was surprised the ydidn't take it as an oppertunity to bash FFXIV, it seems to be such a means to "look cool" in the media to be seen bully bashing this game.

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There were still a few small studios trying to ride the storm with small player bases, games like EVE Online, DAOC, Guild Wars and Warhammer Online (before they got ruined by EA in order to promote their new retarded but beautiful WoW clone, SWTOR)

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Much as the article reeks of troll, he/she makes a few good points such as this one.

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then revealed why (in his opinion) Warhammer 40K Online failed.

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Poor THQ, DMO is still years before being out and it's already failed... oh wait.

im surprised a full on wow bashing article made it to that site

and i hate to say it, but beyond the bashing itself of specific games, its SO DAMN TRUE


as far as 14 not being mentioned, its cuz they are bashing clone games, 14 didnt fall under that

I could guess the writer is from here. Is it you OP ;) ? XIV is different. Here gamers have given tips already long time how this should be built. So if you don't like the new product, you can blame you only, not the devs who listened you.

He has valid point, but the article is really poorly written.

WoW seriously destroyed the MMO market as we knew a few years ago, this is a fact.

Article is directly attacking WoW but honestly it is fairly true. The mmo genre is catering the lowest common denominator now to make a quick buck. The community is suffering, the game play is suffering , the longevity of the games are suffering, and the designs are getting worse as we progress in general.

I personally find it extremely sad people only consider a mmo a game where alot of ppl play at once. It shows how much the genre has degraded since the WoW revolution.

At Xatsh all games are targeting the lowest common denominator, the gaming business has becomes so expensive that to stay afloat and make profit you have to target the casual.

About the Article well its a pile of BS to be honest, just sounds like a bitter nostalgic UO/EO player.

I don't believe for a moment that WOW ruined the MMO market in the way you guys think it did. What WOW did to "ruin" the MMO market is to launch as an extremely polished game, and to rapidly expand and improve with top of the line quality. WOW's developers, designers and QA* were top of the industry people, and it was reflected in their work.

Every big budget MMO that came after WOW tried to appeal to a more hardcore audience, and an audience that sought a change from WOW. Every single one had massive hype built up around it and had hundreds of thousands of pre-orders or followers. And then the games released in an almost unplayable state with game-breaking bugs or lack of content, and the game fizzled. It had absolutely nothing to do with the game not being a clone of WOW or it being an easy mode game, and everything to do with the actual (low) quality of the goods that were promised.

You take a look at how WOW operated for the first few years of its life, and you see that they didn't try to hype anything. They never released features that had major bugs in them; they instead opted to delay some features until they were actually ready and usable (tip: Yoshi is doing the same thing). They placed a massive focus both on story telling and gameplay (and yes, WOW DID have game play), instead of focusing on just gameplay (Aion, RIFT, EVE) or just story (WH, AoC).

You can't blame WOW for "ruining" the MMO industry by being an extremely polished game.

(* The older WOW dev, designer and QA teams. The newer teams that are working on WOW are pretty awful, and it's reflected by the fact that WOW lost approx. 20% of their user base in the last year)

Ah I see, so when worthless entitled mouth-breathing scrubs can't get the attention they are looking for on a games official forums, they post their worthless drivel on their own website.

Well, at least those are much more easily avoided.

And by the way, FFXI had a steady population post WOW's launch for YEARS. Its population only dropped when the quality of its content also dropped (post level cap increase).

I think the problem with modern producers and would-be publishers of MMOs, is that they don't see world of warcraft for what it really is. They see something that they could replicate, but WoW is fundamentally just a fad; and, we will likely never see the remergence of another like it.

Unless producers realize this and start catering to their future and current audience, they'll likely never be successful.

I personally play MMORPGS in order to experience all the great things I loved about RPGS, story, strategy, and character development with friends.

I think he just nailed it.

It's not that WoW was a kiddy game designed for 9 year olds and up.

It's that WoW launched with an incredible budget, extreme polish, and rapidly updated and released content. And not just minor content, MASSIVE content. The size of their expansions is not matched by any other game. Their .1 updates bring as much content as some MMOs entire expansions. Hey look how little content FFXI has with each expansion (at launch day of the expansion, not end-life of the expansion). I mean CoP only released with a few chapters, a few new zones, no new jobs and virtually no new items. Think about that. (Not where it ended up 2 years after the expansion came out).


WoW didn't create the newbie problem. It responded to it. WoW, like most blizzard games, had so many players it didn't know what to do it. They outdid themselves, they had to rapidly create more servers to handle the unexpected influx of players.


As a result, they had 5m players of all different backgrounds. So, they tried to make the game open and enjoyable to everyone who wanted to play the game. Just like your First Person Shooters, WoW has difficulty settings. You've got your Normal Dungeons for everyone where even morons can complete them. You've got your Hard Mode dungeons for players who want basic strategies. You've got Normal Raids for people who want strategy and a bit more difficulty and risk/reward. Then you've got your Hard Mode raids, for people who want an extreme challenge - and most of them are very difficult.

It's not that WoW was easy, it's that WoW had a difficulty slider and made all difficulties produce acceptable reward tiers.

FFXI never did that. FFXI was an extreme basic set of gear at 75, and a hardcore badass set of gear for raiders. No middle ground. That's also how most MMOs were.

Look at Everquest I, virtually no casual gear for level 60 players, but plenty of incredible raid gear. WoW broke the curve by creating casual gear, roughly 20% weaker than raid gear, but allowing them to have fun.


WoW isn't easy, you're just playing on the wrong difficulty. Guild Wars lets you hit max level in 1 day and doesn't even have raids ..... Have you guys tried raiding in WoW on 24 person heroic difficulties? Some of those fights require a lot of attention and reaction. Just because casual players have content doesn't mean the overall game is easy.

Most of the "hard" mmos are considered hard just because they have no casual content - They have virtually nothing to do for casual players besides level up or some basic gameplay functions. Look at FFXI in TOAU. Assaults were an incredible grind. You'd spend an immense amount of time over many days to get one piece of gear. Nyzul Isle you'd spend weeks getting to floor 100, then you could farm gear. Gear was pretty rare, and there wasn't REALLY casual gear for max level players. All gear was designed for people with lots of play time, lots of hours, and no real life.

Look at Xatsh. He's spent many years of his life playing a video game. He may have gotten a relic in FFXI, and led a guild, but he spends more time in a fake world than the real world.

I miss the days when MMOs used to be sandbox games that focused on adventure and immersion, the journey to endgame. Then WoW came out and shifted the genre to focus on players with short attention spans that preferred twitch based gaming. Players that couldn't be bothered with adventuring in a game if it took any time away from their race to max level and needed a linear monotonous line of quests to get them there. Now there's nothing left for fans of the genre in its original form because most games are poorly developed or failed attempts to copy WoW's success.

Yeah that article was a rant, but those who dislike WoW have a reason to complain. There's nothing left for them to play and probably no hope of anything coming out in the future that isn't just another poor attempt at mimicking WoW's formula. You could dumb down any genre to appeal to people who originally had no interest in it and you'll see its fans get upset.

To be honest, MMORPG nowadays are all about profit. Rather than a so called "Deep Experience" like many developers claimed. Many MMORPG out there have their own potentials, that including create mission and quests and modes that are relevant to their Lore. But instead, they made it casual like "Go kill x amount of monsters." - "Search for this." - "Talk to this guy" and then turn in for a twat load amount of rewards for doing the same thing over and over again. To be honest, MMORPG Developers should stick with their own idea, rather than replicate of the same infamous game, and add something a little different to make it seems different, and then claim it's a "WoW Killer". To be honest, as soon they claimed it's a WoW Killer, we all know that the game content are based from WoW. It's like playing the same damn game over again.

Agree with everything Defmetal says, of course its falling on Defears in here.

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Originally Posted by Wolfie

I don't believe for a moment that WOW ruined the MMO market in the way you guys think it did. What WOW did to "ruin" the MMO market is to launch as an extremely polished game, and to rapidly expand and improve with top of the line quality. WOW's developers, designers and QA* were top of the industry people, and it was reflected in their work.

Every big budget MMO that came after WOW tried to appeal to a more hardcore audience, and an audience that sought a change from WOW. Every single one had massive hype built up around it and had hundreds of thousands of pre-orders or followers. And then the games released in an almost unplayable state with game-breaking bugs or lack of content, and the game fizzled. It had absolutely nothing to do with the game not being a clone of WOW or it being an easy mode game, and everything to do with the actual (low) quality of the goods that were promised.

You take a look at how WOW operated for the first few years of its life, and you see that they didn't try to hype anything. They never released features that had major bugs in them; they instead opted to delay some features until they were actually ready and usable (tip: Yoshi is doing the same thing). They placed a massive focus both on story telling and gameplay (and yes, WOW DID have game play), instead of focusing on just gameplay (Aion, RIFT, EVE) or just story (WH, AoC).

You can't blame WOW for "ruining" the MMO industry by being an extremely polished game.

(* The older WOW dev, designer and QA teams. The newer teams that are working on WOW are pretty awful, and it's reflected by the fact that WOW lost approx. 20% of their user base in the last year)

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Who are you and what is your job at Blizzard?

While the article does reak of troll and generally bashing WoW I would have to say that it had atleast damaged the MMO industry, before WoW we got a few good MMOs, now we get sub par MMOs coming out left right and centre from everyone trying to "become the next WoW" because if they do that it will make money.

WoW is like marmite, you either love it and nothing else will do, or you hate it and wouldnt touch it with a 50ft barge pole, there is no inbetween.

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Originally Posted by Evenstar

He has valid point, but the article is really poorly written.

WoW seriously destroyed the MMO market as we knew a few years ago, this is a fact.

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Yep, it truly did. People who never played MUDs or MMOs prior to WoW wouldn't feel this way, they'd feel "it made MMOs better."

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Originally Posted by Delsus

Who are you and what is your job at Blizzard?

While the article does reak of troll and generally bashing WoW I would have to say that it had atleast damaged the MMO industry, before WoW we got a few good MMOs, now we get sub par MMOs coming out left right and centre from everyone trying to "become the next WoW" because if they do that it will make money.

WoW is like marmite, you either love it and nothing else will do, or you hate it and wouldnt touch it with a 50ft barge pole, there is no inbetween.

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Street Fighter set the fighting game genre into motion. Do you blame Street Fighter when someone makes a bad fighting game? A lot of fighting games use Street Fighter's interface as a template.

It's all about quality. Don't blame WoW for simply being successful.

Hmm, but Street Fighter most didn't ever play and found pretty bad. Street Fighter II maybe, but what really set fighting games into motion was Mortal Kombat, Tekken and Marvel vs Capcom. Street Fighter reached a broader audience by being ported to consoles.

Dead or Alive and Soul Calibur were great fighting games too which you could easily say pushed it even further in terms of custimization (since prior to that, it was merely costume/color scheme swaps), but the thing with WoW is, WoW got popular but it's design pretty much ruined everything that made MMOs fun or great, then every other new developer directly copied that design, so yeah unlike blaming street fighter, you literally can blame WoW for what happened to the MMO market.

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Originally Posted by Delsus

Who are you and what is your job at Blizzard?

While the article does reak of troll and generally bashing WoW I would have to say that it had atleast damaged the MMO industry, before WoW we got a few good MMOs, now we get sub par MMOs coming out left right and centre from everyone trying to "become the next WoW" because if they do that it will make money.

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There's two things that WOW did to the MMO market: show people that a wall between players and developers is a bad thing, and that you can indeed receive a polished, high quality MMO with a highly responsive dev team. It set the bar for what it means to have good game development in the MMO industry.

It didn't spawn "WOW clones"; that's just a stupid label stupid people give to a game after those same stupid people give a game the stupid "WOW killer" label to a game that is completely unlike WOW in almost every way.

Every* other MMO marketed itself to a different crowd and only "copied" a few things from WOW, like a control scheme, or UI (which were themselves copied from previous MMOs), or features that had already become standards in the MMO market before WOW (mailbox, AH, instanced content). As someone that actually played some of these failed MMOs and paid attention to their marketing strategy, they play nothing like WOW and were never meant to one-up WOW in what it does.

Those MMOs failed because the teams behind the projects were terrible. Patches that are always delayed, patches that barely bring content, no balance changes, gamebreaking bugs and lag that doesn't get fixed for over 3 months, bizarre, unexplained mechanics, poor customer support, and completely unresponsive development teams that never reshuffled their priorities to fix the damn game and deliver what was promised.

* The only game that ever marketed itself as "the next WOW", or even tried to appeal to the same crowd, was RIFT. It purposely copied almost everything from WOW, with more polish and cooler graphics, to appeal to the WOW burnouts. And it partially succeeded, because the teams working behind the project aren't terrible, and they actually spend time listening to players, polishing old content, adding new content in a timely manner, and have good support.

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WoW is like marmite, you either love it and nothing else will do, or you hate it and wouldnt touch it with a 50ft barge pole, there is no inbetween.

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False dichotomy. I don't have to be in bed with WOW to appreciate what it does well, and just because I don't play anymore doesn't mean that I hate it.

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Originally Posted by Elexia

Hmm, but Street Fighter most didn't ever play and found pretty bad. Street Fighter II maybe, but what really set fighting games into motion was Mortal Kombat, Tekken and Marvel vs Capcom. Street Fighter reached a broader audience by being ported to consoles.

Dead or Alive and Soul Calibur were great fighting games too which you could easily say pushed it even further in terms of custimization (since prior to that, it was merely costume/color scheme swaps), but the thing with WoW is, WoW got popular but it's design pretty much ruined everything that made MMOs fun or great, then every other new developer directly copied that design, so yeah unlike blaming street fighter, you literally can blame WoW for what happened to the MMO market.

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That isn't the point I am making. SF2's success rubbed into other fighting games. Difference is that they made their own unique approach to it. The point is, don't blame WoW for simply being successful.

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Originally Posted by Wolfie

What WOW did to "ruin" the MMO market is to launch as an extremely polished game

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This is where blizard has alot of people fooled. WoW was not even remotely "polished" upon release.

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Originally Posted by Defmetal

.It's that WoW launched with an incredible budget, extreme polish.

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Now they did have a good budget, and update alot fo the time, but there original release was a cluster ****, the polished release is a myth.

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Originally Posted by Elexia

Yep, it truly did. People who never played MUDs or MMOs prior to WoW wouldn't feel this way, they'd feel "it made MMOs better."

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OMG MUDs, how I miss hose. Man those were the days.

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Originally Posted by Velhart

Street Fighter set the fighting game genre into motion.

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thats a heck of a subjective opinion. Most people would claim Double Double Dragon did it. Others would say Mortal combat broke down walls.

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Originally Posted by Velhart

That isn't the point I am making. SF2's success rubbed into other fighting games. Difference is that they made their own unique approach to it. The point is, don't blame WoW for simply being successful.

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No, I got your point, hence my point of throwing in DoA, MK, MvC and SC (all unique in their own way and equally as popular), hating on success isn't really the issue at hand though it seems a lot of people think it is.

You can't blame WoW for being successful, you can blame it for what it spawned though. Any unique or new MMO that isn't a WoW clone or can't be picked up and played in the same way as WoW was, is doomed merely because of that fact. No matter how good the MMO is, "This ain't WoW!" gets it killed.

It's become very hard for new MMOs to stand on their own two feet, which is why Guild Wars 2 for example has only 1 shining grace: The fact it's not following the typical Buy-to-Win, Pay-2-Play or F2PCashShop models, much like Tera's only saving grace was it's battle system and even that novelty has worn off on almost everyone who played it due to lack of content. Rift only got popular because what did it do differently from WoW, realistically? Almost nothing, and that's why it succeeded.

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Originally Posted by Wolfie

There's two things that WOW did to the MMO market: show people that a wall between players and developers is a bad thing, and that you can indeed receive a polished, high quality MMO with a highly responsive dev team. It set the bar for what it means to have good game development in the MMO industry.

It didn't spawn "WOW clones"; that's just a stupid label stupid people give to a game after those same stupid people give a game the stupid "WOW killer" label to a game that is completely unlike WOW in almost every way.

Every* other MMO marketed itself to a different crowd and only "copied" a few things from WOW, like a control scheme, or UI (which were themselves copied from previous MMOs), or features that had already become standards in the MMO market before WOW (mailbox, AH, instanced content). As someone that actually played some of these failed MMOs and paid attention to their marketing strategy, they play nothing like WOW and were never meant to one-up WOW in what it does.

Those MMOs failed because the teams behind the projects were terrible. Patches that are always delayed, patches that barely bring content, no balance changes, gamebreaking bugs and lag that doesn't get fixed for over 3 months, bizarre, unexplained mechanics, poor customer support, and completely unresponsive development teams that never reshuffled their priorities to fix the damn game and deliver what was promised.

* The only game that ever marketed itself as "the next WOW", or even tried to appeal to the same crowd, was RIFT. It purposely copied almost everything from WOW, with more polish and cooler graphics, to appeal to the WOW burnouts. And it partially succeeded, because the teams working behind the project aren't terrible, and they actually spend time listening to players, polishing old content, adding new content in a timely manner, and have good support.



False dichotomy. I don't have to be in bed with WOW to appreciate what it does well, and just because I don't play anymore doesn't mean that I hate it.

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Lol you obviously havent seen posts on here, <WoW fanboy> WoW did this, that and the other which means FFXIV should. If SE listened to the WoW fanboys this would be a WoW clone already.

Then there is the other side "We are releasing a quest finder" "OMG its becoming more WoW-like every patch" you very rarely see a middle ground that says "well WoW did this, that and the other right and I think they could work well in FFXIV, whereas x, y, z didnt work and I think they would ruin the game", then list other MMOs pros and cons.

I have talked to WoW players and the ones I have talked to pretty much say WoW is the best MMO and they would never play anything different.

As for me I would rather die than play WoW, and you never told me what position you hold at blizzard :p

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Originally Posted by Coglin

This is where blizard has alot of people fooled. WoW was not even remotely "polished" upon release.

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It was more polished than everything that came before it, and what wasn't polished, they fixed in extremely short order. The longest running problem WOW had from release was server instability and queues from too many players. Queues were fixed in about 1 month (partially because of trial ending, partially because new servers); and the rest of the performance issues were fixed within 3 months.

Look at their update history. They fixed outstanding, game-breaking issues while the game was still in its trial period, and released a content patch a little over a month after release.

http://www.wowwiki.com/Patches/1.x

This list also doesn't include hot-fixes, which Blizzard made liberal use of to fix critical bugs within a few hours of discovery.

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Originally Posted by Wolfie

It was more polished than everything that came before it

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Still had tons of issues, still had a lack of content, still was very vanilla just like every MMO before it at launch. It was truly no different.

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thats a heck of a subjective opinion. Most people would claim Double Double Dragon did it. Others would say Mortal combat broke down walls.

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Going to have to ask you read more carefully. This isn't based on opinions of the game, I am speaking in technical terms. SF2 set the template (multiplayer head to head fights, unintended combo system, wide cast of characters, basic health bar with the timer in the middle). The success of it's concepts is what I am referring to. Mortal Kombat made the genre bigger yes, but most fighting games base itself off concepts that SF created.

Perhaps it wasn't a great analogy, since games like Ultima Online would compare to my analogy much better.

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Originally Posted by Elexia

No, I got your point, hence my point of throwing in DoA, MK, MvC and SC (all unique in their own way and equally as popular), hating on success isn't really the issue at hand though it seems a lot of people think it is.

You can't blame WoW for being successful, you can blame it for what it spawned though. Any unique or new MMO that isn't a WoW clone or can't be picked up and played in the same way as WoW was, is doomed merely because of that fact. No matter how good the MMO is, "This ain't WoW!" gets it killed.

It's become very hard for new MMOs to stand on their own two feet, which is why Guild Wars 2 for example has only 1 shining grace: The fact it's not following the typical Buy-to-Win, Pay-2-Play or F2PCashShop models, much like Tera's only saving grace was it's battle system and even that novelty has worn off on almost everyone who played it due to lack of content. Rift only got popular because what did it do differently from WoW, realistically? Almost nothing, and that's why it succeeded.

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Then blame other companies for not deciding to be creative. Is Blizzard coming out and saying "Only way you will get anywhere is by copying us."? No, even they have said others won't succeed over them unless they create their own unique game.

I do seen your point to an extent, but you have to blame the gaming community on that one.

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Originally Posted by Elexia

Still had tons of issues, still had a lack of content, still was very vanilla just like every MMO before it at launch. It was truly no different.

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I hope you're ****ing joking, because WOW released with approximately two dozen instances (and these weren't the 20-minute dungeons you know now, they were 1-4 hours long), three of which were raid instances (two 10 man, one 40 man), fleshed out continents and zones, hundreds of quests and impressive quest chains.

Every major flaw that it had, was fixed with hotfixes and patches in its trial period.

no offense to all that think that thread was garbage but i agree with 100% of it. i use the phrase "MMO Planned Obsolescence" when i think modern mmo now. they are garbage u can't play for more then the free month, maybe little more b4 you need to just toss it in the trash. at this point i almost don't want to play mmo's cause i haven't been able to find a mmo i can play for over 6months and still enjoy playing.

simply put making everything for "the masses" doesn't work, don't care if the money is there or not. the same like he said for movies and music. they try to squeeze every type of personality into a tv shows, if everyone and there mothers aren't watching it, ...bam canceled. look at stargate universe, and tera nova. they trying to appealed to more then the scify people by adding crap to the show and then everyone leaves. they dont get "the numbers" they need to keep it. hell my mom watches syfy channel while i haven't used that channel in years. lol.

games, movies, music ...they don't care, they will keep pushing garbage till they get there numbers. it's not like they don't make money either way. ....is simple to me, create games for all types not just masses. or make separate dang servers. but you know why not separate? cause the casual servers will be empty either way in few months. those left playing there that are casual will then run to the full ones and complain again they not getting everything. and the big reason, they make garbage mmo's ...spend less resourses on the parts of game that matter and pump it will crap for casual masses to play. theres no reason they can't go all out for the non masses first then dumb it down and have 2 servers.. no reason.

as for wow and blizzard my thoughts are this, diablo 3 gonna be a game everyone in game can sell gold and items right inside the game, why i mention this? well if they do this don't they need carrot on stick game play again like old mmo's? have items with hugely low drop rates? maybe hard ass content to get threw to do? other wise they won't make money on this idea right? ... even tera is adding crono skulls witch is just an item u can buy in game with the game currency from people in game and it gives u game time. really bad i think to add to games but my thoughts are this, if they do well, witch i think d3 will do very well, the next bliz mmo after wow might have this same thing to it? ...maybe all mmo's will start to copy it again? then maybe we can finally get back to mmo's like they used to be. but this is a lol, thought in my head of possibility, i don't like rmt or the thought of it rampid in mmo's but ...if it gets me back my mmo's then oh well. right now mmo's just suck and i can't stand the thought that there will never be another mmo like ffxi again cause of wallets....and mainstream mindsets.

Oh look, a bittervet hipster wrote a story about how the "retards" ruined his favorite genre. All those "dumb lazy" people who wanted to try out MMO's screwed everything up. Efff Blizzard for making this genre popular and bringing in the lowest of the low. These people who want games where casuals can progress are so dumb. They ruined everything.

Meanwhile, this same person just wiped his entire raid in WoW because staying out of the bad shit is too deep of a concept to understand.

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Originally Posted by Delsus

I have talked to WoW players and the ones I have talked to pretty much say WoW is the best MMO and they would never play anything different.

As for me I would rather die than play WoW, and you never told me what position you hold at blizzard :p

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You've met maybe like 20 people that you've had that kind of discussion with, and you bring your own prejudices about what it means to be an MMO player. You make yourself sound more like a religious fanatic than a person playing a video game.

I played WOW for three years and I haven't touched it in three years, because I dislike the new development team. That doesn't stop me from acknowledging what WOW did well early on, and it also lets me see that WOW's in some pretty sharp decline right now because of a crappy dev team.

EDIT: Totally going to stop replying to you in this topic, because I feel it's like arguing with a rock.

Look simply put, WoW is successful because it has content for all players, of all backgrounds, and each group is treated equally to new content.

All casual players get the same amount of new things to do as raiders.

That keeps every group of the population happy. Most MMOs, especially a lot of WoW clones, try to cater to one group. Rift tried to cater to the PVPers and Raiders and ignore casuals. WoW tried to cater to PVPers. Everquest II tried to cater to Raiders. When I tried WoW I never felt there wasn't anything to do, no matter how I felt like playing. If I wanted to Solo, there was an endless amount of solo content. Or group content, raid content, or even just farming rare mobs and achievements.

WoW is a game for all groups, and that's why it has more players. FFXI was a asian style grind fest akin to Korean MMOs. It was fun, most of us enjoyed it, but that's a very small population.

WoW clone games try to pick apart the thing they like best about WoW, and then try to do it better. "WoW was good except this part..." so they focus 10fold on that part and neglect the other factors. We already have a perfect World of Warcraft, we don't need anymore "I can do what WoW does but better". SWTOR for example, follows WoWs basic structure, but once you get past level 10 it really doesn't feel like WoW. It took the good ideas of "content for all", and it is a similar style game setup, but by making it storyline oriented MMO drew in a new crowd, rather than try to expand an existing market.

I think SWTOR cuts into FFXI/FFXIVs market more than WoW does, because FFXI was the Go-To MMO for storyline lovers. And SWTOR, lets face it, is infinitely better at this than SE is. They have a fantastic budget and big-name voice actors handling every cutscene and NPC interaction. I mean, SOLID SNAKE IS YOUR MAIN CHARACTER (if you're a jedi). Nathan Drake (uncharted) is your main character if you're a consular. That's cool!

Considering that the majority of complaints about FFXIV over the last year and a half consisted mostly about the game not being more like WoW, (or a direct clone of FFXI) I would say the author's argument is quite valid. It seems that people immediately criticize a new MMO as bad if it isn't a WoW clone, but they will still label the game as bad regardless, because it is a WoW clone. This mindset seems to have spread to game critics as well, valididating the author's other argument: that the MMO market has gone from quality games for mature gamers, to bad-quality games made with idiots in mind.

swtor sucks, it's only fun for the first toon u level, even then watchign threw all the voice over was tedious and i skiped threw it all. it's like forcign you to read the boxes in wow. no thanks. only diff is your looking at a npc model talking it..lol

you get geared up and then nothing to do, guilds are empty other then during raid times. pvp is horrible. the warzones are ok till the 100th million time entering huttball, and watching one side feed wins to the other since everyone on both factions play against each others. story is important, but no way in hell does it have a story better then ffxi and ffxiv. the opening cinematic was great other then that...meh. it's just a run of a mil crapfest. ffxi story telling was top notch, no other mmo can touch it.

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Originally Posted by Vanguard319

Considering that the majority of complaints about FFXIV over the last year and a half consisted mostly about the game not being more like WoW, (or a direct clone of FFXI) I would say the author's argument is quite valid. It seems that people immediately criticize a new MMO as bad if it isn't a WoW clone, but they will still label the game as bad regardless, because it is a WoW clone. This mindset seems to have spread to game critics as well, valididating the author's other argument: that the MMO market has gone from quality games for mature gamers, to bad-quality games made with idiots in mind.

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I'm sorry, I didn't know "lag free interface", "intuitive gameplay", "content other than grinding", and "stable economy" made a game a WOW clone. Silly me, let me go back on everything I said.

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Originally Posted by Wolfie

You've met maybe like 20 people that you've had that kind of discussion with, and you bring your own prejudices about what it means to be an MMO player. You make yourself sound more like a religious fanatic than a person playing a video game.

I played WOW for three years and I haven't touched it in three years, because I dislike the new development team. That doesn't stop me from acknowledging what WOW did well early on, and it also lets me see that WOW's in some pretty sharp decline right now because of a crappy dev team.

EDIT: Totally going to stop replying to you in this topic, because I feel it's like arguing with a rock.

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O.o you know me irl? you know I have talked to 20 people with that view STALKER!!!

Seriously, you really havent seen both sides of the argument, you have said one thing against WoW and that is WHAAAA I hate the new dev team!!!

Apart from that you are just blindly saying all good things about the game, either like a Blizzard spy or a blind fanboy and you talk about how polished WoW is, well it doesnt take long to add content based on those painful graphics, and any bugs can be squashed in no time on a turn of the century (few years later, but close enough) game, lets look at some examples shall we, i like examples.

STO: a decent MMO, battle is fun, cool storylines, and a decent amount of content and based on one of the biggest franchises there has ever been, now F2P if I had the money I would pay a subscription, but the big thing is its nothing like WoW

DCUO: so much fun, about the best battle system I have seen brilliant storylines, main downside is once you are lvl 30 its the same old raids and PvP which could have contributed to its move to F2P, but its again nothing like WoW.

Champions online: alot of fun, masses of content, nice battle system, but again nothing like WoW and its F2P

Rift: never played it but a blatent WoW clone and moderate success.

Notice a pattern emerging, with WoW fanboys its "make it WoW or its a sucky failure" /farewell prove me wrong, or have I made you cry yourself into a coma after you realise the truth about your precious WoW.

WoW fanboys = Golum "Its mine, my only. My precious"