Is this game slowly dying?

[Lux_Rayna]

People are getting bored, plain and simple.

People have short attention spans and a lot of choices. Its pretty normal in today's MMO market for ppl to play multiple games. As a result, activity always declines sharply in the maturation phase of a patch. This isn't 2001 when ppl lived their lives in MMO games. This is 2014 where MMO's are more like going to Disney Land than entering a virtual reality. I can't stress this enough. What you see is not a dying game, but decreased activity until the next batch of "rides" come out. That's how MMO's are nowadays, and that is how they will be until the industry is revolutionized again.

[Velox]

and that is how they will be until the industry is revolutionized again.

This is sadly true. With the current system, it will be a very long time until the MMO industry has something to make itself "fresh" again. My guess the only real outlook would be to invest in VR and create a fully interactive VRMMO. Of course, with today's technology standards, that would be incredibly costly and time consuming. I'm sure we will be at that point one day if MMO gaming doesn't die out before we get there, but for now we just have to deal with stagnation.

[Meier]

People have short attention spans and a lot of choices. Its pretty normal in today's MMO market for ppl to play multiple games. As a result, activity always declines sharply in the maturation phase of a patch. This isn't 2001 when ppl lived their lives in MMO games. This is 2014 where MMO's are more like going to Disney Land than entering a virtual reality. I can't stress this enough. What you see is not a dying game, but decreased activity until the next batch of "rides" come out. That's how MMO's are nowadays, and that is how they will be until the industry is revolutionized again.

There is truth to this statement, yes. However, I can't help but wonder..1.X did not feel like this, at all. Everyone who played, played everyday and didn't get bored. We always had stuff to do, we actually had something of horizontal progression done right. We kept coming back for the social aspect of it, and there was always something to be working towards in game.

[Fornix]

People have short attention spans and a lot of choices. Its pretty normal in today's MMO market for ppl to play multiple games. As a result, activity always declines sharply in the maturation phase of a patch. This isn't 2001 when ppl lived their lives in MMO games. This is 2014 where MMO's are more like going to Disney Land than entering a virtual reality. I can't stress this enough.

You mention "people" as if the behavior can be generalized to all players. Not certain whether that was intentional or not. However, I don't think all too much has changed for MMO players from back in the day compared to those now. What has changed though is the number of surrounding players. Back in the day popular MMO's had several tens of thousands of western players. A few dipped into the hundred thousands. None really surpassed a million of western players. Games such as Lineage, Legend of Mir, etc. were massive. However had most of their playerbase isolated in the east.



Those tens of thousands per game were pretty active, played games such as this with a major time investment. 40+ hours per week was more of a standard than rare occasion. Did this really change? Did these players all suddenly start playing a single MMO less? If I look at myself and players I played with back then, for a big portion, it didn't.

What has changed though is the number of more casual players which stepped in over the recent years. Hopping from game to game, and coming in with the waves of content.

What you see is not a dying game, but decreased activity until the next batch of "rides" come out. That's how MMO's are nowadays, and that is how they will be until the industry is revolutionized again.

I therefore also don't think a change in the industry's approach is really going to change anything in that. As it is unlikely that those players would ever fully devote themselves to a single title. And creating content at a pace faster than they can clear it, without it being a tedious grind, is impossible till the date game development is no longer done by humans but replaced by computers. And that is something which is still going to be years away.

If anything, with MMO's being made more and more accessible to console gamers as well, I'd consider it more likely that in the coming decade we'll see the population decreases in periods of content drought to merely grow even further.