The massive MMORPG collapse - MMORPG Center.com

[Jinko]

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.

[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)

[Delsus]

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)

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.

[Velhart]

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.

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.

[Coglin]

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

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

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

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.

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."

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

Street Fighter set the fighting game genre into motion.

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

[Wolfie]

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

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.

[Velhart]

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

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.

[Wolfie]

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.

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.

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.

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.

[Delsus]

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.

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

[Wolfie]

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

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.