The massive MMORPG collapse - MMORPG Center.com

[Elexia]

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.

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.

[Velhart]

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.

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.

[Firon]

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.

Wow i almost coughed up blood when you said mortal kombat pushed the genre forward lol... FG are nothing about customizing or anything like that lol..

[weeble]

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.

[Blarp]

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.

[Defmetal]

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!

[Sidious]

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's a detriment to the game, not a benefit. People might not want to admit it, but they want a world where there are winners and losers. Kids hang up sports posters and participate in athletics to be like their pro idols. Ash Ketchum wants to enslave an entire kingdom of sentient beings to be the best there ever was. This mentality that everyone needs to be on equal footing goes against the nature of humanity, and indeed nature itself.

If you look at the numbers, it's very easy to see how successful the design philosophy for each stage of WoW has been. Vanilla was a more refined Everquest, with characters and lore from the Warcraft franchise. It was wildly popular, and by the time it was over it had gained about 5 million subscribers. Mind you, this was in an era where MMO's were still not considered to be hip or mainstream. Vanilla WoW forged a market for itself, and paved the way for its successors.

Next, Burning Crusade. TBC is where a good deal of the remaining player base started out, and it was destined to be successful because of what vanilla had done before it. It gained 6 million people by the time it was over (for a total retained subscriber base of 11 million), and is held to be one of the better periods of WoW to date.

Then something happened. In "Wrath of the Lich King", Blizzard wanted to change the game so casual players could experience all of the endgame content that the hardcore raiders do. They removed or simplified many of the game mechanics, made "heroic" dungeons very very easy, and eventually created four different types of raids: Normal 10, Heroic 10, Normal 25, and Heroic 25. Also, the progression model was abolished-- you no longer needed to do the prior raid to "gear up" for the latest content. Because activities were so simple and so easy to accomplish in the game, and with the prior raids being inviable, people began to run out of things to do. As such, WotLK stagnated and gained only 1 million players by the time the epic conclusion of Arthas' storyline had completed (12 million retained).

The most unsuccessful period of WoW has been Cataclysm; the current era of WoW. In this era, the developers tried there hardest to "please everyone". Heroics were made to require the use of your crowd control skills again, and you could no longer bulldoze through them in your average gear. Raids were similarly more difficult, although this is more likely due to the changed Blizzard made to healing-- a story for another time. Aside from these two things, however, nothing had changed from WotLK. In fact, Blizzard made it worse by essentially putting a hard cap on how much you could accomplish per day/week. Blizzard still wanted casuals to be on a level playing field. As such, a hardcore raider could get, at max, xxx out of xxx valor points per week. Valor points came from raid bosses and heroic dungeons. This was the first time that, aside from weapons and some tokens, a hardcore raider was physically unable to achieve more than a casual. The "only the current tier matters" mentality continued, and people had even less content to do than in WotLK. Heroics were nerfed because people thought it was the difficultly of Cata that was causing it to be so unpopular, but they were incorrect. They soon realized that it wasn't the difficulty of Cata that was killing it; it was because there was nothing to do. Every single facet of the game had been simplified, restricted, or otherwise dumbed down to make the game more accessible to casual MMO players. The result? A staggering loss of over 2 million players and counting.

That keeps every group of the population happy.

As someone who still plays WoW, and has played since open beta, I can assure you. Discontent with the direction of the game is at an all time high. This isn't an assertion or conjecture; WoW's current losses are unprecedented. Even after offering Diablo 3 for free in exchange for an annual WoW contract, they still lost a record amount of subscribers. Even though they introduced "easy mode" raids that you need only queue for from the UI, they still lost a record amount of subscribers. In WoW, you sit in town-- no need to gather or craft because neither one provides any real use anymore-- and queue for dungeons. You do not interact with your server, and there is no interserver competition anymore. There's no point in the older content except transmogrification items, and there's only a vague point in the current content.

In the end, people don't want an easy game; they want a game where there's something to aspire to. Even if they know it's beyond their reach.

[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.

[Wolfie]

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.

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.

[weeble]

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.