Are MMOs DYING!?...or are we just expecting too much?

[Mimilu]

I don't think were really focusing on the actual points of Josh's video other then having years worth of content and steering into AI talks for some reason. (Ծ_Ծ) ~?
The video is more about how established MMOs like WoW and XIV with years of content and bigger player bases are setting up expectations that new/newer games can't currently fulfill, making developers leery on making new MMOs (especially with the amount of money it cost to make an MMO).
MMO players will general stick to one MMO as their main, get bored or burned out of it, go "vacation" in newer MMOs, get bored over the lack of content (because we expect years worth of content, even from newer games) and community, then go back to their main MMO. We see this in XIV when a new expansion releases: New expansion, population surges. Expansion ages, populations decreases. Repeat with the next expansion.
MMOs as a genre are also designed for people to treat their main MMO as a hobby or second life, using their time investment and the drip feeding of new content to their advantage.

[Merrigan]

AI will reduce the cost of development of these types of games enough that someone will make a good one for those seeking challenge and gameplay, right now it costs millions but as AI advances and can produce HQ assets and such the teams developing these games will be able to get really lean to where enthusiast communities will be able to release games that fit their niche.

It will compose the music, sound effects and graphical assets, so really you will need few developers familiar with using a good engine to produce decent games.

For example this is an AI song:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VJ-rYBC68Q

It's good enough for a game if you ask me, and its free to use. It will only get better from today.

In fact, as hated as the opinion may be CBUIII should use AI to design armor sets for those times where they don't have the time to manually build the sets themselves. Instead of gee... IDK, reusing the same assets over and over again with a different color.

The music is mediocre. And not in the sense that there are tonal errors like AIs producing extra fingers, but in the sense that it's random #10,000 music, with no personality whatsoever.

I'm not trying to be nasty, but people like you scare me. Because if you make up the average consumer base, then any originality or particularity will gradually disappear in a mass production that will be neither good nor bad, and whose only characteristic will be to be “average”. This is what studies on AI point out : the production of creative texts by AI is not bad, per se, but tends towards a standardized production without much flavor, with a noticeable loss of creativity in the texts produced over the long term.

[Ath192]

The music is mediocre. And not in the sense that there are tonal errors like AIs producing extra fingers, but in the sense that it's random #10,000 music, with no personality whatsoever.

I'm not trying to be nasty, but people like you scare me. Because if you make up the average consumer base, then any originality or particularity will gradually disappear in a mass production that will be neither good nor bad, and whose only characteristic will be to be “average”. This is what studies on AI point out : the production of creative texts by AI is not bad, per se, but tends towards a standardized production without much flavor, with a noticeable loss of creativity in the texts produced over the long term.

I'm probably the average consumer. But in general I am for allowing people to focus on the main substance of the game and letting AI take care of generating additional details that humans tend to omit out of time constraints or laziness. The example I gave about a dungeon is a good one. Like no working person is going to bother adding useless sections of a dungeon or intricate details because they don't have the time. But if AI can generate those I would enjoy the freedom of going to see what's up in those sections.

or again, seeing AI outfits instead of re-used assets. That being said, there's a good way to use these tools and a bad way to use them. Like anything. So that is definitely where skilled people are needed. If they can leverage the advantages correctly or produce something horrible.

It's absolutely okay to be scared. Normal in fact, but the potential will be there to make awesome stuff or the biggest piles of garbage you'll ever see. And we'll probably see both.

[ovIm]

I'm probably the average consumer. But in general I am for allowing people to focus on the main substance of the game and letting AI take care of generating additional details that humans tend to omit out of time constraints or laziness. The example I gave about a dungeon is a good one. Like no working person is going to bother adding useless sections of a dungeon or intricate details because they don't have the time. But if AI can generate those I would enjoy the freedom of going to see what's up in those sections.

You definitely need to temper your expectations. What you are doing is just repeating the talking points of those trying to convince people that AI is the future without real proof. Fact of the matter is, using AI is not really generating any value, and that is not purely meant as in monetary value. AI needs constant supervision and is only remixing information it already has been fed. Its no substitute for real human creativity.

Personally, I'd rather take a humans mediocre work over anything an algorithm shat out. A labor of love stands out, one way or the other.

[brinn12]

We had 1 dungeon and 1 alliance raid in 8 months, both can be completed together in a single day. And yet, alliance raid gear has a weekly lockout for no reason, as it's not even BiS at release.

Chaotic and Ultimates? That's content for 10% of the playerbase, and Ulti also has a weekly lockout of 1 totem, in a game approaching the 30-job mark.

An MMO doesn’t need 2 decades of content to keep players engaged. It only feels that way because modern game design prioritizes doing the bare minimum, with lockouts as a crutch to mask the actual lack of content that would justify subbing every month, or even most months of the year.

[Ath192]

You definitely need to temper your expectations. What you are doing is just repeating the talking points of those trying to convince people that AI is the future without real proof. Fact of the matter is, using AI is not really generating any value, and that is not purely meant as in monetary value. AI needs constant supervision and is only remixing information it already has been fed. Its no substitute for real human creativity.

Personally, I'd rather take a humans mediocre work over anything an algorithm shat out. A labor of love stands out, one way or the other.

I highly disagree. It empowers people to produce things that would've taken entire teams to do before. Is it in its infancy? Yes, but this is the worst it will ever be. It will get exponentially better. As for evidence you can see this small demo:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLY38_vJ0hc

Now of course, are layoffs coming because of this maybe in 5 years time? I do think so, but all innovation displaces people unfortunately. And none of us are safe from it or is it an excuse to stop moving forward. From personal experience my job has changed quite a lot from automation but I can say we are a more efficient and better work place for it.

But yeah as all tools they can be good or bad depending on how they are used. I feel the two comments below express the biggest sentiments here, of potential upsides and dangers. And as the video states, humans will always be needed, its just that each person will be that much more efficient by using these tools, so if you keep the same team of people they will be able to produce more content, or you can downsize and keep up the current pace. I would hope they'd keep the same teams and just make more, but its up to whoever is in control of the project.

[Red-thunder]

You definitely need to temper your expectations. What you are doing is just repeating the talking points of those trying to convince people that AI is the future without real proof. Fact of the matter is, using AI is not really generating any value, and that is not purely meant as in monetary value. AI needs constant supervision and is only remixing information it already has been fed. Its no substitute for real human creativity.

Personally, I'd rather take a humans mediocre work over anything an algorithm shat out. A labor of love stands out, one way or the other.

AI is already generating a lot of value in the enterprise/research context, given that you're using it properly (using it in a way that you're not trying to use an LLM to do something you can't already do yourself).

In STEM research basically everyone is now using LLMs. For example it can generate beamer slides for your publications with ease, including putting underbraces on parts of your equations that need to be explained. It can apply simple theorems onto simple questions to yield proofs that a math undergrad could achieve. It can help you generate unit tests. It can digest research once you feed it a PDF and answer some simple questions like "did the authors preempt this particular criticism I have," making it a glorified but very useful Ctrl+F. It is great at generating code chunks for routine tasks, or your can give it your own code and tell it add some bells and whistles.

The problem for all of this is that you need to treat it as a tool, not a replacement of your labor. For example in asking the LLM to prove a certain mathematical lemma, you will need to be the one to read its proof carefully to check if it has taken care of, say, boundary conditions or if it has assumed certain regularity conditions implicitly in its proof. For code, you'll need to read it to make sure that it is using an efficient algorithm and that it's following the logic that you have in mind. What my point is that you cannot ask an LLM to do something you yourself are not capable of doing. That will end up in disaster.

Which brings me back to my original point in this thread, and it's that using AI to free up time for the artists and musicians is absolutely pointless because they cannot code and they will not be able to do anything with some horrible and clunky engine with an LLM. The LLM will spit out code they don't understand and cannot debug. Microsoft's CEO is seeing the same problem where a lot of junior devs are using LLMs as a crutch to cover their own inadequacies. Yes, that's why AI has such a bad rep right now. Unfortunately can we really solve this problem? Telling people "don't use LLMs for things you don't understand" ain't gonna do anything.

[Arohk]

You are looking at one of my raid chars, with my main i have nearly everything finished, the only thing left are the solo deep dungeons, and thats something im really not interested in

fair enough.


My opinion: MMO's aren't dying, there are still a lot of people interested in this type of game, but they are neglected by the game devs or publisher.
All modern MMO's suffer from the same problem, Monetization first, game second, if the main question is how to maximize profit with all sorf of bullsh't like battle passes and cosmetics instead of just making a good game people love for a long time, then it is destined to fail.

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Existing problems are ignored for too long & always take too long to fix,
content always takes too long to make because of self generated inefficient systems.

FFXIV is at a point of stagnation,

Old content pretty much never gets updated, bad systems never get improved or modernized.

Useless new features no one asks for are implemented, while long desired ones like chat bubbles or Viera/Hrothgar hats are ignored. (which have already be done by modders)

The main content of the game is pretty much copy+paste since shadowbringers without much innovation.

I would rather see them reuse and recycle or redo old content to refresh the game than have to wait half a year for something actually new.

Edit:
FFXIV has the huge problem that is must run on PC & Console, and console is really holding back its potential imo. it is also very polished , i have very rarely encountered any sort of bugs since i play the game.

[ovIm]

I highly disagree. It empowers people to produce things that would've taken entire teams to do before. Is it in its infancy? Yes, but this is the worst it will ever be. It will get exponentially better. As for evidence you can see this small demo

Ngl, that thing in the youtube video looks horrible in every sense of the word. It's all smokes and dazzlings. And quite frankly, you can disagree all you want, the experience of someone who actually has business expertise is worth so much more than some guy who claims to have done things in a youtube video, and a couple of mediocre half-assed assets.

AI is already generating a lot of value in the enterprise/research context, given that you're using it properly (using it in a way that you're not trying to use an LLM to do something you can't already do yourself).

While that is true, the very moment you need to double check what your LLM has done, the time that you have saved not making $thing will then be spent fact checking $thing. How much that is depends, but as you say yourself, letting an LLM do work you are incapable of doing yourself will result in unsatisfactory or simply worse results.
I can see LLMs working well in STEM research because the data used there is not quite as subject to human subjectivity like proper coding, drawing, or writing is, but based purely on objective reproduceable facts. Hells, I am hoping that we get that stuff to do our taxes for us so we have more time to do the things that really matter. But until all those algorithms can actually replace human ingenuity and creativity in creating something from nothing, a lot of time will pass.

[Jeeqbit]

The problem for all of this is that you need to treat it as a tool, not a replacement of your labor.

That right there... that is the problem with AI.

The people who hate it are acting like it's a replacement for their labor. The people who are truly excited about AI are using it as a tool.

If your prompt is "do all this for me" or "make a picture for me" then that's not using it properly. That's going to create some AI slop. That people using it for that are trying to make a quick buck with AI slop, and that is quickly saturating their respective market with AI slop so that it's not profitable anymore anyways.

If you put a proper, intelligent prompt into it that, in specific detail asks it to do something very specific, like analyze something, extract information, summarize something, or even when making a picture if you specifically describe what you want it to draw or edit in paragraphs of detail, then it won't be this random slop that lazy prompt writers find it to be.

My dad wanted me to do something that involved converting a lot of unique data from one website to another unique format for another website, which included the conversion of images, directories and embeds, and it would take me months, and I wanted to do other things like play FFXIV, so I wrote some giant paragraphs explaining exactly what I wanted it to do to produce me several python programs to convert the data and it saved me months of work. It still required me to do some of it manually but it saved so much time even just coding it.

I used it as a tool to achieve my own aims and vision faster, and nothing more. The biggest controversy seems over art, but even an artist could direct it to draw what is in their mind if they give it a giant paragraph explaining the vision in their head and keep writing those paragraphs until it reflects what's in their mind already. The issue is when a lazy person just says "make the art for me" and has no vision of their own really.