f13.net

When the first reports about unit sales started to arrive I hold off from commenting exactly because I was expecting this. Two years and half on top of the charts, LOTRO comes out, steals the first place for two weeks, and everyone thinks it's the next big thing. Now the situation is back to normality and I expect LOTRO sales to continue to fall after the opening burst.

In June WoW will still sit there, and LOTRO out of the chart.

Rome wasn't built in a day.

The grouping mechanic is perceived as broken. In that quest experience gives much more the mob killing experience. Now I do not believe that this is true. But the community perceives that it is true and will not group unless that is there quest of the moment. This is the death blow to this game. A very well crafted pretty game but it will suffer retention loses as grouping is essentantaly broken for PUG's

And I've been watching the populations with the social window, they're heading downward.

Are they showing the number of players on a server through that? Or it's just a zone-restricted thing?

Does this even surprise anyone?  I mean really? 

It's a mediocre game in a well-crafted world.  The novelty of the whole lore thing will only last so long without a solid game backing it.  I bet the WoW defectors are already asking themselves why they left to play a similar game. 

Are they showing the number of players on a server through that? Or it's just a zone-restricted thing?

You can filter for almost anything. Getting a full count is a painful process of separating out chunks of less than 100 players. So you set for all zones, and one class from 1-20 that's 80, then 21-30 that's 50, and so on.

I guess it doesn't show anon or monster play people, but honestly, that's not a lot.

Nebu's about right. I had fun for a little over a month, but honestly, it's a 2002 game (specifically AC2) with some 2004 patches (skeletal AH, quest driven, better LFG tool) in a 2007 world. I go from there to EQ2 and it's like one generation to the next--except in reverse order of release. The world just drew me in, but after a while the little bits I've come to expect wore me down.

Thats because you are lazy good-for-nothings. The Amish could have built it in a day. While talking to their pals using their cell phones.

Seriously, Maybe if your country didn't shut down for a couple of hours in the middle of the day, you'd get some shit done.

Those Amish people make me SO mad.

One of these days I'm gonna take one of those foppish hats that wear and stomp on it! Damn Luddites.

This sure went south in a hurry.

Victory?
Can't remember anyone talking about victory. (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=8995.0)


I said (recently, after posting my predictions) it will slowly grow and I still think that.
But neither I or anyone else IIRC ever said "victory".
In all honesty and looking at the above charts, I think my figures were too conservative and if I could change it now, I'd go with something like Simond's predictions (500k - 400k), maybe slightly more. Besides that, I am starting to think that LotRO will have significatly different retention rates in NA and Europe, I am pretty curious about that.

If you think LotRO just lost the taxi to victory, it means you are the only one deluded enough to think the taxi could drive it succesfully to Avenue de Burning Crusade while passing through WoW Street and Blizzard Craze Square.

Ok, one more analogy and I will start killing people.

Do you play it? It's trivially easy to verify as the exp you receive per mob kill is spelled for you right in your chat window.

This is true, but not for the reasons you originally point out. Take a group of friends or guild mates of a similar level who get together to do some quests. Guaranteed the first half of your evening is going to be catching up people in the group to where the rest of the group is so you end up spending half your time not getting quest experience at all. The quest window doesn't display who has the same quests as you the way wow does and you can't shift click to put quest names in the chat window so it's annoying as hell trying to sort out who has what quests. They have taken quest chains to the ridiculous extreme that merely completing several of the initial quests you get in a quest hub is required to open up the offering of the other quests from other people.

Fairly sure that was just me.  Not seen any reason to change my mind so far.

In fact those numbers you got are rather reasonable.

I wasn't referring to anyone here, but I remember that when I wrote Geldon-like on my site that LOTRO was going to be a "short-lived bubble" and enter retention mode two months after launch everyone jumped at my throat, including Dave Rickey and a quite large number of known bloggers.

The same I read on a number of other forums. Here we are pretty much all jaded.

Id like to give them the benifit of the doubt and up my numbers to 60k and 45k respectively. :evil:

And yes, Im still right :hello_kitty:

So has there ever been a MMO that knocked WoW from #1 and stayed there for say... two weeks or a month?

Vanguard? DDO? Auto Assault? Archlord? Dark & Light?

We got just shit in the last couple of years.

Do people really fret about the numbers like this?  Life is too short.

Besides, I don't remember there being a "this is the next big thing" response so much as a "hey, this game is actually pretty fun."  It's still fun. 

LOTRO is better than WoW. I've played both. I think the only big complaint you can have about the game is the end-game... and that will change with upcoming patches. I think anything negative about the game is basically mirrored in WOW. If you want a hardcore game, I'd recomend EQ2... if you want something less involved I'd recomend LOTRO.

My wife absolutely loves LOTRO

I'm still happy with mine. Feels a lot safer to be down in the red than up there with the rest of the guesses!

Ditto.  Lotro is fun.  I could really care less about numbers.  My guess is that they sold enough lifetime subs to subsidize the game for quite a while.  As long as they have hit or are close to hitting ROI via box sales and lifetime subs, then the game can chug along regardless of numbers.

People's fascination with the potential of games to unseat WoW is astounding. 

For games that people don't personally intend to play, it's the only metric that's entertaining in and of itself. Tired of diku? Sure. But it's still interesting when one diku out dikus the other diku at dikuity.

Still though, I don't think many people truly believe LoTRO was going to be the king of the particular castle.

(thats a metaphor, not an analogy... so it's ok, right Der Helm?)

So basically.. this is just another one of your 'I right!' posts? Yippie!

"Which is more fun" is not the purpose of this thread :)

/fakemoderator off

This is the core problem with multi-step quests. WoW has the same problem, but has less multi-step quests. EQ2 has more of a problem, closer to LoTRO. Basically, multi-steps are designed for a more dedicated group of friends who stick to playing together (D&D style), for momentary pickup groups, or for soloers. It's not for the casual group of friends who occasionally like to group for common goals.

I don't think it's the issue affecting LoTRO though. Rather, I think LoTRO is well-executed and fun, there's two core issues:

• The general UI is more muddy than WoW. There's a disconnect between triggering an action and that action actually happening. It's like the game is run by an overt pendulum. Most MMORPGs are in fact, but others, particularly CoX and WoW do a much better job of hiding this.
• A good percentage of LoTRO players came from WoW, and there's a good chance that was their first MMO. So not only is LoTRO their rebound game or just a raw curiousity, they're still probably feeling the pull of the friends and virtual goods they left behind. Add that to the superior polish of WoW in general (though different aesthetic), and it's not so hard to see the trend
  
  

I also don't think anyone is surprised. We didn't see LoTRO as replacing WoW. We didn't see it sustaining the #1 slot. We didn't see it hitting millions of accounts. But them, I doubt Turbine spent $80mil on it, and therefore can achieve "success" even without being #1.

#1 is a stupid rating for this genre. eGenesis makes profit. CCP makes profit. SOE makes profit. NC makes profit. None of their offered games are number one and yet nobody's crying in their pillow.

Just because I haven't done it in a while:

SUB NUMBARS DON'T LIE@!112!@@!@!eleven!@!!!!!

 :-D

Uh...this is the exact same playstyle WOW has. You group for quests that are hard, then break up and solo afterwards. It hasn't hurt WOW's numbers at all.

As for declining population numbers, I don't know, I have had queues every week so far. The game isn't revolutionary, don't get me wrong. In alot of ways it is WOW in Middle Earth. I will say that so far the playerbase seems nicer and more mature than WOW's did.

The game's biggest strength and weakness are IMO the same thing: Deeds and titles. They are great fun, but also a grind and I suspect most people won't enjoy alts as much because of them.

Other than that, the game is fun. It won't be a WoW-killer but I don't care.

ETA: And I wonder if Blizzard sending out 10 day trials of Burning Crusade have affected anything? I got an email , and then I got an actual DVD in the mail from them.

ETA2: And knocking it for its faults that are mostly the result of polish isn't quite fair. For example, WOW didn't launch with the ability to see who all had the same quest you did if I recall correctly. That was patched in later. The game is more or less polished and hopefully they'll fix the few issues, like crafting, fairly quickly.

A few details about LotRO.

1) The dreaded (?) quest chains aren't all the burden some of you are trying to make them look. They are smarter than it seems, cause even in 5 or 6 stepped quests, there are usually (not always, but usually, like in most of the times) 75% of the steps that are solo. This meaning you have to do the first step solo, then the second as a group, then again the 3rd and 4th solo and the 5th or final as a group. It's a great system as the catchup part is usually doable by soloers, and it's supposed to be done that way. If you know yor friends are at step 5 and attempting step 6 later that night, you can login a couple of hours earlier and to the solo-catchup steps alone. I think it's a great way to mix up solo and group content/quests without cutting out anyone. You can always nitpick, but I think they made a great job with the quest chains.

2) (free) Huge updates are good, and apparently they are well aware of the end-game issue. The first patch sounds like a perfectly executed tackle at the problem. They are tweaking the UI in a good way too. This is the kind of early patch that I like.

3) As I said, I am really curious to see NA and EU numbers six months from now. I am under the impression that the Yuros are way more into it. I don't plan to argue non-existing numbers with anyone right now, but I can say that my server is packed to the point of explosion, and I still have to hear of anyone leaving after the first month. I am sure there are plenty, I still have to meet one though.

Finally, before anyone start babbling about fanboism everytime someone here doesn't despise a mmo: I am just killing time while waiting for Conan and Warhammer. I need some PvP. Now Conan, that game I could be a fanboi of. Could.

So, in essence, you came here to brag about how you were right elsewhere, in an argument with people who also aren't here.

So why are aren't you bragging there, to them?

Bloggers are fags.

Solo -> group -> solo -> solo ->group is bad design, imo.  It's what people are talking about when they say they have to 'catch up' their friends.  You might be completing the last portion of the quest, but your buddy got cock-blocked because he had to log the last play session and couldn't catch-up until you were online again.

  Having solo (x3) -> group (x2) provides you the same # of quests, but in a fashion that's more solo-friendly at the beginning AND gives the group more to do once it's formed.  It's a detail thing, but it's the details like that which matter.

This is known as the 'Vanguard Factor'. So much hype they believe in their own mediocrity. I refused to buy this trash from the beginning, as did most of my guild. A smart move, it seems.

In fact what matters is the perspective of Turbine and Codemaster. Because their expectations were set that high.

And because the REST OF THE INDUSTRY is watching this in the hope to see the genre still flourish so that they can get more funds.

The discussion is: is this market growing, or it is just WoW growing? What are the expectations for a big-budget MMO right now?

This game is extremely important because it will point again the direction. WoW had a huge impact on the industry. Haven't you seen that the MMO genre is basically stuck at 3 years ago?

What?

I have found the social panel to be fairly inaccurate. The other day I had it do a list of the number of level 50s online. The count was 8 but did not include a guild mate that was level 50 and online chatting in kinship. Person showed up in the kinship panel just fine. Additionally I know it can take quite a bit of time for all the names it is going to display to actaully show up in the list. In monster play if I do a social panel check of who is in the entire zone first it will show names of those in current subzone, then after 10 seconds more names will start appearing. It does not settle down and stop adding names until 30 seconds or so have passed. In the case of the missing level 50 kinsman however I left it open for 2 minutes without the name coming up and I am talking about just 8 others in the set.

Is this market growing?  Judging from general chat on the LOTRO server I play on most nights, there seem to be a fair few people who have started playing LOTRO who have not played an MMO before.  Servers are filling up quite quickly too.  Make of that whatever you will.  I'd like to be able to give you figures but quite frankly I don't give a fuck.  As for your sales chart - it just shows rankings, not units sold and without having the units sold prior to that period (and subsequently), how can it possibly determine anything?  It's still possible for LOTRO to have sold 10% more copies than the week before but to also have dropped in the charts. 

I'm sure Turbine will let us know when they hit their first million in sales and/or active accounts.

 :evil:

Well let me see if I follow this. WoW went back to #1 in sales which means LoTRO is a loser. Therefore every game that is not ahead of WoW in sales number is a loser game. That about sum it up?

Just for further thought EBgames still has LoTRO at the top of their best seller list, and over at Amazon.com this hour Nancy Drew: The White Wolf of Icicle Creek pre order is at #1, WoW is #2 and LoTRO is number 8. I might have to look into that Nancy Drew thing since it is at #1. :-o

IF they hit their first million in sales and/or active accounts.

Do they even need to break 1mil to be considered successful?

Comparing a games success to WoW is like a musician trying to compare their album to Micahel Jackson's Thriller album. Nothing released since has even come close to it in sales. But there are tons of artists that have had success since then.

We cannot say for sure.

Darniaq loves to speak about costs. I don't think that LOTRO was cheap. And Turbine has already wasted a ton of money till now for this to be their very last chance to survive.

I don't think they are doing all that well, but, again, we cannot know for sure.

Doing better than Vanguard isn't exactly something to be proud of.

As long as they hit their ROI, it doesn't really matter.  Everything past that is maintenance and gravy.  There's nobody here that predicted 1million subs (I don't think), and I think that 400k by Xmas is highly doable -- I don't expect a huge upswing until after summer.  Sure, maybe the types to pick up an MMO aren't lured outside by sunshine and skimpily clad women, but one can hope.

I know you like the doom and gloom and all man, but if Turbine was in dire financial straits, I'm sure it would have been leaked by now.

There were if your memory held more than a few months. They axed AC2, cut most of the AC1 team, the rest just quit. They quit their distributor, bought the license and tried to rise more funds to avoid LOTRO being canceled.

I do believe that if LOTRO doesn't reach their expectations then Turbine is done for good. I'm sure others have more insight but I'm not sure if they want to speak publicly. What remains to be seen is what actually are their expectations. We know at least that Codemaster's goal is 1M just for EU.

Either LOTRO represents Turbine's fate or they did a wonderful work to make someone else pay in their place. Money doesn't grow on trees.

Oh well I'm sure Sony will gladly add LOTRO to their stable should that come to pass.  But I'm betting that Turbine will plug along nicely.  The game doesn't suck, and they are actively adding free content as we speak.  I don't know anyone who has stated that this game was a WOW killer or even a serious competiter but I think theres room for a good solid not WoW 400k subscriber MMO which should be enough to keep things ticking along nicely.

LOTRO is going to do Just Fine.

Why does anyone respond to Hrose?


*posting BONANZA!

/SirBruce On


So far so good


Cheap by what standard? 25 mil? 35 mil? I do believe it was relatively cheap by current standards (i.e. the Vangard shitcan)

I assume you mean AC2.


Oh they are in trouble? Perhaps you have some financials ...

Well no. But making a profit is. Better then some others.

Have a nice day!  :-)

In the end, you don't know shit and are just making up assumptions like most everyone else. Just that yours are relatively negative and some others are more positive.

Offer something a bit more substantial and it could be interesting.

/SirBruce off

This thread needs more MMOGchart.com.   :evil:

No, really! Turbine's hosed! I heard from my nephew's father who was the lead world builder sez that they're fuxored, which is why he left! (Some of this is lies. You figure out what isn't.)

Doomcasting LOTR is funny.  It's a decent enough game (even tho it wasn't for me) that it'll have it's own little niche of fans for a good while.  Turbine just needs to not do anything silly like throw up 20 extra servers based on 2 weeks of sales, hay.

Irony has hit you for 999,999,999 damage.

Falconeer said "I don't plan to argue non-existing numbers with anyone right now, but I can say that my server is packed to the point of explosion, and I still have to hear of anyone leaving after the first month. I am sure there are plenty, I still have to meet one though."

Um, what? If they left how would you meet them???

For crazy statistics, how's this: 50% of the people I know IRL who have tried LOTRO have quit already! 

Well, that would be my wife.  I'm still playing, but it's starting to wane.  :-D


And while I'm picking nits, what's WWIIOnline got to do with LOTRO anyway? "TAXI to victory" (TM LTM) came from the phenomenal clusterfuck which was WWIIO's retarded UI impregnated with a horribly mutated game design then dragged half-developed out of the womb with a phenomenally botched launch.   Granted, LOTRO is missing that magic something-or-other that makes people really excited to play the game, but the servers are stable, the UI is competent, the game design is adequate, and the launch was downright smooth.  Oh wait!  Nevermind, the similarities are obvious. They both have "Online" in their names! 

Hrose is just trying to be "edgy" and "down with the fogie culture."

LOTRO had a fantastic launch, and while obviously it will never compete with WoW, it is clearly successful in its own right.

It's just a pity that you can't say the same for DDO. I was really rooting for that game but it never came together. A real shame, because it actually innovated in the genre.

It's a perfect way to describe a "pie in the sky", the delusional expectations of easy success.

Perfect for Turbine, doesn't even know how to take off but still expect to take over the world.

You almost had me :)
I wasn't expecting to meet them in game. I was referring to real life, my small circle of online acquaintances and the intardnet places I use to keep an eye on. So far, not even here I read about anyone not renewing after the first month (of release, not counting betatesters who never purchased the box).
It's by no mean a statistic, just a raw observation. Your 50% quitters observation is as much as valid.

One million to be successful? One million as a goal?

Ok. Take EQ at its high point. Then take UO at its high point. Then take DAOC at it's high point. Add them all together. Oops still not a million subscribers!

WOW has made everyone crazy. While I don't think LOTRO is a smash hit of the kind they'd like, it's around 175-200k subs. That's a successful sustainable subscriber base. Gives them a revenue between 20 and 30 million dollars a year.

Do you have a source for those figures or is it a guesstimate? (Not being snarky, genuine question).  It would also be interesting to know how many people subbed up for a lifetime too.

I would love some actual numbers too (but I think we won't get any untile the eventual next positive milestone). Things we know are the 200k box sold in the first 3 weeks (IIRC, darn where did I read that?) and the 22 packed servers worldwide. I'd say there are more than 200k subscribers at this point, but what the fuck do I know?

It's based on the usual 20% of subs are on at peak times guestimate using numbers from the social panel. I've seen at least two other people doing social panel counts and we all seem to be coming up with the same concurrency numbers (1600-1900/server). I did some checking of the social panel last night and every one of our guild was present and accounted for. It's the best tool we have.

It might be off by 20% or even 50%. But that still puts it in a certain range--about where you'd guess a successful but not blockbuster game would end up if WOW had never happened.

I have to jump onto the it's successful but not WoW successful bandwagon and wonder why HROSE is so happy to be doomcasting with only about a month to go. It's already >= AC1 numbers at its peak and AC1 kept Turbine alive until now. Sure they've had misfires along the way that were their own fault (AC2) and the fault of the license holders (DDO- Eberron? Really? Even my local gaming store says Eberron is shit that is being pushed on the public and that the whole "design a new world" thing was a scam and the guy who won had "quit" Wizards about a month before the "contest" /nerd rant off)

The only thing that might kill LOTRO is raiding. I know that sounds weird but if they try to mimic WOW and turn the later levels into a raiding grindfest I think it's going to backfire. The forums and chat channels in-game are filled with anti-WOW and ex-WOW players and the vast majority of them have mentioned raiding as one of the reasons they left WOW and came to LOTRO. I know I sagged when I read about raiding being put into the game and my response was not nearly as violent as some of the players. Right now people are pinning their hopes on "different paths to comparable loot".

WoW didn't start out at 8 million subscribers, it took a while to get there.  Now, obviously, LotRO will never catch up if their rate of growth is less than or equal to WoW's but that really doesn't mean the game is 'Teh Falure'.

I'm tired of the fallacious, "It didn't beat WoW numbers yet so it failed." thing.  It's just not true in any aspect of business.  General Electric is a larger company the Boeing so does that mean Boeing failed?  I mean, they both make airplanes parts, right?

Your logic may kick sand into a WoW-fanboi's vagina.  We don't need that.

Fanbois can't see logic at all, even to argue with it, so we are safe.

Yeah, I hate to bring this up again -- WHOSE DELUSIONAL EXPECTATIONS? Nobody here thought it was going to be a WoW-killer. The most optimistic estimates were maybe 750k.

Once again, you seem to have come here and started lording it over all of us for being right in an argument somewhere else. Why not go hassle them? Why are you pestering us with it? We don't really care.

LoTRO seems perfectly successful. They had a stable launch, good word-of-mouth, have a solid game, a good IP, and a 6 figure playerbase. They'll do just dandy on that since their costs weren't nearly as high as, say, Sigils. (If anything, LoTRO was probably cheaper than it looks, since Turbine could modify and reuse a lot of in-house experience, tools, designes, etc and such rather than license them or develop them from scratch).

Is it ok to be stabby about the fact that we all consider LotRO a "good game"?  I think it's a prime example of just how low the bar is being set with regard to MMO's. 

Fixed that for you. The MMO MEDIUM (not genre, goddamnit) has been stuck in a rut since Everquest was released. No matter what anyone tells you, there are no second generation MMOG's. WoW is the penultimate first-gen MMO and yet no one has pushed past that first gen. Warhammer will be first gen. Conan maybe MAYBE a second gen if only because of its release on the 360, but that's really only if it breaks the hotkey mash gameplay paradigm. If it's just class + level + mouse gestures, it'll be another shiny first gen MMO.

Seems pretty arbitrary to me. What defines the "next generation"? If you base it upon significant innovation, shadowbane, SWG, DDO, tabula rasa, EVE online, ATITD, and conan could all be considered next-gen. Does a game have to be successful to be next-gen? Does it have to be new, even? If WoW ran on the PS3, would it be next-gen? Or are these all meaningless distinctions because there's no clear demarcation in the first place?

No, it has to be a different game than what we've seen before. Shadowbane was a diku with PVP and kingdoms in it, much like DAoC, only full-on PVP and much less PVE. Eve followed more of the UO skill-based formula, though it gets points for being a one server game. It's mechanics were mostly EQ-esque (target, hit buttons, rinse repeat). SWG was UO with pewpew lasers. DDO was instanced diku with a little twitch.

It has to make the medium stretch beyond the bounds of what its done in such a way as to feel different, not just be a graphic spit shine on the old formula. Planetside is about the only mass market thing that could even be considered a second-gen MMOG, because it added a new gameplay genre to the MMO medium. I'd put Starport and A Tale in the Desert in that category as well. Everything else has been CRPG's built either on a diku foundation or a skill-based UO-style foundation.

Tabula Rasa MAY end up being a second-gen game, but we'll find out when we find out just what kind of game it is. The hype is unclear.

Strip any of today's MMO's to their core gameplay elements and what are you left with?  It's some shinier version of EQ or UO in 3D.  While the backdrops have changed, the core gameplay elements haven't really been altered much.  Even WoW is little more than a streamlined EQ.  Planetside or WWIIOL came close to what I'd consider "Next Gen" but they're really just FPS hybrids.  Of course, opinions vary.

Some clues to real sales number. http://ve3d.ign.com/articles/790/790122p1.html LotRO released on April 24th. The gross for the regular version was $2,973,385. I think you could divide that by $49 to get unit sales but not sure. The special addition version was number 4 but no gross given. Would be between $2,025,275 for number 2 and $546,000 for number 9.

These are US numbers only. Some info has indicated that European sales were more than US. Third weak after release and HRose posts showed it was still at number 4 in the US. Second weak after release they were number 3 http://ve3d.ign.com/articles/790/790642p1.html Vanguard had dropped to number 6 in its third week and did not have a new release above it besides WOW:BC unlike LotRO. By the fourth week it was out of the top 10.

Yes, most MMOs can be broken down into shinier copies of EQ or UO, because EQ and UO are archetypical game philosophies, game vs. living world. Hell, even ATITD was just the same old crafting mechanic minus the monsters.

I have a great deal of difficulty extrapolating what a "real" next-gen MMO (by your ambiguous definition) would play like. Ever since the LtM days I've been heavily talking up player-created content and advancement based upon player skill and/or community standing rather than time played, but even those massive innovations probably wouldn't meet your standards.

Can you briefly armchair design what you'd consider to be a next-gen MMO? You're great at eliminating games that you don't feel qualifies, but you don't really talk about what would. How would it actually play?

The more I think about it, Second Life qualifies to me as a 1.5 gen MMO. Player-created content is a big part of that, as well as a robust economy (not in the sense of stability so much as in amount of useage). But it still to get to a second generation MMO needs to have a different gameplay mechanic than what we are used to. It may require some kind of change in the input device, such as the Wiimote (the reason I'm so excited about the Wii), or the touchscreen/game table interface linked to in the Microsoft Surface thread. Shifting platforms away from PCs onto consoles is a good start.

It may be one of those things that "I'll know it when I see it" but I can't exactly describe it.

What we've seen of MMO's so far is tweaks on the same old shell. Shinier graphics, more personalized experiences (instancing), more emphasis on directed individual play (quest-based grinding/story modes), more PVP with less punitive penalties. But it's all just been smallish iteration instead of innovation.

How many years have people been waiting for chess 2.0? I've got news... It's not coming.

2.0 is the new 'new millenium'. I want to stab all the pseudo-technical shitbags that lurk in the corners of the library world who are fixated on web 2.0, library 2.0, reference 2.0.

Shut the Fuck Up 1.9, bitch.

Checkers, bitch.  :-D

There have been an inordinate amount of board-based games that are not chess, do not resemble chess and feel nothing like chess that have been created since chess. I don't think "This shit is just like chess only with X" when I'm playing Chutes and Ladders.

Meanwhile, we've gotten exactly 3 models of MMOG. EQ, UO and Planetside. /sadf

So EQ with a wiimote would be nextgen? Nah. And second life is just a graphical MOO/MUSH.

"Next-gen" is an artificial demarcation which doesn't really apply to a constantly evolving genre. It's easy to trace WoW's mechanics back to EQ and then to sojourn MUD, but each iteration added some pretty cool stuff. With various games exploring different aspects of that original game, eventually they'll iterate themselves into entirely new experiences.

On a different note, personally I find the diku mechanics pretty satisfying so long as there's tons of new content to consume. What I really want is a MMO with no raiding, no endgame at all, a MMO that plays like WOW's levels 1-69 forever. New dungeons and quests and lands and loot and levels to explore and conquer always just ahead, all hand-crafted and compelling. And how could you possibly sustain that level of content and advancement indefinitely? Why, player-created content and advancement through player skill, of course!

My point is every MMOG out there is chess with different color pieces or a different colored board. Ok - ATiTD might be checkers and Planetside might be Risk.

But if you are looking for Nethack 3.645, guess what. It's still nethack. And a version number isn't going to suddenly turn it into something it isn't.

No. It would suck mightily. But an EQ world with a Wiimote for combat mechanics that had nothing whatsoever to do with hotkey specials, with various combos of swings and button mashing making for different special powers combos would be. Magic-users/ranged classes and skills would use an FPS style interface while melee would more closely resemble Red Steel with a bit more oomph to the interface.

Now THAT would be shit hot. Maybe on Wii 2.0.

Other then the player-created I like this vision.

Nightmare chess can be pretty fun, though.

Back to the point -- there isn't going to be a "second-gen" MMORPGs. There's just going to be iterative development of MMORPGs, cannabilizing the previous generation's selling points in some places and innovating (ranging from the occasional 'brand new' approach, to new variations on an old approach, to simply getting an old approach to actually work for once). At some point, in the future, someone will draw a bright line on this fuzzy process and declaim "Everything before this is 1st Generation! Everything after is second!".

There's a real justification for leveraging players to generate content. It's impossible to create an endlessly extending game without it. Look at TBC. That expansion only provides around 40 hours of play before you hit 70 and start repeating dungeons, raiding, and farming. You know, the sucky stuff. And it took two years to create. It's not uncommon for MMO players to play 40 hours per week. Reasonably speaking though, I'd say that adding content equivalent to TBC once a month would easily suffice. Can any dev house do that? No way.

While you're correct about the core gameplay issue, here are a few things I'd need to consider it a reasonably new version of the original iteration.  Since I get to do this from my armchair with no burden of having to implement anything, here's where I'd start.

1) Combat that plays out in real time and isn't turn-based.  Defense should be as valuable as offense. Archery should be more than spells with arrows.

2) Actions that have a tangible effect on the world.  If I slay 10,000 orcs, I expect that has some effect on the orc tribes in the game.  

3) Mobs that level.  If I can gain experience, mobs should be able to as well.  

4) Avatars that react to the world.  Age effects, languages, learning.  

5) Weather

6) Proper scale that effects geography, horticulture, zoology, economics, etc.  If you're going to call it a world it should be more than a zone populated with static npc's.  Regions of the world should have regional flavor (Atitd anyone?)

7) Appropriate risk reward.  All reward is boring and all risk is penal.  

8 ) Meaningful specialization.

9) Skill-based play.  A skilled level 10 player will have a chance to beat an unskilled level 50 player.  Equipment should NEVER determine outcomes but serve to enhance play.

10) Large degree of customization.  I should know who a toon is by their look, not the name over their head.  

11) Living NPC's.  

12) Intelligent monsters.  If I'm killing one of your comrades, you should do something about it.  

13) Adaptive questing.  

14) Adaptive merchants.

15) Meaningful (and purposeful) PvP.

16) Customizable player housing and land ownership.

17) Player controled legal system (i.e. sandbox style Atitd)

18) Player accountibility.  

While I admit that many of these are simply features or rules tweaks, some require more.  Many of these have appeared in games already... none to the degree that I think are posssible.  Of course feasibility and cost are a huge part of the equation, but if I get to say what I want, then I don't have to wrry about being practical.

I added only there, because if you bring a knife to a gunfight, you are likely going down. Then again if you sneak behind me and stab me. My bad.

Well exactly, player skill is the equalizer. Knives should be just as effective as guns, they just play differently. Guild wars has an effective approach to this, treating abilities like cards in a collectible card game. EVE online supposedly does something similar too, where older players have a LOT more options open to them but aren't inherently more powerful than newbies.

What the hell ever happened to Seers and such (UO) ? That type of content can be great.

Lawyers.

Plus it doesn't scale unless you are willing to really commit a lot of resources, money, and tools. As an industry, we don't spend enough effort building our own tools, let alone those for something like a Seer program.

I agree with this except I think that levels should be history.  Levels imply a gaining of hitpoints/mana/stat increases etc.  Get rid of them.  The thing that differentiates a new player from an older player is reputation and experience and (if it's a system something along the lines of EVE - for want of a better example), more skills to choose from.

I'm not sure that's ever been really tested. The UO suit was about volunteers as customer support, not game mastering. Game mastering is a part of the game, or at least it has been in Pen and Paper for decades. But after the CSR thing, everyone just fled.

If it isn't, TSR and The Chaosium owe me a TON of money.

Okay, I agree. WoW moves on the same line but it has brought A LOT onto that model. So many things that now we don't even notice anymore because they became standard.

LOTRO doesn't. It doesn't advance the genre or the specific game model in any way. There are titles and other interesting gimmicks, okay. But it doesn't innovate NOR improve the model we had.

That's what I meant. WoW was just the same stuff, but it brought a lot to the table (argue with this, but don't expect me to reply). LOTRO is again the same stuff, but it brings nearly nothing.

It wasn't really about volunteers as customer support, it was about volunteers being treated like paid employees and not being compensated accordingly. They were given strict shift schedules and supervisors then expected to do essentially the same job as paid lower level game masters, and all they got in return was a free play account. Sadly, that horrible lawsuit killed off all community involvement for years to come and substantially hurt the genre as a whole.

How can you get volunteers to work on your game without leaving yourself open to legal action? That's easy, don't give them anything with a monetary value in compensation and don't treat them like employees.

BBC2 money programme tonight spent 30 minutes on online games, mostly 2nd life.  They also toured codemasters hq and said lotro had 100,000 subs in europe.

Found a link. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/6708417.stm)

Nope, it sure doesn't. The gameplay is bland as dishwater.

With that, I agree.

But, please, "generations" discussion again? There's simply too much breadth to this platform to talk about generations. Lineage 1 is gen 1 but Maplestory is gen 3 but Everquest 2 is gen 2 even though it is one UI-shift away from EQ1, which WoW is even closer to in spirit with some major casualization tweaks but came out later. Meanwhile Runescape's been handing everyone their shirt but isn't too far from UO but played in a browser with a 3D client but was much more expensive and years prior to much lighter stuff that's also clocking everyone like Club Penguin and Webkinz.

Come on.

You can only have generations when you have a clear dilineation laterally, across an entire industry. It's the main reason that only consoles can really have generations. And what with the Xbox360 launching a full year before the other two, even that's becoming hazy.

Leave generations to the marketing folks.

No, the point is that multi-steps at all and the inevitability that a PUG or non-dedicated group of friends are at different steps along the way. They still need to catch up, which is a time requirement spent before one can hang out with their friends, and which is more prevalent in LoTRO than in WoW.

You don't know what their expectations are. We don't know what anyone's is, numerically. From what we do know though, Turbine did not spend what WoW did (it was closer to 30-35mil, hard to assess since they have infrastructure to leverage), and has not launched as WoW did, and yet is hitting the exact same target audience that WoW did in a more condensed launch. No way they thought they were hitting multiple millions of accounts. LoTR is a strong IP, but it's been iterated so much it's like "Xerox" to "copy machines". The brand has become the verb. "Oh, you're making yet another tolkien-esque fantasy game? Oh, and it's a DIKU? Great! We haven't seen a dozen of those already! Bring it on!"

Blizzard can get away with that because of the 8 different success factors they have nobody else does, including collective expectations.

No. The rest of the industry watched Blizzard and says "ok, that's it. That's the cap." They're wrong of course, but only because of the same myopia others have in thinking it's all about the flat-fee DIKU and not about the millions being made by those who do different things.

And no, I couldn't care any less who here likes what. I don't play Club Penguin or Webkinz. I prefer DIKU, or virtual lifestyle experiences that don't have sucky UIs or crappy code, and am quite comfortable with that. But the changes are already happening, all around us.

LOTROL brings story. your in the books. If this is meanfull to you you are hooked.. It is the most compelling story ever. i am not playing it, I am playing EQ2 to the extent that I am playing at all. But i have played it and understood it. it is the best story ever. Very well done. It does what it set out to do.And well.

Talk about design for a narrow range of play styles. This is way worse than doing raid content IMO, because this fucks with people's leveling and I'd bet the number of people who fit in this narrow category is even smaller than raiders. Stupid design decision assuming they even noticed it while developing and/or intentionally targeted this tiny group of players.

Exactly. One really annoying example is the self haste on my champion. It's on a 20 sec timer but is spammable with 0 cool down. With the crappy feel of the interface, I need some visual timer to hint when to recast it. If the spell was on a 20 sec cool down I could just look at the button to see if the cool down was up and hit it again but no, I have to try to spot it's icon out of a bunch of similar, tinier buff icons on the opposite side of the screen from where I have the button set up.
Yup it's the little things that get you in the end, and while WoW wasn't my first MMO it was the most recent and the lack of polish gets really annoying.

There rest of the list was the usual tired pie in the sky wishes but this struck me as the perfect solution to Blizzard's problem with gold farmers. They should hire all the farmers to play npc's and monsters. I'm sure even paying slightly more than the gold farming sweatshops it would be cheap. heh.

Not expecting a reply here but just what new things  did WoW bring to the table? I cannot for the life of me think of a single thing, unlless the fact that it was soloable to 60 and had quest oriented game play could be considered innovative.

You catch on quick.  If I'm going to suggest what I want in a "Next Generation MMO" they had better be "pie in the sky".  You're welcome to provide a better list... though I'm sure that belittleing the list of someone else is less work.

Speed and engagement of gameplay, total soloability, content completeness through to the end, and the ability for a heck of a lot more people to actually achieve that end (only to be left with the unfortunate question of just what they should do once they get there).

This was ground breaking, though we could argue whether in a good way ;) No MMORPG before it except GW had such an accessible endgame, and GW's was mostly because you were there to PvP. Every other game with some sort of linear progression to an repetitious endgame filtered people out along the way through laborious grind requirements or general lack of content. But WoW lets almost anyone with a pulse hit the cap.

They just don't have anything to do for anyone when they get there but raid, alt or PvP grind.

LoTRO brings nothing new but a much more immersive story for the relatively fewer people who care, a more realistic ambient setting (which I rather like over WoW), and a messier experience that allows people to find their own way through then game, feeling like they're "cheating" or "hacking" (WoW feels more on rails by comparison).

Single player games, or MMOs?  Some of that stuff tosses virtual economies right out the window.. others requires Holodecks or some kind of adaptive AI before we're even close to seeing it in games.

I like the mobs that level idea.  Of course, i also like the idea of limited resources, and mobs pick-up the stuff that previous 'dead' players dropped... which links into some sort of Permadeth and mobs as strong as players.   

At that point, it becomes a lot less fun to play, though.. so I don't bring that thought out very often.

 - Ed: You know, this whole line of discussion should probably be split out to the game design forum.

There's really no point to it at all to be honest.  I just did it because someone asked for a list of features that I'd consider "Next Gen".  I apologize for the derail. 

Rest exp.

Let's say the two new races and the sucky parts account for about half of the expansion. Data goes in, management comes out: just hire 50 more expansion teams!

Seem like a big number?

Eliminate redundancies and develop better tools: 25 more teams needed.
Put a hard limit on the consumption of the very latest content at 20h/week: 13 more teams needed.

I can buy that, however I don't think that qualifies for the phrase "a lot", I can also half way agree to Darniaq's reply also but I think they could be summed up in the term "solo gameplay".

Back to the OP I am seeing very little bleed from my guild, some drops of course, but nothing like the exodus of guild mates what I saw in SWG and EQII after the free 30. Also I turned on general chat last evening and noticed quite a few obvious newbie questions for whatever that counts for. I think the game is doing OK, perhaps not as well as I had predicted but pretty darn good regardless. About 60 or 70 percent of the people I know in real life and from other boards that tried it during the open beta purchased it and of those I would say 75% are playing after the free thirty.

For all my opinion is worth, LotR turned out to be surprisingly good and one of the better MMO's out there atm. That it didn't kill WoW is perfectly normal and not in the slightest way an indication that it isn't a success.

It'll be several more years before a WoW-killer appears anyhow. WoW is what one of the best managed and most talented studio's could produce with as big a budget as they could amass, it'll have to be technically antiquated before it'll be surpassed in it's genre.

FWIW I believe WOW may have finally hit its peak. For instance, on my old server, Icecrown, alot of the "big names" are gone now. Some whole guilds are gone too. I'm also starting to get "please come back for 10 days" emails and the other day I recieved a Burning Crusade CD in the mail.

As for what it brought to the table: solo play to 60, rest xp, and it removed most of the mmo cockblocks.

What LotRO brought to the table:

- a Story. The first traditional/diku MMORPG where you play a story-mode exactly as in single player ones. In LotRO you don't play to get to level 50 just because it's cool. You play to advance the story.

Why everyone keeps ignoring or underrating this?

Because most LoTRO players came from other MMORPGs which do not feature this so strongly. It's one of the issues of LoTRO that it came 10 years too late. This genre, heck, the roots of all RPGs should have come from Tolkien. Instead everything came from interpretations of stuff he put in place. LoTRO could not come this late to the party without following those same rules, and as such is largely being played the same way others are.

No matter how good the story, reading it does not fundamentally reward the player. I imagine most people skip right to the objectives just as they have done in every other MMORPG since the days they had to decipher inline text prompts from early EQ1.

Couldn't this be said for ANY RPG (Japanese and Console ones included) out there?
I mean: of course you can ignore the story and play it as any other regular quest in any other MMORPG. But the point is not what you can NOT do with the tool, just what it brings to the table. Seems to me like this is a new and a big addition, regardless the numbers of subscription it will bring to LotRO.

We are "saluting" rest xp as innovation while saying LotRO didn't bring anything new to the table. Serious?

FF XI has a "story-mode" too, complete with cut-scenes.

Couldn't see any of it in the 15 levels I inflicted myself in 2004.
LotRO starts with the story and moves from that. It's the first thing you see, it grows with you, it accompanies your char for all the 50 levels, gives spectacular rewards and a big part of it is usually soloable.
Can't remember anything similar in my brief experience in FFXI.

Quest givers in FF XI didn't have giant ! or rings above their heads but each nation has its own series of story-line quests and there are other non-nation specific ones as well.

Cmon Trippy.
EQ1 has a storyline too. It has even a UI button for the storyline stuff. It's not the same!
I am not too fond of FFXI as I said, couldn't bring myself to play more than 15 levels.
But the fact that I have to look for the storyline, as opposed to a game that revolves around it, makes a big difference. Hell, I could be wrong but you can't even enter one of the high level overland zones (eastern Angmar, a regular overland part of the world, not an instance or something) if you haven't cleared step 5 of Book VI story quest. You HAVE to play the story in LotRO. You can avoid reading the text but you can do it in every CRPG since the invention of GUIs.

Looks to me like LotRO is the first MMORPG to put complete emphasis on the storyline, to the point it often PLAYS like a traditional (singleplayer) RPG. I really think it definitely brought something to the table, something a few crpg fans I know awaited for a long time. 

Actually, that's wrong. MMORPGs prove you can. You don't need to read anything in the "RPG" nor talk to anyone in the "Multiplayer" component of WoW or LoTRO in order to win the game. Some would say this would result in a "weaker" MMORPG experience, but that's subjective.

I'm not up on general RPGs at all, but try and imagine getting through, say, KotOR without reading the story. You physically can't because the UI requires you make decisions that absolutely affect the outcome. This sort of decisioning tree has continually be reduced through the years in DIKUs to the point where except for PvP and diplomacy, about the only decision one needs to make is how much time to invest in a pre-planned path.

Even LoTRO, which I love, doesn't require much in the way of decisions. You either do something or choose to ignore something. There's no real counterbalancing, even of the weak variety like EQ1 factions. The story is there as window dressing for people who care more. But it's not a functional requirement of game play.

LOTRO's epic storyline is fairly similar to the FFXI one except there's far far more content to it, it's multiple linked quests for each section, and the storyline is a lot better. It also doesn't have any game mechanic that I'm aware of--if my memory serves the FFXI ones were better known as points where you were blocked from levelling than they were for the storyline.

Didn't AC2 have storyline instances too, that ended with cinematics? I just remembered that for some reason but didn't last long enough in the game to experience them.

There are RPGs where you have to make decisions and RPGs where you don't. It's not a matter of which ones are good and which one aren't. In EQ2 there were lots of quests were you had to choose answers related to the lore or the text, but that wasn't a particularly good example of story-driven MMORPG, no matter the "choices". In LotRO, as in most quest driven singleplayer RPGs, you just need to read the direction and the name of the mob/item you need to find. Story, if you feel like that, it's fluff in both of them. Again, the proof would be my kid, who completed a couple of CRPGs without being able to read English just by whacking and going trough it, and myself, who completed my share of JRPGs in Japanese back in the days.

Look Darniaq, if you want to prove that LotRO is not on par with good singleplayer RPGs, then I agree.

The argument rose when it was pointed out that LotRO didn't bring anything new to the table while WoW did.
My point was just that there is something new to the table here, especially (but not only because) when the bar is set so low as rest xp and soloability, but due to LotRO not selling millions of boxes, this new feature is being overlooked, underrated, and labeled as "meh" at best.

That said, this conversation is too fatiguing. I will go get my rest XP.

Here's the problem: In WoW and LotRO you don't really need to even bother with reading the story... and I'm sure most people don't.  Why?  Because some guy down the road will appear with a "!" over his head at a point after you've completed some rudimentary task.  

The element that I miss from the RPG's of old was that you had to read and understand the plot and story line in order to progress through it.  The game didn't hold your hand through the experience, but rather expected you to understand the lore and solve the problem for yourself.  There's none of that in today's games.  It's all "click NPC A, follow steps, return for loot/coin/exp".  EQ had smatterings of this and players found it an obstacle.  If you bothered to talk to NPC's in EQ, you'd often get a feel for their role in the story and you weren't all that surprised when they gave you a quest later that followed their position.  Today's gamer won't be bothered with reading text.  They want a little "?" that means I HAVE A QUEST OMGLOLZERS!!!.

I'm willing to bet that if you quizzed the playerbase right this minute, that they couldn't tell you anything specific about the majority of quests they've done unless something about it was close to a plotline they saw in the movies.  They click, grab the quest, follow the laundry list, and get their carrot.  DING GRATZ!  (and all that)

I may have missed this, but what exactly is a "TAXI to victory"?

A little history lesson.  (http://www.brokentoys.org/ww2o-irc.html)

<see Lum's comments around 21:16>

Never gets old.

Priceless.

His CAPS key looked like it broke :)

Not what I'm trying to prove at all. Nor am I trying to valuate between good and bad RPGs. I don't know a thing about the recent genre and don't really care about it.

All I'm pointing out is that LoTRO is no more unique for its storyline than MMORPGs that preceded it. The use of "storyline" is a nice marketing message wrapped around a DIKU. And maybe that contributed to some of their current success. But once you get into the game, unless you are predisposed to care about the story already, you're not going to care.  Because the game doesn't require you to.

That is my core issue with claims that LoTRO brought story to MMORPGs, and with story in general. Until it matters in an MMORPG, as in, part of the game mechanic, it's just a thin veneer ("veneer!") of arguable relevance. I've been complaining about this for years though :)

Thank you. That was quite an entertaining read.

Now that I know what a TAXI TO VICTORY! is all about, I need to figure out what it has to do with this thread.......aw fuck it, figuring that out would be like Lum driving a tank, nigh impossible.

Darn!
Not just the storyline. From instances, solo instances and places you have to unlock to keep on dikuing (not end-gaming), the game is built around the main quest. It's not about the text. Ignore that, and you still have a mmorpg where there's a huge, rewarding, purposeful and accesible main quest to follow from level 1 to 50. That's a first to me.

Quick question. Is the overall storyline the same for all races and classes ? Or are there major differences ?

Nothing and no one. Hrose is just VIKLAS!-ing. He wants LotRO to fail so he can gloat about it on a blog that is not this board.

As for the derail, it's much more entertaining than Hrose gloating delusionally about things said in other places on the Interweb that is not this board.

Each race has its own chain at the outset of the game...then they all merge together when you get to Bree.

Interestingly enough, *one* of early LotRO quests is of this "think for yourself" variety. Player is asked by few hundred year old ghost to find a ring which was lost somewhere "close to black rock, near the barracks gate". The catch is (and the quest text indicates it) there is no barracks in "modern Bree" anymore. The solution is to head to *old* part of town and search ruins there that include large, flashing rock at that point.

Not surprisingly this quest is the single most queried about thing in the game 'advice' channel, with typically 5-10 people asking for help to solve it, per hour.

Another good example of the "think for yourself" type of quest in LotRO is the Loremaster's level 15 class quest.

In it, you're supposed to find a certain book in an instanced library (solo).  You're given one page (of 3) of hints to how the books might be catalogued. 

Hurdle 1)  If you're smart, you'll deduce from the quest text how you might get the other two pages before you even enter the instance.

Hurdle 2)  Once you get all three pages, you need to deduce from the coded catalog where the book is stored.

The catch is, while you're searching in the instanced library, patrols of goblins of ever-increasing levels (and they become a pair of lvl 30 elites pretty fast) start entering the library.  You can't brute force it by killing the goblins as you search each and every bookcase.  (Though, some people have ways to use particular Loremaster abilities to work around them).  Blindly rushing into this quest will almost certainly mean one or more deaths.

Sure, you could google the bookshelf location, but if you want a nice little old school mental challenge, it's there for you.

As I recall, the ghost even suggests you speak to another NPC who will drop a very heavy hint about where the rock is. But the NPC in question doesn't have a gold ring over its head, so . . .

Zubey, wait until you try the level 30 loremaster quest, if you haven't already. The player needs knowledge of places they have visited in the past to solve it (I hope that's only an extremely mild spoiler). I admit, I ended up cheating on that one and looking it up, but I imagine it would be very satisfying indeed to anyone who had really paid attention to the world.

Each race has quests that converge on Bree, but each Class continues to have their own quests.

I loved this quest. I couldn't get "Marty, you're just not thinking fourth dimensionally!" outta my head :)

For me too. I can't think of another game that has that Epic series. I have no idea if it sees us all the way through 50. It's a long multi-step quest though, one of the longest I've seen. All I ask is that this quest series not be elevated to some new height of experience never seen before. It's not like exclamation points over character heads, or XML UIs, or Bazaar's, or the trade window, or dozens of other things that were at some point introduced into a game and which fundamentally altered what one could expect from future games.

The riddle quest series in Rivendell is similar to the ghost one in Bree in that you are challenged to think a bit more than is the norm or at least seem to be.  However,  in the end both end up being more about running around looking for something flashing.  In the Rivendell series, you're given a riddle and told that the answer is an item that can be found in Rivendell.  which sounds good even though the riddles aren't super hard, they do require some thinking.  The problem is that when you solve the riddle you end up running all over the freaking valley hoping something will flash on mouse over or trying to buy somthing similar from a vendor.   Heck in the Rivendell quest you don't even save time by thinking it through and solving the riddle because you still have to find the damn thing, at least in the ghost quest you are given an actual hint to the location of the next step.

The story of the Chains of Promethea expansion in FFXI is apparently quite good. (I'm about to start it so I can't speak firsthand)

Anyway I already read LOTR, why do I care about the story in the game? I'm all for a good story but I'd prefer one that I hadn't read before and that hadn't already been rehashed 100 times.

Probably right but I'd say that's more to do with the conditioning of the playerbase about the inconsequential nature of the quests in games like this.  I don't know if you've been playing LOTRO at all but many of the quests that are not part of the main plot are not only inspired by the books but also run in parallel to the main storyline.  Also, while there may be seperate chains, a lot of the quests are all linked by common story themes.  For example (and if you've read the books this isn't too much of a spoiler) a lot of the early Bree/Shire related quests are to do with Sharkey and his group of bandits moving in on the lands.  Then there are other little quests like one where the mayor of Michel Delving in the shire sends you to get money to help repair the town hall roof.  This seems to be of not much note but this quest is based on one line in the book which mentions this event. 

It's not the story from LOTR.  It takes place in parallel with the Fellowship and its stuff, but IIRC, they haven't even left Rivendell yet when you get into the storyline.

OH NOES!!!  CLEARLY LOTRO IS DOOMED!~



VIKLAS!

And with the announcement of SC2, the Starcraft battlechest starts appearing on shelves again.  Heh, funny.

(It's been missing locally for about a year. At least that was the last time I saw it.. still see D2 and WC3 all over)

Turbine can't mess with canon,  so the quests and storyline focus on the North and what's left out or only hinted at in the books.  You get lots of Halbarad, Radagast, etc. directing you in chain quests with specific goals.  It's focused on the reaction in the North to the coming war.  All that's really mentioned in the text is a decisive battle at the Lonely Mountain,  and Mirkwood and Lothlorien ganging up and taking out Angmar.

The North is pretty much glossed over in the text, so there's a fair amount of wiggle room.  Looks like they'll keep advancing the storyline while opening up new zones.  I expect to see Moria, Mirkwood, and the rest opened up in the next year or so....  not sure if they're ever going to push South too far, as that really would get tricky to try and stay true to canon.

The story/lore/world is really very well integrated.  The Story quests are decent,  and the chain quests related to specific places and events can be pretty good.  "Retake Weathertop" is a good example, I think.

Still need alot more solo content in the 30 level range.  It's very dependent on group quests right now,  which are...  a little much the third time you have to do a "fight elites for 2 hours to finish off one quest" deal. 

Given that I consider sales charts as useful as Nielsen rating or whatever it's called, where did you get that chart from, Rose? Is it for North America? Europe? Australasia? World? Linky?

Here's the list from IGN:

http://ve3d.ign.com/articles/794/794007p1.html

However without specific box sales numbers those charts are almost totally useless.

Except when it's used in a completely unrelated juxtaposition like hrose did in this thread.

The only thing I can really go by is the player load on Silverlode and guild retention numbers. Seems as if the game is pretty stable using both of those measures since I have no problem finding a group in the evenings and the guild forums are not littered with asta la vista posts. Since Turbine is not a publicly traded company I could really give a shit about the number of boxes sold, if I had a block or 2 of their stock then I would worry about box sales.

As far as predictions go, I think the game will enjoy steady growth and this is the first game that will begin the steady leaching of WoW subs. WAR and AoC appear to be another 2 that will be chipping away at the giants throne, although I doubt it will be toppled for a long time to come. Still a hundred thousand here and a another hundred thousand there adds up to a lot of money subscription wise so I would imagine the bean counters at Blizzard are having night sweats.

Until they look and go...Hmmm, UO still has like 100k subs after all this time. People become attached to their first MMO. With all the money Blizz has made off this thing, its just a matter of how they can best milk it from here on. You know they expect churn. You know they are planning/working on their next HUGE MMO.

I believe the night sweats really start about the time of AoC launch. Its the only game I know that my old WoW guild will try out. Its also the only game I'll be able to suck my RL friends into. AoC will be big. We'll see how much Funcom has learned soon enough.

Me and some other friends JUST started LOTRO, the only reason is to kill time until AoC. So far, my wife and I seemed to have fun last night in the newbie zone. The graphics are a nice change of pace from WoW...but there is just so much WoW in the game. Not sure if I will buy it after my ten day trial.

Interview (http://www.gamesradar.com/gb/pc/game/news/article.jsp?releaseId=20070604151213374015&articleId=20070604151213374015&sectionId=1006)


No figures, so dunno.  HRose you hear that?  You have been silenced!

In par with the IGN meaningless numbers, I'll post my meaningless sale chart for EUROPE's last week (source? it doesn't matter when you are n the meaningless chart realm):


Oh look, good ole ChampMan pwned WoW. This means that Blizzard will announce server mergers in the next 3 months and will declare bankrupt in the next 6.

On a mildly different note, let me tell you a story. A true story, it happened to me.
Today I went to school to pickup son and well, some guys were handing out some free stuff to the kiddos. I was curious about it so I went in the crowd and investigated about it. When I was 12 they used to hand out free football stickers and sticker albums, and I loved that so I actually stepped in trying without shame to grab something for myself. But this guy was apparently giving out DVDs... what the hell?

World of Warcraft dvds.

There were these guys in front of all the major schools of Roma handing out free WoW 14 days trial DVDs. To 11 to 13 years old kid. I'd leave the commentary to you, but the next time I hear someone comparing WoW sci-fi sale figures (and investment) to regular down-to-earth MMOs I'll shoot.

Oh, almost forgot, but I think this is VERY interesting. In Italy there are some (lousy) recent laws about marketing and stuff like that, so you have to write stuff that you are supposed to be able to prove. So well, tied with the WoW dvd there was this ad flyer (in italian) claiming stuff like "JOIN 8 MILLION PLAYERS AROUND THE GLOBE(*) IN ONE ONLINE WORLD!

The (*)asterisk led to a very very very tiny note hidden in the bottom of the page saying this (in italian): (*) Based on the number of created accounts ("Basato sul numero di account creati") (I'll post a scan if you don't believe me).

Well, that was curious to me. Am I missing something? Didn't we used to teaste Lineage 2 numbers because they were based on created accounts? I was under the impression that 8 millions were the ACTIVE WoW accounts around the world. Should the italian flyer (it's an official Blizzard ad) be right and true, aren't 8 million "created account" worldwide much less than we all thought about the actual WoW figures?

LOTRO is a solid, pretty game with a few extremely glaring flaws that are making my eyes start to twitch everytime I log on now.

1) Money. Repair costs are too much, crafting is too much, auction fees are too much, training is too much. You can stay afloat but this needs a serious adjustment four weeks ago.

2) Travel. So I decide to play for the first time in a week. I bop over to Rivendell to craft a couple things (friends needed some gems cut so they can pursue their deluded crafting goals) and then hearth (map) out to wherever it was that I was questing. Only to find out I'm in a place with no bank, I forgot to drop off my bag full of crafting shit and I'm motherfucking thirty minutes from a bank. Travel just takes too long because I have to sit there and wait. One of the best things WOW ever did was the auto flight paths.

Travel's too expensive too.

3) Boar pieces. I don't want to kill anymore boars. The problem is that the Tolkien estate is very, very protective of their license and in the books as written there's not exactly a wealth of enemies to choose from. Spiders are bad, wolves are bad and there are orcs but... well, that's pretty much it. So I'm still killing boars to feed villages at level 25 and my friends are still doing it in their 30s and I just don't want to kill anymore fucking boars.

4) The UI/combat pacing (which I think are totally related) has been covered pretty well elsewhere.

I'm still subbed and I'm still having fun in short spurts but the game is really let down by a few poor design decisions that grate on me the more I play. I'm holding out for this first big content patch to see how it goes.

Oh, Monster Play. This was my big draw: world pvp over objectives that people actually cared about. Except Meneldor now has a good number of 40-50 people and nobody gives a fuck. Seriously, I've seen two players in the zone EVER. I think it has to do with the type of player it attracts. They're more interested in living in ME than pewpew which makes for a nice community but for shitty pvp.

Here are the charts for (http://www.chart-track.co.uk/index.jsp?c=p%2Fsoftware%2Fuk%2Farchive%2Findex_test.jsp&ct=110022&arch=t&lyr=2007&year=2007&week=21) the last week in the UK.  LOTRO at #4. 


I mention 11 because if you check the archive, it seems that about 4 weeks ago, GW: Nightfall was at #19.  This means than in a couple of weeks it will be the best game ever in the history of everything.

Given what you describe about the Italian laws around advertising, saying "x-million created accounts" is more sensible than having to reprint those promos every time subs change, or having someone come back later to file against them.  Sounds like a cautious legal team, to me.   The figures Blizzard/ VU uses in their press releases have always previously indicated they were referring to active accounts in the previous 30 days.

Like DDO being the fastest selling MMO?

Eve-Online is likely bigger than LOTRO currently. If they dare to repeat those claims why don't they give us subs numbers? It would clear out most of the suspects and guesses.

And pretty much every review I read about LOTRO, while praising it, repeats it's a "me too" MMO.

If you think about it the MMO market isn't exactly flourishing as a whole.

UO, EQ, DAoC, AC, Anarchy Online, DDO, Auto Assault, Vanguard, Matrix Online, SWG... These are all wrecks with nothing left to say. EQ2 survives off WoW's crumbs.

Where's this competition if you exclude those decaying wrecks and all the other works in project? Is really Eve currently the biggest and most solid MMO outside of WoW?

For a market supposed to be popular and growing the overall choice and quality sucks.

Unless they can show me where that information came from I'm assuming Games Radar just made that up. I.e. that's not a quote from Turbine.

That's a shit quest. No really, scavenger hunts are not interesting or challenging in any meaningful way. You guys are just so busy going crazy over not having a quest tell you what to do that you don't realise how it's still a shit quest. If you want to challenge a player you should, you know, challenge them, not give them a quest that is merely a function of time and luck. Make them solve a puzzle or fight a combat for the ring, not search rocks near ruins until they come across the right one. Don't make a player talk to or hover over NPCs until they find the right one to give them a clue euther, if the player wants to talk to NPCs they can do so of their own choice. I read every quest text, I talk to random NPCs all the time, but when all I want to do is finish a quest I don't want to be having to scavenger hunt for some lame NPC/item because not giving me accurate directions somehow adds to my game.

It's on. WoW quests and why you're given them incoming. All from memory.

Dun Morough

A dwarf wants you to collect meat from wolves for food supplies.
A dwarf wants you to kill troggs because they're a threat.
Your class trainer wants to see you.
A dwarf wants you to deliver the mail to someone away from the town.
A gnome wants you to pick up his tools that he had to leave behind because trolls ran him out.
When you deliver the mail it also has a letter for another dwarf and you have to deliver it.
A dwarf wants you to kill boars because there's too many.
When you deliver the mail, the dwarf wants you to kill trolls, he was sent to investigate them but beyond that I don't recall why he wants you to kill them.
A dwarf wants you to deliver beer to town, you then have to return the mug.
The troll quest dwarf wants you to retrieve his journal that he lost to the trolls because it contains his notes.
He then wants you to deliver a message to someone in the next dwarf town.
On the way you meet a guy who has the general "go to the inn" quest, I forget why he sends you there.
In the next town a dwarf wants you to gather boar ribs and rhapsody malt so he can make some ribs.
Another dwarf wants you to go to steelgrill's depot to deliver some tools.
In the depot 2 steam tank drivers want supplies for their tanks, and another dwarf wants you to retrieve and deliver some ammo to rumbleshot.
A gnome wants you to collect gears from lepper gnomes near gnomeregon because he needs them for a machine he hopes will reverse the leper gnome condition.
Once you get the supplies for the tanks one of them wants you to pick up some beer from another town.
The dwarf you delivered the troll message to wants you to explore a troll cave and report back to him what you find because he is responsible for assessing the threat of trolls.
When you go ask for the beer in the other town the dwarf says he will only give you the beer if you do him a favour. Namely he wants you to kill off some of the wildlife because they're getting a little numerous.
He also wants you to gather some shimmer weed from the trolls because he thinks he can make a good beer from it.
A dwarf woman here wants you to switch her beer with the thunderbrew lager because she wants to show them her beer is just as good.
When you give the dwarf the shimmer weed he wants you to deliver some of the beer to a relative of his.
Up in the mountains is a dwarf who wants you to retrieve some meats that he had to abandon due to a yeti.
When you return from the troll cave, that dwarf wants you to go to Ironforge to deliver his report.
At amberstill ranch they have a problem with another yeti who is killing their rams. Naturally they want you to kill it.
At the quarry they are having problems because troggs broke into the quarry and took over. They give you 2 kill quests to get rid of them.
In the northern pass a tank commander wants you to find one of his men who hasn't been seen for a while. When you find him he is dead and you avenge him by killing the bear that killed him.
In the southern pass you give the shimmer stout to the guy's relative and he wants you to give some to a friend of his.

Do you want me to move onto Loch Modan? Perhaps some other starting zones? Or a higher level zone? :P

What the fuck just happened here?  I think he was referring to normal people.

I still figure Blizz got a nice smack in the subs when LoTRO released. maybe it was just coincidence however I recieved the following email on 16 May


When EQII and WoW released a few years ago I was on the EQII bandwagon however I received WoW as a early Christmas present from my brother,who could be the poster child as a WoW fanboy. I played through the free 30 to keep family peace but never subscribed at the end of the first month. As near as I can recall this is the first email I received from them since canceling, maybe they wee just to busy counting their money but the timing was pretty good anyway. Even using the figure of 100k multiply that by $15 dollars and that by 12 months and it isn't exactly chump change. If they get similar hits from AoC and WAR I doubt the big man in the top floor corner office will be pleased no matter how much money he is still raking in.





 

Well then the logical conclusion is those people don't want to be engaged by that specific mechanic. It was even stated above that the wonderful ring quest got a lot of questions in the advice chat. That's just how some (many?) people work, they don't want to read the story, they just want the dinggratz, and if magically fun quest mechanic of obscuring facts gets in the way they will find the facts another way. There's nothing about the way quests are presented in WoW that make them any more or less memorable. The content of the quests sure can. If you read it (and there's something wrong with you if you did) you'd notice I didn't remember the reason why I had to go to the inn because my mind knew it was an inconsequential detail in an obviously contrived quest. I've done that quest so many times, you have no idea, but I don't recall anything about it beyond that it exists. On the other hand I could tell you all about some quests I've only done once or twice because the story stuck. All of them "held my hand" (read: didn't fuck me around) roughly an equal amount to every other quest.

You don't seem to understand WoW is an anomaly.

If I read it right they recognize the problem and are about to add some shitload of solo 30+ quests with the free Evendim update that hits the servers next week (June 13th)  Of course the quality of these or lack thereof remains to be seen.

I don't think it has much, if anything, to do with other games, honestly. Blizzard is just marketing directly to people who they know might be more willing to pony up for BC and re-sub than your average joe. I played for 18 months before cancelling in November. I have gotten 3 of those emails since early April, and got a nice shiny "10 day trial of the BUrning Crusade!" DVD in the mail right before memorial day.

Even if they lose 500k subscribers in the U.S. Blizzard is still not going to lose their license to print money hats any time soon.

My point was that the majority of the player base would be just as happy if they installed vending machines.  Go to the machine, drop in 5 wolf pelts, get a prize.  For the largest majority, the storyline is just a wall of text that they never bother to read.  Click guy with ?, get quest, read objective/reward, do quest, return for phat lewtz.  Ask them what they just did and most would be powerless to tell you.  The last few betas I was in, I submitted many reports on grammatical errors and location errors in quest text.  Very few other people noticed this. 

They don't give sub numbers because it doesn't really matter diddly shit to anyone but them. And that includes me.

If they are profitable, IT'S ALL GOOD. If they are not, everyone will know soon enough. The number of subs really is unimportant these days, especially with the 8-million pound gorilla in the room.


Your post actually shows the MMO market IS flourishing. Look at how many titles are out there, STILL MAKING MONEY. UO and EQ are approaching a decade in operation and are still profitable. DAoC, a small indy shop game, released stable, became the 3rd largest MMO at the time, and made the company enough that they snagged the Warhammer license even after cancelling another in-house project. Oh, and they got bought out for a pretty penny. Despite being shit shit shitty shit at release, Anarchy Online, Auto Assault, Matrix Online and Vanguard are STILL GOING. One presumes they even make money.

While I won't argue that most of those products are deriviative shit (or just boring because I've played so much of it), the market is huge if you count up subs across all the games. It's even bigger when you consider that there isn't really a mass market genre in the medium yet (as in Fantasy is not a mass market genre). And there's only 1 MMOG on a console.

There's no need to be the biggest dick on the block anymore. Having "The One True MMOG" was stifling the industry back when EQ was the big boy. Why? Because everything became an EQ clone, which is the crop of MMOG's you've listed. Having WoW be there with dev budgets and subscriber numbers that no one in the fucking world can compete with means you have to do something that is NOT WOW. We just won't see the fruits of that for 3-5 years yet.

Some people, maybe including Hrose, seem to think that as soon as MMOs fall off the PR pile-on that is CNN, or worse, IGN, they are no longer relevant, are dying, losing money, people are quiting, all that crap. And, as a build on this, if a new MMO doesn't launch to the fanfare of a million angry people on line at GameSpot in their local mall, it's a dud, only for stupid people who don't know any better.

These people are flat out wrong.

You can't measure MMOs the way you measure buy-a-new-game-every-three-months normal video games (and most console games). Believe it or not, most MMO players do not bounce to every single new MMO that enters beta. Most MMO players don't care there's a zillion alternatives. They don't burn through their current MMO frothing for more. They may eventually ditch the current game to follow some friends. But otherwise, well, there's a reason why UO, EQ1, AC1, AO, and blah blah blah still exist. There's a reason new normal video games are measured for maybe a dozen or two hours of solid play, maybe a score or two at best. Meanwhile, MMOs are designed for hundreds of hours of play.

Now, we could argue the relative quality of those hours, and have, and will. But that's not germaine here. Designing an MMO is much more than nail-biting the server architecture. The fundamentals of the experience are different. They need to be or you have no reason to be called an MMO.

Account attraction matters most at launch. Thereafter it's about attracting to offset attrition, to achieve aggregate retention. These games are lifestyles because their business model requires it. SOE has made much much more case from the EQ1 accounts they keep than any they attract at this point. It's declined, sure, but it's not closed. Plateaus feed business models.

Yeah, people forget to cancel their accounts.

You read whatever you like in what I write, but surely it isn't what I meant.

I was commenting the quality mostly. A MMO is dying when subscribers decrease over time. It is dying when devs assigned to the live team are halved in numbers. It is dying when money is moved elsewhere.

There are people who still play Ultima 7, but how's this relevant in the discussion where we talk about present and future?

Subs numbers matter, whether you want it or not, because they directly influence those three points above and whether the game will be kept on life support or it will grow and continue to be interesting.

The same about the TV. You could not give a damn if a TV series is losing audience. You may still like the show, so why should you care about how many others are watching it? Because the show, as result of the decline, will lose authors, will decrease in quality, will switch hands and may be finally get canceled.

Subs numbers, the same way as audience on TV, are what matters above everything else. It's what brings the money and the first reason why these games are made and are possible.

Moreover, if all those games are so successful and making money, including SWG, Vanguard, DDO and Auto Assault, then this would REALLY be the goose with golden eggs. By what you write EVERYTHING is successful and nothing ever fails. Neverending streams of money, successful, competent people who do everything at best. No one ever lose his job. It's all sunny with rainbows all over.

Classic.

I'm not saying that I'm saying I don't want to be PKed! Err..wait sorry. The tone in this post reminded me of a different discussion.

I'm sorry. I hereby confirm that Darniaq knows my opinions better than myself and is entitled to paraphrase and warp everything I write because he knows better.

Don't you people realize that you have to outsell World of Warcraft every week for 6 consecutive years or it is impossible for you to be successful in the MMO business?

No one knows what you write.  Almost every person you ever have had a conversation with has had to guess at what you are trying to say and attempt to come up with something relevant.

This entire thread is a case in point.  TAXI TO VICTORY has crap all to do with LoTRO's launch and crap all to do with ANYTHING in this thread and yet there was three pages of discussion of it because no one has a clue wtf you are talking about.

edit:  Heck, the whole premise of this thread is a conversation you were having with another entirely different group of people somewhere else and everyone here is just trying to figure out what the hell is going on by working their way backwards to whatever the hell point you were trying to make.

HRose when are you going to bring the Cesspit back to life? I miss your ramblings.  :?

Learn2Read.

SWG was not a failure, it just sucked as a game. But it made money. It must still be making money, because no one has closed it down yet. Failed MMOG's get closed down.

Success for an MMOG is making a profit. Because it's, you know, a business. It may not be much of a profit, it may not be as much as the developer wanted (SWG), but if it makes a profit or breaks even, it gets to continue to live. Fuck, HORIZONS is still living, and it's a failure as a game and you'd think a business. But it still lives, so its making someone somewhere money. Why do you think there can be only one successful MMOG and everything that isn't #1 is a failure? There is more than 1 brand of toilet paper, more than 1 brand of hot sauce. There are more TV shows than the #1 TV show, more than one TV network than the #1.

The days of the One, True MMOG for all are over.

It seems that once the ball is rolling it's still better to keep it moving than stop. The *live* service may not continue to lose money but it doesn't mean that money wasn't lost. Somewhere money was lost or both Matrix and Vanguard wouldn't get sold.

We know that Auto Assault lost a lot of money. Still it runs. So things, under the hood, are probably a little more complex than this superficial level.

What I think is that it's not exactly easy to make a MMO that makes a profit. When instead in your words basically all MMOs are successes. Go make a game in your basement because you'll likely succeed, we know where that mantra lead and how it is close to reality. It would be an industry where no one loses nor risks and again I don't think this utopia corresponds to reality. I think instead this is a very hard industry where we had a lot of failures, where people lost jobs, money and all the rest. Pretty much like in EVERY other industry where the risk is high.

It was said that LOTRO HAS TO succeed or it would became really, really hard to find founds again to make a MMO.

I haven't said this.

What I wrote before is essentially because I think it's curious when you figure out that Eve may be the 2nd MMO in our market. Think about suggesting a new player a game. There's WoW, then there's EQ2 that is basically the same. And a list of titles I'm sure you wouldn't recommend. For how big is this genre we don't really have outstanding, representing titles. We don't have examples of excellence, just a pool of general mediocrity. In other genres there are more relevant voices and good examples.

Again, that was a personal consideration. I wasn't implying that other MMO don't exist, just a smaller niche in the niche.


Healthy, real competition assumes that there's a small gap between #1 and all the rest, though. Even an alternation.

Blizzard's numbers really need to be ignored when comparing MMOs.

It is an anomoly, just like Gone With the Wind was an anomoly, just like The Moustrap is an anomoly in the London theatre.

If MMOs in general were so hard to make money with, then no company that had previously made an MMO (especially ones you consider a failure because they only have xyz subscribers) would be making more of them. It is a niche market that has a huge upside as far as continued revenue stream is concerned. Constant revenue, even at a meager 1.5million a month (100k subscribers) is still a good chunk of change.

No, we don't.

That makes no sense, because you are describing an MMORPG-player archetype that simultaneously has yet to play their first game and who is as bored with playing derivative examples of the genre as jaded gamers who have been playing these games for years. Thankfully for WoW, EQ2, LotRO and other ultimately derivative games, that player does not exist. People for whom LotRO is their first MMORPG do not typically play for two weeks and then quit in disgust because "its just another fucking Diku clone" or because "its similar to WoW but not as well produced". They do not have those frameworks for comparison.

WoW is well produced, it has a skillfully plagiarized theme, entertaining humorous touches, and a huge community supporting it. The huge numbers of people playing it aren't doing so simply because its the best MMORPG - most WoW players had not played MMORPGs before - they came because they played Blizzard games. It represents a victory of branding over a very small segment of the video games industry. Games that are similar but which are better executed won't necessarily usurp the market position of WoW, but that doesn't mean that they cannot attract newcomers, and satisfy their online gaming desires well.

Good then. You aren't losing your mind :)

Subs-numbers matter, but not in the sense that many use them nor how they're shown on MMOGcharts. The exampe I always use is Eve and SWG. Numbers that CCP would love to have were not enough for SOE to stay the course. This speaks to the business needs of each company more than any comparison of straight subscriptions ever could.

If a game is still live, it's successful enough. No, it's not going to change the world. No, it won't spawn iterations. I lament the fact that great concepts die because they are tied to games deemed "niche" or "a failure". But we can't call an outright failure game that a business entity still thinks is worth keeping open. All we can say is that it didn't achieve its potential, or didn't achieve expectations. And that is a strong point as well. It just doesn't mean "failure" because it's still got people paying to play it.

So while you may think a game is a failure when the live support team is reduced or the ongoing budget is halved, I see a game that still has a live support team and still has an ongoing budget at all.

This is the reason why very few MMORPGs have closed. This, to me, is the much more important brass ring this genre has to grab. Everyone wants to talk WoW, or more modestly, FFXI. But those are abberations, successful due to variables specific to that IP, technology and team. I'd rather have people consider DAoC, UO, AC1, games that were not niche at their height, considerably niche now when compared to the whole, but still there at all, long since having paid for themselves thrice or more, still being enjoyed by hundreds of thousands of people, still worth paying attention to for what they do.

Basically, it's what you said at the top of page 6: "It seems that once the ball is rolling it's still better to keep it moving than stop." It is. This is truth.

New games will always build upon the old if done right. They will cannabalize the genre and add new players to it. WoW is the first game I recommend to most people I know. But I also know some folks who just wouldn't fit there, so have recommended other games. There's a reason I keep using Club Penguin. This is awesome for first-timers, because it's so low-impact. I've recommended Eve to real people. Heck, I recommended Lineage 2 to real people, and three of them have done nothing but for two solid years.

We know who to talk to for all things MMOG. They do not. So if you put yourself out there with them where they are, you can ensure they don't think this whole this is DIKU.

Doing that helps put the subs-numbers in perspective.

Google auto assault ncsoft loss. Yes, we do. Unless 13.1 million dollars isn't a lot of money. The game only sold 17,000 copies worldwide.

No, you know what Auto Assault did last year.  You have no clue where it's at right now financially.

edit:  Just because the game didn't do WoW numbers does not mean it won't eventually have been a money making investment.  You people seem to think that these things aren't businesses that grow over time.  There is a reason it's almost impossible to kill an MMO and that's because they really do make money even if some of them are much slower at it than others.

AA has a live team, it gets patches and new content.  It has people playing it and paying for it.  A little effort and polish and it could continue to grow just as Eve did.  They probably only have to hit 20,000 subscribers for a couple of years to show a profit.

It sure hasn't made back 13.1 million dollars. It hasn't gained enough new players to warrant opening a second server after merging into just one. It's no longer mentioned in any official NCsoft capacity at all. It's not doing well.

The original statement is still valid. The game lost a lot of money. The game hasn't even begun to make 10% of that amount back. The statement wasn't "The game is currently losing money". It may be operating in the black. But it's going to take a lot longer than 6 months of operating to dig itself out of that hole.

Hrose is basically right. Leaving the servers on is not an indication of profitability.

Servers still running means that the game is making net revenue in that month only. It says nothing about overall profitability. Running a MMORPG is not costly at all, the cost is in the initial development. There is almost no reason to turn a MMORPG off once it is on.

Yeah usually I want to stick up for him though, this time I just dont get the angle.  Who fucking cares about LOTRO enough to start a thread bashing it?  Fuck'n A.  Lets post videos of throwing paraplegics in the pool on youtube instead or something.

*missing word found, more news at 11am*

Hire David Bowman and then try saying that.

You made me hungry for silly shooting cars. I'm re-downloading Auto Assault 14 days trial right now.

Derail.

Fact: Football Manager got released in November 2006 and it's still going stronger than Burning Crusade (in Europe).

Now what the fuck are the Collyers thinking?
They already earned a long time ago a (still valid) license to print money with Championship (now Football) Manager, but they are missing the chance to get the license to print money WITH THEIR FACES ON IT if they don't develop ChampMan the MMO soon.

Football Manager Live (http://www.sigames.com/static/index.php) announced at end of April.  Official site here (http://www.footballmanagerlive.com/en/article/88/index.html)  And just because original ideas are always had by more than one person, Football Superstars (http://www.footballsuperstars.com/) has also been announced.

Keep up!  :-P

Well.

Holy.

I can't speak for anyone else, but when I say "successful enough" it's not just measuring profitability. You can't just look at that number in this industry because if the industry did, there'd be no industry. There'd not be an Xbox 360. There'd not be a PS3 :)

Basically, "success" is "achieving business interests". That could include profitability on that one specific effort, but sometimes it does not. SOE is a great example. We can rant against the inequities of any specific title, and they could only be internally interested in the aggregate of folks they convert to the All Access Pass. They maybe know the average All Access Pass player is not going to be banging on the client and server backend of more than one, maybe two, MMORPGs a week. This could be very high margin for them, the reason they take almost any MMO off the street. Their per-unit sales are less important than their game-specific accounts than their All Access Pass accounts. If that's the case, MxO is successful.


Even keeping an MMOG that nevers get new content running is costly. Bandwidth, hardware, salaries, game masters, CSR. Then add in the fact that all MMOGs do get new content, so add in creative needs, project management/production. Unless you're talking about a single server managed by an intern on a game that never changes, the cost of keeping an MMORPG alive after launch is absolutely going to exceed the cost of making it in the first place down the road. When that tipping point is looming is when companies decide whether to keep going or not.

All that are still going are doing so because it is successful enough in achieving business interests measured, laterally, just as the costs for keeping an MMOG going are.

The huge numbers of players in WoW is because it IS the best MMORPG out. Add to the fact that there is Blizzard's name to get initial business and a ton of word of mouth from there. I don't have the numbers in front of me, but my guess is sold well at launch and steadily doubled numbers over time. Then every bitch and his brother started talking about how good the 'crack' is, got em to try it once, and hooked yet another sub for Blizzard. I know I personally introduced around 10 people to the genre and game. And many of those people got there spouses and co-workers playing, many of which never heard of Blizzard.

I tried the same type of thing with SWG (before I realized it was crap) and guess what? The retention wasn't there. So my point is, they may have came because of the blizzard name (or at least tried it because of it) but they stayed because it is the best MMO out, and their friends are there.

Same thing happened with me. I had a friend who never played MMOs who started spending weekends at my house during open beta to play WOW on my machine. Every person in my circle of friends except one married couple played WOW at some point.

Yep... funny to me how people try to equate WoW success (in the US) with Diablo/Starcraft/Warcraft.  Initial sales maybe... 2 years later?  Nope, there has to be something else in the game keeping people there.  Honestly I could find myself still playing that game... which is just sad as there as SO many things I DON'T like about it.  But, the things I DO like are really quite enjoyable and not reproduced in any other game on the market.

An interesting sidenote about my group of friends who played WOW. My friends who played WOW never played a Blizzard RTS. 2 of them played Diablo 2. My hardcore Blizzard rts friends, the married couple, didn't play WOW.

I thought it was kind of funny to be honest. The rest of us knew very little about the gameworld when we first started WOW.

LOL, fanbois. You'd think I put WoW down or something. Lern2read. People aren't playing the game simply because its the best MMORPG. Though honestly, I'd leave it up to the individual to determine whether it is the best, since that's pretty subjective. However, the numbers certainly suggest that people value production, er "polish" and/or following the crowd.

A lot of people I know who still play wow (and mirror the reasons I toy with playing again) play almost entirely for the social interaction. It is like an irc channel with other things to do at the same time.

Plus I think it is using subliminal messages to keep people hooked  :-P

Thats typical of all MMOGs - people form bonds in the games and retain subscriptions in order to maintain the 'chat network'. People like to chat - even while driving cars in busy traffic. Of course, it does help if you have many servers of a couple of thousand people logged on at any given time rather than a handful of empty servers. But its a good argument for the single world model that EVE uses.

WoW is hardly the BEST MMORPG and you people all have crappy friends.

Okay it's sort of quote from Turbine. This is what Jay Anderson had to say in the Slashdot interview (see this topic here (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=10205.0)):
I assuming he's talking about subscription-based MMORPGs -- i.e. I doubt he's claming LOTRO is bigger than something like RuneScape. So basically he's guessing that LOTRO is larger than EQ and since SOE is now totally tight-lipped about subscription numbers it's going to have to stay a guess for presumably quite some time.

I swear, I'm getting a shirt made that says "Your favorite MMORPG sucks, newb.".

God I love The Onion.

The best MMORPG is UO!  Rawrghrawrh!

/foam

Just getting it out of my system.

Are all these games just kind of running together in anyone else's head, or is it just me?  World of Lord of the Warhammer Ringscraft.  Whatever.  The only thing that even has a distinct outline on my radar is Conan.

I so want that shirt. Please make it real. I want it I want it I want it.

Just to add to the pointless guesswork I've seen that SirBruce wannabe site (http://www.mmogdata.com/) with hypothetical subs numbers. Nothing reliable but his numbers actually look more believable than SirBruce. Which doesn't make them any more true, but they still seem convincing.

In particular he gives detailed SOE numbers that look more believable than all they officially released.

Anyway, it's interesting to notice that in the small pack (http://www.mmogdata.com/files/P2P_MMOG_50000.jpg) basically every title is tanking (basically all of them have fallen below 20k and most of them below 10k). If that's true it means that the market is so stuck that what isn't in the leading pack just finishes to get cannibalized. Speaking about overall market growth of the genre.

It's quite interesting because there was this common claim that every big release also brings new players to old titles. Well, it seems exactly the opposite.

The other interesting observation is that there is NOTHING western-based between the 180k of EQ2 and the 8.5M of WoW. This means that the single titles have ALL lost a massive number of players without exceptions. And what I wrote earlier on the thread may be real: Eve_Online current numbers may make it on par with EQ2 and the fucking second biggest MMO in the west.

Eve-Online. The game believed to be the niche in the niche. The spreadsheet game. The impossibly high learning curve and slow, brained gameplay.

So, as I wrote before, the western industry hasn't been able in years to put SOMETHING, something just passable that can sit at least a little higher. But not just that... Even something that goes at least at half of EverQuest. EQ had solid 400k+, DAoC solid 250k+. The point isn't that those game are now old and have already been replaced. The problem is that there's this BLACK HOLE right there.

Not only WoW grows. But all other competitors are losing subs quite consistently and nothing comes to replace them. The gap increases.

DAoC and UO are competing to who has less subs. DAoC fell from its standard 250k to 70k or so and the number looks reasonable and even conservative if you look at the live stats of their servers.

The SOE's numbers as they are given in the charts:

- EQ 140k
- EQ2 180k (surpass!)
- SWG 50k
- Vanguard 40k

Sum all of SOE and maybe you go close to what EQ had.

Wow, those charts are really hard to read.  For example, the headings of 50k-150k would imply a chart that goes from 50k-150k but that is apparently not the case.

Don't even get me started on the colour scheme...

So you're saying that there is some sort of MMO subscription singularity that sucks in subscribers, who are then unable to escape, and are eventually crushed into tiny bits or spit out into an alternate MMO universe where things are the opposite of here?

Completely overlooking the fact that you're using some other random guesser's MMO Chart (as opposed to Bruce's random guesses) site as a reference, you're still just talking out of your ass. Some games lose subs.  Maybe WoW gains them. Maybe those people stop playing MMOs. You don't have to have absolute conservation of "matter" when it comes to sub numbers. At the end of the day, besides corporate bean counters, who really CARES about subscription numbers?

The industry is not going to ZOMG SUDDENLY lose all of its potential to get more money to make more games. It's not. All of your handwaving won't change that. If anything, a focus on sub numbers only serves to make shittier games in an attempt to "beat WoW."

You're also overlooking two other things about MMOGChart/Data/Guesswork+PressRelease+claimed-insider-knowledge:

• There is no business justification for releasing numbers. The industry has learned. The only people who compare these numbers are self important ranters who either want to be seen as aligning themselves with the leader/underdog, are trying to pull some VC funding from niave sources*, or who are trying to make some point about there being some fundamental definition of "fun". None of this benefits the folks who are the source of these numbers.
• These numbers are too Western focused to matter. A nice historical snapshot of the niave days of everyone learning together, but not indicative of how one can make money in this space. Even that "business model" chart is far too incomplete to be of any use to anyone who wants to look deeper than a nice pie chart.

Feel free to interpret, but the source is almost irrelevant. Gone are those days Hrose. The platform, in its entire breadth, is simply too broad to be measured in aggregate. And anybody who's entering this space isn't measuring it that way anymore. There's no reason to because the needs of every business is different.

* And venture capitalists are no longer niave.

I can honestly say from the ones I've met so far and tried working with that VC's now act as banks, and Angels act as VC's.  If anything, that's what's changed since 1999.


As for LotRO... I played it hard for a bit, but haven't been back or played any MMO for awhile.  One thing that did stand out for me from any other MMO is that a good number of people seem happy to never leave the Shire.  They get to 13-14 and reroll.  I wonder if Turbine increased the level cap somehow with more instanced quests for Shire-centric stuff what would happen.  They still have to open the South Downs so we'll see maybe.  The Shire IMO is really well designed, more than so than any other newbie zone in an MMO I've seen.

On profitability, two things to remember. First is that if you're making more revenue in a month from subs than you're paying out, it may be worth keeping the servers on--but some games may never reach a net profit even with the servers on, because the real issue is the initial investment it cost to make the game. If you're $5 million in the hole before the game ever goes live, make 200,000 in sales of boxes  and you net  $25,000/month after live, you've got a while to go before net profit. But if you're a small company, it might be worth it to do so just to get back to even. For a big company, you really don't want to have such a weak payoff, and you may choose to just swallow the loss (or very small net profit) rather than run a whole operation just to get a trickle of revenue.

Second, the culture industry is a weird place in these terms, with accounting practices that are often designed to conceal revenue and profit flows plus extremely complex parcelings out of revenue. Games may be a little simpler, but particularly if we're talking a licensed property, I'm sure there's some real intricacies involved. There are films where even with public filings of information, it's not entirely clear whether they made net profits, or who got paid off out of the revenue.

Lots of words about numbers every attention seeker could make up (just to have people like you speculate about it).

I think those numbers are all way low.  Like, by 3x or 4x and possibly more. According to those numbers EQ2 has ~6-7000 subscribers per server (19 servers).  All those servers hit high medium loads at peak with four or five of them in the red most of the day.  I've never been in a zone there without a good portion of other people in it.  Just my 'impression' but I think they are way underestimating the number of people who pay and only log rarely.  A good rule of thumb is 8x the numbers of users to subscribers at peak usage for most heavily used things like telephones.  I've seen stuff saying 12x for things like gym memberships.  I wouldn't be surprised to see the medium load EQ2 servers had 3k concurrent users or more at peak.

I'd easily put EQ2 still up around the 5 hundred K or above area.  How's that for numbers pulled out of my ass?  It's easily just as accurate as that site or Sir Bruce.

That chart was funny. My favorite was FFXI churning at lower than 100k when it's one that actually releases numbers and is over half a million. Ethnocentrism for the win.

Your color mistake (not that you can be blamed for that).

FFXI is given at 500k and not updated since Sep 06. You're probably mistaking it for Darkspace (what the fuck is Darkspace?).

I noticed that Raph linked and commented the chart on his blog. I'm not sure if he considers it reliable.

Bruce has claimed the same thing. The problem, of course, is that usually insider information is given anonymously and in secret. Without substantiation, it's all arguable. Was the insider disgruntled? Did they understand the question? Does their business model report things the way these charts require them? Was there really an insider in the first place?

Unless the numbers a) matter; b) support some method of direct comparison; and, c) independently verifiable through means that support public discussion, it's just strong opinion presented through contrived interpretation.

There hasn't been a chart posted on here for ages so here's the latest UK chart up to w/e 2nd June:


LOTRO down two places to 7.  Maybe Abalieno was right!  But wait, what's this? Burning Crusade down 3 places to number 6!  Oh noes!  The sky is falling!  WoW itself has fallen from number 1 spot in the budget charts. This must mean the WoW Taxi To Victory is obviously over.

Not to be totally UKcentric - The Irish charts show that people prefer to play with Norton Internet Security over WoW: BC (this being the entertainment charts)  LOTRO doesn't feature at all obviously because the game isn't fun or original and couldn't possibly explained by not being released in Ireland yet.  The Denmark charts show that LOTRO dropped from number 2 to number 3 in w/e 2nd June.  However, the week before, it went up from 5th place to 2nd.  Damn those crazy Danes - they're fluctuating and unpredictable charts have made my head hurt.

You must have read the Cesspit, though?  Where he would post a bajillion broad predictions a week, mainly revolving around Warhammer and his sense of betrayal.  Then a year later, when the law of averages suggests that a few of them had to have come to pass, there would be a link and a "you heard it here first, giev job please keke.. PS I gave up blogging for real this time".

The straw-man in the OP here is that there were loads of people Geldoncasting WoW and granting its crown to Lotro.  Falconeer knocked that one on the head pretty well.

I think it's one of Raph's ideas that you basically get your sub numbers around launch, and the process from then on is basically static, with a falling-away in the longer run.  Of course, there are exceptions, like Eve and WoW on the goodside and crapfests on the other.  But it's a fair model.

If a game is operating at a profit, then it is not losing money. Digging itself out of a hole has nothing to do with it. As long as you do not sell or write off the assets, a game making a profit is simply a good or bad investment. NCSoft chose to write off the development costs of Auto Assault. Another company with a different tax and reporting regime might have chosen to keep the investment on the books.

Equating current return on investment with underlying value of the investment is quite inappropriate in the Internet age. Silicon Valley is full of examples of investors putting money into a startup, and selling out at a big markup with the company is still making losses. As long as a game is making an operating profit, there is no sense in turning it off. Unless you can sell the code and artwork to recoup your investment. Maybe your game will one day become fashionable, and turn into a good investment from a bad one.

I logged into Auto Assault over the weekend to give it a try and see what I could learn about its design.

On a whim, I did a /who for the entire server on my side.  The response came back 27 people.  Granted, it was around midnight, and that's one of three factions, but, yeah.

Say what you will about EVE and CCP and crew... but it has always impressed me that they put their active players right there on the log-in.  Of course, they could be corrupt, lying thiefs who publish misleading numbers.

But ever since EQ1 stopped posting numbers and moved to "light, medium, heavy" or whatever that junk was I have always thought them spineless.

I'll reserve kudos to CCP until we see how they handle the inevitable decline. Even WoW will stop reporting subs when they start going down. It's the way of business. You only publicly report your growth. Declines are when you turn off /who_all, concurrent logins and all that stuff. And that's not because you're ashamed of the numbers either. It's because once the orgy of hype starts to subside, companies realize the only people who care about the numbers as they were reported on ranters looking to win some forum epeen argument or folks trying to convince some cash out of some pockets.

While there are those who religiously follow the numbers, it gets noticed by everyone when they have been released and suddenly they start getting obfuscated by loads.

Inevitable? The inevitability of Eve decline was like... Two years ago.


DAoC still shows log in numbers. Moreover I don't know anyone who would play a game or stop playing because of log in numbers. If a game becomes empty that's perceivable no matter of hidden or shown stats.

Those numbers aren't the problem, they are just a symptom. You can enjoy hiding the symptoms of a problem, but it's just a little pathetic. Hiding/showing your numbers won't make you gain or lose players. Exactly because those numbers are interesting only for those who are analyzing, not for those who are playing.

At least in television there's a third-party organization that measures the audience with a common standard. But even in that case the audience doesn't influence the audience itself, it's just, again, a symptom.

The food derail was longer than the original discussion so it's been split off into General:

http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=10256.0

No joke. But as a business, you realize most of the people analyzing have no vested interest in your business. Maybe it's for their own, a competitive advantage or to build a new game. Or maybe it's armchair designers. In either case, the company posting the numbers gets no benefit from doing so unless they are on top in general (WoW for DIKU) or on top of a specific sub-category (like, who exactly is the primary competitor trying to leech DAoC's current playerbase?).

It's not about enjoyment or subversion. It's about responsibility to one's IP. People might not quit a game if the game itself starts to decline. But they have a higher probability of not joining a game they see in decline. Whether you think that's a good thing or not doesn't change the practice.

It's an okay game. Character models leave a lot to be desired. The enviroment and background are simply amazing though. It wasn't very often when I was playing WoW that I would stop and say oh wow about how an area looked. Lotro has done that to me on several occasions. That being said the gameplay is nothing groundbreaking and the people in game are somewhat childish. Either anti wow bashing without clear reasons or lore junkies who are taking the game far to seriously. Actually to be honest neither of those are in the majority but it is annoying regardless.

I'm an ex wow gamer, five 70's, done it all seen it all, burned out trying to find a new mmo home.
I've been nothing but dissapointed so far.

First attempt was LOTRO. Pretty at first, love the LOTR lore, but the combat system... sucks.
It reminds me too much of playing a laggy wow. I dunno what it is i just cant get into it. That and like someone else said, chain quests are taken to the ridiculous extreme and the quest log is crap. I had a friend and we spent all our time TRYING to get to a step on a quest we could actually do together. Crafting is retarded and confusing as well.

I got to about level 16 and threw my hands up in the air and said enough. Queueing attacks just isnt my idea of fun. That and my champion was extremely un fun to play. All his attack icons were the same color, which was kind of annoying, and all were subtle variations of the same crap. a 2 hit whirling attack or a 3 hit spinning attack! oh the CHOICES! that game sucks horribly and I can't understand anyone who thinks otherwise. The whole monster thing is a novelty, and not fun for long. Another gripe I had was (maybe this is my personal problem because my system isnt top end and i had it on medium settings) The whole inventory system looks like someone did it in crayon, its very unclear and hard to tell what things are. At least thats how it was for me. I had to constantly mouse over things 1 at a time to figure out what was what, cause the models were so hard to discern I couldnt flat out tell from looking.

The last patch made some nice UI improvements, IMO.

Now, when you mouse over stuff, it turns yellow around the bottom border, so no more annoying stuff with getting confused by the almost greyed-out combat hotbuttons anymore. The inventory icons have been redone, and it's easier to find classes of things by icon and color. For instance, all crafting materials are on a light green background, while quest items are still a darker green. 

I rather like the game, but I never played WoW, so perhaps I'd feel differently if I had.

my main gripe was the combat system i think... that and i had to turn the settings down pretty low whenever i got within a mile of bree or i watched a slideshow.

We're the people who didn't like WoW.

I dunno, the combat is a bit strange, but I got used to it, I guess.

I run the game on a circa SWG-launch machine (Raedon 9000 vid card with a whopping 64 meg of vram), and it looks fine to me. Granted, I don't have much in the way of upgrade options at the moment, but that's cool with me. Heck, I don't get much slideshow at all...I just turn off floating names in high population areas.

If you're looking for the same sort of fun you had in WoW, you won't like LoTRO. It mimics a lot of the same stuff, but gets them just wrong enough to be alienating.

However, it does make up for it in other ways. The biggest is the story. If you scoff at the concept of story, here again, LoTRO is not going to please. You gotta want to be part of the story not directly written by the books (but references them enough for you to say "hey, I remember that) or you're better off in a game less reliant on lore as a fundamental component of immersion.

I've read most of the books available for both Middle Earth and Warcraft, as when I get into a game I really want to get into the lore of the land. These are not high prose novels of course, but they do help out the game worlds.

The thing is that, within the game, LoTRO does a much better job of interacting with the story of the books than WoW does. There is the sense of discovery and advancement that the static world of Azeroth just doesn't have.

If that sort of stuff matters to you, it is easier to accept the limitations of LoTRO. I played a Fire Mage all the way through WoW, about as realtime as one can get. By comparison, LoTRO feels like I'm playing WoW underwater :)

I liked WoW but I enjoy LOTRO much more. The game "vibe" is different. WOW is all about the Leetness and the Epeen. Lotro so far is not as focused on that. Also, LOTRO is expanding at a rate that should make the blizzard devs hang their heads in shame. We'll have our third major content addition in less than 6 months, how long did it take for WOW to add a few measley dungeons?

Honestly, DarkAngel's whole post makes no sense to me. The champion is a slightly more sturdy combat-specced Rogue with less overhead. (no poisons.) LOTRO went even further to removing cockblocks in some areas than WOW did. Hunters don't need arrows. Casters don't have to carry around stones to power spells. (Though admittedly that system was neat in concept it got frustrating having no bag space as a warlock.)

Interestingly, I think LOTRO instances are harder and more interesting than WOW instances so far which is odd because the rest of the game is much easier than WOW it feels like to me.

The champion was not fun to play. In groups I'd run up to whack something the hunters would kill as i got there anyway. The whole arrow thing to me isn't a plus, just because blizzard didn't emphasize it the right way doesn't mean its bad. They coulda really ran with that idea much farther, i.e., different kinds of arrows for different situations, arrows that ignore armor some, or magic based arrows that never run out, poison arrows.. but it just ended up being whatever vendor level arrow you were available to use at the time. I totally understand what the champion is trying to be. It just isn't much fun at being it. A rogue in wow can sap, blind, gouge, poison, vanish, sprint, evade...  with my champion i could basically, do some random combo generating attack, then a combo finisher. Thats it. Its the equivalent of spamming SS and Evisc all day and thats really all there is to it. You just keep getting different variations of SS and Evisc. (besides the aoe attacks, those were cool ill admit)

As a level 50 Champion I must say you, as many WoWers with lots of level 70 chars, have the MMORPG experience of my kitten (and I envy you for that. You are new). Welcome to the world of autoattack, hotbar skills and archetypical classes.

so you are saying because you are level 50 in lotr I'm new? Levelling in LOTR is a joke, and mindless grind like it is in just about every other mmo. (i.e., means nothing to me) If the champion suddenly starts becoming fun 50 levels into the game, clue me in. The reason everyone constantly compares other mmo's to wow is because when we go to play another one it always feels like a massive DOWNGRADE. Look at LOTR's quest log and wow's quest log, enough said. (why is this a problem you ask? because lotr takes chain quests to an absurd level.)  But you are basically saying LOTRO represents what MMO's normally are I guess? by your snarky comment about "welcome to the world of auto attack" ? Don't you mean "welcome to the world of boring, where this has been done 500 times over." Its everquest 2 with a different paint, and WORSE combat system. Because wow was innovative and made combat more flashy, and responsive, doesn't mean its any less an MMO than LOTRO.

Oh and the reason I mentioned the rogue in above post is because...


He compared it to a combat spec rogue in wow. My rebuttle was more along those lines. Honestly its as if you are saying MMO's are supposed to be boring and the same as each other. The champion class was mundane till level 16 when i dropped him. 90% of fights in a group I'd run up to attack a mob, and it would be dead, and i'd still be stuck standing there doing whatever attack i selected. The quests are somewhat interesting, the graphics are alright, but im sorry the gameplay is crap. Not because its not like wow, but because its BORING and UNRESPONSIVE. When I select "Power Attack Skill XYZZFDFLSK" I want it to do said skill. Not 3 seconds later. Like someone said in another thread,I feel as if i'm directing the battle rather than participating in the battle. This might be fine for you, or for other people who didn't like the flashy instant feel of wow combat, fine. But its obviously not for everyone, or LOTR woulda stayed #1 in sales longer.

LotRO is not nearly as combat-centric as WoW.  I'm good with that.  Once I got bored with fighting in WoW, there wasn't anything else to do.  LotRO has other things for me to do when I get tired of combat, plus it's got a slower pace that I appreciate.  Opinions, keke.

T-shirts for sale! T-shirts for sale! Three Unique Slogans to choose from, including "Your favorite MMORPG sucks, newb!", "Your opinion is WRONG" and "Stop disagreeing with my opinions, jerk!".

You got to level 16. That's basically 3-5 hours of play. One thing you have to realize is that the abilities you get at level 1 in LOTRO are still going to be with you at level 50. Everything scales up. In Wow, you were getting rank1 of your skill and a few levels later, you were getting rank2. In Lotro, it doesn't work that way. When you get a new ability, you get a new tool to define your job. At level 16, you don't have many tools yet. You can't really comment on what a champion can do or is at that point.

The champion role in LOTRO is AE dps. His whole existence is about killing waves of non elite quickly. Later on, he gets the possibility to tank a bit more if he equips the right traits.

As for the rest, it's a matter of taste. No point in arguing about it.

I am saying that MMORPGs aren't different enough to justify the crap you wrote, unless you are inexperienced about the genre. You basically described any non-caster class in any DIKU so far.

Still, you felt comfortable enough to go all out on the Champion class you "totally understood" in a whopping 16 levels. (So yes, I am saying you don't know what you are talking about)


So long for the most popular class in the whole game.

I think you, as many others, just don't like LotRO combat (I hate the enque-ing too). But that has nothing to do with classes.
And honestly, I think after your "5 level 70" in WoW, I am pretty sure you'll never feel that kind of excitement anymore, ever. I could be wrong, but that kind of "burning out" never heal.


EDIT: added a quote and a few parenthesis.

uh.. what game are you playing?

level 16 in 3-5 hours? I don't buy that. It was more like 2 weeks of casual play. (an hour or two here and there) granted I started at launch and wasted lots of time exploring.

The max level is only FIFTY. level 16 is almost 1/3 of the way there. If a class isn't fun by then I dont think much is gonna change, like i said if i'm wrong and the champion gains some class defining abilities that make it more interesting and/or enjoyable to play, im all ears. At level 16 I had virtually nothing that wasn't just some sort of attack or finisher that I'd add to my little queue in a fight.  I'm not saying I know everything about the champion class. I'm saying nothing happened from level 1 to 16 to give me any indication the class was gonna become more interesting. Again with the almighty assuming on this forum, Jesus! I simply said I found the champion class unfun to play, allofa sudden I claim I'm a master of LOTRO and the Champion class? well I'm sorry, to give you a comparison, When I first loaded wow, I rolled an Orc Warlock, and combat was interesting from level 1. I rolled champion on LOTRO, and every level i found myself trying hard to not reroll because 'hopefully this class will be worth it". Was really not wanting to end up with a bunch of low level alts. These are just my opinions, no need to get all defensive. You are saying I described basically every Diku MMO's combat? I beg to differ. In every other mmo i've played, I click a button. Something happens. I don't wait for it to happen. Its a minor annoyance sure, but even many LOTRO fans have admitted they can't stand it either. It took me only 16 levels to realize a) i hated my class b) the combat system was driving me nuts

but...  :dead_horse: - sorry.

My sub is still active, but I logged in/out my character last weekend so I wouldn't get clipped from my guild list. Otherwise, haven't touched it in a month. The storyline and instances are great. But the queued combat and lack of abilities (minstrel has one ability worth casting -- the large heal) and insane difficulty in finding a group that is on the same quest/instance just wore me down. I really really wanted to like the game, but my sub runs out the 30th and I probably will drop.

Could this be the first in a new wave of "I played WoW to level 70 on 4 different characters...I KNOW MMOS" kinda guys? Stay tuned! Warlocks...It is amazing to dot, sick pet, and NUKE NUKE NUKE. ;) I'm just giving ya shit, WoW combat definetely is better. You don't like LOTRO, not just the champion class. I personally have found guardian to be pretty fun, I like the reactionary nature of the abilitys....If I block a guy, I can self heal, then I shield swipe him....if I shield swipe I can drop a power stun or AoE taunt. If I parry, I can retailate. If I retaliate I can choose to do a heavy single attack or a light-medium AOE attack or a DoT bleed attack. Between these actions I sneak in the Guardians ward (Parry/evade/Block short self buff attack), a shield bash, or a mocking blow like taunt attack, quick sting jab, or AOE slash attack.


My opinion on LOTRO... Combat is ok. I cant get myself to log in hardly cause my friends don't play anymore. I just can't do MMOs single player or just with the wifey, I bore quick.

Can we start another fast food digression to throw this monstrosity back into it's sorely missed grave?

There aren't even enough brains in here for the zombies to bother with it :vv:

ONE MORE ZOMBIE COMMENT FROM YOU AND I SWEAR I WILL EAT YOUR FACE!!!

You obviously are not mad enough, as you took the time to put spaces in that sentence  :raspberry:

I don't know what that meant, but it made me laugh.

The three basic arguments that show up when discussing which MMORPG's are "better".

The MMORPG you like sucks, and you're a newb for liking it. Variant: It's for 'casuals' or 'carebear'.
Your opinion on any given MMORPG is wrong, because you are a newb/moron/carebear.
You're only arguing with me to be a dick, because even a newb/moron/carebear like you couldn't disagree with my awesome statements.

:)

The problem is the blanket statements like:

All MMOs are a grind
LoTRO Combat sucks
<it's all> mindless and boring

People normally use things like "in my opinion". And those conversant in MMOs generally have long since learned that what's not fun for them may actually be fun for others. This is how you get games with high retention (but low subscriptions, and much MUCH lower overhead) like EVE versus those super expensive yet mostly one-dimensional titles like WoW.

What it sounds like you want is a game with as responsive a combat system but not called "WoW", because you've played that to death.

You will not easily find that here. No other game does WoW's combat as well as WoW in terms of responsiveness and pace except maybe CoX, but that game's got its own issues.

But to rip on every single other game in a forum populated by fans of them without even asking what they like about them is hubris.

Chimpy, are there places in the south where one can get grilled squirrel?

No idea.

I don't live in the south.

You must live south of somewhere.

For example, Signe lives south of the Zombie Headquarters.

Please. The champion is the most 1 dimensional class in the game, as well as being known as the noobling class. By L16 you're going to have seen 90% of the skills you'll still be using at 50. Almost any class is well fleshed out at 20 but at 16 the champion already has all it's subtle features (lol) exposed for the player to see. About all he'd miss is the much desided (by who?) tanking features


I
I don't like the qnque-ing either but I can see champions finding it even more annoying than I do on my guardian.

While the devs appear to claim this is what the class is designed around the whole basis of how fervour works directly contradicts it. Stripping all the character's defences away may seem like a good idea if you don't want a soloing god but trying to keep a champion or two alive while they ea anything with more hp than bunch of L50 bird mobs is going to be fun. Guardian ae taunt isnt gonna help much, with it's max targets 4 limit compared to blade storm and blade wall's max r5. Hopefully that new spell they get to dump all their agro onto someone else is fast enough casting that it doesn't get dropped on the floor by the ui the way my self heal seems to every second chance I try to use it. :)

"Noob class", I agree (I just said popular, and noobs are always popular).
"1 dimensional class" just expose your delusion as a mmorpg player if you really think classes in this dumb games have more than 1 dimension.

Obviously not mentioning the fact that yes, as a champion you can DPS for 50 levels, or tank effectively for about 49. That *could* count for at least a couple of dimensions (If these games were actually multidimensional on the combat side).

EDIT: My biggest gripe with the champion class is the lack of "oomph". My hard hitting skills produce a flimsy "swiish.." instead of a well needed "sbrang!" or "crush!". I love the audio depratment of LotRO but I really wonder what the hell were they thinking with the sounds of some skills. The champion 3-strikes skill is unbelievable, it does the sound of 3-misses. That really bugs me.

Champion is a weird class in that any noob can play it and do decent damage. But a truly skilled player can be a DPS God with a champion. I can tear through things quicker than equal level hunters if I use my skills right. My only issue with the champion so far is that as I get higher in level my survivability seems to actually go down.

omgomg

My Signe smiley I made is a regular smiley now!

:vv: :vv: :vv:

:heart:

SEE SIGNE
WE BELIEVE

...IN YOUR ZOMBIE NATION.

LotR is an interesting beast to analyze, as it seems unusually difficult to pin down why any one person likes or dislikes it.  The game definitely has it's share of issues, but even WoW has some issues, hidden though they might be behind the glare of the highly polished surface.  I like LotR OK, it spite of its issues.  My wife on the other hand doesn't quite despise it, but definitely dislikes it, and not merely because of its issues.

The best analysis we can make of why is, she dislikes it because it's so bland, and because crafting is seriously gimped.  I like it because I can wander around solo and choose my pace, killing or avoiding most things as I wish while still getting to experience most (but not all) of the level apropriate content for my character.

 Each of those reasons could be discussed in detail, but the one I think most relevant to (some parts) of the discussion is the charge of it being bland.  That actually applies to several areas, but one in particular is heroics.  No class seems to have much in the way of true change-the-course-of-battle-to-save-the-day abilities.  We call these "get out of jail free cards".  There are some abilities that seem to have been intended as such, but they just don't make a big enough difference.  Sometimes you can salvage a barely lost fight into a barely won one, but pretty much never can you completely reverse your fortunes from a holy-cow-theres-no-way-we-can-pull-this-off fiasco into a wow-how-did-we-manage-that miracle.  If the tide of battle turns against you, you're pretty much toast if you can't run away, simple as that.

I don't like "IMO." It should be assumed unless someone is blatantly stating a fact. Generlaizations about a game or genre are almost always an opinion. If people read critiques with this in mind, it would save a lot of flame for when it was really warranted.

Darniaq:  People shouldn't be assholes on the internet
shiznitz:  People *are* assholes on the internet.

Check and check.

Nah, I actually agree with shiz's point. All of this stuff begins with IMO by nature of what it is. However, unfortunately, most people don't insert "IMO" into everything said by someone they don't know. As such, it's simlpy safer for new posters to use IMO in their posts for a time.

For what it's worth, I've had quite a few "reversal of fortune" moments with my burglar.   He's got crowd control plus the ability to start Fellowship Maneuvers (aka Conjunctions), which can really pull a fight out of the toilet when it's circling the bowl.  For instance, with coordination, a well-executed FM can do a combined group heal, group power restoration, and massive AoE dmg.

Soloing, he's got some neat tricks too, such as an ability  (http://www.lotro-wiki.com/index.php/Find_Footing) to break himself out of a stun which puts a big heal on himself and gives him a 30 second 50% buff to his ability to Evade.  There are other examples too, but that one in particular can turn a fight from a certain loss to an easy win.

Maybe some classes experience the phenomenon you mention, but my burglar doesn't.

My "feign death" has pulled my ass from the fire more than once. At 43 I am still learning when and where certain skills are best used..

I have two different fears as a Minstrel, evil and Undead. I rarely use them, to ensure the timers are up for when I need them. In groups, I've had a bunch of oh-shit moments that allowed me to go from healing to kill-that-stuff-fast mode.

At the same time, my last incarnation was as a Fire Mage in WoW. In eight years I have yet to play a more effective class at pulling success from the jaws of defeat. I've had people literally /tell me "holy crap" when I've let loose with the timers, particularly once BC geared us up something fierce.

Coming from that to LoTRO Minstrel (which is akin to an incomplete EQ1 Bard), it's quite a leap. But LoTRO isn't "hit auto-attack and watch" either*.

* Of course, I've never played anything that was literally like that outside of maybe when I was grinding Swordmanship in UO

I think what he is calling heroics are actually fellowship maneuvers in LoTR. At least that's the context I get from from rereading the quoted part above. And believe me, it's not opinion when I say some of the complex fm's are fully capable of pulling your balls from the fire right quickly. I haven't sat down and read the list of FM's yet as my bugler hasn't grouped enough to need to know that stuff yet, but one of the high end once like GBRGBR ( or is it GRBGRB?) kiicks serious ass as it heals the party full, leaving a big healing dot on everyone, plus full power, a big smash of dmg and 5 or 6 ghost pets running around. The only real problem with it that I can see is that the only group capable of getting in a situation where it'd help a lot would be completely unable to trigger it. One of those groups that can maybe manage an all red if the wind is right.
 

This has me interested how the Fellowship Maneuvers work. So, how DO they work ?

My Local McDonalds offers a McSquirrel burger. If you want to go fancy at the 7/11 you can get a 7 course dinner. A six pack of Pabst and a Slim Jim.

http://www.thebrasse.com/lotro/fellowship-maneuvers.php

"Fellowship Maneuvers can occur randomly in any battle against a Signature or Elite creature, although group members must be at least level 12 in order to participate in the process.

In addition to random, unpredictable triggers, which can be very hard to act on in time, burglars, and to a lesser extent Guardians, can begin a Fellowship Maneuver cycle. A group can be more prepared for these. For this reason, it is best to have the Burglar (or Guardian) calling the FM series, provided they know what they are doing, hehe.

BURGLAR FM TRIGGERS:

Exploit Opening (level 12) - This stuns your target, creating an FM opportunity.
Trip (level 28) - You can knock an enemy down, opening up an FM round. Trip can only be used while stealthed.
Exposed Throat - After using your Double-edged Strike, this attack will inflict high damage, with a chance of creating an opportunity to use an FM (info according to lotro.com – I have not used this in game yet).
Marbles – These are a crafted item rather than a skill. You can use marbles to throw a creature off balance, allowing an opening for a Fellowship Maneuver. Use of marbles requires the burglar to be trained in the skill "Clever Devices" at level 20. There are three marbles recipes available to Weaponsmiths:
Small Bag of Marbles (small chance of success when thrown)
Medium Bag of Marbles (better chance of success)
Large Bag of Marbles (best chance of success)
GUARDIAN FM TRIGGERS:

Turn the Tables (level 36) - Knock down a target after being knocked down yourself, and open an FM opportunity.
To the King - A powerful attack against an enemy, triggered after the use of Overwhelm or Thrust (these rely on a successful parry). The creature may be knocked down, resulting in an FM opening (info according to lotro.com – I have not used this in game yet).
When the FM event is triggered, a Fellowship Skill wheel appears on each member's screen. If you are not directly targeting the mob, you will first see a target/bullseye symbol. Click on it to participate in the process and it will cause you to automatically join in on the same target.

This is where the coordination aspect comes in, along with a healthy dose of confusion. Upon triggering the FM wheel, the creature is stunned, allowing time to perform the moves. NOT enough time to look up this info, so please read it in advance!

If you fail in a FM attempt, the mob is immune to further attempts for one minute.

The Fellowship Maneuver Process
A Fellowship Maneuver is triggered.
The targeted creature is stunned.
The caller should designate which move your group will try. Remember to have your groupmates assigned to a number in advance, so that they know they are #3, for example.
The first player will select a color by clicking on it. That player is now unable to attack with auto-attack or special skills, until the FM attempt is completed. If he moves, the FM is cancelled.
The color chosen by the first player will appear in the FM queue.
The second player will now click on their color, and on down the line until all players have chosen the appropriate color.
The Fellowship Maneuver completes and the effect goes off.
You congratulate yourself on hitting the right color at the right time and looking like a brilliant fellow.
Wheels on the bus go round and round.
 The Fellowship Maneuver Skill Wheel
It helps to understand what each of the four colors do:

ENT'S STRENGTH (Red) is a straightforward melee attack. As others add more red to the stack, it does more damage. At the 6th level it becomes an AOE attack with a radius of 10 meters.
Burglars and Minstrels must be within melee range in order to partake in setting a red icon. - Used alone, red equals instant damage – use it when you want to kill something fast.

EAGLE'S CRY (Green) is a morale (health) heal that targets yourself at the opening level. At the 2nd level it becomes an area-of-effect AOE (Area of Effect) heal over time. At the 5th level it adds a cure fear effect, and at 6th level it cures wound effects in addition to fear.
- If your party is running low on morale (health), and especially if you have no healer, use lots of green.

SPIDER'S GUILE (Yellow) is a combination of melee attack and damage over time (DoT) effect. At the 5th and 6th stage it also applies a 15-second effect that will drain the target's power and slow the creature's attack and movement speed after the countdown finishes.
Burglars and Minstrels must be within melee range in order to partake in setting a yellow icon. - Yellow is great to use against creatures with a huge number of hitpoints – let your DoT eat away at them. Over time, it tends to do more damage than a red attack.

STALLION'S SPIRIT (Blue) begins as a self-only power heal. At the 2nd level it is an AOE power heal. At the 5th level, Stallion's Spirit calls forth the shade of a fallen warrior to fight alongside you for a short time. At the 6th level, a more powerful shade appears. - Blue is very useful if your party is in a long fight and is running low on power.
Individually, the colors are strong and useful (as well as simple), but it is when you begin to combine them in longer chains that they really begin to pay off.

"

IIRC, the "uber" FM is GRRRRB or it's BRRRRG, I forget which goes first (blue or green) and whether it matters.

There is not enough content in this game. Not enough depth. This game follows the WoW, give it to em now without any work. No discipline. WoW had the BG/Faction treadmill to keep people going. They had the 40 man lol-zerg-raids to keep em going.

WTF does lotro have to keep people playing? It aint the PVMP. It aint the traits…

They will not be able to keep the customers they have due to the game model they are following. They will not add new customers because of the new games that are coming out. Then you got older games that have expansions coming out, graphic updates ETC.


Grunk
75 Dark Knight
Remora

You forgot to witter on about why all of these are so much better - nay, perfect - in FFXI.

I can't believe I'm going to respond to this guy seriously...

Oh, and congratulations on your improved sentence structure this time.

I can't really agree with you here on the whole adding new customers thing. They will add customers the same way every other variation of the genre does - word of mouth, players migrating from game to game, and eventually expansions.

What keeps people that are there now playing? I can't say I know for sure, since I didn't play past beta, but I'm going to assume its a combination of a few things. People enjoy playing in a world whose lore is interesting to them, they enjoy playing with their friends, and from what I've heard they actually are enjoying the game. As to the future, Turbine has one of the best records period for adding new content and updates to their games.

You seem to be caught up on the idea that if the game isn't hard enough or doesn't have enough grind, people won't play it. Well, not everyone plays these games the way you do bud. There are other playstyles out there. I played UO and AC for about five years each, because they didn't focus on grind or mandatory grouping. They let me log in and play when I wanted for however long i wanted, and I still accomplished things. Good luck with that in your game. With WoW, I played several characters up to mid levels, but never had a guy reach 60. Why? Raiding held zero interest for me - I can't commit six hour stretches to play. I played it because I enjoyed trying new classes and running new quests I'd never done.

Bunk = Grunk

heh

Fuck you.  You are an evolutionary dead end in the MMO gene pool.  No one wants your "disciplined" game, and no one will bother making one ever again.  That era of the MMO genre ended the moment WoW cracked a million subscriptions.  Go hang yourself with a rope of soiled poopsocks.


And fuck your fucking dark knight, you humpbacked catass degenerate fucking loser.  Get your ass over to FoH or somewhere else you belong with this fucking dumbass sig of yours.  Go apply your "discipline" to something that matters.  The rest of the universe likes it's games to be fun.

Wait, sigs don't appear in quotes.  You fucking typed that by hand.  Jesus.

Things that are keeping me around...

1.  I can log in and play for 30 minutes and get something done
2.  There's plenty of places to explore and things to try out
3.  I'm enjoying working my way through the story
4.  They have added more content in the first 3 months than WoW did the first year
5.  You can do most of the content without a 'perfect' group
6.  Most important I still find the game fun

I still notice a fair number of true newbies in the starting areas around Bree so people are still buying and checking out the game.  I expect that in the end this will be an AC1 niche type game and while AC1 left me cold I can see why people who liked it stuck around so long.  Regular free content additions are kind of nice.

Do you understand gaming or fun?

If I'm working, I'm getting paid. I play games to relax and have phun.

Except that it didn't, because they tried again with Vanguard.  That went well.

Oh, hells no.  :tantrum:

And WUA summed up what I really wanted to say to him a few posts back.

This is the most interesting part for me. How you are "following close behind" Frodo until you finally meet him in Rivendell, trying to keep minor nuisances off his back with your own quests, and meeting certain key characters in varying closed environments, is at least a semblance of dynamic storytelling. I, uhhh, admit that I liked the strange walk that you do with Frodo in Rivendell, expecting an ambush or something... and all he really does is confide in you about his Angst.

Best system for storytelling that I've seen yet in an MMO (my favorite single player RPG is Planescape:Torment, so I'm a sucker for stories).

And Turbine wasn't happy how they never really got marketing credit for the monthly updates of AC (although there were gems in there like Frore, and innovative stuff like the Shard Defence... Stormy, say something!!). Now they are copying the CoX "issues" and try to get more media attention with that. Successfully, I hope.

I can play as a chicken.

VG was started so long ago though they can be excused for old thinking. What they can't be excused for is the wonton avoidance of the years worth of people who tried to tell them otherwise. There's faith in an idea and then there's zealotry.

Fear of fried noodles?

Too many carbs.

I sure wish people would stop exhuming this thread with their "I think LOTRO is a piece of shit because I play "X" game super hardc0r3 styleee" posts.

 :cry:

Where's grunk when you need him?

He's the one that exhumed this thread earlier today.  But I wouldn't count on him coming back, he may have accidentally seen Blizzard's 9 million subs press release and gone into a rage-induced comatose state.

More likely his check bounced and he was thrown out of rehab.

Where's Amy Winehouse when you need him?

Nice.

Great post, WUA. I'm almost in tears of laughter.



They were building that piece of catass-shit before WoW came out, remember. It was their last great white hope.

But it's not so long since...


Also, there's this classic quote from another of his posts: "if your view is different then mine, I could care less… all it means is your wrong."  The boy's a genius!

You're a kinder, gentler man than I.  I think that - if all that stuff they posted on FOH was to be believed - they actually were confirmed in their decisions to go "hardcore" (which I translate as "unpleasant"), and drove more strongly in that direction for a time in order to differentiate.  They certainly had time for major rethinks to the actual encounters, quests and XP-gain in the light of WoW.


^^^ Excellent internet detection skills, Draconian ^^^

Oh, I agree with what you're saying. But they had the Cult of Brad in place, while he Jim Jonesed along quite obliviously right up till they got booted by MS, and started making last-moment concessions to not sucking. But all their h4rdc0r3 bullshit was in from the start, as basic design fundamentals, so they were largely fucked regeardless.

I mean, just look at how long EQ2 has taken with what I understand is a very good live team to go from from it's early VG-esque steps to what it is today.

My real question, though, is whether Grunk ever took out that lifetime LOTRO sub?

Man, that's a nice find DraconianOne.  O grunk, what a fickle flower you are.

I fear Draconian just ended things nicely.

I would like him banned from my Divorce thread, should it ever happen.

 :wink:

Payin' to hate is just stupid. LoTRO is as easy-mode as WoW.

LOTRO is currently doing better than VG. Perhaps you and your hardcore friends can revive the game!

Anyone have some semi-madeup numbers for LOTRO current subscriptions?  If you're ambitious, I'd love to see the lifetime sub numbers as well.

They haven't added any new servers yet, anywhere (12 US, 15 EU). So I imagine they're at plateau in terms of subs. They had invited 1,000,000 players to test out the Middle Earth World Tour, but I have no idea how many showed up. Certainly we would have heard if they got anywhere near 1,000,000 players though.

My guess would be they have somewhere between 300k and 400k active subscriptions, not enough to add nor merge servers.

I also think they launched Book 9 too early. For one this sets the expectation for content for every book publish, something quite unsustainable. Much of Book 9 felt like it was stuff that was done but not done enough for launch. For another, they could have enjoy a returning-subscriber spike if they had waited another month or to for people to let their monthly bills relapse due to disappointment/boredom.

On lifetime passes, I have no idea. Those people are whack anyway ;)

thank you thank you , we do try, normalcy is highly over rated you know

That feels right to me somehow. If it were near a million, or even over the half-million mark I'm sure they'd be trumpeting it loudly from the rooftops. Not that 3-400k is a bad number for any game not called WoW...

It would be easy enough to use the social window to get peak player counts and extrapolate populations from there.

In this day and age (and by that, I mean post-WoW) any game with a large development budget should seriously question why it doesn't have 1 million + subs.  Unless they are purposefully attempting to be niche, I'd be a pissed investor if my $50 million didn't garner a larger audience.  My hope is that LOTRO will serve as a wake-up call to investors.  It proves that a pretty diku with the right license still isn't enough to grab the big numbers.  

I thiink LoTRO only cost $30mil. That ain't chump change of course. But that is a fairly contemporary budget for a pricey console game that doesn't have a recurring fee, much less one that isn't designed to end it's collection of money.

To me, you need to make some design, business and technical decisions up front, so you can appropriately scale your investment to the potential market. VG would have loved to have a few hundred thousand accounts. But the decisions they made along the way did not support that outcome. Oh they thought it would, but they acted like an indie by not even considering methods to substantiate it.

To me, the days of AAA budgets managed by indie thinkers are over. People want confidence in the return on their investment. That isn't to say indie development is done. It just means $50mil isn't handed over freely to just anyone who thinks they have a good idea and handle the development.

There's a reason so much activity is happening on the browser size. You can proven success in the "millions" for a hell of a lot less money than it costs to make the sort of MMO we here would play for long. Different audience of course, but a bigger one that has different expectations too.

Well expecting to pay $50 and automatically get something with $15,000,000/month revenue (and that's just subscriptions, not boxes at $15 per month per person) is silly in any industry, let alone one with as high marginal profits as MMORPGs.

The box is selling for CAD59.99 up here.  Seemed a little high for a subscription game so I am holding off for a bit until the price drops.

Do price drops cause a noticeable up-tick in sub numbers?

If anyone is looking for this game PM me, I'll save you some money. I got 2 accounts and boxes ill sell for 40 bucks shipped (or 35 for just accounts 26 guardian on one, 25 hunter on other). They are subbed through Mid august as well. We're all friends here, but if we arent supposed to post this kinda stuff feel free to hack and slash it with my apologies.

If anyone wants a guest key PM me with a email address, I went with the lifetime thing at release so I have no need for the game time cards however if I refer you it gets you in the door for ten a month and I will give any time cards I receive away here.

the link: http://www.lotro.com/referral

That's a bit like expecting every new soft drink or junk food brand to reach huge popularity because it's post-CocaCola or post-McDonald world...

Expecting popularity and questioning a lack of success are two different things.  Can you really not see that?

But the perceived lack of success is tied strongly with expected level of popularity. If you set your expectations unrealistically high, you are given to be disappointed which doesn't have to do much with actual success or lack thereof.

Fair enough.  What's an unrealistic expectation when you're investing say... $50 million into a project?  I think most everyone here would consider Vanguard to be a failure yet investors are still chasing after the same shiny diku projects.  Which brings me back to the original comment that you had quoted. 


If they do their homework, their next project should be more successful.  Well... should they get a second opportunity. 

Does this work with a downloadable client ? If yes I would gladly give it a try.

I think so. The way it works is I submit a email address on my account page, they email you the key and other information. I have 3 slots left as of now.

So I downloaded the client, activated my trial account and guess what  I have been doing in the last 30 minutes ?

PATCHING THE CLIENT I JUST DOWNLOADED FROM THE WEBSITE OF THE COMPANY THAT PRODUCED THE FUCKING GAME!

And the patcher has just reached the part where it updates the game data. I am at 2 % done right now. After more than half an hour.

100 of 2892 files done.

God, stuff like that makes me angry.

Now I feel better.

edit: 461/2892 files, 10%. This patcher is worse than Blizzard`s

edit2: 1078/2892 files, 25%. I might start breaking things ...

Well, you are patching the entire game disk onto your machine. IIRC, the client you DL is just the launcher.

The launcher has a size of over 3 Gb ?

Did Hound trick me into downloading Vanguard ?

Yeah, one of the patches is quite painful.

Ah that may be different now, then.  When I was in the beta, your download was just the patcher. I don't recall if that was 3GB or not...

Well I think one of the funniest things about LOTRO, is that the engine is pretty much a cleaned up version of DDO.  The character models are very similar to DDO, to the point that I can almost make the exact kind of male/female human character with same hairstyles and everything.

Money and development time probably didn’t get thrown into the engine at all, or the UI which is also very similar to DDO down to the whisper sounds, and the layout.  The mechanics are different but the overall structure is the same in the look and feel.

Of course since it is the same company, it makes sense to reuse the engine, but I just found that to be funny either way.  Plus I have not seen that mentioned too much in any reviews I have read.  They usually compare the game to WoW but rarely if at all to DDO which seems to be the proving ground for the underlying technologies of the game.

51% 1840/2892 Files.

Way to give a great first impression to your potential consumer. It can't be that hard to put the uptodate version of your client on the download server.

CCP manages to do that for every update I ever downloaded. Hell, sometimes I downloaded the whole client, just to be sure I had the newest version.

But this is ridicioulus, I downloaded the game for two hours and now I have been patching for additional two hourse. I even yelled at the screen.

And why can I only download at~ 55 kb/s. Evertime the speed goes over 60 kb/s on the next file it starts at 50 kb/s again.

I was in beta as well, the download was faster then, after I fiddled with my IE security settings to get it started at all.

Which was a cleaned up version of the AC2 engine.

Hehe Der, I feel for you having bitched about the exact same thing when trying EQ2 a few months back. 80mb download, 4gb patch.

But it could be worse. You could be patching WoW over torrent.

Damm it. "Der" is a German article. Like your "the".

Trippy, could you do me a favor and change my name to just "Helm", I've meant to do that (ask one of the admins) for several months now, "Dar" just reminded me of it.

Actually I found that my last WoW patching was rather painless, compared to this one. And I did not play for about a year, BC update and all that.

edit: 61% bitches ...

Having never played AC2, I can't comment on that bug given my experience with these two games it makes sense.

Always wondered about that. Thanks mleh :)

Die, Der, Die.  (http://smileys.on-my-web.com/repository/Laughing/lol-043.gif)

As you wish.

I love your new avatar.

     (http://www.thesmilies.com/smilies/sad0071.gif)

(http://www.thesmilies.com/smilies/evilgrin0041.gif)

Damn. You people have me repeating  Article conjugation.

Also capitalizing  Nouns which I do all the timeanyway, fucking german classes.


der
die
das

den
die
das

dem
der
dem

des
der
des

It's rattling around in my head and it JUST WON'T STOP!

You can't possibly expect them to edit the game file after EACH patch.  I can't think of a single MMO that I have played that has done that ever (EQ1, EQ2, DAoC, UO, AC2, Shadowbane).  Plus some of that large download is the FREE expansion stuff they put in such as Evendim.

Did you really expect that someone on this board would not find something to complain about regarding a free trial download?

Why don't we just complain about complaining? That is what sets us apart from the beasts.

What good could come of this thread anyway? ><

If Turbine were really in the triple-A league, they would have tuxedo-clad men abseil from helicopters bearing a copy on silver platters, then install it on your machines while you sip brandy near the fire.

Only bush-league fuckers make you download it off the fucking net.

[urlhttp://www.eve-online.com/]I know one.[/url]

I have to agree that if you're downloading a file that is the whole game, it should always be current, or at most one minor patch old.  If you're just downloading a patcher, that's something else... But if you DL a 3GB file, it bettwe have the latest version of the files it has in it already.

They have to update the files on the patch servers... is it really that hard to add in a script to re-build the downloadable .exe too?

--
Alkiera

It's not using any of your bandwidth though. It's bit patching the data files with only what has changed between the patched game and your copy. If you can figure out a faster way to do it fortune may await you.

Thats what you meant, no?

They already let me download the whole client, THEN decided to let the patcher upgrade it bit by bit. That is the thing that drove me nearly over the edge.

Like Alkiera said, keeping an (almost) up to date client on your servers can't be that difficult.

edit: Grammar IS hard.

Actually I would have said a lot.

Pwned by grammar, need more coffee  ... :-D

Sales numbers. 172,000 for quarter in North America. Unknown still for Europe. Don't know if quarter matched calander quarter or if were any pre-order sales before the April release.
http://www.gamespot.com/news/6176030.html

I believe that's about the number that the 20% rule came up with.

172k isn't all that great. But with the EU numbers, it could be as high as 330k units sold as they launched in EU with almost the same number of servers as launched in the US (11 v 12 respectively).

That doesn't translate into active current accounts, nor how many did the lifetime thing.

I canceled today and one thing I didn't know about was losing your founder's discount if you cancel. I'm sure there'll be promos around to sign back up with it but it came as a bit of a shock.
They don't even ask why you quit. Guess they don't care.Mostly tedium in my case. Half hour runs to instances, 320 mob kills for first title in later zones and the sheer grind of collecting enough ancient iron ore to gm my metalsmith finally pushed me over the edge and I just didn't feel like playing anymore.

I lasted about 3-4 months which only CoH and maybe Daoc beats for quitting quicker. Other games I usually start alts but the mere thought of doing the grind again makes me tired of it, despite having had about 5 or 6 60 alts in WoW. Most of my alt's exp in LoTR was gotten during the public beta.

Yes, it is.

To be fair, it's all relative.  Given investment costs, servers, employees, etc. I'm sure that Turbine isn't excited about those numbers given their expectations with such a popular license.  For an Indy, this would be a homerun.   

It's the biggest title they've ever had, that has to count for something.

If the people I know are any indication, the title isn't proving to be very sticky. My old kinship has gone from closing recruitment because they were too large to brainstorming about how to get more members due to people quitting the game.

Anyone in game who wants to do the social panel count?

If DDO was a success, then 172k for LotRO should make them giddy. If it doesn't, they planned their dev budget very badly.

I wonder what the European figures are? They just started their Chinese beta also for whatever that is worth. Our guild probably has about 40% or 50% of the the launch numbers and I really don't pay much attention to the rest of the population but it seems to be fair but not what it was at launch.

Different budgets and different project team sizes.  I'm wondering how many boxes they needed to sell and subs they had to maintain just to pay for the LOTR licensing alone. 

My point was that the "percieved" target audience size for both projects was likely very different.  100k for DDO may have been a success while anything under say 500k may have meant failure for LOTRO.  I know you know all this Haem... I'm just restating the obvious here.

172k is solid, a number to be happy about.

As to the comment that Turbine doesn't ask why one is quitting, that usually comes later in the program when retention becomes more of a focus than content additions. It really shouldn't happen that way since knowing why people who bought your game first are quitting is probably good information to have, but these games never launch "finished" so the first few months after launch are usually content and bug fixing related.

Then you can enlighten me.  How is it that you know that Turbine is satisfied with this number?  Is it sufficient revenue to offset investment and upkeep?  I'm not being even a little sarcastic here.  I'm just guessing that none of the leads on this project were selling a proof of concept with the notion that "If we can get 150k+ subs, we'll throw a party."  When this project was getting off the ground, the expected numbers I was hearing tossed around were in the 400-500k range with hope of upwards of that.  I can't imagine how anyone would be anything more than resigned to cope with the reality that they are at the 172k point. 

once again I point out that those figures are from US box sales reported by Midway for 2nd quarter sales, you can at least double that adding in the European numbers. Side note: does anyone know if the game is available in Korea and other Asian countries yet? Excluding China of course which as I have already pointed out is in the beta phase.

IMO, anything that gets 100k even (and especially) in today's post-WoW world is a success. I've always viewed 50k as breaking even and 100k as successful, ever since the release of Shadowbane, and I don't see even today's economics changing that bar much.

100k subs = $1.5 million in revenue a month at $15/month + 100k boxes @ $15 a box revenue for the developer = another $1.5 million. If the average subscription length is 6 months, then after the first 6 months, they've made @ $7.5 million in revenue. Again, unless their budgeting was terribly planned, they should be able to make back their investment and more within 2 years. Given that MMOG's usually stay around a lot longer than 2 years and after that point, development costs tend to go down, 100k ought to be a success, especially considering the tendency of successful MMOG's to gain subscribers for the first year as opposed to lose them like shitty Vanguard-esque MMOG's do.

They did have a link to an exit survey on the cancellation confirmation page but when I clicked it I got a 404 error.

The reason I don't think 172k is that great is because of the IP. This isn't some no-name license coming out of left field with the hopes of bringing some fanbois with them. This is effing Tolkien, the root of almost everything popular in this genre. And they nailed the game play experience in ways that should have at least let them pass by the likes of SWG.

At the same time, as Hound has said and I did in my last post, we could in theory double the boxes sold based on the unreported Codemasters numbers. At 330k that'd be good.

These games often do grow over time.  What will be interesting will be seeing what those numbers are next time they are released.  As I recall even WoW took a while to break their first million.

Heh.  Coffee---->Keyboard.

WoW had the benefit of a staggered launch in a huge number of territories though. Each successive launch came with some record-event that drew attention back to the core. And they had a much stronger showing initially.

I do agree though that this game can grow. But I think certain things need to happen though, like Blizzard taking a long time on the next expansion. AoC and WAR sucking or being delayed, Turbine making improvements to what still feels like combat underwater, more content and the beginnings of proof that the story is moving forward.

But for video games, especially COMPUTER video games, Tolkien ISN'T some big effing license. It's Tolkien. You might think it would have, what with it being the inspiration for Dungeons & Dragons which started a lot of these things, but in games it really hasn't been a license to print money. The Middle-Earth PNP roleplaying games? D&D has outlasted and outsold them in all editions. Tolkien based video games, even those based on the movie and released concurrently, haven't sold gangbusters either. It's a weird license, in that you'd expect it to be ginormous, but history would not bear that out for any type of licensing other than the movies. Star Wars, OTOH, has had a history of good, great and not so great video games, many more than Tolkien-licensed games. It damn well should have been a blockbuster as an MMOG license, but we won't rehash that.

Again, 172k JUST IN AMERICA is fucking fantastic. And if Europe does bring the total to 330k, I'd call that a rip-roaring success.

The problem I think now is retention. Every person I know that has tried it just fizzles out. I made it about a month. Not sure why it's like that, it just is.

A market strategy based upon players forgetting to cancel their subscription only offers short term success.

I know, and have said similar in the past when discussing LoTRO's potential success. 30 years of computer games have devalued the uniqueness of the license by knocking it off all over the place. Nowadays more people associate Warcraft with fantasy than they do some guy who wrote hard to read books 60 years ago.

But it's still not a generic-IP with a small development budget. And the movies are still fairly recent enough, having captured so many people. That the game isn't based on the movie license, and that you can't play the main characters, definitely has an impact on potential. But that's not based on what license Turbine got. Rather it's based on the needs of an MMORPG.

My saying 172k isn't that great is due entirely to the amount of effort that went into the game (if the $30mil dev budget I've heard is to be believed). Freakin' Eve has more accounts (and that's not a slight on Eve, just indication that a niche generic sci-fi game is doing better than a title that cost more to launch by probably alot and has a recognizable IP). What is the point of securing a large license if you can't drive units with it? It's a monkey on your back in terms of extra money you won't see and extra people in the approvals process that slow everything down. At least it did better by Turbine than AC2 nor a generic fantasy MMO they might otherwise have launched. But that isn't saying much.

If they have 300k accounts, conservatively they'll make their money back in just over a year. After that it's all gravy. And expansion packs.

LOTRO was hardly a rip-roaring success, but it's not a failure like DDO either. Once they start pooping out expansion packs, it'll be a nice little revenue source.

Is DDO still alive, and if so, why?

Yep, DDO is still there and they still roll out content updates, etc. on a fairly regular basis. They've raised the level cap a couple of times, added in more solo content beyond the initial newbie areas, etc.

Why is it still there? Because it has a dedicated enough core audience to keep the lights on. They did just do server merges, but I am guessing that will only increase retention as it will put more people on each server, thus increasing the ease of grouping.

When did Eve get more than 100k accounts? That was the number they bandied about last I heard, which is a fantastic number for Eve. I think even with 172k, LotRO beats Eve.

I would doubt if LOTRO holds 100k US for longer than a month or two, regardless of box sales. But thats just me. Well, me and my wife and my brother and roughly 10 online friends who have all quit. That and stories of Kinships folding already due to players just...not logging on.

I hear the same stories about WoW and it seems to be doing alright. Don't take anecdotal evidence as gospel.

You just playin' devil's advocate or do you have any experience with the game? If so, are you still playing?

It just seemed like retention is a problem when every person that I know who tried the game.......quit. If you asked them why, I'm not sure they'd know, besides "I just didnt feel like logging in anymore."

Between US and Europe im sure subs are fine.

I still play LoTRO, so there's your counter-anecdote. I guess.

Well a few weeks after launch I used the social panel and the "20% of subs are online during normal prime time" rule and came up with 175k. (Pretty amazing that this has remained so stable through so many games.)

So if someone has an account, count people online and multiply times five then multiply by the number of servers and see what it is now.

My guess is that it's down a lot. In June my guild limited membership to friends of members because we were too large to be manageable. Now we have a four page thread of people who quit the game and they're brainstorming for ways to find enough people to make guild grouping viable.

It would be interesting to know what's average time spent in game by player before they quit, for other MMOs. The only one I can recall that sort of went on record with that is EVE, where devs stated average player stays playing 8 months or so (or was it 10?)  But then EVE is quite different from casual fantasy diku, and suspect their average player has longer attention span.

Eve is kind of a weird case, where you can retain an account just to dick around in the forums and still progress your character as if you were actively playing the entire time. I would imagine their retention numbers are higher than other games that require you to actually, you know, play.

I would guess it is down as well. However, this method is less effective these days unfortunately. The gold sales spammers are out in force, apparently running a macro that goes down the "who's online" list. So this is training the playerbase to click their Anonymous box in the Social panel, which among other things remove them from being counted in the "who's online" list.


From May (http://www.eve-online.com/pressreleases/default.asp?pressReleaseID=31) (no idea where it is today, nor how many are actual people):

Damn, Eve got 180k? I had not heard that. Kickass.

Ya know, it's funny, but I feel the same way. For what CCP has done and for the type of incredibly unique game Eve is, I feel like they deserve more of a success. I'm no CCP fanboi if half of what the company reps have done in the game world with the ubers is to be believed. But they're at least persistent and dedicated to maintaining and growing a non-DIKU whack-a-mole level engine.

Well, I did a count now (which over here in Sweden/Europe is almost 1 AM, thus very much off-peak), and I got 910 people online. I'm guessing there are another 50 or so hidden by being anonymous, so let's round to 950. It's not exactly massive, but it's far from depopulated aswell. With a wild guesstimate that's 10% of the population (that does sound high, however. I'd probably go a little lower, but half the peak population seems good enough.) That gives us 9500 players per server and at 11 servers, that's pretty neatly 100K players just in Europe. I take no responsibility for the calculation above, it's mostly to get a clue.

Funnily enough, with the exception for range 1 through 10, I got almost exactly the same number of players per 5-level span. Maybe Turbine know this MMO-stuff better than they initially let on.

But retention is a problem, true enough. I probably wouldn't play either if it wasn't for the fact that I got friends and family playing, plus that it's a very... average game that just suits me fine at the moment. In addition to that I'm curious how Turbine will develop things - and I like dikus. :-D

I'll make a headcount tomorrow or Friday during peak for a better measure.

That's actually pretty accurate at least from a month or so ago. Somebody from Codemasters was interviewed on some BBC program and said Europe had over 100K players. That was back in the end of June/beginning of July timeframe.

Can you imagine seriously leveling up an alt in LoTR? I had two or three in the high teens and the thought of redoing lone lands and north downs leaves me totally cold.

The only plus I can think of is if you find a group of mostly alts they wont managed to fuck up Our greatest Find so badly as to wipe the whole group the way so many pickup groups I found did. I did it on one of my alts and someone showed us a damn shortcut that totally avoided 95% of the goblins after you pick up the item.

FWIW, the Evendim expansion helped a lot there for me.  The thing is, with my first character (lvl 42 burg), I ended up skipping a lot of quests. You just end up out-leveling them, since there are so many quests.  So, when my (change-of-pace alt) level 35 hunter came around, there was only maybe 60% overlap in the quests I did.  With Evendim content starting in the high 20s, you can afford to skip many of the quests you didn't like the first time around.

I hope they continue to add quests at all levels.  It makes alts a lot more palatable.

Yea, but phred is talking about the teens and 20s, and I completely agree. LoTRO has the same problem as some other titles that only really offer one line of content to progress through. Levels 1-15 (I think) are fine, but once you hit Bree, that's it. Same thing happens in WoW, but much later in the levels.

At least it does make finding PUGs easier :)

LFM Goblin king. :)

At least your chances of finding a group for our greatest find that wont wipe will be higher.

Do people's heads still explode when you yell "looking for group!" in the general chat channel?

You know the average MMO crowd. Any excuse to go into moron mode in general chat.

The Bree-land chat channel is modern Barrens chat. Heck, even Bree itself is better. It appears to have never evolved, even though the people in that channel are quite likely on their second or third alt and have played through to other zones. I keep expecting the asshatery that happens in Bree-land chat to migrate to at least Lone Lands as the median level of all players inevitably grow (unless they are still attracting faster than attrition).

An update on a derail :)

Eve is over 200k now (http://www.games-digest.com/2007/08/eif-2007-hilmar.html)

Updates on the business? Nah, don't care.     :-P

So that means ~100k people play EvE since it's a game where nobody keeps playing it without buying an alt.

I was alt-less.

I know I'm an anomoly, but we do exist. :)

For all of LOTRO's claims to a wonderful community I was perpetually appalled at how bad it was when I was subbed. Grouping wasn't as bad as in WoW but the chat was every bit as bad, probably worse.

Not that anyone's taking the crown from Guild Wars anytime soon...

The community in beta was really good, but after release it was just appalling.

I'd agree with that sentiment.

It's just the same as any other MMO, which can also be said for the expectations of the community. LoTRO is just an MMO.

Didn't SWG attempt this with the one character per server thing? 

I'd like single character servers as well or at least give all alts the same last name as the primary character.  This creates at least a modicum of accountability for douchebaggery. 

That's the one thing I like about :nda:.  It's a system that would be nice to see used elsewhere.

From what I remember Evendim only really replaced angmaur though, in terms of the content range it showed up for.

Agamaur/Garth Agarwen is roughly for levels 30-35, Evendim has quests all way up to level 40 (that is, quests are designed for these levels and marked as such)

No  way I will ever level an alt till they get alternate content for the lone lands. I beta'ed this bitch for over 6 months and without exaggeration put at least fifteen characters through their teens and early twenties and I do not even like riding through that area these days.

You mean Granado Espada? You know, there's no NDA on that...  :evil:

Previews have covered this (http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/48265), so it's OK to say. He was talking about tabula rasa.