f13.net

Link (http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=194423)

Some really interesting statements.

40% returned without wow having done anything new is more a mark against funcom than for it. I would be interested though where they come up with a number for who's left to go to aoc, do they just tally all the people who quit during the month it came out?

I'd suspect that's what they do.. as well as counting the people who furiously write "I"M GOING TO AOC, BITCHES" in their exit poll.

Is this the first time we've seen a company exec admit they lost subs to another game so soon after that game came out? I can't recall it happening before. 

I don't recall any other gaming execs that wipe their asses with $100 bills either. It's good to be king.

The loss must have been more significant then any other time for them to mention it. Also, 40% of what is a good question. Could be small, or large.

And unless when you resub, or subscribe, it asks if you just left for AOC, and are returning, i would suspect that some of that is potentially just an increase back to the original subscriber max.

So, i dont really take it as 40% of X returned, because we had a GPS attached to them, so we know its them.

40% of less than 700k.  Prolly not a whole lot less.  That's just speculation though.  But I guess substantial majority of AoC players have WoW subs.

I think the whole point is not so much that AOC took subs, or even that he admits it.  It's more like "yeah, they may be playing that game for a month or two, but they'll be back, and we all know it.  And then WoTLK will be out and we'll have more subscribers than ever.  Now excuse me while I go fuck my hot secretary on a pile of money."

Mythic used fancier words, but basically admitted WoW ate their lunch in regards to DaoC.

I have to admit that I found this press release refreshing.  He didn't pull any punches or hide the truth behind flowery language.  Everything about his statment made sense to me and I believe it.  I don't remembering having that feeling before.

As said before, their success probably awards them this honesty, but it is still nice to experience.

One could also say their honesty helps lead to their success as well.

Particularly notable because afaik there's only AoC in US and EU. That's a much higher (relative) percentage of departures between the games in the markets in which they overlap.

Meanwhile, Blizzard's probably banned more players themselves than they've lost to every other game that's launched since WoW.

 :ye_gods:

Eh, if some new gamer asked me "Hey Ingmar, what MMO should I play?" I'd tell them WoW. There's nothing else out there that has as much universal appeal or approachability. I'd certainly not want to dump someone into Eve or something.

This is actually pretty normal.  That they got 40% back again says that they lost 60% of those that jumped to begin with.  That doesn't meant that AOC retained all of the remainder, but it's probably pretty close, and it gives us a baseline for AOC's retention that is only slightly below the standard 70%.  It means WoW has officially peaked, and the remarks that WotLK will put it back on track are whistling past the graveyard.  There's a good chance they'll see a temporary resurgence with that expansion, but it will be their final high-water mark.  AOC, and/or some other game, will be the "new shiny" that pulls in the newbie hose, and as lower levels are depopulated this will set off a slow cascade of depopulation.  And only a tiny fraction of those that haven't come back by now ever will, they are now happy AOC players and will probably go on to some other game rather than return to WoW.  They'll be rolling in money for a long time, after all UO and EQ1 are still profitable to operate, and WoW hit a hell of a huge "high-water mark".

This was an earnings call for a publicly traded company, they have to be truthful because WoW is a huge chunk of their earnings and regulators from 3 continents are involved.  Before this, the only company putting out hard numbers was NCSoft, because Sony was so large that SOE was lost in the noise (ditto for EA). The rest were privately held.

--Dave

I'd tell them Horizons.

Yeah but you're a dick.

I'd point them at WoW, but only so my EVE server isn't so crow.... I can't finish that with a straight face :(

I'd tell a newbie to try WOW as well. It's still the most fun I've had in an MMO and if level 60 didn't turn into an EQ grindfest I might still be playing it.

You guys think they can print money now? When they release World of Starcraft (and you know they will) they will literally own South Korea.

I'd point them to WoW and also give them my mother's in game name and tell them to contact her for any questions. That sentence says a lot more than just what's at face value I think.

I originally started this reply to agree with you, mostly based on the 10.9 million subscribers number (as opposed to the last several announcements, which have all been an even million number of subcriptions) and the fact that it's been 8 months since 10 million was released.

So then I decided to google for a second and see the trend.  Here is what I got (feel free to correct me):

12/15/2005 5m
3/1/2006     6m
9/7/2006     7m
1/11/2007     8m
7/24/2007     9m
1/22/2008     10m
8/1/2008     10.9m

So basically, since the 5 million mark, we're looking at 3 months, 6 months, 4 months, 7 months, 5 months, and 8 months between announcements, with each announcement, except the last being 1 million new subscribers.  Assuming the last is actually realistically close to 900,000 subscribers (which we should not assume, but it's the only data we have), we're looking at close to 8 months for close to 1 million subscribers.

Looking at the numbers, it appears that WoW grows much slower during the summer and faster during the winter.  There is an xpac thrown in the mix there, but for the most part we're seeing 3, 4 and 5 months in the last 3 winter cycles to acquire 1 million more subscribers, and 6, 7 and 8 months to grow by 1 million subscribers in the last 3 summer cycles, with the final 8 month cycle only growing by a max of 900,000.

I suspect you are wise to think that the curve has died off, it appears we've been in a long flattening of the curve, yet it hasn't yet reached it's peak.  From the numbers above, I don't see a true end to the curve, though the noise here is tremendous since we don't know if the "10 million subs" announcement truly marked 10 million or if it marked 10.8 million, which obviously drastically affects the curve.

Right now I'll say you are probably right on, but until the next round of numbers I'm going to say "eh, maybe". :)

P.S.:  If you read this far, I'm sorry.

Your forgetting or are unaware of Russia, coming soon. But yeah, currently, thats it.

I expected WoW to have a massive jump in subscriptions after Burning Crusade launched as a lot of the people with lapsed accounts came back to try it.  I thought that there would be millions of people resubscribing but that didn't happen, it just continued with its slow growth.  Either WoW has a remarkably high retention rate so there weren't many people to resubscribe or those that leave have very little interest in coming back to see the new content it seems.

Yeah, they are about to release both a Latin American version and a Russian version of WoW as I recall.

I was referring to AOC.

Russian version of Age of Conan coming in Q4 (http://funcom.vnewscenter.com/press.jsp?id=1217452332314)

Quoting this so I can find it again a year from now.  :drill:
Also, I expect Aion to hit WoW's numbers harder than anything else in the forseeable future (i.e. until the arguements shift to Starcraft Galaxies vs KOTORO).

It is hard to draw any conclusions from WoW's year by year population growth because a lot of it comes from opening up new markets. They may continue to get huge jumps up even if the population flattens or shrinks in NA/EU just by virtue of the upcoming Latin America and Russian localizations.

Can you put that into a chart?  My eyes aren't as young as they used to be.

Sadly I already had, but it was a flat line and uninspiring so I didn't post it:

http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pRey7_cjA8QxKu04pz_uxMw

Man that is kind of scary.

That I use my free time to make google charts about WoW?  I agree.

But I would point out that I made the chart while crafting the post, not at some point earlier than that.  And I got the data via google as I created the chart while crafting the post.  I'm not obsessed, I promise.

No I mean the kind of inexorable straight line borg-like growth of WoW is scary, even as I am happily helping it along by recommending it to my friends. I'm the kind of person who makes spreadsheets to weigh the plusses and minuses of the costing of D&D minis figures, a little spreadsheet wankery doesn't frighten me.

It's not really a straight line though is it because those dates aren't evenly spaced? Unfortunately in my hungover state I am incapable of operating spreadsheets.

Chart!

(http://pandadesigns.com/f13/wow_chart_200808.jpg)

One MMO to rule them all  :ye_gods:

(http://www.hotflick.net/flicks/2002_Star_Wars__Episode_II_-_Attack_of_the_Clones/Thumb/002SWA_Ian_McDiarmid_007.jpg)

US/EU is still the main show, WoW makes considerably more from either piece of that than from the rest of it put together.  And there they have undoubtedly peaked.  That curve looks a lot like EQ's, just 20 times bigger and 5 years later.  The market keeps growing, but WoW no longer has the lock on the newbie stream for the US/EU.  And something will do the same in Asia, and fairly soon.  South America may be some compensation for that, nobody has tried to create local servers for them, and their pipes to the rest of the world suck.  But it will still be less money.

--Dave

You'd have to try and guesstimate from The9's numbers to see if they've actually peaked in NA & Europe. The9 typically reports figures differently than how Blizzard is counting (e.g. The9 usually reports peak concurrency numbers instead of "monthly unique users") so it can be hard to compare. Presumably based on what Mike said they've taken a noticable hit from AoC but they could in fact still be higher in NA & Europe than they were in January when they last reported numbers for each general region.

That flat curve is more people in the last 8 months for WOW than AOC's entire sales. That's not really like EQs curve.

The CURVE is the same. You just need to remove the actual values from the bottom and side.

Last I hear, The9 accounted for approximately 45-50% of WoW's total worldwide success. Or roughly: US + EU = China.

Regardless of AoC's actual impact on WoW, that is was mentioned at all is also a first in this post-WoW world. No other game has done probably anything more to WoW than create a rounding error.

I've been curious about how this will fair over there, but I haven't felt it would do anything significant to whatever numbers they have in Q4. I imagine at this point even that Funcom is trying to find a way to get back to some semblance of the 1mil number, having shed some of their early box sale players. When was the last time AoC even reported a number?

What is a lot more interesting is *what* players occupy their time with. I think new players are universally start with monster bashing, then as they mature into gamers they pick up interests, such as raiding, crafting, PvP, drama, else.

WoW is in a very unique position where majority of their player base is a first-time players. Trends within WoW will closely mirror trends of "maturing" of a typical player. I think key for continued success of WoW would be adapting to evolving tastes of their player base - they need to heavily invest into PvP, crafting, sim-city, guild building aspects or risk that segment of thier player base shop around for better suited mmorpg.

AoC 'exodus' were people that liked idea of building guild cities and doing siege warfare. WAR will be about people interested in more refined GvG.

WoW's longevity will be directly correlated to their ability to satisfy 'special interest' groups. They do have a budget to pull it off, too bad they insist to run their operation as a small shop.

There's something wrong with that chart, so I made my own:

http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pjrgRAcsw4-oRSxAiUi5QLQ

Thanks, I haven't really played with google charts before, yours looks much better.

EDIT:  I fixed mine now. 

On the other hand, it doesn't look like Funcom is keeping (http://wowriot.gameriot.com/blogs/Epidemic-Obesity/Funcom-Investors-Jump-Ship-as-Age-of-Conan-Founders/) those, and that 700K number seems highly suspect if investors are dumping the stock (if they were looking at a $100M+ annual revenue stream).  So the theory that once people drop an MMO to try something new they just keep going looks pretty good, if Blizzard only got 40% back.  Just as the initial sales for WW2O and AO turned out to be very good news for Camelot in spite of the Scars of Velious EQ expansion, the market scenarios for Warhammer are looking good.  If the game has what it takes, something I have no opinion on.

--Dave

Do what?  How does that look like EQ's curve?  EQ shot straight up for two years, then leveled off for two years, then was all over the map for two years until WoW released and it went into a nose-dive from which it hasn't yet pulled out. 

Not that I'm disagreeing with your general analysis, WoW's growth is slowing and many many people are looking for something else to do.  But repeating EQ's trajectory, it's not.

One line that I find a bit peculiar from the initial comments is this:

"Morhaime said that players that leave WoW are often drawn back because of the content and SERVICE that Blizzard provides."


There probably is enough content to keep you going if you consider grindy and dull missions as content, but what service he is on about I have no idea.

Blizzard gets about as personal to it's customers as a Pest Controller does to his Roaches and has about as much respect for them too.

I'm pretty sure the fact that AoC is blowing it's own feet off with buggy patching and non delivery of promised content is probably contributing to some bored fuckers still logging in to WoW, or people who just forgot to actually cancel their subs, but it would have to be some stretch of imagination to think that anything service related is bringing anyone to WoW or any Blizzard game.

My prediction is that once the western worlds subscriptions start dipping noticeably, then the Chinese will follow suit rather quickly.
Of course I'm not suggesting that it has anything to do with gold sales, but just a feeling that it will follow this trend.

Other games having to compete with "four years of content" cuts both ways.  I played WoW the first couple years, but I'd never go back.  Why?  I still like it in the abstract- polished, colorful, fleshed-out world, easy leveling, etc.  But things are too mature now.  Getting to 70 doesn't get you anywhere- compared to the mature 70s, you might as well be level 30.  Once a game has too large a gulf between the new and the old, it becomes a considerable barrier to entry.

THere's really nothing WoW can do about this- its simply a function of a game being around long enough. 

Well the new expansion will completely eradicate the long term level 70's power, just like BC did.  The first green quest drops in BC blew away everything the raiders had poured all that energy into, the expansion essentially reset everyone to zero.

With AoC one of the things I was worried about was that the small percentage of players who left WoW for it would represent a huge percentage of AoC's user base.  For example (just pulling nice round unrealistic numbers out of the air here) if 10% of WoW's players left for AoC that would probably make up 50% of AoC's total subscribers.  When those WoW players find out not everything is like WoW and leave en-masse that would just cripple the server populations.  Any new MMO that wants to get subscribers from WoW is going to have to worry about that now.  They will be forced to launch with enough servers to accommodate all the WoW people and then when most leave be forced to merge them.

It's the same problem all the time: predicting those who come versus those who will stay. Smart companies don't make five-year commitments for infrastructure based on continually growing from a huge launch  :grin:

I think the service aspect of it is drastically underrated as well.  Sure we'd like more frequent WoW updates, but the service we get is undeniably better than anything.

Can't say that I've ever had a problem with WoW's CS, which is the service he was talking about.  The only folks I've known to bitch endlessly about it were guys who gave GMs attitude because they were the ones reported.  All my experiences and those of the guild mates I've had have been positive, even friendly and pretty timely. (As friendly as CS can be.)  This covers things from forced renames to losses due to account hacks.


What he said.  Yeah, come back now and you're fodder.  In a few months, the 10+ levels and gear level difference means it's a whole new ballgame for everyone.  It's not EQ-land where those raid items are the be-all end all until the next raid instance boss.  The purples will last a bit longer, but still be replaced by L80-dungeon blues.

They've got a careful balancing act for sure. On the one hand they could make faster expansions. On the other though, they risk going just fast enough to make people question the relevance of achieving the endest of the endgame. This was the Naxx-to-BC problem for the majority of players (why bother, it'll all be obsolete in a month anyway).

I think two years is too long between expansions, but the EQ1 every-six-months too frequent. It's also a question of content too. Sometimes raising the level cap ISN'T a good idea. Why waste all that unused content? If there was no cap raise in BC for example, but still a casual gearing up, more players could have seen the pre-BC endgame zones that BC made largely irrelevant save for the folks who need to witness story arcs and resolution.

But that's another trap WoW is in. It's so easy to hit the cap, the only way attract back lapsed players is to give them that singular thing to shoot for.

I've only ever had to petition a WoW GM once, he was polite and helpful even though the issue was my own damn fault.  Had an add on running which was supressing the bind-on-pickup box for some quest random drop item.  After I'd disabled the add on and logged back in my very next kill dropped the required item again, which was above and beyond the call of duty if it was the GM's doing.

Badges, I mean Achievements will help this.

WOW has over 10 MILLION subs... I mean really.. graveyard? LOL

They could lose 90% of their playerbase and still be king (as long as you don't count browser based crap)

I think they only reason they lost anything to AOC is graphics. They seriously need to work on WOW FX engine. It looks pretty outdated. Hell, it looked outdated when it was released.

WoW's graphics were a great move for them, although I personally hate the graphic style.  You didn't need a high end machine and you opened up your game to a larger player base.  The higher your system requirements are, the more you are going to have people that can't even play.  I have a few friends that just don't have the money to update their machines every time something new and shiny comes out.  The requirements from AoC kept alot of them from even trying the game.

And here I'm thinking graphics (or rather, HW requirements) were a major reason to why Conan didn't last. Out of the gaming people I know, only two have computers enough to even start Conan but all of them got enough horse power to raid in WoW. Maybe better graphics would attract even more (different) people, but it'd come at a high price of current subscribers. Conan's level of detail is not the way to go to attract massive numbers.

AoC's graphics "problem" were sort of the same as Crysis: perception. You can play AoC (and Crysis) on lower end machines. And both hold up pretty well (much better than EQ2 or VG did anyway). The problem though was that everyone read some article about how much of a resource beast these things would be and therefore not worth shelling out the cash for unless you bought a computer in or after summer 2007.

But both Funcom and Crytek (and SOE and Sigil) did it to themselves. That's the risk of advertising a game for its cutting edge graphics.


In the world of publicly-traded companies, you're not rewarded for how well you are sustaining. You mostly get credit only for growing. WoW is having problems continuing the pace of growth they enjoyed through 2007. Everyone knows they'll eventually peak, they just don't know when. It's important because when it does happen, the game will no longer be able to continue to get growth funding. It'll get maintenance funding only, pop out some more expansions, and all of the hype and much of the internal creative energy will go to the next growth opportunity (SC MMO probably). Timed and done right, Blizzard as a company will continue to be the cat's meow through the next launch. Done wrong and they'll end up with an EQ2 against some new sheriff in town.

How good are the rewards? I haven't been following that side much beyond the just-like-LoTRO surface stuff. Do they give actual useful rewards? Or is it more lateral customization (ie, no power gain but you get a cool title)?

Not really. Through the first 8 months of 2007 they gained 1 million "subscribers". Through the first 8 months of 2008 they gained 900K subscribers. For the full year of 2007 they gained slightly under 2 million subscribers. With WotLK coming out this year and the new regions the game is launching in there's a very good chance they'll match that figure as well.

Edit: to put it another way some of you are reading the fact that WoW lost some subscribers to AoC as evidence the game has peaked. I don't see any evidence to support that claim. Sure the game might not be growing quite so fast (though the numbers so far through 2008 don't support that either) but that doesn't mean it has completely stopped growing.

He's talking about earnings really.  Stock prices are generally set by traders who look at potential growth of earnings streams.  Exceed that growth rate, and the stock goes up.  So for Blizzard (Vivendi) they would need to maintain the growth rate of X%.

They have to have more subs added each quarter than in the previous quarter to maintain that rate.   A flat 1,000,000 a year growth isn't going to cut it.

It's impressive how much better the game looks with just the pseudo-lightsource shadows added in beta.

I didn't say "OMFG MAKE WOW DX10!!!" I just said improve the graphics.

Just implementing HDR would be a huge boost, and would have no impact on performance. They could even hide the the option to those people that didn't have HDR compatible vid cards.

Also, simply opening up more advanced video options to people with cards that are less than 5 years old. Has anyone tried the graphics macro that extends your visual range and foliage counts? The game looks tons better and I didn't even lose a single Frame per second. Why do you have to run a macro to improve FX quality? Just make a slash command /Myfxcarddoesntsuck

That's the thing, they do improve the graphics. Just at their standard glacial Blizzard pace. Which in this instance, matches up nicely with current mass hardware trends.

What is this voodoo of which you speak and where can I get me some of that?

How hard is it to scale graphics? I ran Planetside way underspec, and had to turn everything off. And it looked like crap on a crap cracker. WoW with stuff turned down still looked decent enough.

Man, as long as the textures look nice and the poly count means I'm not playing in cubeland, I'm a pretty happy camper.

/console farclip 777
/console horizonfarclip 6226
/console groundeffectdensity 256
/console groundeffectdist 140
/console smallcull 0
/console skycloudlod 3
/console characterambient 0

(thank you google)
This. More than just having low graphics requirements, the WoW team made sure things still looked good with everything turned off.

Thanks! Lazy.

I expect WoW to do an EQ Shadows of Luclin someday. Or they'll just replace it with SC MMO and hope to drag everyone over. Because history never repeats itself in this genre...

Yes, you have a point. The SOL thing was terrible... I, by no means, want them to adjust the graphics in such a way that it raises the minimum system requirements... SOE were idiots for that. I installed SOL and canceled my subscription a week later.

Raph just linked to a survey by Unity 3D (http://blogs.unity3d.com/2008/08/01/hardware-of-the-casual-gamer/).  Nearly 1/3 of the million computers they checked have some version of Intel's on-mobo graphics.  Nearly all support pixel fill rates of under 2 giga-pixels per second.  That's really low by the standards of a modern card, nobody even manufactures a card that slow anymore as far as I know (only the Intel on-board is going to be that slow on a new system).  Which means the overwhelming majority of people are running on the graphics that came with their computers, and those are at least a couple of years old.

When you're talking about an MMO for the mass market, that's what you're looking at for a tech target.  Ugh.

--Dave

EDIT: And anyone thinking to make a DX10 game is really aiming too high, half the tiny fraction of computers with DX10 cards are not running Vista.

Oh, and btw... back up your config file before trying this. The only way to turn it off or on is via the macro... if the improved settings bring your system down to 1FPS or something, I've heard that it's basically impossible to run the macro. So you either need to restore the config file, or reinstall the entire game :ye_gods:

So, seriously, back up your config file first.

that survey is based on an engine used in designing browser based games...

Most people do not buy PCs to play games on them. They buy PCs to also maybe play games on them. More than likely though, they have a PS2 for the four or five games they own for it, and play online games occasionally on their laptop. THAT is the mass market.

Everything else is us. Anyone making a DX10 game is going for a market so small they almost can't afford to make games for them.

Does your gaming rig run Vista?  I have one computer that runs Vista, a laptop with a touch-screen that doesn't have drivers for XP.  I'm seriously considering downgrading my daughter's laptop to XP, it's either that or upgrade the memory as it has "only" one gig.  I have a hard time imagining a game so cool that I'd inflict Vista on my gaming rig to play it.

--Dave

And therefore is going to skew slightly away from the kind of people who upgrade their system for a game, yes.  That's the point, that this is the "mass market" who can't even consider playing current MMO's because their hardware can't handle anything better than 90's level graphics, and they're not going to upgrade.

--Dave

Vista is a stillborn product, so is DrectX10 as long as its tied to it as far as gaming is concerned. Soon Nvida/AMD will force MS to release DX10 for XP and that will be it for Vista. I think PC hardware has peaked, not because there won't be new products but because progress curve is a lot less steep. Top-of-the-line rigs today still will be able to run everything that comes out for next 5 years.

I have Vista, but it's sitting in an unopened box. I've got a pretty good rig I'm not willing to hobble with it. And honestly, I see no real world reason to install it.

Worse than the fill rate is the lack of hardware T&L on those fucking Intel "GPUs".

Here's Valve's latest hardware survey for comparison. Obviously people who play on Steam tend not to be "casual gamers":

http://www.steampowered.com/status/survey.html

It depends a lot on the art direction. Guild Wars looks beautful on GeForce 2-class GPUs but that's cause the models, textures, and environments were designed to look good with low(er) poly counts and without any "eye candy" (shaders, etc.). WoW works the same way (as long as you don't mind the cartoon look).

No clue. But if done "right" it can keep people playing the same character even after hitting the level and equipment cap

I weep for 9,817    of you, 33.6 Kbps in 08. Ouch.

Surprisingly 4 core adoption is also super-low, 4.36 %

It doesn't show the adoption rate, though. I.e. what would be more interesting to see is of the new systems that have been surveyed so far in 2008 what percentage of those have quad-core CPUs.

I remember that mess.  When SOL came out my wife, myself, and two of my kids had EQ accounts.  Of the four computers we had only one of them could run EQ decently after SOL.  We ended up closing two of our accounts and it put us on the track to closing them all in a year or so.  Once we couldn't play together the motivation to play at all went away.

Higher up someone mentioned that many pc's could play age of conan and that it was perception that was keeping the playerbase low.

That is completely wrong. It;s not about perception, it's about how good a game looks while you're playing it. Yes it's true many systems could play age of conan but it's also true those lower end systems would have to play with the graphics turned to "glossy shit" it's a common setting.

Turning the graphics down on aoc does not make it look like wow or eq, it makes it look worse. Game that are designed to run on a certain setting will just not ever look good on the lower ones. So you can critiize wow's graphics or artstyle but it looks the way it's supposed to and people notice that.

I don't think all games have to have wow's cartoony style though but I will argue the "next gen" of mmo's doesn't necessarily mean the graphics need to be top of the line. That's the kind of thinking the spurred on EQ/AOC and other assorted 'meh' games. I'm not entirely sure where the idea comes that pushing graphics to the extreme always results in better sales, because it simply doesn't and games like wow or hell even guitar hero prove over and over again that fun trumps all because newsflash people....


they're 'games'

It's pretty hard. In general, the more "realistic" the art direction is, the uglier it'll be scaled down. Perhaps an argument against realistic graphics, but not every game should have/want the cartoony look. Conan looks terribad at low settings, LotRO looks less terrible and WoW looks okayish (I honestly can't say WoW looks okay on low settings - it's just less of a fall from top settings).

Also, there are some fairly hard restrictions on how much you can scale certain things - DirectX and shader model support are very much all or nothing, for example. It's what hurts LotRO the most when you start tweaking the graphics - the glossy water disappears, weather effects get ugly and so on.

You're missing the point. When they start branching their graphics, they'll suddenly have to check off every spell effect, zone, every new art asset against some very different conditions. Every "not used by 95% of the player base" option will add iterations. Some companies don't care, but I get the feeling Blizzard does. WoW's strong point is consistency and that'd be ruined if too many fancy effects sought their way into the rendering pipeline.

And you're one of those people that still consider maple-story and MMO. I think the quicker we get you developers to knock that shit off, the better off we all will be. Maplestory is to MMO's as ping pong is to tennis. Yea, you can make a lot more money selling millions of crappy ping-pong balls to 10 year olds, but stop insulting us tennis players by calling it "Table tennis." The game is a glorified chat room designed to suck money out of the pockets of children that have borrowed their unwitting parents credit card.

The other thing about AOC's graphics was that you couldn't just turn them down, you need to go get a PhD in Conanology from the message boards in order to figure out what to change to what because "low" vs. "high" were pretty much meaningless in terms of speed.

This.  I had the box in my hand at a Best Buy and did not purchase because of this.  I've outgrown dinking around with this stuff.  I just don't have the patience or time for it.  I certainly didn't want to go through all of that and find out the game looks like crap once I was able to run it.  From everything I've read, that would be the case for me. 

But purdy graphics do sell boxes, albeit not subscriptions. In retrospect, good for Funcom! :drill:

Awesome graphics don't belong in MMOs as we know them for many reasons. It should run on a variety of systems, but also because the "better" a game looks, the longer will additional content take to create and the larger will the patches become. If Conan released significant content updates, they'd be 2 GB and up. Those are some hefty downloads on DSL-speed connections.

Edit:
WTF, wrong button.

Both table tennis and tennis are Olympic sports. What is popular in one region might not work in another, but there is room for both.

Also, MMOs are glorified time sinks designed to suck sub money out of the socially inept who want to feel that they can win at something - anything - in life. See what I did there?

Anecdotal Story:  I came home the other day and my wife was cooking dinner.  She asked if I could take over for a sec so she could check her computer because she had an open petition.  I didn't even know she knew HOW to open a petition so I'm like "Uhh, why do you have a petition?"  She said "I bought something at the auction house and instead of putting it in my inventory I accidently deleted it, so I peitioned."  I said "HAHAHAHAHAH, The GM is going to tell you you are an idiot and you need to stfu noob."

So anyways, she goes upstairs to the computer, I cook dinner.  When dinner is ready she comes down and I say "Hear anything from a GM?"  Her response:  "Yup, he restored my item and said have a nice day."

Now, the point of all of that:  Blizzard's service is far above and beyond the service from any other mmog I've ever played.

Hell in EQ if your account was hacked and your character deleted, the official CS response was that you shouldn't share your password with people and make sure you have a virus scanner installed, hope you have better luck with your next character!

Here's my story on WoW CS.

I was in a Gruul's raid and the leader gave himself my item.  He said, "Petition and I will petition to move the item from me to you."  I was doubtful, but I did it and put in all the information I could muster.

Next day:  I had the item in my inventory.  I didn't have to stay online or anything.  They just as we asked to correct a mistake WE DID. 

I've had a few other instances like this.  I really do not have anything bad to say about their CS and I've been playing the game since launch.

Actually I'm not, that would be Raph.  There's something interesting happening with Maplestory, but it's more that it's an MMO without the G than anything else.  Or a social networking site crossed with "let's pretend".

--Dave

Hilarious.  I'm glad we're graced by the like of Rake who can tell us about the bad customer service and boring content that the 11 million people playing aren't aware of.  Otherwise, left with nothing but reality to judge by, we might get the wrong idea.

I was in a very similar situation; player bids for item he already has, it's supposed to go to the next-highest roller, we petition, the next-highest roller got it the next day.

Also of note, one of the last times I raided Onyxia, the server crashed and everybody lost their loot. The GMs went through all the players and made sure we all got the stuff we were due.

Heh, this is kinda turning into Starship Troopers where one person bad-mouths the lieutenant and everybody steps up to defend him.

It's true that the Maple Stories shouldn't be marketted towards us, but at the same time, that doesn't mean we should purge the world of Maple Stories and never make another one. And I'm sure there are things that can be learned from them. Case in point is this whole conversation; what if WOW could be run on a web browser? And is WOW as simple as we can get, without becoming Maple Story? Or could there be another intermediary-level game between the two?

Wow could be run in a browser. All games can.

I think people mix up "Its in a browser" with "Its a browser delivered app". The second one puts the most restrictions on any project thats going to be run, and distributed in a browser.

I run Vista on my gaming machine and it hasn't caused any problems. That said, Age of Conan fails for me for *other* reasons, so really their market is even more constrained, because even drilling down to that small group, people's tastes differ immensely. People with DX 10 cards and Vista that actually like their game or genre or whatever.

I think CS, especially post TBC, is one of the things Blizzard really nailed.  Before Blizzard customers were a bunch of filthy catass gamers that should be treated with scorn, player mistakes must not be fixed or else all the damn dirty welfare queen players who live in their mother's basements will petition all the time asking for free stuff, and game errors shouldn't be fixed because the game is bug free therefor anything that goes wrong is an act of God. 

Hopefully other companies will see the change in attitudes as a reason for Blizzard's success and treat us more like customers and less like walking wallets.

Design philosphy seems to go two ways on this:

1) Put a lot of effort into making it look spectacular, but only the high-end machines will be able to see it, and the low end cards will look like ass because it wasn't designed with them in mind.

2) Make the low-end have a nice style which look good but maybe isn't hyper-realistic.  Those with high-end machines will like nicer and be able to run with whatever bells and whistles you provide.

Conan looks amazing, and while I appreciate the graphics, during regular play I don't tend to notice them.  Guild wars looks really good to me with its solid art direction, and runs like a dream on my machine, but I know everyone else is able to have almost as good performance without suffering a huge decline in graphics quality.  I really appreciate GW's focus on art direction.

Guild Wars is an excellent example. To my eye, it looks beautiful. And AoC which does not look any better to me has higher system requirements?

Why?

To what end?

Shucks, maybe PixelShader 3028.1515 with the razmatazz glaven feature lets you see the flecks of color in a goldfishes eyeballs, but I don't give a crap.

I don't understand why everyone keeps saying AoC has such great graphics to begin with. Crysis has great graphics. That's because there's actual art direction behind Crysis. AoC just has high resolution textures and lots of polygons.

I find graphics comparisons on the PC kind of silly as different games aim for different hardware profiles. I can't run Crysis so to me the graphics aren't great, they are non-existent. Comparing games on one console makes a lot more sense.

There is an overarching point being made, however, that you can make great art, of both the 'cartoony' variety and the 'realistic' variety without using bleeding edge graphical engines or components. AoC, while having pretty awsome art direction, overbloated their game with high end graphics features that unecessarily cut out a big block of potential customers. It could have been avoided, but it may have been more work.

I find these graphics vs. performance arguments inherently moot.  I applaud all designers that push the graphics envelope because quite frankly without designers doing this it'd stagnate the hardware market as well as slow-down the speed of software progress (one reason why software lags behind hardware increasingly more every year).  Yes, you'll have games that approach genius-level and find that happy-medium between art direction, graphics, and performance... but that level wouldnt be reached w/o apps like Crysis, AoC, FSX, etc.  Not to mention hardware prices would drop more slowly w/o apps that could use them.

I remember having these arguments back when I had a Tandy 1000 and a 2400 baud modem.  It never stops.  I couldnt play the latest version of King's/Space Quest because it wasnt perdy enough, if playable at all.  Enter DX2... and on and on.  I didnt appreciate Space Quest less just because it wouldnt play on my frakkin Tandy box properly!

WoW is successful because it caters to the masses of mediocrity that pervade the gaming public in the US.  It's a smart financial move.  It's not groundbreaking 'cept to show everyone where the "sweet spot" lies.  It serves to "bring balance to the force" so to speak.  Yes, indeed we can look at WoW like we look at Anakin Skywalker... popular, powerful, and shiny but evil incarnate, setting back the galaxy 1000's of years and enslaving billions - turning back to the Good only when he dies, so the Galaxy can move forward.  (okay a bit extreme)

Scandinavian game designers rarely if ever make games for the masses.  It's NOT their style and I applaud them for it.  AoC is no exception.  They design games to push envelopes, not to necessarily make the most dollar initially.  Sure, they can get a bit off-the-wall sometimes but at least they're daring to be different.  And in the end a new Chosen One will emerge and a bigger, better "Sweet Spot" will be found and all will be right with the world.  More people will have DX10 rigs, 21" monitors, raid managers, geek vernacular, etc.  and we'll all look upon this "Space Quest" period and laugh as we simultaneously decapitate our bosses playing an Augmented Reality version of Bushido Blade in the office on a wearable Voodoo rig.

Games like WoW may bring these people to the table, but you're not going to sell them a better Vacuum without having something shiny to show them... regardless of art direction.

So, iyo, for a developer it's a question of whether he/she wants applause or hard cash as the reward for his/her efforts.

Sorry I couldn't hear you over the pompous

You are excluding the fact that arts mature, even without technological progress. Late titles for a specific console look better in general than early ones. This also goes for PC. More often than not has the former generation of technology yet to be mastered when the next step is taken. "Pushing the envelope" is more about not really knowing what you're doing than really progressing, rather the actual progress will happen in other, later, games that copy the parts that turned out well. While it's laudable to "take the hit", you're not the one that will come out with that really inspiring game.

In fact, I'm fairly sure that a 4 to 5-year period between every significant hardware change is healthy for the quality of the games, rather than constantly treading unknown soil as the PC is doing. When was the last time you played a truly enjoyable "bleeding edge" game on PC?

We're seeing evidence that this isn't a good analogy. People should be buying the PS3, but they're not. They're buying the Wii. TR is more modern than WOW. Why didn't it drive them out of business?

I have a feeling you're just playing devil's advocate here, because even the big publishers are thinking fun over high-end requirements now.


I hope that wasn't a rhetorical question, cause I wanna say 14 years ago with Wing Commander 3. :)

I am somewhat playing devil's advocate here.  But remember, without consoles like the PS3 there's a good chance people wouldn't have bought the Wii.  Feel me?  Look at it like the Cold War.  Without escalation there can be no moderate progress.  And as the Wii brings in consolers, so do those consolers eventually buy 360/PS3.

TR has some aspects that'll most likely make it into future titles.  And the fact is, it was FUBARED due to rushed release and a semi-psychotic producer.  Implementation killed that cat, not modern stylization.  The same can be said for AoC; which indeed could've been the "better vacuum."  But so far it aint... not becuase of hardware requirements, but because of faulty implementation.

Fun is indeed the most important, but if you dont push the envelope you end up gimping your own capabilities in the future... which slows down everything even moreso, giving us folk at f13 yet even more fodder to bytch about.  A lot of the design concepts we constantly wish for here aint gonna come about because someone simply decides to make something "FUN."  They come about because increasingly modern groundwork and tools are laid out for the devs and artists to take advantage of.

Is this an excuse to make steaming piles of shyt?  No.  But it doesnt mean we should all still be using our Ataris to make Pixar films either.

And it isn't just the Wii, either. I'm not seeing any strong reason to dump a bunch of money into a PS3 when I have a 360 and a PC and a Wii. There's very little it offers me I can't get from one of the other 3, all of which have a big head start over the PS3 in terms of how many people own one.

No? I don't understand the logic being used here.

He wants you to feel him.

A lot of the design concepts we constantly wish for here don't require high-end systems. I don't see people wishing for more polygons around here.

Actually, if Conan had been half as technically pretty and half as incomplete, f13 would have flamed it half as much. ;-)

Real-time rendering?  Immense player content?  Seamless worlds?  Integrated player-created instances?  True Sandboxes?  Photorealism?
It's not always about the polys either, it can just be about raw calculation.

immense player content, seamless worlds, player-created instances, true sandboxes ... these been done sometimes as far as few years back and on hardware considerably weaker than most recent machines. Real time rendering? technically all games render in real time, so i'll guess you mean something else here. Photorealism? Really, that's what we "constantly wish for here?"

Games do not render in real-time.  They just put pre-rendered pieces together in pre-defined ways.  Go chunk out some fractal terrain on Terragen and Mojoworld and ask your system to render it and see what happens.  Go ask Pixar how long it takes them to render a scene.  Anyways.

Perfect player content requires robust easy-to-use tools that likely uses all-of-the above techniques also.  Making entire gameworlds this way likewise.  Spore will come close, but it's not an MMO (for many reasons, technology being one of them).

Most large seamless gameworlds suck ass.  Ever played WW2O?  Decent game, but crippled by an antiquated engine played on old hardware most of the time.  You LIKE having to instance every 3 feet you travel in modern games?  Moving on.

As for Photorealism, that's a battle I've seen a few times here on f13.  Yeah, some people dont like it... but, many do.  It's largely more of an artistic outlook than a graphical one.  But you can also look at it as simply fitting more pixels and polys in all your graphics.  The goal is achieving resolutions similar to film, no matter what the medium or subject (real or unreal).  The more information you can store in an image the better.

I don't know why people keep trumpeting a 'true sandbox' as something that would have mass market appeal. The average gamer needs/wants structure. Even Spore has structure.

All Sandboxes have wooden borders to keep the sand in.  Otherwise it uhh.. wouldnt be a box. 
No one's saying it doesnt need structure. 
And Spore will be a prime example of why sandboxes DO have mass market appeal (when implemented properly).  I guess you're now arguing between a mere sandbox and a true one?  Define the differences.

Spore won't prove anything. It doesn't become a true sandbox until the end of the game and I wager while it'll sell hojillion copies, most folks won't make it that far. But the vocal minority (which will be 500k-1M in this game) will make it seem like they did. Simply put, it's a shockingly hardcore game from the guy that brought us The Sims. It's been too long since SimCity to call Will Wright a designer for hardcore folks.

Woh, what? Perhaps that just needs rewording.

Also, WWIIO's main Drain on engine resources is the insane amount of calculations they do for combat/physics, its not that the engine isn't capable of better overall graphics (Not talking art here), its a give and take.'

NVM..there just a lot in that post thats off base.

Rewording:  Rendering photorealistic movie-quality images in realtime within a structured gaming Sandbox.

... i'm sorry but this is silly. Games do render, in real time, the content that's made simple enough to allow such operation. The "putting pre-rendered pieces together in pre-defined ways"? This applies just as much to the terrain in Terragen, or to Pixar animation -- these are, after all, pre-defined by animators shot by shot.

If you actually meant to say "real time rendering of renderman quality" then well, that's another thing altogether and the source of my initial confusion.

No one said anything about "perfect" player content, your original demand was "immense". Shitload of player content is already out there, let's not move these goal posts.

So? Maybe large seamless gameworlds in practice just aren't as hot thing to have in game as you think... was it really so exciting to have seamless galaxy in Frontier? And that's about as big and as seamless as things can get.

The more information you can store in the image, the higher demand for quality and detail of all featured content, and consequently the longer time (and budget) required to push the game out of the door. Considering it i'm really not very keen on the push for the photorealism nor i'm sure if it's really "the better" -- as it moves games in the direction of summer blockbusters, extending development cycles and limiting risks publishers are willing to take... and half the time end effect looks just like ass anyway because our minds nitpick details more, the more things attempt to look real.

(additionally, with the output resolutions pretty much capped at 1920 x 1080 at the moment i'm not sure what's the benefit of asking for 'film resolutions' which are roughly 1.5-2x that)

Hopefully the server is doing the combat/physics calculations while the clients do their own graphics rendering?

This appears to be different argument altogether. To remind, the initial point was "we need powerful computers to do things like.... true sandbox!" with the counter-point to it, "true sandbox" games been done already, with hardware quite weaker than modern machines. Which would imply that no, we don't actually need more powerful computers to pull it off, nor is the lack of such computers preventing appearance of more of such games.

It is, but it does affect rendering and frame rates. All servers do. I had a thread with a video posted of what it is they do. Wasent even going to bring up world size, number of players, aircraft ETC..

Bottom line, its all give and take.

I'd say most gamers don't want photorealism anymore. They got it a few times, and said "Oh that's what it's like, ok I changed my mind, I don't like it." Everybody here seems to hate it. Most gamers elsewhere like the idea of it until they see it, then beg for their silly goofy IMVU avatars again.

Sandboxy games taking low computing power...yes. Dwarf Fortress, M.U.L.E., Ultimas 6 and Ultima 7, Rogue...of course it depends on what we want to do in our sandbox, but generally if we're talking about more fun options, that's a function of man power and not computing power. Same with player content. That's a question of the right players putting in the hours, or of clever game systems that bring that stuff out of us. A Tale in the Desert does this beautifully, without need of beautiful graphics.

Uh, yeah, like others have said, games do render in real-time.  I do not think those words mean what you think they mean.

And if a server is doing a calculation, that doesn't affect client frame rates at all, unless you have an extraordinarily weird architecture.

Whattaya mean, movie-quality? Tin Boy quality? We're already doing that in real time. Even then, we can still not create animation that's so convincing that Average Joe won't be able to tell it from the real thing. "Movie-quality" is only good enough to render things that are out of our focus (mattes, partial overlays et.c.) - anything that is IN focus still looks plastic and unreal.

And "true sandboxes"... this has nothing to do with computing power. It has everything to do with human capability to envision what a "true sandbox" would mean. We like to think we're gods, but we're not. A real sandbox is most likely outside the scope of our intellect. When does it become too real? What things aren't desirable in a fictional world? Even with unlimited computing power, would we get games that are more fun? Mind you, Go, the boardgame, is ancient, has very simple rules and is still enjoyed by millions. Tell them we need better graphics and faster CPUs.

For scientific reasons? Sure. For making games that are more fun? Nu-uh.

He wants a holo-deck and won't be satisfied till he can bone marylin monroe while riding a dinosaur

I'd definitely buy a lifetime account for that

Or a heavy use of dynamic content. Yeah, servers do, and can impact clients frame rates in a number of ways. Depends on the design.

If it's just on the server, then no, it won't affect frame rates.  Now, the example above regarding physics sims probably will affect the client, but not because of server calculations, but because A) most likely the client will ALSO be doing a physics sim, and B) if you have a physics sim, you may well have more objects for the client to render.

But the server could decide to do an incredibly realistic combat damage system and it wouldn't affect the client one bit.  The server getting bogged down will not cause client frame rate issues at all, though yes, often they will both get bogged down at the same time by similar things (such as one hundred people being in the same place), but independently and probably because of different calculations.

I don't really know what you mean by a heavy use of dynamic content.  If you're talking about some complex formula for determining when and where things spawn, then no, that wouldn't affect the client at all.  If you just mean that there would be more stuff in the world, then obviously that will affect the client because it has more things to render, but this is totally independent from whether or not the server is struggling.

precisely... and there's no sarcasm here... just precisely
And the moment I envision Marilyn in skimpy leathers I expect her and the non-gelded T-Rex she's riding to be instantaneously generated by the system; from scratch.  <--real-time rendering
(and yes, my head-mounted-display is in the mail)

It is. As is Neopia. As is Habbo. It's not your MMO, and it's not even a business model directly comparable to your MMOs. But you're not getting it if you think a persistent world must be a 3D fantasy full screen immersive diku. There is no single market for "MMO".

Incorrect. Completely different markets. It's like comparing WoW to Second Life. You're just not going to find a significant crossover because the appeal and therefore the markets are just that different.

UO. Just remove the photorealism that has long been proven to NOT be a requirement. See: COD4 vs Crysis or WoW vs EQ2. To achieve "better graphics" often means compromising resources that could have been allocated to things like better world design, better combat systems, better server architecture, better game play.

There's a place to push for cutting edge graphics. But the most successful games have been due to their appeal as games first.

I want a holo-deck too. But you need to remember that the shows that had them were about what went on in them, not just about how fancy they looked. When photoreal can be achieved, it's no longer a worthwhile achievement unto itself.

Would you like to prepay for it? :P

Head mounted display? bah, I will make millions selling crotch-mounted controllers.

This is correct. It should probably be pointed out, that in fact, there is little to no overlap in the skill sets required to create a good game and the skill set required to create a good engine, but we tend to lump these things together as end users when we're having our FUTURE AWESOME GAME fantasies.

Because thankfully, we've been graced with an imagination to fill in the deficiencies. Suggestion is a far more powerful tool for entertainment than cold fact.

Curious. Would you consider Gaia and/or Myspace to be MMOGs?

I know this is obviously a joke, but on a serious note this isn't actually real-time rendering you're asking for.  Rendering is turning data into an image, and we can already do rather realistic real-time rendering of dinosaurs.  What you're asking for here is generating the DATA on the fly.  We don't see many games generating a dinosaur model on demand... but that's not real-time rendering.  That's more like crazily good dynamic content generation.

A few do it, Spore being the most noticeable (GalCiv with its on-the-fly ship designer is probably the second most prominent title, followed in a lesser sense by almost any game with a random map).  There are pretty good reasons why almost no one attempts that sort of thing on a major scale, it's just not needed for 99.99% of what the designers want to do.

edit: Note that this sort of procedural generation is not actually that processor dependent, it's more the scale of effort that goes into the design that's limiting.

Edit2 - Daggerfall, Dwarf Fortress is a great example, there's many more.