f13.net

Let me preface this by saying that I'm not claiming WoW is losing subscribers; only a complete and total moron would say that. Rather I think that a good number of people who have been with the game since around launch are trickling away. Let me explain...

Somewhat recently over on Lothar the two main Horde guilds booted their "lesser" members in the middle of the night and formed a new, better cyborg guild. Standard asshole raid drama but it caused alot of high profile players to cancel their accounts under the pretense that the game just wasn't much fun anymore.

I didn't think much of it at the time but I've noticed over the course of the past two months alot of those "high profile, original, from launch" players making their I Quit posts. The major raiding guild on Lothar just lost a bunch of players due to burnout. Another one did the same. In my Horde guild alot of people have started to trickle away in dribs and drabs.

So, I got a little curious. I've recently rerolled Alliance on Kul Tiras because I hated Lothar (drama pit extraordinairre) and, frankly, I was feeling some burnout and wanted to do things from the other side. There, too, some of the players who had done the same (rerolled on a new server for a fresh start) have made their goodbye posts. I checked Khadgar, where I have some RL friends playing and... yep. Guild leaders, high profile PvPers, forum whores... all quitting due to boredom and burnout.

I got a bit more curious and I'm seeing it on a whole lot of realm forums. The question is why all at once?

Again, only a jackass would claim that Blizz is in trouble in any way, shape or form because raiders/hard cores are leaving here and there but it begs the question as to what the game will look like three or four years from now. I say this because despite the casual 1-59 game and recent concessions to non-raiders the entire WoW endgame is geared toward the die hards. I think their business model is based (concious or not) on repeat subscriptions from the non-casuals. Not that this is different from most MMOGs or anything BUT...

How the fuck are they content with two years for an expansion pack? I'm thinking this is what's driving this. Alot of people I've spoken to don't like AQ, don't like the slow patching and can't imagine waiting another two years for an expansion pack after this one. You run out of things to do and no matter how active these games aren't infinite.

Is this the chink in WoW's armor? A problem not tomorrow or next year but long term?

I think you got it in one right there. People like the game, but with the slow slow patching, and not much new content people are bored. I think this is where you start to see the real difference between online game and virtual world. In a virtual world, players really feel like they live there, and continue to find things to do. When you have been spoonfed content, and there really is no more, you get bored. Also, one of the major draws of these Diku style games (hell, and RPG type) is advancement. What do you do when you have the best shit in the game, wether it be BWL/AQ loot or the PVP gear. People are starting to plateau and they get bored. I know I am feeling it myself. Pretty much the only thing I enjoy any more is raiding, and my guild raids 3 days a week now. Usually due to RL stuff I miss one of those days, so I have 2 evenings worth of interesting stuff. And my guild is still pushing BWL. I could see how a BWL farming guild could easilly get bored. Yeah, AQ was new, but the majority of the loot is about the same as BWL stuff, so its not a major character advancement. I think the only way to get around this happening is to release expansions ala EQ, keep pushing the level cap higher and higher, keep giving new shineys to strive for. New areas to explore and destroy. If Blizzard hopes to keep the numbers it has now, they have to get faster with their expansions.

It didnt help that the last patch was a total desaster ether. For every thing they added or fixed, they introduced 5 new bugs. Yeah, yeah, thats standard I know, but this one IMO has been the worst one to date.

Back in my teenage day I worked at a burger place. At this burger place we had waffle fries and regular straight fries. We made them both at the same time and, really, there wasn't any difference besides the shape. We'd ask people at the drive through, "Waffle or regular?" And each and every day people would pick one or the other. Not one person waffle, the next straight. Inexplicably they'd all choose exactly the same.

This is apropos of nothing beyond the fact that I've found it just as strange that guilds are breaking up and people leaving due to boredome all at roughly the same time. It's like there was this time limit when people's patience finally just ran out: you play for 1.5 years you quit.

The glacial pace of their content is starting to wear on me, as well. I like shiny. I want shiny. I don't have to be first but by fucking God if you're going to make a game that caters almost solely to the achiever in me you better crank the new stuff out.

I really have my doubts as to whether a fresh batch of level 70s will be willing to wait two years for the second expansion.

Yes, it's the slow patching and lack of anything new.  With Raid Lockouts and timers and such you can only do so many instances.  If your goal is to raid every night, that means you're doing a LOT of repeat content, particularly if you're one of the hardcore on-every-day players.  

 This is something we talked about before the game was released.  It was pointed out that the most likely path for things happening was that EQ2 was going to be out early, suck hard in the beginning and change over time into something that may or may not be fun. Meanwhile WoW was going to be great, but lose folks over-time because of Blizzard's glacial pace for doing anything.   This seems to be playing-out in at least a small way with the hardcore, oldschool MMO crowd.

I'll even admit to suffering from a bit of burnout.  I've been playing Gal Civ 2 like mad rather than logging-in to WoW, and I've been contemplating checking out another MMO.  Sure, my guild is only just getting into MC and running Ony, but that means nobody wants to do anything during the week.  That's 5 days of boredom for myself, since I have set days I want to PvP and can work around the house.  I don't feel like logging-in every night just to queue-up while watching TV.

Simply put.. there's a lack of things to DO, even if you do raid.

Edit:
Waffle fries?  You work at Mr. Hero? Mmmm love me some waffle fries once in a while.

Recently on my server, two of the top alliance guilds did roughly the same thing.  The "hardcore" members of the guild were frustrated that they were having low turnouts for a mob that was actively cockblocking them in AQ (Princess Huhu, the new guild breaker).  Keeping a lot of people in the dark, they split off and formed a new guild for the more serious raiding contingent among them.  They said it was to "reunite old friends" since members of these guilds had formed due to a similar split/merger many months ago.  It's bullshit, they got frustrated on being stuck in AQ and people ducking raids because no one likes wiping to a mob continually all night and thus decided to take the easy way out and just throw the weak overboard.

Also in the same month a long time horde guild split up, they weren't anything significant, but they'd been around since damn near launch (broke up after recently downing Rag I think).  Another horde guild split up recently in a manner similar to the alliance fiasco.  A guild called "Mystic Circle" had the guild leader quit the guild and form a more raid focused, elitist splinter group called "RareSpawn".  The split off guild originally tried to steal the entire guild bank assets also.  The impetus for this split might be stress over trying to beat Nef.  The original guild was a rather relaxed raiding guild but had a decent amount of progress and could be considered the third best guild horde side.

People have quit the game over this.  A lot of the enjoyment of the game for people that enjoy raiding is the group they're currently in.  Starting over is not fun. Finding a new guild is not fun.  I imagine the people that got left behind are feeling a bit shell shocked.  Hell, both alliance guilds in that split/merger lost upwards of 15-20 core raiders each. That effectively halts all of their progress and puts them immediately into recruiting mode or just running ZG and AQ20 (if they can muster the numbers).  I know if my guild broke up or I was culled in some sort of refocusing effort, I'd put my chances of quitting at around 90%.  Hell, it could happen to, our guildmaster is really scratching his head as to why we've been playing like complete shit lately (we had a wipe on Rags for fuck's sake).


It's people hitting a content wall.  AQ just put up a new one for people to run full force in to.  Raid guilds will tend to get stuck on certain mobs, and when that happends, certain things are sure to manifest.

1) Frustrations run high. Wiping 6-10 times a night on the same encounter is just discouraging and frustrating.  20g repair bills a night.

2) Attendance dips for learning new content.  People log on for the candy runs but you can barely field a raid for days that are garunteed to be nothing but getting your ass kicked. 

3) People start logging off early.  People start openly bitching in raid chat.  People get really touchy over insignificant crap.

When this happends the higher ups in the guild start making policy decisions that basically try to enforce attendence on wipe nights that ends up having a negative impact on morale.

Lets see what our guild came up with in a meeting (note that these measures passed with near 90% approval).

1. Raids will be random and announced 1 hour before the scheduled raid time. Still gives people ample time to come up with an excuse or just log the hell off.

2.  DKP for learning encounters is doubled. (I like this one).

3.  Inactive status can be obtained in 1 week.  1 week of bad attendance and you're not getting first shot at any loot.  (Was 2 weeks).

4.  To stay off inactive you must show up for 6 hours of new material each week.  This is in addition to making at least 3 raids during the week.

This had resulted in at least 3 active raiders taking some time off.  This hasn't fixed all raid attendance issues, but it has resulted in progress towards downing our current content block (twin emps).

However, we just seem sloppy lately.  I don't know if it's a higher than normal amount of recruits, burn out, getting disinterested in killing the same shit over and over again for crappy loot tables (de'ing multiple drops from Chromag is discouraging), or just a general lull, but we've been aweful. Taking multiple attempts to down f'ing Vael makes me want to heave.


You'd think so, but.. whenever we open up for applications, we get more than we can handle.  As much the end gaming might be suffering from attritition to due boredom and frustation, it's getting replaced continually by new blood.  The game just has too much momentum to be derailed.  I see new 60s all of the time.  The casuals now have several things to keep them busy at 60. 

The only real thing they haven't given a lot of attention to is the pre-60 game.  Which is somewhat understandable from my position because it doesn't take long to hit 60 and I never really found myself wanting for content. 

Heh, this would have made a decent article (sans rambling).  The topic, I mean, not my craptastic writing.

I can only speak for myself but what I've loved about MMOGs has never been the social aspect but the scope of the world and game, the fact that, in theory, it would never end until I chose to make it end. With single player games like Oblivion and Spore coming out that have that scope I'm going to be hard pressed to stick with the game post expansion unless it completely wows me. I sort of doubt that's going to happen.

Oblivion somewhat kills my will to log in also.  Oblivion is filled with new and interesting things.  WoW on Tuesday is something I'm garaunteed to have seen.

Oddly, Guild Wars is starting to really appeal to me again. I want scope by myself and light play with other people. Or I'm starting to, anyway. I liked the Factions preview alot and so long as I don't treat GW like I do an MMOG (ie logging in more than is healthy and catassing) it's fun.

I guess what's puzzling to me isn't so much people quitting (I expect that) as it is the way it's seemed to happen all at once. It's almost like the Hominid French Fry Hive Mind effect I mentioned, some quasi-mystical link where people want and hate the same things at the same time. I wonder what Richard Gere would say...

I think, and I may be wrong, that Modern Angel works/worked for Arcadian Del Sol. Did your manager have a special....hat?

Nope. He thought wearing hats indoors was rude so he wore a big hair net instead. Go fgiure. Whatever happened to Arcadian, anyway? Just to derail the topic, of course.

Lots and Lots of WoW. 47 (http://www.xfire.com/profile/arcadiandelsol) hours this week? Doesn't seem right, since his all-time is only double that. He also posted (http://www.arcadiandelsol.com/) last July. What ever happened to arcadian radio? I vaguely remember him doing a podcast thingy...

Arc quit writing to manage a chik-fil-a restaurant his buddy owned.  As a result, his time to do internet stuff decreased significantly and he seems to have abandoned it.  I've seen him online on x-fire over the last week, but not ever having known him personally, I didn't think to msg him and ask what drew him out after all this time.  I imagine it was vacation or another ugly house-repair injury.

I always enjoyed his writing over the years. To answer your question, Merusk, it was Backyard Burgers.

Arcadian and I have a special relationship. I know he misses me. Terribly.

I can totally see how people would get burned out, but I also don't want to see the mudflation that I saw in EQ, such as more and more vanilla content and crap like AAs.

Especially AAs, I hated that shit in EQ. I got disgusted when I couldn't get into a decent guild because my rogue didn't have an extra 5% to stamina and dodge.

I think it's the nature of the beast. World of Warcraft doesn't have much "World" to it and it caters to one type of player, that being the achiever. I know they give token xp for exploring but seriously... drop in the bucket. Where do they go? They've made the game and it is what it is. I don't really see where they can go except for mudflation.

My question is: why would they need to go in another direction?  The "lack" of world, the catering to the achiever, has them up to their ears in cash.  Part of my ramble had a point and that what you're seeing on your server and others is cyclic.  It's happening all of the time and just naturally happens when people hit content walls or simply run out of crap to do (wish I had that problem, raiding leaves too much shit undone).  Guild fragment, people quit.  This happened when people were first learning MC and Onyxia, when they hit Rag, when they hit Vael, when they're learning Nef and now when they hit massive cockblocks in AQ like Princess Huhu and the Twin Emps.  It isn't a sudden trend, it isn't a graze along the port side of the Titanic, it's just a blip in the heartbeat. (I don't know how the cycle works for casuals or how it works for die hard PVPers.)

They'll add content.  They'll add more content.  They'll add different types of content (PVP, raid, solo, group). They'll do it at a glacial place. Many people will quit, even more will subscribe. ... Profit.

[Drudge siren]BLIZZARD IS SLOW AS SHIT AT MAKING ANYTHING....DEVELOPING[/Drudge siren]

I'm getting bored and I haven't even done ZG or AQ or BWL or anything past the first 10th of MC yet. I'm officially getting burnt the fuck out on Stratholme despite the fact I really like its general look and really like killing the undead for some reason, and I've never liked Scholo or the Blackrock Spire series (Everything in Blackrock Mountain fucking sucks. Big black square rooms with muddy textures and too much trash).

For some reason no one in my guild ever wants to do Dire Maul despite the fact it's much easier in terms of pulling, has some of the absolute best non-epic loot, and is generally much more fun than the older instances.

We don't have the numbers to even attempt a 20-manner. We have maybe 12-13 level 60 players, and one 60 priest who is on with any regularity (he is very very good at what he does though). My guild leader is interested in maybe forming an alliance with another extremely laid-back casual guild to take a shot at AQ20/ZG/*BRS so we don't have to group with random chuckleheads.

Raid content is the fucking devil and Blizzard needs to stop making it.

I'm not saying that they need to go in another direction. It was stated that going in a mudflation direction would suck and my reply was that it's pretty much the only place they can go. They've killed world PvP, created a static (albeit fun for a year and a half) world, crafting is useless and haven't released any instance besides a raid dungeon in a year; I'll tack on that I am a raider to that last statement as a qualifier.

I think some of these content problems are exacerbated by the fact that it's just so easy to get to 60. The raiding is the most accessible I've seen, too, as much as people think it's not. I think that one piece a couple months ago by Lum (The game is TOO accessible!) may be on the right track.

I think that if they haven't quit up until now, they are doing great.  I personally got to 58 then quit the game for quite a while.  A friend lured me back and I hit 60 and started raiding, and now I once again have WAY too much to do in the game.  So much I can't see being bored for many months. But then the boredom bug strikes without warning, so who knows.

I am not sure about the large amount of people quitting.  I suspect that if you check the forums at any given time you will see a large percentage of I Quit posts.  I'm sure the percentage goes up and down.  You might have caught it on an upswing, but depending on your expecatations, you might have caught it on a downswing and still been surprised by the amount.

I personally have not seen a surge in people quitting.  People come and go, that's the nature of MMOGs.  In my guild for some reason we are having a large amount of old players returning at the moment.  I think it's just random.

I personally don't mind the slow patching.  But then again I only play 4 hours a day, maybe 6 on a weekend night clearing MC, and not every day.  Those with 12 hr a day habits can be expected to burnout quickly.   It would be nice if that glacial pace was matched with high quality patches for the time invested, though...

Do you ever wish you played with us on a real server? You would have went out in a hacking blaze of glory a year ago and reclaimed so much of your life.

You're paying $15/month to show up at work 6 hours per week? Pay me $5 and I'll staple gun you a few times a month. Same thing.

Playing WoW seems pathetic, and I've currently got 4 active subscriptions to mmo games.

Back on topic, I'm really amazed it took people this long to get bored. I wouldn't complain about the 2 year wait for a WoW expansion. Most big WoW patches have more content than any other games expansions.

WoW will also maintain large large numbers for the same reason EQ1 did, we all know that somewhere in the 1-3million of their subs are brand new to the MMO scene.  Which means to them WoW is the greatest thing ever, whereas everyone else is suffering from "goddamn I've seen this pattern before and I know where this is going" syndrome.

Kill big dragon X times so you can get +3 stat upgrade
Wait for new big dragon to be patched in while killing same old big dragon over and over so other fuckers can get their +3 shiney.
Repeat

Toss in the occasional increase to the level cap and viola, Moneyhats!

I'm sure fucking glad that is the winning formula of MMO design.

I'll never play on a PVP server for this type of game. Ever. I don't want to be bothered anymore by the 19 year old version of myself when leveling (because I have to, yay).  Yes, I'm a giant wuss now.  Given the right game system, I could be less wussy (possibly).


I don't.  I show up when I show up. Nothing's changed for me. Enforcement for time cards is surprisingly lax in a video game.  I was one of the no votes for every one of the measures beyond the more DKP stuff.  I'm sure I'd be one of the first culled if our guild was to fragment or go even more hardcore.   


I'm afraid to ask what the other 3 are (other than EVE).  You going to ship me that PS2 anytime soon?  You could cure me of my WoW habit.

Eve, Eve, Eve, EQ2.

Sure, email me your address. nijasan@gmail.com

I see a lot of people on FFXI boards who have left and are now coming back. And I see very few people leaving for WoW.

One of the things FFXI did right is there are a lot of different end-game activities. You can do big group stuff, small group stuff, missions and quests, grind for merits (another kind of end-game XP), participate in level-capped stuff, etc. FFXI also has a ton of different jobs you can raise which is not as painful as rolling an alt because it's the same character and you can switch back at any time.

WoW seems like the end-game is either battlegrounds (which have issues) or the same raids over and over again. Either that or roll a totally new character that has no relation to the first.

Having 20 armiores and 10 million gil made the game extremely fun :(
I won't go back, though - FUCK genkei. Fuck it long, and fuck it hard.

Ok, I'll take my stab at this.

- Oblivion rocks and I've had no interest playing WoW lately.  I'm not to the point of cancelling, but after a month of no play I might consider it.  Perhaps there are a lot of other people in the same boat?
- When you lose your guild, WoW is not fun on its own post 60.  I've been through that lull.  I basically played WoW by myself for a few weeks and was ready to quit.  Once I found a good guild again, it was like a whole new game.  These people you mention all have the same thing in common, loss of their guild.  Facing the fact that you have to start over again trying to build up a database of friends is probably more than I'd be willing to do again.  I'd quit too.

When you design a game that forces you to have such a tight guild to get the ultimate goodies, this is what you get.  Eventually all guilds fall apart or move on to the next shiny game.  I believe the loss of a guild in MMOGs is the single most powerful cause for cancellations.  I'd think these companies would try to buildi their games so that people are more flexible than this, but go go 20+ man content. /shudder

The FFXI comments?  No way I'd go back to that.  I know they've made the grind easier, but it will still be orders of magnitude harder than WoW.  WoW has it right as far as nice casual 1-59 level building.  If anything, games should do this yet easier.  Yes, it makes it so you have to hand feed content.  That just means you have to work at feeding it.

I'm amazed Blizzard doesn't have the cash and planning to just continuously pump out the content.  They are in such a good position right now to maintain dominance for years to come.  Of course, they can choose the UO route and blow their top position with bad decisions for many years and still make some money.

I also believe there will be a point where the truly casual will all hit that 60 level and find out there really isn't much more for them and quit.  They'll start to lose big numbers then, at least for the US market.

A few high end raiders quitting won't affect the game because those aren't the masses who play. The high end is very important because it gives players something as a goal, while expansions and new dungeons continue to move that goal further away. But as a community? It's just not that big. They burn out, blow up in drama. But it doesn't have that much of an affect because it's a tiny percentage of your community.

IMHO that concept of a goal most players never reach is why building content exclusively for 1-5% of your players works as a business model. Your ubers are effectively a marketing scheme.

Or that's my 2p.

I've had WAY more fun with all characters below level 40 then I ever did with my 60s. Honestly there is a lot of content in the pre 60 game. I just keep making alts on Horde and Alliance. Then I level them in different zones than I did the others. Being low level is fun. I have a 21 druid that I keep logged in Redridge. I login, gank until there is too much high level heat and log out. Who needs the end game. There is a lot to do pre-60. Honestly its a different game with every different character class. Why be in a hurry to get a full time job end game?

You do realize you sound like a fucking blackass pot, right?

Lots will be back for Naxx in all likeliness.  Hardcore guilds on my server have had some churn, but from what I've seen, a lot of the churn seem to play alts on PvP servers or somesuch. 

EDIT: Really though, the hardcore guilds are having fallout because AQ's itemization is a tad off from what a lot expected.  It's essentially filled with itemization that was otherwise lacking, such as druid feral gear.  This caters to a minority; the vast majority of raiding players are not interested in loot from the first half of the instance.  Where the items start getting interesting (increase in ilevel) is at the twin emperors, but this fight requires more coordination and skill than what most BWL guilds are used to.

So, the super hardcore guilds are capable of progressing past the emps and getting some rare upgrades.  The lite hardcore guilds (the vast majority) have a lot of trouble getting to this point, and since the loot isn't there, a lot lose interest.  Either that, or they find or form a guild that can get to this point.

I see it as the raiding playerbase coping with how the top raid game is now structured.  When BWL was at the top end, it offered upgrades that were really far more accessible in comparison.

In my opinion, Blizzard is being too careful about mudflation.  They're adding to the end extreme of the raiding spectrum rather than shifting the entire thing forwards.

On the content front my guildmates and I came to the realization that the majority of the stuff coming in the expansion pack is already in the data files right now, just locked up. There was a pretty cool video that came out way back when of a guy who hacked the files (assume on his own little private server) and went riding around. Black Morass, Hyjal, Caverns of Time and so on.

So if it's taking them two years to finish up the stuff that's already in game I shudder to think about expansion number two. I was not a Blizzard fan when I came to WoW so while I'd heard of their slow release schedules I had no idea. We can talk about what would make WoW better or worse all we want but the only hard fact is that people demand expansions for Diku games. Start dragging and, well... I could see them take a small tumble (though still be a raging success) if they continue to ass drag with the post-70 expansion.

I've done WoW raiding and it takes up more time and it's less fun than what I'm doing now.

Then again I don't give a shit about the shiny, so I'm not the target audience.

A good bowel movement is more fun than raiding.

That doesn't change the fact you called playing WoW pathetic at the same time you admitted to being a multi-account holder in another MMOG. You're like a crack addict spitting on an alcoholic.

My prediction, and feel free to write this down, is that it will take somewhat longer but WoW will spawn an incarnation of lumthemad the likes of which not even God has seen.  It will happen in AOL and MySpace, using Unicode fonts, and their king-queen shall be legion, but it will come to pass as surely as the heavens doth wheel.  Beneath its sandals will be crushed to dust a thousand Shadowbanes and a thousand-thousand Auto Assaults, choking the Neo- McQuaids and Anti-Kosters on the bone-dust of the corpse of online gaming itself.  The wailing of The Bowman shall pierce the veil, unleashing hell on copper.  Those left alive shall witness the Final Days before Korea becomes self-aware, and nanoseconds later become enslaved by towering and cruel avatars shaped as a large and moving Flash Object.

And lo, it was scribed.

Good points. I think AQ may have been the tipping point. I know of only a few people who are interested in AQ. For some it is the loot but I don't think that's all.

Alot of folks ground their asses off to get the gates open and I think it was just such a let down. The bugs and their storyline aren't terribly interesting. The server crashes at opening, I think, put some people off of the whole thing. The big, number one reason I keep seeing, though, is that the raid guilds were forced to grind Maraudon to get the requisite nature resistance. Seems like a fairly trivial thing but when you're the big kid on the block and you're forced to go back to a bluebie instance to get your NR on? Right or wrong that has to blow.

The main raiding guild on my server (quick question: I see guilds citing precise standing in worldwide raid progression. Is there some site I'm not aware of that tracks this?), top ten or fifteen in the world, cleared AQ. And THEN they largely broke up. They just said, "Fuck this. AQ sucks. The items suck, no nature resistance sucks, etc."

I don't think anyone's "cleared" AQ40 yet.  I believe Ouro and C'thun are still waiting to be killed.

The loot blows ass for the most part though, especially the first 3-4 bosses.  It is a let down.  AQ20 is a hell of a lot more fun than 40, but it suffers the same itemization issues also.

Raiders don't want to spend the time learning new instances for loot side-grades.  Ohh well, priests finally get an upgrade over Benediction. Woo hoo.

Ah, my mistake then. Looking over at their progress thread I know they did the big green slime guy who's apparently the source of ALOT of bitching.

Viscidus (sp?).  A mob that requires tons of nature resist and drops.... nature resist gear. GG.

PvP is what makes the PvE raid game sort of suck with sidegrade after sidegrade.  They need to scale gear in battlegrounds or we'll be stuck with PvErs bitching about sidegrades and PvPers bitching about getting pwnz0r3d by purpalz forever.



I think I'm in love.

Yeah, Viscidus. The one that requires the nature resistance which doesn't actually exist in game.

Im pretty sure C'Thun has been killed. I dont know about Ouro, but I was told C'Thun was the major end boss of the dungeon.

C'thun has been taken to his second or third stage.  No one's downed him yet unless they're keeping it on the down low and that just doesn't happen on WoW's forums. 

Ouro is an optional boss (like Viscidus).  Supposedly ridiculously hard and currently bugged (shocker!).

Flesh this out a little and I will be more then willing to subscribe to your writing on this subject as a religion.  Seriously, I think a doomsday MMO gaming religion is something the world needs.  I'm sure as high priest you can get some kind of tax write-off.

That was great, Yegolev.

And Modern Angel, yes, two years for an expansion is pathetic. But they can get away with it in the current market, like they get away with incredibly poor server performance and queueing on many realms. I am pretty sure the majority of WoW subscribers are MMOG noobs, not just a couple of million, obsessed for the foreseeable future. And WoW remains the most polished and accessible MMOG for anyone else starting out.

It still has plenty of momentum and subscriber numbers will continue to grow. Post-expansion will be a high point, like post-Kunark in EQ. If they manage to turn around another expansion within 12 months of the first, they will retain returnees like EQ did with Velious. They've begun to address the non-raiders' issues with things like the dungeon set 2.0 armour quests, and they've shown they can make raiding more accessible in ZG. The gap between the kind of stats on MC gear and the stats on Dungeon 2.0 gear still has plenty of leeway for more non-raider quests.

It's still a very well-positioned game, with many opportunities to recapture people who have left it, and many new accounts still joining. Just as long as the expansion actually lives up to the hype.

It sounds as though I'm completely slagging on the game, at least in a roundabout way, when that's not really the case. I still play. Alot. And my experience since leaving Lothar and my old zerg guild has injected a bit of fresh life into the game for me. All the same, I'm ready for new stuff. Doing MC with a guild that has their shit together will be a breath of fresh air but it's still doing MC. The expansion can't come fast enough so I can swing some new shinies.

What the game has for me is polish. I never thought polish mattered much; I dabbled in most of the MMOGs that came out but I was largely a turn-based strategy grognard. I didn't give a shit if my games were hex maps with barely animated counters on them so long as they had SUBSTANCE. Polish, graphics? Fuck all that. Those were for other people. Boy, was I wrong. For every thing that another game does better than WoW that game lacks that polish that I used to sneer at.

That said I (and I suspect a decent handful of people) will be out of there in a second if we can get our depth AND polish. Give me Shadowbane without the bugs, bullshit and stationary spiders, for instance, and I'll be there with a quickness.

I bailed on the game about two months ago.  My primary character was 60 for about four months and the raiding game (MC & ZG) just wasn't fun.

Of course, one of the reason it wasn't fun was the assholery of guild politics.  One might say guild politics are not part of the game, but since you need 100-200 people in a guild to field a 40 person MC raid, that is simply not true.

The revamping of the old instances like Strat and Scholo is tempting, but it really was a relief push back the mouse and keyboard and get away from the game.  I don't need to watch my fat ass getting any fatter.

I'm not bored.  I just leveled a druid to 35 and have devoted the last couple days to lvling engineering, and I one-shotted a 60 mage with a 4k Death Ray crit.  Life is beautiful  :heart:

Yeah, the second half of AQ40 seems to be a huge vael-style NR cockblock. It's amusing, since I remember tigole saying that they'll not make any more resistance-heavy dungeons after MC and BWL. But at least they made green dragons spawn constantly (might've gotten fixed in last saturday's hotfix)... I remember watching a guild take Taerar down twice in one hour, that's a lot of NR lovin'.

I don't raid, and so far the 1.10 patch seems "ok". A lot of the previously crap blue/green instance drops are actually useful now, balanced out by the lowered instance caps. (BTW, friends don't let friends do 10-man pickup UBRS. It burnssss us.) I still get wtfpwned by BWL-geared folks, but AQ20 actually has comparable gear (compare http://www.thottbot.com/?i=40736 to http://www.thottbot.com/?i=52789 and http://www.thottbot.com/?i=52666 to http://www.thottbot.com/?i=39255 ), etc. I really dig the mini-ZHC dropped by Drakk, too.

Oh yeah, tier 0.5 doesn't seem worth getting for most non-raiders... my DM/strat/scholo blues and crafted blues/epics are better in most cases than the items from the quest line (which is both hideously expensive, takes a lot of time to complete, and plenty of luck/preparation for stuff like the 45min baron) except for the bracers, which is thankfully easy enough to procure. Not to mention running undead strat 50000 more times to get my dreadmist leggings? Eff that noise.


-- Z.

Heh, for me it's the inverse. The lack of something meaningful to do at 60 if you're not hardcore PVP or raiding made me wish for the days of EQ and it's AAs and LDON/Dragons of Norrath style gear you could work on a bit at a time without it being a big-ass faction grind for the colour purple. Gold for quests is a step up, but still gold isn't very meaningful in comparison to being able to work a little on your characters' gear or innate abilities or on augments (ie diablo gem-slotting). My experience is more like Fabricated's as far as content level goes.

My schedule doesn't allow for regular raids, and even when it did I wasn't interested, cos, you know, been there, done that, got the EQ t-shirt (and somehow the raids in EQ were more fun for me, despite the game's other issues.

Result of all this? Stopped playing about a year ago after playing from near-release. Restarted in November, account has been inactive again for a month or so and instead I'm finally working my way through Far Cry.. hurrah!

I've never done WoW raids, but the way people describe them makes them sound interesting.

If all of WoW's raids collected together were released as a singleplayer game, with the rest of your raid counterparts played by reasonably competent scripted AI, would it be fun?

So the people who are getting bored are the people who have finished all of the high end dungeons except AQ?

Why should this surprise anyone?  Few can maintain that level of guild/time commitment over years.  Months, sure, but eventually people realize that their time is better spent elsewhere.

I don't understand the whole "blame Blizzard for slow content" theme.  Unless you're hardcore, the content isn't slow, and why should Blizzard cater to the extreme top end?  Doesn't make sense.

It's not the game.  It's the nature of the catass achiever to rip through content quickly and grow bored.

When talking about raiding guilds, guild politics IS the game. The raids are just the "reward" for dealing with all that politicing shit.

EDIT: Yes, raids are the Jack Abramoff of Guild Politics.

I would. Especially if you could customize the AI for strategies, try out different tactics, see what works best. It'd be like all the fun of a guild without all the guild drama.
it'd get old faster, of course, ther'es not a lot of incentive to run MC for the 20th time, but I can see playing it and gearing up for the next dungeon. You'd burn through content even faster, but the content DOES stand on it's own. For a while, anyway.

I don't know why you think you need 100-200 people, my guild has just over 60.

Much of the entertainment derives from coming together, formulating a strategy, and having everyone do their individual part to triumph as a whole against otherwise impossible odds.  The encounters are very well designed by relative MMO standards, but they're mostly trivial after the learning phase. In addition to upgrading your character, you can parade around in the loot; a proclamation of your guild's solidarity and coordination, of sorts.

It's a unique, collective experience that you can't reproduce in a single player game, I'd say.

EDIT: Yes, guild drama is sorta incidental to playing the raid game.  You can get lucky though, and find a good group of skilled people.  My current guild has about 80 active accounts.

They've put out a ton of content, but it has mostly been towards the audience that DOES rip through their content faster.  As for me and the rest of the casuals, we are left with the same quests and instances we had before. 

I agree, there is a ton of content for 1-59 and I've done most of it with several alts, but after a year of doing this without any real additions to that portion of the game, the content additions seem to be slow to us.

AQ20 and AQ40?  I only liked that before they were opened I was able to sell all my crap for more money.  Now, even that has gone away so the raiders can prance their spoils in front of me.  They've catered to the catasses and once they've left, the casuals will be looking at the same content that was in the game for them over a year ago.

I'm still fine with it, but not because of any of the new content they added.  It just doesn't pertain to me.  I'll eventually get tired of rolling alts through the same stuff.  The expansion will add some stuff for me with that respect for a bit, but when the hell is that realistically coming out?

Some raids would, yah. It could play out like a tactics game where you only have complete control of one major player. 

There's a quest early on in Ashenvale for the horde where you go along with a small strike force of Orcs to take back an outpost from some night elves.  It's a very cool quest and a concept I wish they'd implement a lot more in the game.  It's rather well balanced, also.  Very possible to lose the encounter unless you're making a difference.

I don't know about that.  This game came out almost a year and a half ago.  Plenty of non-hardcore people have been 60 for over a year.  You have Strat, Scholo, UBRS and Dire Maul.  Over and over.  For a year.  Blizzard's slow content generation isn't just a problem for raiders.

Exactly. The problem for the raiders isn't slow content it's the QUALITY of content. Churn happens but I think it's been a bit more than usual due to AQ sort of sucking in the ways they enjoy.

...

I think that could be rephrased - I initially read it very differently from the way I think you meant it.

I should rephrase that. :) Multitasking kills my English and typing skills.

In all the ways that matter to the top end raider AQ falls short of what they enjoy.

I'm going to quibble here with your definition of a casual.  If you have done most of the content with several alts and played for a year, you're closer to a catass than a casual.  You don't have to be hardcore to be a catass.

As far as new content goes, there's more being added in the next patch, I believe.  Necropolis dungeon?

Thank you for bringing this up, Xanthippe... I was going to say the same thing.

Consider as counterpoint my position:  played since release (with several month break). I have one level 60.  My highest alt is 27.  I raid ZG, AQ20, MC, BWL often (2-3x a week). I am geared in mostly purples.  I consider myself a casual (0-4 hrs weekdays, 0-6 hrs weekends).

edit: purples and one orange.

You also have 3 battlegrounds and two realms with almost completely different quests.  Reputation.

Of course, my perspective may be different due to taking 6 months off from the game.  I'm most definitely in the catass category when I am playing, and I burned out on both realms before they came out with the honor system.  When I first came back, it seemed like so much has been added to the game, as well as improved about the game.

I don't expect to not grow bored with a game within about 6 months or a year, if I catass away at it.  One of the best things about mmorpgs is the ability to drop out, then drop back in without losing a thing.

Unless they're... SWG was it?... and they give your character the axe a few months after you cancel.  I never understood that.

Its not catass vs casual its raider vs non raider.  Theres tons of casual raiders out there, it really doesn't take as much of a commitment as most people assume, theres also tons of catass non raiders.  I have friends with 4 level 60s in the best blue/purple gear avialable outside of raids and my guild if full of people who log in 6 hours a week and have full epic suits from mc and bwl.

If you're playing more than 10 hours a week, you're not a casual player.  You're in some mid-range.  I'm not sure whether I'd argue 15 hours a week or 20 as the cutoff above which one is plainly catass, but it's somewhere in there.

About FFXI, I'm not saying it's better than WoW overall. I'm just saying two things:

1: There are a variety of end-game activites.
2: PvP is level capped to avoid people bringing in insane drops they got in PVE.

1 is hard to copy, but 2 is so easy.

How does level capping address discrepancies in gear?  Is it impossible for someone to have great gear at level x and another person to have poor gear?  How does this mechanic work in FFXI?

Edit: It would be possible (not sure on how hard to program) for WoW to level cap gear in regards to battlegrounds as every piece of equipment has an item level. 

Seems that your definition of casual is well below mine.  10 hours a week is 5 days a week @ 2hrs a day. If you play any semblance of regularly and do any instances - Deadmines or BFD included - you hit this mark.

Yep, I am so catass.

Maybe I should get a girlfriend or something else to eat my time.

By the time you're getting into 15 hour a week range, you're hitting "real world usefulness" territory.  15 hours a week can equal a damn good part-time internship or part-time job. I know kids who run nonprofits, 527's or in one case political director for a House race - give or take a bit, 15 hours a week is about what they put in as well.

By the time you could literally be a substantively better person with the time you spend on a hobby, that's a lot of time spent.

For instance, in the spirit of freedom and honesty, I will admit that in the past week I have been catass on this board.  It's kinda addictive, though.

Emphasis mine. You don't get much more subjective than that.

Some PvP is level capped and some is not, but it seems the most popular is cap 60 where the max level in FFXI is 75. Now it is of course possible for one level 60 guy to have better equipment than the other but the really insane equipment typically doesn't exist at that level. The really really good equipment where you have to get a drop, then combine it with a bunch of other drops etc etc etc doesn't happen until 70+.

On any given thing, sure.  I'm not judging what you'd spend the 15 hours on.  I'm just saying, no matter what your walk of life or  your interests, there's almost certainly something you could do with 15 hours a week that, in your own reflection after having done it, would leave you personally better off.

So when are you going to start preaching to the folks who watch 40+ hours of TV. Or read for that 15-20 hours, play golf, work on their yard or go hunting/ fishing/ boating.  They're not fulfilling their potential as human being either.

I recommend you start with the hunters first.

There used to be a saying: "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy".

Then again, some people are workaholics and would rather be working.  I don't think that makes them better people, necessarily.

Then there's this anomaly:  http://news.com.com/Power+lunching+with+wizards+and+warriors/2100-1043_3-6039669.html

I'd view the TV example as more comparable, and I'd say roughly the same thing to them.  But, uh, they're not here, are they?

I'm waiting for my current group of guildies, who are really the only reason I'm still playing, to hit 55+ in sufficient numbers that I can run through BRD, BRS, Scholo and Strat with them a few times for the fun of doing it with a group of people I like for whom those dungeons are substantially a new experience. Maybe we'll have enough people to do ZG as well; I don't see us having enough to do Molten Core, which is fine because I got very tired of it when I was wth an active raiding guild. I suppose I'll hang on to the expansion and play with that a bit. I doubt it will keep me very long.

I think the criticism of Blizzard's post-launch content development direction is fairly warranted. They built a game that at launch treated the extreme powergamers like the long tail of a graph whose high point was somewhere else, as people who needed to be given something but for whom the game was not centrally intended. Then post-launch, it was all about the powergamers, pretty much. Even PvP, which promised to provide some kind of alternate satisfactions, was suborned to a pretty brutal time spent = power logic.

I'm not so much saying this in the context of condemning powergamers flat out; it's just that in this case, I think it represents a misunderstanding of the design breakthrough that WoW actually achieved, and it puzzles me. How can Blizzard have set out with such apparent deliberation to break through to a bigger market and then turned around and ignored that market so persistently? You could cynically suppose that it's because they understood after launch that the game they had created was socially "sticky" enough (look at why I'm still playiing) that they didn't need to do anything else except with the powergamers, who demand constant attention. But non-raider content seems to me to be easier to design rather than harder. Imagine adding three quest lines a month to increase the feeling that you have to alt up multiple times in order just to see all the content. That keeps people going in single-player RPGs, after all--they'll play through multiple times just to see all the quests, do all the things, and so on. Are three well-designed quest lines really harder to do than AQ? Or for that matter, was Dire Maul harder to design than MC and BWL?

I think this is the major uncompleted design problem of the standard-issue Diku-themed MMOG: a content-supply model that potentially keeps your subscribers around and reasonably happy. AC1 in a funny way got closest, way back at the beginning of the big commercial era--it was able to create some sense of narrative progression in the world, open new dungeons fairly regularly, mix things up, do world events, and on a close-to-monthly schedule. That caused some problems, for sure: the devs were prone to introducing elements whose consequences hadn't been fully thought out (gambling, for example, where on its initial introduction, it was pretty easy to make quite a lot of gold-per-hour in relation to the standard monster-kill economy), partly because of the rapid development cycle for content. WoW is at the opposite end of the spectrum: a MMOG where the relative polish of its content has a lot to do with its success, but where that same polish has led to a pretty serious case of design constipation as far as keeping the gameplay novel and engaging. If someone can figure out a way to roll out Diku-appropriate content on a regular basis that is also fairly engaging and polished, I think they're going to have a customer base for as long as they want. But maybe the problem here is also that the Diku form is pretty hostile to narrative: what makes content "new" is the way it powers or levels characters. That you can't keep doing or you go Monty Haul pretty damn fast.

Sigged!


I think the problem - or explanation depending on your point of view - is that the expected progression is:  newb -> quester -> instance runner -> gear collector -> raider.  This model is reality at least some of the time.  Adding high-end content only works for this model because everyone goes through the low end approximately once, but they spend a lot of time at the high end.

The raider paradigm (and to a lesser extent, gear collector) is so different than the rest that a non-trivial number of people stop there and start over  (how many peopl fit each model would be gold information btw).  There's a different experience available to some extent for each race/faction, but ultimately it's not much different, so by the third or fourth time it's getting old.  Therein lies the problem.

Personally I'd like to see some of the storylines already started advance.  They could put in "Storyteller" NPCs to get new players caught up, but the new lowbie quest line could involve what happened to Abercrombie after he sent Stitches to Darkshire?  Surely the Night's Watch didn't take that lying down.  What happened to the Defias after Van Cleef was executed by an intrepid band of adventurers?

Narrative advance is what AC did as well as any commercial MMOG to come out has done. Elemental invasions, the coming of Bael'Zharon, new Olthoi attacks, and so on. Arwic being destroyed. What's interesting is that they found a way to do it where it did not require changing old content, and they supplied narrative experiences to all levels of players. In fact, some monthly events required low-level players to run through their dungeons to do something for the sake of the event as well as the high-level players.

Compare that to the AQ-gate event and you can see that the design paradigm is not moving forwards in this case, but regressing rather badly. But again, this is partly the consequence of the polished design of the quest lines in WoW. Blizzard is understandably attached to all the work they put in on the quest lines which presently exist in the game. If Van Cleef shows up somewhere else, then what's the Van Cleef in the Deadmines doing? Still, I'd love to see Blizzard consider something along the lines of the destruction of Arwic in AC. Take a relatively underutilized location and "move the plot along" to some new state with new quest lines. Use some more triggered events that follow up on quests players have already completed and give the sense of dynamic narrative movement. Even in the best case scenario, though, WoW is just not the game that's going to deliver this kind of experience: it's not designed that way. Any game that doesn't have a good content-delivery model is going to hit a boredom tipping point relatively quickly, and after that, the only thing that will keep it in a good market position is lack of competition (WoW has virtually none that counts) and social stickiness (WoW has that in spades, in part simply because it has such a larger playerbase).

If I were trying to think about a WoW-killer, I'd be trying to think about a good system for content delivery in an otherwise vanilla Diku-design. If DDO had come up with something that let them feed new 'modules' to players on a monthly basis, it could have been an interesting model to look at. But clearly they didn't: their content is going to come as slowly and agonizingly as any other game of its kind.

I think I would beg to differ with this logic.  It's not that WoW has no competition, it's just that it blows away the competition.  Being the clear market leader and having no competition are two different things.

Stickiness any MMOG has, and (one could argue) the worldier ones have more stickiness.  I'd be more likely to leave WoW than a game in which I maintained a highly customized house, for example.

I absolutely agree about the AC1 model though.  Speculation: maybe it's not financially viable to maintain (expensive and not enough of a value-add to draw in customers).  I haven't watched AC1 lately - are they still delivering content on that schedule?

AC1 still gets regular content updates.  I bet that would draw in potential players to a game that was newer/prettier/marketable.  AC1 is just so freaking ugly now, that you can't move it off the shelf (if you can get stores to even stock it, they sure as hell are spining it).  Word of mouth, friends telling friends to play is probably your primary source of new subscriptions.

UO has the same problem.  Tons of content, but dogshit ugly, and hard on newbies.

Actually both games are hard on newbies.  In AC1 you can *gimp* your character.  You may not know you have for about 60 levels, but you have.  If you pick the lesser skills, you are dooming your character to be unable to solo easily in the triple digit levels.  Easy soloing and duoing is AC1's bread and butter.  I'm not sure if they have a complete respec option yet.  UO you can always peel your skill points off and stick them somewhere else.  Then of course there's suspicion as to whether or not you've really gimped your character, and rather just not gone with what the l33t accepted template should be.

On the original topic, there are still more newbies coming into WoW than people leaving.

Why are the people leaving?

I would guess it's a combination of 1.5 years being a long time to play a title, and the lack of large new content.  There's a shitload of content added so far.  I'll agree that WoW patches are pretty beefy compared to the usual.  There just hasn't been that big chunk at once that an expansion usually gives you.  It doesn't have to be about new level caps, but when I think typical expansion, I think new classes, races, and continents.  Something that makes starting over more appetizing.  WoW has that somewhat already with different content for Horde and Alliance.  Just maybe it is running out for the average catass?

I'll agree with the new raid content is hard assertion too.  On my server Hellscream, there's a lot of churn going on in the Uber Guilds right now.  Guilds are having trouble getting players to show up for Nefarian, and AQ40.  Everyone and their alts show up for MC farm night, but when plans change, or its get your ass kicked night, guilds are having trouble filling raids. 

Which leads to the problem my guild is having.  We're losing members left and right to the cherry picking going on by the big guilds.  Basically, we as a medium guild (can field full ZG's, AQ20's, any 5/10 man almost every night) serve the large guilds by training new players to play, gearing them up in Scholo, Strath, UBRS, Dire Maul, and ZG, then sending them up to the Major Leagues.  Everytime we hit a new raid wall (can't beat spider boss at the moment in ZG) we all dread who we're going to lose the next day.  Folks don't want to stick around and learn, they want to go to easy.  We bring in new players every week, help them level up, send down massive amounts of loot/mats, gear them up in the 50's, train them to play their class in a group, then lose them.  It was easy the whole way up to 60, why should they put up with difficult when the fun part starts... I guess.

So I can see the same thing happening on a larger scale.  Except, when you're in the huge guild, and they are stuck on Twin Emps/Nefarian, and you hate logging in because IT'S HAAAARD...  where do you go?  You probably battleground, and show up on easy raid night, and give excuses why you cannot go to BWL/AQ20, till you get /gkicked, and then unsub.   Seems a little contrived to be the majority of people leaving, sooo...

It's probably just boredom after 1.5 years.

The analysis of AC1 is really, really out of date.  You cannot gimp your character in AC1.  The game has unlimited respec.

So, uh, discard that.

But keep his analysis of AC1's live events.

The problem?

One, game art and modelling assets are progressing faster than tools for worldbuilding.  AC2, for instance, was never able to deliver as much content as AC1 per month for precisely this reason.

Problem two:  From a business perspective, why do it if you don't have to?

Just as Raph realized they lowballed by making UO 10 dollars a month, Turbine was lowballing what their customers would tolerate by offering a significant new content patch every month.

They've renegged on that for AC1.

There's a concept in psychology called the "difference principle", I think it is - If you present people with two dissimilar things one after another, the dissimilarities in the latter thing will appear exaggerated.  For instance, show people a pretty girl and then an ugly girl, and they'll view the ugly girl as uglier than she actually is.

Lowballing hurts you big-time when you're a business.  If MMOs had started at 30 a month and then come down to 25, we'd talk about how cheap they were getting.  We think in terms of the 10 dollars a month paradigm because that's what we were socialized into by the early games.


It's the same with monthly content patches.  Those who are long-time Turbine customers have been socialized into the free-content-update-per month paradigm.  Those who are used to WoW's more, shall we say, "gradual" model of content addition will likely leap for joy if Blizzard gives them 20% more.  By offering relatively little to begin with, Blizzard is playing it smart in a business sense.

As far as "WoW Killers" go I think we're all going to be surprised at exactly how good the numbers are going to be for WAR and Vanguard. Will they still be pitiful in comparison to WoW? You bet they will but I think there's a decent number of people who discovered the market through WoW (as has been pointed out several times) but who are looking for something new.

While I'm not new to MMOGs I am new to playing the endgame. While I actually enjoy WoW's endgame (mostly) I'm looking out for the next shiny; shiny with enough polish and flow to compare favorably but with more depth to it. Everything I enjoy about WoW I enjoy because the other games don't have it. DAoC might have better PvP but it has horrid PvE. EQ2 might have better PvE (I'm not very sure about that) but the character animations give me motion sickness.

A game comes out which gives me that total package like WoW does except does it better has me for a very, very long time. Do not fuck up WAR, please.

I don't think Vanguard will attract nearly as many people as anyone thinks. That kind of PVE? She's not the same as the WoW type, and the only people who would think it would be better would be those whose idea of fun involves the self-flagellation of the hardest of hardcore EQ1 raiding.

I dunno, Vanguard tempts a lot of people, myself included, for reasons other than EQ catass raiding - namely, the promise of an incredibly detailed world.

If all that just turns into "A wide variety of places to camp mobs and hunt ubers!", I'll bow out, but at present I'm not totally willing to write off its potential.  Reading the writing on their site, it really does sound like they've learned a lot from EQ and they're trying to build a game that's not just EQ2.5.

Color me guarded but hopeful.  Maybe I buy into PR copy too easily.

Vanguard makes me sick to even think about it. When the designer guy did that interview (forget his name), and basically said "Players think they know what they want, but they dont. We know what they want, and what they want is a huge grind". Ugh. Fuck him, and fuck that.

Thousands of people have been invited to the Vanguard beta. But it's in such bad shape, it only gets about 100 players at peak evening time. Brad McQuaid has admitted as much (link stolen from http://n3rfed.blogs.com):

http://www.vanguardsaga.com/forums/showpost.php?p=930689&postcount=44

The Vanguard screenshots look incredibly dated, visually it belongs in 2001.

Edit: They haven't learned anything at all from the past. Their bullshit about min specs is the exact same bullshit EQ2 spewed out.

"It also needs optimization, and while I am confident that we will continue to optimize the game and that combined with machines that will run Vanguard well and video cards becoming so powerful and cheaper so quickly that we'll be in fine shape from a min and reccomended spec at launch"

This is *exactly* what the EQ2 guys said. They were wrong, and these guys are wrong too. You can design an engine that runs well today AND runs well in five years.

Edit2: In that same thread Brad also makes some "conservative" estimates for sub numbers. He says they will get 200k old EQ1 users and 5% of WoW players. This is DotBomb era planning. "If one out of every 100 people that buys dog food buys it at our website we'll all be rich!"

How can they assume they will get most of the old EQ1 people? Won't those people maybe just keep playing EQ, or EQ2, or WoW? Let's not even point out that former EQ players and WoW players are not distinct groups. That 200K ALREADY includes a lot of people now in WoW!

The whole thing is just silly. They have no fucking clue.

Meh, 15 hours a week spread out as, say, 2 hours a night after work/study Mon-Fri and 5 hours on a saturday night with no travel time besides walking to whereever in your house the computer is hardly equates to the same thing as 2 days a week, fulltime. It's downtime. I know that when I get home from work the last thing that interests me is a part-time job or internship  :-P

My point is that you can't just quote hours per week and have it mean much without context and taking travel time into account.

I can't wait till Vanguard comes out. Everything I've read about it seems to indicate that it'll take all the things I hated about EQ1 and amplify them into a great big catass-friendly e-peen measuring device fuckwit magnet. Let's hope it does well for them, and keeps the rose-coloured-glasses set out of other games I might play.

That's the idea but it's so dated and the implementation appears to borked I don't think it's going to matter. I think if they delivered a game that executed well on "the vision" it would be a bad game but a moderate success, but it doesn't look like they can deliver a well executed game so it's not really going to matter whether players like "the vision" in the end or not.

Wow those screens are so bad. MMOG companies really need to get with the program and start making their games more cartoony. Look at WoW for instance, the graphics as far as polygons and textures are concerned, are pretty shit. They get away with it though as it's hard to directly compare it to current graphics. As another example I was playing some old FF games a little while back just to see if I could actually finish one (other than X). FF7 looks really dated, but it was easier to get over the graphics than with FF8. Why? Cause it was basically a cartoon, and we forgive so much when watching them, but FF8... its "realism" only helped me realise how shit it was compared to current graphics. Now MMOGs take years apon years to develop, and then they are supposed to stay in the market for years and years with only ever minor updates. WoW gets away with that easily, games like EQ2 and Vanguard are gonna look like total ass in just a couple years, and Vanguard is already there. Stupid.

Maybe once our graphics get to a point where you simply cannot improve them much at all, then MMOGs can go realism, until then they're just shooting themselves in the foot IMO.

It's a general problem with western-style art. I wouldn't say the answer is "cartoony" as much as stylized. If something is supposed to look real it's really obvious when it doesn't. If something is supposed to look stylized it doesn't matter.

"Cartoony" is not really the right word. FFXI has aged very well graphically, but it doesn't have a cartoony style. However it does have a stylized look. Elvaan are much lankier than a normal person, Taru much smaller, etc.

Compare the characters in FFXI to EQ2. The EQ2 characters (aside from frog and rat) look basically the same from most angles - same overall proportions. The smaller races are just scaled down versions of larger races.

There is a happy medium between cartoon graphics and realisitc graphics. In the US though especially with fantasy everyone is looking at guys like Vallejo (sp?) when they should be looking at someone like Yoshitaka Amano instead.

The Vanguard pics of the wolf race are just silly. They are proportioned and stand exactly like humans except they have a wolf head that looks totally wrong on their body. It's like bad 3d clip art.

I agree.  FFXI got many things wrong, but they got the art completely right.  It was beautiful.  Do not try to make realistic human models.  I don't care how great technology gets, this will always fail.  Slight modifications to proportions, stance, etc. is all it takes.  It just takes somebody knowing their stuff to get this right.  Obviously FFXI found somebody with the know-how.

FFXI got a lot of other things right too.  I'd like to see a grindless FFXI on the level of WoW.

Yeah it does look laughable. WoW does these non-human characters right, a Tauren isn't just a cow head on a human body.

Yeah I can go with that. I remember some robotics person saying that robots would most likely not be made to look too human because all the tiny little differences would make them creepy. The more something looks real, the more you notice the differences, however slight.

The uncanny valley

When a suicide is widely publicized, there's a slew of copycats shortly thereafter. Did the original publication cause the following copycats, or were they just people on the edge waiting for something to give them that last nudge? If TV and newspapers hadn't printed the original story, would the copycats have just waited a few more months until something else pissed them off and pushed them over the edge?

Seeing other people quit the game is a bit of social proof that says, "hey, if you're on the fence here, go ahead and do it." I think the waves of unsubs are a phenomenon of social dynamics, not necessarily caused by anything in the game.

A side-effect here is that after a wave of unsubs, the people that are left will be more dedicated than average, and they also reinforce themselves, recommitting to the game.

It's true; It's why so many people had problems with the spirits within (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0173840). Things just don't look or move right and people really don't like it.