f13.net

It sprung out in the Auto Assault topic.

Recently I am really enjoying Planetside, which I bought and loathed back in 2003 when it was released.
So I labeled it "Best MMO comeback of all time" (IMHO, of course).

Assuming you all disagree, what would you vote in such a poll?

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the Falconeer

AO, without a doubt. Given their horrific launch they could easily have gone the way of Horizons.

Still gonna stand by EQ2. Sure it wasn't terrible at launch but it's about, oh, 900x better now.

As for AO, if I still don't want to play it, did it make a comeback? :P

I would vote for EQ2 but I have played it since launch som it isn't really a comeback story for me. Planetside it is. I really have to resist the PS urge to pick EQ2 over it right now. Man, I love flying a Liberator with bomber and gunner slots filled.

If they're going to be declared 'best MMO comeback', then it's probably because sins were much more easily forgiveable back then. Hell, if UO or EQ were released today, they'd probably go the way of Horizons as well.

I vote for AO as well.

To me "comeback" means the game had a (relatively) decent number of subscribers, lost many/most of them (for whatever reasons) and then managed at least to regain those numbers. Without the peak/drop/repeak pattern you are just talking about "most improved" not best comeback. So to me EQ2 and PlanetSide don't even qualify for that award.

I'd vote for EVE myself. After a fairly disastrous launch they've just quietly improved the game and picked up new subscriptions until at this point they're almost out of "niche game" status. With over 100,000 subscribers they're probably bigger than AO or Planetside by now. Defeating that early bad word of mouth is an impressive accomplishment IMO.

Well both AO and PS are free now so its probably not fair to attribute them with a comeback - after all would they have made the same recovery had it not gone free?

I wouldnt have said Eve's launch was horrible, its just the game was easily exploitable by those that had been in the beta due to the balance problems......

Eh, i'd vote for EQ2.  AO is impressive that it still exists, but considering how open the field was when they turd in a box was released, they really can't get my vote.  EQ2 started off in completely the wrong direction, got owned by their competition, but reworked their game to a large degree.

However, soon it will be Fallen Age.  Sure, the slug infested bomb of a game never made it out of beta, but  I have it on totally believable internet authority that this is actually the secret title Lum is now working on so it will be the next robot jesus...with slugs.

Xilren

I would have to say Eve. When it launched it pretty much did not do anything. Their devs just buckled down and kept improving it and now a LOT of people talk about eve and are enjoying it. How that one avoided the bug zapper initially I don't know but its really found its stride and is going strong now.

kaid

Either AO or Eve. I think I'd go with Eve. AO had been expected to be a big thing and by all rights should have been the hit that DAOC ended up being. They did a great job turning it around and they got back a lot of customers, but I doubt if they ever fully recovered. Eve on the other hand I get the impression was never planned to be all that mainstream, it probably has more customers now that it did at launch, and it's probably going to end up hitting the kind of numbers it expected to before launch.

EQ2 has done a lot right, but I don't think it's really recovered the subscription numbers. It might be a contender in a year or two if things go right.

From the business side, I'd have to say Eve. After all, the game got dropped by its publisher a few months after release and not only came back, it's reached 100k subscribers with very little, if any, retail presence.

For game quality, I'm going to have to go with EQ2. The game was boring as dirt at release, it's now playable and fun. I don't think it'll ever get the commercial success SOE thought it would, but it's a decent game.

Planetside shouldn't even be considered. I expect it's next on the chopping block. It's just not that good a game compared to other free offerings out there.

Eve. I played the first two weeks of release and snapped the CD in half and cursed it for years.

Now it's easily the best PVP mmo available.

"Comeback" in terms of changed-for-the-better: EQ2, maybe AO. Eve has gotten better by a lot, but just at delivering the core experience that's always made it what it was anyway.

"Comeback" in terms of business success, where it was previously doomed to forever-dead: AO maybe.

In my opinion. Of course.

And how we can talk about this and not "Deepest Downfall"? Maybe because we all know what that is? ;)

We've got several titles and two companies fighting for that one.

Does "deepest downfall" assume the game was somewhat successful and then failed or never succeeded at all? AC2 and HZ are neck and neck for the latter. SWG wins hands down for the former.

I "nominated" this elsewhere for about the same award:  Earth and Beyond
And no, I wouldn't be surprised at all if you couldn't recall it   :)

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the Falconeer

Jumpgate :)

Jumpgate?
"That" Jumpgate? I mean NetDevil's Jumpgate?
First game of Auto Assault developers?
Gotta be kidding me :)


--
the Falconeer

Eve Online is the winner here. Word of mouth is growing.

I disagree with the votes for Everquest 2. SOE made a lot of tweaks and threw a few bones to soloers. However, the core game is unchanged and it's as dull as ever.

Another vote for EVE.  At release the game was shite - only ships were cruisers or frigates, missiles pwned all, there were no alliances or anything like that, mining was the only way to make cash and the thing crashed like a fucker.  It was limited, horribly boring and buggy.  Over that summer they lost something like 1/3 of their subscribers (judging by accounts online at peak times) leading many to voice that the game was doomed.  But since then CCP methodically fixed most of the problems and filled out the gaps, now it's still growing near three years later.

I don't feel EQ2 is any more or less dull than WoW experientially. Graphically, yea, WoW is just a happier world to be in fulltime. But that it has a bajillion more players doesn't change the core mechanic. Further, you can have a thousand servers all day long when the amount of people on any given one is probably the same as any given EQ2 server.

EQ2 has not made a business comeback though, and may not. But the team has spent the last year pretty much redesigning it, and it is a much better game than it was at launch. As far as I've seen, no other game has changed for the better and changed as much as EQ2. Most other games that have gone through huge changes on this level and beyond were mostly received either with derision or outright account-cancelling hate.

Only reason I don't consider Eve as having a huge comeback is because most of the truly deep changes were player-directed. The game itself has had many more features added to it, but nothing that is completely dissimilar from any 3-year-old MMOG. I'm certainly no expert though, so maybe I am unduly discounting player bases, things like the Titan, and the newbie tutorial thing.

I'd have to vote for EVE, simply because its too early to determine if Planetsie's free promotion has yielded sales.  If Planetside featured content updates and actual marketing in a scale that even vaguely resembled EVE, Planetside would be a success.

AO's free promotion worked well too, but EVE is the only MMO I have seen succeed almost entirely on word of mouth and banner ad.

I don't could EQ2, because SOE releases games a minimum of six months too early.  Initial EQ2 was just a pay-to-beta sold in a nice box, and the game itself was patched in later.

AO went from 0 to 4.  I'd rate that ahead of EQ2's move from 3 to 6.  Cuz 4 is bigger than 3.  If I put this on a chart, you'd all believe me.

See MMOG is quality like the Richter Scale or Warp Factor. The leap from 3 to 6 is lot more difficult than the 0 to 4.

AO actually made it's greatest recovery before it went free to play. It won back a lot of subscribers and had a great game going. The froob campaign was really more about getting new players for a game that was badly aging in graphics than it was about fixing the original disaster.

I could say the same about EQ2 ;)

Planetside being free seems interesting though.

Though caring enough to get around to play install it over just playing Far Cry/BF2 atm and Oblivion/a bit more WoW and whetever the next FPS will be might make it hard.

thought I read it was Simon & Schuster Interactive that were their original publishers, but that arm of the book company went bust.  No matter.  EQ2 gets my vote for most improved, and EVE for best comeback. 

EQ2 with planetside getting an honorable mention. The fodd..err, reserve program has pumped my sniper kills up to 50+ a night. And honestly, who doesn't love pimping noobs?

Eve and AO are both equally good candidates.  Each has had their respective comeback.

As for the opposite, I vote Fighting Legends.

I have to jump heedlessly onto the accelerating bandwagon which is Eve.  I heard it was like Elite ages ago, tried it, and found it was like Elite on my BBC micro in terms of repetitiveness (oh but I loved Elite all the same), but far less reliable.

Now I love it.  Although it's not without its problems.  It still isn't entirely stable, and borked elements remain.  But it's the best PvP out there, the best Sandbox in the mainstream and more...

Endie

I agree.  As an aside though they have incrementally improved the game as much as they can now - without a massive investment.  As Toast points out:

The Planetside Rserve program seems to be working. I joined an outift after a week back in the game and we have almost a full platoon (3 squads of 10) every weeknight for a few hours and more than half are Reserves. Only nine of the 158 outfit members have Teamspeak (which makes TS pretty useless for the moment.) I have been playing PS (to the exclusion of EQ2) for three solid weeks now.

Doesn't Planetside have built-in voice support?  Or, is that only for the paying subscribers (not the fodder)?

That was the plan but it never worked.

Im sure the fodder program has increased subs.

It got me and about 5 friends to come back. Thats +5 from where they were! :) Seriously though, its a great idea. If i was stuck at BR6 I would find a way to get 13 a month to get more certs. There is nothing wrong with fodder to kill anyways, makes us old vets smile.

I am not sure about why I hated Planetside so much back in 2003 (maybe I had too many expectations?) and I am loving it so much now.
Can't recall what was different back then.
I just think it's an awesome, surprising game.
What's its guilt?
Bad advertising or bad karma?

--
the Falconeer

Are Lightning tanks still worth a damn? That was my favorite vehicle back in the day.

Yes, but it helps a lot if you can repair it yourself. There is an AV buff on the test server that will make all tanks more vulnerable to Infantry AV, though.

The one change I really like is that there is a weak version of the sniper rifle available without the sniping cert. It has a 10 round clip and fires rapidly. One clip is enough to kill an agile armored enemy or take out a spitfire.

If you are on NC/Markov and looking for an outfit, I joined Total Pwnage (lame name I know) but there is plenty of squaddage available with 160 members. My character is MrJoshua.

The problem with Lightning Tanks is that THEY ARE NOT MOSQUITOES.

Any time you spend in one is a waste of potential Mosquito ownage time.

That is a personall skillset issue. I have spent 5x as much time in a Mosquito as a Lightning. I cannot kill shit in a Mosquito to this day, while getting kills in a Lightning is as easy as stepping on an anthill.  For some reason, I am a very poor judge of vectors (both mine and the target's) while flying

One could argue that ww2ol's launch was so stupendously bad that the fact it survived longer than a year is easily the best mmolg comeback.

Except if you look at the chart which shall not be named you see growth for about 6 months after launch and then pretty much flat (i.e. zero growth) since then. So it doesn't have the up down up cycle that says "comeback" to me.

I agree, AO or Eve has that comeback (Eve in particlaur seems to have gone quite well).

How much of Eve is really a comeback though? To me they seem to follow the fairly traditional MMO model of growth: just keep going up. They, like all early games, benefitted from the huge influx of new players to the newer titles, some of whom will trickle out to the ends of the genre. People eventually leave a title, and a good chunk of them seem to leave for other MMOGs. This isn't even just about SWG:NGE, though they did clearly benefit from that.

So is Eve a candidate for "comeback", or did they just keep growing enough to finally get noticed?

Eve feels like a comeback because word of mouth is driving interest to new level. The game suddenly has greater credibility.

Some is due to CCP making the game steadily deeper and better over the last few years. (though, new players wouldn't know any different).

Much is probably due to environmental factors. I agree that WoW grew the industry, and some players are burning out toward new games. I understand that many Eve players fled SWG recently as well.

Eve has benefitted from external forces, but they had to have a viable game ready to grow. Most comebacks are some combination of opportunity and preparation, after all.

Eve is snowballing these days. I'd say it's a big comeback or a big turnaround because I played the first two weeks of release and quit in utter disgust. Threw away the cd, cursed the game up and down in the normal way, and vowed never to play it.

Here I am, 3 years later, and I've never been into another mmorpg this much.

The Eve snowball effect is "dangerous" in a good way. It's one of those games that require lots of people for lots of fun. It's OKAY fun a few people, but when the universe is jam packed it's just amazing.

Eve was at around 2,000 to 3,000 users on average for what? The first year or so? It's about to turn 3 years old and I'll see 22,000 - 25,000 concurrent users online every day.

Another way that it's "weird" is that the US primetime hours aren't the busy hours. It's more popular in Europe.

So, basically, WE (those of us in the states) get to do the 4am ninja raids at 9pm EST.

Hmm, so a comeback from a sort of steady stagnation to a robust growth. That'd certainly qualify in this genre, so I agree. I did vote for Eve (and EQ2) in my first reply, so now I agree with it for more reasons :)

/shrug

I converted my Eve trial from trial to sub a few days ago.  Isn't it what we've all said here for years?  Give me a game and I'll stay.  No game no sub.

Working as designed.

Interestingly, while I hated EQ2 myself (trialled at launch) the general consensus here and elsewhere is that the game has polished up and improved a lot since then.

I found it pretty amusing to see this on the VG:SOH board just now, since I'm reading through and enjoying some Schadenfreude. I guess there's already rose-coloured blinders for EQ2?


Hasn't EQ2 at least stabilised since they started changing it? Has it increased in subs over the last year or so?
Does anyone have a link to semi-current sub numbers for EQ1 and 2?

Well given that they merged servers the answer is probably no. And SOE stopped publishing (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=5634.msg138952#msg138952) their global subscriber figure almost a year ago except for a vague mention of "hundreds of thousands" after seeing a sustained period of zero growth.

I wasn't aware that EQ2 had server merged. From what I understand, EQ1 is now pretty stable now that they merged the servers into about half their old number, so at an extremely rough guesstimate I'd think 200-250k. They're still pumping out expansions and revamps, and I've heard interweb rumour that EQ1 is still doing better than EQ2, but you know, interweb rumours are good...