Mark Jacobs Interview Regarding AoC and Hellgate (Why They Tanked)

[cevik]

WoW needs competition.  Competition drives change and innovation.  When all competition fails in the wake of WoW, we all lose. 

Competition just for the sake of competition isn't good enough.  WoW may need competition, but people creating shitty games like WAR should not be rewarded just because WoW needs competition, it sends the wrong signals.

[Nebu]

MMORPGS are derivative.  Millions of people like this.

While true, that has little to do with the comment I made.  MMOG's ARE derivative. They don't have to be.  

[Nebu]

Competition just for the sake of competition isn't good enough.  WoW may need competition, but people creating shitty games ...  should not be rewarded just because WoW needs competition, it sends the wrong signals.

Of course... I didn't suggest anything else. Unfortunately, fun is subjective.  In a subjective market one man's "good" is another man's 'crap".  Right now the only metric we have for "fun" is financial success.  I'm not convinced that financial success = fun.  Blizzard is successful for many more reasons than just the mechanics of their game. 

[IainC]

I'm on dangerous ground here so I'll tread carefully. Firstly I am clearly not Mark Jacobs, just in case anyone wants to try projecting my opinions on him or Mythic. Secondly I don't work for Mythic nor do I have any special insight into the corporate culture there. All of the following is from stuff that's been around, conversations and interviews with Mythic people and my own experience. For the record I don't believe that Mark has ever said he doesn't think forums are a good idea. All the quotes I can find from him on the subject are generally pro forums but anti official ones.

Feedback.
This is basically my job and I guess that Mythic's CM team have a similar brief. You don't need official forums for that, you can take the community's temperature over a broad range of external sites just as easily as you can from one monstrous self hosted forum. For subjective stuff this is pretty trivial to do, you surf around, take notes, copy a few pertinent points from particularly insightful posts and go for it. It's not rocket surgery.
For more specific and objective feedback then forums are not your main data point anyway. This is why you have server metrics and stats tools. Jeff gave a pretty detailed answer to this at our Paris press event (there's a video floating around of this interview if you care to hunt for it) where he explains that for things like balancing they have so many data points to work from, they can pull stats on almost everything that happens in the game to determine exactly what the true state of balance is. How many times a particular class dies vs another class, average damage dealt by specific abilities, killing blows dealt by a career all of that kind of stuff. The data set is huge and can be parsed in all kinds of fun ways.

Outward communication.
Again this is partly my job and I have a number of tools to do that. Firstly I am active on all the main forums. Anyone who would have been part of the community on an official forum will be active on at least one of the big community sites. I have no fear that people will get left by the wayside as a result. Secondly we have the official sites where we can publish news and general info that we want large numbers of our players to be aware of. If people somehow manage to miss all of that then the chances are they would have missed it if we had official forums as well.

You don't need official forums to have a thriving community. There are good reasons to have them and good reasons not to, it's not an automatic choice.

[cevik]

The derivative nature of mmogs is far from the problem.  The problem has a lot more to do with competence in the creation of new mmogs.  WoW was a huge success because they just took everyone's ideas and did them right.  The first few months were full of "ohhh, this is what [insert game here] would have been like if they had done it the right way!"

[cevik]

I'm not convinced that financial success = fun.  Blizzard is successful for many more reasons than just the mechanics of their game. 

I hear lots of talk that Blizzard happened upon a succesful game on accident, that it's not really fun and that they are somehow our giant robotic overlords who are forcing random asian kids to subscribe to bolster their numbers (or whatever), yet I never encounter anyone in game that isn't enjoying themselves.  Everyone I know that plays WoW plays it because they have fun playing it.

[Nebu]

You also have to credit the players for some of WoW's success.  Player-generated UI elements did a lot to overcome the deficiencies that WoW released with.  

As for "doing things right", I take issue with that.  Wal Mart is very financially successful and has one of the most streamlined processes in the business world.  Many people argue that Wal Mart is Sears done right.  While pandering to the masses can make you rich, it doesn't make you good.   Blizzard did well to mainstream the MMO genre.  Was this a good thing from a gaming/creative standpoint?  I'm not so certain.  They certainly did demonstrate what a large number of inexperienced gamers were looking for.  I applaud them for that.  

[Vinadil]

The derivative nature of mmogs is far from the problem.  The problem has a lot more to do with competence in the creation of new mmogs.  WoW was a huge success because they just took everyone's ideas and did them right.  The first few months were full of "ohhh, this is what [insert game here] would have been like if they had done it the right way!"

I think the WAR folks are looking to grab a few of those people who look at WoW and say, "Hmm, I wonder what it would look like if they did Real World PvP the right way?"  There might only be a handful of people who care because the rest are happy with BGs and Raids all day.  To me WoW has created a near perfect example of the Massive Single-Player online game.  I love the single player experience, whether it is PvE or PvP.  The movement, the gameplay, the visuals... they all work.  And, it is easy to jump in, do some quick killing, and jump out.  I will play WoTLK when it comes out, and probably stick for 2 months... until I get hit with the raid grind.  THat is, unless they learn some tricks from WAR and figure out how to do Real World PvP that... matters somehow.  Right now WAR is the kind of game I will keep on my computer just because it has a greater chance to deliver the kind of gaming experience I am looking for than any other game.  They have also done something unique.  They have actually done something that Blizzard has attempted (open world PvP)... and WAR did it better.  I have full faith that Blizzard will watch, learn, and improve.  But, at least the WAR guys have a decent starting place from which to make their own improvements.

[cevik]

You also have to credit the players for some of WoW's success.  Player-generated UI elements did a lot to overcome the deficiencies that WoW released with.  

But this is just one of the things that Blizzard did right.  We had always ASKED to be allowed to create our own UI elements with a toolset as rich as what Blizzard provided, but until WoW released we were always told "no no, if we let you do these things, then the dirty evil players will cheat.. CHEAT I TELL YOU."

No one before or since has allowed UI modding to the degree that WoW has, and it's a big part of their success.

Of course it takes a lot of effort too, there were "cheats" created by the UI (fear trinket macros bound to movement keys being a big one I remember), but instead of blaming the players, Blizzard closes those holes as they appear and apologizes for ever allowing them in the first place.

[cevik]

I think the WAR folks are looking to grab a few of those people who look at WoW and say, "Hmm, I wonder what it would look like if they did Real World PvP the right way?"

And had WAR been a solid game that did World PvP the right way they would have had a chance.  I know that PvP being my primary interest in mmogs, I was really looking forward to WAR for quite some time, but it just isn't a good PvP game.  I've listed my big complaints in other threads though so no need for me to repeat them here.. :)

I guess the thing that I'm most frightened of when it comes to WAR is that when it's not hugely successful, everyone is going to blame PvP.  The good news is, WAR appears to be forcing some changes back on to Blizzard when it comes to PvP, so I'll keep my hopes up for WotLK.

[Vinadil]

Cevik... I have read your complaints, and honestly I think we must have played different games.  I have been in the beta a good while, still am actually though its still under some wierd BTA, and did not experience 1/10 of the issues you had.  All in all WAR combat feels almost EXACTLY like WoW combat to me (yea I have my WoW years of experience...) except that WAR added friendly targets.  The class skills all play out in their own way of course, but that is true anywhere.  The Difference comes in the world design.  There IS NO open-world PvP in WoW outside of random gankfest/guard aggro locations.  It just does not exist.  In that regards... WAR is better.

Also, I think it is a bit too early to talk about WAR in the past tense.  We should at least give them a week into launch maybe?

[tazelbain]

Totally agree that Jacobs is full of shit on the "listen to customers" thing, given that this has always been a problem that Mythic has had AND that Jacobs has decided to not run forums because, well, he doesn't want to listen to customers. Oh, sorry, I mean that they have a "magic method" for getting real customer feedback as opposed to those unrepresentative forums which as we know having nothing to do with how people feel. Which raises questions about Jacobs knows about customer reactions to Age of Conan, presumably, since he doesn't believe in and doesn't bother with forums, given that they return no valuable or important information about customer reaction.

Come on. Warhammer has no official forums because if things *do* go wrong in any way, he's hoping that will dampen the reaction and keep the news from spreading too widely. WTG on the "listen to your customers" idea.

I think Mythic does listen to the customer.  But for whatever reason, Mythic steers like the Titaniac.  They usually hit the ice burg.  By the time they change course many users have already abandoned ship already.  This whole combat responsiveness issue is their first test to see if they can do better in WAR.

[cevik]

All in all WAR combat feels almost EXACTLY like WoW combat to me (yea I have my WoW years of experience...) except that WAR added friendly targets. 

Out of curiosity, do you use the mouse or keybindings?

[HaemishM]

Most the folks here don't like MMORPGs, and you want them to fail

Please to speak for yourself. I'd like MMORPG's just fine if I could tell most of them apart without looking at the title. They've become like web browsers - minor cosmetic differences wrapping the same inherent gameplay. We've all said that WoW is just Everquest with less suck, but that statement would be true for all but a handful of the MMORPG's out there, both successes and failures. Planetside and Eve are about the only things that are truly distinguishable anymore from the standard MMOG formula.

I love the MMORPG medium. I just think it's stuck in a creative rut of genre-rehashing and needs a good culling. As for wanting MMOG's to fail, if that's what it takes for someone to grow some fucking balls and go against the grain, so be it. Also, just going against the grain isn't enough, you still have to make the game work.

[slog]

Most the folks here don't like MMORPGs, and you want them to fail

Please to speak for yourself. I'd like MMORPG's just fine if I could tell most of them apart without looking at the title. They've become like web browsers - minor cosmetic differences wrapping the same inherent gameplay. We've all said that WoW is just Everquest with less suck, but that statement would be true for all but a handful of the MMORPG's out there, both successes and failures. Planetside and Eve are about the only things that are truly distinguishable anymore from the standard MMOG formula.

I love the MMORPG medium. I just think it's stuck in a creative rut of genre-rehashing and needs a good culling. As for wanting MMOG's to fail, if that's what it takes for someone to grow some fucking balls and go against the grain, so be it. Also, just going against the grain isn't enough, you still have to make the game work.

I read this as "I'd like MMORPGS if they were something else entirely than what they are."

no kidding.

[HaemishM]

Reading is unfair to some.

I'd like the MMOG medium better if there was some fucking variety. I love me some steak, but if I had to eat the same steak every single day, I'd be bitchy about steak after awhile. 90% of the MMOG's in release today are one particular cut of steak, with the only differences being how large the steak is.

MMOG developers seem happy to treat MMOG's as a genre instead of a medium.

[Slayerik]

Haemish put it down better than I could have, but I agree with everything he posted there.

The biggest problem these days is we are served shit-filled steaks. Looks good on the outside, once you cut to the meat of the game .... oh you get the point.

[tmp]

No one before or since has allowed UI modding to the degree that WoW has, and it's a big part of their success.

That isn't really based on anything but presumption, is it? I mean, is there any data how many of 10 mil WoW players actually utilize these customizations to any extent, let alone consider it "success factor"?

It's of course equally a presumption on my part, it's just the average "battlenet barrens mouthbreather" doesn't strike me as type who'd want to fiddle with scripts and all that geeky stuff...

[UnSub]

All the quotes I can find from him on the subject are generally pro forums but anti official ones.

The comments I've seen on the matter generally amount to "let someone else deal with the hassle and abuse".

Feedback.
This is basically my job and I guess that Mythic's CM team have a similar brief. You don't need official forums for that, you can take the community's temperature over a broad range of external sites just as easily as you can from one monstrous self hosted forum. For subjective stuff this is pretty trivial to do, you surf around, take notes, copy a few pertinent points from particularly insightful posts and go for it. It's not rocket surgery.

Your insightful posts are spread across 18 threads on 5 sites and may be deleted by forum mods who don't agree with them, so 'just as easily' overstates it a tad. It might be easy now (beta forums and internal forums and all that), but if a fan site or two chooses to turn on WAR for nerfing Marauders or something, collecting this feedback becomes a bit more complex. Also, you don't get the same melting pot of ideas that larger forums bring to the table (unless one fan forum has become the unofficial official forum).

As for listening to the data as the 'main' source of objective information / balancing, there is a reason why the phrase 'working as intended' is a joke. If there is a problem with the underlying system then you need the community to be telling you that things aren't adding up. Yes, I know, the signal-to-noise ratio is bad, but it's even worse when you have to trawl 5 different sites that you don't have any control over to find something.

Outward communication.

Most outward communication has very little to do with listening to your community.

You don't need official forums to have a thriving community. There are good reasons to have them and good reasons not to, it's not an automatic choice.

No, you don't need an official forums to have a thriving community. It's just that those MMOs that don't have official forums - TR being the most notable - have tended to show weaker communities around the game. Will it happen to WAR? We'll find out soon enough.

But the point wasn't about building a thriving community - it was about listening to your community. Which you've just said is a trivial task and favour checking the data. If it's trivial to get the subjective material from fansites, why not have the official forum and keep it central?

Believe it or not, I do understand that forums are generally full of the self-interested (and sometimes that self-interest is trolling / abuse) but this goes for all forums. Avoiding the creation of an official forum on the grounds it will be full of abusive posts ignores the facts that unofficial forums will be just as bad, if not worse, because the company has no control over what is said there.

EDIT - cause it's 1am and correctly closing tags is hard.

[murdoc]

No, you don't need an official forums to have a thriving community. It's just that those MMOs that don't have official forums - TR being the most notable - have tended to show weaker communities around the game. Will it happen to WAR? We'll find out soon enough.

I may be showing my biases here a bit, but I disagree. DAoC had no official forums, but as far as online gaming that I participated in went, that one had the closest knit community. I STILL talk to people that played on my server, but were in a different realm and can name many guilds and players from my brief stint in that game (release to slightly after ToA). No other online game I've played has approached that for me.

I think you need a happy medium between strictly focusing on official boards (as WoW seems to be doing) and not having ANYTHING official.

[cevik]

No one before or since has allowed UI modding to the degree that WoW has, and it's a big part of their success.

That isn't really based on anything but presumption, is it? I mean, is there any data how many of 10 mil WoW players actually utilize these customizations to any extent, let alone consider it "success factor"?

It's of course equally a presumption on my part, it's just the average "battlenet barrens mouthbreather" doesn't strike me as type who'd want to fiddle with scripts and all that geeky stuff...

While I suspect there are a large number of mod users, I'm sure you are right that there are very few mod creators.  But you don't have to fiddle with scripts to get mods running.  In fact, in the most basic sense you've been able to get hundreds of mods running by just executing an application locally, like cosmos ui back in the day (which is the first mod everyone I know used) to AceUpdater and Curse Updater (which are being combined as we speak), so you don't need to do anything but click one button to have mods.  

As far as mod usage goes, I know that I've never been in a raid that didn't require CT_RaidAssist back pre-TBC and now DeadlyBossMods or some equivalent, and those types of mods typically have a way of checking to make sure everyone is using them (and thus people will be booted if they aren't).  Perhaps the groups I run with are more strict than most, but when you consider that pre-TBC some large percentage (I seem to recall something like 75%?) of the population had raided (according to Blizzard), and now post TBC I bed that number is much higher with easy entry level raids like Kara (and hell, even ZA is a million times easier than ZG was).  

But now I must digress, because the original statement from me was typed too fast, what I really meant by the sentence is:  No one before or since has allowed UI modding to the degree that WoW has, and it's a big part of their success [that they are willing to do things that everyone else said couldn't be done because the dirty cheating players would take advantage of it].

I don't know if UI mods themselves play to the success of Blizzard, but I do think that Blizzard has taken that "ohh, it can't be done, can it?  Well try this!" stance with a ton of things.

[UnsGub]

Your insightful posts are spread across 18 threads on 5 sites and may be deleted by forum mods who don't agree with them, so 'just as easily' overstates it a tad.

Disagree.  http://elitistjerks.com/forums.php has all that is needed for Designers to understand the problems and learn about possible solutions.  Signal to noise is too high on Blizzards own forums for meaningful feedback and actionable items.

[Vinadil]

All in all WAR combat feels almost EXACTLY like WoW combat to me (yea I have my WoW years of experience...) except that WAR added friendly targets. 

Out of curiosity, do you use the mouse or keybindings?

Mouse to move (left and right) keybindings to fire all spells/abilities.  I am an old RTSer, so I have every possible combination of keybindings attached to any ability I might need.  My mouse just helps me turn and every so often it clicks on an enemy if my [tab] (or whatever) does not properly select it.

[cevik]

Mouse to move (left and right) keybindings to fire all spells/abilities.  I am an old RTSer, so I have every possible combination of keybindings attached to any ability I might need.  My mouse just helps me turn and every so often it clicks on an enemy if my [tab] (or whatever) does not properly select it.

Then we must have been playing different games, because that's exactly how I play (all keybindings, never click on the interface) and it was way to mushy for me.  The responsiveness of my spell casting when compared to what I expected out of it was just too far off to ever be reasonable in pvp for me.  I was hoping perhaps it was a key binding issue that could be fixed (and thus why I asked if you clicked), but if that's the way the game plays throughout, I just can't imagine it being reactive enough for any real meaningful pvp.

I'll just felt like ever battle I lost it was because the timing of the key press had so much slack that I couldn't time my spells correctly.

[WindupAtheist]

your personal dislike of the genre is influencing your predictions.

So far the old guard has utterly failed to meet the raising of the bar set by Blizzard.  This first real post-WoW wave of releases haven't even amounted to a speedbump, haven't even had a game that surpassed peak EQ1 numbers.  They came talking about the lessons of WoW, development teams filled with experienced people who had worked on multiple MMOs, armed with IPs like Lord of the Rings and Dungeons and Dragons, and all they did was splatter against WoW like bugs on a windshield.

And now DAOC 2.0 is supposed to be the Great White Hope?  Because it's got some hardcore nerd tabletop wargaming IP going for it?  Get the fuck out.

[Nebu]

And now DAOC 2.0 is supposed to be the Great White Hope?  Because it's got some hardcore nerd tabletop wargaming IP going for it?  Get the fuck out.

No, WAR will do better because it is a fundamentally better game than LotRO, D&DO, TR, and Vanguard.  Will it do WoW numbers... no.  Will it surpass everything to date save AoC's first month? I suspect it will.  I don't think WAR will pump the boxes out like AoC did, but I do believe that we'll be hearing about it (and possibly talking about it) for far longer.

[Hutch]

Most outward communication has very little to do with listening to your community.

I think you're overstating the value of listening to the community. Or having any direct interaction with them at all.

I have yet to see a forum for a MMOG, either official or otherwise, where the signal to noise ratio wasn't so low as to be practically unmeasurable.

Forums cost money to run. Hiring staff to monitor and moderate them costs money. They're full of trolls and illiterates and other wastes of time.

What are the offsetting benefits? You will very occasionally trip over a useful post from a player. You will be able to set the tone of the boards, in terms of moderation. Do these even come close to offsetting the costs?

As far as I'm concerned, Jacobs is onto something here.

It helps that DaoC, for all the pratfalls, was a pretty good game. Not my cup of tea, but a lot of people enjoyed it. Warhammer, if one believes the buzz, is also going to be pretty good. The point being, if you have a good game, there's less to fear from people creating negative buzz on the un-official boards. The game will speak for itself. Six months down the road, if you've got subscriber numbers that you're happy with, you don't need to worry about the "community".

No MMOG so far has crashed and burned because of the "community". I've never quit a game because of something I read on the official web site. I quit games because they get boring. I'm (obviously) only speaking for myself here, but the official forums don't have any input to how much fun the game is.

[tazelbain]

Mythic was so in touch with their playerbase they made ToA and drove them away.

[Hawkbit]

Lots of armchair CEOs up in here.  Keep up the good work. 

[cevik]

What are the offsetting benefits? You will very occasionally trip over a useful post from a player. You will be able to set the tone of the boards, in terms of moderation. Do these even come close to offsetting the costs?

Nearly every technical problem I've ever had with a mmog has been fixed due to forum posts by people who have had the exact same problem and found a fix for it and posted.

There are often great amounts of fun and interesting theorycrafting about every class ever on official forums.

The server communities on official forums usually thrive and give a lot of reasons for people to continue playing the game.

While I'll agree that the "general discussion" part of the official forums usually has a poor signal to noise ratio, I think as a whole, official forums are an excellent way (and usually the only real way) for a new player to get excellent information about a variety of things that they will likely need to know to become acquainted to the game.

[Ingmar]

I'm on dangerous ground here so I'll tread carefully. Firstly I am clearly not Mark Jacobs, just in case anyone wants to try projecting my opinions on him or Mythic. Secondly I don't work for Mythic nor do I have any special insight into the corporate culture there. All of the following is from stuff that's been around, conversations and interviews with Mythic people and my own experience. For the record I don't believe that Mark has ever said he doesn't think forums are a good idea. All the quotes I can find from him on the subject are generally pro forums but anti official ones.

Feedback.
This is basically my job and I guess that Mythic's CM team have a similar brief. You don't need official forums for that, you can take the community's temperature over a broad range of external sites just as easily as you can from one monstrous self hosted forum. For subjective stuff this is pretty trivial to do, you surf around, take notes, copy a few pertinent points from particularly insightful posts and go for it. It's not rocket surgery.
For more specific and objective feedback then forums are not your main data point anyway. This is why you have server metrics and stats tools. Jeff gave a pretty detailed answer to this at our Paris press event (there's a video floating around of this interview if you care to hunt for it) where he explains that for things like balancing they have so many data points to work from, they can pull stats on almost everything that happens in the game to determine exactly what the true state of balance is. How many times a particular class dies vs another class, average damage dealt by specific abilities, killing blows dealt by a career all of that kind of stuff. The data set is huge and can be parsed in all kinds of fun ways.

Outward communication.
Again this is partly my job and I have a number of tools to do that. Firstly I am active on all the main forums. Anyone who would have been part of the community on an official forum will be active on at least one of the big community sites. I have no fear that people will get left by the wayside as a result. Secondly we have the official sites where we can publish news and general info that we want large numbers of our players to be aware of. If people somehow manage to miss all of that then the chances are they would have missed it if we had official forums as well.

You don't need official forums to have a thriving community. There are good reasons to have them and good reasons not to, it's not an automatic choice.

So what is a player to think when he has some sort of question he wants answered, goes to the Mythic website, and finds no direction on where to look for information? I actually had this happen with a friend just today. He bought the preorder box, went to sign up for the forums so he could start reading about things, and was baffled by their lack of existence. Failure to have official forums is, no matter what, going to result in losing a certain amount of your newbies right off the bat to experiences like that.

It also sends a message to some players, and that message is 'we don't care enough about you to put any real resources into this.' Instead we get left in the hands of 3rd party boards with amateur moderation (this is the worst thing of all) and no organizational interest in facilitating  any actual dialogue between players and the company. A community the size of F13 (a couple thousand registered accounts) is fine to manage this way, but VN, with its teeming thousands, was a goddamn hellhole - to the point where, I seem to recall, the general forum for DAOC was actually shut down and Mythic people refused to post there. It was 100x worse than the WoW General forums ever have been, and the blame for that can rest squarely on the fact that the people in charge of moderating it were volunteer community people with no corporate interest in keeping things under control. People who aren't getting a paycheck burn out much faster with this sort of thing. Yeah, you do get your occasional Tserics even with official forums, but my server forum on VN went through more moderators during DAOC's run than Blizzard has had CMs working for them ever.

Also, let me point again to the WoW beta forums. There is an actual dialog going on there with WoW devs, and anyone who plays the game can drop in and read it. This makes players better-informed, and makes them feel empowered, like they have a role in the game themselves. The same thing happened with CoH (maybe it still does). Mythic's model for DAOC, where they would occasionally talk only to people on a private board who were locked up with an NDA, was incredibly frustrating for a lot of players, and I say this as someone who *had* access to said board. (Let's not even get into the failure of the TL program as a communication device, as I think there are really just a couple specific people who should take the blame for that.)

I want to requote the line I think is where Mythic really goes wrong here:

Anyone who would have been part of the community on an official forum will be active on at least one of the big community sites

This just isn't true, especially in a post-WoW world. Players are pretty well conditioned to expect official forums now. Of all the MMOs I've played, DAOC (and now WAR) are the only ones I can think of that don't have them. Like it or not, this is now a big missing bullet point on WAR's feature list, and even though the game is fun I think you can expect a slightly lower player retention rate over the years because of it.

[Mrbloodworth]

Case in point. When vanguard also did this, i was trying to find an answer to an issue. I went to 5 diffrent sites. Got 5 diffrent answers, And 3 of those were from 3 diffrent Vanguard developers. 0 worked.

[Ingmar]

I have yet to see a forum for a MMOG, either official or otherwise, where the signal to noise ratio wasn't so low as to be practically unmeasurable.

Then you haven't been looking. Even WoW's are manageable, particularly the class specific forums, the raids & dungeons forum, etc. CoX did a *wonderful* job with this.

[Riggswolfe]

MMOG developers seem happy to treat MMOG's as a genre instead of a medium.

Except in a way, they are. Most games go through this. FPS and RTS are all inherently the same with tiny little tweaks here and there to change things up. No one has made a major change to either genre in how long? I think expecting MMOs to make major changes is akin to expecting the next FPS to be revolutionary and different from its predecessors. The best you can hope for is a Deux Ex out of the same old, same old, and even that game wasn't that different from all the others out there.

[Hutch]

I have yet to see a forum for a MMOG, either official or otherwise, where the signal to noise ratio wasn't so low as to be practically unmeasurable.

Then you haven't been looking. Even WoW's are manageable, particularly the class specific forums, the raids & dungeons forum, etc. CoX did a *wonderful* job with this.

I was actually thinking of City of Heroes. The moderation there has clamped down some in the past year, but there used to be a godawful amount of trolling and otherwise useless posting. And I'm not even talking about the "general" board (does CoH even have one?). I'm thinking specifically of the Suggestions board, or whatever it was titled. You know, the kind of board where a dev might go to look for feedback from the playerbase. An anthropologist would have had a life's work in there, figuring out the social power structures. Classical primate usenet behavior. Shouting down ideas you don't like. Flinging poo. Banding together to call on the tribe's great warriors to come drive out the newcomers. A massive fucking echo chamber, with the gestalt purpose of trying to keep anything from actually changing. Especially if a suggestion flies in the face of some documented "we can't do that" three-year-old post that a dev made. Self appointed moderators. I hated it, and I never even made a post there. God help the newb who came in there thinking they had a good idea. I was glad when the mods came in and took it down.

I agree that the AT boards and some of the other specific boards there (Player Guides in particular) are quite helpful. I disagree with the idea that none of these things would have been possible on an unofficial board.