The MMOG landscape - unchanging and eternal (since 2004)

[Venkman]

Correct.

Which goes back to what I said earlier: how big is the market for hardcore (relevant or not) PvP anyway when far and away the most successful example of it barely ever scraped 250k at a time when the dominate title is 48x that.

And again that isn't to say it won't be tried again. Rather, it's to set the expectation of not expecting it from a big budget publisher. They don't put big budgets behind indie concepts.

[Falconeer]

I think we settled (!) on that other thread that the market for hardcore pvp is 100k at best. And we even settled that those 100k want different kinds of hardcore pvp 

[Arthur_Parker]

I don't think hardcore pvp is the right term, it's all about freedom, of both player interaction and character advancement.  The market has stagnated because it's rare for someone to come up with a better idea, the ideas that are used again and again have been accepted as the correct way of doing things.

Take UO and DAoC, in UO you could speak to anyone on screen, in DAoC you can speak to anyone in your realm.  If someone died in UO you couldn't have a two way conversation as one person was a ghost, that's a far smarter way of stopping smack talk than just blocking all cross realm communication.  The reason blocking cross faction communication caught on is because it works, duh, but you can stop nuisance phone calls by ripping your phone out too.  Nobody has improved it on it yet or even attempts to, so we appear to be stuck with it.  A recent positive change is unlocking custom titles for your character (LOTRO, WAR etc), it's only text and yet it's very popular.  Taking WAR as an example, they seem obsessed with making people grind for things, they could easily have put in custom cross realm taunts that could be unlocked, e.g kill 100 Humans to allow an Orc to moon the opposing side.

Bind on pickup is another example, fucking horrible idea, doesn't make an sense from a logical point of view either.  It's just a way to stop gold farmers and twinking characters, it completely ignores the fact that sometimes giving someone who isn't as advanced a magical sword can be fun.  Levels, we moved from UO (skill based, no forced classes), AC1 (soft levels, a level 40 could kill a level 80, no forced classes) and EQ (hard levels, forced classes) to mostly the EQ style, why did that happen?  Purely because EQ had 550k subs?  Levels work for PVE, balance is easy, why are non PVE centred games being marketed as pvp/rvr yet still using levels?

What about all the stuff that got left behind, UO treasure maps, remember those?  AC1 allegiance system, sure exp chains got out of hand but some form of incentive for a more advanced player to seek out and help new players is a good thing.

The one recent positive change is they stopped advertising these games as 2nd generation, thank god for that.  Because as far as I can see the original big three games were third generation and we've been moving backwards in terms of originality and focusing far more on trying to design out known problems rather than design in fun.

[Lantyssa]

What league(s) did you guys play in?

I honestly don't remember.  They grabbed me with MPBT and I just shot things when we moved over to whichever mech game was out at the time.  I didn't do much of the league stuff myself.

My company was the Blackhearts, which had some affiliation with the Disciples of Carnage.  We seemed almost independent to me, but there was some history there between the upper echelons and the unit.  I think I caught their eye by using DFAs in MPBT. 

[UnSub]

I mean maybe you could come up with some crazy gay elf shit where everyone is a SPRITE SPIRIT and you then just take control of creatures and use their bodies as mechs/spaceships, and then you have an EJECTION SEAT to eject your gay elf sprite spirit and possibly get away, leaving the mortal body that you inhabited to be looted. I'll stop at that because this train of thought is absurd.

Brilliant idea actually... Its not absurd at all tbh.
It would take a bit of evolution and pre-production to see where the idea can become a full fledged game but I can definitely see it being worthwhile venture in the end. Just thought I would point that out.

I have an idea for a game where the player characters would be unkillable spirits who could possess the bodies of normal people, effectively using them as meat shields and for any tactile situation (since spirits can't interact with the tangible world).

However, I don't think anyone is going to fund Gay Elf Sprite Spirit Online (GESSO) so it can remain a pipe dream.

[eldaec]

Bind on pickup is another example, fucking horrible idea, doesn't make an sense from a logical point of view either.  It's just a way to stop gold farmers and twinking characters, it completely ignores the fact that sometimes giving someone who isn't as advanced a magical sword can be fun. 

QF fucking T

MMOGs only have value because of interaction between players. Any mechanics that enforce limitations on that interaction automatically count as idiotic.

I know there are certain devs who read these forums, and they'll read the sentence above and think I'm just being a dick when I say that. But I'm not saying this for impact. Any mechanics that enforce limitations on interaction automatically count as idiotic. In a MMOG the only meaningful content is other players and any decision that doesn't reflect that IS FLAT OUT WRONG.

This is a big part of why EVE and WoW (and maybe CoH, possibly PS) are the only current MMOGs I have real respect for.

[Venkman]

It's not that easy. BoP was instituted not to limit the interactions of the masses but rather to prevent the dominance of a few exploiting that dominance either against other players or to play the game wrong (RMT, exploits, etc). This is because a few were able to screw up the game for many, and that resulted in a worse gaming experience for a large number of people who took their monthly fee and went elsewhere.

Same can be said of public adventure zones, twinking, powerleveling, kiting, and a bunch of other ideas tried again and again until the genre realized that growth comes from continuing to control the world in ways that protect players from each other. Because ultimately it always comes back to the most important fact of this space:

You've got a bunch of non-accountable random anonymous people seeking a good time until they're done who have no financially vested interest in ensuring the game is fun for everyone.

That's the first and most important rule when entering this space. The more control you put in their hands, the narrower the enjoyment is going to be. Yes there'll be a bunch of examples about guild and alliance leaders with social interest and the poor schlep who's RMTing to pay the rent or something. But neither of these directly impact the bottom line of a company better than the account fee they collect from the most people possible.

And all of that is fine. As long as you're not interested in playing a game that's on the tip of everyone's tongue, great! Seriously, this genre has dozens of titles players perpetually by people who couldn't give a rat's ass about any of the other games. But that's not the growth side. That's the core.

[eldaec]

I don't see how anything you just said supports the sort of decisions that the likes of late-EQ or WAR, or even aTitD have consciously made to limit the amount of interaction between new players and veterans (even if they are friends).

That is what I'm criticising, and that is what the likes of EVE, PS, CoH actively avoid.

[Venkman]

I don't see how anything you just said supports the sort of decisions that the likes of late-EQ or WAR, or even aTitD have consciously made to limit the amount of interaction between new players and veterans (even if they are friends).

That is what I'm criticising, and that is what the likes of EVE, PS, CoH actively avoid.

I blame the wrong insights being taken from the right experiences (kind of the problem with TV and movie sequels: hey, audiences rated are explosions highly so that means the next movie = more explosions!). You can have the best intentions and the skill to pull it off, but still be wrong.

This may not be the example you're thinking of so let me know if you got a better one. These are just the first two that occured to me:

Problem: Players want to advance their characters through PvP.

Wrong insight- Ok, let's let them level up via XP. Oh but wait, power curves are wonky in diku, so let's solve that problem by compartmentalizing players such that only players of certain levels can PvP. Oh but wait we want to ensure everyone has hte exact same opportunities all the time because that's how we're pushing the game. Ok, let's compartmentalize further to ensure only balanced brackets.

Result: Oops, a population that isn't reaching the critical mass we miscalculated as needing and therefore vast swaths of unused content.

Right insight- Ok, what does it mean to advance a character? Power and abilities. Oh, and power curves are wonky in diku. Ok, let's create a separate advancement track that doesn't interact with the diku XP PvE system and create a completely separate reward system that has just enough overlap with the PvE rewards that the vast majority of players can dabble in both. But let's ensure we focus first on the most important thing we know for sure the largest amount of our target markets want, and polish the hell out of that until it shines like no other.

Result: A game that blew through critical mass into ludicrous mass with so much money they've been able to since expand the game into the lateral realms desired, rather than trying to be too lateral right out of the gate.

Problem: RMT is driving the belief that the game economy is inflationary and that the value of traded goods are so high players need to turn to PlayerAuction.com, MySuperSale or eBay to buy the ingame currency because they cannot get enough of it fast enough through normal gameplay.

Wrong insight: Ok, let's remove coins altogether. Instead players will just trade goods for deconstruction. Oh, but wait, players figured out the common denominators anyway and created the same value chain anyway and well we screwed up a bunch of other things too including freakin chat so instead of a utopian panacea, we have a wasteland.

Right insight: BoP. The very best items need to be gained through normal game play. Oh, but let's also ensure that "normal" game play is not just the purview of those who play 30 hours a week because all that does is alienate the hundreds of thousands of other people that know their very lifestyle is between them and any sort of substantive character improvement.

[TheCastle]

However, I don't think anyone is going to fund Gay Elf Sprite Spirit Online (GESSO) so it can remain a pipe dream.

lol
What is most odd about this is that for some reason I overlooked that the name of the game would be GESSO and just thought about it s core game play mechanic. I completely did not even realize the gay elf spirits part which would normally snickering like an idiot. "He said gay!" 

I wonder if you could make an IP based around the worst possible concept like this but do a solid game with it just to see how people react. The preview would show a bunch of gay elfs flying around taking over massive dinosaurs and huge robots so they can prepare for the most intense battle ever. Both sides stop for a moment and stare levelly at each other then the screen fades out and the words fade in.

"Don your tutu this December..."

Then you you know how after the preview should be over but they always throw in that last shocking moment for some reason. In this case you would see a gay elf with a chain gun firing while screaming as hes enveloped in a nuclear flames in a massive battlefield surrounded by his dead friends. Another nice touch would be that in the preview it can say something like "Choose your side!!" but when the game ships both sides are gay man elfs that look exactly the same.

Actually scratch that if I was going in guns blazing I would consider having the option to choose between races for character customization. You would have the option to play the game as a shark, aquaman, or a gay elf. You can give them tattoos and pick the color of the initial armor that gets replaced with some generic crap after the very first quest. This would also be cool because it would be the first MMOG where players can birth new characters by cybering. Gay Elfs can only have babies with sharks and sharks can only have babies with Aquaman. Id release it on consoles too.

[Sir T]

[TheCastle]

Hey shock value might get more sales!
Its a strategy nobody ever considers!

[SnakeCharmer]

BoP was instituted not to limit the interactions of the masses but rather to prevent the dominance of a few exploiting that dominance either against other players or to play the game wrong (RMT, exploits, etc).

To me it's nothing more than a stopgap or bandaid fix for poor game design/mechanics that's just stuck around because 'that is the way it's been, that is the way it shall always be'.

[Venkman]

It's the way it's been because a few hundred thousand people liked it before twelve more million people showed up to also like it 

I don't want to harp on this one point, but really, anyone who's been around this genre long enough knows the why behind certain design decisions. These are not just fun cute little projects banged out in off-the-shelf tools. They're business enterprises first, play experiences second, games to be had within third. As such, everything is eventually a business decision of some type.

All that means is that an idea surviving contact with player's sense of enjoyment is more important, because it needs to do so for a much longer period of time, as a business model, than any other genre.

That's why I don't put value judgments against ideas employed in wildly successful games.

[Slayerik]

- PVP/griefing. You can't really achieve a truly immersive world with PVP flags, but if you have open PVP, even with harsh social consequences, you are shutting out a huge chunk of your potential market. I won't play games like that anymore, not as my Single Main MMO of Choice anyway. Call it the "No Slayeriks Clause".

I think it is possible to have PVP/griefing and still be mainstream to a large degree.

According to CCP stats a larger amount of the active account population is located in Empire/Carebear space.

As long as there is an area where a significant amount activities for people to do without fear for their life.

The main problem is balancing risk vs reward.

There has to be a reason to enter the Slayerik zones without it being required for those who want to live their life in peace.

It shouldn't require supreme amounts of metagaming/zerging/minmaxing in order for someone to explore pvp areas unless they're complete retards though so that explorers and traders can find a niche.

I think Eve does this well? but it might be very hard for a more mainstream publisher not to bow under pressure to make pvp areas more accessible.

Disclaimer: This is from the viewpoint of someone who plays Eve and hangs with Slayerik 

My main point was that Slayerik is able to do what he does *in Empire/carebear space.* Or at least was, I don't follow Eve that closely - work up a bunch of positive zone faction, blow away some poor sap with a hauler full of money, then work his way back up the faction tree to do it again, or whatever. That's the sort of thing I wouldn't want to be possible and I suspect is a turnoff for the general crowd of gamers, if not a deal-killer like it is for me. I don't mind there being unsafe space; I do mind there being no truly safe space for my PVE entertainments.

If that sort of thing is possible, people will do it no matter how harsh the consequences. I saw it happen all the time on a small MUD where the punishment went all the way up to deleting the character. People would just make another one, work their way up, and go out in a blaze of griefing glory.

But there's no doubt that NOT letting people have the capability to choose to behave in that way screws with realism/immersion/verisimilitude/whatever-you-prefer-to-call-it like crazy.

Sorry for the wall-o-quotes, but I wanted to respond to the 'Slayer griefing' derail. (no Slayerik clause....I got a laugh outta that , thx :)

In Eve, there is varying degrees of space security. 1.0 is instant help from Concord (town guards/police). In .9 the response is close to instant. In .5, the response is roughly 10 seconds now (I was nerfed!!!!). Once you enter 0.4 - 0.1  there are no Concord and only gate guns defend the innocents. As an additional penalty for doing what I do, the higher security you are in when you suicide gank them the more of a security status hit (once it gets too low I can't enter the highest security systems, starts at 1.0 and gets worse and worse until I am flashing red and attackable anywhere).
In 0.0 there are no penalties for 'piracy'

Yes, I use the perception that .5 safe is space, just because Concord is there and I kill idiots that carry 500 million isk in a 500,000 isk ship without taking any precautions in fitting their ship to defend itself (if only for 10 secs or warp core stabilizers so that I can't prevent them from warping). I kinda think of it as wearing around very expensive jewelry in a nightclub. Sure, there are bouncers and shit. But you still hear stories about athletes getting mugged for there cash and jewelry. If you have the money for diamond bling, get a bodyguard.

I understand people who might not want it in their game. Mostly, they are people that can't learn to play or bother learning game mechanics (not you Ingmar, just in general). I've heard suicide ganking talked about in noob corp channels quite a bit, so when you hear that do you not think 'hmmm I wonder what that is, maybe I should find out'. But they don't or they get careless or rushed. A little prevention or taking more time completely eliminates the risk of me. 100%.

For the record, I don't do it for the griefing...it is just very good money and something I can do at work. Scan ship....back to F13....Scan ship....Nile Online.....Scan Ship....talk on IM....Scan ship... OH NICE, he's got a billion ...he's gonna die!

Anyway, they have been nerfing it some but still allow it. If people had seen the sheer amount of shit I have had blown up in my kills and realized I am helping with inflation, they'd all thank me!  Or something.

It is that which makes Eve so great. You aren't safe, even if 99.9% of the time you are. There are 'evil' guys like me out there trying to scam you, gank you, bait you, and just plain kill you. There is a place for pirates in this world. And in the end we are all part of an incredible economy and some of us are involved in an even cooler massive political and social battleground in 0.0

[Draegan]

If you can come up with a type of MMOG that you want to play that isn't WOW I'll be pleasantly surprised.  I think most people want a different flavor of WOW/EQ1/SojournMUD/DIKU.

Is this a trick question?
I want three games, and none of them resemble WoW even remotely:

1) A huge sandbox, similar to Ultima Online. Of course it needs FFA and nasty PVP. It could use permadeath on certain circumstances. You can call it Ultima Online 2.
2) A full PVP game based on territorial conquest from the ground up with a huge focus on guilds and subguilds. It has to be completely instance-free. You can call it Shadowbane 2.
3) EVE with just a bit more twitch and an even wider scope, as in battles on planets surface and, yeah, Mechs and tanks. The game Slayerik came up with, I'd play it.

So easy. Are you pleasantly surprised now?

To clarify: I don't think these games would succeed. You just asked what we want, and this is my dreamlist.

Those are just rehashes of current games as you even said.  Nothing new.  Just different rule sets.

[Slayerik]

It's the way it's been because a few hundred thousand people liked it before twelve more million people showed up to also like it 

I don't want to harp on this one point, but really, anyone who's been around this genre long enough knows the why behind certain design decisions. These are not just fun cute little projects banged out in off-the-shelf tools. They're business enterprises first, play experiences second, games to be had within third. As such, everything is eventually a business decision of some type.

All that means is that an idea surviving contact with player's sense of enjoyment is more important, because it needs to do so for a much longer period of time, as a business model, than any other genre.

That's why I don't put value judgments against ideas employed in wildly successful games.

Who actually likes BoP ? I thought people just deal with it. Actually, its great for people that can catass so you can really show you earned your Tier 7 buttpiece. Other than that, why or how does it really help? Who gives a fuck about twinks? If you don't like them, don't make one. Gold farmers wouldn't be able to make any money off them, and it would also decrease the value of the old BoE shit (less money for goldfarmers).

Then again, I think loot should drop and you should have a massive bank where you can have a bunch of gear sets. Hey look, when I die I'm actually out of the fight for a minute. It mattered that I got owned. Throw in Mark and Recall and we got ourselves a game :) Whoops, I'm back to my UO pipedreams.

[Mrbloodworth]

However, I don't think anyone is going to fund Gay Elf Sprite Spirit Online (GESSO) so it can remain a pipe dream.

Bullshitt.

[TheCastle]

I think the reality of it is that people want a single player game where they can play coop with friends or sometimes a random person from time to time.
Getting ganked is up there with forced grouping and other such basic taboos that prevent people from just being able to play the game.

One very strange comparison I recently made while talking about this topic was that if I had to have a subscription to play Oblivion and it had huge continents I can explore with tons of official patches, crafting, persistent auction house, updates, upgrades and expansions to the content with the ability to sometimes invite a friend or two to play with me I would be still playing that game right now.

I mean think about how much more attention MMOGs need from the developers themselves. When people buy a pay to play game they are buying the idea that if its not perfect right now it will be down the road. Or at the very least they will be adding all kinds of new stuff into the game overtime. While most single player RPGs such as fallout3 it very much has an inherent lack of depth you would need for the game to work as a MMOG and no real promise of constant updates or even just a willingness to patch and rebalance some things. Single player games completely lack very simple concepts MMOGs have yet MMOGs seem to be moving more toward being mostly single player games. I am willing to bet that a very large portion of all player bases just want a very in depth RPG and are not really as enamored by the idea that the world is persistent or even what that entails as you might think.

[Arthur_Parker]

It's the way it's been because a few hundred thousand people liked it before twelve more million people showed up to also like it 

I don't want to harp on this one point, but really, anyone who's been around this genre long enough knows the why behind certain design decisions. These are not just fun cute little projects banged out in off-the-shelf tools. They're business enterprises first, play experiences second, games to be had within third. As such, everything is eventually a business decision of some type.

All that means is that an idea surviving contact with player's sense of enjoyment is more important, because it needs to do so for a much longer period of time, as a business model, than any other genre.

That's why I don't put value judgments against ideas employed in wildly successful games.

That's the second time I've seen you win the "thinks most like a developer" award.  The above post is also the reason this thread exists, it manages to be absolutely right while being totally wrong.  I'd be a lot more convinced that devs weren't try to bang square pegs into round holes if I didn't see bandaged hands everywhere.

EQ had 550k subs, WoW has what, twenty times that?  Why?  Because Blizzard did a better EQ.  If Blizzard picks AC1 or UO, does a similar makeover, removes the crap ideas, adds polish, they would get twenty times what those games had at peak, because there isn't a single piece of evidence to suggest otherwise.

Your post is a template to design the correct safe mmorpg, no wait they are called mmo's nowadays because having your character able to sit in a chair isn't deemed as important as it used to be.  "Don't reforge the shards of Narsil noob!  Andúril is BOP".

The flip side of not putting value judgments against ideas employed in wildly successful games is the unspoken fact that you will prejudge ideas that haven't so far been wildly successful.

[IainC]

It's the way it's been because a few hundred thousand people liked it before twelve more million people showed up to also like it 

I don't want to harp on this one point, but really, anyone who's been around this genre long enough knows the why behind certain design decisions. These are not just fun cute little projects banged out in off-the-shelf tools. They're business enterprises first, play experiences second, games to be had within third. As such, everything is eventually a business decision of some type.

All that means is that an idea surviving contact with player's sense of enjoyment is more important, because it needs to do so for a much longer period of time, as a business model, than any other genre.

That's why I don't put value judgments against ideas employed in wildly successful games.

That's the second time I've seen you win the "thinks most like a developer" award.  The above post is also the reason this thread exists, it manages to be absolutely right while being totally wrong.  I'd be a lot more convinced that devs weren't try to bang square pegs into round holes if I didn't see bandaged hands everywhere.

EQ had 550k subs, WoW has what, twenty times that?  Why?  Because Blizzard did a better EQ.  If Blizzard picks AC1 or UO, does a similar makeover, removes the crap ideas, adds polish, they would get twenty times what those games had at peak, because there isn't a single piece of evidence to suggest otherwise.

Your post is a template to design the correct safe mmorpg, no wait they are called mmo's nowadays because having your character able to sit in a chair isn't deemed as important as it used to be.  "Don't reforge the shards of Narsil noob!  Andúril is BOP".

The flip side of not putting value judgments against ideas employed in wildly successful games is the unspoken fact that you will prejudge ideas that haven't so far been wildly successful.

I bet there are a lot of developers at SOE, Mythic, Blizzard etc who would totally love to buck the trend and make an awesome AC1 or the definitive take on 'EvE with swords'. Sadly the developers don't get to choose what kind of game they make. If it's going to be as good as WoW then you need to throw WoW scale cash around and the people who are in a position to set you up with that want to see precedent for success. No-one will help you innovate but they'll be lining up to bankroll your proven formula for success. At the moment the only proven formula for rampant success is 'Do what Blizzard did'.

[Slayerik]

and thus the stagnant pool we see today.

[Kamen]

It is that which makes Eve so great. You aren't safe, even if 99.9% of the time you are. There are 'evil' guys like me out there trying to scam you, gank you, bait you, and just plain kill you. There is a place for pirates in this world. And in the end we are all part of an incredible economy and some of us are involved in an even cooler massive political and social battleground in 0.0

Exactly.

Even if you don't like the game, Eve is different than everything else out there.  Most people call Eve an internet spaceships pvp game, a griefer paradise, etc.  They're wrong.  Yes, non-consensual pvp is allowed in Eve, but that's only part of what you would expect to find in what Eve really is - a virtual universe.  In Eve, managing your risk, and finding the fun is up to you.

Setting your own goals and finding your own fun is something many gamers are simply incapable of doing.  A lot of people who try Eve are disappointed when they aren't led by the hand and told what they have to do to "level up" or how to become a success.  Most gamers want to be told what they have to do to "win the game".  In Eve you need to be capable of and willing to set your own goals and end game, and that's why I love the game, and also why it will probably never have a million+ subscribers.

Sure, there are constraints on what you can do, but Eve is by far and away the most open ended online gaming universe I know of.  You can take the obvious career pathes and mine, explore, pirate, run missions for the NPC's, trade, manufacture, conquer and claim space, etc, but beyond that a lot of very creative people have gone to the next level and created non-scam banks, mercenary services, for hire R&D services, trusted third party agent services, cemetery's  , free trade zones, etc.  The trend of improving the playground by giving us the tools to make our own fun will continue next year with customizable ship building, and eventually with in station ambulation.

Yes, you can be a dick in Eve, and as you would expect there are consequences, risks, and ramifications for going down that road.  Slay suicide ganking afk haulers doesn't make him a dick in my eyes.  He preys on lazy people with more money than sense.  I applaud him for it.  The people afk hauling billions in cargo in high sec deserve the same thing that a drunk flashing thousands of dollars of bling and hundred dollar bills hanging out of his pockets gets - a life lesson.

[Arthur_Parker]

At the moment the only proven formula for rampant success is 'Do what Blizzard did'.

Blizzard picked one of the big original three games and improved it.

[SnakeCharmer]

If it's going to be as good as WoW then you need to throw WoW scale cash around

This is going to sound more snarky than it really is...

But how does doing your job (as a coder, programmer, dev, whatever) correctly, acurately, and efficiently cost more money than writing a buggy piece of shit?  All the money in the world won't cover up sloppy work (a + where a - should be, typos in script, haphazardly placing NPCs in walls, lazyness(?), inattention to detail).  

Seems to me doing it right the first time costs less, not more.

Let's face it.  Nobody is innovating.  There's very few fresh faces.  You're all pretty much doing the same thing.

As someone whose livelyhood is essentially project management involved with multimillion dollar projects and logistics, throwing money at the issue is rarely the solution.  Effective, organized, and efficient work, however, is.

[IainC]

I hear you. More cash != more awesomeness. Assuming you have competent guys however as a baseline the more money you have the more of them you can hire so you can have better assets (as artists can spend more time on each one), more content (as you have more writers, level desigers etc). You can try more things for size as your dev team has wiggle room to shelve stuff that doesn't perform and come up with new stuff. You can have an awesome quality of staff with a small budget but you won't have a lot of them and they won't have as much time to do stuff with.

The more you have to spend the higher your chances are of finding awesomeness. It's still possible to encounter suck instead but you're giving your product a better shot at avoiding it if you assume all else is equal.

[SnakeCharmer]

If money were the issue, Vanguard would be at 20 million subs by now.

Edit:  This comment really should be in my other post....

[Lantyssa]

I bet there are a lot of developers at SOE, Mythic, Blizzard etc who would totally love to buck the trend and make an awesome AC1 or the definitive take on 'EvE with swords'. Sadly the developers don't get to choose what kind of game they make. If it's going to be as good as WoW then you need to throw WoW scale cash around and the people who are in a position to set you up with that want to see precedent for success. No-one will help you innovate but they'll be lining up to bankroll your proven formula for success. At the moment the only proven formula for rampant success is 'Do what Blizzard did'.

Unfortunately, it's only proven to work for one company.

And the suits are missing the important part of what Arthur said.  They can pick any successful title, and refine it til it glows.  It'll be a lot easier to win again UO or AC1 than WoW, because WoW is already EQ refined.  Trying to polish WoW gets a marginal gain at best, and since it already has its audience, the draw won't be as strong as giving players something different.  The sandboxers, the explorers, the people wanting stories though?  We're hungry.  Give us a EQ->WoW level of refinement and a whole new market is opened.

[Goreschach]

I bet there are a lot of developers at SOE, Mythic, Blizzard etc who would totally love to buck the trend and make an awesome AC1 or the definitive take on 'EvE with swords'. Sadly the developers don't get to choose what kind of game they make. If it's going to be as good as WoW then you need to throw WoW scale cash around and the people who are in a position to set you up with that want to see precedent for success. No-one will help you innovate but they'll be lining up to bankroll your proven formula for success. At the moment the only proven formula for rampant success is 'Do what Blizzard did'.

If the past couple years have shown us anything, it's that 'doing what Blizzard did' is a recipe for Epic Fail.

[sidereal]

Only if you completely misunderstand what Blizzard did.  Which everyone does.

[TheCastle]

Only if you completely misunderstand what Blizzard did.  Which everyone does.

Most people copy ideas with out actually understanding why the ideas were successful in the first place. Its a very common phenomenon.

[Slayerik]

Um, they way I saw it was they took their rather large gaming audience and built and heavily tested a Diku MMO that was scalable for low end machines. They made up for the lack of cutting edge graphics with great artistic flavor and comedy. Did I mentioned they betaed the piss out of it? They improved most systems, and their big innovation was an "!"    So Blizzard had a large audience, a very solid infrastructure (from Battlenet), and a reputation for only putting out good games, when they were ready.

Then they started printing money.

[TheCastle]

Um, they way I saw it was they took their rather large gaming audience and built and heavily tested a Diku MMO that was scalable for low end machines. They made up for the lack of cutting edge graphics with great artistic flavor and comedy. Did I mentioned they betaed the piss out of it? They improved most systems, and their big innovation was an "!"    So Blizzard had a large audience, a very solid infrastructure (from Battlenet), and a reputation for only putting out good games, when they were ready.

Then they started printing money.

Yeah and what happens when someone tries to compete.

Diku MMO that was scalable for low end machines

They advertise to make it a DX10 or otherwise raise min specs

They made up for the lack of cutting edge graphics with great artistic flavor and comedy

make a game that takes itself more seriously and refuses to dance
added combos and additional complexity to the core system to make it more competitive

Did I mentioned they betaed the piss out of it?

But we already know this idea is so fun we don't need to do as much testing! WoW is our proof of concept so little details like RVR and  PVP change nothing about the successful formula! And look we improved on every other aspect about WoW. Higher system requirements, dance dance revolution combat system, and we offer much more hardcore PVP. Never mind all of the exaptations along the way. look not at the man behind the curtain!!

[Ratman_tf]

If money were the issue, Vanguard would be at 20 million subs by now.

Edit:  This comment really should be in my other post....

Money can hire talent and skill, but it can't guarantee it.

[Slyfeind]

Um, they way I saw it was they took their rather large gaming audience and built and heavily tested a Diku MMO that was scalable for low end machines. They made up for the lack of cutting edge graphics with great artistic flavor and comedy. Did I mentioned they betaed the piss out of it? They improved most systems, and their big innovation was an "!" ...

I was wondering about this. Who came up with that exclamation point as a quest marker? The earliest I remember was in Diablo 2, but I seem to recall seeing it earlier than that. Not counting the JRPGs that have mini-cinematics with a character going "!" and then running up to talk to you, like FF Mystic Quest.