Cracks starting to show?

[Paelos]

And so far nobody has been as successful with their second MMO as their first.  I suppose the WoW devs might just be arrogant enough to believe that doesn't apply to them.

They would be right if Blizzard could pull off a stable, working, twitch-FPS-style MMO based in the Starcraft universe with gear, crafting, housing, and an appearance tab.

 

[Nebu]

And so far nobody has been as successful with their second MMO as their first.  I suppose the WoW devs might just be arrogant enough to believe that doesn't apply to them.

Was Anarchy Online more successful than Age of Conan?

[Reg]

Oh hey you're right. I consider myself disproved.

[Rasix]

I'd argue that LOTRO was a lot better than any of Turbine's previous offerings.

[Chimpy]

What about NCSoft? I am not sure what their first MMO was, but surely one of their newer ones has been more successful than whatever that was.

[Modern Angel]

I have it on pretty good authority that they've shipped massive quantities of staff and resources to the next MMO which Tigole got shifted to post-WLK launch. Even barring that handwavey, trust me please declaration there are any number of signs that they're operating with a smaller team and budget than they were in the salad days. I suppose I should reword my question, since "second games aren't as good" and "it's their main source of income" don't prove anything. Why do you think Blizzard is immune to the hubris inflicting every single MMO studio ever created?

[Ingmar]

And so far nobody has been as successful with their second MMO as their first.  I suppose the WoW devs might just be arrogant enough to believe that doesn't apply to them.

Was Anarchy Online more successful than Age of Conan?

If I had to hazard a guess I would guess that AO had better market share at its peak than AoC has had. I'm sure AoC has better raw numbers, but the market is completely different now. Kind of like comparing Greg Maddux and Christy Mathewson, you have to adjust for park factors, length of season, the dead ball era etc. ;)

[DraconianOne]

You'd instance housing, goober.

Who pissed in your Weetos?

[Sjofn]

I have it on pretty good authority that they've shipped massive quantities of staff and resources to the next MMO which Tigole got shifted to post-WLK launch. Even barring that handwavey, trust me please declaration there are any number of signs that they're operating with a smaller team and budget than they were in the salad days. I suppose I should reword my question, since "second games aren't as good" and "it's their main source of income" don't prove anything. Why do you think Blizzard is immune to the hubris inflicting every single MMO studio ever created?

I don't see why making a second MMO, for any company, is a sign of "hubris." Yes, the second MMO tends to make people slap their foreheads and wonder if they learned ANYTHING AT ALL from making the first one, but I don't think it's crazy megalomania to want to try making a second one after the first has been successful.

[Modern Angel]

I think that's fair. But I think it would be fairly hubristic to take 2/3 (or whatever) of your live team on WoW and put it on an untried property, essentially sticking WoW on the path to retention only mode. Especially when you have the hiring power of a small country.

[Sjofn]

Well, I also don't think it's crazy to think, "We want to make a new MMO" and then think "And I'd rather the people who made our first MMO, with all the experience they've gained doing that, and their familiarity with what we feel worked and what didn't were the ones to do it." I know people enjoy wringing their hands and doomcasting, but I really haven't seen much in this patch or this expansion that screams to me that the new people are hugely worse than the old people. Shit, they've done stuff that I'm pretty sure the old people would've never done, and the game will be better for it.

[kildorn]

I think that's fair. But I think it would be fairly hubristic to take 2/3 (or whatever) of your live team on WoW and put it on an untried property, essentially sticking WoW on the path to retention only mode. Especially when you have the hiring power of a small country.

It's smarter to just keep rolling with your one product and never look towards the future when it gets old?

Everyone makes a product, puts it into update mode with a smaller staff and starts working on something new. To not do that is pretty much declaring you suck at running a company.

What you want to avoid is killing your existing product too early by leaving a shitty support staff.

[Chimpy]

If Blizzard didn't give some of those artists and designers something new and different to work on instead of WoW, you can be damn sure a lot of them would have jumped ship by now and gone somewhere else to scratch their creative itch.

[Arrrgh]

If Blizzard didn't give some of those artists and designers something new and different to work on instead of WoW, you can be damn sure a lot of them would have jumped ship by now and gone somewhere else to scratch their creative itch.

God forbid they lose the armor artist...

[apocrypha]

Blizzard can take 2/3rds of their WoW development staff off onto another project and still leave a team many times larger than any other MMO has on it.

Makes sense for them to accept that WoW can't remain top dog forever, that at some point they will inevitably go into retention mode and that they would be best served by already having the replacement well into development. Even if that's 5-10 years from now, which is, let's be honest, the usual Blizzard dev cycle.

[FieryBalrog]

Cataclysm is far too ambitious a concept to be the sign of a company that's resting on their laurels aka moneybeds.

Are they probably using their A-team on the new MMO? Sure. But the B-team could have easily slapped on another continent, added 61 point talents, thrown bandaids over the resulting gaping holes, dealt with the bitching and called it a day. We'll see how well they pull it off, but they aren't treading water, and as a result people are a lot more excited for a 6 year old game than they otherwise would be.

I can't imagine anyone who's played for 6 years straight isn't a little tired of WoW and just burned out from the number of hours they've logged, but for someone like me who plays 3 months a year, which is probably the majority of the playerbase, I'll buy the expansion and have fun with it.

[Xanthippe]

I stayed subscribed to UO for almost two years after I'd stopped playing it just because I couldn't bear the thought of giving up my house.  Housing in WoW would be a huge success.

Never having played UO, what was it about their housing system that made it so much better than anyone else's?

How did UO avoid having slums sprout up everywhere?

I did play DAOC, (housing was instanced), but it always felt slapped on to me, and I never really got that into the decorating aspect because, even with decorating, all the houses looked mostly the same. 

I would love housing in WoW if it was part of the world, and not apart from the world. 

[Reg]

Never having played UO, what was it about their housing system that made it so much better than anyone else's?

I think the best thing about it is that UO housing was as you say "part of the world."  If you were lucky enough to get a prime spot and had a little talent you could do some really impressive things with a customized house.

How did UO avoid having slums sprout up everywhere?

It didn't unfortunately.

I would love housing in WoW if it was part of the world, and not apart from the world.

I just don't see it happening with any modern game. The best you could probably get would be a zone dedicated entirely to player housing and it's just not the same.  In UO I had a villa across the road from the Yew cemetery and there was a constant stream of people coming by to fight skeletons. If they let you do something like that in WoW the Barrens would instantly turn into an overcrowded slum with wall to wall houses.

[SurfD]

I always thought that Asheron's Call did a really good job of implimenting player housing.   They had "housing for the unwashed masses" in the form of instanced "appartment complexes" so that even the lowest of the low could get at least a room to call their own, but they also had outdoor housing, in the form of little communities that were sprinled across the map where you could get a one or two story house with 3 or 5 rooms if you were decently well off, or shoot for one of the larger houses (usually only 2 or 3 in a "community").   And then they had huge sprawling mansions for guilds to use, tucked away usually in pretty "way off the beaten path" places.  Of course, one major advantage AC had is that it's world was HUGE by most game standards, with a LOT of largely unused empty space / virgin wilderness everywhere that could easily be developed into small, scattered housing districts.

The major problem i see with doing housing in WoW is that the game world, for the most part, is simply not designed around the idea of letting players place houses, or even for the devs to really plop down little gated communities for people to buy space in.  Take nearly any random spot in the game world large enough to accomidate a player house or small community (barring a few zones like the Barrens), and there is usualy already something important there, or within spitting distance of there, that would just make the house / community seem out of place.

[Ingmar]

They've openly stated they don't want their housing to 1) clog the landscape and 2) replace the capital cities as the central social points. Most other games with housing have failed at one or the other of those (UO and DAOC being the iconic examples of each, respectively.)

LotRO didn't kill Bree as a gathering place with its housing, but the houses are almost purely cosmetic there, and it being Blizzard we're talking about here I think they probably want actual systems attached to their housing. They're not big on putting something in just for looks past really simple stuff like pets.

[Numtini]

Put me down as another huge fan of AC's approach. Their system only really worked because while the real houses were very rare, it was a constant grind to keep housing up. I can't remember what the thingies were, but you needed some item to pay the rent and if you didn't pay, you lost your house. I was part of a fairly large size guild with a mansion and I remember them needing to organize in the last week of the month so they didn't lose it. It wasn't just a formality.

[Ingmar]

The other issue of course is WoW zones are so heavily designed for quest flow and such that there just aren't a lot of 'dead space' areas that might be appropriate to toss some housing into - especially with Cataclysm taking a hammer to underutilized spaces like Azshara.

[Xanthippe]

What happened to your house in UO when you unsubbed?

[Dren]

What happened to your house in UO when you unsubbed?

After a number of days it went bye bye.  I believe it was refreshed by you opening the front door if I remember right.  You could actually lose your house while you are subbed if you didn't log in and "refresh" it.

The reason you won't see housing like that anymore (among the other reasons stated,) is the huge amount of lag it created.  UO's biggest problem from beginning until, well, now probably is the amount of items in the "world."  When you got around heavily populated areas, you came to a crawl.

Given that, I'd much rather they put resources towards a good smooth lag-free experience than cut back just so houses can clutter the landscape.  That's why I'm perfectly fine with solutions like FFXI's or Wizard 101's or even the guild compound system Guild War's has/had.  Housing just plain needs to be instanced or you run into the problems of the past.

[Malakili]

What happened to your house in UO when you unsubbed?

After a number of days it went bye bye.  I believe it was refreshed by you opening the front door if I remember right.  You could actually lose your house while you are subbed if you didn't log in and "refresh" it.

The reason you won't see housing like that anymore (among the other reasons stated,) is the huge amount of lag it created.  UO's biggest problem from beginning until, well, now probably is the amount of items in the "world."  When you got around heavily populated areas, you came to a crawl.

Given that, I'd much rather they put resources towards a good smooth lag-free experience than cut back just so houses can clutter the landscape.  That's why I'm perfectly fine with solutions like FFXI's or Wizard 101's or even the guild compound system Guild War's has/had.  Housing just plain needs to be instanced or you run into the problems of the past.

What about some kind of middle ground where players can place the physical house, but walking in takes you through a loading screen.  This would hypothetically allow you to have communities sprout up, but cut way down on the number of items sitting around in one place..

[Lantyssa]

So, SWG?

The main problem is sprawl.  If there aren't pre-defined lots then people will build everywhere.  If there are pre-defined lots, then guilds and friends get upset when they can't move in close to one another.

Travel and world-size have huge effects on this, too.  Housing needs to be easy to reach.  You need enough space to accommodate players.  People want their own unique place, but instanced housing solves a lot of issues.

[K9]

Clearly the solution is more lighthouses along the coast of Westfall. Lighthouses for everyone!

[Malakili]

So, SWG?

The main problem is sprawl.  If there aren't pre-defined lots then people will build everywhere.  If there are pre-defined lots, then guilds and friends get upset when they can't move in close to one another.

Travel and world-size have huge effects on this, too.  Housing needs to be easy to reach.  You need enough space to accommodate players.  People want their own unique place, but instanced housing solves a lot of issues.

I don't really have a huge problem with instanced housing to begin with, I'm just trying to think up alternative methods.  As a really good example, I enjoyed the hell out of LOTRO housing.  Instanced neighborhoods, so you could often get into the neighborhood where your guild had the guild house, and even if you couldn't its real easy to zone over to it. 

[Lantyssa]

I'm curious how Horizon's towns would have worked out, had it been a good game.

My ideal system is a bunch of easy to reach hubs, which is where towns spring up around, with a lot of empty space between and maybe a few hidden lots out in the middle of nowhere.  But then I love huge open world designs.  I just think there needs to be some convenience factor in there as well.

[Dren]

Malakili:  That's an interesting idea, but there would still have to be some control over it.  Just by even having the "item" of a visible house and portal might be enough when multiplied by 10k to be an issue with connection stability for many. 

Perhaps you have designated "housing" in different areas throughout the world.  Each one is represented by some type of graphical representation of a "village."  To start, it looks like a very small gathering of maybe 3 houses.  As soon as you step into the area, you are instanced to the "village."  There will then be a large area with a few houses to visit.

As the "village" is populated more, the outer world graphic of it will grow to look more impressive, etc.  When you zone into it, the area is the same size, but with obviously more houses/structures.

Another benefit to this could be that a "village" could work together to get improvements to their graphic of their town.  I'm thinking moats, walls of different materials, flags, etc.  All of it would be fluff, but that's really all we are talking about here.  Those items would change the instance for the "village" too, so people can build pride into their accomplishments as a community.

So with that idea, there would just be maybe 6 "villages" for each faction in different areas.  That wouldn't clutter anything up but could give people a feeling of space yet an easy way to reach their "village" and home/guild.  If the 6 areas fill up, Blizzard can implement more.  Make sure there is a UO like rule of only keeping structures that are actually used regularly too.  That keeps the number down significantly over time.

Damn it!  You guys got me talking about it again and I want it again.  I'm going back to dreary reality now.  Thanks...

[Typhon]

That's a cool idea Dren - especially like the idea of the outer village getting large as more folks build houses/improve houses in the inner village.  Would be neat if they implemented CoX's "door" technology in the outer village that would allow you to zone into different parts of the inner village.

To prevent arguments you'd probably have to lock the theme of the outer village, and have the upgrades be solely based upon the number and quality of houses within the inner village (your idea having the village residents work together is much nicer in a fairytale land where anonymous strangers where able to get along).  Even then you'd have people bitching at residents to upgrade their shit.

[Dren]

That's a cool idea Dren - especially like the idea of the outer village getting large as more folks build houses/improve houses in the inner village.  Would be neat if they implemented CoX's "door" technology in the outer village that would allow you to zone into different parts of the inner village.

To prevent arguments you'd probably have to lock the theme of the outer village, and have the upgrades be solely based upon the number and quality of houses within the inner village (your idea having the village residents work together is much nicer in a fairytale land where anonymous strangers where able to get along).  Even then you'd have people bitching at residents to upgrade their shit.

Well, when I said work together I was thinking more along the lines of what you wrote.  It would be more of an automatic thing where as the residents build and make their own structures better the town improves as well.  Maybe you lolore it as "The residents of this town are more prosperous, so they are taxed higher, so there are better improvements to the city as a whole."

Actually, a tax system might be exactly what is needed.  It would handle the improvement idea as well as the "keep your house refreshed" idea.  If you stop paying your taxes, your house goes away.  If you build a larger structure with more and more neat things, your tax increases, which, in turn, improves the town that much more, etc.  Wood fence turns into a stone wall which turns into a brick wall, etc...  (The Artists can have a field day with this kind of thing.)

[craan]

Hey and then HOAs could form and kick people out if they don't pay their 10g fee or keep their virtual lawn clipped.

[WindupAtheist]

The debacle that has been Wintergrasp over the course of this expansion qualifies as a misstep in my book. It's gone from a massive uncontrolled world PVP event to, on a lot of servers, a 5v5 battleground where 90% of the players wishing to participate are locked out because they're all in the same faction. Sure that may have been totally predictable, but at least Blizzard got all that sweet faction/server transfer cash, right?

Where the misstep becomes a crack in the armor is where they carry this model right into Cataclysm with Tol Barad and such. Either they're content to have a lot of people locked out of ever taking part in it, or they're content to have a lot of people locked out of taking part in it until they finally break down and cough up some more delicious transfer money just for this.

If SOE did this, people would either be laughing or shitting blood, depending on whether they played or not.

[ezrast]

The debacle that has been Wintergrasp over the course of this expansion qualifies as a misstep in my book. It's gone from a massive unplayable clusterfuck of lag to, on a lot of servers, a 5v5 battleground where 90% of the players wishing to participate are locked out because they're all in the same faction, or else still a minor clusterlagfuck.

Was this not everyone's experience?