Is there a boredom tipping point that's being reached?

[Jayce]

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

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

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

[bhodi]

Yep, I am so catass.

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

[Telemediocrity]

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

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

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

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

[Calantus]

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

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

[Margalis]

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

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

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

[Telemediocrity]

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

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

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

[Merusk]

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

I recommend you start with the hunters first.

[Jayce]

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

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

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

[Telemediocrity]

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

I recommend you start with the hunters first.

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

[Khaldun]

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

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

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

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

[Jayce]

has led to a pretty serious case of design constipation

Sigged!

everything else

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

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

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

[Khaldun]

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

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

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

[Jayce]

the only thing that will keep it in a good market position is lack of competition (WoW has virtually none that counts) and social stickiness (WoW has that in spades, in part simply because it has such a larger playerbase).

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

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

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

[Driakos]

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

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

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

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

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

Why are the people leaving?

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

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

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

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

It's probably just boredom after 1.5 years.

[Telemediocrity]

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

So, uh, discard that.

But keep his analysis of AC1's live events.

The problem?

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

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

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

They've renegged on that for AC1.

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

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


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

[Modern Angel]

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

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

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

[HaemishM]

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

[Telemediocrity]

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

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

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

[Morfiend]

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

[Tale]

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

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

[Margalis]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Azazel]

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Azazel]

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

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

[Margalis]

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

[Calantus]

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

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

[Margalis]

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

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

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

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

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

[Dren]

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

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

[AcidCat]

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

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

[Calantus]

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

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

[Modern Angel]

The uncanny valley

[Heresiarch]

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

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

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

[bhodi]

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

It's true; It's why so many people had problems with the spirits within. Things just don't look or move right and people really don't like it.