Matrix Online vs. World of Warcraft? Interesting...

[Falconeer]

Slate had an interesting article 3 days ago (I only read it today thanks to slashdot trackback) about the "lameness" of World of Warcraft. Or better, the lameness compared to the success rate of the product and the potential of the medium.
It's just A point of view, but I really appreciated the last part of it:

Compare that to a game like The Matrix Online, where major characters hand out new challenges and even die to move the story ahead.

Blizzard has written new storylines before. Last winter, it challenged players to team up and fuel a worldwide war effort. As a payoff, it unlocked new territory. This was a good example of letting the users drive a story, but Warcraft needs more of them. New wars should break out, cities should rise and fall, and all hell should break loose at least once a month—and the players should be the ones to make it happen. After all, in a world that never changes, you can never make your mark.

What can I say? We all know Matrix Online sucks for millions of reasons beyond storyline, but still it makes me think that Massive Games started with the right foot back in ther nineties and turned to the dark side shortly after that. They are, as of now, wasted technolgy, wasted chances to offer deep and different games.
8 millions user wants to play WoW while not more than 300k wanted to play UO at its peak?
Please, someone protect us from what we want!
And please, Raph hurry up crafting a new game.

[stray]

We all know Matrix Online sucks for millions of reasons beyond storyline, but still it makes me think that Massive Games started with the right foot back in ther nineties and turned to the dark side shortly after that.

MxO doesn't suck that bad (Don't take that the wrong way though. I don't play it). As far as overall design goes, at least.

[Endie]

And please, Raph hurry up crafting a new game.

Raph's next project is not for us.

[Surlyboi]

Indubitably!

That said, my feelings on WoW's lack of...well..."wow" are well known, but to say MxO is better because of the storyline? A stretch at best, seeing as none of the people they've killed have actually managed to stay dead.

[Merusk]

Here's a thought;

The masses don't care about 'leaving their mark' in a virtual world, because we're too busy living in the real one.  Games are an escapism, not a need for validation and 'becoming well-known.'

Crazy, I know.

[Surlyboi]

Yeah, but that's why I play EQ2 and PS and CoX...

[stray]

Those so called games you're talking about have just as many anchors in them to keep people from the "real world". Possibly even more.

[Xilren's Twin]

the players should be the ones to make it happen. After all, in a world that never changes, you can never make your mark.

Um, yeah.  Problem is, when 7.5 million people all try to make their mark they end up drawing massive phallus shapes....

Game vs world, here we go again.

Xilren

[HaemishM]

It's much easier to do server wide, world-changing events when your player base can fit in a fucking closet. So I'm not surprised if Matrix Online is more dynamic than WoW.

The game still sucks balls, though. I felt like I was watching a really bad animatic of the Matrix animated DVD more than I was playing a game.

[Surlyboi]

Those so called games you're talking about have just as many anchors in them to keep people from the "real world". Possibly even more.

Indeed. And far fewer tools.

[stray]

Game vs world, here we go again.

Xilren

I see Worlds as being containers for games, not ideas that are opposed to them. Not only that, but they are containers for many games -- not just one. In this respect, I think Worlds actually represent the "Game" side of the argument better than the "Game" side represents the Game side.

[Nebu]

My gaming hypothesis:

People want to be told what to do or at least be given their game within a structured context.  This is key to the success of scripted games vs sandbox games.  Without structure, most people flounder and in floundering they find no fun. 

[Soln]

that article was funny

[Rasix]

My gaming hypothesis:

People want to be told what to do or at least be given their game within a structured context.  This is key to the success of scripted games vs sandbox games.  Without structure, most people flounder and in floundering they find no fun. 

This is what Dave Rickey refered to as the "directed user experience".  He noted this as an area where EVE could greatly improve and is part of the reason why it might not be a bigger success than it is.

Interview here.

Some salient bits:

Dave Rickey: We're letting the game get in the way of the social experience, when the players use their social capital to get past barriers in the game, we say "you're not supposed to play that way" and we "fix" them. Games provide a directed user-experience and people need that. Then a time comes when the players want to step off the rails of the directed experience, and we don't want to let them. It's the Game vs. World question. But worlds are inherently larger than games. A world can contain a game but a game cannot contain a world. How can we embed a full game into a world without stepping on its worldliness, direct the player to the fun without interfering with the social interactions? This is a problem we must resolve with virtual worlds.

Schild: UO, The Sims Online, SW:G - they didn't resolve it.

Dave Rickey: It comes down to the player footprint. How wide can the effects of a
player's actions spread? If you're talking about EQ or WoW, it's the avatar and the range of attack. His indirect footprint is his vendors, auction orders, and his guild. It's a narrow footprint. Then you look at SW:G. Players have a huge footprint. You've got housing, pets, the market, and once you add all of that up, the players can have a huge impact on what seemed like a large world - which in turn proved to be quite small. Contrast this with Eve. Eve has a world that's so vast it's mind-boggling. 5,000 star systems, roughly 30,000 asteroid belts, 50,000 planets, 200,000 moons. 140K players fit right in and don't fill it even though they can have a large footprint. You have to find your own fun there though, and that's a very hard thing to do.

Schild: But how do you bring all of this together? The player having a substantial footprint but not upsetting the world - and multiplying that out - a minority of players ruining a world.

Dave Rickey: Eve gives hints. There is a directed experience. There are storyline and tutorial missions. It just needs to be better, do a better job of keeping the player entertained until he can find his own fun. You have safe areas, less safe areas, and areas where the only safety is in the power of the friends you have, and everything that is critical to the directed experience is in the safest areas. So you have this hint of a path to take the world and game and meld them into something that has the advantages of both.

Schild: But people expect a certain amount of freedom from these "sandboxes."

Dave Rickey: The effects you have in a single-player sandbox can be truly global. You don't have to worry about other people's experience. I've never finished a GTA, but I've played them and enjoyed them immensely. Eventually I get to a mission that's too damn hard and I just start playing with the sandbox. With SW:G each planet was 10x10 miles. Not even the city of Austin. The entirety of it, all 8 planets wasn't even the city of Austin, which isn't all that big. And then we got used to the standards of single player games. The world in GTA isn't bigger than SW:G. But when you have it to yourself it's huge.

[Sunbury]

Can't there be a game with both structure, but structure in a 'sanboxy' way?

Say a MMORPG with no static quests, instead all are dynamic and geared to the current state of the region.

The state of various parts change with user actions, and then quests adapt to that (in a hard-coded fashion, I'm not talking world AI).

So you have a 'mine', it starts in mode A filled with mobs.  Quests givers in a nearby town give quests to kill mobs in that mine.   When enough quests have been completed, the mine is now in mode B.  Quest givers now give crafting quests, or 'protect NPC' quests where NPCs move items to the mine, or repair machinery.   Some mobs may still (more slowly) respawn, and if not killed, a quest giver announces that.   Etc. etc.

When running, there could be quests to escort ore to town, or bring or escort supplies to the mine, etc.

Obvously this would have to be a huge world with zillions of mines, farms, bridges, remote towns, transport systems, etc to transition the states of each one.   They could revert to an earlier state if certain events happen, or if other random events happen.

[stray]

My gaming hypothesis:

People want to be told what to do or at least be given their game within a structured context.  This is key to the success of scripted games vs sandbox games.  Without structure, most people flounder and in floundering they find no fun. 

I want the above when it comes to single player games. I love that shit.

As far as mmo's go though, that kind of approach (so far) results in some form of static pez dispensing. And when it isn't bland, it's because it's instanced and segregated....Thus defeating the purpose of being a massively multiplayer game.

If rich, scripted experiences could be done within a multiplayer environment, then I'd be all for it. But it seems to me that mmo's would be better off catering to ideas that take community and open endedness into account.

[Merusk]

But it seems to me that mmo's would be better off catering to ideas that take community and open endedness into account.

Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Sunbury;  What you describe is still more 'game' than 'world' because it is structured.  It just has 3 states "PC Controlled", "Contested", &  "NPC Controlled" rather than the single state of most MMO areas.

I still hold that all virtual worlds are doomed to failure.  Without Perma-death and item loss, all exertions are meaningless over time anyway.  When they have both, they will not be an area more than a few hundred would be willing to spend their cash to play in.   They are mental masturbation for those who can't control their own reality.

[Surlyboi]

But that's not why I play MMOs. I don't play because I relish the opportunity to group with some foozle whacker from the other side of the planet. Though that occasionally is nice, I play because it's a shared world. I play MMOs because there is the opportunity to interact with other people, sure, but that's icing on the cake. Not the specific end goal of my gaming experience. If I don't want to be bothered with someone else's drama, I don't need to be. I got enough of that shit raiding in EQ back in the day. I found the experience less-than-thrilling.

I'll take the pez dispensing over the forced-grouping and chats full of Chuck Norris and ORLY? crap that is considered "community" any day of the week.

[stray]

Well, to be honest, I haven't seen prime examples of either game or world. I'm not going to argue about virtual worlds too much. In theory, I gravitate towards worlds, but in practice, I gravitate towards nothing...So far.

If my choice is pez dispensing or Chuck Norris, then my choice would be single player games. And that ain't bad at all.

[Nebu]

Keep in mind that almost everyone on these forums is someone that we could have also met potentially in an mmog.  Yes, there are a lot of prepubescent mouth-breathers in games, but occasionally you have the opportunity to meet a few people you actually respect the ideas of. 

I'm still willing to take my chances.  I've met some outstanding people through gaming that I never would have had the pleasure to know otherwise.

[Surlyboi]

I'm a bit on the fence. Almost anyone that posts here at f13 I'd gladly group with in an MMO or even cozier setting (NWN module, perhaps?). That said, I'd love to be able to play a single player game that has the breadth and depth of say a SWG or even a WoW. The problem with the single player aspect is that sooner or later you run out of ways to skin that cat. The draw of MMOs to me is that new content is added occasionally which makes things interesting again and makes me want to unlock those new secrets. Now sure, this sometimes happens with mods and add-ons and expansion packs for single-player games, but not nearly with the regualrity it happens in MMOs.

[Merusk]

I find it interesting all 3 of you are making better arguments for games than worlds.  Games let you control who you interact with and HOW far, far better than worlds.

Now, I completly understand all of your dislike for the current direction of game spaces.  They appeal to a certain player the same way RTS or FPS games do a different segment.  There's no expansion into a multiplayer, constantly-updating game of ANY genre other than RPGs, and there should be.   I don't, however, see how "I like playing with multiple people." and "I don't like RPG-play" translate into "virtual worlds r awesome."

Also, your arguments about the 'community' amuse me.  A different iteration of the same stuff would have popped-up in ANY game/ World/ console that had any kind of presence.  People were bitching in the same manner about the EQ community when IT was the big game in town.

[SurfD]

Granted it has a small user base compered to WoW (not sure how it stacks up to MxO), but what about Asheron's call?  Seems like every other week they were introducing new and crazy world events, some of which even had far reaching impacts on the game environment (such as the time when they actually nuked 2 or 3 of the main cities into giant smoking craters).

Sure, it doesent really allow for far reaching changes by individual players, but they really seemed to have a fairly fluid and dynamic world they could mess around with.

Also, what about Ryzome (or however it is spelled) and their new player created content push thing?

[caladein]

Haemish is right on the money, MxO's fun parts were complete "accidents" and not because the world was somehow more dynamic, but because it was tiny.

Everything I remember as fun for the year or so I played was: a) Legion was the only guild with a big interest in PvP R&D and thus was on the cutting edge of PvP research by default; b) we were able to go into a fight outnumbered 2.5:1 and still come out pretty well; and c) the personal and factional rivalries were enhanced because you couldn't help but run into people at events.

Morpheus dieing? That was pretty funny for us (we were Machinists, so that's seeing your No 1 enemy go down), but nothing more then the catalyst for a lot of bad jokes in TS. Ivalesco? Probably the best event they ever had, not because the event was awesome, but because of the animosity between TDA and Legion (Regression) or between Endless Armada and The Collective (Method).

The PvP? It was great because once a rival faction (usually The Endless) reverse-engineered whatever Build/Gear kit we came up with, we had to completely change our fighting style. And this "arms race" happened every week for months, so it kept the PvP fresh.

This is one area where WoW does fall behind MxO, but through no fault of its own. If I figure out some awesome idea, it probably isn't just me finding it. Assuming no one's figured out my "Super Awesome Idea", once some random guy in a BG revere-engineers it, the chances of it coming back to bite me in the ass are minimal.

Also, because there are a lot of people doing R&D, you're going to get people publishing their results, which advances the state of PvP. Because an RE'd idea always came back at us, the biggest disappointment I have is that I wasn't able to publish a lot of my work on Team Patchers (area healers), so I always saw the same critical mistakes over and over again, and it made me slap my forehead (right before the guy got dropped).

[Slyfeind]

Any style of content in a game needs equal visibility. If you want the digital actors of MxO to be on par with the static quests of WoW, then the digital actors need to be as plentiful, and as much on-demand, as WoW's static quests. Otherwise that's just something that you hear about, that someone else did, back when the game launched, that one time.

[schild]

Nebu and I have talked about this subject at length. And I'm glad he's weighing in here, it gives me reason to show up in a thread I'd normally avoid.

When I want story, I seek story.
When I want sandbox, I seek sandbox.

The problem with MMOGs is if you're going to make a virtual world (the literal term, not the metaphorical gameplay wankariffic term that's tossed around so much by me and everyone else [raph]), you kinda have to pick story or sandbox. You can have both, but no dev team can really pull that off. WoW is, in no way whatsoever, a sandbox. Neither is the Matrix. The closest online games to sandboxes were UO and SW:G and you know how well they held up on the story end - badly. They had to add themeparks and instances (Corvette, etc) to SW:G to add any sort of "thing" resembling a directed user experience.

But anyway, getting back to the point of that last paragraph, an MMOG is used to escape the real world and enter another WORLD. Without both sandbox and story elements that are obvious - it fails to be either. It just ends up as silly as virtual reality as always been. The reason I don't dick around with MMOGs anymore is that they fail at the most fundamental level. They're trying to be a world, but beyond having planets, countries, districts, and a bunch of wandering jackasses, they fail. There's no "love" in MMOGs. That intangible THING that made games like Shadow of the Colossus, God of War, Indigo Prophecy, PS: Torment, Super Mario 3, Trace Memory, etc. be so great.

If games want to force me to create fun, I'll stop playing them. Telling me I demand story won't work either, with the right amount of that THING, I'll spend 100+ hours in a free environment. You think I played Diablo 2 for so long for the story? SimCity 1, 2000, and 3000? Aww, hells no. I played them because they had that THING. WoW almost has that THING. Most Blizzard games have it. They're good at that. Unfortunately, much to WoWs detriment, they have 7.5 million other THINGS that fuck up that one THING. And those other things haven't played enough MMORPGs to see that they're never going to get that first MMORPG experience again. Sometimes I wish I hadn't played MMORPGs until WoW.

Anyway, that THING is "love." And I can tell from a pre-alpha press release whether a game will have it or not. I'm the worst kind of customer and the best kind of customer. I have money and time to blow and friends who will buy things when I say it's worth it. And lots of them.

As for MxO: Less than mediocre. We can discuss all the great things mediocre games do at length, but at the end of the day, all we want is for those bells and whistles to make good games great - cuz nothing is saving a game that starts less than mediocre. Of course, if you want to talk about this shit, I suppose someone needs to write an article about how Horizons is better than most MMORPGs because the crafting was so NEATO when it came out.

[stray]

Shadowbane had love.

Granted, it was love from an old, piss stinking bum -- but he had a big heart.

[Venkman]

Another interesting topic emerging from a thread with a turn-off title 

You can have both story and sandbox in a game if you adjust the expecatation of "story". We are all protaganists in a way, making our own histories, making our own marks. We evolve in these games, and our histories are stories. Whether WoW or SWG, there are people who've done things that affect many others who tell the story.

The traditional view of "story" though is Ultima III or one of the two hundred Final Fantasies: a defined role in a defined world, more of a choose-your-own-adventure book than a living breathing world. Even the most "living" ones are experiences designed around a single protagnist (you).

That expectation in a persistent state world is unrealistic. The only way to obviously affect the world by your actions is to instantiate it so much it doesn't feel massive anymore outside of whatever economy emerges. That's enough for some people maybe.

To make a world "alive" is to accept the random social nature that is other people. That is where I personally see the divide. There are those who accept and like that and those constantly frustrated by it.

It's not hard to argue which group is larger. Basically, I think a game needs to be about compelling game play. What can emerge from that is story (posts, art, machinima, etc). But to cast the widest net across the most gamers, it can't be about the stories they create but the stories they play.

[Engels]

I think that Schild means polish and cohesion when he says 'love'. Single player games have discrete goals and it's far easier to create a context for a story, or game activity, since your scope is by definition limited to the individual's experience.

Wow 'nearly' has that thing Schild calls love simply because it's polished to death. It presents the resemblance of a cohesive universe, but in the end, you end up with a sense of fragmentation and dissolution of the atmosphere created the minute you step into one of the larger player cities and see everyone screaming about their wares, or the OOC banter in the larger player arenas.

MMOs cannot, by definition, provide a sense of an author's vision or story as can be delivered within an single player RPG. They aren't really meant to, either. They are first and foremost meant to provide a WORLD, or a context within which an adventure or activity can occur. This world cannot be underminded by other players. Secondly, and this varies from game to game, they are meant to provide some form of meaningful activity for multiple players within that context which further gives the impression of the single player's involvement within that world.

The same thing can be said for single player games, except that, of course, single player games do not have to please more than one person at a time. As such, the goal of 'love' is easier to reach.

I personally see a lot of actual love put into various MMOs by their authors. CoX is a good example, with funny well written scripts. WoW has that too. Post Luclin EQ is a prime example of a complete lack of love. The bad quest delivery, the complete abandonment of world cohesion with the introduction of the Wayfarer story arcs, the transparent mechanisms by which the devs interfere with player development simply to keep players playing (aka grindage) all show a fundamentally desperate and ignorant methodology behind the upkeep of a once successful game.

The strange thing is that that didn't prevent EQ from its continued success. Why? Because years of context were already there and social networks were long established. EQ survived for at least 4 expansions of utter crap post-Luclin simply because the game already had a world that was constitutionally able to handle bullshit for a sustained period. In the end, of course, SOE devs destroyed their own creation by no longer having a connection with what made the game successful in the first place.

[Nebu]

Schild and I have discussed this very point for hours.  It always interests me as we have such different gaming styles.  The bottom line appears to be that we all look for something different in our games.  I've found that I play online games more for social interaction than anything.  I've even joked to many that online games were (to me) nothing more than a chat room in a 3d environment.  I enjoy the competition, comparing myself to others in game, and the social interactions that come from meeting the few people worth knowing. 

I personally enjoy more open playstyles, but I don't think I can consider any online game I've played to be a world.  Perhaps "less scripted" would be more accurate.  I enjoyed UO, SWG, Atitd, and DAoC the most.  While DAoC may not seem as open as the others, the pvp portion is quite varied and complex.  I also think that I would have enjoyed EvE a great deal had I found some people early that I enjoyed playing with. 

I'm not suggesting that one style of game is necessarily better than another.  That would be like comparing chocolate and vanilla.  I'd just like to see developers do more than emulate the paradigms that have been successful in the past.  From a business standpoint, I understand why they must.  Investors want the safe money.  Perhaps I'm just yearning for days gone by... when people playing computer games like MUDS had some barrier to entry.  The filtering process seemed to produce a playerbase that was a bit more sophisticated and interesting.  Is it too much to want an intelligent and challenging game that not everyone can "win"?  I'm starting to believe that pandoring to the bottom of the curve is where the money is and games that target that audience are all I'll have to look forward to in the future. 

[pxib]

I've said it before and I'll say it again:

I only care about the stories that I tell. If they happen to relate to the game's plot that's nice, but I'm just as content to tell stories about bugs I exploited and funny player/player (as opposed to character/character) interactions. I don't necessarily have to tell these stories to anybody but myself, but I must be inspired to invent them.

Something has to make me believe that the game has something worth telling a friend about.

That's what I read when schild says "LOVE".

As I play more and more games of a particular type I cease to be surprised by the same old stories and they're not worth telling anymore. That first-MMOG experience was great because absolutely everything about the game experience was new. So something had better be new under the sun (and worth writing home about) or I'm not coughing up monthly bucks anymore...

...whether they're for a world, a sandbox, both, or neither.

[Margalis]

I think most players do want to leave a mark.

But they also want to play a non-shitty game. And that is more important. WOW doesn't do everything right. It does a lot of stuff wrong. But it is still better than other games, and that is what matters.

It is kind of silly to use logic like "WOW doesn't let you leave your mark, and it is popular, so obviously leaving your mark is not important." Matrix Online may have some cool elements but in the end it isn't a very good game. That's why people don't play it.

[Venkman]

WoW does let players leave their mark. It's just left on other players. I have long believed games can evolve from pure diku to a world and along the way give players more ways to have a virtual life beyond game goals alone. The only games that have done that so far (afaik) are AC1 (Houses, Allegiance) and DAoC (Houses, vendors, etc). Neither had WoW numbers, nor even EQ1, but they placed respectably in their eras.

WoW could go that route too. There's no reason the money they're printing can't go to broadening the experience, instantiated housing, player vendors, player events, etc. Maybe they will or maybe they won't ever see the need for it.

I think this is a better way to go than trying to build a virtual lifestyle experience and hoping the millions come. Sure SL boasts 1.5mil+. Check how many people are actually paying the land-ownership fee though (25k-30k, at $10.95). That's not a model to go by in my opinion. And every single other lifestyle experience has been either below or well below the 300k subscriber mark. Hard to point to that as the success future publishers or VC should fund.

So start with a successful model and then grow it, as the demands of the players grow and/or broaden (if they do).

[stray]

I have an easier time picking apart what shouldn't be in mmo's, rather than what should be in them.

Like, I'm not going to type up some list of specific 'virtual world' features all mmo's should have, but I don't want to see concepts that actively work against the idea that these are massively multiplayer games either. There's got to be some kind of line drawn between mmo's and single player games --- Else you get something that's a poor substitute for both.

[Falconeer]

Of course, if you want to talk about this shit, I suppose someone needs to write an article about how Horizons is better than most MMORPGs because the crafting was so NEATO when it came out.

Another interesting topic emerging from a thread with a turn-off title 

Just to clarify, topic title was a ploy. Maybe not a good one (I am broken too, not just my English), but that was the idea.
Would have it been a little less of a turn-off with a title like "The death of MMORPG Game Design", Darniaq? :) Guess not, I am just not good at titles.
Neither I, nor the article author (I hope) thought for a second about a comparison between the two mentioned games. Just, in my intention, what's about designing massively multiplayer games and what happened in the recent years: you can build one with less and less features than any of its predecessors or competitors, even less than a crappy game like MxO, and it manages to score bigger than free sex.
That was the interesting part to me.

Apparently it's just because of the polish. It's just because of the "look" of the game, the feel of it. Way over than the game itself, its mechanics, its ideas.

The interesting part is that in my opinion World of Warcraft marks the death of game design, year zero. From those ashes it has to slowly born again (we are still talking about MMOs Game Design) and somehow live and grow past WoW. You think I am wrong?
Lots of professional game designers here on these boards could prove me wrong too, so I could finally shut up and go back to my coffin. I am just guessing here. From all those "think outside the box!" I read in their interviews (even Lum shot one of those in his newly reformed "about" page, and by the way I can't wait to learn more about his ideas), and from the fact that the Blizzard guy himself (can't remember the name right now) spent the most part of his recent WoW triumph-toaster to enlighten us about "the Lost Art of Polish".
So, guess how are all those MMORPG's game designers out there feeling about their ideas and theories on crafting a successful MMORPG. Where are they now? They write books, they crunch ideas and give hints of those on blogs everywhere but apparently they can't make a successful game, not anymore. What are they doing now? They are probably working on a new game, sure, but a pre-wow one or a post-wow one? Are their ideas changed because of WoW's quality, or because of the market success of WoW? And did they really know, right after the EQ boom and the first generation of MMORPG, when they supposedly started to work on a new batch and generation (can't stop laugh thinking about Garriot and his 3rd generation Tabula Rasa) of MMOs (some of which we, alas, already played and abandoned in disgust) that the only thing able to really succeed was a new EverQuest with Blizzard graphics?

Guess what it feels like in this age and era to be one of those MMO game designer: you spent the last ten years thinking about your next game, moving from past games ideas to unexplored and uncharted lands, just using the power of this new medium and related technology you have in your hands. Someone thought about sandboxes, someone thought about pvp models and dynamic worlds (yes, Shadowbane), someone thought about complex crafting processes, economic models, evolving storylines... and the one that destroy all your efforts (actually destroys it, because after WoW investors come knocking at your office door yelling that you are an idiot and you better come off with something that can be sold FAST! Even if you are Mr. Ultima I guess... ) is just an iteration of the original simplest model, with better graphic, some talented art guys and a shitload of money to promote and "polish" it.

So, it's interesting (again, but maybe just to me) that the game that won (over-won, ultra-won, Won) the 10 year war of MMORPGs is the one with less features, less game design originality and just with more "polish" and graphical attractiveness.

...

I closed my opening post invoking Raph's originality for a new game able to cleanse and reconcile me with online games as soon as possible. I still do. Problem is, I am afraid, I will love it. But it won't be a financial success :(