Gamers know not what they want...

[Sky]

I liked Eve while I played it. It's not real friendly to my playtime windows, though. Too much time travelling, I never got into the bookmark things. I acknowledge I was a lazy newbler :) Great game, though. I do wish it had a more TIE Fighter kind of flight model...

[tazelbain]

  The point is that there's a PvP+ game that is commercially successful,

Clearly, Eve pays the bills.  But like in the Bioware interview, the word out of developers mouth is usually niche.  And that's not a compliment.  I have more hope for WAR (assuming EA doesn't fuck it up) not because I think it what a perfect PvP game should be, but as a further attempt for PvP to make in-roads into the mass market.

[Kamen]

The point here is not whether you can get ganked, even (theoretically) while running through the newbie tutorial.  You can, Eve is PvP+ all the time, everywhere.  The point is that there's a PvP+ game that is commercially successful, on a scale that is beyond what we believed possible (Eve is well over 100K paying accounts, probably past 150K).  That may be small potatoes in this post-WoW, anything-under-1-million-is-a-failure market, but that says something too, that there really is an alternative to chasing the mass market.

Eve is probably the most *important* game in existence right now.  WoW is destined to become a footnote in history, the game between EQ and the Game That Replaced Religion.  Eve shows us that most of what we thought we had learned about MMO game design was wrong.

--Dave

Bingo.

Every day of continued Eve growth God strangles one of the Dev's who "knew" that there was no market for a game where the PvP wasn't a pathetic, painless joke.  Everybody knew that nobody would tolerate being stolen from or scammed.  Everybody also knew that gamers were really a bunch of whiney, nerd, grind monkeys who needed a fantasy setting playground (heavily bumper padded to prevent anything negative) where they could mindlessly level away without any risk of setback.  They also knew gamers were totally incapable of setting their own goals, or measuring their own success without being spoon fed a quest/storyline and provided a "You are teh uber Level 60" title next to their names to reassure them they were achieving something in a non-persistent game setting.  Oh yeah, they also knew forced grouping was a swell idea.

Give us a persistent sandbox, toys that go "pew pew", and get out of our fucking way.

[Sky]

Clearly, Eve pays the bills.  But like in the Bioware interview, the word out of developers mouth is usually niche.  And that's not a compliment. 

That's a problem. WoW is going to take the damage EQ dealt the industry one step further. Now dumbing down gameplay isn't enough, you have to hit meeeelions of subscribers to be 'successful'.

Eve is successful. CoH/V is successful. Great games that target what they do. If only PS could have caught on (too many bunnyhoppers imo). Rather than trying to be some mega giant and structuring your development costs around that, try to get a few guys on first base.

Also, part of skyrocketing dev costs is salary. Take a reality check.

[tazelbain]

LOL, thought of a better example of niche.  SWG. They fell into niche and it upset them so badly they felt the need to gut the game and the playerbase.

[Krakrok]

Also, part of skyrocketing dev costs is salary. Take a reality check.

Nerf the artists and bring in the programmers to do procedural content.

[caladein]

Clearly, Eve pays the bills.  But like in the Bioware interview, the word out of developers mouth is usually niche.  And that's not a compliment.

That's a problem. WoW is going to take the damage EQ dealt the industry one step further. Now dumbing down gameplay isn't enough, you have to hit meeeelions of subscribers to be 'successful'.

It didn't dumb the gameplay down. It just took the electrodes off people's nipples. I don't really think that a PvP+ game needs to rape my mom and salt my lawn if I get blown up.

If you can take the nipple electrodes away from EVE, make it accessible, and make it fun within some reasonable time frame, you'll get Money Hats.

- Not being able to jump to zero in EVE was pretty odd. They changed that.
- EVE's character creation system was confusing and you could relatively gimp yourself. They're changing that.
- Maybe they'll even make the tutorial less soul-crushing one of these days.

CCP appears willing to take a bit of soul-crushing away if it boosts the fun by a large enough margin. If they don't, they'll get their PvP+ lunch eaten just like EQ.

[Nija]

You could take Eve's systems and cut/paste them into a fantasy setting and wear money hats, too. Then you'd have to deal with things like hand to hand combat lag and a couple other logistics nightmares, but it could be excellent.

[Krakrok]

Was it too much to ask for Auto Assault to do that?

[hal]

Defend, someone said Planetside and defend in the same sentence. I saw it. In Eve  a player will defend because the space there holding means wealth. Theres a reason to defend.  Asteroids grow every day during downtime, If you hold a section of space your wealth grows every day during downtime. There is a reason to defend. There is no reason to defend in planetside, or battlefield. Thus , few do.

[Nija]

Was it too much to ask for Auto Assault to do that?

You know, thinking about it that would have worked brilliantly. The answer to your question is "Yes" by the way.

[Strazos]

Speaking of Auto Assault...it recently went down to $0.01 at Gamestop, so if you REALLY want a copy, you could just try asking for it.

[tazelbain]

Now there is a game that needs a NGE.

[Venkman]

The point is that there's a PvP+ game that is commercially successful, on a scale that is beyond what we believed possible (Eve is well over 100K paying accounts, probably past 150K). That may be small potatoes in this post-WoW, anything-under-1-million-is-a-failure market, but that says something too, that there really is an alternative to chasing the mass market.

If you look at the percentage of the overall market size though, PvP+ is arguably just as insignificant now as it was when SB launched. Eve caters not to an MMOG player as defined by where most MMOG players are. It caters to a subset, an MMOPvP player, or some new definition to be defined.

Eve is important, but in my opinion mostly because it's yet another example of a completely vertical company carving themself a good niche within a larger base. CoH, GW, EQ1 early on, DAoC before EA, SB from Wolfpack, UO before EA. Extend that out to Runescape, Club Penguin, Habbo Hotel before Virtual Magic Kingdom. One company, one game, one team, one business model. Create a compelling game, align it to a good niche, scale your business to match.

WoW as a footnote? I very much think not. M59 vs UO vs EQ. Where do most neophytes think the genre began? How much does the expert truth matter to the folks coming with the money? What do they see? What inspires their emulation.

Indies need to define their own space, so broaden their view. Big companies will zillions though? They look to the big numbers. And it's hard to ignore where those big numbers are.

As to "what is massive"? Oh yea, Eve is definitely the best example of what a massive multiplayer 24/7 online game should be. But it also requires we ask that question: just how much massive/immersion does the average gamer want?

WoW sorta answers that.

[MahrinSkel]

WoW says what EQ already told us: Fantasy diku is really easy for new players to get into. And the market for these is really big, Korea and the rest of asia wasn't a fluke, just a fast-forward version of the inevitable future as far as size goes.  Yes, there will be a game that makes WoW look like EQ, numbers wise.  It won't really be any better than WoW, just "more accessible", more expensive, and marketed like a blockbuster movie.  Yes, I'm predicting we will see a game with 70 *million* players or more, a budget (including a world-wide marketing carpet-bombing) in the hundreds of millions.  Scary, huh?  On the other hand, odds are it will be made by some company in Asia, and we'll have no idea what the hell they see in it.

EDIT: What I missed in there was my point: Fast-forward 10, 15, 20 years.  Do you think that the games we play then will just be slightly tweaked versions of Diku/EQ/WoW updated for new technology?  Or are you like the Linden Labs guys, you think that some virtual reality cyberspace will absorb everything?  Or maybe you're with Raph, expecting something closer to a gamey version of MySpace in 3D (which really isn't that far from Second Life)?

Me, I think that we've only barely scratched the surface of the potential of these games as an entertainment medium.  And games like Eve and ATITD represent something far closer to what these will become than WoW does.  While Second Life and the "pure social space" environments Raph focuses on lately are something important, to me they aren't *interesting*, and ultimately they aren't worth working on from my POV.

--Dave

[Sky]

It didn't dumb the gameplay down. It just took the electrodes off people's nipples. I don't really think that a PvP+ game needs to rape my mom and salt my lawn if I get blown up.

Err.. Ok. Sorry games had a difficulty/learning curve. Don't go into dangerous places loaded with valuables. Around we learn that young, maybe you live in some nice small town that leaves its doors unlocked. It was my thought that compared to UO, EQ's PvE death penalty was nipple electrodes (and the final straw for me, losing levels that took me months to gain was garbage).

[Strazos]

Stuff

--Dave

Kind of depressing, but I want something else. I already know that I find WoW boring, and I don't want more Habbo Hotel, Second Life, or a damn 3D MySpace.

Am I going to be stuck until someone makes Holodecks?

[Krakrok]

I always knew you were a closet LARPer.

[Jayce]

Kind of depressing, but I want something else. I already know that I find WoW boring, and I don't want more Habbo Hotel, Second Life, or a damn 3D MySpace.

Am I going to be stuck until someone makes Holodecks?

Not to be snarky (seriously!), but it sounds like MMOGs are not for you.

If I'm reading and inferring right, it sounds like you think that they may have unrealized potential, but are not there yet. Sounds like you should check back in a few years, or just write it off as a loss.  I thought my first girlfriend had a lot of potential but it eventually turned out, she didn't.  I moved on.

Stuff

--Dave

I don't think I buy that fantasy diku is only for new players.  There are plenty of us 10 year+ vets that enjoy the casualness of WoW (now that we are 10 years older with the corresponding dwindling in playtime).

Sure, I'd love to get into a deep experience like Eve, but I don't have the time to devote at the moment.  Not just to playing, but to learning the deep skills I need to excel and watching the political situation sufficiently.  Grind for honor?  Easy, interruptible.

Finnegan's Wake is a demonstrably better and more rewarding read than (say) Steven King, but I just don't have time to delve into it.

[Venkman]

WoW says what EQ already told us: Fantasy diku is really easy for new players to get into.

But this isn't "new players" really. This is "friends of folks who like the same sorta thing" getting their feet wet, fringe followers who eventually are enticed by a title. The public face of this genre hasn't radically changed since EQ1 really, so it attracts people of similar desire. That has been successful, but until WoW it was largely thought to be steady growth, not skyrocket. And since WoW, people are back to steady growth because few feel like the critical success factors of Blizzard/VUG can be replicated by anyone else.

Some think another WoW can come along and out Blizzard Blizzard. But all that does is beg the question of whether there are orders of magnitude more people out there who want fantasy-themed diku, and not getting their fill in all the Western titles and many of the Eastern ones (Maplestory chief among them). Codemasters and MTV are making their bets now. We'll see how that goes. The challenge with Eastern titles is their reliance on microtrans, something Westerners consider "RMT" restated. Can games like Kartrider and Audition survive as flat-fee games? We'll know soon.

Fast-forward 10, 15, 20 years. Do you think that the games we play then will just be slightly tweaked versions of Diku/EQ/WoW updated for new technology? 

Some will. Others won't. This genre will continue to be impacted by other ones. FPS interfaces, RTS methodologies, aggregated mini games in persistent environments, Sports titles. Think of the differences between 20 years ago and now. I say forget 20 years. 5 years from now we'll likely see games as big as WoW but for completely different players.

It'll be the folks that can drag in the GTA player, the FIFA player, the Halo player, monetize them, retain them, that'll truly grow some breadth to this genre. It won't be folks who wrap diku with housing and crafting mini games. We know how much the current player really cares about that stuff (as in, they'd rather quest and combat).

Basically, we completely agree in that we've only just scratched the surface. I don't think they'll become like Eve though. That's simply too immersive for the average player. ATITD too. SL with a good intuitive user experience would also be. I don't think humanity will evolve to prefer what the fringe MMO players are doing. There's only so much escape the average person is even interested in having.

I do think some of the elements of the indie titles will translate to broader experiences. But I also think those broader experiences will first radically change by incorporating concepts from beyond dice rolling in a Tolkien-esque setting.

[lamaros]

Finnegan's Wake is a demonstrably better and more rewarding read than (say) Steven King, but I just don't have time to delve into it.

If that is what you think.. Then you shouldn't read anything. You are beyond hope. Seriously. If something requires a greater commitment of time then it simply takes longer. It doesn't require that you have more free time. So stop reading King for a week and instead read Joyce in a month. You'll read 1 book compared to 4, but as you said; it'll be more rewarding.

That said. It is in no way an apt comparison to MMOGs. Most MMOGs require a commitment of time over a finite period to be rewarding, not a commitment of time over an infinite one.

As far as the world goes, I'm inclined to think were're reaching the nadir of overconsumption, or will in my lifetime, and that the future of computer games is not all along existing lines.

Anyway, Genre lines blur. At some point I expect most games will be MMO ones. People will stop giving a shit about WoW and 'subscribers' once they come to terms with this and get back to making good games and not chasing after numbers.

[Krakrok]

I don't think humanity will evolve to prefer what the fringe MMO players are doing. There's only so much escape the average person is even interested in having.

I think you are missing the trend that everyone is turning into nerds.

[stray]

I don't think humanity will evolve to prefer what the fringe MMO players are doing. There's only so much escape the average person is even interested in having.

I think you are missing the trend that everyone is turning into nerds.

Before I start....How serious are you being here? 

I hope not very much. It's like when the masses first started buying home PC's -- It didn't make them nerds. Or the dot-com boom. Didn't make them nerds. Wired might have proclaimed a Geek Revolution at this time (not to mention labeling themselves stupid shit like "the Digirati"), but the revolution never really happened. Nerds are still nerds, and normal people use them to fix their spyware problems.

[Strazos]

I always knew you were a closet LARPer.

Well, yes and no. Would I give it a shot? Sure...but I can't stand the people I've met that do it, and I don't have the time. Also, I wouldn't do it unless I could do it right...psuedo/realistic gear, and fuck that beanbag shit...but the kind of mechanics I am looking for are prolly not used.

Not to be snarky (seriously!), but it sounds like MMOGs are not for you.

If I'm reading and inferring right, it sounds like you think that they may have unrealized potential, but are not there yet. Sounds like you should check back in a few years, or just write it off as a loss.  I thought my first girlfriend had a lot of potential but it eventually turned out, she didn't.  I moved on.

I dunno...there's Something for me in this space. I had fun in EQ, for awhile. I also had fun in CoH, Eve, WoW, and GuildWars, for awhile. I even had some fun in Earth and Beyond, for awhile.

It might just be possible to chalk this all up to my tendency to become bored of things very easily. I delve into something, eat through a lot of content, get bored, and leave. This does not just apply to MMOs. /shrug

[Krakrok]

Before I start....How serious are you being here? Nerds are still nerds, and normal people use them to fix their spyware problems.

I don't agree. It isn't happening overnight but it is happening. Without going into an entire diatribe I'll just list some shit which I think is  nerdy that has become mainstream. Pick any of the below that you don't think was nerdy at one point and is now mainstream.

Myspace & Widgets. iPods. PVRs. WoW. Cell Phones. Web cams. Blogging. Blackberries. Star Wars. LOTR. YouTube. Comics. Video games. VOIP.

Should I even list the Internet and computers here? Watch some news clips about the internet from the 80s and early 90s. It looks pretty fucking nerdy.

[stray]

The average Myspace page looks like dogshit. Not geeky.

Chalk up iPods, pvrs, cell phones, youtube, voip, and web cams to mere convenience. Are washing machines and blenders geeky too?

Star Wars and video games were never geeky. Childish maybe, but not necessarily geeky. Popularity among different audiences is due to the children growing up.

Comics still aren't popular. The movies are. Same goes with LotR.

But....I will say that's the one realm where there could be some argument here.

[Krakrok]

stuff

You missed it. The fact that people customized their pages at all with CSS and HTML and flash widgets is nerdy. The fact that 40 million or so fucks made their own geocities 2.0 pages is nerdy. The fact that internet dating exists is pretty damn nerdy. It's so nerdy that nerds think it's nerdy.

Cell phones having ringtones and cameras aren't a convenience. It's a gadget. It's Dick Tracy's watch which is pretty nerdy.

iPods are nerdy. They had to load the music onto it from somewhere somehow.

Recording with VCRs was pretty nerdy. Only nerds ever had the correct time on their VCRs.

In 1995 the Internet Phone was pretty damn nerdy. eBay bought Skype for a billion dollars or whatever it was semi-recently.

Some old guy who was making YouTube web cam videos died. His wife made a video to say he died. That's pretty nerdy.

Internet video was pretty damn nerdy when Yahoo bought Broadcast.com for X billion dollars. Now CBS is saying YouTube is boosting their ratings by 13%. That is nerdy.

Star Wars isn't nerdy? Give me a break. It has aliens and magic. Mainstream people laugh at Star Wars jokes.

Grown men and women sitting around playing Madden 2006 and Bejeweled is pretty nerdy. NBC lighting Christmas trees in SL is pretty nerdy. Gangbangers sitting around slackjawed playing GTA is pretty nerdy.

Hollywood making assloads of comicbook based movies isn't nerdy? Some senator comparing Iraq to Mordor and Sauron isn't nerdy?

Politicos interceding in the Blackberry patent dispute so their shit didn't get shut down shows how nerdy they are (oh nooos don't take away my email and IM).

[stray]

Recording with VCR's was nerdy? WTF?

I'd say going through the trouble of setting up internet phone in 1995 is nerdy. Hell yes it's nerdy. But that has nothing to do with appreciating the benefits of that technology --- once it's been packaged and tweaked to convenience. You're confusing end users with fidgeting enthusiasts.

Star Wars made a gajillion dollars in 1977. Not yesterday. All kinds of people loved it. Just because nerds flipped out from it doesn't mean they were the only ones. Fucking John Singleton of all people (guy who directed Boyz in the Hood) decided to become a director when he saw it.

[Trippy]

"Nerdiness" is a state of mind. Technology usage does not make you a nerd.

[Krakrok]

"Nerdiness" is a state of mind.

Quantify that.

[stray]

Just to sum up my point of view: The average person isn't embracing technology just for the sake of it. It's purely because of benefits and convenience. That's the main difference between them and nerds at least.

Also, if anything, nerds have become more approachable and/or acceptable in recent years (in a Kevin Smith kind of way). So it's not other people who've changed. Nerds have.

[Krakrok]

fidgeting enthusiasts.

The average person isn't embracing technology just for the sake of it.

nerds have become more approachable and/or acceptable in recent years

I'd define that as 'hacker'. I think I'd define what I think Trippy means by "nerdiness" as a state of mind as 'hacker' too.

I don't embrace tech just for the sake of it either. Early adopters do that. And I fail to see the benefits and convenience of sitting around at home recording yourself on a webcam and uploading it to YouTube.

I can agree with nerds becoming more integrated but it's a two way street. Nerds aren't the majority of the ones playing Madden 2006 and Bejeweled. Even at a conservative count 1 in 7 people in the US have a customized Myspace page. That's pretty significant.

[lamaros]

People have not become more nerdy.

Perhaps when you were a kid you just didn't realise that more people are nerdy than the obvious ones that stick out in class.

That you are noticing now does not mean it's on the rise.

[Sky]

When I was in school, I was one of maybe ten kids with a computer. Now all kids have computers and spend way more time on them than I ever did, even though I programmed and ran a bbs. I used to go to the library after school and read for an hour or two, now kids come in and spend four hours on myspace.

They're a bunch of fucking geeks. I love pc games but spend maybe an hour a night playing them (if I'm lucky). I consider myself a geek, but I spend a small fraction of my free time on the pc compared to most folks I see. If it weren't for internet access at work, I'd have maybe a couple dozen posts here :)

And geeks are cool, now. That alone is a sign of the rise of the geek mainstream.

[stray]

That they're using PC's a lot still doesn't indicate geekhood. More than likely, they're just downloading porn and talking to friends. That's a far cry from spending an evening coding BASIC.