EQ Never

Gecko_sl said:

I agree F2P is the last stop for a game built around the sub model. However, a well built non sub MMO actually has far more potential as there are a magnitude higher amount of players who could play the game, and spend the bucks to buy extra content or services.

The MMO sub market, especially in North America, is ruled by the dirty casual. Those are the people who play a few hours a week. Most of them do not sub to WOW 12 months a year, and many won't sub to another game again. However, what they will do is buy a game like Guild Wars 2 and feel comfortable playing it a few times a month, since there is no DMZ or 'subscription wall' that makes the game a crappy deal for them.

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F2P is also great for players who like to jump around from game to game every few days. Variety being the spice and all that. If I subbed to every game I log into every month it would pay for a new truck.

There are so many games out now and most of them have something fun to do. Playing just one game is boring. Been there, done that, but only because there wasn't any other game out at the time. F2P lets people explore endless amounts of content. Think of all the mmo's together as just one massive mmo that gets bigger every day.

I really don't understand how anyone can stomach doing the same game for months on end, year after year. Maybe they are heavy drug users and their brain cells have turned to jelly.

mkopec_sl said:

Ok, and this can be clumped together with all the other pieces of shit that never made it anywhere. Warhammer, EQ2, AoC. All little clumps of shit that hover around 100-200K. Sucess? maybe if you call it that. Im sure they are all making money. Shit, EQ still has 100K+. Fuckhead!

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Actually, I went back and played LOTRO after the last expansion, and it was actually a lot of fun. It was well worth buying the expansion and sub. My brother, a couple friends, and I played for a number of months.

If it wasn't for the fact that we went back to EQ, we would still be playing it. Damn WQ addiction.

Convo_sl said:

I think a lot of people disagree with this. If the content is good, community is solid and the world has enough going on, plenty of people will play for years.

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They use to but that ship has sailed. Again, there were very few choices when WoW came out. But now there are so many mmo's out that the modern player jumps from mmo to mmo every couple of months. That is the industry norm and it isn't going to change. Developing for the old model is guaranteed to go against what the market has evolved into and therefore is doomed to failure.

The simple facts are that no developer can create content fast enough to keep majority of the modern mmo players occupied. They will move on to the next shiney and there is very little the devs can do to stop it. The best you can hope for is a solid, but small core of players who keep the game going and profitable.

There isn't going to be another WoW that prints cash for years. The next big thing will be totally different. It will make a lot of money, but not the way WoW did.

I think the issue between FTP and sub models is simply that a FTP model is constantly reminding the player why they are playing the game, to make some company money. A sub model, you can put the money you paid out of your mind and just play the game for the most part. FTP is constantly tearing your attention away from the game with some new shitty deal or promotion to try and get you to buy more shit, it's annoying as all fuck.

FTP will have more individuals play the game, however for what length of time before giving up is a different story.

The big hook in MMO's has always been the community and social aspect. Playing these games solo is just an alternative to solitare for the most part. Beyond what type of subscription model a game uses, if there is not a strong cause for social interaction and community building, then people are going to move on and not get hooked.

If you undermine the need to work together with other players by letting people buy their way to whatever rewards they want, you will neuter a lot of the potential community growth your game may have had. FTP isn't the devil, but it can quickly get out of hand and destroy an experience if it is not kept on a very short and unobtrusive leash.

Lotta fuckheads up in hur!

You can do a cash shop without affecting the game in the slightest bit and be successful.

Look at TF2: Hats.

Just hats. That's it. Fucking hats. You may say "oh but crates and keys..." yeah, they give fucking hats. And they do nothing.

I don't see the issue. I do, however, see an issue in actual stats on gear or some epic mount that looks badass being able to be bought for 25$. At the end of the day, MMO's are all about your epeen and if you can't show off that you worked for that mount then what's the point. Yeah, you have a giant dickdragon for a mount, but so does everyone else that paid money for it. No, I want to slay a dickdragon and then reanimate it and humilate it by riding it everywhere so the rest of the world can see that I'm better at hitting 1-6 on my keyboard.

Monthly subscription = Soviet Communism - theoretically equal, but practically all the benefits go to the uber players and their dev cronies

FTP = American Capitalism, theoretically and practically pay to win

So we've come to this.

Da comrade.

FTP can't be a good thing for any SOE game. About 80% of this forum would end up spending more than a monthly sub to the game if it's from SOE. They'd probably charge you for every dungeon in the game and anything outside the dungeons would be lowest quality gear.

mkopec_sl said:

I disagree with him as well. If people are jumping from game to game its not because they like doing so, IMO, its because they cannot find a good home to settle down to. All it is is a testament to how unappealing those games are in for the longterm.

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exactly this. grim's rant, in a nutshell, is a perfect example of why they're called the ADD generation. they're like fucking goldfish. "wha? something can hold my attention for more than 30 minutes? no fucking way!"

Yeah no. EQ had shitloads of flaws that even experienced gamers (myself with 350+ days played when I quit in 02 for the first time. Yeah, Addict much?) saw for what they were even during the heyday of the game. Had options existed, people would have exited much faster. PlayOnline (FFXI's horribad server UI loading deal) was fucking terrible and anathema to anyone who just wants to log in and fuck around. Shit was cumbersome to the max, and almost completely intentionally. DAOC was PVP, and for those who played EQ on the normal servers and not the Zek silliness were probably not champing at the bit to try it out. SO! You had EQ, and... EQ. If you wanted a western PVE experience from 1999-2002+, you played EQ. The options outside that were abysmal at best.

What does all that have to do with people having ADD in modern gaming? The simple fact that EQ lacked what a lot of gamers wanted. And that includes lots of the original 600kish people that were involved in the genre. The people who experienced the sheer retardery that was GoD's "Tuned for level 70" nonsense were like 5-10% of the gaming population at best. So the question would have to be asked then, why did the rest leave? New and shiny? Apparently new and shiny enough to jump ship en masse when the first real alternative to a PVE centric game existed without jumping through the FFXI hoops and cancel their EQ subs of 1-4 years? What does that tell you of games "like EQ" as a whole?

The short and simple of it all is that the game that fits shitloads of gamers wants hasn't been released outside of what we can percieve from WOW's numbers. A substantially non-trivial amount of EQ high end raiders loaded into WOW and played there for -years.- Shit was not a fluke of newbs who didn't know a SSOY from a SOD jumping ship because they had massive ADD. It was because the mechanics of the game they were playing, as well as the environment of the game they were playing (Seriously, GoD was tardsville for expansions but it isn't like anything for the next two years was any good either and the sour taste that was VT/Rathe Council/POTime was still extremely fresh. That is almost 2 years of Xpacs prior) wasn't very fun for a very large portion of the userbase. Ie, EQ wasn't really fun for a large portion of the playerbase, but they kept playing it until the first reliable alternative existed.

Because, and this number is completely pulled out of my ass... 95% of the playerbase was not experiencing the truly broken shit of GoD. At least 80% were still in pre-PoTime mode after it was nerfed and GoD was released. Because? They simply didn't have the gear to experience the broken shit in GoD. 5-10% of each server, at -max,- knew from first hand experience how terribad that xpac was at the time. The rest... were playing a game. And when a better game came out, they switched to the better game. When it comes down to it... WOW was the better game than EQ. Except for 5-10% of the populace who bitched about it.

Eq's mini monopoly of the genre early on really doesn't have anything to do with the hopping around we see today. People are not leaving for superior games or better anything at this point. People are leaving because they are sick of the same old same old. They go to try something new, and most of the time find out it's just a different flavor of suck. So they move on. That and most MMO's are stuck in this fucking retarded design mode, where they spend 90% of their development cycle on the leveling content and leave people holding their junk while they try and come up with an end game.

I understand why they still have leveling content. It's simply to stratify the player base and spread people out so they don't have 2k users all hanging out in one spot. But there are much better ways to get people to want to spread out. Whatever amazing epic bullshit someone decides should be the end game, that should just be THE game. Having to develop a host of content that gets loved once and loathed every time afterwards is utter crap.

So yeah, crappy content development that focuses on disposable encounters and non reusable assets is a poor investment of time for any company; and will result in a game that lasts 2 weeks before people jump to the next shiny turd.

I think you are assuming much by saying that people aren't looking for better games when they change titles. Like... I think your assumption is completely wrong and that is that. People left EQ to find a better game that fit their sometimes myopic view of what games "should be" to find greener pastures. If they were happy, they wouldn't leave the games they were in. If people were happy with EQ (even the people who had never experienced pernerf Uqua or Velious pre-everyone with prismatics) they wouldn't have left. So what you are positing, is that people involved in the genre simply have ADD and will try anything because they are nutjobs and that is the final line? It has nothing to do with the search for "better" at all? Eve is a vastly different game from EQ, and a vastly different game from WoW. So what you are saying is that they aren't looking for better experiences in what they personally like, but are simply looking for the next random shiny and could give a shit less if what they find is what they want? That the vast, overwhelming majority of players who populate this genre (including the vast, overwhelming majority of the original EQ 600k) are effectively cats looking for the next laser pen light to follow? I sort of don't think that is true for one second. At all.