Vitality
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I remember the good ole days at the wizards of the coast lan center where I would pay $7 an hour to play diablo 2 at the mall near my house.
Jerk jerk jerk.
Pan'Theon: Rise' of th'e Fal'Len - #1 Thread in MMO
- Thread starter gogojira_sl
- Start date
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Guest, it's time once again for the massively important and exciting FoH Asshat Tournament!
Go here and give us your nominations!Who's been the biggest Asshat in the last year? Give us your worst ones!
Jerk jerk jerk.
Jimbolini
Semi-pro Monopoly player
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Thousands of hours working with Bulletin Board Construction Set for my Atari 800.
Could only run my BBS after dinner (7-10pm) .. Took up our only phone line.
http://www.atarimagazines.com/v4n4/bbcs.html
Could only run my BBS after dinner (7-10pm) .. Took up our only phone line.
http://www.atarimagazines.com/v4n4/bbcs.html
Ukerric
Bearded Ape
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That was essentially what MMOs were before Ultima Online. UO is when the transition went from pay-by-hour to subscription. And now, we're transitioning to a mostly freemium/F2P cash shop model. (about every MMO who attempts subscription ends up transitioning. Save the elephant)
Melvin
Blackwing Lair Raider
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Back in Ought Two, I stayed with my dad for a week and just used my existing Earthlink dial-up account because they didn't give a fuck where "I" connected, as long as there was only one of "me" logged on at a time. A month later my dad sends me a copy of a $300 phone bill because I was using a long distance number for the next town down the road.
shabushabu
Molten Core Raider
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I get what your saying but shit... more power too them, if it doesn't suck i will play it.
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Yeah, that's the thing, though. We'll all try it out for a second or two, but even if it doesn't suck, we'll probably ditch it after that first "free" month. Just like every other MMO.
You're right! I forgot the days of playing on BBSes. I was actually using it for playing multiplayer DOOM. We'd log into a BBS which had some plugin to allow pseudo-lan capability and 4 of us would play together. And it was that pre-pay model. We'd pay up front and then money would be deducted as we played. It worked well back then and I think it could still work today.
Erronius
<WoW Guild Officer>
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The model of the future will be finding sponsers to cover our adventures. One day I will have something more awful than the EQ days of mismatched dyes: a shield bearing the mcdonalds logo, a chestpiece featuring a rival MMO, a banner flying the flag of nikes, and all-state insurance horse-armor. The horror. The horror.
RobXIII
Urinal Cake Consumption King
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Ahh good old Legend of the Red Dragon on BBSs
/speaking of Gates of Discord, thats when my whole guild left EQ1, myself included. Never really looked back outside of P1999 for a few weeks
EQ had already been out for 5 years when WoW released, you fucking moron. That's why the sub numbers went down that far. How many games do you still play 5+ years after launch? After PoP, EQ sucked. Everyone was ready to move on. It was no longer the same game. That has absolutely no bearing on how good EQ was before then. There's a reason why people played that game for several years, and it has nothing to do with "nothing else to play." If you played a game you hated for that many years, you're a god damn idiot, or a liar. Which one are you?
GoD certainly didn't help. Pretty much everyone I know was pissed off enough at EQ by the time omens rolled out, that everyone was just kind of done with all that stupid unpronounceable muramite shit that no one cared about. If they had released something more like dragons of norrath, serpents spine or house of thule, I think more people would have maintained a bit more interest in EQ. WoW came out and was just so polished and solid compared to GoD.
Ukerric
Bearded Ape
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Counterpoint: EVE Online launched in 2003. It has grown in subs at a regular rate for 10 years+ now. People unsub and resub all the time, even 5 years later.
People don't get magically tired after 5 years. People will get tired after 1 year, 2 years, 5 years, 8 years, 10 years of playing.
Basically, you have four subs profiles in the MMO space:
- The outlier who started and is still growing, years later.
- Most recent offerings: huge start, 3 months to a year later, crash down to 20% of peak.
- Start, plateau after a couple years, then progressive decline when people get tired after N years of playing.
- And then, one game that started, grew, plateaued, then crashed hard and brutally lost 3/4 of its playerbase in a single year, 5 years after its launch.
That's what you need to argue against. The crash in subs is the hallmark of a bad game, or a game that doesn't live to its expectations. Rifts, Conan, Warhammer, etc. were all games that failed hard. People don't leave "en masse" a good game. A good game with its niche grows, plateau, and decline slowly when people get tired of it (City of Heroes, for example).
So there's really two ways on interpreting this.
The first is that EQ shows the same mark of being a bad game. It's just that its crash occured 5 years after launch instead of two months. So what's the difference between EQ and Conan or Rift? The answer is other games. When EQ launched, and for most of its 5 years of good run, there were very little competition, and most of that competition was flawed to one point or another. WoW came around, EQ crashed, and all the bad games that followed crashed immediately because WoW was already there.
The second is that EQ is a good niche game, but didn't really have a 500k-following potential. It had a 200k-following potential, and if it had launched along WoW, it would have gotten its 200k, plateaued, and then slowly dropped. It got to 550k peak because there was nothing else to play.
In all cases, trying to launch the same game, in a world where WoW and EQ both exist means a very, very small pool of gamers interested in the EQ-type niche. Most of the EQ-type players have already access to cheap alternatives (F2P EQ, P99). You have to convince them to come with something better, but you can't expect more than 100, maybe 150k tops, players, if you're really optimistic.
That's what investors are going to look at. They see a very small potential. And you then get into the deflating budget spiral: you might need a huge budget to get players, but the numbers don't support a huge budget, so you get a smaller budget, which attracts less people, and so on until you balance the two. And that point is all likely to be at the low end of a standard minor game studio, or more likely into the indie scene.
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Ukerric wins this one. Etchazz, do you honestly believe (when talking to this crowd) that there isn't a niche of gamers who play the same game for 5+ years? Do you remember where you are?
If the EQ team hadn't made so many poor choices in terms of trying to keep up with the WoWs, a lot more people would likely still be playing today. When they started to try to play catch-up with EQ, there was no more reason to stay -- WoW simply did it better and with a larger, more established lore base and following.
(I was going to say "and no space cats", but then I remembered the Draenei. Space Russians instead of cats. Whatever.)
If the EQ team hadn't made so many poor choices in terms of trying to keep up with the WoWs, a lot more people would likely still be playing today. When they started to try to play catch-up with EQ, there was no more reason to stay -- WoW simply did it better and with a larger, more established lore base and following.
(I was going to say "and no space cats", but then I remembered the Draenei. Space Russians instead of cats. Whatever.)
Mr Creed
Too old for this shit
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Many people are pointing out GoD as the cause, and I think you're painting over that. There were a few alternatives from 1999 to 2004 that didnt dip EQs numbers much. PoP and GoD rewrote the game rules for EQ and at least PoP had alot of fans that loved it, you'll be hard pressed to find someone that liked GoD (I actually kinda did but that's besides the point). EQ players were in massive unrest months before WoW showed up because of GoD, to the point of SOE running a massive PR spin campaign, player council, flying "famous" players in to buy their opinion and all that to get things under control again. I'm not saying that WoW isnt a factor in EQ's decline (it certainly is the biggest factor), but SOE fucked things up just fine on their own during the year leading up to that point.
Soygen
The Dirty Dozen For the Price of One
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Wakandan please. There's a large distance between tradition and "EQ done right(again)!".
Jysin
Ahn'Qiraj Raider
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Exactly my point I made a couple pages back. WoW certainly had a very large impact, but you cannot discount the collossal fuckup that was GoD. Smedly himself admitted it was the biggest mistake in SoE history. I am fairly sure I had linked screenshots of my guild raiding GoD (on a live server, not beta) with a level 1 GM Dev in our raid. He was taking tuning notes and giving GM Rez on wipes.
Between the abysmal state of EQ, the Beta of EQ2 and WoW, then subsequent release of both is why EQ bombed in 2004.
Ukerric
Bearded Ape
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Just a minor nitpick: in EQ, raiding population was a minor part of the player population. You had about 30 servers for 550k subs, average 18k players per server, and for each server three or four guilds raiding at the current expansion level, with maybe a dozen guilds doing some regular raiding overall. That's about a thousand players raiding, with 17k players... not raiding.
If every single raider in EQ had packed and left, it would have been barely noticeable in terms of subs.
Jysin
Ahn'Qiraj Raider
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My point was not even about the raid scene. It was more to do with the fact GoD was tuned for level 70 and shipped without the level increase. The real story was GoD and OoW were supposed to be one single xpac. SoE tried to rush things out the door and effectively split the xpacs up. GoD never came with the level increase and everything was basically broken. Solo, Group, and Raid content was all built around this fact. Between the broken rush job and the tuning issues, it was just a steaming pile of poo for all players.