Just a note for Blackblade to, UO have adopted conventions from other games but I wouldn’t say succefully. Everytime it came in seemed people quit in droves. I know AoS broke the final straw for me and I had played for 7 years (although it had been hanging on a thread since the trammel/felucia split). I didn’t get the reasoning either, people who wanted gameplay of other games were already playing them, thoose who were in UO actully liked the game and played it despite aged graphics. I guess the number crunchers like saw a slight rise overall since expansions sells boxes, but the retention can’t have been as good if you compare a new player starting to a 3 year player quitting (since bonds is what keeps people in the game).

With regards to Shadowbane, I would certainly highlight the concerns of Hades before bringing up a new server. If there haven’t been changes to ranking of towns, then the end result will be a paralyzed server, where one or more large guilds have “won teh gaem!!!”

Well, Anarchy Online’s deat was somewhat slow, if you consider going from subscriptio to a free-play model as death. But they still have premium subscriptions, so I guess it’s not really did. You’re right that most MMOGs that have actually closed down actually did so within about 3 years.

There were rumors that Turbine was going to shut down Asheron’s Call last year once they launched LotRO, but that never happened. I expect either AC or UO will be the first to be shut down due to “old age”, if you will, sometime in the next few years.

Have we actually seen this yet? Every cancelled MMO I can think of died fast, if it wasn’t outright stillborn. I can’t think of any offhand that have died of old age.

The bottom line is that SB’s city and siege mechanics alienate the medium sized guilds, and you always end up with a few superpower zerg nations. When that happens large scale PVP grinds to a halt so that none of the remaining big nations get destroyed, and PVP ends up being a lot of hit and run small skirmishes that don’t mean crap. If a big nation is taken out, most of their people leave and the rest are absorbed into the survivors. Ultimately there’s almost no one left, and the server dies.

In the summer of 2002’s SB beta, the game mechanics were such that a medium sized guild could create, support, and rebuild a city without it being so crushing that they left the game. The mobile trebuchets and unscheduled sieges also made it so that PVP was unpredictable, so people had to be on their toes. So you had a lot of participants and being crushed didn’t make you want to quit the game.

They made city building and city crushing too painful, made it hard for a medium sized guild to survive as anything other than a vassal to a larger nation, got rid of mobile trebuchets, and put sieging on a timer. The scheduled sieging IMHO was very boring, and a lot of the time the city being sieged set their siege window at BUMF**K A.M. in the morning. Since city sieging could only happen on a set schedule, people spent all their time rolling exp groups for shits and giggles.

So this reset does nothing but further the decline unless there have been changes to make medium sized guilds more viable IMHO.