Broken
Toys
Random comments about
games and tractors
Achievement Unlocked! User Interface Design Innovator
Frequent readers will remember that I get a bit testy about user interface designers that crib liberally from World of Warcraft.
| Print article |
Broken
Toys
Random comments about
games and tractors
Frequent readers will remember that I get a bit testy about user interface designers that crib liberally from World of Warcraft.
| Print article |
about 9 months ago
They can make the copies as literal as they like, barring becoming an easy target for Blizzard’s lawyers. It won’t buy them instant success. WoW’s incredible bandwagon effect had less to do with the game being very well-built (which it was) and more to do with having several million Blizzard fans waiting in the wings to try out their first MMORPG.
about 9 months ago
The fascinating thing for me is that some of the commenters on Eldergoth’s blog post are outraged and furiously deny any copying.
“your “Review” of it certainly sounded biased. You almost sound like a Wow Fanboy.
Of course there are going to be things that are the same as WoW..”
and
“The crafting system on the surface looks a lot like WOWs, but if you actually got very deep into it you find it changes.”
about 9 months ago
Even AO had people trying to shout down criticism in the first few weeks, and its launch was a disaster of nearly biblical proportions.
about 9 months ago
Oh hai thar! Another interface naz– err, stormtrooper! Can I mention early Vanguard now?
about 9 months ago
I hate that WoW has become a standard.
about 9 months ago
Has it occurred to anyone else that maybe this is actually a carefully thought-out ploy to get people to break their addiction to games like WoW? Think about it: it’s just like WoW, only badly enough done that it might sour you even on your WoW experience.
And the game’s name is Alganon. As in [alcoholic] gamers anonymous.
Maybe they’re not stupid and vapid and derivative… maybe they’re just really that smart.
Okay, never mind: it would be nice, but clearly they’re just that clueless.
about 9 months ago
Didn’t someone from Blizzard say that Mythic almost copied WoW’s UI for Warhammer and didn’t the spin doctor MJ defend then? That was an interesting level, Alganon just sounds like some kind of dental filling.
about 9 months ago
@geldonyetich
Why does Blizzard have that fanbase? Probably because they make rock solid games, WoW being one of the best game I’ve ever played. No, I don’t buy Blizzards fanbase as the reason WoW is successful. Blizzard has the reach they do because of the games they make.
@GTB
I’m glad WoW became a standard. I’m not happy that developers try to use that standard when it doesn’t fit their project.
about 9 months ago
It’s not even that the WoW interface layout, derivative as it is of previous titles, is the best way or even a very good way to display that information. The thing with WoW is that it works smoothly and looks clean. You drag something, it works. You click something, it works. Graphics are clean, colors are right, words are spelled right. When my character swings a weapon, it looks good. The right sounds effects play at the right time. I don’t feel like everything is happening via remote control from Mars with a slight delay (hello, Warhammer).
If people just copy the layout of the windows and menus, but the game doesn’t work as smoothly as WoW, people will find out within 10 minutes of playing. Then they will quit.
So if WoW set the standard for anything, it is for *polish*, in my opinion. You can have a fantastic interface that looks nothing like WoW, but people are still going to compare the “feel” to WoW. If it feels clunky and laggy, forget it.
about 9 months ago
There is a grey area of copying some functional elements of a succesful games UI for your new game. You want to start or keep your players in a comfortable familiar place, especially as they learn your game. So to their eye you want them to feel as if the UI has evolved from previous games they have played, and is not something wholesale new and scary with a high learning curve.
But there is a far cry from mimicing some functions and wholesale copying design and graphical elements (including the ones tyhat dont actually have a purpose in your game).
about 9 months ago
Can we call it Algeron instead of Alganon?
about 9 months ago
I’d buy this if it weren’t for the fact that there’s been games that have done just what WoW has done even better without receiving even a tenth of the fan base.
about 9 months ago
Blizzard: building creative fences around game design.
Nothing really new, there are already a bazillion of Diablo clones out there.
about 9 months ago
The key ring thing really crack me up (copied from WOW but no key functionality).
For me, the only thing bad about Blizzard is the long wait for Starcraft II. They also don’t allow me to bot but I quit WOW because of that, and give me more time for my other stuff so it is not too bad.
about 9 months ago
Alganon – from the makers of Horizons. Seriously, is there anything else you need to know about it?
about 9 months ago
I wasn’t sure what to make out of the makers of Horizons being behind this. You’d think having some past experience – any past experience – would be a boon. However, what’s being pointed out by the previewer seems like a project that any group of tech-minded kids fresh out of high-school can cobble together.
about 9 months ago
“I’d buy this if it weren’t for the fact that there’s been games that have done just what WoW has done even better without receiving even a tenth of the fan base.”
Name one. Whatever you list I’ll be able to give you a laundry list of flaws that more than outweigh whatever it is you think said game did better than WoW.
about 9 months ago
On the subject of “games that have done just what WoW has done even better without receiving even a tenth of the fan base”, how about LoTRO? That’s almost as polished as WoW, and even should have had the built-in fanbase. I’d still be playing that if they put any effort into the PvMP system.
about 9 months ago
@Montague: Just no. A “list of flaws” is not a relevant assessment of a game. WoW has a list of flaws. Conversely, opening MS Paint, selecting Fill-In and the color Red, and clicking once creates a red square or rectangle with “no flaws,” but that doesn’t mean it’s any fun.
WoW took the EQ clone kit and plopped WC3 art in it. Bam. Done. Name one thing they did outside of this, aside from the (admittedly great) quest system that added flavor and a functional tracker to the same boring quests from every other game.
about 9 months ago
I’m sure you could. Then I’d counter with a list of improvements. We’d go back and forth quibbling over what feature is more valuable than another, price points, ect, and in the end what we’d probably end up with is either a grudging admission that both games are roughly as good but Blizzard’s success is completely unusual or (more likely) absolutely no progress made at boring into eachother’s craniums at all.
Pass.
about 9 months ago
I’ve got to side with Montague over Geldon on this one. Too often people place the credit for Blizzard’s success with WoW on their fan base (sometimes combined with their marketing blitz). This is not only inaccurate, it is detrimental to the health of the industry as it obscures THE most important lesson that developers and publishers need to learn from it.
Blizzard’s fan base got them one thing and one thing only. Several hundred thousand people willing to try WoW out. When basically ALL the reports from those early adopters were glowing endorsements from open beta on, THEN the number of people joining in skyrocketed to the millions.
Look at those numbers. Several hundred thousand people tried out WoW, turning into millions of players after a few months. With AoC and WAR, you had 800k+ people trying them out turning into a few hundred thousand players after a few weeks. Notice anything different about that?
If a slavering fanbase is the key to a successful MMO release, then both AoC and WAR should have at least matched WoW. After all, there are far more people champing at the bit for a good MMO now than when WoW released.
The difference is the quality of the experience, and that is based both on design and the relatively bug-free implementation. Yes, there were login queues at release. Those queues preserved the quality of the experience while Blizzard scrambled to meet demand which FAR exceeded ANYONE’s predictions. So while you might have had to wait to get into the game, once you did, outside of Ironforge pretty much everything worked RIGHT (except for the loot lag bug which was probably the biggest threat to WoW’s success that it has yet encountered). Everything else was smooth. Content was all in place and functional, game systems worked, balance was reasonable, etc.
The only MMO’s released since WoW that have come close to the quality standards it set are Aion and LotRO. The jury is (mostly) still out on Aion, but it looks like its issues with grind and ganking will put a crimp in it’s growth. It will still be pretty big, but not huge like WoW.
LotRO’s relative lack of success is harder to diagnose. Most people who tried it and left give a kind of “meh” for why it didn’t work for them. I think it was a combination of factors that took just enough zing from the experience to leave it as an also-ran. Those factors include everything from the slow-responding character controls to too-realistic character gear (not enough differentiation, color, bling, or skin depending on your preferences) to having some of the best content gated by the diffuclties of grouping.
The killer for me leaving LotRO was my wife quitting in disgust, and her flash point was crafting cock-blocks. Crafting, by design, at least at release, was only useful for twinking. There was no way your character could craft anything useful for him/her-self, as the resources you needed to make items useful for a given level were only available in regions with monsters 5-10 levels higher. Likewise the crafting level needed to make a given item was 10 levels or so higher than the adventure level that item was useful at, so even if you were careful and sneaky and able to get at the resources above your level, you still couldn’t make the items that would be useful to you. Then to add insult to injury, this limit was deliberately reinforced by a stupid COMBAT quest you had to complete every 10 (or was it 20?) levels in order to increase your CRAFTING level, and said combat quest was pretty much undoable until you were 10 or so combat levels above your crafting level! Way to piss off most of your crafting-oriented players Turbine!
So anywho, content and polish (and polished content) are key. There’s a million or more people out there ready to play, if someone would just get their act together and deliver that again. On release day. Able to run well on most gaming machines. Without any stupid design choices that punish players for anything but cheating or griefing. And polished enough that people don’t need GMs to intervene to solve problems whether caused by other players or the game. And…
about 9 months ago
@Count Nerfedalot
You lost me at “several hundred thousand.” I count Blizzard’s following in the millions.
It’s a bit easy to misread. It’s not that I’m saying the WoW is a bad game. It’s not that I’m saying that a highly refined, tried-and true experience won’t help with subscription retention.
What I’m actually saying is just that you probably won’t fish in millions because only WoW has done that (at least if you’re only considering Western-made MMORPGs). Even EverQuest only had something like 600k subscribers, total. You’re only going to pull millions if you’ve got major brand name appeal going for you, no matter how good your game is.
about 9 months ago
A better point to make in regards to the matter of hands really isn’t “WoW aient as great as its millions make it seem.”
A point I prefer to make in this situation is more alone the lines of, “if the players wanted to play WoW, [i]they’ll play WoW[/i].”
Making your game an imitation WoW only works if your invitation has something else going for it, such as a much cheaper price point.
Last I checked, Runes of Magic (a [i]very[/i] capable WoW clone) was Free To Play. So, basically, if you’re set on beating WoW at its own game, your game will have to beat free as a price.
about 9 months ago
(Wow, did I ever butcher that last entry, that’s what I get for answering on a side window while playing X3)
about 9 months ago
LotRO was well put together, it just wasn’t very usable (or consistently usable). For instance, it was harder to dismount than it was to buy a house.
They do have the most responsive bug fixing I’ve seen in an MMOG, they aren’t afraid to go after low-hanging fruit that has little gameplay impact but contributes to the overall feeling of polish (e.g. a Two-Hundred Weaponsmith became a Two-Handed Weaponsmith – introduced and fixed after release). They’ve also put out a tremendous series of improvements and extensions to the base game. While the playability of the game isn’t everyone’s cup of tea their technical execution has been pretty solid. They could just use some UX help.
WoW still comes crashing down with uncomfortable regularity and they’ll patch an ability over here and screw up the audio files over there, but the story of how they got to their release puts that into context.
To sum up: LotRO looks to have been produced by a more mature process than WoW, but has generated a less enjoyable/popular product.
about 9 months ago
@geldonyetich
If I lost you at the hundreds of thousands vs the millions you claim, then that is because you are stuck on this idea that a million or two Warcraft and Starcraft and Diablo players somehow equals 9 million people willing to try WoW at launch. It didn’t. WoW didn’t get 9 million subs because millions of people loved Warcraft already. It got 9 million subs because the first half million people who played it LOVED WOW and told/showed their friends and they tried it & etc.
The point is, a highly refined, tried-and true experience won’t just help with subscription retention, it’s essential for breaking out of the hard core and into the mainstream. Other things are required to get those numbers, including whatever it is that LotRO is missing. But without the polished/refined/user friendly experience, it’s IMPOSSIBLE to get those numbers.
about 9 months ago
Not at all. But that would be problematic thinking, yes.
about 9 months ago
But i think you COULD get those millions without a higher than usual number of seed players, especially since the usual number now is 800K!
If you can’t agree on that, then we’ll have to agree to disagree until such time as somebody actually delivers another highly refined game to test the hypothesis. I’m not holding my breath on that, since it’s seems only Blizzard is willing to take the time it takes to do it.
about 9 months ago
Many have tried and failed, but by all means hang on to the dream.
about 9 months ago
MMOs such as Age of Conan and Warhammer online got hundreds of thousands of “seed players” but floundered because those players didn’t really stick around or recruit their friends.
The MMO market is much larger than it was when WoW launched, in large part because of WoW. You can get the same number of early subscribers as WoW did even without having an established fan base going in, but you’re never going to approach WoW’s success unless people decide that they’re having so much fun that they absolutely MUST continue to play, and tell their friends.
about 9 months ago
To clarify, I never said subscription retention or the bandwagon effect were not major factors to WoW’s success. I’m merely pointing out that copping WoW’s style alone isn’t enough.
Well, no, I’m not only saying that, I’m also saying if you made a perfect WoW clone you won’t get nearly as many players.
First, because you’re not Blizzard, who (if the charts are to be believed) brought in millions of Western players who apparently never played an MMORPG before.
Second, because if the players wanted WoW, they’d just keep playing WoW, unless you gave them something very significant you can’t get in WoW. (E.g Runes Of Magic’s Free To Play model.)
It’s not an unreasonable assertion that simply copying WoW has zero chance of earning you millions of subscribers.
about 9 months ago
David Edery, the ex-portfolio manager of X-Box Live, described it best:
# of players in the market / # of games in the market = screwed developers
There’s a LOT more competition in the MMO space and for the majority of players they don’t have the resources (coughtimecough) to commit to more than one (some people subscribe to several, but they are by far the minority).
It’s not enough to release an MMO and assume you’ll get numbers equivalent to other games out there. Those players have to come from somewhere – either you will be their first MMO (a difficult enough proposition in itself) or you’re going to have to steal them from another game. When you are effectively positioning yourself as “WoW, but on a fraction of the budget” you’re not going to pull players in from WoW. You’re not going to pull players in who are knowledgeable about WoW but chose not to play it. Your only hope is to find a niche of people who have never played an MMO but are willing to try – and the majority of those aren’t going to choose your game, because if they don’t know anything about MMOs their main influencer is going to be “I’ll go with one of the popular ones – if that many people are playing then it’s probably good”.
Yes, it’s a cheap and lazy way to pump out your game, but you have effectively screwed yourself from ever getting more than 500 peak players.
about 9 months ago
Geldon has it. You can’t achieve WoW-like levels of success by being WoW because there already is a WoW. You can’t achieve them by being “like WoW but a bit better” because people tend to stay with what they know – your “a bit better” has to outweigh all the time and emotiional investment and friends a player has in WoW. Alganon, of course, is failing to have any “a bit better” and doesn’t even have a full set of “like WoW”.
The Holy Grail of MMO success now has to be “as popular as WoW but in a different way”. Someone needs to find that special something, and that’s a lot harder than just copying the market leader (right now, trying to break the console market seems to be the favoured way to go).
Of course, once someone DOES manage to make a game as popular as WoW, there’ll be endless second-rate copies made of THAT…
about 9 months ago
I never said anything remotely like a WoW clone could match WoW’s success. Enough with the straw man arguments.
I’ve made two points.
One, I contest the assertion that “several million Blizzard fans waiting in the wings to try out their first MMORPG” is the prime reason for WoW’s phenomenal success. Rather, I credit their success to the quality of the game experience they produced – the whole “EQ without the suck” thing, which was actually more of taking the best ideas from all it’s predecessors and implementing them *right*.
For a whole lot of those millions in the wings, it wasn’t the first MMO they tried, just the first one worth subscribing to. And for the vast majority of those for which it *was* the first, they didn’t jump in until the word got out that it was good. WoW was easy enough to play with sufficiently rare and minor gotchas that people felt comfortable encouraging their less geeky friends to give it a shot, confident that said friends wouldn’t come back with a “wtf did you reccommend this pos for?” after the game kicked them in the crotch. Had WoW released in the buggy and incomplete state any of it’s contemporaries did, it would have had similar, mediocre results, in spite of those millions waiting breathlessly in the wings.
It was the quality of the game on all levels that created the buzz that allowed WoW to jump out of the limited pool of existing MMO players and pull in millions more.
Two, I assert that releasing with WoW’s production values (note I am NOT saying cloning WoW’s superficial features!!!!) is a prerequisite to achieving another breakout success. Central to those production values are having a complete set of practically bug free core systems, a complete set of polished content in place from level 1 to max which you can play through at least once without having to repeat anything, and no poke-your-eye-with-a-stick design features to annoy large portions of your player base.
I know it’s an unpopular idea among the developer community, but just differentiating yourself with some creative new features without matching the overall production quality just isn’t going to cut it. And sadly, Aion would seem to show that cloning the look and feel of WoW plus approaching its production quallity actually does give you a shot at breaking out. At least until your playerbase starts spreading the word about the poke-you-in-the-eye features that you added which WoW didn’t have.
Content and polish are key. Cool ideas and innovative systems are all well and good, but will *not* repay the investment it takes to develop a full MMO without being presented in the context of a fully functioning game system and a content-complete game experience.
about 9 months ago
I’m sorry, but is that the Barrens pictured on their “about” page? And that game description is a knee-slapper. “Alganon is a Fantasy MMORPG that is like a Fantasy MMORPG!” Facinating!
And then there’s the design goal: “Simple Gameplay with Unlimited Growth in a massive world of immersion and interaction” That has to be the most vague “about” page ever.
about 9 months ago
Okay, so I just noticed there’s more below the fold of the page. But one has to wonder if it’s a good idea to bore someone to death before getting to the features of the game.
about 9 months ago
I would say WoW’s success came from looking at their predecessors (by which I mostly mean EQ) and not doing many of the Dumb Stuff that plagued said games (TRAIN TO ZONE anyone?).
Yes, WoW did have the strength of Warcraft fans on its back, but it has since grown far beyond that. Not to mention that the game can run smoothly on machines that choke on other games. I was introduced to the game via a free trial a friend gave me, and a few days later I was buying the actual thing.
I have since mostly burned out of the game, although in my case its less a matter of “I now hate this game” and rather “I already did everything. What now?”. I have raided mostly casually, since I lack the patience and time for hardcore raiding.
This actually DOES bring up the subject of endgame… how do LOTRO and WAR handle it?
In either case… its easy to point to a game and go “This is a WoW clone!” but there are *reasons* for this… incredible success will do that. What developers need to offers is not a copy of the ‘WoW Formula’, but rather an improvement on it.
about 9 months ago
W.o.W. should not be a standard. It isn’t that good. W.o.W. is just a copy of EQ without the Brad McQuaid stupidity and some technical fixes. The world waits for a truly good MMRPG.
I still find it hard to believe no one has built the 30 million paying users MMRPG, yet.
Rules:
1. Stupidly easy. So easy a cat walking across the keyboard would literally earn a skill up in something.
2. Hide grinding in fun to do things.
3. Open PvP in a single high value area. Rest of game is PvE and designed that way, completely ignoring PvP and leaving that one PvP ignored.
4. profit.
about 9 months ago
If it were a straw man argument it’d be more credible than simply misreading what I wrote, which is apparently what you must have done, because I never said otherwise.
And I’ve got a chart that says otherwise. When you’ve got more players than existed in all the other MMORPGs put together, and the population of those other MMORPGs hasn’t been completely sapped, you have to face facts: they pulled in a whole new fan base.
When you consider that Blizzard’s games have sold tens of millions before the release of World of Warcraft, it’s not an unreasonable assertion that a great deal of these millions were quite probably Blizzard fans. You can bicker all you like, but where’s your evidence to the contrary? All you have is speculation, don’t pretend otherwise.
Of course, I can’t prove those millions are Blizzard fans any more than you can disprove it. After all, WoW also had an unprecedented level of advertising. No other game has Mr. T or William Shatner telling you to go play them.
Well, if you were hoping to disprove me on this point, you’ll be sorely disappointed: I never said otherwise. What I’m pointing out is that having established a prerequisite does not in itself guarentee Blizzard millions because (as the previous chart would indicate) Blizzard millions are highly, highly unprecedented.
Furthermore, I think D-One is absolutely right in the wider sense of things:
A good part of why WoW worked so well is because it was very well refined, but it hardly innovated.
Perhaps my favorite analogy in World of Warcraft is liken it to McDonalds: billions served, but it still not fine dining.
One thing I’ve had to accept about myself is that the vast majority of gamers haven’t been at it nearly as long. Consequently my tastes are not going to be ones that developers are going to prioritize developing for. Because technology costs a lot, if they were going to make games for the rare few gamers as advanced in the hobby as I am, there’s no way they’re going to break even.
My only hope is that there are developers who are talented enough to leverage a smaller budget and be content with making only a minor profit, not for desiring big piles of cash, but rather because they’re genuine craftsmen who care about what they make.
about 9 months ago
I think D-one is hitting closer to where I think (or at least hope) the next “big” MMORPG breaks out.
I’ve gotten a bit tired of “PVP is the endgame!1!!111″. Yes it looks good on paper to the developers, develop some rules, some maps and let the players create their own content by killing each other and hope it holds their attention until the next expansion pack. You could say even WOW uses this formula.
I’m not saying “raid until you die” is the solution either.
I would like to see a game where your character never truely reaches their full potential, where there is always something to do when you log into make him better, and I dont define that as getting a +1 to ogreslaying sword. That requires a dev willing to churn out new content for my $15 a month in most probability.
..but maybe its just me.
about 9 months ago
@Fatebringer
One thing I think WoW did right was have a sort of, “the game doesn’t begin until you get to the end game” focus. Not specifically raiding, not specifically PvP, but with a great dearth of things to do when you hit maximum level to the point where you’re never truly done playing.
Take a look at Champions Online right now, and this would seem to be one of the major problem the game is suffering from right now. Considering the end game is so very unrefined, the dearth of activities quickly exhausted in terms of entertainment value, that there’s no reason to stick around. The subscription retention value simply isn’t there.
about 9 months ago
The lack of an endgame need not be the deathblow to the game either, IF the game can stand well enough on its own for replayability. The best example of this would be CoX. CoX’s endgame for years consisted of a single event – Hami the giant blob. 1 event. Even so, after the initial fall off, the game’s population has remained fairly stable, because it has so much replayability.
Now, I’m not playing CoX right now, but last year I wandered over and spent a few happy months playing a char type I never had an enjoyed myself thoroughly. Even doing some of the same stuff I had before was fun. The game is better now (well, and worse in some aspects I guess) than it was then, but it’s still very replayable.
about 9 months ago
Not to dominate the comment thread…
CoX vrs Champions Online is tricky business because in CoX you’d start over several different characters to try different power combinatons. Champions Online, you can try out a different power combination at maximum level instantly… if you’ve got a retcon token. The respec process is total.
I suspect the resulting lack of retread will knock out any CoX-like retention Champions Online might have had.
about 9 months ago
@geldonyetich: Yeah but you’re technically not done playing WoW only because they have a boatload of content, and you probably don’t WANT to try to experience 100% of it. Some people don’t care to craft, or PvP, or play the Auction House, and so forth. So there does come a point where you are effectively done until a new patch pulls you back in by giving you something new to experience in an area you do care about. That’s not really an endgame, in my view, not in the sense that A Tale In The Desert, for example, has an endgame.
High level WoW appears to be all about raiding for gear. If I’ve heard people say one “the real game doesn’t begin until…” phrase, it ended with a raid instance. (Not caring for raiding, I’ve never leveled a character past 60.)
about 9 months ago
I’m not really super into grinds either. (Or am I? It seems to be an identity crisis with me sometimes.)
However, the thing about WoW is the game developers looked at the game and said, “okay, a casual-play focus should work great to entice players into playing the game… but what then? They get to the end of the game, and they leave. We can’t have that.” So what they pulled was an elaborate bait and switch: cutting-edge, casual friendly gameplay at first, that transitions into the raids and end game PvP that EQ and DAoC did before them.
about 9 months ago
@D-One
Arguably, EQ should not have been the standard. But it was, none the less.
about 9 months ago
“So what they pulled was an elaborate bait and switch: cutting-edge, casual friendly gameplay at first, that transitions into the raids and end game PvP that EQ and DAoC did before them.”
You should be asking yourself if this is bad, or wrong, because it would seem to me that elaborate bait-and-switch tactics are the best response to balancing people who would rather roll another alt than grind through the entire endgame versus people who want to focus on a single character. Subsequently, I’d suggest that games that ape Warcraft and fail do so largely because they don’t know what the fuck they want to do, and can’t produce a coherent plan to that effect.
As an aside: Geldon, you are an asshole, like me. If you want to make friends and influence people you need to drink more alcohol, or smoke more pot, and mellow out a little.
about 9 months ago
I was saying that the bait and switch was a good move because it did provide an end game. Most games that ape Warcraft fail to successfully do so because they see the casual front without realizing the back is as hardcore as Ever(Quest). But then, imitation is the resort of those who don’t trust themselves to think on their own.
Valuing intellectualism brings about it a remarkable loneliness given the popularity of this interpretation. This would be an effective cure, indeed. However, destroying one’s God-given mind so I can fit in with those who deign not to use it seems a remarkably irresponsible solution in the long run. I think I’ll just cut my losses, instead.
about 9 months ago
geldon, do you consider yourself to be an intellectual?
about 9 months ago
There’s a segway into something off topic and self-defeating if I’ve ever been roped into one.
about 9 months ago
First off, you should probably not claim intellectual standards during an act which is tantamount to yelling at a wall. Granted, you’re not yelling, but it still doesn’t improve the situation. Secondly, I don’t really need to make a list of intellectuals who really liked to get sloshed and/or stoned, do I? Lastly:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1993980/
Nebu on F13 tossed this little gem at me when I dismissed the “glass of wine a day,” aphorisms I’ve been hearing almost all my life as pseudoscience. The jury is still out on cannabis, because a lot of the older work on it’s effects has been called into question.
about 9 months ago
One offhand comment about dope making people dopey turns this into a thread about pot to you? And you give me a link about cardiovascular benefits to disprove it. Really?
In any case, all I see here is a whole lot of misinterpretting what I was saying.
about 9 months ago
The Horizons/vaporware drama on lumthemad was some of my favorite internet of all time. This brought back some good memories, and I thank you for them.
about 9 months ago
I can forgive copying ideas… this isn’t copying ideas.
For goodness sakes, they have graphics identical to WoW’s that look cut and paste that have no function in their game (keyring).
I can see copying something because it’s a good idea or sellable… but I can’t see excusing cutting and pasting things directly and then figuring out how to make it work. Saying lots of games are similar as an excuse is an insult to everyone who sought to make their game include WoW elements
about 9 months ago
There’s a reason no-one has built a 30million paying user MMRPG yet.
There aren’t 30million people willing to pay for a MMRPG. It’s not about game design, it’s about market size.
about 9 months ago
@Foamy Squirrel
At least if you’re talking about the Western market. In the East, it’s actually not to uncommon to have MMORPGs with tens of millions of subscribers. Perfect World Online (China) has 30 million or more depending on who you ask.
about 9 months ago
@Foamy Squirrel
There aren’t 30 million people willing to pay for an EQ/WoW style time-sink based game. There may well be that many people willing to pay for a game that’s designed around dipping in for less than an hour a few times a week – Grand Theft Auto Online, anyone?
The hardcore MMO players will ‘burn through the content’ and quit very quickly – but I’d be quite happy to lose 30,000 of them if it means keeping the other 29.97 million customers
about 9 months ago
True – Eastern MMORPGs have a lot higher ACCOUNTS… but the vast majority are some flavor of Free-To-Play, which means measuring any kind of active userbase is hard. People who create an account and then never play again, or people who create multiple accounts are almost certainly included to inflate press release numbers – the closest anyone got to accurately measuring was Guinness Records who awarded Runescape for having 10million active accounts. WoW beat that, and Runescape is FREE. If you’re going the non-time-sink route, then expect your price point to similarly drop with the relative time commitment (and then you’re competing with Farmville and Mafia Wars – can you really call yourself an MMORPG at that point?).
Bottom line, there aren’t going to be 30million people willing to cough up money for your MMORPG. There may be 30million people willing to try it (if you’re incredibly lucky), especially if it’s free, but pay? No.
about 9 months ago
To put this in perspective – Call of Duty: MW2 is expected to become the new top selling game of all time. It’s projected to sell around 13million units by the end of the year. That’s across 3 platforms.
WoW is an anomaly. Unless there’s a dramatic shift in the market so that there are only 3 products to choose from, it’s perfectly possible that no other single game will ever produce the revenues that Blizzard are enjoying right now.
about 9 months ago
As you can tell form my other posts, I’m definately on board with the idea WoW is a considerably anomaly. Funny you should mention MW2, I think that one can learn a bit about why WoW has done so unusually well from it.
It’s now MW2 that brought millions of players – the bandwagon affect gravitating from a quality of game assessment would not be possible considering we’re talking pretty much day 1 sales, nobody had a chance to tell anyone about how it would play. Thus, it had to be a continuation of pre-existing sentiment coming from the whole Call Of Duty series, picking up more and more players with each game.
In the same way, it’s not necessarily any quality of WoW itself that brought millions of players, but rather a continuation of players who had jumped aboard previous Blizzard franchises (mainly Warcraft, probably) that brought about the phenomenon.
But, of course, if WoW completely sucked, they wouldn’t have played it as long as they did. Subscription retention is a whole other kettle of fish – imitating WoW is more about getting people to try your game in the first place.