Frequent readers will remember that I get a bit testy about user interface designers that crib liberally from World of Warcraft.
I am never allowed to complain about that, ever again.
Achievement Unlocked! User Interface Design Innovator
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How Am I Wasting My Time?
#1 by Sheepherder on November 14th, 2009
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.
#2 by geldonyetich on November 15th, 2009
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.
#3 by Rtas on November 15th, 2009
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.
#4 by Lee Quillen on November 15th, 2009
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
#5 by Foamy Squirrel on November 17th, 2009
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.
#6 by geldonyetich on November 17th, 2009
@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.
#7 by Tremayne on November 18th, 2009
@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
#8 by Foamy Squirrel on November 18th, 2009
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.
#9 by Foamy Squirrel on November 18th, 2009
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.
#10 by geldonyetich on November 18th, 2009
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.