Causes of Stagnation and Failing's of Current Generation MMO's

[PerpetualGamer]

So the other day while I was trolling the Star Wars: The Old Republic forums? Which I love to do, might I add? There was a topic titled ?Why do all mmo?s fail these days?? that I desperately wanted to read for the many laughs I was sure I would get from it. When I went to reply and add my own trolling behavior I couldn?t help but actually think of something productive to write, and I came up with the following.

When it comes to a Massive Multiplayer Online Game, you are not paying for the game 90% of the time. World of Warcraft is and will continue to be the winning formula for quite some time. Before WoW it was Everquest, before EQ it was Ultima Online. The reason that EQ became more popular than UO was because it had enough changes to the core formula to be interesting.

So let?s take a look at why WoW overtook EQ. The first thing we must realize is that EQ was already on it?s way out when WoW was released. However even that doesn?t explain the total destruction that WoW did to EQ. So let?s look at some screenshots from both games.

The interface for each game doesn?t differ from the other by any outstanding feature. The gameplay really isn?t THAT different from each other either. So that leaves? Graphics? If that was the case, then Vanguard: Saga of Heroes would?ve dominated WoW. Newbie friendliness? Possibly but I don?t see that being the underlying cause.

When a new game is released that lacks TRUE innovation over its predecessor it will ?fail?. See Rift? All the rage for a month, until people realized that those tiny additions weren?t enough to keep their attention. This is attributed often to ?my friends play WoW so why would I start over?, but it?s my firm belief that it goes even deeper than that.

WoW wins, because it is Warcraft? There were multiple single player games before it came out, with a single well written story amongst them all. Whenever you watch a movie or an anime you often find at the end of the movie, tv show, or anime that you wish the story continued. You wish that you could find out what happened afterwards. World of Warcraft, is simply a game that CATERS to that need on a massive scale. Many people don?t even need to know all the past if you have enough help understanding the present, which is why friends will still play WoW even if they haven?t played Warcraft 1, 2, or 3.

There hasn?t been a single MMO release (to my knowledge), since WoW, that has the following criteria.

1. A storyline that has been given to players via single player games, which allows them to complete it at their own pace, without losing any of the experience. This way they can gain a understanding and love for the story and want to be part of it at a massive level.

That being said, if a MMO is going to succeed then there has to be a reason for us to care.

What do you guys think about the current Generation MMO'S?

 

[Lucyfer86]

Well aside from Guild Wars, all i see usually is bunch of failed WoW wannabes. Now, im NOT saying they suck, just that they were not super popular WoW killers they tried to be.
If we look away from MMORPG's, there's World of Tanks, for example, which very nice to say the least.

But then again, i haven't played every singe MMO out there..

As for myself, i place all my hope for Guild Wars 2 to be the new saviour of MMO's

 

[Baldr]

I've heard rumors the Rift still has an active strong base population. It is hard to tell since Trion doesn't release subscription information. They got enough support to launch in Korea, which is always a good sign. I would put Rift in the successful instead of failing category.

 

[Richardplex]

I think what actually matters in mmos, and possibly to other games/media, is the downtime. The uptime - the peaks in the graph of engagement, be it raids or rifts or whatever - is what people remember, but it isn't what people do most of the time. It is the downtime, the troughs of the graph of engagement, that matters.

Here's my experience and justification; I used to play wow. Since a month after The Burning Crusade, I've played through that, Wrath of the Lich King, and a month of Cataclysm before I quit. Wrath of the Lich King from the experience of people I've talked to, was a pretty lame expansion, but people kept playing through it. Cataclysm, was pretty awesome when it came out but many people quit quickly. Why is that? The hope that Cata would be different, but under it all it was the same thing? I don't think so, people wouldn't of stuck through WotLK for that. Cataclysm promised to be like vanilla wow, but failed? No, it was far better than vanilla, nostalgia glasses removed. QQ about classes being nerfed changed? True for some, but it wouldn't cause the quitting on the scale it happened. So what is it?

Cataclysm is superior to WotLK in almost all respects. Music, graphics, raids (apart from Ulduar, WotLK raids were pretty bad), questing, all of these were greatly improved in Cata. PvP is debatable, but I didn't really do player-vs-player, so I'm not going to go into that. Uptime wise, Cataclysm dwarfs WotLK. But what happened to downtime? There was never as much happening in Orgrimmar and Stormwind as there was in Dalaran. All the new zones were seperated, so one couldn't fly around the new zones without constantly teleporting back to Org/SW every 30 minutes. Questing was good, but doesn't last long. There was no need to farm for gear, epic flying mounts were easy to get, there was simply nothing to do.

And that is what I think is the problem, the lack of things to do in downtime, where there is little innovation. Rift failed because nothing was added there, as well as being fairly... not amazing. And unless The Old Republic fixes this, it will go the same way.

/Rant over.

 

[2xDouble]

Somebody hasn't seen this: http://penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/the-future-of-mmos

Basically, it's because Blizzard is raking in billions of dollars and everybody likes billions of dollars.

 

[Gatx]

So you're basically saying that WoW succeeds because it's part of an already popular IP? I disagree. The number of people who play World of Warcraft vastly exceeds the number of people who've played any other Warcraft game, hell, some WoW players didn't even know there WERE other Warcraft games.

And what about games like the Matrix Online? Star Wars Galaxies? Star Trek Online? Lord of the Rings Online? All the background and settings of those games are pretty well known, and not just to gamers the way the Warcraft franchise is, but none of them have succeeded as much as WoW has.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

So the other day while I was trolling the Star Wars: The Old Republic forums? Which I love to do, might I add? There was a topic titled ?Why do all mmo?s fail these days?? that I desperately wanted to read for the many laughs I was sure I would get from it. When I went to reply and add my own trolling behavior I couldn?t help but actually think of something productive to write, and I came up with the following.

When it comes to a Massive Multiplayer Online Game, you are not paying for the game 90% of the time. World of Warcraft is and will continue to be the winning formula for quite some time. Before WoW it was Everquest, before EQ it was Ultima Online. The reason that EQ became more popular than UO was because it had enough changes to the core formula to be interesting.

So let?s take a look at why WoW overtook EQ. The first thing we must realize is that EQ was already on it?s way out when WoW was released. However even that doesn?t explain the total destruction that WoW did to EQ. So let?s look at some screenshots from both games.

The interface for each game doesn?t differ from the other by any outstanding feature. The gameplay really isn?t THAT different from each other either. So that leaves? Graphics? If that was the case, then Vanguard: Saga of Heroes would?ve dominated WoW. Newbie friendliness? Possibly but I don?t see that being the underlying cause.

When a new game is released that lacks TRUE innovation over its predecessor it will ?fail?. See Rift? All the rage for a month, until people realized that those tiny additions weren?t enough to keep their attention. This is attributed often to ?my friends play WoW so why would I start over?, but it?s my firm belief that it goes even deeper than that.

WoW wins, because it is Warcraft? There were multiple single player games before it came out, with a single well written story amongst them all. Whenever you watch a movie or an anime you often find at the end of the movie, tv show, or anime that you wish the story continued. You wish that you could find out what happened afterwards. World of Warcraft, is simply a game that CATERS to that need on a massive scale. Many people don?t even need to know all the past if you have enough help understanding the present, which is why friends will still play WoW even if they haven?t played Warcraft 1, 2, or 3.

There hasn?t been a single MMO release (to my knowledge), since WoW, that has the following criteria.

1. A storyline that has been given to players via single player games, which allows them to complete it at their own pace, without losing any of the experience. This way they can gain a understanding and love for the story and want to be part of it at a massive level.

That being said, if a MMO is going to succeed then there has to be a reason for us to care.

What do you guys think about the current Generation MMO'S?

I don't even know where to start with this. Since you're such an advocate of trolling, I half suspect that's what you're up to here.

UO was never the "winning formula" for MMOs. It was the only formula. It has virtually no imitators whatsoever. Everquest did not "overtake it" and "make changes to the core formula". One is a sandbox MMO in which you can be a fucking apprentice shoemaker. The other is the same loot and level treadmill we've been playing for the last decade. They couldn't be more dissimilar if they were in different genres.

EQ was not "on its way out" when WoW was released. It remains active to this day.

You don't see "friendliness" as a reason WoW eclipsed the ABSURDLY DRACONIAN EQ, hm? That's...I don't know what to say about that. Wait, I do know. "That is absurd".

No MMO since WoW had a significant story line they could draw on? That's a pity. If only Lord of the Rings Online had some kind of established story line they could have used to lure people in. Or Warhammer...no history there whatsoever!

Rift did not "fail". It has roughly 500K subscribers and is making Trion a fat monthly profit. This bizarre perception that the "failure" point for MMOs is < 10,000,000 subscribers is ludicrous. There are a lot of MMOs out there because they are all making money.

I think the current generations of MMO is stagnant. But you never actually discussed stagnation in the industry, despite it being 1/2 of your title. It stagnated because WoW's improbable success inspired a frenzy of imitators. Unfortunately, WoW's success was less mechanical and more a function of Blizzard bringing accessibility and marketing push to a genre that had previously enjoyed little of either. And once it achieved a certain crucial momentum, the money and attention they could lavish on it was second to none, making it easy for them to cuff away competitors by cannibalizing their ideas and squashing their troubled launches with expansions and content patches.

 

[Fishyash]

But what happened to downtime? There was never as much happening in Orgrimmar and Stormwind as there was in Dalaran. All the new zones were seperated, so one couldn't fly around the new zones without constantly teleporting back to Org/SW every 30 minutes. Questing was good, but doesn't last long. There was no need to farm for gear, epic flying mounts were easy to get, there was simply nothing to do.

And that is what I think is the problem, the lack of things to do in downtime, where there is little innovation. Rift failed because nothing was added there, as well as being fairly... not amazing. And unless The Old Republic fixes this, it will go the same way.

/Rant over.

I would agree. In fact there were plenty of things they wanted to do that would probably contribute to 'downtime' but was canned from the game, like path of the titans. What happened to that?

Also, it's almost like they are rushing things. Their major content patches seem a bit anemic, 4.1? No raids, just some redone heroics with some dailies. That's just an example though... honestly raids should be coming out every major content patch. I bet lots of people were dissapointed when they expected firelands to be out in 4.1, and instead just got very bored when blizzard decided it would pushed back.

Also something rather suprising, firelands getting cleared in one day. Not by just one guild either. I think the uptime was also lacking a little bit, even compared to wotlk.

 

[EmperorSubcutaneous]

Yeah, pretty much what everyone else has said. Warhammer, Lord of the Rings, Final Fantasy, and others all have a strong foundation and fan following, but none of their MMOs ever did as well as WoW. Why?

Well, first of all, WoW was quite different from EQ. It was much, much more casual friendly, and you could level up by questing solo rather than moving from zone to zone grinding endless mobs in a party containing a tank, healer, etc.

Additionally, it got lucky. It snuck into the market at the exact moment when the internet and games in general were becoming mainstream rather than just something for nerds, and because it was so comparatively casual-friendly, it snagged a lot of people who wouldn't have been interested otherwise.

Then those players started convincing their friends to play. And they convinced their friends. And word spread, and the media paid attention, and eventually WoW became a cultural phenomenon. That's the reason it remains popular, you know: it was most people's first MMO, and their friends still play it. People want to stay where their friends are, and your first MMO is pretty much always the one you get most attached to.

Until WoW, people believed that 500k was the maximum number of potential players you could hope for if you made an MMO. Any MMO that reached that number was considered a solid success. Currently, the vast majority of MMOs have between 100k and 500k subscribers; it's pretty much only WoW and a small handful of Korean MMOs that are over the 1 million mark (not counting free-to-play games, because they're too hard to keep track of). You can't measure an MMO's success by comparing its subscriber numbers to WoW's, because WoW destroys the curve.

Rift is the only MMO to have come out since WoW that had an acceptable launch, and it's still doing pretty well, but people are definitely getting tired of the standard WoW formula that various companies have been copying and (ideally) improving on for the past seven years. SWTOR doesn't honestly stand much of a chance of "dethroning" WoW, since the general consensus is that if you're bored of current MMOs, you won't find it to be particularly special. However, if you're still happy with the genre as it is now, you'll find it to be one of the better ones out there.

Sandbox MMOs like Ultima Online have never been anywhere near as popular as the themepark MMOs, because they require a lot more work from the player to be enjoyable. EVE is the only one that has managed to make it big in the sandbox world.

Archeage is another sandbox MMO that's coming out soon, which you might like, but like I said, sandbox MMOs will always be a niche subgenre.

My money remains on Guild Wars 2 making the biggest splash. They seem to be the only ones who actually looked critically at the MMO formula and are attempting to improve on it.

 

[lacktheknack]

Because they're really really really really really really really really really expensive to maintain.

If it doesn't take the world by storm (and most games don't, even good ones), then it's not going to be able to maintain its own cost.

 

[4173]

I think what actually matters in mmos, and possibly to other games/media, is the downtime. The uptime - the peaks in the graph of engagement, be it raids or rifts or whatever - is what people remember, but it isn't what people do most of the time. It is the downtime, the troughs of the graph of engagement, that matters.

Here's my experience and justification; I used to play wow. Since a month after The Burning Crusade, I've played through that, Wrath of the Lich King, and a month of Cataclysm before I quit. Wrath of the Lich King from the experience of people I've talked to, was a pretty lame expansion, but people kept playing through it. Cataclysm, was pretty awesome when it came out but many people quit quickly. Why is that? The hope that Cata would be different, but under it all it was the same thing? I don't think so, people wouldn't of stuck through WotLK for that. Cataclysm promised to be like vanilla wow, but failed? No, it was far better than vanilla, nostalgia glasses removed. QQ about classes being nerfed changed? True for some, but it wouldn't cause the quitting on the scale it happened. So what is it?

Cataclysm is superior to WotLK in almost all respects. Music, graphics, raids (apart from Ulduar, WotLK raids were pretty bad), questing, all of these were greatly improved in Cata. PvP is debatable, but I didn't really do player-vs-player, so I'm not going to go into that. Uptime wise, Cataclysm dwarfs WotLK. But what happened to downtime? There was never as much happening in Orgrimmar and Stormwind as there was in Dalaran. All the new zones were seperated, so one couldn't fly around the new zones without constantly teleporting back to Org/SW every 30 minutes. Questing was good, but doesn't last long. There was no need to farm for gear, epic flying mounts were easy to get, there was simply nothing to do.

And that is what I think is the problem, the lack of things to do in downtime, where there is little innovation. Rift failed because nothing was added there, as well as being fairly... not amazing. And unless The Old Republic fixes this, it will go the same way.

/Rant over.

I think you're onto it. I quit when I was pretty much at archeology or nothing. I liked the archeology just fine, but when my spots are something like Felwood, Tanaris and Loch Modan it saps the will to continue. Too much downtime within my downtime activity.

 

[WaruTaru]

Yeah, pretty much what everyone else has said. Warhammer, Lord of the Rings, Final Fantasy, and others all have a strong foundation and fan following, but none of their MMOs ever did as well as WoW. Why?

Well, first of all, WoW was quite different from EQ. It was much, much more casual friendly, and you could level up by questing solo rather than moving from zone to zone grinding endless mobs in a party containing a tank, healer, etc.

Additionally, it got lucky. It snuck into the market at the exact moment when the internet and games in general were becoming mainstream rather than just something for nerds, and because it was so comparatively casual-friendly, it snagged a lot of people who wouldn't have been interested otherwise.

Then those players started convincing their friends to play. And they convinced their friends. And word spread, and the media paid attention, and eventually WoW became a cultural phenomenon. That's the reason it remains popular, you know: it was most people's first MMO, and their friends still play it. People want to stay where their friends are, and your first MMO is pretty much always the one you get most attached to.

Until WoW, people believed that 500k was the maximum number of potential players you could hope for if you made an MMO. Any MMO that reached that number was considered a solid success. Currently, the vast majority of MMOs have between 100k and 500k subscribers; it's pretty much only WoW and a small handful of Korean MMOs that are over the 1 million mark (not counting free-to-play games, because they're too hard to keep track of). You can't measure an MMO's success by comparing its subscriber numbers to WoW's, because WoW destroys the curve.

Rift is the only MMO to have come out since WoW that had an acceptable launch, and it's still doing pretty well, but people are definitely getting tired of the standard WoW formula that various companies have been copying and (ideally) improving on for the past seven years. SWTOR doesn't honestly stand much of a chance of "dethroning" WoW, since the general consensus is that if you're bored of current MMOs, you won't find it to be particularly special. However, if you're still happy with the genre as it is now, you'll find it to be one of the better ones out there.

Sandbox MMOs like Ultima Online have never been anywhere near as popular as the themepark MMOs, because they require a lot more work from the player to be enjoyable. EVE is the only one that has managed to make it big in the sandbox world.

Archeage is another sandbox MMO that's coming out soon, which you might like, but like I said, sandbox MMOs will always be a niche subgenre.

My money remains on Guild Wars 2 making the biggest splash. They seem to be the only ones who actually looked critically at the MMO formula and are attempting to improve on it.

Was gonna type up a long post, but that ^ sums it up nicely.

Adding to the above, despite book-to-film-to-game franchise having a large following, not everyone who read the books or watched the movie of a certain franchise pick up the game. Conversely, Warcraft started as a game, and its easier to jump from one game to another compared to making the jump from book/film to game. Not everyone who read the book or watch the film is a gamer.

 

[PerpetualGamer]

Adding to the above, despite book-to-film-to-game franchise having a large following, not everyone who read the books or watched the movie of a certain franchise pick up the game. Conversely, Warcraft started as a game, and its easier to jump from one game to another compared to making the jump from book/film to game. Not everyone who read the book or watch the film is a gamer.

That is my point in that regards. As for the other information provided, particularly the arguments that EQ was WAY Different than UO and that WoW was way different from EQ...

OBVIOUSLY EQ was way different, I even said that, which is why it forced UO into the background. On a side note, UO was the winning formula because... thats what a MMORPG was supposed to be at the time... A sandbox, Pen and Paper kinda thing...

WoW was not THAT Different from EQ if you remove the user friendliness, and yes I will accept that user friendliness is a big part of a games success but it's not the primary factor is my point. Every Perfect World clone and it's dog is way more user friendly than wow.... (spam skill a until dead, when you learn skill b.. .spam that instead). But they aren't as fun as WoW. When I say success vs failure, I'm referring to ... The "hype" feature of a game. People still refer to WoW on an almost daily basis, I have not seen that level of popularity with rift... or any other MMO... Infact the only time anyone ever mentions those to me is when I say "MMO blah blah fail blah". When I ask my friends what mmo they play, its either WoW, or none. Very very rarely is it anything else.

 

[krazykidd]

Hey hey ! What about eve online ? That has quite a big player base , and is still going strong ( plus a few scandales can never hurt ) .

 

[Sixcess]

WoW is a freak anomaly - a never to be repeated mega-hit. Problem is, most of the industry seems blind to that fact.

MMOs 'fail' because developers and publishers (and players) alike can't see past the huge pile of money Blizzard sits on. They set out to challenge WoW or at least get WoW numbers, and inveitably they 'fail' and announce server mergers and/or changes to the payment model. Meanwhile the casual MMO crowd jump on each new release then immediatly abandon it when they realise they didn't get in on the launch of the next WoW, they just played an MMO. Then the next new release comes along and it happens all over again.

MMO developers and publishers need to just accept that nothing in the foreseeable future will beat WoW, and then they need to stop trying and just make games that a realistic number of people will find different enough from WoW to enjoy for an extended period of time. As it stands it's as if FPS developers launched every title with the expectation that their game would beat CoD, and consider them failures if they didn't.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

WoW is a freak anomaly - a never to be repeated mega-hit. Problem is, most of the industry seems blind to that fact.

MMOs 'fail' because developers and publishers (and players) alike can't see past the huge pile of money Blizzard sits on. They set out to challenge WoW or at least get WoW numbers, and inveitably they 'fail' and announce server mergers and/or changes to the payment model. Meanwhile the casual MMO crowd jump on each new release then immediatly abandon it when they realise they didn't get in on the launch of the next WoW, they just played an MMO. Then the next new release comes along and it happens all over again.

MMO developers and publishers need to just accept that nothing in the foreseeable future will beat WoW, and then they need to stop trying and just make games that a realistic number of people will find different enough from WoW to enjoy for an extended period of time. As it stands it's as if FPS developers launched every title with the expectation that their game would beat CoD, and consider them failures if they didn't.

It's really only us talking heads on internet forums that consider them failures. Even games viewed as CATASTROPHIC failures, like Warhammer Online, are still profitable. Games like Rift, which everyone seems to view as a failure in here because it wasn't WoW 2, are making money hand over fist.

So I'm guessing it's not so much the developers that need to change their expectations for these games. It's the fans.

 

[Sixcess]

It's really only us talking heads on internet forums that consider them failures. Even games viewed as CATASTROPHIC failures, like Warhammer Online, are still profitable. Games like Rift, which everyone seems to view as a failure in here because it wasn't WoW 2, are making money hand over fist.

True. I did touch on that a bit but probably wasn't clear enough. The part of the MMO crowd that migrates from one new release to another en masse (i.e. the ones that say "my guild is moving to Rift/TOR/whatever") they are, in many cases, looking for the next big thing and will judge those games based on population.

I've spent a lot of time on Fallen Earth and one of the most commonly asked newbie questions in the help channel is "how many people play this game?" The City of Heroes forumites frequently try to deduce how many paying subscribers the game has based on the parent company's quarterly figures. Why? Because people like being part of something big perhaps, and/or because a 'big' game is percieved to be safer from cancellation.

So yeah, players do equate numbers with success, and probably shouldn't, but so do devs and publishers. You can be sure EA will shout TOR's pre-orders numbers from the rooftops, just as you can be equally sure that within 3 to 6 months at most they'll stop talking numbers about how many people are actually playing.

So I'm guessing it's not so much the developers that need to change their expectations for these games. It's the fans.

I'd say both.

 

[PerpetualGamer]

It's really only us talking heads on internet forums that consider them failures. Even games viewed as CATASTROPHIC failures, like Warhammer Online, are still profitable. Games like Rift, which everyone seems to view as a failure in here because it wasn't WoW 2, are making money hand over fist.

So I'm guessing it's not so much the developers that need to change their expectations for these games. It's the fans.

I think that the metric of "profit" shouldn't be used to measure the success of something meant to entertain, obviously from a investor standpoint, almost every mmo that turns a profit is a success. But a game is about fun. We should remember that we need to measure a game on that metric alone, none of these other metrics. just my thought.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

I think that the metric of "profit" shouldn't be used to measure the success of something meant to entertain, obviously from a investor standpoint, almost every mmo that turns a profit is a success. But a game is about fun. We should remember that we need to measure a game on that metric alone, none of these other metrics. just my thought.

What the hell kind of metric is "fun"? It's completely subjective.