I played AO for just over 2 years the cancelled, I still have fond memmories and like alot of things that were done in that game. Interesting thing is I do have GW1 and occationally I will play. I probably would have done that with AO too but for the sub. I think over time as the game gets old it just isn't worth it to me to keep paying a sub just for the permanence the MMO would have to offer something more then maintance. Never tried a lifetime membership I suppose it would have the same effect as GW1 has on me. I guess to some extent the sub model makes me feel obligated to play all the time so when I stop doing that I let the game go.
What gives you that sense of permanence OP? Is it anything qualifiable?
In general, anything that pulls data from how the game was played in the past to shape its future. There are some specific mechanics that help (monuments, items with history, player-constructed infrastructure), but there are subtler, hard-quantify qualities that emerge from a long history of patches and interation - the eternal beta that gives a sort of organic feel that rises from a feedback loop.
Now, I'm not saying that old games > new games. There's a fine line between gathering history and gathering rust. But let me take three veteran games I've played and make a couple of comments:
UO: very organic feel from the weight of different teams and different layers of history; player housing, items and books all contribute to a rich sense in-game sense of history - when a house falls, it's like an archeological dig. Unfortunately, the game has really struggled to stay technologically relevent and has no clear path into the future as anything but a museum to a bygone era.
WoW: some lament the polishing of sharp edges and old zones can feel like ghost towns, but achievements have made characters feel like miniature catalogues of history and I'm impressed by the way the mechanics are structured to support longevity. However, lore-wise, it's still a very much top-down written game - not a lot bubbles up from the players and I think cataclysm suffered from this. Although it certainly made the revamped zones more efficient and advanced the story a chapter, when I played through them, I rarely encountered anything that made me feel the footsteps of the 10 million players before me.
Eve: I'm not a PvPer - in fact I avoid it like the plague, but I simply can't deny the value that this game draws from the accumulated history of drama. A video of the slow evolution of territorial control is mesmerizing. This is a game that really feels like data and news are as much cornstones of its existance as the code of the game itself. (*grumbles quietly about people now assuming that only PvP can offer this*)
The problem with retention is that these games are themeparks. There's only so many rides to ride and after you've ridden them each a dozen times, you end up dancing naked on a ledge by the mailbox in ironforge.
What the world needs is a AAA sandbox done right. One where there is no cutscenes or storyline to follow because what you do IS the story. One where players have the proper mechanics and resources to drive their own agendas to whatever ends they desire. That's where retention is. Where one can leave their mark and either be sung or forgotten.
Do I really care if a music band I enjoyed before is no longer together?
Not really, there are other musicians out there.
Do I really care if a movie/tv show ends?
Not really.
Why should MMOs be different?
I'll play what I find fun with my friends and move on.
That's the problem. Dev's are designing MMO's for the single player/coop crowd who likes story, fast, fun, simple gaming and quickly "moves on".
MMORPG's, the original ones, were designed as long-term persistent worlds. Your character lived in the world as much as journeyed through it. There definitely is a demographic for this. Most wondrous type of gaming I have ever experienced.
I see that posted a lot here, but when asked for data to support that none ever shows up.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein "Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
Originally posted by lizardbones If I was still playing WoW, I would have never played HalfLife2 or Portal. I would never have played Minecraft and I wouldn't now be playing The Walking Dead.
That makes zero sense.
The only kind of games that a subscription MMO would keep others from playing is *other* subscription MMOs. I don't know many people that didn't have time for other games fit around their MMO schedule, and the ones that *only* played WoW were total freaks, because they had all the time in the world ot play other games - they just didn't, because they were complete lunatics.
You need to replace the word 'forever' for 'years'. No game is gonna last that long, but by all means, they should last us years at a time like they used to.
I have a limited amount of time for video games. It doesn't matter why. It would not be fun to spend 15 minutes per night in game. It would also not be fun to spend only one night a week playing WoW or any other MMORPG. If time is a limited resource, where it is spent matters. It can be spent divided up among different games or it can be spent on a single game at a time. If spending it on one game at a time offers the most fun per week or month, it doesn't make sense to never move on to another game. The games will become repetitive.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
Do I really care if a music band I enjoyed before is no longer together?
Not really, there are other musicians out there.
Do I really care if a movie/tv show ends?
Not really.
Why should MMOs be different?
I'll play what I find fun with my friends and move on.
I still listen to a lot of the music I grew up on, regardless if the band is still together or not.
Same with Movies and TV shows, I own sets of my favorite TV shows and movies and continue to watch them long after the shows have ended or the movie has come and gone from theatres.
The difference is TV/Movies/Music is a passive entertainment with nothing vested into it other than time. An MMO has something you build from scratch, you develop a character into something much more than it was at the start. You become part of a community, friends are made. When you move to a new MMO, you start from scratch.
When the Simpsons became crap and I stopped watching new episodes, and started watching a lot more Family Guy I never felt like I was starting over. It had a completely different sense then starting a new MMO.
I feel like MMOs in this regard are more relatable to hobbies. I could play golf for a year, then quit, and play basketball for year, then baseball, so on and so forth, but doing this I will never really excel at one. I would much rather just stick with golf and become a scratch golfer. I feel the same way about my MMOs. Of course there are people who would like to be a jack of all trades, it’s all preference, like most things.
I see that posted a lot here, but when asked for data to support that none ever shows up.
We're all working with our own honest desires, anecdotes and reading the tea leaves of what statistics do find their way into public. It's completely fair to cast doubt over how representative we are of the wider potential market and to believe that publishers are better at this than we armchair analysts, but I think it's unfair to stop a forum discussion cold until there is a market research report in hand.
I was recently struck by a comment in another thread that players should, when they reach the "end" of an MMO, simply move on to another game. "Follow the fun" is normally a rather straight-forward and obvious suggestion (I may have even tossed it out myself once or twice), but this time I had a strong visceral reaction to the idea - it seemed horribly, horribly wrong as a suggestion for an MMO. Although I don't always come out and say it, in the back of my mind, I feel that MMOs should aspire the hold their players for a lifetime, that they should aspire to still be online a hundred years from now, although they might not bare much resemblence to their 1.0 state.
I am not still playing the first MMO I ever played. Or the second. But the first game I ever played is still online, still running and in the back of my mind, I keep expecting that someday I'll revisit it and look for old footprints of the past. And even as I wander, I still keep expecting that I will find a game that I will play for the rest of my life. You see, to me, what really differentiates an MMO from an ordinary video game is not massively, it's not even the multiplayer - it's the permanence. It's the database I care about in the end, that sense that my gameplay is a part of contributing data to something that will last forever.
In terms of moment-to-moment fun, suitability to my playstyle interests or even graphics quality, there are probably better games out there than the ones I'm currently playing. But what these new ambitious games pouring out often lack is that sense that their world is sustainable - that the game will still be online and actively evolving in a year, in five years, in ten years.
So ... Is the sense of permanence an important consideration in your choice of MMOs? Or am I just being a little eccentric?
No. I don't need any permanence.
ANY games, even with a huge budget, has limited content. I am NOT in favor of playing the same thing forever. Some repetition is ok but everything gets old. It is in human nature that we want new stuff.
And there is no fundamental reason, except a personal preference, why a MMORPG needs to last forever.
I am more in favor of game hopping, as long as the game is fun. And as far as guild/friends are concerned, they can hop with me, or I can make new friends. In fact, a service like Battlenet is ideal since you keep your friends across games.
Permanence need not be interpreted as forever, just a good MMORPG maybe ought to have a steady, profitable 6 to 8 year run. The length of time makes players' investments into their characters worthwhile. Perhaps this is how MMORPG's are so different than single player or coop games.
I wonder, maybe, if MMORPG's are not for the game-hopping folks. Maybe single player or coop is more down their alley.
6-8 years? Nah. A few months is a LONG time in gaming. I won't even play WOW for 8 years.
And why make the distinction between MMORPG & co-op RPG? If the game is fun, i don't see a reason why i should not play it for a while. Secondly, the play style of MANY MMORPGs are exactly the same as a co-op action RPG like Diablo 3. You wait in a city (lobby) for your dungeon/raid to pop.
And what is worthwhile is for each individual player to decide. Who says i need years to feel leveling to be worthwhile?
I see no fundamental reason why a player should not play and enjoy a MMO for a few months, or even a few weeks. In fact, I have been doing that.
Originally posted by maplestone Originally posted by LoktofeitI see that posted a lot here, but when asked for data to support that none ever shows up.
We're all working with our own honest desires, anecdotes and reading the tea leaves of what statistics do find their way into public. It's completely fair to cast doubt over how representative we are of the wider potential market and to believe that publishers are better at this than we armchair analysts, but I think it's unfair to stop a forum discussion cold until there is a market research report in hand.
If it requires a AAA Sandbox game to prove that a AAA Sandbox game is viable, and there is currently no financial reason for any developer to create a AAA Sandbox game, then...there is no 'then'. It just stops right there. It doesn't matter if a AAA Sandbox game would prove something because it'll never happen without that initial something to say it can be done.
It applies to permanence as well. If there is no financial incentive to create a game with more permanence, then it won't happen. It doesn't matter if creating a game with more permanence would prove that it's a good idea, there has to be some reason to think that's true before it happens. Something that's quantifiable to investors and developers. We know what the incentive is for players to have permanence in games, but what's the qualitative and quantitative incentive for developers?
Moving beyond that, I don't know that older games had permanence so much as they had little competition and a lot of repetition. People didn't jump games because there were no games to jump to, and there weren't a bunch of games imminent. Now, shortly after a game releases, there's another game available, and if there's not, there's always news of a game that's going to be available soon. This is a new environment for MMORPG. When SWToR released, TSW was in the pipeline. TSW has released and GW2 is in the pipeline. This doesn't even take into consideration all the single player and multiplayer coop games. So it would be better to make games with a quality of permanence, it just may not be as viable now as it used to be.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
ANY games, even with a huge budget, has limited content. I am NOT in favor of playing the same thing forever. Some repetition is ok but everything gets old. It is in human nature that we want new stuff.
I would point out that major league baseball has been offering the same game for over a century.
ANY games, even with a huge budget, has limited content. I am NOT in favor of playing the same thing forever. Some repetition is ok but everything gets old. It is in human nature that we want new stuff.
I would point out that major league baseball has been offering the same game for over a century.
You don't see me playing major league baseball. Do you watch only your fav movie forever?
ANY games, even with a huge budget, has limited content. I am NOT in favor of playing the same thing forever. Some repetition is ok but everything gets old. It is in human nature that we want new stuff.
I would point out that major league baseball has been offering the same game for over a century.
Yes and people have been playing MMO's for years as well. UO, EQ for sure but WoW, EQ2, CoH, Eve, VG... many many games, both old and new people have been playing for years.
However like baseball very very few people play them every day for hours upon hours for years upon years. Most people play 1-2 days a week for a season, then again the next season...
IMO I honestly do not think most people every played MMO's for years and years, even old games, it was always only a small percentage. Millions of people tried EQ, but it capped out at 450k at it's peak, therefore we can state that most people did not like it/or prefered not to play it for years. Same with WoW, probably 100 million have played it, and it capped at 12 milllion with only 30% going past level 10, therefore once again either most didn't like it, or prefered not to play it for years.
IMO nothing has changed that way, most simply did not play for years, only a very few did. I do not think most people every got to end game in EQ and I don't think most people have ever gotten to end game in WoW.
Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it is bad.
I'll never understand how gamers can stick with a single title, non-stop, for years.
A scoop of chocolate is always better than a scoop of vanilla, but if all I've had for months and months is chocolate, I'd kill for some vanilla. If you don't, you must have burned out your taste buds and don't even realize it. I'm guessing many longtime WoW players (as an example of a game with "permanence") can't even tell they're eating ice cream anymore. They just keep shoveling cold goop into their mouths by reflex.
Originally posted by ReallyNow10 Originally posted by nariusseldonOriginally posted by ReallyNow10
Permanence need not be interpreted as forever, just a good MMORPG maybe ought to have a steady, profitable 6 to 8 year run. The length of time makes players' investments into their characters worthwhile. Perhaps this is how MMORPG's are so different than single player or coop games.I wonder, maybe, if MMORPG's are not for the game-hopping folks. Maybe single player or coop is more down their alley.6-8 years? Nah. A few months is a LONG time in gaming. I won't even play WOW for 8 years.And why make the distinction between MMORPG & co-op RPG? If the game is fun, i don't see a reason why i should not play it for a while. Secondly, the play style of MANY MMORPGs are exactly the same as a co-op action RPG like Diablo 3. You wait in a city (lobby) for your dungeon/raid to pop.And what is worthwhile is for each individual player to decide. Who says i need years to feel leveling to be worthwhile?I see no fundamental reason why a player should not play and enjoy a MMO for a few months, or even a few weeks. In fact, I have been doing that.It ain't the same. Now, if short term casual gaming is your thing, fine. No one is keeping you from that, and in fact most games cater to players like yourself.
But, for folks who want a deeper, more immersive experience, with longer term social bonding, the MMORPG as a world setting is the way to go. This sort of game is needed... again.
(Analogy) In a town full of burger joints, what's wrong with adding in a fine dining restaurant? Folks who want a quick burger can still hit a burger joint; no one is forcing them to the table at the fine dining restaurant.
Restaurants, even fine dining establishments suffer from the some of the same issues that video games do. First of all, there has to be interest for a particular type of restaurant in a particular area in order to get funding for the restaurant. The current nonexistence of something doesn't establish anything about that something except that it doesn't exist.
If there is no fine dining establishment, it doesn't mean there's a market for it, and it doesn't mean that it wouldn't be successful in that market. It just means it's not currently there.
We're back to quantifying the need for such a place first. "It doesn't currently exist" doesn't do it.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
"From community comes a meaningful place in a virtual world. Most games have pretty "volatile" communities anymore. In addition, themeparks get their names for a reason. They are "rides". Sooner or later you either gotta get off the ride, or vomit. Both of which happen in these forums often "
This has to be the best way I've seen it put. Community is everything - and that is not to say you have to be someone active on forums or chat, but it's what the player base as a whole feels, reacts and behaves.
Personally, I am one of those old dusty crones still playing EverQuest 1. Sure I wander away for months at a time to play other MMOs but I keep going back to EQ. Why? Nostalgia I think. A great base game. But mostly chasing down the memories of what made me fall in love with MMO's. EQ wasn't my first, but it will always be my favorite.
That said, I also recognize I am chasing down a memory of the past. Communities have changed over the years. In the 'old' days of MMO's there were only a handful of games to play, and the communities were darn near religious about guarding their game vs another. I remember when WOW emerged, guildies were almost considered traitors for jumping ship. Guilds were families, and servers were extended families. Most games have such a high turn over now, as another poster in this thread said - a lot of people are considered veterans after paying their first sub fee. I think what I miss is that longevity. Knowing who the server leaders were - knowing who the guilds to aspire towards were, who to run and hide from, who were the trolls and who were the gold farmers. Now, it's just a bunch of random names you see for a few days and then become new names.
So yes, I do miss the 'permanence' of it all. I wish I could find that golden era again, but I know it will never happen.
If I was still playing WoW, I would have never played HalfLife2 or Portal. I would never have played Minecraft and I wouldn't now be playing The Walking Dead.
That makes zero sense.
The only kind of games that a subscription MMO would keep others from playing is *other* subscription MMOs. I don't know many people that didn't have time for other games fit around their MMO schedule, and the ones that *only* played WoW were total freaks, because they had all the time in the world ot play other games - they just didn't, because they were complete lunatics.
You need to replace the word 'forever' for 'years'. No game is gonna last that long, but by all means, they should last us years at a time like they used to.
When you can play 5-10 hours per week it makes sense. MMOs are extremely time consuming even games which are supposed to be casual are super time consuming compared to other games. While I was playing MMOs, I used to play more hours per week (way more- probably 15-20 hours a week) and I didn't play other games. Ever since I stopped playing MMOs I have played tons of games and I am actually having a lot more fun.
MMOs can never provide me with the content that buying new games can. Worst thing is that MMOs are not so much fun as they are addictive.
Mission in life: Vanquish all MMORPG.com trolls - especially TESO, WOW and GW2 trolls.
It ain't the same. Now, if short term casual gaming is your thing, fine. No one is keeping you from that, and in fact most games cater to players like yourself.
But, for folks who want a deeper, more immersive experience, with longer term social bonding, the MMORPG as a world setting is the way to go. This sort of game is needed... again.
Longer != deeper
Longer != more immersive.
SKYRIM is pretty immersive .. no one is going to play it for years.
In fact, i would play MANY MMOs on the market today. However, none of which i will play for more than a few month (may be at most a year), except WOW. WOW is phenomenal holding my attention for more a few years. I don't expect to play it much more though.
"From community comes a meaningful place in a virtual world. Most games have pretty "volatile" communities anymore. In addition, themeparks get their names for a reason. They are "rides". Sooner or later you either gotta get off the ride, or vomit. Both of which happen in these forums often "
This has to be the best way I've seen it put. Community is everything - and that is not to say you have to be someone active on forums or chat, but it's what the player base as a whole feels, reacts and behaves.
Personally, I am one of those old dusty crones still playing EverQuest 1. Sure I wander away for months at a time to play other MMOs but I keep going back to EQ. Why? Nostalgia I think. A great base game. But mostly chasing down the memories of what made me fall in love with MMO's. EQ wasn't my first, but it will always be my favorite.
That said, I also recognize I am chasing down a memory of the past. Communities have changed over the years. In the 'old' days of MMO's there were only a handful of games to play, and the communities were darn near religious about guarding their game vs another. I remember when WOW emerged, guildies were almost considered traitors for jumping ship. Guilds were families, and servers were extended families. Most games have such a high turn over now, as another poster in this thread said - a lot of people are considered veterans after paying their first sub fee. I think what I miss is that longevity. Knowing who the server leaders were - knowing who the guilds to aspire towards were, who to run and hide from, who were the trolls and who were the gold farmers. Now, it's just a bunch of random names you see for a few days and then become new names.
So yes, I do miss the 'permanence' of it all. I wish I could find that golden era again, but I know it will never happen.
Community is not a reason (for me) to hold onto a boring game. Plus, community is not game dependent. Most of my WOW friends are playing Diablo 3 now. No one says you can't play with the same people in more than 1 game.
I never said community was an end all be all. What I was stating is what a community is NOW compared to 10 years ago are two very different things.
For me, Community is important. I play MMOs for the social interaction. If I wanted an amazing submersive game play - I'll go play a single player game - they are designed precisely to make you the main focus. MMOs are about interaction with others within a game.
Sadly, more and more it's become a game of soloers who can chat, trade and auction to one another - and not much more.
I see that posted a lot here, but when asked for data to support that none ever shows up.
We're all working with our own honest desires, anecdotes and reading the tea leaves of what statistics do find their way into public. It's completely fair to cast doubt over how representative we are of the wider potential market and to believe that publishers are better at this than we armchair analysts, but I think it's unfair to stop a forum discussion cold until there is a market research report in hand.
Now that's a crazy conclusion to derive from my statement, which was nothing more than pointing out it was stated as fact ( "There definitely is a demographic for this." ) and not saying he was wrong or that it shouldn't be suggested. I'm all for permanence in an MMO. I'm all for players making their marks. I'm all for designing an MMo with the intent of being around... say... 10, 20 or even 30 years later. Why? Because an MMO can be a virtual community, and virtual communities are where most of the current generation and - for the sake of keeping in touch with them - their parents are living right now. People often know more about the others in their virtual community than they do about the people that live on their own block.
If an MMO sets out to be a virtual community, the devs, whether they realize it or not, are setting out to build something to last decades. Ten years from now I can easily see internet communities being a crazy crossbreed of UO, EQ2 and Facebook.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein "Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
Community is not a reason (for me) to hold onto a boring game. Plus, community is not game dependent. Most of my WOW friends are playing Diablo 3 now. No one says you can't play with the same people in more than 1 game.
Which is a good example of the changes in community type. Community isn't just who you know, its who you don't know. For those who remember say...Vanilla WoW, the difference is night and day. When WoW was new, the same people were around. You knew who the top guilds were, top raid leaders, other players you could either mentor or protege. You heard of people by word of mouth, not from reading leaders boards or forum posts.
Its not so different from living in the real world, if, for example, you lived in the same community for many years. You end up knowing something about the guy at the end of the street, or maybe even meeting and becoming friends.
I'm not suggesting anybody play a game that is boring, far from it. I'm merely suggesting that moving on from game to game does not foster online communities, unless we consider (as you have mentioned) services that pull communites together in different ways, ala facebook, battlenet, steam, etc.
Maybe that is the future of online games: whatever developer can successfully foster a community around a variety of games, creating a higher form of permanence than mere "tracks in the sand" within a virtual world?
Now that's a crazy conclusion to derive from my statement, which was nothing more than pointing out it was stated as fact ( "There definitely is a demographic for this." ) and not saying he was wrong or that it shouldn't be suggested.
Fair enough. I had let myself overlook the hyperbole.
Sure that is a valid defense, generically, but it misses the point, MMO's by design (originally at least) were supposed to be something you found fun with your friends for a long period of time. Becuse they were world simulators with communities to build that provided fun beyond mere content. So the point is, if they are designed to appeal to a subscriber for a signficant amount of time, and they're not, then something is wrong. Either they are failing at their goal, or they've changed their goal with their respect towards their expectation of what the player is looking for, without actually coming out and saying it.
Your comment doesn't really stand up to that. If the first couple of bites of a piece of pizza tasted great but the taste turned to crap before you got to the end of the slice would you shrug it off and say "Well, I enjoyed the first few bites. I'll try another slice."?
Whoa, whoa. There are still people playing SWTOR, a year later. There are still people playing Everquest 1, 13 years later. There are still people playing Anarchy Online, as bad as the graphics are. There are still people playing UO, for goodness sake. By what criteria are you saying these games have failed in their design?
A. Clearly Evertquest and UO are older MMO's that built communities. They are the examples that prove the rule.
B. That SOME people still play SWTOR doesn't mean people in general are still playing. In fact given the drop in subs and incredibly huge server merges indicates a whole lot of people played for a bit and moved on.
C. A year is too short a time period to look at in the lifecycle of an MMO to determine if people are sticking around.
Ok, so EQ and UO have communities. What about DAOC? City of Heroes? LOTRO? DDO? Champions Online? GW1? All of those games have people who still love them and play them. With the possible exception of DDO, all of them have significant long-term, end-game play. I've heard of people who spend 9000 hours in GW1, that is clearly a long-term commitment.
Let's look at the recent and upcoming crop of MMOs, the ones supposedly designed with the casual player in mind. Rift - arguably more raid-centric than EQ. TERA - a political structure that lets players actually compete to see who runs the world. GW2 - designed from the ground up to make content viable, challenging and replayable from low-level to cap.
These aren't throwaway games any more than the elder crop is. No one can seriously believe the creators of these games expect people to play for 4 months and bail. I see much lamenting over the transitory nature of MMO games, but I'm hard-pressed to find any games that actually are transitory.
Comments
I played AO for just over 2 years the cancelled, I still have fond memmories and like alot of things that were done in that game. Interesting thing is I do have GW1 and occationally I will play. I probably would have done that with AO too but for the sub. I think over time as the game gets old it just isn't worth it to me to keep paying a sub just for the permanence the MMO would have to offer something more then maintance. Never tried a lifetime membership I suppose it would have the same effect as GW1 has on me. I guess to some extent the sub model makes me feel obligated to play all the time so when I stop doing that I let the game go.
In general, anything that pulls data from how the game was played in the past to shape its future. There are some specific mechanics that help (monuments, items with history, player-constructed infrastructure), but there are subtler, hard-quantify qualities that emerge from a long history of patches and interation - the eternal beta that gives a sort of organic feel that rises from a feedback loop.
Now, I'm not saying that old games > new games. There's a fine line between gathering history and gathering rust. But let me take three veteran games I've played and make a couple of comments:
UO: very organic feel from the weight of different teams and different layers of history; player housing, items and books all contribute to a rich sense in-game sense of history - when a house falls, it's like an archeological dig. Unfortunately, the game has really struggled to stay technologically relevent and has no clear path into the future as anything but a museum to a bygone era.
WoW: some lament the polishing of sharp edges and old zones can feel like ghost towns, but achievements have made characters feel like miniature catalogues of history and I'm impressed by the way the mechanics are structured to support longevity. However, lore-wise, it's still a very much top-down written game - not a lot bubbles up from the players and I think cataclysm suffered from this. Although it certainly made the revamped zones more efficient and advanced the story a chapter, when I played through them, I rarely encountered anything that made me feel the footsteps of the 10 million players before me.
Eve: I'm not a PvPer - in fact I avoid it like the plague, but I simply can't deny the value that this game draws from the accumulated history of drama. A video of the slow evolution of territorial control is mesmerizing. This is a game that really feels like data and news are as much cornstones of its existance as the code of the game itself. (*grumbles quietly about people now assuming that only PvP can offer this*)
The problem with retention is that these games are themeparks. There's only so many rides to ride and after you've ridden them each a dozen times, you end up dancing naked on a ledge by the mailbox in ironforge.
What the world needs is a AAA sandbox done right. One where there is no cutscenes or storyline to follow because what you do IS the story. One where players have the proper mechanics and resources to drive their own agendas to whatever ends they desire. That's where retention is. Where one can leave their mark and either be sung or forgotten.
I'm a unique and beautiful snowflake.
I see that posted a lot here, but when asked for data to support that none ever shows up.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
I have a limited amount of time for video games. It doesn't matter why. It would not be fun to spend 15 minutes per night in game. It would also not be fun to spend only one night a week playing WoW or any other MMORPG. If time is a limited resource, where it is spent matters. It can be spent divided up among different games or it can be spent on a single game at a time. If spending it on one game at a time offers the most fun per week or month, it doesn't make sense to never move on to another game. The games will become repetitive.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
We're all working with our own honest desires, anecdotes and reading the tea leaves of what statistics do find their way into public. It's completely fair to cast doubt over how representative we are of the wider potential market and to believe that publishers are better at this than we armchair analysts, but I think it's unfair to stop a forum discussion cold until there is a market research report in hand.
No. I don't need any permanence.
ANY games, even with a huge budget, has limited content. I am NOT in favor of playing the same thing forever. Some repetition is ok but everything gets old. It is in human nature that we want new stuff.
And there is no fundamental reason, except a personal preference, why a MMORPG needs to last forever.
I am more in favor of game hopping, as long as the game is fun. And as far as guild/friends are concerned, they can hop with me, or I can make new friends. In fact, a service like Battlenet is ideal since you keep your friends across games.
6-8 years? Nah. A few months is a LONG time in gaming. I won't even play WOW for 8 years.
And why make the distinction between MMORPG & co-op RPG? If the game is fun, i don't see a reason why i should not play it for a while. Secondly, the play style of MANY MMORPGs are exactly the same as a co-op action RPG like Diablo 3. You wait in a city (lobby) for your dungeon/raid to pop.
And what is worthwhile is for each individual player to decide. Who says i need years to feel leveling to be worthwhile?
I see no fundamental reason why a player should not play and enjoy a MMO for a few months, or even a few weeks. In fact, I have been doing that.
If it requires a AAA Sandbox game to prove that a AAA Sandbox game is viable, and there is currently no financial reason for any developer to create a AAA Sandbox game, then...there is no 'then'. It just stops right there. It doesn't matter if a AAA Sandbox game would prove something because it'll never happen without that initial something to say it can be done.
It applies to permanence as well. If there is no financial incentive to create a game with more permanence, then it won't happen. It doesn't matter if creating a game with more permanence would prove that it's a good idea, there has to be some reason to think that's true before it happens. Something that's quantifiable to investors and developers. We know what the incentive is for players to have permanence in games, but what's the qualitative and quantitative incentive for developers?
Moving beyond that, I don't know that older games had permanence so much as they had little competition and a lot of repetition. People didn't jump games because there were no games to jump to, and there weren't a bunch of games imminent. Now, shortly after a game releases, there's another game available, and if there's not, there's always news of a game that's going to be available soon. This is a new environment for MMORPG. When SWToR released, TSW was in the pipeline. TSW has released and GW2 is in the pipeline. This doesn't even take into consideration all the single player and multiplayer coop games. So it would be better to make games with a quality of permanence, it just may not be as viable now as it used to be.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
I would point out that major league baseball has been offering the same game for over a century.
You don't see me playing major league baseball. Do you watch only your fav movie forever?
Yes and people have been playing MMO's for years as well. UO, EQ for sure but WoW, EQ2, CoH, Eve, VG... many many games, both old and new people have been playing for years.
However like baseball very very few people play them every day for hours upon hours for years upon years. Most people play 1-2 days a week for a season, then again the next season...
IMO I honestly do not think most people every played MMO's for years and years, even old games, it was always only a small percentage. Millions of people tried EQ, but it capped out at 450k at it's peak, therefore we can state that most people did not like it/or prefered not to play it for years. Same with WoW, probably 100 million have played it, and it capped at 12 milllion with only 30% going past level 10, therefore once again either most didn't like it, or prefered not to play it for years.
IMO nothing has changed that way, most simply did not play for years, only a very few did. I do not think most people every got to end game in EQ and I don't think most people have ever gotten to end game in WoW.
I'm not telling you what to play.
I'll never understand how gamers can stick with a single title, non-stop, for years.
A scoop of chocolate is always better than a scoop of vanilla, but if all I've had for months and months is chocolate, I'd kill for some vanilla. If you don't, you must have burned out your taste buds and don't even realize it. I'm guessing many longtime WoW players (as an example of a game with "permanence") can't even tell they're eating ice cream anymore. They just keep shoveling cold goop into their mouths by reflex.
6-8 years? Nah. A few months is a LONG time in gaming. I won't even play WOW for 8 years. And why make the distinction between MMORPG & co-op RPG? If the game is fun, i don't see a reason why i should not play it for a while. Secondly, the play style of MANY MMORPGs are exactly the same as a co-op action RPG like Diablo 3. You wait in a city (lobby) for your dungeon/raid to pop. And what is worthwhile is for each individual player to decide. Who says i need years to feel leveling to be worthwhile? I see no fundamental reason why a player should not play and enjoy a MMO for a few months, or even a few weeks. In fact, I have been doing that.
It ain't the same. Now, if short term casual gaming is your thing, fine. No one is keeping you from that, and in fact most games cater to players like yourself.
But, for folks who want a deeper, more immersive experience, with longer term social bonding, the MMORPG as a world setting is the way to go. This sort of game is needed... again.
(Analogy) In a town full of burger joints, what's wrong with adding in a fine dining restaurant? Folks who want a quick burger can still hit a burger joint; no one is forcing them to the table at the fine dining restaurant.
Restaurants, even fine dining establishments suffer from the some of the same issues that video games do. First of all, there has to be interest for a particular type of restaurant in a particular area in order to get funding for the restaurant. The current nonexistence of something doesn't establish anything about that something except that it doesn't exist.
If there is no fine dining establishment, it doesn't mean there's a market for it, and it doesn't mean that it wouldn't be successful in that market. It just means it's not currently there.
We're back to quantifying the need for such a place first. "It doesn't currently exist" doesn't do it.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
This has to be the best way I've seen it put. Community is everything - and that is not to say you have to be someone active on forums or chat, but it's what the player base as a whole feels, reacts and behaves.
Personally, I am one of those old dusty crones still playing EverQuest 1. Sure I wander away for months at a time to play other MMOs but I keep going back to EQ. Why? Nostalgia I think. A great base game. But mostly chasing down the memories of what made me fall in love with MMO's. EQ wasn't my first, but it will always be my favorite.
That said, I also recognize I am chasing down a memory of the past. Communities have changed over the years. In the 'old' days of MMO's there were only a handful of games to play, and the communities were darn near religious about guarding their game vs another. I remember when WOW emerged, guildies were almost considered traitors for jumping ship. Guilds were families, and servers were extended families. Most games have such a high turn over now, as another poster in this thread said - a lot of people are considered veterans after paying their first sub fee. I think what I miss is that longevity. Knowing who the server leaders were - knowing who the guilds to aspire towards were, who to run and hide from, who were the trolls and who were the gold farmers. Now, it's just a bunch of random names you see for a few days and then become new names.
So yes, I do miss the 'permanence' of it all. I wish I could find that golden era again, but I know it will never happen.
When you can play 5-10 hours per week it makes sense. MMOs are extremely time consuming even games which are supposed to be casual are super time consuming compared to other games. While I was playing MMOs, I used to play more hours per week (way more- probably 15-20 hours a week) and I didn't play other games. Ever since I stopped playing MMOs I have played tons of games and I am actually having a lot more fun.
MMOs can never provide me with the content that buying new games can. Worst thing is that MMOs are not so much fun as they are addictive.
Mission in life: Vanquish all MMORPG.com trolls - especially TESO, WOW and GW2 trolls.
Longer != deeper
Longer != more immersive.
SKYRIM is pretty immersive .. no one is going to play it for years.
In fact, i would play MANY MMOs on the market today. However, none of which i will play for more than a few month (may be at most a year), except WOW. WOW is phenomenal holding my attention for more a few years. I don't expect to play it much more though.
Community is not a reason (for me) to hold onto a boring game. Plus, community is not game dependent. Most of my WOW friends are playing Diablo 3 now. No one says you can't play with the same people in more than 1 game.
I never said community was an end all be all. What I was stating is what a community is NOW compared to 10 years ago are two very different things.
For me, Community is important. I play MMOs for the social interaction. If I wanted an amazing submersive game play - I'll go play a single player game - they are designed precisely to make you the main focus. MMOs are about interaction with others within a game.
Sadly, more and more it's become a game of soloers who can chat, trade and auction to one another - and not much more.
Now that's a crazy conclusion to derive from my statement, which was nothing more than pointing out it was stated as fact ( "There definitely is a demographic for this." ) and not saying he was wrong or that it shouldn't be suggested. I'm all for permanence in an MMO. I'm all for players making their marks. I'm all for designing an MMo with the intent of being around... say... 10, 20 or even 30 years later. Why? Because an MMO can be a virtual community, and virtual communities are where most of the current generation and - for the sake of keeping in touch with them - their parents are living right now. People often know more about the others in their virtual community than they do about the people that live on their own block.
If an MMO sets out to be a virtual community, the devs, whether they realize it or not, are setting out to build something to last decades. Ten years from now I can easily see internet communities being a crazy crossbreed of UO, EQ2 and Facebook.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
Which is a good example of the changes in community type. Community isn't just who you know, its who you don't know. For those who remember say...Vanilla WoW, the difference is night and day. When WoW was new, the same people were around. You knew who the top guilds were, top raid leaders, other players you could either mentor or protege. You heard of people by word of mouth, not from reading leaders boards or forum posts.
Its not so different from living in the real world, if, for example, you lived in the same community for many years. You end up knowing something about the guy at the end of the street, or maybe even meeting and becoming friends.
I'm not suggesting anybody play a game that is boring, far from it. I'm merely suggesting that moving on from game to game does not foster online communities, unless we consider (as you have mentioned) services that pull communites together in different ways, ala facebook, battlenet, steam, etc.
Maybe that is the future of online games: whatever developer can successfully foster a community around a variety of games, creating a higher form of permanence than mere "tracks in the sand" within a virtual world?
Fair enough. I had let myself overlook the hyperbole.
Ok, so EQ and UO have communities. What about DAOC? City of Heroes? LOTRO? DDO? Champions Online? GW1? All of those games have people who still love them and play them. With the possible exception of DDO, all of them have significant long-term, end-game play. I've heard of people who spend 9000 hours in GW1, that is clearly a long-term commitment.
Let's look at the recent and upcoming crop of MMOs, the ones supposedly designed with the casual player in mind. Rift - arguably more raid-centric than EQ. TERA - a political structure that lets players actually compete to see who runs the world. GW2 - designed from the ground up to make content viable, challenging and replayable from low-level to cap.
These aren't throwaway games any more than the elder crop is. No one can seriously believe the creators of these games expect people to play for 4 months and bail. I see much lamenting over the transitory nature of MMO games, but I'm hard-pressed to find any games that actually are transitory.