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Current trends in MMOs are actually hurting them
Neherun
Member UncommonPosts: 280
As the title states, todays immediate-rewards society has shifted MMO trends to allow players to complete all of the games content without an effort. No longer you are required to socialize to gain friends, guild or clan mates, or even rivals.
This, among other things has shifted the typical MMO player into not thinking through possibilities, and shift the blame on previously obvious solutions to faults at game design (it can never be an user error). This new school way of thinking is damaging MMOs and dumping them down.
Prime examples:
"Ganking of lower levels is griefing" - So a player of enemy faction slays his enemy. On paper this doesn't sound bad at all, its in the games design. Enemy is enemy, and should be put down. However for a solo player, who happens to be the low level, and the victim in this assault, it creates negative thoughts around the game. Back in the good old days, when people got flayed by a higher level, they simply called out help to deal with the enemy. Nowadays though, they state that such behavior is "Not ok" or that it is "Griefing of players" when the solution is absolutely simple: If you cannot handle something solo, you call out for help to deal with the problem.
"All content should be accessible to all of the players" - A statement that sounds good on paper. Why shouldn't all players have access to all of the games content, especially if they are paying a subscription to the game. The reason is quite simple,. actually. The moment you open up the content to everyone, you automatically dumb down the games difficulty so less than average skill player can complete it. This dumps down not only the games difficulty, but the mechanics and strategies required to complete the game. Good example of such behavior is Diablo 3. While its only an RPG, the Inferno difficulty was drastically dumped down in the later "Inferno nerf" patch so everyone could complete the said content, this was based on player statements that it was simply too difficult. Yet during the time the nerf came, every class had completed the Inferno difficulty, some with better gear than others. Surely it was extremely difficult for some, but wasn't the original idea of Inferno that you are faced with a grim reaper punching you in the face, not you punching the grim reaper into the face repeatedly? Remember those lovely, difficult raids that weren't necessarily gear dependent, but man did they require cordination to complete? Well, with todays trend those things are history.
Group finder tools - Sure, this answers directly to the demand for immediate satisfaction consumers, but what it truly does is annihilating the last remaining socializing of solo players in MMO. These days people select the content, and press "Search". They join a group, at maximum state a greeting, go the select content and if something goes wrong, they just bail the ship and look for a group that can complete the select content faster. Whats more rewarding, wiping multiple times in a dungeon and finally completing it with a group, or pressing "search" enough times to get a group that gets the job done fast, when both take actually equal amount of time to complete? This also applies to PvP content. I still recall the good old days when someone just yelled in the streets that he is forming a raid to enemy territory, and requesting people to join him. Today, you press H/J/K whatever the PvP finder button is, and press "search" so you will be immediately taken into PvP action with no socializing required.
Effort-based progression - Read: Time-based progression. When did all of the MMOs progression shift to a simple pattern: Time spent in the game = progression. This is the real killer, and is tied directly to contents avaibility. Why do people seem to think its a good solution that your character gains power, regardless of players individual skills as a player if the player plays enough? What's the point in that exactly. The best PvP gear can be attained by afking your way in the PvP content, the best gear from PvE comes directly from resources you gain for even trying to complete the content. It's gotten to extremely ridiculous point. So many are looking for challenge, and everything is catered to the sheep flock of todays consumers I'd like to call with all names possible.
Progression should never go backwards - This is a double-edged sword. If players can shift in their progression backwards too much, it really hurts the enjoyement of the game. But is it really the sharper edge of the two? Players not having any set backs nullifies the possibility of risk. Having no risk in MMO content means there's really nothing at stake, making the games casual strolls around the park in acid when nothing matters. Which one would you prefer: Your heart beating out of your chest when you play in adrenaline infused rage, or wiping drool from your cheek every 5 minutes when you have to slap yourself not to fall a sleep during content? Best part is, in the 90's losing all your gear wasn't actually considered that severe of a punishment for dying. Ask that from typical immediate-rewards gamer.
Fairness and balance for everyone! - Sounds like a declaration of presidental canditates speech. Yet today this is actually a subject to moaning. MMO balance used to follow a simple statement: "If its balanced in group play, or has a relatively simple counter - no matter how powerful it is, as long as it can be countered, its in balance." Today, nope. Everything gets dumped down so brainless player can match the set up, even if he has no counter to it. It just happened in the Elder Scrolls Online with Devouring Swarm ability. Those who do not know what it is: It was ultimate ability, costly point-blank AoE that dealt damage and gave you health based on the damage dealt. The trick was to utilize this ability by wearing gear that made the ability extremely cheap; Allowing people to spam it. Now, the ability was bugged in two ways: It could be stacked, and its healing worked in a damage-shield that should have disallowed healing. Yet the counter to this ability was so simple even a trained monkey would realize it after a while: Do not stand in the AoE, especially with a group since the abilitys efficiency is obviously tied to number of players it hits. What happened? People cried the ability was OP, and instead of fixing the bugs tied to the ability: Zenimax nerfed the whole vampire skill tree to the ground. Absolutely disgusting. What would have been the other option? Zenimax could have simply fixed the bugs and stated that the ability was easily countered by not standing in the AoE. Surely if a player could win a 1 v 10 it sounds shifty, but really, when the solution to win a fight was so simple, all you can blame are the players, not the ability.
What does this do? It kills the strategies and out-of-box thinking in MMOs. Remember when you were about to set foot in a game, and you had a whole paper sheet ready where you had theorycrafted ideas for your character, what he's going to use with what? Non-existent. That brings us to:
Lack of blueprints - I call this plague by the term. No longer are players required to do any sorts of planning, no matter the content. You just play, there's no real reason to put those brain cells to good use. And why, its catered to the immediate reward society where you shouldn't be really wasting your time planning, but only to do something. Again it lowers the value of gameplay.
TL;DR Todays MMO features that cater to make the content more easy and accessible are hurting the value of said content by lowering the standards in todays game play. And people just accept that without swallowing.
Comments
The issue here is you aren't looking at it in terms of providing a service and having empathy towards players' experiences aside from your own.
"Ganking of lower levels is griefing" - sure realistically, your perspective is correct, but people don't log into games to get murdered and not be able to make progress for 1-2 hours straight (and then you are told you have to pay money for that experience??) one player's experience is brought up at the expense of another? talk about allowing the community to literally cannibalize itself
"All content should be accessible to all of the players" - this is a bit touchier, but if a company is asking me to pay the game and tells me to also spend most of my free time (regularly) just to experience all of the content sounds like a bad deal from a customer/provider point of view, sure progress and time should be required to see everything, but it shouldn't require scheduling my whole life around it and spending as much time as my actual job regularly to even have a chance to experience certain parts of the game
Group finder tools - ask GW2 how that went, people set up their own tools outside of the actual game anyway then they implement their own within game much later, just because the game we are playing in is a medieval setting doesn't mean we have to forget we are on the internet, btw nostalgia is nice but don't forget about the negatives that existed back then too
Effort-based progression, progression should never go backwards - this is the same as your "all content should be accessible to all" argument, you're just repeating yourself, but I'm not repeating mine, remember you're not the only one who pays into the game
Fairness and balance for everyone - not sure how this is a problem, sure companies might not be good at it, but I think this should be an ultimate goal for all. Funny you bring politics into it, I'm guessing you don't believe in income inequality either or the fact a system can be rigged to favor a certain industry or sect of people. Your generalization in this section is more disgusting than how they nerfed a skill tree in ESO imo.
I think the issue with your perspective is that its far too general and imo doesn't reflect entirely what is actually going on in the MMO industry. I think there's a bit of truth, but working in absolutes is definitely staining your own view and expectations on what an MMO should be. It just sounds like you think the old days were better than the new without balancing out the overall positive pieces of the old with the negative that also existed. MMO's have progressed in many other ways, just many forgotten and ignored for the sake of argument. Just appears the forum posters here are just getting more and more polarized and the amt of hate somewhat makes me question the motives of many who tend to frequent these boards.
Remember in high-school gym when people would pick teams for basketball? People would rush to pick the tall kids, and the fast kids. They'd also pick their friends, and friends of their friends. They'd leave out the guy who was a bit heavy, or the guy who is new in town, or the guy who is a foreigner, or the quiet guy, or maybe the guy who doesn't have the right shoes, or the right friends. Those are the guys who don't get picked...and if they do get picked, they stand on the sidelines while the five that are really wanted play the game.
I don't think the changes you mention, OP, are a response to an 'immediate-rewards society' or anything like that. The changes are a counterbalance to the society of exclusivity that pops up whenever you vest player organizations with the responsibility of making the game accessible. Because I lived through the days when MMOs were simply like the high-school gym experience writ large--picking a team from a million member pool--the ones doing the picking were guilds, and they left far more people on the sidelines than they picked for the team.
In a perfect world, player organizations will make the game accessible to everyone. But the truth is that they only make the game accessible to their friends and the people they like, to the exclusion of everyone else. It is, frankly, not in a guild or clan's job description to make the game work for all. They aren't good at it--they've never been good at it--and relying on player-made organizations to facilitate the bulk of the game is a pipe dream.
Because, from my perspective, guilds, clans--whatever you want to call them--have done a very poor job in making the game accessible to the line subscriber. It reached such obscene levels in the late-2000s that you have to fill out applications, force yourself on headsets, and hook your game up to metrics and aides to show statistics like DPS...all so that a few powergaming heavyweights will group with you on games like WoW and EVE. Those were games that didn't promote grouping as much as they promoted selectivity; guilds and clans only were interested in the people who would play the game THEIR WAY, which is like a job, or some twisted rendition of corporate life.
And if you are interested in uniqueness, unorthodox builds and variety, a guild-centric MMO is the absolute worst place to find it. They simply won't take you if your character isn't "the best" build, mathematically speaking. You'll be sitting out like the weird kid or the short kid in gym class.
This marginalized your typical player, who is wondering why he should play when nobody who is doing the "important stuff" you mention in your post, OP, is interested in making the game work for everybody. Because the motivations of guild and clan play are different than the motivations of the developer. The guild or clan does what is in the best interests of the guild or clan, to advance its power or efficiency or glory. This is a different motivation than the developer, who has a need to give all these players who are in the game something interesting to do.
So I don't blame them for making the content more accessible to those people who, quite frankly, don't fit in to the kind of games the guilds and clans would like them to play. They are looking for fun too, but never found it in the kind of guild-centric and team-centric, high stakes loot game that came before.
__________________________
"Its sad when people use religion to feel superior, its even worse to see people using a video game to do it."
--Arcken
"...when it comes to pimping EVE I have little restraints."
--Hellmar, CEO of CCP.
"It's like they took a gun, put it to their nugget sack and pulled the trigger over and over again, each time telling us how great it was that they were shooting themselves in the balls."
--Exar_Kun on SWG's NGE
Agreed with OP completely, and for those reasons i've paid 0€ for playing MMOs since october 2010.
The current trend is to hype whatever name you can associate with, grab as much money before the game releases, from the widest possible audience regardless if it's the right game for them. Sacrificing things that make the games special or unique to add "features" that everyone says they want but only serve to water down and homogenize the games.
What's more, I can't wait for this new Alpha/Beta access trend to backfire. Why do you think AA is $150? Because they are making sure it pays off now. Now as far as AA, the alpha and beta periods will be short compared to games to come. What do you think is going to happen in other games like EQN? Most of these games, for the average player, have a several month lifespan after they release. Those "average" players who buy into alphas are going to be done with the game before it even launches. WTF is that? A brand new game will released and already be played out? And do you think SOE will give a shit by then if the game sucks? They've already over-monetized their players.
This post is so good. Nail on the head.
People buy the game of chess... they know what chess is, but buy it nonetheless. They then proceed to turn it into tetris because they really don't like chess. Those that do like chess are like, wtf, this used to be a game of chess, what happened to this game. The tetris lovers are all like, you are playing the game wrong. Well no kidding, I was playing chess, you turned it into tetris and now I AM playing it wrong. You look at the store shelves, chess here, chess there, but none of them are actually games of chess... just tetris with the chess name.
Reality is, if you never liked MMOs, changing it doesn't mean you do like them. In the end we have a misnamed game. That is what we have here today... games that call themselves MMOs that aren't really MMOs all because someone preferred tetris over chess. Too late now, the cats out of the bag. It's not going to be turned back into chess now. Tetris it is, like it or not. We got screwed. Plain and simple. Time to turn CoD into UO or the like because that is the only way you're going to get your game back, by screwing the players in another genre out of their game just like those did to ours.
While this may have been the experience of many players, much of that experience comes as a result of the decisions the individuals made within the game. So do we let a few power players dominate? I have to say yes. I was not one of those power players, but in the games I played when that was still the trend, I had more fun and an overall better experience. I always knew it was on me to get where I wanted in the games, not the developers.
In MMOs, you are picked to the extend you get involved and participate, not how you look. If you were sidelined in an MMORPG, it's because you put yourself there. And now we are seeing developers try to cater to the sideliners. Guess what? They are still sitting on the sidelines, only now the game itself has been dumbed down for them to be able to compete. It has ruined it for everyone.
Ironically, many of those power players were the same ones who were sidelined in gym class.
On the flip side you get a lot of fairly bland games that anyone can play. This is fair for everyone and appeals to a lot of people, but on the flip side the games are just not very good IMO. They are generally based on non stop combat these days and the combat is generally not that challenging outside of PvP and endgame raid. There are always going to be people who are left out in a more challenging or time consuming game. I was never the best by a long shot and chose to avoid the groups that are spoken of in this thread. I still progressed and had a lot of fun. I didn't need kill in groups. I was happy with challenging solo content, freedom of choice, and interacting with others outside of combat. I feel that MMOs today are just to dumbed down for me to enjoy.
Crazkanuk
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Azarelos - 90 Hunter - Emerald
Durnzig - 90 Paladin - Emerald
Demonicron - 90 Death Knight - Emerald Dream - US
Tankinpain - 90 Monk - Azjol-Nerub - US
Brindell - 90 Warrior - Emerald Dream - US
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The question now becomes, which group of players changed it to Tetris first? Because from where I am standing, the first people to change this genre were the Counterstrikers and the FPS clans that turned a role-playing game into the quest, raid, loot grab we had in the middle 2000s...Now I find that these same people who want the high-stakes quest, raid, loot grab are complaining that their genre has gone away in favor of casual, solo-centric play.
It is as if my game of D&D was turned into chess, which was turned into Tetris. Turning the Tetris back into chess isn't going to give me my D&D back...it'll only give the powergamers chess back.
__________________________
"Its sad when people use religion to feel superior, its even worse to see people using a video game to do it."
--Arcken
"...when it comes to pimping EVE I have little restraints."
--Hellmar, CEO of CCP.
"It's like they took a gun, put it to their nugget sack and pulled the trigger over and over again, each time telling us how great it was that they were shooting themselves in the balls."
--Exar_Kun on SWG's NGE
Obviously there is a market for a game that avoids everything the OP describes. It isn't a game I will play, nor is it a game most people will play. It's niche. And niche is fine. I hope such a game comes along with more meat to it than Darkfall, for example, and more polish than Mortal Online.
My problem is when someone paints such a game as the savior, the second coming, the game that will right all the MMO wrongs. No, it won't. If all MMOs avoided what OP describes, there would be very few players left. Why should games only cater to a small group of hyper social PvPers when most of us do not care for this type of gameplay?
I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals.
~Albert Einstein
What I find funny about this is, the whole high school analogy, these games were made FOR THE KIDS ON THE SIDELINES. Of course, once all those kids we're having a great time in hard, challenging games, the other kids saw what was going on and came over and changed our games so they could keep up.
Personally I agree with someone above, that I would prefer going back to the elitist's at the top of the game. No game ever made people "revolve their lives" around it. That's a completely personal choice, you can still progress in those games, just at a slower rate. Mainly because the games were designed for players to STAY IN THE GAME FOR LONGER THEN 3 MONTHS. Where as, the players that couldn't stand moving so slowly and we're envious and jealous of the elitiest's didn't wanna put in more time, so they bitched, moaned and complained to the point that now we have games that are dead after a couple of months to a year.
Personally if people want to have the gameplay of today, which they already do, I'm fine with that. I just wish that we could get 2-3 games that were aimed more towards the old school game play, so that those of us that enjoy worlds that we can live in for over a year, have a home to play in. Rather then either not playing at all or staying in the games we've been playing for 15 years that the devs have been trying to change to todays norms.
Don't blame the players, blame the dev's and companies producing these games, they are all now focused on making as much money as fast as possible, from the widest audience possible.
The pseudo-sociological BS that some people are spouting is rubbish, it's now purely down to making money.
― Terry Pratchett, Making Money
At some point people are just going to have to accept that the market has changed. If the justification for a particular feature is that is was good ten or fifteen years ago, and that's the only justification, it's probably no longer a relevant feature. Besides, there are more MMORPGs running right now than ever before, and outside of WoW, there are more players per MMORPG than ever before and MMORPGs are making more money than ever before. The idea that the MMORPG genre or market is broken is a little broken.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
Beatnik, good point.
I think the key to bringing inclusiveness back into the high school (mmo) is do what other organizations have done (ex. military).
They make the little guy matter. They make it so the more little guys you include, the more you help them, the more it brings the top elite success.
I think EVE does a great job at this. So yer not a great fleet commander, nor are you good at trading, but you can collect space iron. And we 'need' space iron (or whatever they mine) to make huge titanic death stars. Anyone can mine space iron, so they are recruited, nurtured, and ultimately included.
-WL
Werewolf Online(R) - Lead Developer
There is a market, it's just not a lasting market. Which is why most games these days are all quick cash grabs from alpha to first 2-3 months of live. The publishers/devs know that the gamers of today are a fickle bunch, so they make a game with all the bells and whistles of todays games, to get the hype and start making money for unfinished products and then they don't really care when the game is under populated, they just switch to F2P and start nickling diming everyone who comes to play for a month or two to pay the game off.
However I don't believe the OP truly means it's the savior of the genre. It may sound that way, and this is only my opinion, but I think he just wants options rather then the same formula used over n over n over n over n over with only minor changes to it. There hasn't been a game with the options that the OP is talking about in years. Even games that come from IP's with that type of established game play have gone the completely different direction. *cough* EQ franchise*cough* Hell I was happy that even ESO made the lvling LONGER for the first time in years, it was one of the few features that was kinda brought back from the old style of game play. I was impressed that they did that and ppl kept posting how they liked it, which I thought funny, cause so many posters here said how they hated long lvling processes, but man the amount of, " I love ESO" posts/threads were rampant on this site.
Personally I love the rational that only these type of games are made cause that's what the majority of gamers want, I think it's more about getting as much $$ from the players that just look for a laundry list of systems in a game and not actually catering to them that makes these games. But what do I know..
I completely agree with right now, there are more players, more games, and the genre is growing, which is a good thing. I think my main issue is choice in games, way to much cookie cutter out there and I really don't see how anyone can argue with that. I mean serisouly, how many people who started in the genre after wow have actually played a game for more than a year? There are a couple games that players have, sure, Wow, Eve, ya know, the big titles, but I don't hear that coming from F2P or indie games, which how this post sounds, they're doing great.
This is a good post which touches on the problems when elitism is promoted, however, it is very generic and not always the case.
Back in my EQ days where you not only had the problem of finding a large guild to do raid content the content itself was contested and you usually had a handful of guilds on whatever server dominate the content. The guild I was a part of was too small to do the content and the other guilds became snobby when it came to allowing people to hook up with their raids so our guild just decided we would openly invite everyone with a pulse into the guild who wanted to do raid content and after a while brute forced out way into the rotation. Not only did we complete all the raids and the horrible gating requirements we had an open invitation to everyone on the server to join our raids, at one stage running three simultaneously 80 man raid where we had less than a third of our guild in the raids.
We just provided the leadership, the core roles and the coordination and we dragged a lot of people through the content, geared a lot of people, but more importantly a lot of people got to experience content they normally wouldn't have and could experience it without leaving their smaller guilds.
In other games we similarly given open access to people to guild related perks which would take others many years or more likely never going to achieve, yet we allowed others to join our guilds and get access to perks before leaving to go back to wherever they came from.
Something inherently flawed with the older harder core MMOs is they lacked the incentive to be inclusive, content is usually a lot harder with noobs, because they usually do dumb shit and die or lack the skills or lack the gear to do the content, when you are inclusive to a lot of below average players you are carrying people.
We initially only did it to piss off the bigger elite guild who even turned their noses up at us, we wanted to show they weren't elite and we would do this content dragging the dregs of MMO society through it to boot. But in the end we met a lot of fantastic people, met some scumbags too, but by far most people were awesome and appreciative and you make good friends doing nice things to people for no personal gain.
I think you can have the elitism and the hardcore but there should be perks to being inclusive, without the incentives people will just prefer to stick to a smaller more controlled environment. If the content is really hard it is a lot harder to manage a guild with so many people and do the content if a lot of them are below par. People who are 'elite' generally prefer to pick an easier to control team which enhances their probability of success, it is why the fat kid sits on the sideline.
I am all for hard content and content some of my best memories from my MMO days comes from trying to get from one zone to another through dangerous territory, the old EQ experience was one of my favourite ones even though the game was pretty brutal and lacked a lot of modern touches.
I think there is scope for more challenging MMOs but I think there should inherently be more pros for working in larger teams of more diverse players. There are ways to achieve that, however, there hasn't been a modern MMO that has gone down that path that I have run into.
I feel the bigger problem is not how fast but the actual content.Quest hub gaming is not RP gaming it is simply a game to follow a laid out path of boring game play.
When i watched that Chinese game Asura online,i got goosebumps,i was like..THAT is what i want in my game.Not the factual game play but the stuff that was shown in the marketing video.
To explain it in a simple manner,i want to be able to roam around with a group of players and run into tons of NPC races,enemy territory.Some see you coming and become hostile,some might be friendly .Inside of those NPC factions should be SEVERAL reasons to have fun exploring them all,perhaps various different crafts or items or drops or resources within.
Even more fun if you could do quests for a REASON,like perhaps gain favor with that race ,then they allow you some npc followers that might aid an attack against their enemy rivals.So you might gain 5 npc warriors and take your 6 man group with them to attack a nearby village of enemy NPC's.
SKILLS need to be there in games,it is dumb to just pick up ANY weapon and all a sudden you are a master swordsman or master Pike user.Creatures need to be stronger or weaker versus different weapons and spells,basically REALISM should be in there as well.A PERFECT example is you wouldn't go out fighting a bird with a Sword,you would use a Sling or a Bow or crossbow or a rifle it just makes sense,yet games often don't make any sense at all.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
The flip side to this is that most f the casuals were perfectly fine just playing the game and not bothering with elitist end game crap. However, then the game devs seemed to go out of their way to cater to the elitist raiders and completely ignored the casuals. They would release more elaborate raid content and the casuals would get a few new reskinned items that were locked away behind stupid grinds designed to be enjoyable only to someone with a lobotomy. The casuals got upset and realized that they had the market power to make the devs instead cater to them. The elitists whined, moaned and complained but did not have the power to change things back. The elitists then got jealous of the attention the casuals were being given and their epeens could not handle it. So they petitioned for leveling content to be made faster so they could skip through it.
EVE is probably the worst example I can think of. The bar is just set too high there in terms of who players have to be to get included in the guild system, and most (a good 90% of players) don't qualify. And at times, I don't blame the guilds/corps/alliances for being so picky...people can, and have, lost everything because they trusted the wrong person.
First of all, if you don't consent to wear a headset, forget it. I found out really quick in that game that they weren't going to trust someone they couldn't speak to behind the screen. That's all fine and good if you have no problem with it, but for the ones that do (like me), that could be a problem.
Second of all, forget about learning the skills you want to learn. You are going to learn the skills they want you to learn, which usually means maximizing your utility to them. And in complete fairness to them, they'll give you the skillbooks they'll want you to learn free of charge. But by the same token, you'll be so busy skilling up their skillbooks to build up the skills you'll want to use.
Third, forget about playing the game that you want to play. They have an idea of they game they want you to play, in accordance with the needs of the leadership. If you are lucky, you might have a bit of free time on the side to do complexes and that; but for the most part, if you are online, you are accountable to them.
And to be fair, the guild/alliance will be more than willing to give you everything you'll need to play the game: free ships, free skillbooks, free implants...the works. But this all comes at a price that I think is too high; your autonomy to play the game your way, earn your own way, and produce for your own advancement. It is, I think, antithetical to what brings a lot of us to these games in the first place: self-discovery and writing your own story.
Frankly, I think a much better solution was the one SWG did and DAoC did: NPC factions. NPC factions give players the opportunity to get into the conflict without having to be first "initiated" by a player-organized gatekeeper. Because as long as we give the gatekeeping power to player powers, there will be more incentive to keep the gates closed.
__________________________
"Its sad when people use religion to feel superior, its even worse to see people using a video game to do it."
--Arcken
"...when it comes to pimping EVE I have little restraints."
--Hellmar, CEO of CCP.
"It's like they took a gun, put it to their nugget sack and pulled the trigger over and over again, each time telling us how great it was that they were shooting themselves in the balls."
--Exar_Kun on SWG's NGE
This brings up another point I was thinking about, which is developers making different server rulesets for the same game. ArcheAge in particular would, in my opinion, greatly benefit from this.
The Democrats, curse their rightward bound souls, like to call this Big Tent. Get as many people as possible by waffling every which way but not be quite as rightwing as the Republicans. This has not worked out for them because we all live in one country. MMOs are not so limited. So why do we end up with so few that have three, four, or more rulesets?
In one sense, this will make a segment of the PvP crowd unhappy, since a certain segment of it craves PvP against the unwilling. But I do have enough faith in gamer humanity to believe that most open world pvpers simply crave a rich, beautiful gameworld to wander around in while constantly living in fear of being attacked or constantly stalking equally eager opponents. So why aren't more developers creating feature rich, triple A, multi server gameworlds that cater to everyone while segmenting those who will, by their very nature, ruin each other's gameplay?
Edited to add: Fickle? Are we? Or are we merely more fortunate than gamers of old, because we have so many choices available to us compared to 1999-2007-ish? Regardless, I very much hope OP gets what OP wants. But not if I can then no longer have what I want. OP doesn't want to live in my solo carebear world, but I also don't want to live in OP's world. And once again, why should either of us ever have to?
I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals.
~Albert Einstein