I don't like all this talk of lowering expectations and standards. How can anything move forward or improve if we don't demand better? ...If we force ourselves to settle for less then that's all we will ever get.
The problem isn't high expectations. Our problem is we are not being heard by game makers and we are not in agreement on how to make things better.
In our combined experience as MMO players, we have played everything and
seen it all. That knowledge is valuable and vital to the infinite
progress of MMOs toward unattainable perfection.
Unfortunately
our vast combined knowledge of MMOs isn't easy to access. If developers
could do it without hopelessly sifting through millions of scattered
forum posts they would all be doing it. Instead it would take them more
time and effort than developing an actual game.
Because of this, developers seem mostly blind to what we really want. That's evident in the way they keep recycling things that had success in the past in the most uninspired ways possible. They are playing it safe because they don't have a clue what new ideas will be accepted by most of us or even where to begin with them.
..In short, settling for less isn't the answer. It is the problem.
We need to figure out, in concise detail, what kind of game(s) we want and find a way to be heard (and taken seriously) by developers if we ever hope to get a game that is good enough.
(I don't see it ever happening but that's what I think it would take)
Really, the things of the past are apparently too much to ask for because of the "no adventurer left behind" act like many companies have adopted over the past decade to remain competitive, which is just another way of saying money before quality. Almost every mmorpg's sense of an expansion follows the same formula of making almost all the content before the expansion irrelevant so "everyone" has a chance to "catch-up" which is arguably a large reason as to why many people in the past would not resub that often to cames, because they would feel like they would be too far behind depending on their work schedule. So persistence got thrown out the window for many mmorpgs. This is why WoW is pretty much a "new" game every expansion and even FFXIV, which of course adds multiple "catch-up" methods through out the expansion, in turn making only the current and previous patches current and even anything before the previous patch pretty much irrelevant in the same expansion. Today's logic is, why "work" for entertainment just let me throw money at you so I can have "fun" when part of the fun is the journey, not just reaching the destination.
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Please do not respond to me, even if I ask you a question, its rhetorical.
Please do not respond to me
The problem isn't high expectations. Our problem is we are not being heard by game makers and we are not in agreement on how to make things better.
In our combined experience as MMO players, we have played everything and seen it all. That knowledge is valuable and vital to the infinite progress of MMOs toward unattainable perfection.
Unfortunately our vast combined knowledge of MMOs isn't easy to access. If developers could do it without hopelessly sifting through millions of scattered forum posts they would all be doing it. Instead it would take them more time and effort than developing an actual game.
Because of this, developers seem mostly blind to what we really want. That's evident in the way they keep recycling things that had success in the past in the most uninspired ways possible. They are playing it safe because they don't have a clue what new ideas will be accepted by most of us or even where to begin with them.
..In short, settling for less isn't the answer. It is the problem.
We need to figure out, in concise detail, what kind of game(s) we want and find a way to be heard (and taken seriously) by developers if we ever hope to get a game that is good enough.
(I don't see it ever happening but that's what I think it would take)