I really don't think it's what WoW did, I think it's more of what WoW had.
I have to agree. A LARGE installed base from the Warcraft series of RTS games, coupled with the Diablo series, gave this company a huge market of Fantasy players ready for more of the Blizzard stables products. The continued popularity of the game is related IMHO to the personal real life $$$/time sink it is. At roughly $160/year + the time players have invested, it's hard to throw everything away without feeling like you've been ripped off. I play a few free/micropayment MMO's and find that I can't destroy characters and walk away for the same reaons.
Perhaps another reason that WoW became more popular and more accessable was it's allowance for user modification. I can't think of many MMORPGs at all that allow user mods. WoW's mod community is quite prolific.
Vault-Tec analysts have concluded that the odds of worldwide nuclear armaggeddon this decade are 17,143,762... to 1.
Blizzard mainstreamed the MMO game for good or bad. They made it easy and accessable to a wider audiance. Alos it helped that they already had a successful IP behind them in the Warcraft and Starcraft games.
They took all the good things from UO, EQ and other MUD's out there and mixed it with their own system and this gave birth to WoW. Personaly I realy do not like the game, although I have played it I found it empty and dull with little more than PvP and a few quests that you do over and over again and whether its alliance or hoard the quests always have the same flavour to them.
The PvP is accessable to everyone and its not forced on to the player, but it has no lasting meaning within the actualy game world. So in effect its pointless and mindless game play. Which is one reason why I love Eve Online. At least a corperation or Alliance can have a effect in the game world.
The quests are simple and is a follow this marker to this WP kill X amount of creatures and return to the quest giver. Its ok and a good enough time sink to get you to level 70 or what ever it is now.
Crafting is not important like it should be. In WoW there is no reason to craft other than cook if your a hunter or alchemy. Other than that you might as well forget about it.
To sum it all up WoW is a game for children who want to enact their cartoon fantasies, and when they get older they realise that there are better and more in depth MMO's out there waiting for them to play. It has done well enough to put the MMO onto the main stage of the media, but its not that good a game when you realy look into it.
I was wondering about this too and i have already made a huge searching for this on my own , so this is my opinion
1.They hadgames lke diablo , wracraft, starcraft so people already know them
2.They made a huge announcement for the release date both for expansions and the game.
3.It had so much content that you can do alot of stuff when you get bored of questing
4.People always look for stuff to level up like i can enter an instance if i level up one more time , i can wear new stuff and much much more and in wow they have planned this in a such a brilliant way that every single level there is something to play for. I think this is the biggest one
5. It appealed to both babies and big guys so there was alot of guilds and stuff that kept the game's economy , crowdness busy.
6. The developers were promising , they have never done something such a big fail instead of class ballances. Before i left Warhammer online they promised for such an awesome thing called land of the dead but when we saw what it is like %30 players left the game. Why would you make something based on little pve content to pure pvp game?
7. wow had the balance of high pve moderate pvp so it always made ppl play the game
8. Last and the most efficient one that we dont even reckognise is atmosphere , It had awesome maps and places to travel and quest. The musics made people remind the game because you remember the music you are listening later too. Like bloodelf's musics in that place made me play the game , it was beautiful .
It was advertised in game magazines just like any other MMO at the time.
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WoW's most effective advertising was done in EQ1, SWG, and DAoC /general chats.
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Well, word-of-mouth too.
That's actually untrue, but feel free to prove it if you can (links and sources, outside of the MMOchart graphics you have already posted on mmorpg.com hundreds of times)
As some people already mentioned before, WoW actually did have and use a larger budget to advertise on tv with known actors, plus also advertise via media outlets outside of the usual ones, especially when the game was out for a few months. This managed to introduce WoW to a larger group of people who were unfamiliar with the genre and boosted the hype.
Saying that WoW's most effective advertising was done in other MMO's is plainly hilarious and just fanboi talk (well, it's the same one(s) arguing that point again and again till it becomes mindnumbingly boring). Of course a number of MMO gamers will have started playing WoW too - I did too, but I liked GW that I played at that time more, personal preference - but a lot of the initial playerbase came from people that played other Blizzard games before and their number swelled afterwards because of people outside of the MMO genre that had never played a MMO before: this happened because of word of mouth outside the usual MMO gaming channels and was enforced and boosted by smart, extensive advertising.
The ease with which predictions are made on these forums: Fratman: "I'm saying Spring 2012 at the earliest [for TOR release]. Anyone still clinging to 2011 is deluding themself at this point."
to say all other mmo's before WoW never advertised is not true at all there was a move called the new guy ever see it or herd of it Everquest had a bunch of spotlights in that move there was also a tv show called portal that was all about MMO's it would have ppl running around in the game talking to the Human who was named Dave and etc i have seen growing up alot of EQ1 comercials same with DAOC i think out of all the old mmo's AC was the only one i didnt see a comercial for .
Yes there were a few of them there was also a MMO for the PS2 called Everquest online adventures with a expansion called frontier as well as a diablo type gamed called Champions of norath and also a PC RTS game based on everquest as well there were alot of things EQ did right the thing is WoW came at the right time EQ was starting to wear off its flavor and ppl wanted something new so EQ2 and WoW were there new choices
Yes there were a few of them there was also a MMO for the PS2 called Everquest online adventures with a expansion called frontier as well as a diablo type gamed called Champions of norath and also a PC RTS game based on everquest as well there were alot of things EQ did right the thing is WoW came at the right time EQ was starting to wear off its flavor and ppl wanted something new so EQ2 and WoW were there new choices
I never knew what Warcraft before WoW.
I learned about WoW from Game related Shows.
I played Runescape and Guild Wars before playing WoW.
I left Guild Wars because of the lack of a Crafting system, and the lack of Persistent Seamless world. I was expecting Runescape 3.0 from GW since it was advertised as a F2P 3D MMORPG that requires Box Payment.. I guess thats why I was so disapointed.
Well... before WoW, there were no straight up EverQuest clones.
All the games did something new innovative and exciting. With these risks and diversity they alienated someone.
What WoW did was have a massive pre existing player base that never had touched an MMO, a massive marketing budget that no other MMO company had, and they took no risks and made no improvements with their game, they just dumbed down EverQuest mechanics to a level where no one could ever lose, become frustrated, or confused.
One games like LotRO came after it, they weren't different enough from WoW to grab a large player base, and they didn't stick to their IP enough.
Games like Age of Conan just weren't good period, or finished at launch, and the Conan fans are a MUCH smaller number.
What draws me back to WoW time and time again, despite long breaks searching for another mmo "home", are the following:
1. Different starting areas for different races, with said starting areas being easily (to varying extents) reached by other races so I don't have to look at the same scenery/do the same quests with every alt I roll (and I tend to roll a lot these days). Linked to this, the fact that there is a choice of areas throughout the levels, again bringing some variety for multiple characters.
2. Smooth movement and gameplay.
3. Well thought-out classes.
4. The best pet classes (warlock and hunter) that I have experienced in any mmo in terms of effectiveness and flexibility of pet.
5. Interesting lore. Most games I can hardly be bothered to read the lore, but I actually read a couple of the books and really enjoyed them.
6. Huge variety of ways to experience the game, as other posters have said, from pvp to pve to roleplay, with room for casual or hard-core type playing styles.
7. There are still active European servers ... wow, just wow. Most other games I play have had to consolidate the servers and unfortunately those that are left tend to be in US. Nothing against US servers, just that as a UK player it can lead to higher latency.
If I wasn't the kind of person who tends to get bored with anything if I do it too long, and if I could only play one mmo, it would probably still be WoW for all the reasons above, even though in the times when I have a break from it I can never imagine playing again. I haven't bothered to list all the things I don't like about WoW (of which there are plenty), because I'm trying to answer the OP and give my own opinion of what WoW has (for me) that I can never quite find in other mmo's.
p.s. I also wish there was spellcheck available for these posts, although the spellcheck which comes with Google toolbar seems to work fine.
I don't think it was there fanbase because I don't thonk it is that big compared to say the star wars or warhammer fanbase. I think a lot of it was luck and timing. Let's be serious, they had a release that would have sunk any other mmo into the ground yet some how came out unscathed. I think a lot of if had to do with the mmo community being a lot more forgiven.
The number 1 thing they did was ease of entry into the experience.
The number 2 thing was story, theirs is just better and more memorable and also was experienced by an already massive audience from the previous Warcraft RTS titles and expansions.
Other companies have tried to profit off of the whole, "story everyone already knows about" routine but, often fail in the implementation of the game's mechanics (see Warhammer).
[rant]
I'll add one thing that all future developers should take note of, community. If your community cannot keep itself in check it will be over run by assholes. Why in the world hasn't there been a player based rating system ala Amazon and Xbox Live is beyond me.
We as MMO players really need to step up and respect our community and be more active in shaping it. For the adults if you have a child playing an online game please for the love of god enforce the idea that the online space is to be behaved in just like the real world. Why? Because social media isn't going away and one day not so far into the future your potential employer or college admissions person will be able to see that you're a douchebag that no one likes you in game save for a few 13 year olds and they'll be ale to ask you about it.
EQ set the stage for a complex, relatively hard MMORPG in which you had to actually think. WoW comes along with its huge fantasy world following and then dumbed everything down greatly for ease of play to reward the retarded masses that don't want a challenge. Word spread greatly that "everyone was playing WoW so I must too!" Subscriptions numbers just exploded versus other MMORPG's.
I played WoW for the first 3 months of launch. That's all I could take. Games like EQ2, Vanguard and Age of Conan are so far superior.
what did WoW do, that other EQ clones didnt do, which made WoW so Successful?
Well,first of all it had timing. EQ was ageing and losing subs fast while no one yet had taken it's place. If it had released a few years earlier the competition would have been on but now EQ had no chance.
LOTRO had very bad timing, it released when Wow was really strong and pulled in a lot of new players.
Then it had "polish". EQ2 released almost the same time but it was in horrible shape at launch. If it would have been good from strat things might have been very different today but SOE just released it too early.
The third key to Wows success is that you can play it on any junk computer, so many kids who can't afford a good gaming computer can still play.
Timing is a key thing to success and it should be time for one or several really large game again any day now. Wow released when EQ was 6 years, now Wow is 6 years. Of course EQ did make far more expansions and that might influence how long the game lasts but 6 years is a long time for a MMO and it is likely that something new will take over as the largest game, probably GW2 or TOR.
But Wow will be around for a long time, EQ is still around. It is possible that Blizzard might make it F2P in the future but that should be at least 2 years in the future.
The biggest factor of what made WOW such a success can be broken down to the following :-
1) Virtually unlimited budget
2) Aggresive advertising
3) Exisiting customer base
4) rather than invent their own system and take any risks the copied from exisiting games ideas that worked
5) simplistic game play and low tech requirements ensures anyone can play
These four things are what ensured their success. Their exisiting playerbase od warcraft stratergy players garunteed that a lort of people would at least buy the game to try it out. The massive amount of funds they had and were willing to commit meant they had the time they needed to finish without intervention by backers.
Their advertising campaign ensured that everyone knew about them and enabled them to entice people into at least trying them out. Lastly by not designing new technologies or ideas they only needed to make not of exisiting trends and to copy accross to their own platform the ones that people seemed to enjoy.
To date WOW has created nothing new in the mmorpg industry ALL their new concepts and features have been taken from other games.
So ultimatly the key to WOW's success is it takes no risks and poaches aideas from those companies that do. It saves them money meaning they only need to invest in technologies that have already been tested and muck like Microsoft their sheer size means that eventually people credit the idea ad theirs anyway.
what did WoW do, that other EQ clones didnt do, which made WoW so Successful?
Well,first of all it had timing. EQ was ageing and losing subs fast while no one yet had taken it's place. If it had released a few years earlier the competition would have been on but now EQ had no chance.
LOTRO had very bad timing, it released when Wow was really strong and pulled in a lot of new players.
Then it had "polish". EQ2 released almost the same time but it was in horrible shape at launch. If it would have been good from strat things might have been very different today but SOE just released it too early.
The third key to Wows success is that you can play it on any junk computer, so many kids who can't afford a good gaming computer can still play.
Timing is a key thing to success and it should be time for one or several really large game again any day now. Wow released when EQ was 6 years, now Wow is 6 years. Of course EQ did make far more expansions and that might influence how long the game lasts but 6 years is a long time for a MMO and it is likely that something new will take over as the largest game, probably GW2 or TOR.
But Wow will be around for a long time, EQ is still around. It is possible that Blizzard might make it F2P in the future but that should be at least 2 years in the future.
Funny, I remember that EQ2 had a much better release than WOW. Infact the WOW release was terrible. Server queues, frequent crashes etc etc. It was a joke. The thing is WOW's only advantage at release was its low tech requirements, and its heavy fanbase from Warcraft startergy days. It took 6 months if I remember correctly for all the performance bugs to be ironed out and dealt wih finally.
EQ2 was more advanced than WOW and took more risks in new ideas and technologies. Where WOW was basically a bastardised clone of DAOC, EQ and Anarchy Online, this combined with a very low system spec reduced their chance of game play issues (yet the sheer number of broken quest trains were staggering). So no WOW did not have a perfect or even polished release its release was just as troubled as all other mmorpgs infact worse than some.
Six months after their release and once their intitial login issues had been resolved they strated a massive advertising campaign which they have continued since THIS more than anything else is what contributed to their success.
What draws me back to WoW time and time again, despite long breaks searching for another mmo "home", are the following:
1. Different starting areas for different races
Standard in most MMOs
2. Smooth movement and gameplay.
3. Well thought-out classes.
Standard and WoW classes are rather simple and primitive
4. The best pet classes (warlock and hunter) that I have experienced in any mmo in terms of effectiveness and flexibility of pet.
Very primitive compared to pet classes in some other games, like Dark Age of Camelot or EverQuest
5. Interesting lore. Most games I can hardly be bothered to read the lore, but I actually read a couple of the books and really enjoyed them.
Well, its more or less just Warhammer lore. But it is passable in a tongue and cheek way.
6. Huge variety of ways to experience the game, as other posters have said, from pvp to pve to roleplay, with room for casual or hard-core type playing styles.
All within the confines of the game. WOW has PvP, but its poor PvP. Poor crafting system, and its raids are only hardcore compared to WoW's other content, in MMO scope WoW raids are super casual.
what did WoW do, that other EQ clones didnt do, which made WoW so Successful?
There has to be something that other EQ clones are doing different from what WoW did,,, right,,,,,
It is not what WoW did, but what Blizzard had. They already had a huge customer base from Warcraft, Starcraft, and Diablo that were used to the game lobby mentality that WoW offers. If they did not have all those players, there would not have been anything special about WoW.
But that same excuse would apply to Warhammer which had DAoC and Warhammer fanbase behind them, yet it flopped. Same for other strong IP MMO.
need I point out
AoC and LoTRO for debuging this age old excuse?
PS: your MMO was Exposed!!!!
You're wrong "the others didn't hve the advantage of Warcraft + the Blizzard fans for other known titles (Diablo, SC...)" - as in PC GAMES THAT "Gamers of all ages enjoied".... and ONE MORE, VERY IMPORTANT ADVANTAGE - "THE TIMES WHEN WoW was RELEASED" - compared to the other titles mentioned above...
Warhammer fans were still a "minority" compared to WoW - which had fans from "ALL CORNERS" - not just the Warcraft fans...
LoTRO - is the worst example. A game based on a book + movie... I'm prety sure most that read the book or have seen the movie, didn't join this MMO... but many WoW players, bored of WoW probably did (even if they didn't cancel their WoW subscription)
Same goes for AoC - when it was released "HORDS OF WoW players" joined this game - but most didn't like what they seen... I remember them revolted by their AoC experience - making fun of it and turn back to WoW, hopping for a better experience with Warhammer Online.
Conclusion: - "the idea about things being even is just in your imagination".
Advertising and IP. Warcraft 3 was one of the most popular games around the time WoW was released. Most people just play WoW because Mr. T told them to or they saw the Leeroy Jenkins vid on youtube. WoW didn't do anything better than the previous MMOs(aside from a few barely important things). It's not like people buy WoW and another game like FFXI or DaoC and play WoW because they think it's better. Most people just don't know any other MMOs than WoW, they have nothing to compare it to.
what did WoW do, that other EQ clones didnt do, which made WoW so Successful?
There has to be something that other EQ clones are doing different from what WoW did,,, right,,,,,
I don't think there has ever been an EverQuest clone. If there were one, i'd likely be playing it.
I think what made WoW so successful was that it ran very smoothly for most computers, it was easy to learn & play and that it didn't require a lot of time to feel a sense of accomplishment. It was/is an MMO that anyone can do well in and I think that appeals to a far great number of gamers, which is likely why most games today are following suit. It's a business & companies want a piece of that pie.
4) rather than invent their own system and take any risks the copied from exisiting games ideas that worked
5) simplistic game play and low tech requirements ensures anyone can play
The same can be applied to Warhammer and look how that turned out.
Even the Sims Online meets most of your points there and it bombed so hard it closed down already. That is the most popular PC gaming franchise in history.
There is more to making a successful game than money and advertising. There has to be something to get players to spread word of mouth to their friends to join them. Something we are not seeing happen in most other games and I think the reasons are pretty obvious.
I think there are far more reasons why wow is so successful that get overlooked
For one it was designed to be fun first. That may sound like something that should go without saying, but how many mmos have we seen release that were just a jumble of ideas thrown together without actually seeing how they worked in a live environment. Take EQ2 for example. It release within 2 weeks of wow and withing a few months soe was already revamping core systems, scrapping ideas and completely changing the direction of the game. Warhammer is another great example of a game with features that sound great on paper, but fall apart when put together.
This really ties into what I think the big reason is. Wow addressed the market with their design and goals. The mmo market was in really bad shape and just ripe to get their ass kicked by a game that took its time to release and gave players what they wanted and that is exactly what happened.
It was considered normal to buy a new mmo and have to wait 12 months to let the devs get the game to a decent level of quality. Really, for the most part, we as mmo gamers just accepted broken and poor games at release as a normal part of playing an mmo and that funding a game through its first 12 months with the hope that things would improve is how things go.
Comments
I have to agree. A LARGE installed base from the Warcraft series of RTS games, coupled with the Diablo series, gave this company a huge market of Fantasy players ready for more of the Blizzard stables products. The continued popularity of the game is related IMHO to the personal real life $$$/time sink it is. At roughly $160/year + the time players have invested, it's hard to throw everything away without feeling like you've been ripped off. I play a few free/micropayment MMO's and find that I can't destroy characters and walk away for the same reaons.
Perhaps another reason that WoW became more popular and more accessable was it's allowance for user modification. I can't think of many MMORPGs at all that allow user mods. WoW's mod community is quite prolific.
Vault-Tec analysts have concluded that the odds of worldwide nuclear armaggeddon this decade are 17,143,762... to 1.
Blizzard mainstreamed the MMO game for good or bad. They made it easy and accessable to a wider audiance. Alos it helped that they already had a successful IP behind them in the Warcraft and Starcraft games.
They took all the good things from UO, EQ and other MUD's out there and mixed it with their own system and this gave birth to WoW. Personaly I realy do not like the game, although I have played it I found it empty and dull with little more than PvP and a few quests that you do over and over again and whether its alliance or hoard the quests always have the same flavour to them.
The PvP is accessable to everyone and its not forced on to the player, but it has no lasting meaning within the actualy game world. So in effect its pointless and mindless game play. Which is one reason why I love Eve Online. At least a corperation or Alliance can have a effect in the game world.
The quests are simple and is a follow this marker to this WP kill X amount of creatures and return to the quest giver. Its ok and a good enough time sink to get you to level 70 or what ever it is now.
Crafting is not important like it should be. In WoW there is no reason to craft other than cook if your a hunter or alchemy. Other than that you might as well forget about it.
To sum it all up WoW is a game for children who want to enact their cartoon fantasies, and when they get older they realise that there are better and more in depth MMO's out there waiting for them to play. It has done well enough to put the MMO onto the main stage of the media, but its not that good a game when you realy look into it.
I was wondering about this too and i have already made a huge searching for this on my own , so this is my opinion
1.They hadgames lke diablo , wracraft, starcraft so people already know them
2.They made a huge announcement for the release date both for expansions and the game.
3.It had so much content that you can do alot of stuff when you get bored of questing
4.People always look for stuff to level up like i can enter an instance if i level up one more time , i can wear new stuff and much much more and in wow they have planned this in a such a brilliant way that every single level there is something to play for. I think this is the biggest one
5. It appealed to both babies and big guys so there was alot of guilds and stuff that kept the game's economy , crowdness busy.
6. The developers were promising , they have never done something such a big fail instead of class ballances. Before i left Warhammer online they promised for such an awesome thing called land of the dead but when we saw what it is like %30 players left the game. Why would you make something based on little pve content to pure pvp game?
7. wow had the balance of high pve moderate pvp so it always made ppl play the game
8. Last and the most efficient one that we dont even reckognise is atmosphere , It had awesome maps and places to travel and quest. The musics made people remind the game because you remember the music you are listening later too. Like bloodelf's musics in that place made me play the game , it was beautiful .
Hope this helps ^^
wow took all the known ideas of mmos and kinda perfected them.
they put those ideas in an engine that could be run by the majority of PCs out there.
they enabled instance "grind" in their diablo style, something people liked.
"I'll never grow up, never grow up, never grow up! Not me!"
That's actually untrue, but feel free to prove it if you can (links and sources, outside of the MMOchart graphics you have already posted on mmorpg.com hundreds of times)
As some people already mentioned before, WoW actually did have and use a larger budget to advertise on tv with known actors, plus also advertise via media outlets outside of the usual ones, especially when the game was out for a few months. This managed to introduce WoW to a larger group of people who were unfamiliar with the genre and boosted the hype.
Saying that WoW's most effective advertising was done in other MMO's is plainly hilarious and just fanboi talk (well, it's the same one(s) arguing that point again and again till it becomes mindnumbingly boring). Of course a number of MMO gamers will have started playing WoW too - I did too, but I liked GW that I played at that time more, personal preference - but a lot of the initial playerbase came from people that played other Blizzard games before and their number swelled afterwards because of people outside of the MMO genre that had never played a MMO before: this happened because of word of mouth outside the usual MMO gaming channels and was enforced and boosted by smart, extensive advertising.
Success creates its own hype and success story.
The ACTUAL size of MMORPG worlds: a comparison list between MMO's
The ease with which predictions are made on these forums:
Fratman: "I'm saying Spring 2012 at the earliest [for TOR release]. Anyone still clinging to 2011 is deluding themself at this point."
to say all other mmo's before WoW never advertised is not true at all there was a move called the new guy ever see it or herd of it Everquest had a bunch of spotlights in that move there was also a tv show called portal that was all about MMO's it would have ppl running around in the game talking to the Human who was named Dave and etc i have seen growing up alot of EQ1 comercials same with DAOC i think out of all the old mmo's AC was the only one i didnt see a comercial for .
Didnt Everquest also have a console game for the PS2?
Philosophy of MMO Game Design
Yes there were a few of them there was also a MMO for the PS2 called Everquest online adventures with a expansion called frontier as well as a diablo type gamed called Champions of norath and also a PC RTS game based on everquest as well there were alot of things EQ did right the thing is WoW came at the right time EQ was starting to wear off its flavor and ppl wanted something new so EQ2 and WoW were there new choices
I never knew what Warcraft before WoW.
I learned about WoW from Game related Shows.
I played Runescape and Guild Wars before playing WoW.
I left Guild Wars because of the lack of a Crafting system, and the lack of Persistent Seamless world. I was expecting Runescape 3.0 from GW since it was advertised as a F2P 3D MMORPG that requires Box Payment.. I guess thats why I was so disapointed.
I expected more from GW. Iam going OT,,, anyway
many of these mmo had advertisement.
Philosophy of MMO Game Design
Smoother gameplay.
Well... before WoW, there were no straight up EverQuest clones.
All the games did something new innovative and exciting. With these risks and diversity they alienated someone.
What WoW did was have a massive pre existing player base that never had touched an MMO, a massive marketing budget that no other MMO company had, and they took no risks and made no improvements with their game, they just dumbed down EverQuest mechanics to a level where no one could ever lose, become frustrated, or confused.
One games like LotRO came after it, they weren't different enough from WoW to grab a large player base, and they didn't stick to their IP enough.
Games like Age of Conan just weren't good period, or finished at launch, and the Conan fans are a MUCH smaller number.
1
What draws me back to WoW time and time again, despite long breaks searching for another mmo "home", are the following:
1. Different starting areas for different races, with said starting areas being easily (to varying extents) reached by other races so I don't have to look at the same scenery/do the same quests with every alt I roll (and I tend to roll a lot these days). Linked to this, the fact that there is a choice of areas throughout the levels, again bringing some variety for multiple characters.
2. Smooth movement and gameplay.
3. Well thought-out classes.
4. The best pet classes (warlock and hunter) that I have experienced in any mmo in terms of effectiveness and flexibility of pet.
5. Interesting lore. Most games I can hardly be bothered to read the lore, but I actually read a couple of the books and really enjoyed them.
6. Huge variety of ways to experience the game, as other posters have said, from pvp to pve to roleplay, with room for casual or hard-core type playing styles.
7. There are still active European servers ... wow, just wow. Most other games I play have had to consolidate the servers and unfortunately those that are left tend to be in US. Nothing against US servers, just that as a UK player it can lead to higher latency.
If I wasn't the kind of person who tends to get bored with anything if I do it too long, and if I could only play one mmo, it would probably still be WoW for all the reasons above, even though in the times when I have a break from it I can never imagine playing again. I haven't bothered to list all the things I don't like about WoW (of which there are plenty), because I'm trying to answer the OP and give my own opinion of what WoW has (for me) that I can never quite find in other mmo's.
p.s. I also wish there was spellcheck available for these posts, although the spellcheck which comes with Google toolbar seems to work fine.
Good combat.
Never played another MMO with good combat like WoW has and it has put me off playing anything else until they get it done right like WoW.
The number 1 thing they did was ease of entry into the experience.
The number 2 thing was story, theirs is just better and more memorable and also was experienced by an already massive audience from the previous Warcraft RTS titles and expansions.
Other companies have tried to profit off of the whole, "story everyone already knows about" routine but, often fail in the implementation of the game's mechanics (see Warhammer).
[rant]
I'll add one thing that all future developers should take note of, community. If your community cannot keep itself in check it will be over run by assholes. Why in the world hasn't there been a player based rating system ala Amazon and Xbox Live is beyond me.
We as MMO players really need to step up and respect our community and be more active in shaping it. For the adults if you have a child playing an online game please for the love of god enforce the idea that the online space is to be behaved in just like the real world. Why? Because social media isn't going away and one day not so far into the future your potential employer or college admissions person will be able to see that you're a douchebag that no one likes you in game save for a few 13 year olds and they'll be ale to ask you about it.
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EQ set the stage for a complex, relatively hard MMORPG in which you had to actually think. WoW comes along with its huge fantasy world following and then dumbed everything down greatly for ease of play to reward the retarded masses that don't want a challenge. Word spread greatly that "everyone was playing WoW so I must too!" Subscriptions numbers just exploded versus other MMORPG's.
I played WoW for the first 3 months of launch. That's all I could take. Games like EQ2, Vanguard and Age of Conan are so far superior.
Well,first of all it had timing. EQ was ageing and losing subs fast while no one yet had taken it's place. If it had released a few years earlier the competition would have been on but now EQ had no chance.
LOTRO had very bad timing, it released when Wow was really strong and pulled in a lot of new players.
Then it had "polish". EQ2 released almost the same time but it was in horrible shape at launch. If it would have been good from strat things might have been very different today but SOE just released it too early.
The third key to Wows success is that you can play it on any junk computer, so many kids who can't afford a good gaming computer can still play.
Timing is a key thing to success and it should be time for one or several really large game again any day now. Wow released when EQ was 6 years, now Wow is 6 years. Of course EQ did make far more expansions and that might influence how long the game lasts but 6 years is a long time for a MMO and it is likely that something new will take over as the largest game, probably GW2 or TOR.
But Wow will be around for a long time, EQ is still around. It is possible that Blizzard might make it F2P in the future but that should be at least 2 years in the future.
The biggest factor of what made WOW such a success can be broken down to the following :-
1) Virtually unlimited budget
2) Aggresive advertising
3) Exisiting customer base
4) rather than invent their own system and take any risks the copied from exisiting games ideas that worked
5) simplistic game play and low tech requirements ensures anyone can play
These four things are what ensured their success. Their exisiting playerbase od warcraft stratergy players garunteed that a lort of people would at least buy the game to try it out. The massive amount of funds they had and were willing to commit meant they had the time they needed to finish without intervention by backers.
Their advertising campaign ensured that everyone knew about them and enabled them to entice people into at least trying them out. Lastly by not designing new technologies or ideas they only needed to make not of exisiting trends and to copy accross to their own platform the ones that people seemed to enjoy.
To date WOW has created nothing new in the mmorpg industry ALL their new concepts and features have been taken from other games.
So ultimatly the key to WOW's success is it takes no risks and poaches aideas from those companies that do. It saves them money meaning they only need to invest in technologies that have already been tested and muck like Microsoft their sheer size means that eventually people credit the idea ad theirs anyway.
Gadareth
Funny, I remember that EQ2 had a much better release than WOW. Infact the WOW release was terrible. Server queues, frequent crashes etc etc. It was a joke. The thing is WOW's only advantage at release was its low tech requirements, and its heavy fanbase from Warcraft startergy days. It took 6 months if I remember correctly for all the performance bugs to be ironed out and dealt wih finally.
EQ2 was more advanced than WOW and took more risks in new ideas and technologies. Where WOW was basically a bastardised clone of DAOC, EQ and Anarchy Online, this combined with a very low system spec reduced their chance of game play issues (yet the sheer number of broken quest trains were staggering). So no WOW did not have a perfect or even polished release its release was just as troubled as all other mmorpgs infact worse than some.
Six months after their release and once their intitial login issues had been resolved they strated a massive advertising campaign which they have continued since THIS more than anything else is what contributed to their success.
Gadareth
You're wrong "the others didn't hve the advantage of Warcraft + the Blizzard fans for other known titles (Diablo, SC...)" - as in PC GAMES THAT "Gamers of all ages enjoied".... and ONE MORE, VERY IMPORTANT ADVANTAGE - "THE TIMES WHEN WoW was RELEASED" - compared to the other titles mentioned above...
Warhammer fans were still a "minority" compared to WoW - which had fans from "ALL CORNERS" - not just the Warcraft fans...
LoTRO - is the worst example. A game based on a book + movie... I'm prety sure most that read the book or have seen the movie, didn't join this MMO... but many WoW players, bored of WoW probably did (even if they didn't cancel their WoW subscription)
Same goes for AoC - when it was released "HORDS OF WoW players" joined this game - but most didn't like what they seen... I remember them revolted by their AoC experience - making fun of it and turn back to WoW, hopping for a better experience with Warhammer Online.
Conclusion: - "the idea about things being even is just in your imagination".
Advertising and IP. Warcraft 3 was one of the most popular games around the time WoW was released. Most people just play WoW because Mr. T told them to or they saw the Leeroy Jenkins vid on youtube. WoW didn't do anything better than the previous MMOs(aside from a few barely important things). It's not like people buy WoW and another game like FFXI or DaoC and play WoW because they think it's better. Most people just don't know any other MMOs than WoW, they have nothing to compare it to.
I don't think there has ever been an EverQuest clone. If there were one, i'd likely be playing it.
I think what made WoW so successful was that it ran very smoothly for most computers, it was easy to learn & play and that it didn't require a lot of time to feel a sense of accomplishment. It was/is an MMO that anyone can do well in and I think that appeals to a far great number of gamers, which is likely why most games today are following suit. It's a business & companies want a piece of that pie.
The same can be applied to Warhammer and look how that turned out.
Even the Sims Online meets most of your points there and it bombed so hard it closed down already. That is the most popular PC gaming franchise in history.
There is more to making a successful game than money and advertising. There has to be something to get players to spread word of mouth to their friends to join them. Something we are not seeing happen in most other games and I think the reasons are pretty obvious.
I think there are far more reasons why wow is so successful that get overlooked
For one it was designed to be fun first. That may sound like something that should go without saying, but how many mmos have we seen release that were just a jumble of ideas thrown together without actually seeing how they worked in a live environment. Take EQ2 for example. It release within 2 weeks of wow and withing a few months soe was already revamping core systems, scrapping ideas and completely changing the direction of the game. Warhammer is another great example of a game with features that sound great on paper, but fall apart when put together.
This really ties into what I think the big reason is. Wow addressed the market with their design and goals. The mmo market was in really bad shape and just ripe to get their ass kicked by a game that took its time to release and gave players what they wanted and that is exactly what happened.
It was considered normal to buy a new mmo and have to wait 12 months to let the devs get the game to a decent level of quality. Really, for the most part, we as mmo gamers just accepted broken and poor games at release as a normal part of playing an mmo and that funding a game through its first 12 months with the hope that things would improve is how things go.