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Love the Site But Not All of the Articles
Razeekster
Member UncommonPosts: 2,591
I am kind of tired of coming here and looking at articles that put a positive spin on things that are clearly negative. The latest insult to my mind is how all these articles are being written about SW:TOR going F2P and having the gall to say that it's not because the game is an abject failure. Wake up and smell the humus MMORPG.com.
SW:TOR is not going F2P because EA is being kind or made a financial mistake in making SW:TOR P2P instead of F2P. F2P isn't always the "go to" model. If that was true all those P2P MMORPGs out there would be doing badly, which they clearly aren't. I'm tired of people thinking that if P2P games don't have a ridiculous amount of players in them than they are failures. RIFT is a good example of a game that is doing well with the P2P subscription model and they most certainly don't have millions of players.
The reason why SW:TOR is going F2P is because players realized that SW:TOR wasn't as good as many sites (such as this site) hyped it up to be. It's because the atrocious amount of money dumped into SW:TOR still didn't fix the fact that not enough love or patience was put into the game. You can hype a game to kingdom come, but it's the players that play the game and it's their opinions and wallets that matter the most and they've clearly spoken.
As a writer it hurts me to see that a lot of articles on MMORPG.com are written to hype up a game instead of to write about it with 100% honesty. I still have a ton of respect for MMORPG.com, but I'm definitely starting to lose a bit everytime I see such articles.
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Comments
It's pretty much how the world works. It's the same in world politics, people lie but it's obvious to the masses that they have to say it even though it doesn't make sense. But if you look around, there's people who have a different approach, and acctually says whats on their mind. Both in politics and videogame critisism
That's why I love user blogs on gaming a lot more at times because they seem to be more truthful because they aren't being backed up by sponsers or advertisements.
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True that.
When a game goes F2P it is always because it doesn't have enough subscribers, that's as simple as that.
When WoW will have less than 500K subscribers, it will go F2P......................it's not rocket science.
Subscription is the more profitable way of making money, as long there are enough players.
The reason why F2P is overtaking subscription models is because MMOs are so crap today, that nobody is willing to subscribe anymore, therefore now 80% of MMOs are F2P.
I am subscribed to EvE and Tera, I never play F2P, because coicidentally they are not even good enough to be played for free.
Anyway I agree with the OP, but you need to understand that the majority of Publishers pay to advertise their games to this site, so do not expect any criticism from the columnists (By the way if I see another TSW review, I am gonna throw up. Is it the 5th part now?)
I ignore the articles and particularly the reviews.
The only thing I like about MMORPG is the community and the Forums.
Thankfully, I think they are done with the TSW review (I refuse to play any Funcom games after all the past mistakes they have made. It's nice to know there are nicer people who don't mind giving them another chance though).
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Yet another "How can people like things I don't like" thread. How original.
I want a mmorpg where people have gone through misery, have gone through school stuff and actually have had sex even. -sagil
You obviously didn't read my full post if you came to that conclusion.
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I just wrote a response that was critical of MikeB's article but I don't think the article is a negative reflection on the website. I personally like that there writers here have staunch opinions about a lot of MMO news. It makes things interesting. And more importantly it offers a different perspective from people who've had interviews and private discussions with developers over the years. That's something the majority of forum posters have no access to.
Just as long as I can (in this case with TOR's F2P conversion) comment freely that I think they are treating the game and its developers with kid gloves then I have no problem at all with the articles.
It wouldn't be a huge issue with me if it didn't seem like they did it with every game that they reported on.
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Find me the last AAA MMO that MMORPG.com criticised................good luck with that.
This is not about not accepting that people have different taste in gaming, but acknowledging the fact there is a certain pattern which is very obvious.
I am not going to criticise MMMORPG.com too much, everyone is entitled to support their business the best they can, every site and magazine does that.
But not reckognising that this site have a soft spot on big publishers (particularly the ones that buys full homepage advertisement space), it means being either in denial or just plain naive.
Same....I jsut dont know how many kickbacks alot of these sites get in exchange for positive reviews......Even some of the posters here we just dont know if someone from Funcom or EA or Mythic or some other company created an account to drum up business.
It doesn't take much looking around to see that sandbox fans have flocked to this site in recent years (because they have nothing better to do than hang out here). It also doesn't take much looking to see that the people running the site don't hide their fondness of themeparks.
Put the two together and you get a tinfoil-hat brigade claiming everything is about advertising monies and all the writers are corrupt.
Add to that a "special" set of peoples who can't understand that people have varrying tastes and we get our daily dose of chaos and pointed fingers.......
I want a mmorpg where people have gone through misery, have gone through school stuff and actually have had sex even. -sagil
This site has been in the tank to the large developers/advertisers for some time.
I mean really: How many dozen articles praising TOR to the skies and hyping every single feature and patch (!?!) have come out on this site?
And other sites are not much different.
In other industries, "legitimate" news outlets to not review the products they are paid to advertise, nor write article after article singing the praises of the same.
And in the rare cases they do, they publically disclose and disclaim the hell out of it, when it is something actually "newsworthy". Just so people do not question their integrity.
IMO, this is not a news site as much as a paid opinion site.
And how many AAA sandbox MMOs are there? Themepark MMO advertisements pay MMORPG.com's paychecks not sandboxes. That's why "the people running the site don't hide their fondness of themeparks."
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They are called shills, if they weren't shills then companies would stop advertising on their site, would stop giving them "breaking information", videos, interviews and the rest of the content that keeps the rabid MMO fans comming here.
Its just buisness. Thats not to say that its not repugnent and immoral, but that is buisness in general.
Two things.
In response to those who say that games go f2p only because they are doing badly and that p2p is always more profitable, I submit LotRO. At the time of its f2p conversion LotRO was one of the most well-respected games on the market and had a lot more subscribers than most of its competitors. It went f2p because Turbine believed that they had found a model that was more profitable than p2p and so they converted their flag-ship game. Whether or not they actually have been more profitable I have no idea.
SWTOR almost certainly still has enough subs to sustain it. Perhaps it is because EA is looking at trends and has determined that they will not be able to sustain enough subs that this decision has been made. Perhaps it is an attempt to boost their game into the black this fall (I'm guessing they have not yet turned a profit considering production cost) and then allow the chips to fall as they may. Whatever the case with SWTOR, endicting games that are f2p as abject failures while claiming that p2p games are not is ridiculous. Rift is an amazing game and p2p, but subscriber estimates at this time are very low. It is almost certain that LotRO, an f2p game, has more subscribers than Rift. Which is more profitable is anyone's guess. LoL probably has the most players in the Western online market and it is f2p and probably makes far more money than SWTOR does at this point. SWTOR is a failure in terms of game quality and its conversion to f2p might also fail. That has little to do with the realities of one business model over another.
As for the premise that sites like this are always positive due to sponsorships, while that may be true sometimes, sites like this are always positive because if they skew negative nobody reads them anymore. People who gave SWTOR a poor review before launch were brutalized and dismissed as idiots. I gave Tera a mixed review before it launched, claiming that it would have been better served had it launches as f2p, and my review was not well received. I gave GW2 a glowing review, which was probably not as well done or as accurate as my SWTOR review, and people mostly love what I have to say, although I am still being ripped by fanboys because I wasn't 100% positive so they feel I should go back to WoW. After playing the TSW closed beta I didn't even bother reviewing it because I could think of little nice to say about the game so posting a review would have been completely detrimental to my channel and my reputation.
The same holds true to some degree for movies. The first person to give The Dark Knight Rises a bad review received death threats from people who hadn't even seen it yet!
Gaming sites that give negative reviews on games like swtor within a month of its launch will go out of business because their readers will abandon them. Blame greed and sponsorships all you want. Us gamers, so often driven by a mob mentality, have only ourselves to blame for not being able to find objective reviews.
http://www.youtube.com/flymolo
The Articles are opinion pieces not news articles or scientific theorums.If you don't like a certain writers opinion don't read articles by that person(s) articles.
Also I'm a bit tired myself of seeing SW:TOR's score brought up by people who can't get over it.For most peopel the score accurately reflected what was reviewed which was the intial levelling process which enamored many because it had single player RPG production values and story presentation which enamored peopel at the time.The Game didn't start to fall apart till you spent some time at max level,that's when the score for that game starts falling rapidly.
Had TSW come out before SW:TOR it would probably be getting much better scores because now SW:TOR has made people more wary about being enamored by story telling and not wating to see how the end game plays out.
Fully agree with OP. I understand they need to be careful not to step on too many toes, but the positive spin and hype MMORPG.com puts on everyfuckingtime with the big publishers is just disgusting and insulting to their own community.
Goddamn corporate lapdogs, grow a pair.
The problem is, this site does not differentiate much, if at all, between a "news story" and a "feature" and often they appear in both sections.
Further, how many even remotely negative or even "non-positive" bits about TOR have appeared here at mmorpg.com?
Exactly one, once, and that one was very lukewarm in its criticism.
As compared to the 80-100 positive or very positive ones.
For a game that is/has been tanking as hard as TOR, one would think that some of the failings that are obviously there, might be mentioned, but it is not so.
By your logic, if there are many writers, and a person does not happen to like one, there are others to read.
Problem here is that they ALL follow the party line, and thus they "like everything" or at least "dislike nothing", which is problematic for a site that proports to offer "reviews", with some level of objectivity.
I agree.
Everyone does that...........it's business.
But that's the good thing about Internet, you no longer have to believe what the media tells you.
The community generally is more "honest" about things, one way or another.
I generally read the members reviews to make up my mind, both the negative and the positive ones, I never believe any of the MMORPG.com reviews (or any other site as you pointed out).
As a reader I'm tired of these articles too. I've lost all respect for this site ever since they posted that the review total for SWTOR was 9/10 when they too knew that the game wasn't even the same code as the final beta at launch and was rife with graphic errors.
The other thing that has struck me is the clear bias this site has. Apparently, it's not okay to post well thought out factual forum posts about this game title (one risks being called a monster-under-the-bridge if one does just after the launch of SWTOR) but it's completely okay to post completely unfounded nonsense in the forums of another game on this site (three guesses which one) where even the features list proves the poster wrong. When one reports those people, nothing occurs and even MORE future postings of the same type occur without a single warning or closing of a forum thread.
It's disturbing to say the least.
That's right Razeekster, people often claim "conspiracy theory conspiracy theory!" when one is pointing out a simple well known widely practiced business model.
You mean all the ones that are not WoW and still stick to the monthly sub? Trying to think, EvE... Warcraft... Rift...
WHOO! Thats a whopping three games...
That Guild Wars 2 login screen knocked up my wife. Must be the second coming!