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The Worst thing for MMO's? The "fans"...
benit59
Member UncommonPosts: 114
Just visit any of the forums here and you can see first-hand the unspeakable amounts of venomous criticizm and overwhelming negativity that is spouted on a daily basis. People blame the publishers, developers, and "suits" for the failure of games lately, but maybe we should look at ourselves and the community we create...
http://massively.joystiq.com/2012/09/28/ex-bioware-dev-negativity-too-much-for-zeschuk-muzyka/
Comments
So the quality of a game is actually the fault of the community, and not the people who created said game?
That line of thinking is lurdicrous at best.
Also, "I'm sure the internal culture at EA had pinned the Old Republic conversion to free-to-play as a failure and hung that completely on Ray, so that would have hurt his upward climb. But, I figured he would fight harder. EA upper management must have been even worse than I thought," Oster explained.
What does that have to do with the community? The community of EA execs? EA makes bad games, enough said
The above is my personal opinion. Anyone displaying a view contrary to my opinion is obviously WRONG and should STHU. (neener neener)
-The MMO Forum Community
The subject of the article is almost irrelevant...its the idea of the communities affect on games and their negativity en masse that is pertinent.
Then to punctuate the point...the article is followed by an innumerable amount of highly negative posts.
"Hype" and it's backlash are terrible for any product. But since MMO players tend to be more vocal than a lot of other player bases, I think it's impact is magnified.
So if we are talking about Hype and De-Hype, yes, I can agree it has become one of the worst plagues to hit modern MMOs.
"Never pay more than 20 bucks for a computer game."-Guybrush Threepwood
"I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me."-Hunter S. Thompson
As to the topic of the thread and not in relation to the given example, I think there is a big problem right now and it isn't just in games.
For whatever reason, the internet has made it cool and fun to be negative and to hate on everything. It is almost no longer acceptable to go out and say you actually like something as then you aren't cool buy simply hating. It is also always cooler to hate the bigger the thing.
Game forums also have a major flaw, if people are enjoying the game they don't think to go and post on the forums. Why would they? They're happy with how everything is. So the forums, by their very nature, are filled with hatred and vile. How many times have you tried a product, say a candy bar, enjoyed it and thought "Hey I'll call the questions/comments line and tell them how good they did." It doesn't happen.
People don't like to take the time to tell people when they did something good or that they liked. But people will take hours out of their day to spew forth every negative comment they can find to let people know they made even a minor mistake.
I'm sure that wears on plenty of devs and it is likely why you see so few devs interact with the communities and instead they have community reps who filter the information both ways to make it easier to deal with.
Strange...a company that makes bad games manages to stay in business making games for several decades.
This kind of hyper-critical negativity is so common place in gaming communities that people responding to this topic are almost like zombies; they absolutely can't help themselves and some ridiculous garbage like this escapes from their lips (keyboard). I almost wonder if you said it out loud if you would realize how ridiculous it is that you responded to a post about overly negative criticism with...
I'm wasting my time.
Not sure I agree w/ the article, but I will say that gamers do a lot more harm for the quality of games than they realize or care to admit.
Gamers are often just as quick to dump on a newer game that's trying to take risks, as they are to complain about games being 'all the same', only to support the very thing they are complaining about. This is starting to change w/ the growing support for indie games, but it's still hard to tell how long it'll be before we see that support cross over into the MMO space.
While the lines between MMOs and other genres are starting to blur, the standard 'full blown' MMOs some of us want have more and more fractured & inconsistant support.
Forums such as this one have many functions, not the least being forum PVP, usually of the FFA variety. (no full looting yet)
Regardless how negative the postings here and elsewhere are, you can't equate that to MMORPG failures, these games do a fine job in failing on their own lack of merit, the negativity is just backlash in response to the root cause.
Sure, some folks hate everything, unless it's their perfect MMO, but still, those "haters" dont't influence the success or failure of a MMORPG in any way, (and certainly not when it involves a juggernaut like a AAA title)
Let's face it, lots of people hated SWTOR, D3, GW2 and WOW, and yet it has done nothing to prevent those titles from selling gazillions of copies, nor prevent millions of players to stay subbed and keep enjoying these games.
Never mistake forum posting as having any lasting influence on the real world, it doesn't IMO.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
The problem isn't that there's criticism where it's justified. It's that people have gotten in the habit of overly critisizing everything, just because it's easy. It's become understood that somehow being cynical is more honest, and that new games cannot possibly be good, because a game being good has come to mean that it needs to match some hyper-inflated expectations people created that aren't grounded in reality. Nowhere is this more aparent than in the MMO genre.
It's good to be critical, if it's warranted, but it's extremely harmful to the gaming community if you just shoot down everything for the sake of being critical. Every great gaming studio that we've come to know started from humble beginnings, and grew into what they were famous for. If we want newer studios, with newer ideas, then the same breathing room needs to be given for those ideas to develope.
This doesn't mean we should support bad games, but it also means that a game isn't inherently bad if it doesn't have a AAA budjet, or 110% of the features that you personally prefer. Unfortunately (especially on these forums), there seem to be too many gamers who don't get that.
And there are plenty of examples of that all over the internet. It is just cool to hate things now.
Like when that old lady in a small town wrote a review of the new Olive Garden that opened. She liked the food and that atmosphere. The article made its way across the internet and people just ripped her to shreds for possibly liking Olive Garden at all. It is just the way people are now. Hate everything. If it is big and successful hate it even more.
My wife loves Olive Garden. Someone call my divorce attorney!
if i had to peg anything its players laziness.
i have no problem with efficiency, but it has gone too far and its costs have yet to be realized.
Oh the "Fans" are the worst, recently a new breed called:
"Fanboy hater troll". Any critical post about a said mmo will be flamed down with personal attacks on the poster.
It's not about criticizm, it's about hating on people who criticize. And that's exactly why the communities are so bad.
This is bad two fold, this attracts the regular common trolls and radicalized any poster in one of both factions since there is no in between anymore.
Let it run rampant like in actually every mmo board currently and you get the fueled "negativity" the article complains about, but it certainly isn't originated from the critical post.
It's pure hyperbole over anything remotely beeing the best ever to everyting is the worst ever...EVER.
And stories like this only fuel the fire of haters and trolls on both ends. They try to draw away the focus about the game, of it's good and bad sides, about discussions, into a personal level about the poster's ability or inabilities.
If it wasn't for the fans, companies would have a hard time getting their message to the players, which would mean that they would have to pay a lot more for add campaigns and still not have as good sales. WoW had record sales in its time but they were a fraction of swtor's 2.3M units during first month, market is much much bigger nowadays.
Without the fans games would launch with 200-300k players and mmorpg's would be the niche it was 10 years ago.
Let's face it, critical posts that are well thought out and written without hate are rarer than any other MMO rare spawn.
It would be one thing if people would go to an official game forum, or even places like this, with a well written criticism of certain elements in a game. It would be even more rare if people followed up that post with more posts respectfully discussing those elements. But what do you really get most of the time? "Go DIAF you f&^king devs!!!" and worse things. People posting "LAWL this game sucks so hard" isn't real criticism, it is trolling and that is the majority of it. Go look at most major MMOs official boards, it is 90% trolls spewing crap (and that includes the troll fanboys spewing crap back).
The age of healthy debate from differing points of view is over. Now everyone just wants anyone who disagrees with them to die a horrible death for possibly thinking differently.
Also gamers should realize that devs, and all people, respond better to actual reasoned criticism instead of "You suck" or "I will unsub 753 accounts if you don't do this!!!" approaches.
It's the reason these and other forums are in complete disarray. There is a pretty big group of people who want something deeper and long-lasting than WoW or GW2 for example, but for the past 6 years the industry has ignored that group, making games that are streamlined at launch to avoid the "WoW crowd"'s harsh criticism and demands for nerfs and easy access gaming. Whether WoW and GW2 are good games isn't even the question, there are just some people who don't like the kind of MMO they represent.
The reason for devs bowing to their demands? Well, the group that complains is larger and has more money. It helped in creating a huge hate rift between fans of both types of MMO; casual and hardcore.
Killing? You mean progress. MMOs are much better games since EQ.
Or, we can play the suits for making bad games. The Docs saw the writing on the wall. EA controls their games now, they don't want to witness their legacy getting butchered.
Those games were horrible and they deserved all the criticism they got.
The internet gods should force all players to think happy thoughts. Anyone caught being negative will be cast into the corn field never to be seen or heard from again.
There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own.
-- Herman Melville
Haha! So well put. I second this, strongly.