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I should admit I was wrong about GW2.
DKLond
Member RarePosts: 2,273
Since I like to be fair, I feel I should admit I was wrong about GW2 and the level of success it would enjoy.
I honestly expected the game would be all but dead ~3-4 months post release in terms of player activity and forum interest. I thought most people would be fed up with it - and I expected it to be much less of a success than it seems to have become. Now, I never expected failure - definitely not, but I thought it would be facing a widespread and heavy backlash right around now.
I'm not personally into the game - and I have a lot of bad things I could say about it, but I will spare you the negativity in this thread. It seems my tastes are, indeed, merely my tastes - and they obviously don't apply to as many people as I expected.
All I can say is that I was wrong - and I'm happy that so many people are enjoying a new and shiny MMO, even months after release. I'm sure we'd all love to have that feeling - and I'm envious of it.
Anyway, congratulations to ANet and the people playing GW2!
Comments
It probably only has about 500K-800K players actively playing. That is a success but far from what most thought. It sold 3Million and only retained a 3rd of its client base so to me that = failure.
Honestly curious of where you pulled that number out of...
I'd agree it's doing a bit better than I expected, but that still isn't saying much in comparison to the MMO audience at large.
"This is life! We suffer and slave and expire. That's it!" -Bernard Black (Dylan Moran)
I didn't mean to suggest it was a huge success - but simply a success.
There's no way it's not a success with the amount of attention and forum activity we're seeing still.
As for numbers, I have no idea - and it's obvious that the amount isn't too impressive - or ArenaNet would have made them public.
But given my opinion about the game and its design - I honestly didn't expect this level of continued dedication by fans. They very clearly struck a chord with a significant segment of the gaming populace - and that's not a trivial accomplishment.
GW2 is amssive sucess and will only continue to grow, guess haters will always find some reason to hate it.
I feel sry for them they are wasting their time and energy on bashing the game since they dont have any game to play.
And props to you for admitting your mistake, most of the others still think that the game is dying and 90% of servers are empty....
Even that can't be said though, even the most avid people like Itgrowls and Zylaxx turned around already, I mean there's still some crazy defenders left but those two alone were quite surprising.
That being said it's a success as far as MMOs go but in relation to the hype and Anets expectations it's probably not doing so well.
You really shouldn't feel sorry for anyone, that's just a personal opinion. People like myself who've been opposed to the format of game design that structured GW2 aren't wasting our time or energy presenting our argument, because most of us enjoy coming to these forums to engage in discussion. I know it's easy to get pulled into the "troll", "hater", "fanboi" paradigm, but it doesn't really exist, and I think you'll find that most people who are open about their dislike are probably playing a slew of other games, regardless the ease or comfort it may provide to generalize disagreement as people who don't play games anyway.
"This is life! We suffer and slave and expire. That's it!" -Bernard Black (Dylan Moran)
I actively point out GW2s faults (i.e., bashing), yet have TONS upon TONS of games to play. That's just so odd, right?
ONTOPIC: I'd like to point out that while GW2 is a success on PC box sales wise for sure, determining whether it's a MMO success will only be possible if they release active user numbers (which won't happen, I assure you).
We will know if it's a MMO success when the 1st expansion hits, and even then only if they release sales numbers for the expansion (NOTE: they never did for GW1 expansions, altough part of that was due to the strange bundling they did back then).
http://lyrics.iztok.org/verse/Lynyrd_Skynyrd/Simple_Man/80615
What defines an MMO success? How many boxes must be sold that folks would actually say "success"?
3 million? Or does it need to go up to 4 million expansion "boxes" sold? Is it possible to sell 2 million boxes, and then have enough income through the BLT to support the game and future expansions? Can a an MMO have 400k active players and make enough money to be a success? Or is there some arbitrary number it must have that the MMO community has deemed acceptable?
GW2 has a loyal fanbase. It's not some completely overrated game like SWTOR, which IS actually a failure. It doesn't matter if many people have left, the fact that the game has no subscription but still has value to it makes it a success whether someone likes it or not.
500K-800K would be a huge success for a subscriber MMO 10y ago.
As far as they profit from box sales and not from subscriptions, minus the employers cost, it might be a huge success.
+ what you define as a failure; your theory goes for every MMO out there then. 60-70% of a new MMO are ppl that come and go within 4 months after release.
"going into arguments with idiots is a lost cause, it requires you to stoop down to their level and you can't win"
This forum is and has always been a breeding place for GW2 fanbois, which are the most obnoxiously loyal group of fanbois ive seen in gaming in 15 years. The game could be a steaming pile of dung and the GW2 forums would still be flush with activity. I wouldn't consider forum activity a sign of anything here... In some cases it might even be a bad sign.
but yeah, 3 million copies sold is nothing to sneeze at, and the game's not bad... Even if I personally can't get into it. It's real saving grace is that it never adopted a subscription, otherwise it would have fell flat on its face like the rest.
i think it would have did extremely well if that had been smart enough to have a proper PvP infrastructure and ELO system in at launch. I think they really blew it on that one. The games PvP is a lot of fun.
I disagree.
The amount of forum activity - good or bad - tends to reflect the level of interest a game enjoys.
Obviously, it's not an accurate tool and some games have strong dedicated forums by the developers, making other forums less active - but I'd say it's pretty clear that GW2 has a large active fanbase still. Large can mean what you want it to mean - but my estimate is above 300K and below 1.5M players players - and that's enough to constitute a success in this day and age, where 95% of all recent MMOs have less than that.
I'm not saying it means anything in terms of the quality of the game - merely the amount of active players.
That's why Darkfall has routinely been a high activity forum around here for years,because of "interest".
I'm not sure how easy it is to show how many actual play GW2.
As a sub game It's pretty easy just count active subs but with GW2 B2P model is hard to get a clear reading, what they have to do basicly is manual count logins for let say a month, some weeks/weekends have more logins than others so you have to make a educated guess to see how many of those 3+ mill still play on a regular basis.
If it's not broken, you are not innovating.
We must have very different concepts of what "high activity" means - because before the announcement of DF:UW, the forums were very quiet.
That said, it's one of the VERY few viable sandbox MMOs with full loot PvP - so it's only natural that it will get a bit more attention than would otherwise be the case with such a small playerbase.
But if you take a look at GW2 activity - it's a completely different story. There's massive activity and there has been a massive activity since release.
In my (over) 15 years of gaming, have found the amount of fanbois pretty much correlates with the amount of trolls, but maybe its just me...
I can't help but think that love or hate the game the better it does the better for the industry as a whole. Well, unless you absolutely adore the WoW model (game and financial) and want to see more and more games of its ilk.
The game that I'm rather surprised is doing so well is SWTOR my hunch is the setting is a big part of that.
Compared to what? Newly released or upcoming games? DF has consistently been in the top 10 for years post and prior to release, and has a extremely small player base in comparison to its peers.
It, much like GW2, has some extremely protective and vocal defenders.
I'm not so convinced. See, a while back, back when guesting was still weekly, I decided to try out a number of other servers because I was fed up of the zones after level 30 being a real ghost town. Even Orr was, with almost all (if not all) waypoints contested. So I tried a few other servers, each as empty as the last. That was one of the things that convinced me to give up on it, because the game is very broken if you're the only person running around in a zone. It's like they didn't even anticipate that.
Remember how public quests were in Warhammer Online? That's pretty much what's going on in GW2, it's exactly the same phenomenon. It's like they never even conceived the possibility that their zones would be really empty. I can only assume that, in general, people are tiring of the game by about level 20 or 30. If my sample with the servers I tested is any indication, their player retention is terrible. This is Warhammer Online all over again; history repeating itself.
This success/failure shite on this site is beyond me honestly. There seem to be enough people liking and playing GW2 so it must be sucessful. Personally I don't like GW2 but this does not make it a failure.
In my 30 years of gaming, I'd tend to agree.
But the trends change all the time and it's a curve of good/bad word of mouth. Most hyped games start with massive fanboism and a few vocal detractors - and then it slowly changes as more and more people are getting fed up and realise the game can't be perpetually interesting. At this point, the detractors start to outweigh the fans. It's a natural development.
But there's no way we'd be seeing this level of forum activity if the game didn't have a significant playerbase.