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Why do we accept lower quality products from MMO developers?

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  • TheLizardbonesTheLizardbones Member CommonPosts: 10,910


    Originally posted by Icewhite
    Originally posted by lizardbones I'm not saying, "People are stupid for buying MMOs", I'm asking, "What is the feature of MMOs that makes these obvious deficiencies irrelevant?"
    Expecting a simple answer to an enormously complex question.

    Simplest answer is that not everyone sees doom in all directions. Easy, truthful.

    Now, are we done with this thread?

    "My friend's eight year old son isn't player SWToR as much as he can because of the huge amount of development required to build SWToR. It's something else. What is it?"

    He likes it?

    He's not concerned whether EvilCo is taking advantage of him? (That's something you learn from reading forums...I'm assuming he does not. Consider: would you want him to?)

     




    For someone who wondered why I posted such a negative thread, you have certainly picked a negative focus for your posts here. At what point did I predict doom? My posts say something different; people are spending more money in the genre year over year, not less. There are some reasons why this shouldn't be the case if you compare MMOs to single player games or even just take a look at MMOs in general and how well they run. MMOs are providing something that other games do not provide. What is it? What are you getting out of MMOs that would contribute to their continued market growth? This shouldn't be that hard to answer.

    I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.

  • BladestromBladestrom Member UncommonPosts: 5,001
     
     

    ...

    I'm not saying, "People are stupid for buying MMOs", I'm asking, "What is the feature of MMOs that makes these obvious deficiencies irrelevant?" My friend's eight year old son isn't player SWToR as much as he can because of the huge amount of development required to build SWToR. It's something else. What is it?

    Mmorpgs have thousands of real people playing on the same servers, single player games don't.  Single player games have issues around mocking human behavior with scripts realistically, mmorpgs don't.  Swings both ways, in fact you could ask this question about any 2 things.

     

    rpg/mmorg history: Dun Darach>Bloodwych>Bards Tale 1-3>Eye of the beholder > Might and Magic 2,3,5 > FFVII> Baldur's Gate 1, 2 > Planescape Torment >Morrowind > WOW > oblivion > LOTR > Guild Wars (1900hrs elementalist) Vanguard. > GW2(1000 elementalist), Wildstar

    Now playing GW2, AOW 3, ESO, LOTR, Elite D

  • wordizwordiz Member Posts: 464

    I'm just gonna throw this out there cuz I'm sick of hearing it. The OP is right. The players/consumers that support crappy games are only half to blame. The media industry starts it's own trends to follow, we are not sooo intelligent that we create our own path through life anymore, anyone that thinks that is ignorant. We're bombarded by adverts and billboards and a million flashing pictures on a daily basis that tell us what to like, how to think, etc. Nearly every single bad trend in MMO development was started by the developers.

    How many people screaming, "Blame the players, blame the players!" are:

    A) The people supporting sub par quality media.

    B) The people that bought the "bad spending habits" excuse when the banks took all our friggin money?

    Negative folks, you blame the government, you blame the rich and powerful, you blame the developers, you blame the ones with millions to spend on marketing campaigns and MMO development. Wake up folks.

  • IcewhiteIcewhite Member Posts: 6,403

    -Nearly every single bad trend in MMO development was started by the developers.-

    Sorry, I'm still laughing at that one. Can I sig that?

    Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.

  • wordizwordiz Member Posts: 464
    Originally posted by Icewhite

    -Nearly every single bad trend in MMO development was started by the developers.-

    Sorry, I'm still laughing at that one. Can I sig that?

    Absolutely. It's the truth. 

  • IcewhiteIcewhite Member Posts: 6,403
    Originally posted by wordiz
    Originally posted by Icewhite

    -Nearly every single bad trend in MMO development was started by the developers.-

    Sorry, I'm still laughing at that one. Can I sig that?

    Absolutely. It's the truth.

    And prima facae, which is part of its beauty.  :)

    Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.

  • wordizwordiz Member Posts: 464
    Originally posted by Icewhite
    Originally posted by wordiz
    Originally posted by Icewhite

    -Nearly every single bad trend in MMO development was started by the developers.-

    Sorry, I'm still laughing at that one. Can I sig that?

    Absolutely. It's the truth.

    And prima facae, which is part of its beauty.  :)

    Not once do I remember players putting up the money, or the programming talent in changing the way a game they played is made. All the systems proposed by WoW that changed the format were proposed by the developer, forced on the community. Same with GW2. The fact you think that we have any control over a product without being a member of the development team is a tad egotistical. You really think your opinions are that powerful? Knowing latin doesn't make you right.

  • IcewhiteIcewhite Member Posts: 6,403
    Originally posted by wordiz
    Originally posted by Icewhite
    Originally posted by wordiz
    Originally posted by Icewhite

    -Nearly every single bad trend in MMO development was started by the developers.-

    Sorry, I'm still laughing at that one. Can I sig that?

    Absolutely. It's the truth.

    And prima facae, which is part of its beauty.  :)

    Not once do I remember players putting up the money, or the programming talent in changing the way a game they played is made. All the systems proposed by WoW that changed the format were proposed by the developer, forced on the community. Same with GW2. The fact you think that we have any control over a product without being a member of the development team is a tad egotistical. You really think your opinions are that powerful? Knowing latin doesn't make you right.

    Slow down hoss, I was agreeing with you.

    Devs are indeed responsible for ever bad development to ever appear in an MMO.

    ...and every good one.

    Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.

  • wordizwordiz Member Posts: 464
    I don't ever remember people saying, you know what we really need, is for 3D movies to come back...or a 3rd rendition of the Star Wars trilogy....or you know what Dragon Age: Origins really needed? Live action combat. That would make it SO much better. You know what I really want, is for developers to break a game up into a hundred pieces so I can get charged for it a hundred times... We have no control. We're their b*tches.
  • wordizwordiz Member Posts: 464
    Originally posted by Icewhite
    Originally posted by wordiz
    Originally posted by Icewhite
    Originally posted by wordiz
    Originally posted by Icewhite

    -Nearly every single bad trend in MMO development was started by the developers.-

    Sorry, I'm still laughing at that one. Can I sig that?

    Absolutely. It's the truth.

    And prima facae, which is part of its beauty.  :)

    Not once do I remember players putting up the money, or the programming talent in changing the way a game they played is made. All the systems proposed by WoW that changed the format were proposed by the developer, forced on the community. Same with GW2. The fact you think that we have any control over a product without being a member of the development team is a tad egotistical. You really think your opinions are that powerful? Knowing latin doesn't make you right.

    Slow down hoss, I was agreeing with you.

    Devs are indeed responsible for ever bad development to ever appear in an MMO.

    ...and every good one.

    Ahh my bad. I guess I'm just used to arguing with you. LOL!

  • RusqueRusque Member RarePosts: 2,785
    Originally posted by wordiz
    Originally posted by Icewhite
    Originally posted by wordiz
    Originally posted by Icewhite

    -Nearly every single bad trend in MMO development was started by the developers.-

    Sorry, I'm still laughing at that one. Can I sig that?

    Absolutely. It's the truth.

    And prima facae, which is part of its beauty.  :)

    Not once do I remember players putting up the money, or the programming talent in changing the way a game they played is made. All the systems proposed by WoW that changed the format were proposed by the developer, forced on the community. Same with GW2. The fact you think that we have any control over a product without being a member of the development team is a tad egotistical. You really think your opinions are that powerful? Knowing latin doesn't make you right.

    So you guys either weren't around or have forgotten what actually happened?

    I posted this in another thread, but it seems fitting here as well:

     

    Here's the thing, developers aren't really making the games dumbed down, but they are enablers.

    That's a lot of what happened to WoW. Blizzard made the first mistake of allowing 3rd party addons, as soon as that happened it left the players to their own devices to come up with easier and more efficient paths to phat lewts!

    People reminisce about Vanilla WoW having less hand holding, but look at how simple 99% of the fights were in Vanilla WoW vs the 3-5 phase 4 abilities per phase with environmentals going on in current day WoW raiding. It used to be you'd show up and unless someone knew the fight, everyone would die repeatedly for 4 hours and congratulate each other on making some progress on the bosses health bar.

    But then someone made DBM. All of a sudden you get sounds, lights and messages popping up on your screen telling you when something is about to happen. Because of it's extreme usefulness and efficiency guild masters would require you to install it to raid.

    DPS/Healing/Threat meters - also created by the community - REALLY helped to dumb down the game. Back in the day, threat mattered for tanks and good ones had to practice. But then someone made little boxes with numbers and red bars that fill up. Now everyone could measure their threat. Tanking went from challenging to yelling at everyone for making their red bar bigger than the tanks red bar. Not only did it make the game easier, but it made people ruder and less patient.

    As expansions came out, people wanted to race to level cap to get their epics faster than other people, so someone made QUEST HELPER!!! O M F G this single add on alone should draw the ire of every RPG gamer on the planet. I don't know how people can point the blame at Blizzard when their intention with questing was to make you read and then discover what you had to do. Quest Helper destroyed that. It got so bad that Blizzard implemented it into the game's UI simply because nearly everyone had it installed.

    Most hand holding changes came about because blizzard tracks stats and can see how many people are playing with what. At some point it becomes better to just make it a part of the game instead of making people risk downloading malware from 3rd party sites and claiming they got hacked.

    Same thing happened in PvP. There used to be no target of target or casting timers of your oppoenent's abilities. People made addons for those, and Blizzard saw that a 3rd party add on was giving an unfair advantage. Banning it meant having to check everyone in pvp all the time. So instead, they made it standard.

    Someone made an addon (forgot the name) that pops up colored lines and whatnot when you have proc effects. Hey look, it made people more efficient and provided an unfair advantage over people who hadn't downloaded those mods. Now it's standard.

    Basically what I'm saying is that you can trace nearly every little bit of dumbing down of MMO gameplay back to the community itself. Someone made the mods, and then people who wanted an advantage over others downloaded them.

    Blizzard should have responded by banning all add ons. Instead they enabled the community and provided the rope by which we all collectively hung ourselves.

    We wanted cast bars

    We wanted quest helper

    We wanted dps meters

    We wanted to know what every boss was going to do

    We wanted dungeon finders

    Well, now we have it all, only after we made the mess do we realize how far it took us away from what we were enjoying in the first place.

  • AlBQuirkyAlBQuirky Member EpicPosts: 7,432

    Reading this thread reminds of the qualifiers we many times place on compliments.
    "You throw pretty well, for a girl."
    "That's a really nice drawing, for an 8 year old."
    "You write really well, for an amateur."

    And the winner is...
    "This is a pretty good game, for an MMO."

    Does it come down to "expectations?"
    Do we, as players, expect less from our MMOs than our other computer games?
    If we do, should we?

    - Al

    Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse.
    - FARGIN_WAR


  • wordizwordiz Member Posts: 464
    Originally posted by Rusque
    Originally posted by wordiz
    Originally posted by Icewhite
    Originally posted by wordiz
    Originally posted by Icewhite

    -Nearly every single bad trend in MMO development was started by the developers.-

    Sorry, I'm still laughing at that one. Can I sig that?

    Absolutely. It's the truth.

    And prima facae, which is part of its beauty.  :)

    Not once do I remember players putting up the money, or the programming talent in changing the way a game they played is made. All the systems proposed by WoW that changed the format were proposed by the developer, forced on the community. Same with GW2. The fact you think that we have any control over a product without being a member of the development team is a tad egotistical. You really think your opinions are that powerful? Knowing latin doesn't make you right.

    So you guys either weren't around or have forgotten what actually happened?

    I posted this in another thread, but it seems fitting here as well:

     

    Here's the thing, developers aren't really making the games dumbed down, but they are enablers.

    That's a lot of what happened to WoW. Blizzard made the first mistake of allowing 3rd party addons, as soon as that happened it left the players to their own devices to come up with easier and more efficient paths to phat lewts!

    People reminisce about Vanilla WoW having less hand holding, but look at how simple 99% of the fights were in Vanilla WoW vs the 3-5 phase 4 abilities per phase with environmentals going on in current day WoW raiding. It used to be you'd show up and unless someone knew the fight, everyone would die repeatedly for 4 hours and congratulate each other on making some progress on the bosses health bar.

    But then someone made DBM. All of a sudden you get sounds, lights and messages popping up on your screen telling you when something is about to happen. Because of it's extreme usefulness and efficiency guild masters would require you to install it to raid.

    DPS/Healing/Threat meters - also created by the community - REALLY helped to dumb down the game. Back in the day, threat mattered for tanks and good ones had to practice. But then someone made little boxes with numbers and red bars that fill up. Now everyone could measure their threat. Tanking went from challenging to yelling at everyone for making their red bar bigger than the tanks red bar. Not only did it make the game easier, but it made people ruder and less patient.

    As expansions came out, people wanted to race to level cap to get their epics faster than other people, so someone made QUEST HELPER!!! O M F G this single add on alone should draw the ire of every RPG gamer on the planet. I don't know how people can point the blame at Blizzard when their intention with questing was to make you read and then discover what you had to do. Quest Helper destroyed that. It got so bad that Blizzard implemented it into the game's UI simply because nearly everyone had it installed.

    Most hand holding changes came about because blizzard tracks stats and can see how many people are playing with what. At some point it becomes better to just make it a part of the game instead of making people risk downloading malware from 3rd party sites and claiming they got hacked.

    Same thing happened in PvP. There used to be no target of target or casting timers of your oppoenent's abilities. People made addons for those, and Blizzard saw that a 3rd party add on was giving an unfair advantage. Banning it meant having to check everyone in pvp all the time. So instead, they made it standard.

    Someone made an addon (forgot the name) that pops up colored lines and whatnot when you have proc effects. Hey look, it made people more efficient and provided an unfair advantage over people who hadn't downloaded those mods. Now it's standard.

    Basically what I'm saying is that you can trace nearly every little bit of dumbing down of MMO gameplay back to the community itself. Someone made the mods, and then people who wanted an advantage over others downloaded them.

    Blizzard should have responded by banning all add ons. Instead they enabled the community and provided the rope by which we all collectively hung ourselves.

    We wanted cast bars

    We wanted quest helper

    We wanted dps meters

    We wanted to know what every boss was going to do

    We wanted dungeon finders

    Well, now we have it all, only after we made the mess do we realize how far it took us away from what we were enjoying in the first place.

    WoW was already dumbed down, prior to the plugins. 

  • wordizwordiz Member Posts: 464
    Originally posted by AlBQuirky

    Reading this thread reminds of the qualifiers we many times place on compliments.
    "You throw pretty well, for a girl."
    "That's a really nice drawing, for an 8 year old."
    "You write really well, for an amateur."

    And the winner is...
    "This is a pretty good game, for an MMO."

    Does it come down to "expectations?"
    Do we, as players, expect less from our MMOs than our other computer games?
    If we do, should we?

    The first highlighted point is exactly what we get now a days. My response to the second: WE SHOULD DEMAND MOAR!!!

    lol. Seriously though, I know I'm not the only MMO gamers years ago that had so much more in mind when it came to the future of MMOs. I don't know what the hell happened.

  • jimdandy26jimdandy26 Member Posts: 527
    Originally posted by wordiz
    I don't ever remember people saying, you know what we really need, is for 3D movies to come back...or a 3rd rendition of the Star Wars trilogy....or you know what Dragon Age: Origins really needed? Live action combat. That would make it SO much better. You know what I really want, is for developers to break a game up into a hundred pieces so I can get charged for it a hundred times... We have no control. We're their b*tches.

    Except you bought it, in large quantities. Which tells the developers that people like it and want more.

    I did battle with ignorance today, and ignorance won.

    To exercise power costs effort and demands courage. That is why so many fail to assert rights to which they are perfectly entitled - because a right is a kind of power but they are too lazy or too cowardly to exercise it. The virtues which cloak these faults are called patience and forbearance.

  • wordizwordiz Member Posts: 464
    Originally posted by jimdandy26
    Originally posted by wordiz
    I don't ever remember people saying, you know what we really need, is for 3D movies to come back...or a 3rd rendition of the Star Wars trilogy....or you know what Dragon Age: Origins really needed? Live action combat. That would make it SO much better. You know what I really want, is for developers to break a game up into a hundred pieces so I can get charged for it a hundred times... We have no control. We're their b*tches.

    Except you bought it, in large quantities. Which tells the developers that people like it and want more.

    I didn't buy it!!! But yeah, this is why it is obvious that the consumers bear half the responsibility for what gets made. People gotta learn to think for themself, but as I've said a thousand times on here, it's a proven fact that the majority of people will buy what is new/cool/popular over personal preference. Until people start thinking for themselves we find ourselves in a "reverse renaissance".

  • GravargGravarg Member UncommonPosts: 3,424

    I wouldn't say all newer MMOs are mediocre.  The problem with a lot of newer MMOs isn't the developer's problem at all.  Unlike other genres, MMOs rely heavily on player interaction and the community as a whole.  Today's MMO community isn't cohesive or as generous as the community of older MMOs.  This is where the whole are newer MMOs better or worse than older MMOs comes to a point.  There will always be bugs in any game, I haven't played a game in a long time that didn't have at least one bug, they happen no matter what.

     

    MMOs are no different in the aspect of other genres except when it comes to cost and the involvement of the community.  Almost all games from other genres are basically released and rarely ever majorly updated with new content (other than DLCs).  Strictly single player games are rarely if at all updated.  The game is released and you're stuck with whatever happens.  The bonus to this is that the developer does not have to worry about the toxic community that the MMO community has become.  I'm not saying that everyone complains about every game, but a lot of people seem to complain about every single developer and newer MMO that comes out.  A lot of the things that people complain about are an opinion or a problem that originates from the community itself.

     

    Neverwinter's recent exploit comes to mind quickly, since it just happened.  Cryptic and PWI should've fixed the exploit a long time ago yes, but the small part of the community is the one that was using the exploit.  Not all blame can be put on Cryptic and PWI.  I don't believe there is a single thread on this site blaming the exploiters.  Just because I own several guns, and I "could" go to a store and steal everything they own and all their money, doesn't mean that I should.  I know that's put all the way to one extreme, but it points out that when players are doing things that hurt the game's experience, it's not all the developers' fault.

     

    I recently had a thread and poll asking whether or not people read the quest texts in MMOs, and last time I checked it was like 2/3 of players do not.  The problem I see with this is that a large part of the community isn't playing MMOs how they're meant to be played.  They're rushing to get to the "endgame" (which doesn't exist in MMOs).  Playing MMOs this way makes them shallow and uninteresting.  A problem that isn't the developers' fault.  I can take Skyrim (game of the year in many awards), and play it totally wrong making it totally sucktacular.  The problem with MMOs is when you have a mass quantity of people together doing it, it magnifies the problem.  Thus you get the problem with newer MMOs.

     

    I'm not saying that none of the fault lies with the developers, I'd say it's about 50% since there's really two parties involved in the problem, the community, and the developers.

  • NaughtyPNaughtyP Member UncommonPosts: 793

    Thread title is wrong. It should say... Why do I accept lower quality products from MMO developers?

    Because I try to avoid crap. I've spent about $100 on MMOs in the last 4 years and as soon as I thought something was crap, I stopped playing and deleted my CC info. I am actually voting with my wallet. Why aren't you?

    Enter a whole new realm of challenge and adventure.

  • IcewhiteIcewhite Member Posts: 6,403
    Originally posted by jimdandy26

    Except you bought it, in large quantities. Which tells the developers that people like it and want more.

    In WoW's case, many people "bought it" several times, counting expansions.

    Self-loathing? Masochism?

    Or maybe, like that 8-year-old boy back just a bit ago, the forums haven't yet taught them all of the reasons they shouldn't be having fun.

    Experiment: Pick up a fresh title (it can be F2P if you don't want to spend cash).

    Hop on the local game forum here, and pop in a simple op: "You know, I kind of like playing this, this is kind of fun."

    Count how many replies follow before the first guy gleefully pees in the wheaties.

    Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.

  • The user and all related content has been deleted.

    image

    Somebody, somewhere has better skills as you have, more experience as you have, is smarter than you, has more friends as you do and can stay online longer. Just pray he's not out to get you.
  • wordizwordiz Member Posts: 464
    Originally posted by Icewhite
    Originally posted by jimdandy26

    Except you bought it, in large quantities. Which tells the developers that people like it and want more.

    In WoW's case, many people "bought it" several times, counting expansions.

    Self-loathing? Masochism?

    Or maybe, like that 8-year-old boy back just a bit ago, the forums haven't yet taught them all of the reasons they shouldn't be having fun.

    I think you're on to something here. Grown men subjecting themselves to panda bear characters riding around on flamingos, because they feel it's the best option. What about my ex-biker buddy that prances around on his mesmer  in GW2 leaving trails of butterflies? These guys used to smash face with shields and battle to the death. Either people are punishing themselves or they've lost their sense of dignity. 

  • IcewhiteIcewhite Member Posts: 6,403
    Originally posted by wordiz
    prances around on his mesmer  in GW2 leaving trails of butterflies? These guys used to smash face with shields and battle to the death.

    Face-smashing and butterflies are mutually exclusive?

    Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.

  • TheLizardbonesTheLizardbones Member CommonPosts: 10,910


    Originally posted by zymurgeist
    Originally posted by Iselin Originally posted by zymurgeist Because we're foolish and desperate. Because we're more interested in new and shiny promises than a functioning foundation to build upon. Jumbo jets are more difficult and expensive to build than lawn mowers. That doesn't mean they shouldn't be thoroughly tested because "oh heck they're going to blow up and fall out of the sky now and then, it's inevitable."  There will be problems with anything complex but companies not making every attempt to minimize them is our fault. If you make stupid mistakes your company should die not prosper. A lot of unfair charges are laid against corporations but one that applies to any large organization is that they reduce moral hazard and accountability. They hide incompetence and increase waste. Some of that is acceptable if the product is profitable but when you look at MMORPG landscape it's clearly a dog's breakfast.
    Good example...lawnmowers and airplanes. Especially considering that in the US "More Than 600 Children Undergo Mower-Related Amputations Each Year" http://www.amputee-coalition.org/absolutenm/anmviewer.asp?a=1206 ... and that's just amputations and children under 10. Airplane accidents per year (all airplanes not just jumbo jets)? ~ 150 average. Next analogy? This thread... amazing how a deeply held prejudice ("Those evil corporations pumping out shitty themepark clones are just ripping us off, Jim!) can withstand any and all evidence to the contrary...not to mention common sense.
    Mower amputations are overwhelmingly caused by stupid people not machine failures. It's completely irrelevant to the point. Pick anything simpler than a jumbo jet then. It won't change the fact that not enough is being done to prevent problems and gamers are just taking it on the chin. Corporate actions reflect the will of their markets not their investors because investors will abandon corporations that don't serve their markets and make money.  The customer has all of the power they just won't use it.  


    That's the thing. The consumers are using their power, and largely telling developers that they are doing pretty close to good enough. They keep buying video games. They want them. Consumers have to be getting something out of the deal. That something might be the experience of buying a new product, or getting in on the ground floor of a new game, but that's still something.

    I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.

  • Squeak69Squeak69 Member UncommonPosts: 959

    my answer is simple, when you ahve a set price, like B2P or P2P and most SP are B2P, then you go off the number of people who buy it, and the numbers of people who continue to play it.

    when you go off of F2P the method changes, and you go purely off of what makes the most money, and this is where things start getting borked, with most modern MMOs being F2P devs have lost thier ability to judge game quality due to a simple fact, whales are always going to pore large amounts of money into a game whether it be good or crap.

    F2P may be the way of the future, but ya know they dont make them like they used toimage
    Proper Grammer & spelling are extra, corrections will be LOL at.

  • dgarbinidgarbini Member Posts: 185
    Originally posted by jimdandy26
    Except you bought it, in large quantities. Which tells the developers that people like it and want more.

     

    That is a common mistake made by both people looking from outside and the companies as well.  Things are not always a hit because they are good or demanded a lot.  Lets say Movie A was a hit.  Was it a hit because of the lead actor? the story? the production values? the marketing?  The timing?  Very good and high demanded products fail all the time because of outside factors, and very bad products can be a hit because of outside factors.  I would argue WOW is largely not a hit because of game mechanics that are demanded, it was the right product at the right time.  Why did GW2 sell so many copies, hype which has nothing to do with a game at all.  Thus buying large quantities of something doesn't mean its wanted more.  How did Jurassic park 2 do?  Blair witch 2?  Success of a product is a specific set of circumstances reached at a very specific time which often cannot be recaptured, and high sales do not always indicate approving the product or wanting more of similar.  Just because I feel like a candy cane today doesn't mean I want everything to always taste minty, perhaps it was just a passing whim or perhaps I regret that purchase (GW2 I'm looking at you).

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