Everytime one of these discussions comes along it leads to a littany of.....
"You don't have it quite right...this is how it REALLY is" rebuttals.
Games evolve. Hardcore is in the eye of the beholder. What you do to acheive perfection may be to you hardcore and what another does may be hardcore.
For example...back in the day when I was 17 (I'm 50..my back in the day was waaaay back) hardcore mean't we programmed our own worlds. Not only did we PLAY the games hardcore..we had to create the world. Very similar to creating your own D&D adventures with pen and paper but ours were 0's and 1's.
I sat there in high school (1979 to be exact) and wondered what would happen if..one miraculous day, our graph paper worlds and endless stream of computer cards would become 3-D reality. And here we are.
Speaking for myself....WOW (my game of choice for now) has complexity that escapes most people who don't see the beauty of the design...the endless programming and intertwining of ideas and lore. eye of the beholder...remember?
And if you still want hardcore?...it's there. It may not be there in camping, or arranging small armies of people to help you get one piece of loot. But it's there. I like the complex skill it takes to play a character at the upper levels of skill. The "part time job" it takes to be a good enough mage/warlock/warrior/etc.. to raid with some of the best players in the world.
Or PVP hardcore?...Try to play against some of the hardcore's living together in the same house to reach the pinnacle of gaming.
Hardcore is still there to some..and....playing as much as I have over 33 years...I can still see it.
Wow used to be fun when it was hard now the quests are to simplex the game is to simplex and raiding has lost its glimmer when the fights are dumbed down to the point of why do i play this game??>?
I came from the Era of UO and before that Neverwinter nights on the old AOL and to go even further back to Dark Sun Online on the TEN network. Games were hard not so damn simple as they are now. I played wow for years and it just kept getting easier. MMOs want to keep people they need to make it challenging again not a simple grind fest .
"The original players, myself and perhaps you too, suddenly became the minority – and if you don't believe that, I challenge you to look at the subscription numbers (EQ: 450k in 2003). Every single one of us could easily fit into 1/10th of WoW's 2008 playerbase."
Um, no...
450,000 subscribers is not a minority. That would be considered huge numbers by any measure of success.
450k may be 10% of 4.5 million, but what does that matter? It doesn't. At all. Guess what? 450k is also 1% of 45 million! Z0mg!!!111
It also doesn't make them the minority. It makes them a vast majority who are more than enough to cater to for financial success.
You also have to consider region/nationality. WoW is not monetized the same in China as it is in the United States. WoW having millions of subscribers, when most of them are Chinese, doesn't really compare to a game that is only sold or only popular in one region.
There are more factors to success than profit, and more variables to think about besides pure subscription numbers or concurrent users.
If you don't believe it, do your research. The author is the ONLY person who thinks 450,000 subscribers is "the minority".
For some reason, I think the author doesn't understand that WoW isn't the measure of success for a game. In fact... most MMO's would jump for joy at the idea of half of what EQ had in its prime. If indeed 450k is the correct number.
That is financial success. For game success, you only need to count as many players as 1 WoW server or 1 Everquest server could handle. How many, max, were on a single server?
That is the population that any other MMO has to meet, to equal those games in terms of success via population & gameplay. Give or take, based on the size of the world (Vanguard would need more, obviously.)
At any given moment, you will only be playing on a single server. These servers do not host 10 million people. They do not even host 1% of that. From what I gather, WoW servers at full host about 0.2% of that.
Comments
Everytime one of these discussions comes along it leads to a littany of.....
"You don't have it quite right...this is how it REALLY is" rebuttals.
Games evolve. Hardcore is in the eye of the beholder. What you do to acheive perfection may be to you hardcore and what another does may be hardcore.
For example...back in the day when I was 17 (I'm 50..my back in the day was waaaay back) hardcore mean't we programmed our own worlds. Not only did we PLAY the games hardcore..we had to create the world. Very similar to creating your own D&D adventures with pen and paper but ours were 0's and 1's.
I sat there in high school (1979 to be exact) and wondered what would happen if..one miraculous day, our graph paper worlds and endless stream of computer cards would become 3-D reality. And here we are.
Speaking for myself....WOW (my game of choice for now) has complexity that escapes most people who don't see the beauty of the design...the endless programming and intertwining of ideas and lore. eye of the beholder...remember?
And if you still want hardcore?...it's there. It may not be there in camping, or arranging small armies of people to help you get one piece of loot. But it's there. I like the complex skill it takes to play a character at the upper levels of skill. The "part time job" it takes to be a good enough mage/warlock/warrior/etc.. to raid with some of the best players in the world.
Or PVP hardcore?...Try to play against some of the hardcore's living together in the same house to reach the pinnacle of gaming.
Hardcore is still there to some..and....playing as much as I have over 33 years...I can still see it.
Wow used to be fun when it was hard now the quests are to simplex the game is to simplex and raiding has lost its glimmer when the fights are dumbed down to the point of why do i play this game??>?
I came from the Era of UO and before that Neverwinter nights on the old AOL and to go even further back to Dark Sun Online on the TEN network. Games were hard not so damn simple as they are now. I played wow for years and it just kept getting easier. MMOs want to keep people they need to make it challenging again not a simple grind fest .
"The original players, myself and perhaps you too, suddenly became the minority – and if you don't believe that, I challenge you to look at the subscription numbers (EQ: 450k in 2003). Every single one of us could easily fit into 1/10th of WoW's 2008 playerbase."
Um, no...
450,000 subscribers is not a minority. That would be considered huge numbers by any measure of success.
450k may be 10% of 4.5 million, but what does that matter? It doesn't. At all. Guess what? 450k is also 1% of 45 million! Z0mg!!!111
It also doesn't make them the minority. It makes them a vast majority who are more than enough to cater to for financial success.
You also have to consider region/nationality. WoW is not monetized the same in China as it is in the United States. WoW having millions of subscribers, when most of them are Chinese, doesn't really compare to a game that is only sold or only popular in one region.
There are more factors to success than profit, and more variables to think about besides pure subscription numbers or concurrent users.
If you don't believe it, do your research. The author is the ONLY person who thinks 450,000 subscribers is "the minority".