It's no secret that mmos have changed several times over in the past 20 years. Some say it evolved in a good way, some don't like it.
I would like to single out a specific point in history:
November 13 2008, this is when Blizzard released Wrath of the Lich King expansion.
Boom !.... Something happened !.... All of a sudden the game was easy.
Boom !.... Something else happened !.... Dungeon finder (LFD) was invented, forever changing the community.
- Before this time, difficulty was never spoken. In my opinion harder was never an issue to anyone, but that's my opinion. Easy game play changed almost over night as we were sleeping in our beds. The REAL REASION, to sell expansion's. To get players to Lich King Fast. To get players to spend money.
- Before this time, the industry did have a problem with groups and PUG's. This truly was a problem, no one can deny that. However the leader of all mmo's (World of Warcraft) decided to change the community rules forever. Now this is my opinion, but I don't think this decision was completely thought out by Blizzard. Quickly on paper "LFD" sounds like a great problem solver, But it devastated any chance of community. Like it or not the game turned into a lobby game. Without going into detail, an overhaul of the social panel would have been a better choice.... But the huge idea of a "Dungeon Finder" was too great of an invention for Blizzard to pass up.
Why World of Warcraft ?
We all know the answer to that, their the boss and still are. The template to making money !
However, I'll say something very important...... Blizzard's World of Warcraft being the King of all mmos can make mistakes, huge mistakes and recover. All that follow can't afford to make the same mistakes, BUT THEY ARE..... They don't have the bounce back like Blizzard.
What do you think changed everything ?
Disclaimer:
This is my opinion, I'm sure many will hate me for this as always for stating my OPINION.
Comments
WoW may not have been the first MMO, but it was definitely the first MMO that really emphasised the Massively Multiplayer aspect of MMO's
Dungeon finder killed off human relationships and turned a huge world into a lobby.
You might say I don't have the time anymore to play WoW like that. Yeah, if I want to get all the gear. Go easy on the gear piñata then I don't have to clear the same crap everyday with infinite amount of difficulty. I want to be part of a community. Otherwise I have much better options.
I don't hate lobbies. But I like MMOs because I like to be a part of a vast world. Otherwise FPS, MOBA and even games like For Honor or Fortnite make me a lot happier.
I can now play the game when Im playing the game.
No more sitting in one spot yelling "37 Monk LFG for XYZ PST" for hours on end. And when a group is looking another party member I would get responses like "Ugh no monks".
Then , it was "well, no groups today, guess I'll try again tomorrow"
Which, quickly became "no groups again today, why am I even playing this stupid game?"
These days, you can find a group for many activities(5 man dungeons, raids, world quests, PvP) in short order. So much better than the "good ol' days" of spamming LFG chat for hours.
Maybe because I started playing during vanilla and not during Wrath and had a long list of friends that I played with almost 24/7 at times.
I foolishly replied to this thread knowing that it would fuel more stupid threads from the OP. It's not like he hasn't hashed this out a thousand times over. . .
This forum has turned into that cheap bar everyone knows, where getting drunk and telling tales of the way things were, justifies the loss of all those brain cells.
wow changed everything by taking ideas from the mmos before it and expanding upon them. Blizzard greatly benefited from the internet being a baby thus being able to grow within Internet Pop Culture. They also made a game that was easy to run on every computer. Combine all that with the fact it was the early 2000s.. that's the basics.
There is another "level" to it though.. the psychology part is the biggest reason. They make people addicted the game by hiding "rare loot" behind a RNG aka variable ratio. It makes people keep coming back to get that rare thing. Its the same tactic casinos use in Vegas. Slot machines.. Once they finally get that "rare thing" they find a new thing to chase.
The truth is, its not the thing that's rare, (its really pixels) its the dopamine that you are craving, your brain is literally saying "hey this feels good we did a thing! we are awesome! lets do another thing!". Its a psychological reward system. Nothing wrong with that, Dopamine isn't itself bad.. its good in small dosage.. but WoW constantly give it to you. You pay Blizz 15 a month, they feed you a new way to hide the dopamine you desire. Blizzard over the years have learned how to entice players to keep giving them money for this experience and that is why they are still here with a 15 year old game still on top.
No amount of innovation in a MMO can remove them simply because they were the first to implement this tactic. Therefore, if your friends say hey lets try the "new mmo" 9/10 only like 2 of you guys will try it the rest wont because they are so close to getting that new (insert anything).
In gambling..the money AND its the dopamine you get from winning a few hundred at blackjack so you go play slot machines cause you think its "your night" and you have the right gear/techniques now to finally do it. Your odds are increased to "win" because you kept playing those slot machines. It becomes a very vicious thing if people are careless about their playtime.
I've seen people lose their entire life, friends, family over the addiction to WoW. So again it can be fun, if you understand what they are doing to you and what you are getting yourself into..exactly like Vegas, everything in moderation.
Did WoW make the MMO market different? of course it did.. its easy to see just look at every mmo after it they are ALL directly influenced by it. The reason being is wow recognized at some point they could use the psychology behind games to make a fortune. That changed the market.
Edit: Not sure what mmo introduced micro-transactions first but I think that would be the second thing that changed the mmo market.
"The Society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools."
Currently: Games Audio Engineer, you didn't hear what I heard, you heard what I wanted you to hear.
However on a side note:
I was great at finding groups easily using the social panel almost "instant group filling".
This method was not for everyone, that's for sure. But it shows the potential was their... If only they enhanced or publicized this feature, it could have worked much better.
Social panel was the key for all mmos, very few used it.
Did LFD solve this problem? Yes it did, but it also created lots of new problems which were solved by turning the original game to something else.
Do i like it now? No, i hate the abomination the genre has become with this feature.
It's super easy to find groups now but i no longer care since i don't play anymore.
Very powerful last line
Finding people is easy, but I no longer care, because of what it is !!!
I say that solely from my opinion. If you enjoy the modern MMO great for you, as an original niche MMO fan I don't think the new MMOs take advantage of all this genre has to offer.
It was really another Blizzard game that started that: "Diablo 2". The first Diablo was hard, even at easy as most other 90s games but during the time between it's release and 2001 something have happened. The internet had become a widely spread thing at that time, people started paying their bills online, shop and listening to music (remember Napster?) so people who never gamed started to buy computers.
And the major game companies wanted their money so they made things easier. Since it initially worked well they kept lowering the difficulty the entire 00s and around '08 they just took things too far, most gameplay got so easy that people started to play far less in any PvE game.
If you compare the time people spend in a Dragon age game with the Baldurs gate game you see a huge difference, most of us spent months playing BG but DA only last 2 weeks at best. Not a huge problem for singleplayer games but for MMOs it is a disaster.
Wow and others left the hardest raids alone (besides nerfing the numbers of players) but everything else got nerfed hard and the new players who started raiding is rather low because of the huge difficulty gap.
I am not saying that MMOs should be incredible hard, just that the difficulty needs to be reworked. When Wow released it had a rrather good difficulty slider actually, starting easy and slowly sliding towards hard as you progressed. Players got better and played longer then today where everything is insanely easy until the hard endgame.
As for the dungeonfinder, that is way more complicated. The reason PUGs become so bad is not just because of it but also because other factors. For one thing have the server size increased a lot. The other social interactions besides PUGing have gone down and the games tend to point and say that you are the only important hero in the world conditioning people to become more selfish.
Wow certainly have a huge impact on the genre but not that huge,
This is what i meant by saying that LFD did solve one problem but created lots of new ones. It was the invention of this tool that created a snowball effect to the whole game when they started to design everything around this new feature instead of tweaking it more suitable for the game that had become quite popular already.
As for Blizzard tweaking things ........ didn't people feel that this was because of the long / very long queue times during the first great content drought?
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Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
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I must confess, I was happy to see the dungeon finder at first. I didn't predict anything. But after a couple of years I realized the effects it had on the community. That I didn't like. Made me quit, the convenience killed it for me.
Lobby games are a lot more efficient. It is not like cities in WoW are anything but 3D lobbies anyway. May as well make it more friendly to navigate. In fact, isn't it great that in a game like D3, a few clicks will get me in the game mode that i like to play? None of these walking around and jumping through hoops before I actually can play.
You do not create an immersive living plausible world with computer apps like a dungeon finder,that to me is just retarded.Sure you can say it makes things easier,but so what,i don't want easier i want a role playing experience,something Blizzard has no clue about.
I do NOT look for a mmorpg thinking "ok where are the best add-ons,give me a dungeon finder,giver me cross server grouping,NO..I want to feel like i am part of a living breathing world and NOT a computer game.
Blizz is definitley not a lone although MOST are in this same boat,they simply do not understand what they are even making.You might as well sell a cookbook for all i care,if it doesn't live and breath immersion it is a waste of time as a mmorpg.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
You do not realize that they do not want a "immersive living plausible world"? They want a good game.
Now who is the "retarded"?
We should not be treated like little kids playing connect the dots,paint by numbers,ok after that join our instances.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
Why? It is not like gamers are better story writers than professionals.
And it is a free world. If devs want to sell THEIR stories instead of you, and they are widely successful (like in WoW), why should they listen to you?
Wow was not made to be a world simulator like UO, it was made for casual fun. And yeah, I think they went too far with the casual thing eventually which hurt the fun part but that is just my own opinion.
Blizz obviously thinks that even MORE casual is the way to go. Hence, hearthstone, HOTS and their current golden boy, Overwatch.
Obviously, fun is subjective. Blizz don't participate care about *your* fun. They care about fun enough for the millions that they serve.