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.
[...]
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.
Well, I would not say that Wow was the first to emphasize the Massivelly Multiplayer part of MMORPG, many others did this before it starting with UO, lets not forget that each WoW server still had something between 6 to 10 thousand players and other MMO's did this before it. But WoW was the first to emphasize Super massive Subscription numbers. And that signaled to the industry that there was money to be made because all of the sudden you move in to a multi Billion dollar Business with millions of paying customers.
In that sense yes it changed much because it brought attention to the genre in a big way , actually, in one of the ways that most matter..money. Plus it introduced the genre to many new players of the new generation.
We, as players may talk about the Game and how it changes and do not like when the game changes for reason we perceive having a monetary goal, but we often forget that to them it is first and foremost a business. So they need to grow it they need to report growth and have more profits so for sure their preoccupation is focused on what elements does the game need to attract more paying customers?
I know you may not like this line I am taking here but it is part of the whole truth and without it truth would not be whole.
As for the "Community" you speak of, I am not so certain I agree. In Vanilla WoW it was very difficult to go to Raids. It was not accessible to all and only accessible to a few exclusive groups.
If that is what you call a community...then I disagree because to me it is a self-designated Exclussive Group who sees itself as above other players and entitled to things others should be denied access to, that is not a community, and exclusivity is not good for a community.
So I think with Lich King the game actually opened the doors for a community to happen. A community is a group of diverse people coming together from all walks and accomplishing common talks or overcoming shared challenges. Having fun all together.
It is with Lich King that all of the sudden many people from all over the server started being in contact with one another and engaging with one another meeting and befriending one another associating together for more adventures in the game. If that is not a good thing for the community I do not know what is...or why you see this as a negative.
If WoW itself started losing people it is not because of this "ease" you refer to. It is because people grow up and change in life and with it their interests. Now that many were introduced to the genre some wanted to experience something different. Also because WOW essentially is more of the same expansion after expansion, little tweaks here and there or additions of feature ensure a better retention maybe even facilitate new players to come in but it is absolutely normal that in time the population decays.
There are literally Tens if not Hundreds of thousands of MMORPG's out there, you cannot expect everyone to be playing one of them. Today there is an estimated 400 million MMO players in the world. Really the 5-6 million WoW has is hardly a big number compared to the total population. But it is one of the biggest (not the biggest anymore) Subscriber player base playing a single game still, and this it constitutes a Community which is much bigger than many others.
If as you say Lich king was counter to community I think WoW would not be maintaining these subscription numbers today.
The community is there and the game does provide for it better than before. It may not be any longer your select "Community" of familiar people you used to see day in day out. But it certainly is a more diverse open and pleasant community than before, which has more opportunities to fun.
Cheers!
- Duke Suraknar - Order of the Silver Star, OSS
ESKA, Playing MMORPG's since Ultima Online 1997 - Order of the Silver Serpent, Atlantic Shard
I should make a footnote that YES i do understand that if a game wants to deliver their own story part f the game,that is fine,i get it but the MAIN design of the game should focus on OUR STORY not the developers. We should not be treated like little kids playing connect the dots,paint by numbers,ok after that join our instances.
A game can't design the players' stories.
Games either tell stories or give players tools to make their own stories.
Neither is better than the other. Each appeals to an audience.
Well if LF... is your idea of a bad thing well we just don't have anything to really talk about but I will anyway. I loathed having to block people left and right because they were spamming chat 24/7 to fill that last spot which never seemed to get filled. This is something I detest almost as much as people that think damage meters mean crap in a scripted fight where they are not doing the mechanics because they think the damage meter is more important. Now could they have just done something like the premade where it didn't auto group you yeah that might have been better. With that said.
I will agree that, that point was the starting point for dumbing down the game and removing the need for having specific classes in groups. Before this you had a reason to bring a hunter along for this or a warlock for that specifically,etc... and it all made sense. You didn't go into even trash mobs without a plan of attack really and just think we are just going to AOE everything down to a boss without stopping. So yeah in that respect Lich King was the beginning of the worst thing to happen group content across the board.
It also had one of the best parts to, the story was involved and was important for a lot of people. I can't stand a game without a good lore or story revolving around it myself. This was the story from the RPG's that most wanted to see and play through in the MMO. And it was great all the way through for most.
So in respects to did the game change everything. No point in even asking that it did across the board for every game that followed it and still does to this day. This game just happened to drop at just the right time and was addictive enough to actually ruin peoples lives in the real world to boot. It is the game that almost every developer holds as the standard these days. It is the game every developer wants to copy in respects to how many players and the income it pulled in. Will this every happen again, most likely until we can actually jack into a world and walk around without needing peripherals ect... it will not. It had a small market to compete with and took it over to become the head of the snake per say.
I should make a footnote that YES i do understand that if a game wants to deliver their own story part f the game,that is fine,i get it but the MAIN design of the game should focus on OUR STORY not the developers. We should not be treated like little kids playing connect the dots,paint by numbers,ok after that join our instances.
A game can't design the players' stories.
Games either tell stories or give players tools to make their own stories.
Neither is better than the other. Each appeals to an audience.
I feel like in MMOs the focus should be giving players the tools to make their own stories. The interactive nature of MMOs makes them kind of a bad format to tell stories with as everyone you meet (or at least everyone of the same class/race/whatever the storylines are based on) will have the same story you do.
As a roleplaying game, you shouldn't have to change your backstory from the story you've been running through in order to have storylines make sense when you engage in roleplay with other players. However that's what needs to be consistently done in MMO"RPG"s.
So IMO scripted storylines should be kept to events that it makes sense if hundreds of players have the same general experience. For instance going through basic training to join an army or graduating a mage's college with the events that happen to you there being general enough to not break immersion. None of this "You are the chosen one!" "You're the hero who saved your instructor from the bandit attack!" "You slayed the lich king!" Stop trying to make us feeling ****ing special to the point of breaking immersion.
Or if you do, make it part of a single player game or a game that you run through with a small group of friends like Diablo. Not some massively multiplayer open world format where you will meet thousands of other players who are also "special".
So IMO scripted storylines should be kept to events that it makes sense if hundreds of players have the same general experience. For instance going through basic training to join an army or graduating a mage's college with the events that happen to you there being general enough to not break immersion. None of this "You are the chosen one!" "You're the hero who saved your instructor from the bandit attack!" "You slayed the lich king!" Stop trying to make us feeling ****ing special to the point of breaking immersion.
Or if you do, make it part of a single player game or a game that you run through with a small group of friends like Diablo. Not some massively multiplayer open world format where you will meet thousands of other players who are also "special".
Why? I am playing Death of the Outsider, a single player game. It is not like I do not know millions of other players are playing the same game.
So if you just put them in the same server, and phase them out, there is no difference in the experience. In fact, you play Diablo story on the server. So as long as when you are the "hero who saved your instructor from the bandit attack" when there is no other players around, what is the problem?
That is exactly the same experience as a single player game. "Immersion" is way over-rated. Otherwise the most popular game on steam would not be PUBG which is clearly a game with artificial rules, and no lore that matters.
The difference between an MMO and a single player game is that I am likely to talk to other players. MMOs are not PUBGs, MOBAs, or Tetris. Most of them try to some degree to put you into the shoes of your character. Especially MMORPGs.
As games which are both social, and RPGs, you shouldn't be forced to break immersion in order to roleplay in a social setting.
To a certain degree it's just a measure of how truly unimaginative MMO developers are that they can't create an engaging world in which you are not "The chosen one!"
Blizzard caused a stir in the world. The world had to adapt. Now the only MMOs who dare to call themselves P2P are the decent to good ones. Else, most of the playerbase goes to an F2P or B2P.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Companies are still about profits. Players are still inward to themselves. Difficulty is always going downhill....
Want to try something radical? Get some friends together and play Dungeons and Dragons Beats what MMOs have become today to a bloody pulp.
Maybe the industry would evolve and do what needs to be done if they weren't given the green dollar-ridden sticker of approval by the masses. Money Talks and as long as money is made, its the green light that justifies the genre to continue doing the same it has been doing.
The world had a chance to change as far as MMOs were concerned. It didn't!
It adapted and adjusted after Blizzard's Success. The world could have learned a lesson from Blizzard but it didn't. I do not like WoW much, but Blizzard takes care of that game like its own love-child.
FF XIV was garbage and then Square-Enix learned the Blizzard Lesson... Listen to your playerbase regardless how idiotic they are and focus your energy on making that game good and the people will come.
Instead of "Oh no, we won't catch up to Blizzard, so lets just make an F2P and milk the public for what they are worth for three months and then move on to our next abomination"
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.
I always found the LFD/Dungeon finder a bit redundant. I use it because it is easier these days because getting people by shouting usually results in it taking forever, but we used to actually roll with static groups back in the day. It wasn't sitting there finding groups all the time etc. We would plan out times to tackle this or that that was group content and then other times work at other things. In Final Fantasy XI for instance this was common. We'd schedule a few nights a week to work on leveling content and the like and then go do gathering/crafting in downtime and get ready for the next meetups.
Kind of miss getting a group together and then manually walking to the dungeon but then remember what a hassle it was. There was a time where you had to check if anyone else was running it and you had to book in a slot and you could get kicked out the game for interfering with another groups run. Excessive standardization killed the whole experience.
The trend toward easymode did not start with WOW. But it established easymode as the direction of travel in MMO's from launch not the WotLK.
As the years went by easymode became the direction of travel for all genres, I don't think WoW alone did that, back then MMO's were not built mainly on the principles of solo games. So they were seen as needing very separate design criteria. But the "success" (in terms of sales and player traffic) of making everything ever easier in WoW certainly did nothing to hold the rest of gaming back from the fluffy bunny gaming world we now live in.
I don't have anything against groupfinders as part of an mmo ui. But in an mmo genre the automatic non-rp teleportation as part of a groupfinder is a little mmo breaking as i see the genre.
Talking about games where thousands of players exist simultaneously in a single instance and mechanics related to such games.
I cant imagine how much money some people have paid to play WoW......Almost 13 years of subs amd I lost count of the number of expansions.....The people that have played since day 1 have most likely spent $2500 plus for a video game...And this is better than f2p?
if you had gone F2P you would have spent more than that in the cash shop during year 1. At least with subscription you know where you are and what you get. It's not our fault that most online games sucked and those that were good have gone backwards instead of forwards. Even the newer stuff thats comming is rehashed old stuff that we have done before in other games or are like early 2000/pre 2000 graphics and gameplay style.
I have now turned to playign these survival game type things. Yes they need work but if they had this in an MMO and mini games inside the MMO's liek proper fishing, pub games, archery contests (or shooting contests depending on game type) pit fights, and other things. Crafting you either become a gatherer (meaning you can gather all stuff) but you cannot do anything with it but sell. Whilst others will have Metalworking - Which splits into 2 Blacksmithing/Weaponsmithing. Leatherworking, Cooking, Farming<---- most foods ingrediants can only come from this. Then make it so recipes drop in game, dungeons can drop gear and if that gear is unwanted broken down into the mats that make it so crafters can make top gear as well. Player economies where say a guild starts with a max of 15 players to start, leveling up the guild, doing guild achievements, builkding certain buildings (leveling up these buildings) can also increase teh guild player size. Shops in player owned towns/cities can sell items that, that guild has made, bought (from players or other cities, or found) thus giving player economy.
Alas things werre going well but games seem to have gone backwards recently (like they lost teh ability to code new stuff).
I don't think 2500$ matter that much compare to 13 years of your life. It is more important to find something you enjoy.
I have to agree here with a perspective spin on it.
Each month of playing is $15. If I play a game hard for that month it's only .50 cents a day. Nothing wrong with that as long as I turn it off when needing a break.
Also, any offline game I wouldn't get over one months value out of it for $59.95.
You can even look at it this way. $59.95 for a one month game, then $59.95 for another game the next month and so on..... However, the advantage is it's a different game or different experience each month. That's a lot of money to have that new experience every month.
At 1st, WoW did what WoW did. What changed MMOs was everyone else trying to do what WoW did. Then WoW, for some reason tried to do what everyone else was doing, even to their own product. So, in a roundabout way, sure. WoW had a band wagon and they got out from behind the wheel and then jumped in back with everyone else. Now the dam thing is out of control and plays nothing like the original game which is what made it successful in the 1st place
At 1st, WoW did what WoW did. What changed MMOs was everyone else trying to do what WoW did. Then WoW, for some reason tried to do what everyone else was doing, even to their own product. So, in a roundabout way, sure. WoW had a band wagon and they got out from behind the wheel and then jumped in back with everyone else. Now the dam thing is out of control and plays nothing like the original game which is what made it successful in the 1st place
Are you sure it's WoW copying it's clones and not just WoW making dumb decisions that it's dingleberries implemented ASAP once WoW did it?
I could have sworn WoW was the first to do things like axe their own skilltrees and then SWTOR and other trash titles just blindly followed along.
At 1st, WoW did what WoW did. What changed MMOs was everyone else trying to do what WoW did. Then WoW, for some reason tried to do what everyone else was doing, even to their own product. So, in a roundabout way, sure. WoW had a band wagon and they got out from behind the wheel and then jumped in back with everyone else. Now the dam thing is out of control and plays nothing like the original game which is what made it successful in the 1st place
Are you sure it's WoW copying it's clones and not just WoW making dumb decisions that it's dingleberries implemented ASAP once WoW did it?
I could have sworn WoW was the first to do things like axe their own skilltrees and then SWTOR and other trash titles just blindly followed along.
No, I am not. But it doesn't really matter, the game I loved is dead. Might as well be as SWG or COH for what made WOW so good.
It was the unicorn every major game studio between 2004-2008 spent tens-hundreds of millions chasing without understanding what happened with wow and why it was so popular. It sort of killed mmorpgs as it flooded the market with "meee tooo!" games, so much money wasted, investors became turned off with spending that investment and getting a game that made good returns for 3-5 months then slowly died.
WOW was blessed with the right type of game at exactly the right time, in the exact enviroment to flourish (BNET) and stay populated. Part of the reason it stayed successful was its low system requirements allowing more people without expensive rigs to enjoy it...something many other games failed to realize was a thing...i know i didnt have $1200-$1500 when i was a kid...but was able to buy with my own money a shitty GPU and PSU to play some games and wow did work for me though i didnt like it.
But yeah WOW sort of ruined everything. It got too much attention everyone tried to emulate it an failed aside from a few that are still kicking but not raking it in like they were suppose to...with most dead....and now its just indy games kickstarted and a few passion projects on the mmorpg scene....at least traditional mmorpgs....and i fully expect most of those to fail either before or shortly after launch...due to an extremely small pool of dedicated mmorpg traditionalists.
WOW had perfect timing with the internet becoming the norm in households and online gaming being so new...i said this back in 2005 but most of the mmorpg crowd hated RPG games....but wanted online gaming and socializing in games...only mmorpgs offered that...which is why there was a slow degradation of the RPG aspect and why today MOBA and co-ops are far more successful....and mmorpgs are dead....except wow and a few major IP's still kicking but maybe not thriving.
Personally...i just wish i had gotten wow back in the day rather than anarchy online and got with the program...i might still be mmorpging....
Comments
In that sense yes it changed much because it brought attention to the genre in a big way , actually, in one of the ways that most matter..money. Plus it introduced the genre to many new players of the new generation.
We, as players may talk about the Game and how it changes and do not like when the game changes for reason we perceive having a monetary goal, but we often forget that to them it is first and foremost a business. So they need to grow it they need to report growth and have more profits so for sure their preoccupation is focused on what elements does the game need to attract more paying customers?
I know you may not like this line I am taking here but it is part of the whole truth and without it truth would not be whole.
As for the "Community" you speak of, I am not so certain I agree. In Vanilla WoW it was very difficult to go to Raids. It was not accessible to all and only accessible to a few exclusive groups.
If that is what you call a community...then I disagree because to me it is a self-designated Exclussive Group who sees itself as above other players and entitled to things others should be denied access to, that is not a community, and exclusivity is not good for a community.
So I think with Lich King the game actually opened the doors for a community to happen. A community is a group of diverse people coming together from all walks and accomplishing common talks or overcoming shared challenges. Having fun all together.
It is with Lich King that all of the sudden many people from all over the server started being in contact with one another and engaging with one another meeting and befriending one another associating together for more adventures in the game. If that is not a good thing for the community I do not know what is...or why you see this as a negative.
If WoW itself started losing people it is not because of this "ease" you refer to. It is because people grow up and change in life and with it their interests. Now that many were introduced to the genre some wanted to experience something different. Also because WOW essentially is more of the same expansion after expansion, little tweaks here and there or additions of feature ensure a better retention maybe even facilitate new players to come in but it is absolutely normal that in time the population decays.
There are literally Tens if not Hundreds of thousands of MMORPG's out there, you cannot expect everyone to be playing one of them. Today there is an estimated 400 million MMO players in the world. Really the 5-6 million WoW has is hardly a big number compared to the total population. But it is one of the biggest (not the biggest anymore) Subscriber player base playing a single game still, and this it constitutes a Community which is much bigger than many others.
If as you say Lich king was counter to community I think WoW would not be maintaining these subscription numbers today.
The community is there and the game does provide for it better than before. It may not be any longer your select "Community" of familiar people you used to see day in day out. But it certainly is a more diverse open and pleasant community than before, which has more opportunities to fun.
Cheers!
Order of the Silver Star, OSS
ESKA, Playing MMORPG's since Ultima Online 1997 - Order of the Silver Serpent, Atlantic Shard
Games either tell stories or give players tools to make their own stories.
Neither is better than the other. Each appeals to an audience.
I will agree that, that point was the starting point for dumbing down the game and removing the need for having specific classes in groups. Before this you had a reason to bring a hunter along for this or a warlock for that specifically,etc... and it all made sense. You didn't go into even trash mobs without a plan of attack really and just think we are just going to AOE everything down to a boss without stopping. So yeah in that respect Lich King was the beginning of the worst thing to happen group content across the board.
It also had one of the best parts to, the story was involved and was important for a lot of people. I can't stand a game without a good lore or story revolving around it myself. This was the story from the RPG's that most wanted to see and play through in the MMO. And it was great all the way through for most.
So in respects to did the game change everything. No point in even asking that it did across the board for every game that followed it and still does to this day. This game just happened to drop at just the right time and was addictive enough to actually ruin peoples lives in the real world to boot. It is the game that almost every developer holds as the standard these days. It is the game every developer wants to copy in respects to how many players and the income it pulled in. Will this every happen again, most likely until we can actually jack into a world and walk around without needing peripherals ect... it will not. It had a small market to compete with and took it over to become the head of the snake per say.
As a roleplaying game, you shouldn't have to change your backstory from the story you've been running through in order to have storylines make sense when you engage in roleplay with other players. However that's what needs to be consistently done in MMO"RPG"s.
So IMO scripted storylines should be kept to events that it makes sense if hundreds of players have the same general experience. For instance going through basic training to join an army or graduating a mage's college with the events that happen to you there being general enough to not break immersion. None of this "You are the chosen one!" "You're the hero who saved your instructor from the bandit attack!" "You slayed the lich king!" Stop trying to make us feeling ****ing special to the point of breaking immersion.
Or if you do, make it part of a single player game or a game that you run through with a small group of friends like Diablo. Not some massively multiplayer open world format where you will meet thousands of other players who are also "special".
So if you just put them in the same server, and phase them out, there is no difference in the experience. In fact, you play Diablo story on the server. So as long as when you are the "hero who saved your instructor from the bandit attack" when there is no other players around, what is the problem?
That is exactly the same experience as a single player game. "Immersion" is way over-rated. Otherwise the most popular game on steam would not be PUBG which is clearly a game with artificial rules, and no lore that matters.
As games which are both social, and RPGs, you shouldn't be forced to break immersion in order to roleplay in a social setting.
To a certain degree it's just a measure of how truly unimaginative MMO developers are that they can't create an engaging world in which you are not "The chosen one!"
The world had to adapt.
Now the only MMOs who dare to call themselves P2P are the decent to good ones.
Else, most of the playerbase goes to an F2P or B2P.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Companies are still about profits.
Players are still inward to themselves.
Difficulty is always going downhill....
Want to try something radical?
Get some friends together and play Dungeons and Dragons
Beats what MMOs have become today to a bloody pulp.
Maybe the industry would evolve and do what needs to be done if they weren't given the green dollar-ridden sticker of approval by the masses. Money Talks and as long as money is made, its the green light that justifies the genre to continue doing the same it has been doing.
The world had a chance to change as far as MMOs were concerned.
It didn't!
It adapted and adjusted after Blizzard's Success.
The world could have learned a lesson from Blizzard
but it didn't. I do not like WoW much, but Blizzard takes care of that game like its own love-child.
FF XIV was garbage and then Square-Enix learned the Blizzard Lesson...
Listen to your playerbase regardless how idiotic they are and focus your energy on making that game good and the people will come.
Instead of
"Oh no, we won't catch up to Blizzard, so lets just make an F2P and milk the public for what they are worth for three months and then move on to our next abomination"
This isn't a signature, you just think it is.
As the years went by easymode became the direction of travel for all genres, I don't think WoW alone did that, back then MMO's were not built mainly on the principles of solo games. So they were seen as needing very separate design criteria. But the "success" (in terms of sales and player traffic) of making everything ever easier in WoW certainly did nothing to hold the rest of gaming back from the fluffy bunny gaming world we now live in.
It's not our fault that most online games sucked and those that were good have gone backwards instead of forwards.
Even the newer stuff thats comming is rehashed old stuff that we have done before in other games or are like early 2000/pre 2000 graphics and gameplay style.
I have now turned to playign these survival game type things. Yes they need work but if they had this in an MMO and mini games inside the MMO's liek proper fishing, pub games, archery contests (or shooting contests depending on game type) pit fights, and other things.
Crafting you either become a gatherer (meaning you can gather all stuff) but you cannot do anything with it but sell. Whilst others will have Metalworking - Which splits into 2 Blacksmithing/Weaponsmithing. Leatherworking, Cooking, Farming<---- most foods ingrediants can only come from this.
Then make it so recipes drop in game, dungeons can drop gear and if that gear is unwanted broken down into the mats that make it so crafters can make top gear as well.
Player economies where say a guild starts with a max of 15 players to start, leveling up the guild, doing guild achievements, builkding certain buildings (leveling up these buildings) can also increase teh guild player size. Shops in player owned towns/cities can sell items that, that guild has made, bought (from players or other cities, or found) thus giving player economy.
Alas things werre going well but games seem to have gone backwards recently (like they lost teh ability to code new stuff).
I have to agree here with a perspective spin on it.
Each month of playing is $15. If I play a game hard for that month it's only .50 cents a day. Nothing wrong with that as long as I turn it off when needing a break.
Also, any offline game I wouldn't get over one months value out of it for $59.95.
You can even look at it this way. $59.95 for a one month game, then $59.95 for another game the next month and so on..... However, the advantage is it's a different game or different experience each month. That's a lot of money to have that new experience every month.
I could have sworn WoW was the first to do things like axe their own skilltrees and then SWTOR and other trash titles just blindly followed along.
WOW was blessed with the right type of game at exactly the right time, in the exact enviroment to flourish (BNET) and stay populated. Part of the reason it stayed successful was its low system requirements allowing more people without expensive rigs to enjoy it...something many other games failed to realize was a thing...i know i didnt have $1200-$1500 when i was a kid...but was able to buy with my own money a shitty GPU and PSU to play some games and wow did work for me though i didnt like it.
But yeah WOW sort of ruined everything. It got too much attention everyone tried to emulate it an failed aside from a few that are still kicking but not raking it in like they were suppose to...with most dead....and now its just indy games kickstarted and a few passion projects on the mmorpg scene....at least traditional mmorpgs....and i fully expect most of those to fail either before or shortly after launch...due to an extremely small pool of dedicated mmorpg traditionalists.
WOW had perfect timing with the internet becoming the norm in households and online gaming being so new...i said this back in 2005 but most of the mmorpg crowd hated RPG games....but wanted online gaming and socializing in games...only mmorpgs offered that...which is why there was a slow degradation of the RPG aspect and why today MOBA and co-ops are far more successful....and mmorpgs are dead....except wow and a few major IP's still kicking but maybe not thriving.
Personally...i just wish i had gotten wow back in the day rather than anarchy online and got with the program...i might still be mmorpging....