Vardahoth said:
When the mmorpg's were built to last and good, people would stick with them for years (not weeks or a few months before moving to another game).
That was never the case, just there were no other options "back then".
All of the major subscription based mmos that lost their players and moved to f2p in the last decade would beg to differ.
L2 lost it's sub model due to ncsoft banning legit players vs bots, and becomeing very greedy with their p2w model. How long you think a game run like that will last. Now to get anything in the game, you need micro transactions. They lost most of their customer base after this (except for a few whales). My evidence to support this is when they opened up classic with paid subscription, the earnings were greater than their f2p game (gee I wonder why):
"From what I can understand 4th Quarter income for ncsoft RU/KR pulled in more money than NA this time around and it looks like most of it was from the classic server."
If a game is good, people will pay for it. There you have it...
I think there is some degree of standing to question why a game isn't holding population or growing. If the game is good then people won't be running around trying other games- they will be having to much fun in the game they are playing.
There is no need to eat same pizza every day...
When the mmorpg's were built to last and good, people would stick with them for years (not weeks or a few months before moving to another game). People wanted to spend time into building their character and sort of live in the world that mmorpg's used to offer. Because the world itself was not so closed off as they are now, and discouraging any situations allowing players to meet up and do stuff together (which btw is an oxymoron for mmo).
When you invest a lot of time into something, it holds a meaning to you that gives high sentimental value. why do you think college degrees are 4+ years. Blackbelts are 5+ years. Sadly pretty much the only two things I can think of that are not instant gratification and hold some real meaning.
College I was not taking the same class for 4 years.
I think there is some degree of standing to question why a game isn't holding population or growing. If the game is good then people won't be running around trying other games- they will be having to much fun in the game they are playing.
Because the themepark genre got stale awhile ago. Content is finite and repetitively reskinned over the whole themepark branch. Its better to make money upfront and by people willing to spend more than 15 a month than bleed subs to people who are finished the game.
All of the major subscription based mmos that lost their players and moved to f2p in the last decade would beg to differ.
L2 lost it's sub model due to ncsoft banning legit players vs bots, and becomeing very greedy with their p2w model. How long you think a game run like that will last. Now to get anything in the game, you need micro transactions. They lost most of their customer base after this (except for a few whales). My evidence to support this is when they opened up classic with paid subscription, the earnings were greater than their f2p game (gee I wonder why):
"From what I can understand 4th Quarter income for ncsoft RU/KR pulled in more money than NA this time around and it looks like most of it was from the classic server."
If a game is good, people will pay for it. There you have it...
I think there is some degree of standing to question why a game isn't holding population or growing. If the game is good then people won't be running around trying other games- they will be having to much fun in the game they are playing.
There is no need to eat same pizza every day...
When the mmorpg's were built to last and good, people would stick with them for years (not weeks or a few months before moving to another game). People wanted to spend time into building their character and sort of live in the world that mmorpg's used to offer. Because the world itself was not so closed off as they are now, and discouraging any situations allowing players to meet up and do stuff together (which btw is an oxymoron for mmo).
When you invest a lot of time into something, it holds a meaning to you that gives high sentimental value. why do you think college degrees are 4+ years. Blackbelts are 5+ years. Sadly pretty much the only two things I can think of that are not instant gratification and hold some real meaning.
College I was not taking the same class for 4 years.
But you did only have 1 degree after 4 years right? More than likely attended the same college?
Playing the same game doesn't mean playing the same weapon, using the same skill (not skills), being stuck in the same class, being stuck in the same clan, or staying in the same area and 1 village for the whole game.
Vardahot i think you are being way too cynical, you keep talking about the mmo genre like its flourishing just like it was back in 2006, dying doesn't mean dead, most players will play any morpg just because its there, everyone has time but not everyone has money, its been proven for ages with studies and stadistics that the main revenue of mmos with an item mall model comes from the richer side of the playerbase, the revenue from average players doesnt even ammount to 20%, a normal person is seen spending anywhere from 10 to 100 dollars a month on an mmo with item mall or a moba, i've seen people sink 500 dollars a month in a single item mall like its nothing.
Game developers (not just online games) are now much more concerned about releasing new content like the wow pony than they are about releasing expansions, new classes, patches, or even updating their news or keeping with schedule.
Even Kojima tried to go against it and all he gained was being fired from Konami, remember how Konami wanted to copy AC Unity and have every weapon have a DLC-like prize? for Konami whats the point of that if you don't make it harder for players to obtain the weapon, or unavailable outside official RMT?
What about Evolve, the DLC selling platform that emulates being a full game, kind of like how AngryJoe described it, if not word by word.
Or The Division's day 1 season pass, where they cut half the content from the game because (aparently) they reached their quota with preorder and released it as a DLC bundle just to milk it. (which btw were supposed to be two different DLCs in PSN but weren't available individually outside the season pass)
Thats whats ruining mmos, the quality is dying, as a result people are not flocking towards them anymore, just look at the giant, wow is now selling a boost to lvl cap because their playerbase was reduced so much the game is breaking down.
Its a fact, people need to accept facts
Also, that part where you compare people in this thread to idiots and global warming activism? lol. Fun, but you just compared gamers to how many green political parties, thats just......... really, keep the tinfoil hats, gamergate, and the XCX boob slider out of the conversation pls hahaha
I do not agree that mmorpg's are dying genre, quite the opposite. While it is true that new mmorpg's are in no way innovative, in many aspects they are way more action games as rpgs, but in rpgs also lies progress & future of video games. There is no doubt, that games will get more and more realistic, rpg elements are one of the key elements for that.In fact, rpg element is they key for this. If we look at ''offline games'' are RPG games very well alive, actually they are the most popular & by far the most developed games together with simulations. Only multiplayer rgps do not make any significant progress, outside graphics, there is very little transfer of progress from offline to multiplayer rpgs. While offline rpgs starting to combine action, adventure, simulation & puzzle elements into non linear progression, non-linear world,...not much of this is to see in mmos, well action elements are.
in rpgs also lies progress & future of video games. There is no doubt
Actually, I think the 'RPG' half of the equation is the most stagnant. Not really greatly changed since Ultima and Rogue and DOOM. Kill stuff, collect stuff, sell stuff, repeat.
Ooh look, I'm killing stuff with a pulse rifle instead of a bow. That IS waaay different!
The 'MMO' half only suffers from too much cloning of controls and UIs. And a great deal of confusion surrounding pricing models, but that'll work itself out over time.
I think mmorpg's had a difficult time these few years ,and many players were turned away from them. We had many flops, bad publishers, unstable servers, p2w or simply bad game models, and stuff that made players not play it anymore.And most were, simply said, bad, yes, bad games, you cant make a new dungeon expect all players to play it for next several months and call that a content.. noooo.
But, there are many upcomming titles in 2016-17 and i hope at least one of those is my kind of game.
It pains me to say it because I have loved MMOs for so very long, but the general formula of MMORPGs has just become outdated. There are so many great options for online multiplayer entertainment these days that don't require huge time (and/or money) investments before you reach the 'fun' part of the game, and frankly the majority of MMORPG players consider elder game content the real payoff.
MOBAs, FPS, and CCGs are the top online games these days and they share a lot in common with each other, mainly that they are free or cheap to play and/or compete in and they offer immediate payouts of fun. There is no grinding until the entertaining part (though you can certainly grind ranks etc). There is typically no money involved to be competitive (there are exceptions certainly). The main games in these genres (LoL, Dota, CS, Overwatch, Hearthstone, etc) command a genuinely massive amount of players. There is no huge sense of wasted time if you decide to quit one of these games for a while, no real sense of being left behind.
Maybe the concept of a game like Camelot Unchained can change that by eliminating the level grind ramp-up and maybe not. Frankly though MMORPGs just don't captivate me the same way they used to because I no longer have the infinite time required to be top tier or even not to feel left behind.
I can always boot up a game of DOTA in an hour and be perfectly satisfied while paying zero though, and that is something no MMO can offer me right now. Someone will eventually figure out the formula to make something resembling an MMORPG that fits the current market, but it will likely take some time and iteration to nail down. For now I'm just going to casually watch the genre evolve from afar and await something that scratches that itch without requiring more time than my job to be competitive/enjoyable.
It pains me to say it because I have loved MMOs for so very long, but the general formula of MMORPGs has just become outdated. There are so many great options for online multiplayer entertainment these days that don't require huge time (and/or money) investments before you reach the 'fun' part of the game, and frankly the majority of MMORPG players consider elder game content the real payoff.
MOBAs, FPS, and CCGs are the top online games these days and they share a lot in common with each other, mainly that they are free or cheap to play and/or compete in and they offer immediate payouts of fun. There is no grinding until the entertaining part (though you can certainly grind ranks etc). There is typically no money involved to be competitive (there are exceptions certainly). The main games in these genres (LoL, Dota, CS, Overwatch, Hearthstone, etc) command a genuinely massive amount of players. There is no huge sense of wasted time if you decide to quit one of these games for a while, no real sense of being left behind.
Maybe the concept of a game like Camelot Unchained can change that by eliminating the level grind ramp-up and maybe not. Frankly though MMORPGs just don't captivate me the same way they used to because I no longer have the infinite time required to be top tier or even not to feel left behind.
I can always boot up a game of DOTA in an hour and be perfectly satisfied while paying zero though, and that is something no MMO can offer me right now. Someone will eventually figure out the formula to make something resembling an MMORPG that fits the current market, but it will likely take some time and iteration to nail down. For now I'm just going to casually watch the genre evolve from afar and await something that scratches that itch without requiring more time than my job to be competitive/enjoyable.
Logged on just to respond to this. Yes! Bullseye! Play grinders, you get bored, or you might simply have no time to invest, if you have no time to invest ,your not competetive ,if you can buy your way to be competetive, the game is crap p2w, and if there are no ways of someone being OP compared to the rest, you get a feeling of emptiness (GW2) where everyone is on nearly the same strenght.
Nowadays its all based on where the scraps of community are remaining, the mmorpgs are not as active these few years as they were before, good ones got dated, and no new good ones got released for quite some time. Theres still a chance for 2016-17 releases.Untill than, i just like many others hop from title to title, and in the meantime play mobas and the other genres.
Speaking for myself, I'm just so very, very tired of the same old formula used to construct the systems that make up MMOs.
Nine times out of ten, hotbar combat puts me to sleep. You press a button and get an effect. How does pressing 1 translate into casting a fireball? It doesn't feel like i'm casting a fireball, it feels like I hit 1. Most classes feel the same to me when the meat of the game play is pressing 1,2,3,4 over and again. The difference between using hotkeys to cycle through a rotation for a Sorcerer, Archer or Thief is merely a difference in animation.
The quality of quest development it is apparently acceptable to release with makes me dread the leveling process. I'll find myself repeating the same basic task fifty times when it was a chore the first time. I don't want to kill ten bear-asses for 1000 xp and a few gold pieces anymore. Can't I just not, instead? Why won't you let me not? If I try to tell you to shove your phoned-in leveling experience where the sun don't shine and continue on I just walk into a place where everyone slaps me around without the slightest effort.
Highest-on-threat-table and taunt effects is as dirt-simple as you can get for enemy behavior, yet damn near every MMO in the last decade and a half seems comfortable with including it. Every single fight works out the same way. Tank builds threat, healer heals tank, dps focuses mobs down. Sometimes they'll throw us a bone and give us things to not stand in or a mob or two which must be cc'd. Wow. Such excitement. Why is it possible for me to break dance in the middle of a group of enemies and have them all ignore me completely because my large plate-wearing friend called them all smelly jerks? Shouldn't a few of them take a swipe at me for my insolence alone or because I have my back to them?
There's a bunch of other stuff but I tend to write books on these topics so I'll not, except to say instanced dungeons: ewww. I should point out that I don't mean to say that these things are impossible to well, that every game with hotbar combat will suck, because that's not the case. Playing an Assassin in Blade and Soul was a unique and very enjoyable experience for me in terms of MMO mechanical game play and that's very much hotbar combat. Elder Scrolls Online had fantastic questing, if you bothered to listen to why you were doing the things asked of you. This is because they noticeably devoted resources to it. I'm actually not sure how you do threat tables and taunts well, but you can surely do enemy behavior better. DnD Online required you to have good positioning in your party with tanks up front, squishies in the back and leather-wearers in between to intercept mobs running for your casters because the mobs wouldn't politely attack the tanks just because they were asked to.
The problem is, getting one aspect right isn't enough and since 'right' is completely subjective, a game designed to be just right for goldie-me may very well be doomed to fail because the majority of potential customers think it idiotic items have a fixed space in the world and there are no auction houses to magically move the shit into your inventory. Others will be completely new to the genre and find all of the minimum-effort systems I've played with a dozen times new and exciting.
The obvious solution to me is for developers to temper their expectations and quit trying to become Blizzard but instead aim to be the CCP of old. Don't spend 300 million developing and marketing a game and imagine you'll get 5 million subs who will stick with you for years, because they won't. You'll sell a million and lose most of them in a few short months. Instead spend no more than 50 to build a stable foundation with enough to do for you to grab a few hundred thousand subscribers who are into the niche you aimed for and hold on to them for dear life while you shove your profits back in and grow your game with them. Your dev team should grow after launch, not get decimated. You will never be Blizzard but you may be CCP. Just don't throw all your money into a spin-off game designed exclusively for a geriatric console at the far, far end of its life-cycle when all of your existing customers are pc gamers. Instead, turn 1/3 of your stations into co-op deadspace areas, dumbasses. The problem here is that this basically requires a sandbox. People are spending hundreds of millions on themeparks and aren't able to provide enough content to keep players. You will not get a stable base of customers with a fraction of that budget if you're not going sandbox and giving them the toys with which to make their own content. They won't stick around with you to let you continue what you've started.
Another thing I see that may work for whomever gets it right first if you're more into the theme-park thing is a Massively Cooperative ORPG. Throw all of your players together into a situation where they have to work together to accomplish a task. Giant city and a zombie outbreak. Tower of Duraga, SAO or Is it wrong to pick up... style huge dungeon people need to work together to clear levels of. Spaceships and a war. You need to set your players up against overwhelming odds and get them to join forces without factions splitting them up and restricting interactions between some players merely to combat. This is being done at a very small scale but not massively. I'd avoid pvp for the simple fact that the Day Z mod when it was Arma players and the Day Z mod after it became popular were two completely different games and one of them couldn't hold a candle to the other. The question of whether this stranger would work with you or take your shit was an interesting one when there were multiple possible answers. It's far less interesting when the whole world wanted to play and the answer was always the same. The survival genre cannot survive popularity and remain what it was, it becomes something else. So give your players a challenge from the AI and let them join together, set them up against a world which very much wants to kill them and is capable of doing so. Massively Cooperative.
Understandable given that mmorpg.com is veritable minefield of these "mmorpgs are dying"-type threads even though we only need one locked and stickied with only one sentence explaining the problem: "Been there, done that."
Understandable given that mmorpg.com is veritable minefield of these "mmorpgs are dying"-type threads even though we only need one locked and stickied with only one sentence explaining the problem: "Been there, done that."
Subspace!! Chaos server player here. Only commenting on your warbird avatar.
It pains me to say it because I have loved MMOs for so very long, but the general formula of MMORPGs has just become outdated. There are so many great options for online multiplayer entertainment these days that don't require huge time (and/or money) investments before you reach the 'fun' part of the game, and frankly the majority of MMORPG players consider elder game content the real payoff.
MOBAs, FPS, and CCGs are the top online games these days and they share a lot in common with each other, mainly that they are free or cheap to play and/or compete in and they offer immediate payouts of fun. There is no grinding until the entertaining part (though you can certainly grind ranks etc). There is typically no money involved to be competitive (there are exceptions certainly). The main games in these genres (LoL, Dota, CS, Overwatch, Hearthstone, etc) command a genuinely massive amount of players. There is no huge sense of wasted time if you decide to quit one of these games for a while, no real sense of being left behind.
Precisely. That is also why many mmorpg put in convenient features .. click a button, and you can do a quick dungeon run, to compete with these games.
In fact, you forget to put in ARPG where you can just go in and kill stuff, with minimal set-up & hassle. It is not a surprise that MMOs are increasingly like that. In fact, that is why you have hybrids like Destiny & the Division.
In fact, devs stop making AAA mmorpgs in the west because they can make these more popular online games. So why bother?
Comments
There is way more options, and more importantly, high quality games to choose from today then ever before.
Lets see your Battle Stations /r/battlestations
Battle Station
Game developers (not just online games) are now much more concerned about releasing new content like the wow pony than they are about releasing expansions, new classes, patches, or even updating their news or keeping with schedule.
Even Kojima tried to go against it and all he gained was being fired from Konami, remember how Konami wanted to copy AC Unity and have every weapon have a DLC-like prize? for Konami whats the point of that if you don't make it harder for players to obtain the weapon, or unavailable outside official RMT?
What about Evolve, the DLC selling platform that emulates being a full game, kind of like how AngryJoe described it, if not word by word.
Or The Division's day 1 season pass, where they cut half the content from the game because (aparently) they reached their quota with preorder and released it as a DLC bundle just to milk it. (which btw were supposed to be two different DLCs in PSN but weren't available individually outside the season pass)
Thats whats ruining mmos, the quality is dying, as a result people are not flocking towards them anymore, just look at the giant, wow is now selling a boost to lvl cap because their playerbase was reduced so much the game is breaking down.
Its a fact, people need to accept facts
Also, that part where you compare people in this thread to idiots and global warming activism? lol. Fun, but you just compared gamers to how many green political parties, thats just......... really, keep the tinfoil hats, gamergate, and the XCX boob slider out of the conversation pls hahaha
Ooh look, I'm killing stuff with a pulse rifle instead of a bow. That IS waaay different!
The 'MMO' half only suffers from too much cloning of controls and UIs. And a great deal of confusion surrounding pricing models, but that'll work itself out over time.
We had many flops, bad publishers, unstable servers, p2w or simply bad game models, and stuff that made players not play it anymore.And most were, simply said, bad, yes, bad games, you cant make a new dungeon expect all players to play it for next several months and call that a content.. noooo.
But, there are many upcomming titles in 2016-17 and i hope at least one of those is my kind of game.
MOBAs, FPS, and CCGs are the top online games these days and they share a lot in common with each other, mainly that they are free or cheap to play and/or compete in and they offer immediate payouts of fun. There is no grinding until the entertaining part (though you can certainly grind ranks etc). There is typically no money involved to be competitive (there are exceptions certainly). The main games in these genres (LoL, Dota, CS, Overwatch, Hearthstone, etc) command a genuinely massive amount of players. There is no huge sense of wasted time if you decide to quit one of these games for a while, no real sense of being left behind.
Maybe the concept of a game like Camelot Unchained can change that by eliminating the level grind ramp-up and maybe not. Frankly though MMORPGs just don't captivate me the same way they used to because I no longer have the infinite time required to be top tier or even not to feel left behind.
I can always boot up a game of DOTA in an hour and be perfectly satisfied while paying zero though, and that is something no MMO can offer me right now. Someone will eventually figure out the formula to make something resembling an MMORPG that fits the current market, but it will likely take some time and iteration to nail down. For now I'm just going to casually watch the genre evolve from afar and await something that scratches that itch without requiring more time than my job to be competitive/enjoyable.
Yes! Bullseye! Play grinders, you get bored, or you might simply have no time to invest, if you have no time to invest ,your not competetive ,if you can buy your way to be competetive, the game is crap p2w, and if there are no ways of someone being OP compared to the rest, you get a feeling of emptiness (GW2) where everyone is on nearly the same strenght.
Nowadays its all based on where the scraps of community are remaining, the mmorpgs are not as active these few years as they were before, good ones got dated, and no new good ones got released for quite some time.
Theres still a chance for 2016-17 releases.Untill than, i just like many others hop from title to title, and in the meantime play mobas and the other genres.
Nine times out of ten, hotbar combat puts me to sleep. You press a button and get an effect. How does pressing 1 translate into casting a fireball? It doesn't feel like i'm casting a fireball, it feels like I hit 1. Most classes feel the same to me when the meat of the game play is pressing 1,2,3,4 over and again. The difference between using hotkeys to cycle through a rotation for a Sorcerer, Archer or Thief is merely a difference in animation.
The quality of quest development it is apparently acceptable to release with makes me dread the leveling process. I'll find myself repeating the same basic task fifty times when it was a chore the first time. I don't want to kill ten bear-asses for 1000 xp and a few gold pieces anymore. Can't I just not, instead? Why won't you let me not? If I try to tell you to shove your phoned-in leveling experience where the sun don't shine and continue on I just walk into a place where everyone slaps me around without the slightest effort.
Highest-on-threat-table and taunt effects is as dirt-simple as you can get for enemy behavior, yet damn near every MMO in the last decade and a half seems comfortable with including it. Every single fight works out the same way. Tank builds threat, healer heals tank, dps focuses mobs down. Sometimes they'll throw us a bone and give us things to not stand in or a mob or two which must be cc'd. Wow. Such excitement. Why is it possible for me to break dance in the middle of a group of enemies and have them all ignore me completely because my large plate-wearing friend called them all smelly jerks? Shouldn't a few of them take a swipe at me for my insolence alone or because I have my back to them?
There's a bunch of other stuff but I tend to write books on these topics so I'll not, except to say instanced dungeons: ewww. I should point out that I don't mean to say that these things are impossible to well, that every game with hotbar combat will suck, because that's not the case. Playing an Assassin in Blade and Soul was a unique and very enjoyable experience for me in terms of MMO mechanical game play and that's very much hotbar combat. Elder Scrolls Online had fantastic questing, if you bothered to listen to why you were doing the things asked of you. This is because they noticeably devoted resources to it. I'm actually not sure how you do threat tables and taunts well, but you can surely do enemy behavior better. DnD Online required you to have good positioning in your party with tanks up front, squishies in the back and leather-wearers in between to intercept mobs running for your casters because the mobs wouldn't politely attack the tanks just because they were asked to.
The problem is, getting one aspect right isn't enough and since 'right' is completely subjective, a game designed to be just right for goldie-me may very well be doomed to fail because the majority of potential customers think it idiotic items have a fixed space in the world and there are no auction houses to magically move the shit into your inventory. Others will be completely new to the genre and find all of the minimum-effort systems I've played with a dozen times new and exciting.
The obvious solution to me is for developers to temper their expectations and quit trying to become Blizzard but instead aim to be the CCP of old. Don't spend 300 million developing and marketing a game and imagine you'll get 5 million subs who will stick with you for years, because they won't. You'll sell a million and lose most of them in a few short months. Instead spend no more than 50 to build a stable foundation with enough to do for you to grab a few hundred thousand subscribers who are into the niche you aimed for and hold on to them for dear life while you shove your profits back in and grow your game with them. Your dev team should grow after launch, not get decimated. You will never be Blizzard but you may be CCP. Just don't throw all your money into a spin-off game designed exclusively for a geriatric console at the far, far end of its life-cycle when all of your existing customers are pc gamers. Instead, turn 1/3 of your stations into co-op deadspace areas, dumbasses. The problem here is that this basically requires a sandbox. People are spending hundreds of millions on themeparks and aren't able to provide enough content to keep players. You will not get a stable base of customers with a fraction of that budget if you're not going sandbox and giving them the toys with which to make their own content. They won't stick around with you to let you continue what you've started.
Another thing I see that may work for whomever gets it right first if you're more into the theme-park thing is a Massively Cooperative ORPG. Throw all of your players together into a situation where they have to work together to accomplish a task. Giant city and a zombie outbreak. Tower of Duraga, SAO or Is it wrong to pick up... style huge dungeon people need to work together to clear levels of. Spaceships and a war. You need to set your players up against overwhelming odds and get them to join forces without factions splitting them up and restricting interactions between some players merely to combat. This is being done at a very small scale but not massively. I'd avoid pvp for the simple fact that the Day Z mod when it was Arma players and the Day Z mod after it became popular were two completely different games and one of them couldn't hold a candle to the other. The question of whether this stranger would work with you or take your shit was an interesting one when there were multiple possible answers. It's far less interesting when the whole world wanted to play and the answer was always the same. The survival genre cannot survive popularity and remain what it was, it becomes something else. So give your players a challenge from the AI and let them join together, set them up against a world which very much wants to kill them and is capable of doing so. Massively Cooperative.
And here I went and wrote another book anyways.
In fact, you forget to put in ARPG where you can just go in and kill stuff, with minimal set-up & hassle. It is not a surprise that MMOs are increasingly like that. In fact, that is why you have hybrids like Destiny & the Division.
In fact, devs stop making AAA mmorpgs in the west because they can make these more popular online games. So why bother?