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MORPGs

AmatheAmathe Member LegendaryPosts: 7,630
in The Pub at MMORPG.COM
No, the title isn't a misspelling or a typo. 

Suppose you have a game that is in every way a  MMORPG.  Except over time, the population dwindles and dwindles. Until one day you really can't say it's "massively multiplayer anymore.  It's barely hanging on to claiming it is multiplayer.

What remains is a MORPG. There are lots of those these days. The ghosts of mmorpgs past.  

Most of them have in common that they managed somehow to stay afloat, but just barely. 

Of course, not every older MMORPG is a MORPG. Some are doing quite well and have decent populations. 

But what can be done to save the MORPGs? They are like lovable old hunting dogs that aren't taken hunting anymore. A citizen of the Island of Misfit Toys. 


EQ1, EQ2, SWG, SWTOR, GW, GW2 CoH, CoV, FFXI, WoW, CO, War,TSW and a slew of free trials and beta tests

Comments

  • cameltosiscameltosis Member LegendaryPosts: 3,707
    Massively multiplayer or just multiplayer is about capability, rather than how many people are actually in the game. So, an MMORPG with a really small population is still an MMORPG.


    but, semantics aside, as to your real question I know what I'd like to do.


    I would like there to be a "caretaker" company setup that takes over aging MMORPGs and keeps the lights on. This company would continue to run the game's server(s) in administration mode. Players would pay the company a subscription and gain access to all games that they run. If the company was successful enough, then they would be able to hire devs and stuff to patch/expand the games under their keeping, but my expectation would be that they'd just be in admin mode only.
    Scorchienanemo
  • AmatheAmathe Member LegendaryPosts: 7,630
    cameltosis said:
    Massively multiplayer or just multiplayer is about capability, rather than how many people are actually in the game. So, an MMORPG with a really small population is still an MMORPG.

    Respectfully (and I mean that, because you make great posts), you sort of beg the question. Is it still a MMORPG? Does it say that somewhere? 

    If having the capability, used or unused, is the standard, then a game with only one guy playing it could be a mmorpg, so long as more players theoretically could play if they showed up. 

    So is it actual players, or theoretical players?


    Mendel

    EQ1, EQ2, SWG, SWTOR, GW, GW2 CoH, CoV, FFXI, WoW, CO, War,TSW and a slew of free trials and beta tests

  • Tuor7Tuor7 Member RarePosts: 982
    edited February 2020
    If the game has the capacity to allow a large number of people to log in simultaneously, then it is massively multiplayer, regardless of how many people actually log on.
    Post edited by Tuor7 on
  • ChildoftheShadowsChildoftheShadows Member EpicPosts: 2,193
    Amathe said:
    cameltosis said:
    Massively multiplayer or just multiplayer is about capability, rather than how many people are actually in the game. So, an MMORPG with a really small population is still an MMORPG.

    Respectfully (and I mean that, because you make great posts), you sort of beg the question. Is it still a MMORPG? Does it say that somewhere? 

    If having the capability, used or unused, is the standard, then a game with only one guy playing it could be a mmorpg, so long as more players theoretically could play if they showed up. 

    So is it actual players, or theoretical players?


    It’s the design that makes a game the genre it is, not the number of people that play it. 

    Now, if these companies deliberately reduced the capacity of each server, say to reduce the cost of running the servers, then yes it would in fact be changed by design and no longer an mmo. 
    Scorchien
  • MendelMendel Member LegendaryPosts: 5,609
    cameltosis said:
    Massively multiplayer or just multiplayer is about capability, rather than how many people are actually in the game. So, an MMORPG with a really small population is still an MMORPG.


    but, semantics aside, as to your real question I know what I'd like to do.


    I would like there to be a "caretaker" company setup that takes over aging MMORPGs and keeps the lights on. This company would continue to run the game's server(s) in administration mode. Players would pay the company a subscription and gain access to all games that they run. If the company was successful enough, then they would be able to hire devs and stuff to patch/expand the games under their keeping, but my expectation would be that they'd just be in admin mode only.

    Your "caretaker" company sounds an awful lot like Daybreak.  Be careful what you wish for, you might get another Daybreak.



    Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.

  • cameltosiscameltosis Member LegendaryPosts: 3,707
    Mendel said:
    cameltosis said:
    Massively multiplayer or just multiplayer is about capability, rather than how many people are actually in the game. So, an MMORPG with a really small population is still an MMORPG.


    but, semantics aside, as to your real question I know what I'd like to do.


    I would like there to be a "caretaker" company setup that takes over aging MMORPGs and keeps the lights on. This company would continue to run the game's server(s) in administration mode. Players would pay the company a subscription and gain access to all games that they run. If the company was successful enough, then they would be able to hire devs and stuff to patch/expand the games under their keeping, but my expectation would be that they'd just be in admin mode only.

    Your "caretaker" company sounds an awful lot like Daybreak.  Be careful what you wish for, you might get another Daybreak.




    I had in mind the games museum thing that was floating about a few years back, except that people could actually play the games online, rather than have to visit the museum to play them.

    Or a Netflix for aging games.

    But yeh, a Daybreak is equally possible......


    Not that I imagine it would work. Companies are too possessive of their babies, they won't sell their old games off if there is the smallest possibility that someone else could make money off their code, or that someone else might use that second hand code to compromise the rest of their portfolio.

    I can dream though....an official SWG pre-cu server somewhere......
  • anemoanemo Member RarePosts: 1,903
    edited February 2020
    Quite a few MUDs are ran indefinitely.   Though ones that actually have GMs that stay active normally keep 20 to a few hundred online at a time (I don't know that's gotta be close to at least 500-100 weekly active players).

    This even "smaller" dev talks about it here: https://cranktrain.com/blog/autopsy-of-an-indie-mmorpg-1/  and  https://cranktrain.com/blog/autopsy-of-an-indie-mmorpg-2/  Eventually they came to the conclusion that adding even "10 more hours" of content would take them over a year of time, and that even though the servers were costing them less than $50 a month it didn't seem worth it or fair to anyone.

    ______________________
    EDIT for people who aren't interested enough

    I mentioned in the previous post that there were ‘financial’ reasons for eventually shutting the game down. Lots of people have assumed that that was server costs, but it wasn’t. Running the game was fairly cheap, in terms of money, because I could run a game server on a Digital Ocean $10 instance very comfortably, so I could run a few in multiple places around the world, and the main website and master server sat on a slightly larger virtual server in Germany. Even just five, six years ago, the costs would be so much higher, but they’re pretty tolerable today.
    The biggest ‘financial’ cost is time. I estimated that going back and changing the game’s design, or just keeping on trucking with the current plan and adding more content to make the game closer to ten hours in length would take at the very least another year’s work. That’s fine if you’re at University, you’ve got tonnes of time, but that wasn’t the case by the time the game was completed and had been released for a little bit, I was three months out of University. So rather than the servers, it was the producing of content that was the, very real, financial cost.

    Tuor7

    Practice doesn't make perfect, practice makes permanent.

    "At one point technology meant making tech that could get to the moon, now it means making tech that could get you a taxi."

  • delete5230delete5230 Member EpicPosts: 7,081
    The answer,
    MMORPGS are games on line.  Story driven theme park solo games WITH NO REPLAY VALUE.

    Even the well built games-on-line with all their cinematic videos and nice graphics hold lower value then off line games. 

    In a way they don't fit in any popular category..... The only reason they start off strong is because people are starving for a REAL mmorpg and will play anything.

    30 days of content and their done.
  • kitaradkitarad Member LegendaryPosts: 7,919
    edited February 2020
    Amathe said:
    No, the title isn't a misspelling or a typo. 

    Suppose you have a game that is in every way a  MMORPG.  Except over time, the population dwindles and dwindles. Until one day you really can't say it's "massively multiplayer anymore.  It's barely hanging on to claiming it is multiplayer.

    What remains is a MORPG. There are lots of those these days. The ghosts of mmorpgs past.  

    Most of them have in common that they managed somehow to stay afloat, but just barely. 

    Of course, not every older MMORPG is a MORPG. Some are doing quite well and have decent populations. 

    But what can be done to save the MORPGs? They are like lovable old hunting dogs that aren't taken hunting anymore. A citizen of the Island of Misfit Toys. 


    What can be done? Hmm hard to think of a solution. The only one is to make your playing it easier on yourself. I recall at one time playing Dungeons and Dragons Online in a particularly anaemic time of its existence. The same goes for Vanguard too when I played it.

    I joined a guild and that really opened things up for me and I was able to ask people to group and the guild itself did stuff together. Without joining a good guild you would be soloing the whole time in both games. In Vanguard it was particularly lonely as the world was large and nothing will project the sheer sense of being all alone when you walk and walk and see absolutely no one else. 

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