However he has a problem. He likes his daughter Betty a lot and wish they could spend more time together. Betty is 20, she finished school and high school and at the end of he university years. Which locks her into the university campus while Adam works in his corner office in a downtown tower. The future expectations aren’t better. While Betty’s grades are good and with a little help from her dad she can definitely get an intern job at his firm, that only means commuting to the tower together and maybe hanging out at lunchtime. Adam would still be on the top floor corner office while Betty will be on the second floor working on small customer complaints. Even if she is a very talented investor and the rest of the board won’t see nepotism problems and she makes it to exec level by 40, Adam will be 70 by then, likely a semi-retired advisor instead of an active board member. The thing is that no matter how they like each other and how much they play the same game, Adam and Betty won’t be able to play corporate exec together.
This must not stand. We must implement a catch-up mechanism to propel Betty to the board. Instead of getting a positive review for every year, she must get one every week. Instead of rewarding her entry level salary for dealing with small customers, she should get $500K like the execs. After all it’s absolutely not her fault entering the firm just now and we must make sure that friends and family aren’t separated. Those who come late must be fast-tracked to where the oldtimers got, walking uphill in the snow.
The above can be the manifesto of some bizarre communist youngster who has no idea what he’s talking about. Or, a completely valid plan in a gaming company that runs the MMO “Shark of Wall Street” where players take part in an imaginary investment firm.
I’d love to say that the first isn’t our problem, but bizarre communists are real, but hey, let’s not do politics and focus on gaming, where the rewards are nothing but pixels. It’s not like you can’t pay mortgage if you lose in “Shark of Wall Street” or a dragon kills your raid. It’s a game where anything is possible and nothing matters. Or, should be.
The thing is that in MMOs, the bizarre communist idea of “let friends play together” is real. Not only most content is easy enough to be completed by literally pressing the same one button again and again, but latecomers don’t even have to press the same button again and again, there are catch-up mechanisms. These are shortcuts implemented later in the game that hand out the reward that took lot of work (even if trivial work) to earlier players. For example to level up in WoW to 60 was a several hundred hours task back in Vanilla. Then leveling to 70 was another 50-something hours in TBC. Getting to 80 was like 30 hours in WotLK. 85 in Cataclysm was another 20, so is 90 in Pandaria. Getting to 100 was 20-30 more in Draenor. Now, if you download the game for the first time, you get instant level 100.
Not only the tasks are skipped, but also the memories. Vanilla WoW was a decade ago and I remember many places, many NPCs, many stories and many hard tasks to conquer. I could still heal the Shattered HC gauntlet and know how to pull back the pack in Shettek to avoid being feared into new packs. The recent players know nothing of that. The content – while technically there – is practically deleted. No one has reason to ever play it.
I strongly believe that catch-up mechanisms (defined as “making progression on older content easier/faster later”) is the worst decision MMO makers made and is the biggest knife in the back of the genre, bigger than “bring the player, not the class” or “accessible content”. I didn’t quit WoW, I play it optimally. I mean that by not playing, I get the same rewards as the players by logging in a later date and do some trivial task.
I also believe that the next big MMO, the heralded WoW-killer will be not only without catch-up mechanisms but will be marketed around the concept of no catch-up mechanisms. In the age of automatic matchmaking, phasing and servers able to handle millions, the “there won’t be players for old content” excuse won’t fly. Let me explain how the next big MMO will be built:
- Tier 1 content is released and server goes online. Players progress, some players complete the content fast, others not.
- During the lifetime of the T1 content, it gets balanced, spell problems ironed out, the game changed as needed
- T2 expansion arrives on a new server. You can transfer your character from the T1 server to the T2 if you completed the T1 content
- Guilds exist in all tiers at once. So if you create a guild, that name will be locked for all tiers and if you transfer your character to T2, you’ll find yourself in the same guild. T1 guild bonuses apply to the T2 guild but not the other way, if you complete guild tasks in T2, that gets you T2 perks that are non-existent in the T1 server
- After T2 arrives, T1 balance becomes the gospel. It receives only bugfixes (that would allow actions that weren’t meant to be done at the first place) and graphical updates. No nerfs, no “balance changes”. If the game was balanced for a year, it’s still is. If the same mechanics are unbalanced in T2 (like mages are much stronger than rouges in a T2 dungeon), then T2 content is fixed, not the classes
- If a new player arrives to the game, he can only roll character on the T1 server and has to complete it, just like those who first came, with nothing being easier or faster. He’ll still be faster, since he doesn’t have to suffer bugs, have better UI and he just has to complete it on the normal level, while original players probably worked for achievements and trophies available only in difficult settings.
- Of course he can go for the T1 achievements himself, but then he have to complete the hard content with fellow T1 achievement hunters. If he transfers to T2, he can’t do them anymore as only the T1 server has T1 achievements. T2 characters can’t return to the T1 server. The player can roll a new character of course. This means that if you just started playing and claim a T1 achievement, you’ve defeated the same challenge that every other achievement holder did and not like in “go solo a lvl 60 boss at 100 for achievement” WoW.
- When T3 content is released, T2 becomes gospel like T1 did. Those who completed T2 normal content can move to T3. T2 achievements will be unavailable at T3
.
PS: I can’t believe that I agree with r/eve again:
Context: CCP had huge layoff that included EVE “celebrities” CCP Logibro and CCP Manifest. CFC Falcon – of course – survived and can continue his mission of driving EVE to the ground for “beers”.
I thought you were all for meritocracy? What you just described was all Union-reasoning, with seniority and grinding.
In your example, if Betty is capable of being an exec – or better than the current crop of exec candidates – why shouldn’t she be able to bypass the nonsense inbetween? We can assume there is some level of knowledge-from-experience necessary for certain positions, and there is also likely merit in being able to prove that one can perform work for X amount of time without scandal. But the slow, corporate grind up the ladder on an entirely arbitrary basis? Kissing low-level manager ass and hoping one’s work is recognized enough for a promotion on a strict, fiscal year basis? That seems like everything you have been speaking out against for years. If you can do the job, you should be able to do the job.
As for the MMO, it’s doomed to failure for all the reasons why practically no company does it today: it segments the population. Five years post-release, who is still playing on Server 1? Just the few thousand (hundred?) new people who were convinced to play by their friends, and random people trying it for the first time. Except all their friends are on Server 5, all active players are on Server 5, all the advertisements and marketing materials and development time is literally catering to Server 5 exclusively. So, as a new player, your experience is strictly the old content before the devs hit their stride, on a barren server that was designed to house tens of thousands of comrades simultaneously but is now a ghost town. I hope raid content wasn’t gating the entrance to Server 2, because who the hell is still committed to the game and hasn’t passed that bar on Server 1 years ago?
FFXIV forces you to complete all the Main Story Quest nonsense and I’m slogging through it currently. “Low-level” dungeons are still being ran because the LFG system will level you down to match the content, so veterans and newbies are grouped together. But it’s still awful. I have a long, lonely, boring grind to an endgame I guarantee I can excel in. Or I could pay $$$ and skip it. Or stop playing.
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No.
And with a 3 word explanation: “End Game Content.”
Back in the day, when leveling WAS the game, it was supposed to take a long time. And it did! I enjoyed it… I only got to level 35 in EQ because it was so solo hostile, but I eventually got to level 59 in WoW and started raiding. Sure, I still did solo work… even did a 5 account multi boxing experiment where I tried to do 5 man dungeons. (I sucked.)
But end game shut all that down. The environment today is just too different from what it was then. Once the “End Game Content” genie was let out of the bottle for enough players, that’s what they wanted to do instead of being content to level.
Next, the expansion cycle of long term games like WoW forced the compression of the leveling process even further. It was ludicrous to expect that a NEW player who was aware of the end game and wanted to get there to slog through original vanilla, and original TBC, and original WotLK.. etc. It’s ridiculous. The obvious solution was catch up mechanics.
That said, WoW is dated and weak. It’s chain of expansions is no longer relevant. When a WoW killer DOES appear, it will have a much shorter leveling cycle, and will replace that cycle every expansion… with the goal being to get the player to the end game content is a reasonable amount of time.
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@Azuriel: the gate is performance and not merit. If Betty can clear T1 in a day, she can transfer.
The “segment the population” is an outdated argument. It’s from WotLK times, the rise of “social gaming”. Then it was a big thing, allowing friends to play together. Now it’s so common that it’s no longer a selling point. If you want to play with friends, you can play almost anything from D3 to PUBG and countless mobile titles. So making a sacrifice about the core feature of the game for the ability to play with friends is wrong. Joe will play this game as his main game with a “professional” guild and play Clash of Clans on his phone while commuting to work with his friends.
The couple hundred or thousand being new players assumption is completely wrong. WoW sold over 100M copies with never having more than 10M active subscribers. Since WoW is 10 years old, the average playing age of WoW is a SINGLE YEAR. So I would guess that the T1 server will be more populated than T5. The problematic server will be T3 and T4, but if the game is successful enough (100K+ active players), it will always have 100-200 online for a normal raid. The “server designed for 100K and has 1K can’t be a problem” in the age of phasing. Design for 1K, phase out the 99K.
Development will come to old servers in the form of graphics, UI and performance updates. Also there is no reason not to implement vanity nonsense like Halloween event on the old server. Please note that “advertisements and marketing materials” necessarily only focus on such things, as you can’t advertise competitive stuff.
FFXIV simply has outdated “many servers” technology: https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/worldstatus/
No doubt they can’t find players for old dungeons.
@Smokeman: your argument is simply “this is how it is, so this is how it should be”. I openly condemn the “end game content” in an MMO, exactly because if we take it seriously and consider every other content as irrelevant, we no longer have an MMO with a World. I don’t say that it’s wrong, I’m saying that it’s a different genre which cater to different players. Your argument is just as weird as “Today’s most selling game is PUBG, let’s not make MMO, let’s make another king of the hill shooter”.
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the gate is performance and not merit. If Betty can clear T1 in a day, she can transfer.
But she can’t, because there are X hours of unskippable leveling labor involved. And then another Y hours in Server 2. And Z hours in Server 3, etc. The devs add leveling content with each expansion because probably > 75% of their customers enjoy it/consider it the primary benefit of the MMO, but it’s completely disconnected from the raiding part of the game. Betty could be the best player in the world, but unless she buys an account, your method requires her to slog through hundreds of hours of leveling content.
The problematic server will be T3 and T4, but if the game is successful enough (100K+ active players), it will always have 100-200 online for a normal raid.
It really won’t. For one thing, you can count on one hand the number of MMOs with 100k+ active players. For the second, only a small percentage of those active players will ever be raiding – at the height of WotK, pre-LFR, it’s like 10%-20% at most. Perhaps that’s where you got your 100-200 number? But then you have to take into consideration how many of those raiders are M&S. In fact, there should be people drowning in M&S at the bottleneck, because all the competent people would have cleared the raid and moved on.
The plan is simply unworkable. If raiding is required to move to the next server, >80% of the playerbase would never buy any expansion. If raiding isn’t required, then you just force the competitive people/raiders to slog through several hundred hours of nonsense content for no reason, just like the best employee in the world starts at the bottom of the Union totem pole with no hopes of advancing faster. What WoW and most other MMOs is doing is precisely the most logical and reasonable method. It obsoletes content, but so what? That content served its original purpose – there is no reason to fetishize one’s experience from 5+ years ago.
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worldofwarcraft(WOW) end game is literally, standing between ah and bank and pressing the dungeon finder button. that’s it.
not from me, credit goes to kungen, I’m no fan of him but he is on the point with this one. stumbled upon this while searching for blackdesertonline(BDO) stuff, when BDO had all the promise and potential: “Why does no one understand what’s important in an MMORPG any more?” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9MNFWhCw8dg.
people don’t know what they want. And even if they try to articulate it, they usually are in cognitive dissonance about it and DO something else entirely. majority plays a easy singleplayer and want to play a more easy singleplayer by inviting friends or if making friends is to much hassle via randoms by a LFG-button.
I solo/duo since the 90s, so I’m far away from target demographic. me and my partner are somewhat casual/hardcore. due to RL work we play casual hours. but those few hours are as efficient as possible hence hardcore. we have enough accounts to cover game necessities (back in the day where you didn’t have charslots, like starwarsgalaxies(SWG) at start.) and usually looking back we tend to end up in pvp and solo-/duo-ing group content.
your expansion tiering doesn’t make “old content” relevant it makes it more a barrier like finalfatasyXIV(FFXIV) mainstory. it is hard to prepare for X expansions as a dev. the fundamental problem with tiering is breaking old content and streamlining it and somehow make it still relevant filled with active players new and veteran. downleveling characters like guildwars2(GW2) makes the content still hard enough. relevance can come from items, at least for me, that are still very nice to have in any expansion or higher level. SWG had various items as quest reward from long quest chains those items gave buffs, so at some point you WANT to not MUST do them for min-maxing or build-enabling.
The question is what is easier for a dev? building new-player-stuff within a new expansions abandoning the old completely or changing old stuff to streamline to a somewhat same-hours-spend player experience. If T1 took 60h I would like to take T1-T9 also 60hours + maybe Xh more per expansion? you get the idea. so yes from all stages of expansion and story some stuff has to go but be relevant, fun, deep, engaging (marketing PR can go ham here)
either way people will whine.
boosting doesn’t go away, it is too good money for the devs.
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Hah!
“I openly condemn the “end game content” in an MMO”
No you don’t! You embrace it fully. The deal is your “end game content” isn’t playing the game at all, buy rather manipulating it’s economy to “get rich.” The “end game content” of being the richest colors your every view. Ok, that’s not the “as designed” end game content, and it’s being destroyed by RMT and P2W, (And in my opinion, shouldn’t be there in the first place, as it disrupts the game.) I understand that you’re frustrated that you can’t play your version of the “end game content” because of that.
Before the existence of “end game content”, people were content to waste time grinding for the fun of it. But now that that genie is out of the bottle, it will naturally consume the rest of the game. It’s not “This is how it is, so this is how it should be.” It’s market forces. A vastly superior product came along and the players embraced it.
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Wouldn’t a better analogy be: pharmacist regularly needs to retake exam to be qualified, and scores in previous exams don’t matter?
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@Azuriel: seeing leveling as “unskippable labor” is coming from WoW, where leveling content is indeed bottable. The world best player is barely better than a “press fireball button to continue” mage.
But imagine a game where leveling is challenging, exciting and someone being good at it is much faster than someone who keeps wiping on quest mobs.
You are right, that “75% of their customers enjoy it/consider it the primary benefit of the MMO, but it’s completely disconnected from the raiding part of the game”, but it’s not a problem of my design, it’s the problem of MMOs in general. I tend to believe that raiding was a mistake and Mythic dungeons are the right thing. For simplicity, let’s assume that the game has no raiding at all and all content can be cleared in a group of 5.
You still don’t realize how obsoleting content is against the defining feature of the MMO genre: persistent world, defined as “previous gaming sessions significantly affect the current”. It’s a genre. It’s not for everyone. But if you throw it away, you are competing with MOBAs and I think LoL is a better MOBAs than WOW.
@Anon: I agree that player economy is a bad move for any game which is not explicitly an economy game.
@Smokeman: no. The devs went for the move that give them a better next quarter income at the cost of longevity. It’s the same mistake they do with P2W. But it doesn’t matter. If one believes you, his only logical move is to make a WoW clone that beats WoW (good luck). If one believes me, he can make a different product from WoW that can coexist as it serves different players.
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“If one believes you, his only logical move is to make a WoW clone that beats WoW (good luck).”
No no! I do not espouse that at all. I think WoW is past it’s “use by date” and needs to be replaced. Unfortunately, there are 2 types of people trying to make games:
1) WoW clones trying to cash in. These will all fail.
2) PvP oriented games with MMO attributes. Like Albion Online. These will all fail to really take off unless they make the PvP aspect irrelevant.
The problem here is AAA games, the money thinks these are the two paths that can be taken, and if you’re trying to make a AAA game, you have to beg for the money. Back in the day, when MMOs were actually doing new things, we weren’t trying to be AAA games, we were shoestring operations trying to get a a piece of a small market. Now the money is here and they are killing it to try to make a fast buck.
WoW as as innovator crashed into the wall as soon as the “end game” hit and both factions were essentially forced to exist side by side. That stupid, short sighted decision has just metastasized into the game it is today. Alliance and Horde should have had separate dungeons and raids then and now.
There IS a path to make a “WoW killer”, but it’s not in cloning WoW. It’s in learning from the past and understanding that the 2 things most people hate are ganking and forced grouping. RMT and “buying advantage” would be the third thing.
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Anon at November 1, 2017 at 1:25 pm:
I watched that guy’s video.
Like him, I “Played the heck” out of the game, (But without the profanity.) But that era in MMOs is gone. Even trying to do that now makes you even more aware of the end game.
However, I think his core analysis is inherently flawed. The main flaw in WoW is the fact that the BEST gear is only available to group content. Group content is a horrible end game gear up mechanic, group content is easily gamed, all you have to do is get into a group that’s above your pay grade and you breeze through it relatively speaking, while at the same time pissing everyone else off.
The dogma of “The best gear must come from group content” is as horrible as the primary dogma that WoW killed “Death must have a severe penalty.” was. It’s a game, the penalty of having to run back and get your stuff, perhaps some repairs, etc. Is sufficient.
What players WANT, is to play a solo game in the same space as other players. They don’t want to complete with them, so they don’t like forced PvP or forced rarity caused by competition. That should be the primary “end game”, you do solo content as you improve your gear and stats. Group content is fine too, but you’re doing that for the fun of it, not the gear. Of course, you’ll find out how many people really want to raid when you get to that point, it will be few and you will probably have to schedule times for it.
BDO actually looks pretty good if not for the PvP and the “I bought my way to the top” economy aspect.
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One of the secrets is that the high-end actually likes catch up mechanics. The problem is attrition. You are constantly losing people to real life, so you need replacements. Without decent catch-up mechanics, high-end play is unsustainable, as you soon lose the ability to form a group at your level, and have to fall back to the lower levels or wait for the people there to catch up to you.
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I think your main assumption is wrong. Yes, they communicate that catch-up is for friends and family, but the main reason is the returning players, so in the long run it’s the profit. There is only a few people who have never touched WoW (but a potential player), so most “new sales” are returners. Who have played some content, have some memory, but have out-dated characters or want to try new ones. If they come back because of the newest expansion’s or patch’s new feature or zone or lore or whatever, they will be disappointed if they realize they have to do something else for a long time before they can get to the desired one. They will be more like buying some other new game where the newly marketed content is accessible right away.
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@cathfaern: if 100M WoW was sold and active player count was around 8M, then the average player played 8 months. There are returnees, but most people must be new.
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This entire topic revolves around the notion that “vertical” leveling is the only method to advance a character. Why must the road be 60 miles long, as was the case in Vanilla WoW? Why can’t the advancement come instead from the horizontal expansion of skills, trades, knowledge and lore? No level cap. Everyone is able to attempt end game content from day one, except implement a risk versus failure damage/death mechanic that is based on a performance and time metric when engaging in end game content. Let guilds establish “squads” of players who have put in the time, or money in allowing some form of “catch-up” mechanic through the use of purchasable, in-game currency that can be spent at NPC trainers and consumable sellers. Progression can be gated on so many levels other than vertical means.
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It seems to me that you forgot that games are not work, they are entertainment.
Yes, it is quite stupid to give Betty “catch-up” to Adam. I think nobody challenges that.
And now let’s have another analogy. You come into cinema with your children to watch the Disney’s “Moana”. But you can’t do that because it is tier 56 Disney’s animated film, and you must have seen tier 55, “Zootopia”, beforehand. And to see “Zootopia”, you of course must have proof that you have seen “Big Hero 6” (tier 54). If you’re new to Disney, you have to start with tier 1, 1937’s “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”, and slowly work up through 55 tiers because, well, we can’t have morons and slackers watching “Moana”!
Now, in real world unprincipled Disney Studios did allow catch-up mechanism and you could walk into cinema as a total noob alongside your friends that watched 55 previous Disney titles and ruin their experience by your bad watching skills. Moana grossed $643 million.
How much do you think would Moana bring in in perfect world with strictly tiered content?
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I’m really not sure how you calculated that number. A sold copy could play for 1 month (included subscription) or for 8 year. You can’t just average that.
But nevertheless: you really think that there is a lot of people who never played WoW, but is a potential player? This game is more than 10 years old, there is no chance that someone who play with MMOs / online PC games never heard of it. If they heard of it they either tried it (which is easy for many year with the f2p until lvl20 trial), or they are not interested. And although WoW developed much it’s not really changed that much that someone who did not liked it before (without even trying it) will like it now. So how would be that bunch of people who are “WoW – virgin”?
Also I know reddit is not an authentic statistical source, but just check it: there are ton of “I got back to WoW help pls” (mostly near patches and expansions) while there is only 1 or 2 “I’m a new WoW player” in a month (and these are mostly unrelated to patches and expansions). Also most truly new player writes that they love to explore the world and look everywhere and take it slow. They are not interested in the catch-up mechanism, rather disturbed a bit by it (they outlevel old content too fast).
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@Souldrinker: I’m not saying all games should be like that. MOBAs and FPS shooters have no progression. But MMOs make no sense with catch-up. Character progression is their selling point and they make it trivial with catch-ups.
@Cathafaern: Blizzard released both numbers. There is a chart with 8M average players over 10 years and there is the number 100M sold. These two can only be true if the average player has 8 months playtime. And yes, you can average the guy with 8 years subscription with the guys who quit after 1 month.
Who are the “WoW virgins”? The same people who are “college football virgins”: those who just came to the age where they can play.
The reason why you get “I got back to WoW help” and no “new player” is that a new player is unaware that he “needs” help. The returning player is aware of the endgame and the level cap and the ilvl and he asks for the optimal way to catch up. The new player is running around in Mulgore, throwing hugs to NPCs, picking peacebloom and explores with an ear-to-ear smile.
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The point being missed here by OP and that video is that we live in a different time. 2003 = virtual world games were a new and a novelty, people were first getting broadband rather than 56k (being billed each hour of connection), perhaps normies were getting their first internet connection period, and escaping your real life to an internet world seemed exciting and intriguing. So running around just “being” and roleplaying as your avatar in the world was viable. Do you remember Second Life? That was the epitome.
In 2017, real life is now an escape from your internet life, and virtual world environments are old news. It just won’t sell anymore, in these days. If it did, it would exist and not just be a theorycraft.
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@Case: exactly that’s why I think the next big MMO will be the one with VR compatibility. Because that will be the same groundbreaking thing that the first online worlds was.
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@cathfaern: surely not, because VR isn’t a ruleset but a technology. A graphics update so to speak. So if a new MMO with VR will be successful, in 3 months WoW will get a huge VR patch which will somewhat suck but will be enough to keep the customers and a year later with its infinite resources Blizzard will make WoW the best looking VR MMO.
The ONLY way to have a successful MMO not called WoW is to make it with a ruleset that Blizzard doesn’t want to follow (like EVE and its full loot PvP)
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@Gevlon: Sure, I’ve never said that that MMO won’t be WoW. There is a high chance Blizzard already working it, I won’t be too surprised if they would show or hint VR in WoW today at Blizzcon (though I think it would be too early).
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I am not entirely sure that character progression is the main selling point of massively multiplayer online games. There are some objectively existing phenomena that contradict it, most promiment is existence of alts (time spent on alt is time lost on progressing the main).
It could well be that the main selling point is the “massive” group play. MMOs are the only games with weird concepts like threat, agro and trinity. Group dynamics in MMOS are more intricate than in MOBAs and group FPS. And of course, the group sizes are on average bigger than in any other game genre.
Catch-ups indeed harm the integrity of progression but they enable group play. Instead of players being more or less evenly distributed on progress scale, we have big clump of players on “current content” and have greater choice of people to play with.
As catch-ups harm one aspect of the game and help the other, it is just a mathematical problem if we should have them or not (players lost due frustration from their “destroyed” progress versus players unable to find comfortable playing partners and quitting).
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@Souldrinker: when over a million player plays the same game, even distribution can’t mean that there isn’t anyone to play with. The problem is that the server structure is horizontal instead of vertical. There is no reason for Adam to be lvl 54 on server X together with Betty who is lvl 100, while Cindy is lvl 54 on Y. Adam and Cindy should be on the same server.
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@Souldrinker: Alts usually are created exactly because you can’t progress anymore on your main character (example: locked out of all raid where you can get any more gear), or your main characters progress is too slow to be fun (only 1-2 gear remains to BiS or you have to farm too much AP for next level). Or you simple bored with your main, but that’s another case. So the existence of alts are an evidence for MMo’s main feature is character progresson, and not contradict it.
In Legion you can mostly always progress on your main character, so alts are not so popular, and usually used for top-end raiding or for money making exactly because otherwise player says that it would be better to progress their main than leveling / gearing alts.
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The point being missed here by OP and that video is that we live in a different time.
The point is “interests in endgame” makes up a minority of people in a game. yes it rises a bit over the past 2 decades. BUT endgame is not “the game” for an MMO. The majority does their thing enjoying their entertainment. GG wants to be MMO-rich, a minority. I want to have build diversity so I don’t really know at a glance what to expect in pvp, a minority.
If endgame is the shit. why do people bother with MMOs or rating games.
Vanilla WOW. no gear sets. vastly different skilllevel. etc. you heard bittervets. enchants meant something, buffs meant something. I played it because it had variation in skill builds. blues where all the rage and you could do some very interesting builds, so I grinded and flipped AH to finance that. I stopped with TBC, with the legendary hype and class set trend dumbing down skillsystem. here and there Bliz tried to bring it back. And failed, the majority doesn’t care and don’t want to think or experiment (theory crafting another minority).
In 2017, real life is now an escape from your internet life, and virtual world environments are old news. It just won’t sell any more, in these days. If it did, it would exist and not just be a theory craft.
Roblux 300% player increase (virtual), LEGO 5% sales decrease (RL phsyiscal) this year(first decrease in over a decade btw). I wonder. Toys’R’Us going bankrupt. exiting times.
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