Thott on Kunark

[garyogburn]

Stumbling around the interwebs looking for leveling info on Kunark, I come across this little gem:

http://www.afterlifeguild.org/Thott/kunark.php

I didnt start until the tail end of velious, so I dont know how accurate this article is in saying that Kunark was a mistake because of how hard it was to get to 60. What do you guys think? Any merit to this?

[Toony]

Oddly enough I recall 60 to 65 being harder than 50 to 60. For me at least, it was all about motivation.

[azeth]

Oddly enough I recall 60 to 65 being harder than 50 to 60. For me at least, it was all about motivation.

60-65 was miserable for me also, I think I spent most of my time in Bastion of Thunder and Plane of Valor.

[Rhodes]

It takes from 40 to 100 days of /play time (each day is 24 hours spent playing, so 10 days /play is 240 hours) for someone's first character to get to the original level cap of 50.

I lol'd

[Dr4z3r]

It could be said that it was a mistake by the developers to make 50-60 take as long as it did. The article linked makes some convincing arguments for the notion that the amount of time required to get to 60 is too great, compared to the available context to experience while doing it.

But on what scale can we judge this mistake? The article said the major concern was that everyone would get to 60 right away, get bored, and leave. That obviously didn't happen, so Kunark was successful in averting that potential crisis.

Of course, averting a potential crisis does not at all excuse an overreaction that causes a real crisis. The article claims that people were frustrated with how long leveling took, and got bored with the idea of leveling in general. It says:

Most games currently under development are shooting for the persistent PvP and 3d IRC crowds more than true RPG world exploration and character development, simply because of the negative reaction most players have towards levelling after Kunark.

Does this sound correct to you? To wit, I can think of some pretty big, or long-lasting games that use levels and are popular today. To wit: Diablo 2, EQ2, WoW, and (gasp!) even the original EQ. Apparently, far from burning people out on leveling up, Kunark left such a good taste in the community's mouth that repeated expansions since have been regular and popular, including repeatedly increasing the level cap.

With the benefit of 10 years' hind-sight, we can probably say that this article's conclusion (leveling up is on the way out thanks to Kunark) was not entirely correct. However, we might also agree that Kunark was a mistake, and that WoW's decision to keep the time /played to level from 1 to max relatively constant, even as the level cap has increased has proven quite successful.

Of course, there's always a counter-example, and in this case it's this server right here. Obviously there are quite a few people who weren't burned out by Kunark, but rather are fired up to do it all over again!

[UrsusMajor]

While leveling up is not on the way out, it has been drastically decreased. Look at two of the most recent games, DCUO and Rift.

In DCUO you can go 1-30 over a long weekend. I rolled a character on a PvE server on Thursday evening after work and was 30 by early Sunday afternoon.

Rift, people were 50 by the end of the first week of release. While these were mainly the poopsocking crowd, I just hit 50 on my main two days ago, took 3 weeks for me.

Compare that to some of the original MMO's like UO, EQ an AC where for UO and EQ it took most everyone months (if you didn't macro in UO) to get to max skill/level. I believe my main character on Siege Perilous was just actually approaching being a 7xGM when about 8 months later I moved to AC. Speaking of AC, I don't believe anyone hit the max level of 126 until well over a year after the game was out.

I think this is mainly do to a shift in the gameplay of MMO's. They used to be very much about the world you played in and actual adventuring. Today leveling is just looked at as a means to an end when the realy game actually begins.

When was the last time any MMO had an expansion like Kunark? An expansion that wasn't just about increasing your characters levels but actually gave you a bunch of content for levels 1-50. The Burning Crusade gave us two new races but only new content for levels 1-20. With Cataclysm you got some new content for levels 1-10 for the new races and revamped content to STREAMLINE leveling from 10-60.

[Sparkin]

Oddly enough I recall 60 to 65 being harder than 50 to 60. For me at least, it was all about motivation.

Really? 60 to 65 was a joke once you got into Valor and HoH. I remember many ppl doing it in a couple weeks or less. It was a sprint in comparison to 50-60.

50 to 60 was a huge grind. It took most people (except for the extreme hardcore) many many months.

That said, that's exactly why I loved Kunark more than any other expansion. When exp is so slow, you don't (or at least I didn't) feel the need to rush to the end. Personally, it allowed me to enjoy the content more, explore all the different areas and whatnot without feeling the need to level as soon as possible.

[Knightmare]

One aspect that WoW really brought out, in contrast to Everquest, which is not really considered is this:

The longer it takes to level, the more potential familiarity and skill a player can have at a given class. If you level a character up to 50 in 3 weeks, how much skill will you have at that class? You've only played it for 3 weeks and haven't had many difficult learning experiences! And so this is one reason why (imho) we had so many unskilled raiders in WoW and easy-leveling games like it.

Compare Everquest. A person could spend a large chunk of time leveling. But by the time they made it, they had some clue how to play the game and how to play their class. I recall original EQ raiders on my server as actually having skill almost regardless of what guild it was.. something that I didn't find much of on any server in WoW except in the top rated guilds. (I didn't stay in EQ2 DaoC or WAR long enough so I won't comment on them.)

People like feeling progress, which leveling gives. It's common and popular to this day and as yet there just haven't been many good alternatives. Imagine posting on the WoW forums that the days of leveling are long gone :rolleyes:

[Foxx]

levelling from 50-60 was horrible for me, and I was in top3 pve guild on my blue server at the time. I was 50 before kunark came out, and I had a ton of play time (8th grade and my entire leg was in a cast). 59 was my favorite level, I won a fungi tunic and that 2hb from sebilis truncheon of doom that procced 50% slow on mobs... a warrior solo'ing mobs for exp while lfg was A++


level 60-65 was retarded easy, halls of honor and bot made it fly by..

IMO, big reason why levelling isn't what it "used" to be, is because back then most of us just didn't do things the right way, didn't know the ins and outs of our classes and the best spots. But yea, it took me just a few days to hit 80-85 in wow, its absolutely nothing compared to what 1-50 was, and deffinetly 50-60.

[fugazi]

snip

Don't forget that EQ back then didn't have any kind of competition. Nowadays, the attention-span of a game is radically shorter and you need to pack a punch in the time you're given to make a lasting impression. If EQ was released now, with newer graphics but the gameplay of 1999, we'd laugh at it and call it utter shit. The time invested does not warrant the rewards (xp/loot), that's why EQlive steered away from the original.

Don't forget that McQuaid based EQ pretty much on AD&D. There you level once every so many sessions, while a computer has to reward you each time you play. In 1999 they had the luxury to succeed with this approach, in 2011 such an approach is destined to fail.

[Slave]

"It takes from 35 to 50 days /played to get from 51 to 60."

If you really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really SUCK, and most of that time is spent chatting with people. When you don't chat, you are raising your swimming or begging skill.

This whole article is beyond out of whack with that as a premise, sorry. lol

[Messianic]

I think I had 25-30 days played - total - when I hit 60.

[UrsusMajor]

Don't forget that EQ back then didn't have any kind of competition. Nowadays, the attention-span of a game is radically shorter and you need to pack a punch in the time you're given to make a lasting impression. If EQ was released now, with newer graphics but the gameplay of 1999, we'd laugh at it and call it utter shit. The time invested does not warrant the rewards (xp/loot), that's why EQlive steered away from the original.

Don't forget that McQuaid based EQ pretty much on AD&D. There you level once every so many sessions, while a computer has to reward you each time you play. In 1999 they had the luxury to succeed with this approach, in 2011 such an approach is destined to fail.

How do you KNOW it's destined to fail? Nobody has even tried something like it since DAoC? When WoW first came out it took much longer to actually level than it does now and I don't remember people complaining. You have a large number of people playing on P99, you have an even larger number of people playing on the two EQ Live timelocked progression servers.

Do I think a game with a long leveling process would draw the millions that WoW has, no, but I don't think any game can actually do that. Do I think a game with a long leveling curve could actually be successful today, yes I do.

[Grizlor]

I had like 94 days /played when I hit 60. God I sucked.

[mwatt]

I think that whether one will agree or disagree with the main premise of this article is based upon one's basic approach to this type of game. There are two basic "types" of people in the MMO world:

A) People who don't consider that they have "won" the game until max level. They want to reach max level so the "real" game can begin, which is more or less "raiding", or in some scenarios, "PVP".

B) People who "win" every level because they appreciate the game for the journey, as much or more than they appreciate it for the end game.

Most gamers, at least these days, probably belong to camp "A". So for correctness based upon sheer numbers, the article probably espouses a real truth of sorts. I belong to camp "B". I suspect that simply by virtue of being here, so do many of the other players in Project 1999. It is a sadness to me that there are so many players in the world who would fit into camp "A".

[Felizcat]

For the pvp crowd, leveling is just a race. First to max level is king of the hill for a while and can grief lower levels and probably has access to better pvp-gear faster. How often have you heard in betas, early-access time or the first week: What's the endgame going to be like? Crazy.

The other fast leveling crowd are of course the raiders, who have to be the first to kill the T1/2 bosses first on their servers. Nothing less will do. All energy is put into leveling and gearing up. However, I've seen a couple of times where the top raiders are actually fully immersed in the game, lore and tradeskills, not just the raid. They just have so much more time on their hands to get there. Some Ambition helps as well.

[gnomishfirework]

Seriously, I felt like 59-60 alone took longer than 60-65.

It took me over a year to get my first char to 60.

My next 60 took a great deal less time, but this was on stromm with pop already out. I'd say it will take me two to three months to go from 50-60.

The thing about eq, though, is you can raid before 60. I raided a shit ton of content on my enchanter and got epic and never got 60.

I don't think grinding like EQ is the ideal way to progress, but I enjoy it a million times more than the quest based leveling systems. I play an MMO to play with people. Not myself.

[Rael]

How do you KNOW it's destined to fail? Nobody has even tried something like it since DAoC?

Vanguard, but that failed due to a rushed release/bugs more than anything.

[yorumi]

Vanguard, but that failed due to a rushed release/bugs more than anything.

Vanguard really wasn't a classic eq style game when it launched. They said that is what they were making but it's not what they ended up making. By the time the game was release it was largely a WoW clone.

More than anything vanguard is an example that a classic eq style game would work. Think about all the buzz that was generated when it was thought it was a going to be like classic eq made by the creator of eq. Then when they utterly failed to deliver anything remotely like that it was a commercial disaster.

[fugazi]

A classic EQ 'style' game, sure. But Classic EQ? Where you lose 20-40 minutes of your play-time every time you die? Where you can spend 2-4 hours looking for a group as a warrior while soloing for pitiful xp? That shit don't fly no more ;)

[yorumi]

A classic EQ 'style' game, sure. But Classic EQ? Where you lose 20-40 minutes of your play-time every time you die? Where you can spend 2-4 hours looking for a group as a warrior while soloing for pitiful xp? That shit don't fly no more ;)

You're kind of taking out a lot of classic eq there, there's certainly more that made eq great than this but when you say solo for good exp and have a relatively meaningless death penalty we're fast approaching wow. I'm not denying that a large majority of modern gamers are losers that can barely figure out how to turn a game on without a walkthrough, just that I think a game like eq that has a slow leveling pace and punishes you when you die can still be successful. I mean we're all here so it obviously flies with some part of the gaming community.

The closest attempt at classic eq I'd say was ffxi, it's got name recognition so it's hard to say but solo was all but impossible and death stung quite a bit. Given that and p99 here, a private server with no formal advertising, I'm not convinced it wouldn't work. You don't have to pull wow number to still make quite a bit of profit.

[Dr4z3r]

Don't forget that EQ back then didn't have any kind of competition. Nowadays, the attention-span of a game is radically shorter and you need to pack a punch in the time you're given to make a lasting impression. If EQ was released now, with newer graphics but the gameplay of 1999, we'd laugh at it and call it utter shit. The time invested does not warrant the rewards (xp/loot), that's why EQlive steered away from the original.

Don't forget that McQuaid based EQ pretty much on AD&D. There you level once every so many sessions, while a computer has to reward you each time you play. In 1999 they had the luxury to succeed with this approach, in 2011 such an approach is destined to fail.

I think you're way off about attention span. The difference is that companies like Blizzard have realized that the most lucrative demographic to attract is one that is employed and has a family, and so wants to make significant progress even if they can only play 2-3 hours a week.

It is by catering to that demographic with the leveling and questing system, and others with PvP and hardcore raiding, that WoW has achieved its level of success.

[casdegere]

I'm not sure that Kunark was a mistake. When it was released EQ was booming and people seemed to eat up its difficulty compared to other games. Contested zones, camps and loot. Traveling still took time/danger vs. coin and corpse recovery could be dangerous. What they added with Kunark was almost mandatory grinding on top of it all. But some people always had/have time and energy to login for vast hours upon hours of EQ even still. It held their attention, it certainly held mine more then any other game I have ever played.

Before rotations on raid mobs the guilds with the most people that barely worked or slept were the ones that got the kills. People were addicted to the point of divorce and/or financial ruin. I even remember cases where wives, girlfriends...moms/dads deleted characters of insanely addicted EQ players and there were suicides and/or violent repercussions afterward.

On Rift, people had maxed out their level and crafting professions in 1-2 weeks. Doubtful there is enough content made for that game besides PVP to keep them satisfied for very long. To have seen level 60, 70, 80, 85th level characters in EQ soon after their perspective content add-on was a much bigger deal than 1-2 weeks of play. I mean, someone could grind on through, xping almost nonstop and do it fairly quickly but everything else will not be getting developed. Equipment, spells, crafts etc. would nearly have to be ignored. Banks and/or sellers have to be traveled to at some point as well. In these new games things like sellers, portals etc. to get back and forth to convenient places are built into the game from the start.

[Toony]

A classic EQ 'style' game, sure. But Classic EQ? Where you lose 20-40 minutes of your play-time every time you die? Where you can spend 2-4 hours looking for a group as a warrior while soloing for pitiful xp? That shit don't fly no more ;)

It fly's just fine over here. I like the fact that there are consequences for mistakes. And as far as grouping, shrug whats worse, looking for a group longer than you'd like on instantly getting one full of mouth breathers?

[Supreme]

The XP to go from 60-65 was the same as gaining 44 AA.

The XP to go from 50-60 was 211 AA.

Old numbers i remember.

[mwatt]

Vanguard, but that failed due to a rushed release/bugs more than anything.

I fell in love with VG. It was sheer torture to watch what happened. First SOE "saved it", like fishing a drowning butterfly out of a swimming pool. Then they proceeded to pull off it's legs and wings, one by one.

[Elissa]

I think that whether one will agree or disagree with the main premise of this article is based upon one's basic approach to this type of game. There are two basic "types" of people in the MMO world:

A) People who don't consider that they have "won" the game until max level. They want to reach max level so the "real" game can begin, which is more or less "raiding", or in some scenarios, "PVP".

B) People who "win" every level because they appreciate the game for the journey, as much or more than they appreciate it for the end game.

Most gamers, at least these days, probably belong to camp "A". So for correctness based upon sheer numbers, the article probably espouses a real truth of sorts. I belong to camp "B". I suspect that simply by virtue of being here, so do many of the other players in Project 1999. It is a sadness to me that there are so many players in the world who would fit into camp "A".

You're right but I think there's also a little more to it. Why is "max" level so enticing in this game or other games? Lots of reasons, I'm sure, but there is definitely the aspect of having access to and getting the best or nearly the best available gear.

Classic EQ was fun before max level for a lot of reasons, but not the least of which was that, in most cases, you simply didn't quickly outlevel rewards you obtained while making your journey to 50. I might get a sweet item leveling up in my teens that I could very reasonably continue to wear into my 30s (or higher). Sure, you can argue this is because there weren't too many equipment options, but there are enough. I always hated WoW's loot system... finding better gear within a couple level's time at most (which was only a matter of hours of playing). Conversely, in EQ I remember feeling absolutely incredible wearing a full set of bronze... BRONZE. Not saturating the market with tons of new equipment that rapidly scales with level is highly preferable to me. EQ rewards max level players with the best items, but they're not (in many cases) leaps and bounds ahead of what you could have obtained at an earlier level.

Of course, this system (I believe) can only work when leveling is hard. If it's easy, it would be silly to have amazing items obtainable at level 25 that are still great at 50.

[Gnar]

60-65 was miserable for me also, I think I spent most of my time in Bastion of Thunder and Plane of Valor.

Think of how fun it would have been fighting off other players bro? NPCs suck at PVP, makes the game more fun

[garyogburn]

I fell in love with VG. It was sheer torture to watch what happened. First SOE "saved it", like fishing a drowning butterfly out of a swimming pool. Then they proceeded to pull off it's legs and wings, one by one.

Me too. I played a blood mage and had a blast. Couldnt make it past 30ish though. I remember in one dungeon when you pulled one mob, it trained the ENTIRE ZONE onto you lol. Could of been great though.

I think the whole leveling debate is kinda moot. What makes EQ awesome isnt about the long leveling times, its what happens while you are leveling. You interact with other players in ways you just cant in other games. You really get to know people and rely on them so you dont get screwed over by the crazy death penalties :P

[Bruno]

Vanguard, but that failed due to a rushed release/bugs more than anything.

Vanguard was very hardware intensive. I actually bought a new computer just to be able to play it. There was also not much to do at level 50 except pvp, which was ridiculously imbalanced. Phoenix shaman were just insane. I thought the crafting system was pretty neat though.


60-65 was miserable for me also, I think I spent most of my time in Bastion of Thunder and Plane of Valor.

I'm always in the minority when I say I loved PoP. Flagging and clearing time was probably up there with my favorite raids in EQ. I will never forget the rathe council.

[Kyden]

I am wondering how many more times this article is gonna be pulled up on the web and posted on this forum. Guess what, the replies are always the same too.

[Bubbles]

Kunark's biggest issue re: the level grind was...

Replayability.

In Classic once you hit 50 you couldn't wait to start another toon and get it to 50, too.

In Kunark, once you hit 60 the LAST thing you wanna do is start up an alt, at least to seriously level beyond just donking around soloing.

[Jarnin]

I like how Thott completely ignored all the outdoor zones where level 50-60 players can get exp. Apparently you can only level to 60 in dungeons.

[Leokaiser]

Leveling hasn't gone away, no, but the pacing of leveling and the rate of reward has changed dramatically. Sometimes the only notable progress you made during a lengthy session in EQ was seeing a bar fill up - regardless of the fun you might have had, the end result isn't as satisfying for most people compared to when you actually gain a tangible benefit from your play to carry on to your next session ("just want to ding, then I can log"?). Things like AAs or faster leveling rates and the consistant stream of gear/ability upgrades were the solution to this, to make (almost) every session a rewarding one in terms of character progress.

The problem is that as rewards become more frequent, they become less significant, so it is a hard formula to balance.

I'm fairly certain that no game hoping for commercial success will adopt a classic EQ approch to leveling, where A) groups are pretty much required for certain classes, yet there are no tools for ensuring the players will find one, B) progress is slow to the point that all you might get from hours of play is 10% of a level and some coin or C) the possibility to actually lose progress from a session due to exp loss on death (while danger and the fear of death are good, you are mad if you actually enjoy suffering a death penalty).

As someone sussinctly put it, that shit don't fly no more. Game budgets are huge these days, so you need to reel in the punters, not a niche who enjoy corpse runs and waiting 30 mins on boats. This server, which is free to play, developed and ran by hobbyists using an exisiting game client, and aimed at people who loved EQ classic (flaws and all), cannot be held up as proof that a similar commercial game released today could survive in the difficult market of MMOs.

[Scroll]

I'm always in the minority when I say I loved PoP. Flagging and clearing time was probably up there with my favorite raids in EQ. I will never forget the rathe council.

PoP was my favorite too, and a perfect ending once I finally left EQ1.

[yorumi]

I'm fairly certain that no game hoping for commercial success will adopt a classic EQ approch to leveling, where A) groups are pretty much required for certain classes, yet there are no tools for ensuring the players will find one, B) progress is slow to the point that all you might get from hours of play is 10% of a level and some coin or C) the possibility to actually lose progress from a session due to exp loss on death (while danger and the fear of death are good, you are mad if you actually enjoy suffering a death penalty).

As someone sussinctly put it, that shit don't fly no more. Game budgets are huge these days, so you need to reel in the punters, not a niche who enjoy corpse runs and waiting 30 mins on boats. This server, which is free to play, developed and ran by hobbyists using an exisiting game client, and aimed at people who loved EQ classic (flaws and all), cannot be held up as proof that a similar commercial game released today could survive in the difficult market of MMOs.

I think you're honestly only seeing what you want to see and ignoring the rest. It is possible to make a commercial success on the EQ model of slow leveling, harsh death penalty and nearly necessitating groups. I said it before but FFXI is a perfect example. Until a later expansion soloing was impossible for all but one class, fairly harsh death penalty and you could lose a level and all gear was level locked so you could find yourself unable to equip your gear. Granted they've killed it now but it was a big commercial success. Ironically the same thing killed both eq and ffxi, dumbing the game down, making travel trivial, less exp to level, easier to solo etc.

I would also point to vanguard, rather large popularity when it was announced that it would be a game similar to classic eq. Why did most people leave when beta started and it launched, "this isn't classic eq it's a wow clone." Granted the bugs and extreme system requirements didn't help but if it had truly been like classic eq I bet people would have had a lot more patients with the game and let them fix that.

And honestly look at how many failed wow clones are out there. There's more failed wow clones than eq clones. That's not to say a classic eq game is going to become the next wow but I don't believe the evidence supports the notion that a game on classic eq's model will automatically be a commercial disaster.

Just because the toyoda corolla(or whatever go with it for example sake) is the most popular car doesn't me we shouldn't make mustangs because the market is smaller.

About the bugdet, that's honestly their own problem. Eq was ambitious but it wasn't system busting when it launched. MMOs don't necessarily have to cost unholy amounts of money. Look at the success of the free korean mmos, yes they problems with their core game design, but they use lower quality stylized graphics that are much cheaper to produce and many of these games are more successful than big budget subscription mmos. With more affordable 3d engines out there now, many that come with built in camera systems, physics effects, particles, and more, it's much more possible to make an mmo that isn't tens of billions of dollars to start up.

Is a low budget game going to be the next wow, probably not, but then is anything? I mean I suppose something is but look at how many of have tried and failed so horribly. There's a market of poeple out there that want a harder mmo that isn't instant gratification, this is evidenced by ffxi, vanguard, and the success of soe progression servers as well as this server(no advertisment private server and it's got a respectable population). A game like that is going to be almost uncontested in the market, whereas a wow clone has thousands of mmos both subscription and free out there already.

[Envious]

Ninnu did 50-60 in like, 2 weeks or less? He and some light necro got it within a few hours of each other, and were the first 2 lvl 60s by almost a full level, if not more.

On a live pvp server~

[Leokaiser]

<snip>

Yeah, I should maybe have quantified that I'm speaking about AAA titles here, and by commercial success I'm not just meaning anything in the profit margins, but something that meets the expectations of the developers and their backers (hence I don't consider WAR particularly successful, for example, even though it probably turns a profit).

FFXI, like EQ, was released at a time when MMOs were still a relatively niche market. The reason so many emulate WoW (I feel the term 'Wow clone' is applied too liberally) in many respects is due to the fact that WoW brought the genre into the mainstream by cutting out a lot of things that kept it niche. Pretty much any big developer who wants to release an MMO which is successful by the standards of 2011 (rather than 1999 or 2003) wants a slice of that mainstream audience. From what i've seen of FFXIV (I could be totally wrong here), it doesn't seem as if Square were very confident the FFXI formula would work for them in today's market.

Vanguard is actually the perfect example of what I'm talking about here. It started out on a path towards The Vision, and I doubt they strayed from it because they themselves lost faith rather than caving in to the demands of the mainstream audience they hoped to attract and/or the finacial overseers.

If someone comes out with a low budget game that aims to make a large profit from 100k subs or the equivelent in item transactions (see: Korea), I'm not going to know their relative success, but it's not really on the scale I was talking about considering the size of the MMO market.

The most interesting blip on my gaming radar at the minute is the MMO under development by Curt Schilling's 38 Studios. Here is a guy who loved EQ, who also loves WoW, and is a player first-and-foremost rather than a developer; here is a player putting his money, time and reputation on the line. Will his game be more comparable to EQ or to WoW? No one knows at the minute, but if someone like him isn't going to bring back corpse runs and 40 minute hoofs across a continent to get a group, I wouldn't be too hopeful that any other big players will.

[yorumi]

I still don't think you're giving credit where credit is due. FFXI was released in north america mere months before WoW, and for pretty much all of it's life was in direct competition with WoW. The various census data they put out reported over a million active subscriptions at it's peak. Perhaps it was just getting stale but the game didn't start to die until things were made more WoW like, you would think if anything that should increase subscriptions.

EQ was the same way, again perhaps it's age but when did it start to die? As soon as it was made easier. SWG was supposed to be the anti-EQ, which is sort of what you're arguing that WoW did, it died a horrible death(i know it's techincally still around but lets be serious), they even tried to outright copy WoWs design and its STAR WARS, and they could get a population worht anything. Vanguard goes to be like WoW, they're not running two servers and only one is populated.

I guess my question is how many games do we have to make like WoW that are horrible failures before we stop saying WoW is the only way to make an mmo? Obviously WoW did a lot right, but you can't just completely ignore other games that have had success, and a game isn't a complete failure when it doesn't have 10 mil subscriptions. You'd actually probably be amazed how many games out there are around the 100k mark and the profits are amazing.

I think the real problem is the mmo industry might possibly be the least creative sector of the video game industry. All the games are just copies of something else, and there's rarely an original idea.

[mwatt]

I think the real problem is the mmo industry might possibly be the least creative sector of the video game industry. All the games are just copies of something else, and there's rarely an original idea.

I think the real problem is that the mmo industry is basing their game design ideas off of game mechanics and themes found within WoW, because of it's huge success. They give no consideration to the idea that a major reason for the huge success of WoW is not just WHAT it is, but also WHO produces it. Blizzard consistently produces engaging products that are mature enough to be released and it does not make a habit of pissing it's customers off as time goes on. They have an excellent reputation within the gaming industry. This has a Synergistic influence on their gaming populace.

So far, every company that has tried to copy the WoW formula has produced a WoWish game, but without the backing of a Blizzard. Who wants to play a game that is already like an existing game except that it is worse and is run by corporations that sink because of inadequate bank or like SOE, generally just fuck up their games and piss their customers off?