Quote:
Originally Posted by Lune
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This is all connected to the death of the sense of 'community' during late WOTLK that moved players away from a more classical MMO environment, toward a game whose social interactivity was more like a Dota or call of duty. Elite quests were removed, so you never had a reason to interact with anyone out in the world. Dungeon finder was implemented, so you never had a reason to interact with your leveling cohort or server community. Instead of putting in the effort to find reliable individuals to do dungeons with, the matchmaking system sticks you with people from other servers, and you do the dungeon without saying a word, then leave and never see them again.
When all those systems were fully implemented during Cata, Dungeon Finder, Raid Finder, and a strictly single player questing experience, many players lost easy access to the 'social bonds' that are notorious for keeping somebody glued to an MMO. Coupled with total class homogenization, the game lost its social soul, and completely lost its appeal to me.
All those things happened right around the subscription decline, so I like to think those are some of the reasons why.
Also, time travel expansion. lul
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Five to six years ago I would have been in line with you. Back then I wanted an EQ classic server. I too rationalized how EQ had took the wrong fork and went downhill thereafter.
What do I think now?
My explanation for it's more complicated now and uncertain, since almost every - if not all - MMO's die with age. If it were something as simple as getting the community right, I think there'd be more vampires. Vampires!!??? The reclusive MMO's that do not die!! Show me where they're? They shall remain legend.
You have things like this:
- How to combat increasing content and power of higher skilled/leveled players?
- How to combat declines in graphic quality?
- How to combat declines in general quality, throughout the game?
- How to keep players interested in the same game?
- How to ensure your developer team is always the best?
- How to combat the desire to spend money elsewhere on newer games?
I could probably go on forever. Some of these should be more correctly mixed together or omitted altogether. I've had so many posts on this I forget all of the points there're to make and how all of it's interwoven. Fact is, it's very difficult for me to relay all of it and I think I'm failing miserably.
The first and most important thing that comes to mind when I think about all this is how there's a need to always make new content for older players to keep them playing. As a side effect, this creates a mountain of content that all new players must climb. Because this mountain is always increasing in size, to make it climbable within a reasonable amount of time the designers inevitably manipulate the progression curve so at any particular point in an MMO's life it'll require the same amount of time to reach max level, given equal effort and aptitude. The outcome this produces - as the MMO ages - is new players will climb up the mountain faster and faster - something that's necessary to ensure they can reach the top in equal time. It's possible that in this process something inexplicable and hard to resolve happens and negatively affects the game.
And there're a plethora of other issues. One example, in my mind, is the MMO code tends to get more like spaghetti because new developers are joining the team and old ones are being lost. While sucky programmers can be to blame too, this makes it hard for the developers to find a middleground, since different developers have different habits and the code is always growing. They attempt to create common rules and guidelines, but even this doesn't stop the spaghettification that, like a leaky faucet, creates problems. It becomes more and more bloated, and it just seems to become more and more expensive to maintain.
And what about graphics? It's damn hard to keep a graphics engine always cutting edge. It requires so many other things in the game to be right for the company to justify the expense. And if you have a lot of old content, updating it all can be a major pain. This is especially true if you didn't plan on updating it in the first place. It's almost always easier to just leave the old content alone and make something new.
Bottom line, somehow it gets harder and harder to keep something OLD interesting and "new". Just as it's harder to keep a person growing older looking like they're 20 and much easier to just always find a new 20 year old. How many 70 year olds look 20 and how much money has to be spent to make them look that way?
What I'm saying is the reason they do it this way - the reason they abandon old decaying games - is the same reason we tear down old buildings rather than reworking them. It is cheaper.