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Are people moving away from big MMOs?
This is not a rant against neverwinter, or any particular game. It's just something I've noted in the various MMOs I play.
People say that NW is loosing players, I also visit the forums of WoW, Gw2, DCUO, Tera, and others, and you know what they ALL have in common? More players leaving than the new ones coming in.
So my question is, where are all those players going? Is the MMO genre becoming stale and people are prefering smaller more casual games?
Myself, I love MMOs, I love getting immersed in a rich world with a rich story and being able to play while I talk with people all around the world about game stuff or just general life stuff. But I wonder if people like me are becoming less and less interested in it, and prefer something quicker and more casual, like LoL or maybe World of tanks? (just to name some more casual games)
Please don't turn this topic into a "I'm leaving Neverwinter because..." this is not about it, do you think the market is changing? Do you think MMOs need a change? How do you see the future of online gaming?
People say that NW is loosing players, I also visit the forums of WoW, Gw2, DCUO, Tera, and others, and you know what they ALL have in common? More players leaving than the new ones coming in.
So my question is, where are all those players going? Is the MMO genre becoming stale and people are prefering smaller more casual games?
Myself, I love MMOs, I love getting immersed in a rich world with a rich story and being able to play while I talk with people all around the world about game stuff or just general life stuff. But I wonder if people like me are becoming less and less interested in it, and prefer something quicker and more casual, like LoL or maybe World of tanks? (just to name some more casual games)
Please don't turn this topic into a "I'm leaving Neverwinter because..." this is not about it, do you think the market is changing? Do you think MMOs need a change? How do you see the future of online gaming?
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I have already played over 1500 hours in Skyrim, Oblivion and Morrowind.
The marketers are so focused on next quarterly profits they don't realize they are cooking the golden goose instead of harvesting eggs long term.
Encounter Matrix | Advanced Foundry Topics
I guess that's also a possibility, in these days were we all search for instant gratification, people are more prone to jump from the next big thing instead of staying as a player.
at least i am still here.
I remember my first MMORPG experience. The game had a day and night cycle. Different hunting grounds for different classes in the same level. Monster had different running speed, where immun/resistance to some kind of damage (Golems where super slow and got a lot less damage from wind attacks and blades but additional damage from blunt weapons, but if they finally reached you, they could deal devastating damage). Even in your class you could choose your weapon freely but of course had some BIS Weapon type but you wasn't limited to one specific weapon class.
That is almost non-exisiting anymore in the current MMORPGs. Everything is streamlined in some way. It is less "Sandboxy", less experiement, less second world like. I mean even story wise the most MMORPGs are blunt dumb and simply doesn't even try to get me think "hell that is like a living and breathing world".
In addition many players got burned alot by the Publisher/Developer that they generate the next big MMORPG hit. They also get so far that since WoW every MMORPG is a copy of WoW or more likely Everquest-like title. Former Sandbox-Elements are gone.
Since WoW it is almost the same game. Every time. Only a few are different and can live with a decent amount of playerbase like Eve Online.
I do think that is a part of what Strongholds is trying to accomplish but I feat it is to late. The long-term players from Beta mostly left by Module 3 (in this case a new MMO was a big drawl that out weighed the social relationships or any many cases like my guild we left together). Since then there has been transient traffic but it hasn't been the same in NW. The social stimulus can inspire people to get the new shiny to show off to their friends or do crazy nonsense stuff for bragging rights (ex. soloing dungeons). I think if module 7 content was module 3, NW would be far more healthy fiscally.
Being the new game out will get people in the door, what I don't see any MMOs outside of WoW accomplishing is how to keep them inside (of course WoW has pretty much ran its course).
A.There are the first jumpers that totally leave never looking back with nary a fair-thee-well. They find their new MMO and start telling family/guilders about it and encourage them to also jump ship.
B.There are the ones that are vested in their characters and hang on, even if they are bored to death, they hate to give up what they have invested in time and funds, but even they at some point miss their family/guilders and they start "dabbling" in the other MMO that the #1 players jumped to, at some point they just sort of wither away.
C.Then there are the last player types, they hang on ever more dissatisfied until the game sunsets.
What are some of the signs that starts the leapers?
1. End-game arc. The new players, that would replace the old players, see just how daunting the task would be to get to end-game and it intimidates them to the point they don't want to invest in the time effort.
2. Content stagnation. This goes hand in had with #1, new players that weren't scared off by the huge end game arc, start playing and find the zones they need to progress through deserted, the end game players aren't there to consult so they never gain a base line loyalty to the game and at some point just drift off.
3. Forced socialization mechanics. At some point producers of a MMO fall into the "friends play and stay longer" trap. They believe all the sociology clap trap from college and figure what would it hurt to force some aspect of the game to drive people together? This actually is detrimental, people don't like to be forced, if the game doesn't naturally support them choosing to group and they feel forced, they begin to opt out. (Did you really become friends with the "new" kid when your mom told you that you had to be friends? No, you faked it for mom and resented it.
4. Friends and family mentality. remember that phone company MCI and their "friends and family program"? The one were you gave to MCI 5 names of people you talked to most of all, and they would give you a lower rate when you did talk to them? It was a flop. Why? Because A. you either felt like a HAMSTER quisling ratting out your circle of loved ones to get a lower rate. or B. your circle of loved ones got irate with you, when MCI started using the info you gave to hard sell them to join MCI. At some point you regretted doing what you did just to get a better rate, players get like that also, they start regretting the purchases they made in the game and at some point ask themselves is it really worth it? And off they go to another MMO.
5.Re-gear fatigue. When the game keeps getting a new tier again and again so often they can't keep up. There is always some new faction they have to gain rep with all over again to get to either content to earn gear or be able to buy etc. OR there is some new area they have to grind repeatedly to get at the gear or earn the drops for. If this is repeated to often it just gets stale and they get basicly bored away. It's like the GF/BF that wants to "talk" a subject to death that's never resolved/resolvable, making you lose sleep for days on end, into the wee hours even when you got to work in a few hrs. At some point you just dump them, you are tired of walking through your days like a zombie from sleep deprivation.
From my view point I'm seeing #1,#2 and #5 effecting me, and with the recent announcements of Mod7 and some of Mod6 I'm seeing parts of #3 creeping in and expecting #4 for mod8.
I'm starting to feel like player type (B)...some of my family are giving me emails with the old "What? are you playing that old HAMSTER still? Why not come over to X game, I got a slot for you in our guild and will help you out and gear you up! Just let me know!"......I was player (C) before, unless things change (and soon).......
Imagine someone coming into NW right now. There is a bewildering amount to do, 6 mods to get to grips with and the chat will be going crazy when mod 7 launches tomorrow. It's the same with the other big MMOs. They have grown so large that it can feel hopeless to try to get anywhere in them in any sensible time frame. NW has the additional obstacle of that crazy hike in difficulty level when you ding 60. That could easily put off some folk from the entire genre.
There will always be hardcore players who play fanatically but they alone cannot sustain the game. So, yeah, maybe the MMO world needs to sit back and evaluate what people want. The problem the industry has is the sheer amount of time and money it takes to get one of these games to market. Skyforge, the new kid on the block, has been in development since 2010. The game they just launched was designed based on their perception of what gamers wanted 5 years ago.
Immersion is one of the most important thing in a game, if you fail on that, bye bye.
It's like a trick of magic, when you are with an illusionist and he is distracting you, you don't even notice that he's stealing your clock from your wrist. After the trick, you will be amazed, even if he shows your stolen clock.
But nowadays, game companies don't even try to distract you, they go for your clock, grapping your wrist like angry monsters... They promise that they will distract you, but then you realize it's a lie, and the magic is broken.
In the other hand, with the illusionist, you know he tricked you, he lied to you, but you're still amazed and with a dumb smile in your face... and then you say: Whaaat? Do it again!
NWS-DOVA9JIJV - The Lost Seneschal
NW-DT3221YUY - The Wildcross Bride
Foundry Grand Master.
My takes in this issue for shooting down after chewing over!
To this relatively new gamer, from what I gather from seasoned pro gamers is the lack of high challenges to egg their skills on to keep playing. Approx lvl 70 seems to be the speed of light limit for most all MMOs for some reason.
I'm looking for the development of standalone "quasi-MMOs" which are single player RPGs with A.I. fellow-gamers (maybe sampled from real life ones) that play almost indistinguishably from real MMOs. I think such a MMO might also learn how strong and skilled its player is and "construct" next levels tailor-made to challenge their ability. I think you can have (maybe impossible to really conquer) a game with infinite levels this way (specific to the gamer). The Quest Forge concept is great idea in this direction; allow no holds-barred in customizing types of obstacle or monsters or puzzles.
I also think people would play harder and more enthustically if they knew they had real skin to lose in the game. Until we're into full-dive VR, one isn't going to "feel" the consequences of being in a game, but maybe there's a poor substitute. I'm not into hitching debit/credit cards willy-nilly, but why not a "cash penelty" in the game where if you die or get badly wounded or fail a guid or whatever, a dollar or less is deducted from your debit/credit account. Ouch! Micropayments as low as $.75 is doable on eBay, so maybe the reverse is true to enable this concept.
Okay maybe (partly) silly solutions, but maybe theres a little meat in there too!
Take Well & Care All!
Leafa(ye)
I think there are two different issues with this -- F2P are often poor, rushed, gimme-the-money quality games.
e-sport on the other hand are completely twitch-based. I don't think e-sports/twitchy works very well as MMO games. MMO has way more people to deal with than e-sports competitions that are limited to 10v10 type populations. MMOs that try and pander to the twitch-based player lose the larger pools of aging, slower, and RP populace.
Encounter Matrix | Advanced Foundry Topics
As for my experience in NW, well...I just moved back to browser MMO I played before NW (NW is my very first "big" mmo experience) which is not as stressful and time consuming. Not leaving NW completely and still doing my leadership tasks on 52 characters for AD I "might" need in next modules.
There's only a limited number of people with funds, infrastructure, and time budget to participate in those complex long-term-commitment-type games. And every quarter half a dozen or more games catering to this limited market is launched. Eventually, most people will find their ecological niche, or find out that other game types are more to their liking. Also the genre gets competition from neighbouring ones - games like e.g. Borderlands (2).
So, when a limited pool of players is distributed over ever more games, figures for each game decline, obviously.
Another factor is that in every game - not only this one here - there's the oldies' accumulated ressources giving them an advantage, or headway, that new joiners simply cannot catch up. Unless they're willing to either spend an even greater amount of time or money to do so. So the fraction of new players that choose to put that effort in gets ever smaller over a game's lifetime.
Both factors are global ones affecting all MMO games, irrespective of their size. And they lead to a gradual slow decline in player count.
The problem with the e-sport model is that it's not legal everywhere unless there's no chance involved in winning the money, and there's a lot of scrutiny on companies that do it (in the US anyway) because of the potential for use in money laundering. The US government was all up in Linden Labs for that in Second Life, for example.
I think the real answers is a combination of way more games out there and less interest in sticking with one for the long haul, especially since most games aren't particularly polished and always have this sort of unfinished feeling to them. It used to be in MMOs that if the company that supported it stopped making new content tomorrow, the game could still stand alone for a good long time because the product was polished and solid - it's not like that now. MMOs don't even try to be solid, they only try to be good enough. Sadly, the same is becoming true for all games since even single player games can now release half-finished trash to check the "Released on Deadline" box then fix all the bugs over the next couple years to say they're giving support. PC games could be patched before, but console games REALLY had to be solid - now? no so much. Frankly, the whole game development industry has being pathetically lazy, and we - the customers - have been forced to accept that and it's become deregur for a game to NEVER be fully working as intended, and it's only getting worse.
Anyway... I think the answer really is just population dispersion, to other MMOs to single player games, to mobile games, to whatever.
Sekhmet@kvetchus_
Guilds: Greycloaks, Blackcloaks, Whitecloaks, Goldcloaks, Browncloaks, Spiritcloaks, Bluecloaks, Silvercloaks, Black Dawn
Tredecim: The Cloak Alliance
People have changed. People want stuff now, not tomorrow. Everything has to have a "cheat mode." This is the age of entitlement. Everyone thinks they deserve the best gear, everything unlocked, and end game content day one. Then they get bored because they have nothing to work for and blame it on the game because they got what they wanted.
Market demands was a big one. back in the days of EQ and DAoC, there was less of a demand on various aspects of the games function. people who played back then were probably what you would call "die-hard" MMO fans. They didn't necessarily fall into the general populace when it came to gaming.
But with the advent of increased technologies, there was a greater demand on developers to produce more quality products. keeping ahead of the tech curve became harder (advances in technology came faster, and as a result newer games had graphical/technical advantages that the older MMO's couldn't compete with unless they remade the whole game. From that point it was a race to see if the older dated game could keep up with the newer cooler looking ones.
the other Competition was dynamics. one MMO may have been good at raid development or group content, and another at PvP or RvR, but with the current development of games at the time, it was often one or the other. But with changes in the market and tech, it became far too common that MMO's had to have ALL those elements in accordion with each other. Balance became far more critical at that point, and an almost impossible carrot to catch.
Also (not sure if it was as a result or just part of the changing marketplace), MMO's caught the attention of larger scale producers, who were often more concerned about quarterly reports and shareholders gains then actual development of the game itself. Many of those MMO's took advantage of purchase offers (either to get a larger pool of money to work with to keep up with the competition, or just to buy out and make their own retirement nest come early), and rapidlyi got locked under the older, more stoic approaches to business that many of these companies had (and still have unfortunately).
I remember when I used to play some MMO's simply because I loved certain aspects of them. But I think the "first love" bug is also part to play in this. the market saturation can only reach a certain level before it hits "most" of the people that will play these styles of games. I think that when WoW opened MMO's to casuals, things grew rapidly mostly because of the first love feeling. but now that most of the viable MMO market has passed that threshold, trying to create new and interesting things to keep an audience that has already passed that first stage of an MMO relationship is far tougher.
And when you add together the increased competition, the heavier expectations of the market, and the cooperate strangling of ingenuity and dedication (dedication as in focusing on good game development instead of income thresholds), and on top of that add a saturated market that doesn't have the blush of first love to fire they're enjoyment...and it's a tough field to develop stuff in.
This is where the Indie market I think fits it. with less demand (as they have smaller budgets, with no larger scale cooperate push), they can put out a game that doesn't have to compete at AA or AAA levels. The smaller size also allows them more immediate and interactive response to the gamers needs.
They don't have to answer to a VP that is 7 tiers above them that doesn't even know how the game works, and they don't have to abide by cooperate structures and policies that were put in place for an entirely different market, they can adjust on the fly, and with the advent of f2p models being more accepted by the community, it allows them a way to keep a game up without necessarily having to hit that competitive threshold that a sub model would need (which IMO was part of the competition thing).
So while I don't necessarily think that people are leaving "bigger MMO's" for "smaller ones", at the same time, those smaller developer teams have advantages that the bigger ones don't. but time will tell to see if these smaller MMO's will become "the market"...I see it much like any good business in the open market. if the business is done right, it grows...and often too big for the person who made it in the first place. then they get offers to buy out, or they themselves decide to franchise out to grow more...and often the first thing that goes is quality and/or quantity.
Reminds me of this smaller restaurant in my home town. It was family owned (for 3 generations), and the kind of place that spoke of family togetherness and quality food. Heck, my grandparents went to HS with the folks that started it! that kind of family owned.
But after 3 generations, I guess the family didn't want to do it anymore. so they sold. It's still a good restaurant...but the food quality and quality of the meals make it obvious that the new owners are making up costs in certain areas. and with the change, it feels more like an upscale Denny's then a quality family restaurant.
I'm honestly not sure if it's bad or good, but its the changing marketplace. All I know is that I really don't go there anymore (any more often then I do Denny's). things change....successful MMO's get bought out or grow beyond their britches...it's part of the market, but just like my old restaurant, It's tough to get yourself to go there once it's been absorbed by the conglomerate machine.
What drew people into that game was the fact that it was immersive and new. There was no quest. Only goals you set yourself. There was no levels. Just skills you had to train up. There was not even really any classes. If you wanted to be a warrior (we called them warlocks lol) who slung a few spells so be it. Or an archer that could throw spells as well good for you. There was no real wrong way to play.
Today we are pigeon holed into working in groups and rewarded for doing so. We are forced to chose how to play based on what makes us more viable and wanted in a group setting. We are forced to grind levels. We are forced to constantly be upgrading gear. While in the very first MMORPG the best gear was crafted and once you had that you had that. No need to upgrade unless you died or your equipment broke.
Today MMORPGS gravitate to the grind fest. While players of old wish a return of the days when there was no grind other than what you set a goal to grind. You was not forced to do so to remain competitive. Once your skills where trained fully you where competitive the rest was about skill. Skill determined how a fight will go. I actually was demolished by a PK (player killer) back then who only equipment was a halberd. (Back then pks traveled light in case they died). The huge amount of dex from not wearing any armor allowed him to swing at incredible speeds as well as the huge amounts of damage from the hally and me being a warrior in full plate and shield and a katana. He out damaged me and took my gear. My goal then became to get better and kill him. I did.
Here in modern MMORPGS there is clear cut lines of progression. You only have REALLY one viable option. Upgrade or be left in the dust. People are tired of that and are honestly I believe wishing for the days of old. You see even in pen and paper DnD there was no real clear cut lines you had options. Which I admit NWO does fail at giving you more options. While playing NWO you feel like you have a little kid with a temper who is forcing you to play the way he wants you to and not gently giving you nudges in the right direction.
and the most important thing in a mmo ,REWARD.You dont reward your players for spending time playing they will leave the game, and the RNG is a big disappoint to use in a game.
They fight reward them and they will stay and dont use RNG to give reward
Most new mmo's saw that now that RNG kill game
I am playing a game now and they dont use RNG to give reward,you kill a boss you will get your class reward guarantee. and every body get a reward for their class
In my opinion the better reward you give to your playerbase the longer they will stay,pay or no pay
I have had Skyrim since 2012... it was a Father's Day present from my son... that has 1500 hours. I have played over a couple hundred each on Oblivion and Morrowind. Daggerfall... I cannot find for PC, though I want it.
Honestly, out of all the MMOs I have ever played... which the count is close to 20... the player-base in NW is probably the most intelligent, imaginative and curious of all. Kudos to so many well thought out and expressed ideas.
Daggerfall is free via the elder scrolls official site: http://www.elderscrolls.com/daggerfall/
Holy HAMSTER thank you. Downloading as we speak.
RNG has it's place but there needs to be safety mechanics to keep people from being RNG screwed. I've seen games do it with tokens from killing bosses redeemable at a vendor and one game did it by having a counter and after twenty runs of a raid you got to pick a piece of gear from a list from the quest giver. Safety nets make rng work.