Interesting Links for 20-11-2012
- Cola - still not healthy after all these years.
(tags: funny food health coke ) - Why the (current) paid MMO model might be unsustainable.
(tags: games free starwars mmorpg ) - Was Jimmy Saville a mobster?
(tags: crime JimmySaville ) - Israel’s desperate gamble is likely to backfire
(tags: israel palestine ) - Philippa Boyens talks about writing ( Read more... )
MMOs seem to launch with a lengthy beta (partly closed, populated by people that the company have invited from their other MMOs, via invites from email lists and forums or hardcore fans, and then finally an open beta after that. And sometimes with later beta testing of further content. The problem is, these players are the ones who are often really keen to play the content, so they do so during the beta then just sit on the forums complaining and complaining and complaining about the lack of new content, or how it was better in beta, or how newbies are spoiling the game, or how people aren't doing things right and they know best because they were there during beta. (although City of Heroes did have a content-creation system that was as close to sandboxy as you'll get in that style of linear-missions MMO and was apparently popular)
There was more than one occasion in CoH when I wanted to play new content but couldn't find a team because the people who cared about it had already played it in beta and were done with it - especially if they were going to have to babysit someone who hadn't seen it and didn't just want to burn through for fast XP. In TF2, there was huge amounts of arguing on forums about weapons or changes in the beta and it was sometimes hard to actually discuss the proper live version of the game. And in both CoH and (to an extent) in The Secret World, once you did start grouping with others, it was difficult since if you weren't involved with the metagame of which powers had been buffed or nerfed or which synergies were bugged etc (that you'd only get from forums discussing the games), you might struggle to compete or even be actively excluded.
The discussion of EVE is also kinda misleading as a business model for other developers. Yes, the game works because there are people to have your buzzword-tastic emergent sandboxy gameplay with. That means that (yet another) purported WoW-beater MMO that launches with said buzzword features will need to attract and retain people or it'll fail even faster if the gameplay is contingent on there being X amount of players (the downward spiral of MUDs and MUSHes are a great example here - some of them were fairly low maintenance once they were up but people logged on to play them with others so regardless of what the content was like, if there was no one else there, you'd leave)
And look at all the indie online multiplayer games on Steam with no one playing them. Some of them look great, but there's no point in buying them since no one ever plays them online except for about five minutes after they've been in the Steam sale. People are playing WoW and using Facebook in droves not just because they're good (arguably they're not, in many ways - lots of MMOs have done aspects of that kind of game better than WoW and FB is ridiculously crap for users) but because everyone else is there. If the content is terrible, but the game is popular, it'll continue to be popular a good long while. WoW seemingly has an outdated payment model, an outdated style of gaming (assuming that you see sandbox emergent gameplay as what people want) and yet it's still popular.
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