I started during Specters of the Rail and stopped at the beginning of Deimos. Not early enough for the TRUE OG experience where there was still stamina, but early enough for the space ninja experience before DE started to race itself to the bottom. Before potatoes could walk around outside their frames, before stronkor tonkor got nerfed, before relic reworks, before open playfield meme, before helmeth, before railjoke, before kuva, before the riven mafia, before all the good weapons were ruined, before they admitted arcwing was a complete failure and itzal was the only one worth using, before Steve started ripping off other games wholesale, before a lot of stuff.
There goes my interest in trying it again! What about Vindictus? I enjoyed that quite a bit many years ago until I hit the carcinogenic enchantment grind at endgame. How's it doing now?
tl;dr they removed potion count restrictions and animations, gave every character massive health and stat increases, put iframes on everything, and made the whole game a cakewalk. Way to defeat the whole point of an action game! That's probably why they're making a non-MMO sequel.
There are countless examples of this same phenomenon. I know I've seen people here talk about the decline of games like Everquest, World of Warcraft, and Guild Wars 2. I really don't understand how, time after time, devs can take a solid foundation and ruin it. Is there some practical reason that necessitates butchering the core game over time, or are they all just stupid?
Last edited by WhiteShark on November 12th, 2024, 23:45, edited 2 times in total.
The original developers/designers stop working on it.
Listening to the playerbase.
Not listening to the playerbase.
Went full libtard.
Warframe had all of these. They kept adding new frames like it was a 1980s cartoon selling toys, most frames are useless and it just dilutes the frames because you end up having a lot of frames that are "X, but better." Most of the designers moved on. They let ******** moderate the global chat and it went from massively active 24/7 to people afraid to use it for fear of getting banned. etc.,
The insistence upon adding new features is another one. I think players want more content, not features.
Look at the popularity of Classic WoW, they could just spin that off and start adding new dungeons/raids.
Functionally no difference between a good game getting a bad sequel and a good MMO getting bad updates. It will always happen in the end unless the company dies early enough to be fondly remembered. People get old, get replaced, and get gay.
One of the staff planted pet ****** into the moderator team which is why saying "Nezha is a trap" gets you auto dropped from chat. Before the second open world expansion the libshit stuff was pretty low-key, but then they kicked it into overdrive and never looked back. DE decided instead of trying to keep or please the massive crowd of veterans that they should continue to appeal to newcomers and alienate old players instead. Hence, the whole racing against themselves to see how ridiculous each new bit of content can be. I have no idea what the newest stuff is, but if it's anything like the old-new then it's all content islands and it can all be done in matter of weeks. Once you're done with whatever it is you'll never want to play it again.
Things started falling apart with the open world junk. It let them be lazier than usual while morons thought it was great when it' a static field where nothing changes. Plus, crap like fishing and hunting get boring after the second time you do it. It's make work and it has nothing to do with being a space ninja and neither do hoverboards or not-dreadnoughts. Warframe has a severe case a schizophrenia.
It's a wonderful idea but the problem is that running those servers and creating content is expensive. So, devs face a handful of problems, with most of them ending up in the money running out.
The 1st problem is solving the money issues, continuous development requires continuous revenue generation.
You can try pay to play, but then a lot of people won't buy the game and the MMO experience is about a big space with lots of online interactions, either through chat, doing quests/missions with others or just exploring the world. Then there's the subscription model, where everyone can play but you have to gate stuff behind the sub paywall or else its not worth it. Finally, you have the freemium model, where everything is free but you have to have micro-transactions to actually fund the game, which means you have to gate cosmetics behind them.
The 2nd problem is that the normie crowd now are always looking for the "next best thing" due to increasingly less tolerance to FOMO amongst the younger crowds. A new game comes out and 2 days later people are already asking about DLC and what comes next. They either played it non-stop and beated the game, paid the price of early access or watched a streamer do the same things. They basically cheated themselves out of the fun of playing the game in the altar of "consuming" the content. With MMOs, everytime something new comes up I always see the question of "how is the post-game?". So, they seem to care less about the "game" part of the MMO and more about the "post" game part. This is an issue because that leads to devs or corpos or both to think they have to pad the game with grindy mechanics that no one likes. Also, ball busting grind lends itself very well to the freemium model, but offering ways to circumvent the grind through the micro-transactions.
The 3rd problem is WoW. No, really. WoW destroyed the MMO scene. That means that at the very least the corpos will not be keen to take a risk with the huge investment and gamble that is betting on an MMO to actually return a profit if it's not a WoW clone. Stuff like Star Wars Galaxies or Everquest will most likely never happen again because the risk is too much. It has to have the "DPS, Tank, Support" paradigm and geared towards raids or its equivalent.
The 4th problem is that mobile gacha games basically did what the hypothetical freemium MMO could do, but better in terms of revenue generation in the eyes of the corpos. I understand these are most definitely not the same as an MMO, not even remotely. But, for the bottom line of the corpos, the gacha prints money and costs a fraction of what an MMO would cost. Since its a safer bet, that means companies who could think of creating an MMO would just go to the gacha route.
The 5th and final problem that I think plagues MMOs is the actual longevity of the project. The beauty of stuff like Star Wars Galaxies is that it was more about the experience of living in a digital world, different than our own world, and being tied to the Star Wars franchise. What I mean is, there was not "classes" and such, you had some professions and skills and that's it. People could and did earned money just by being a Twi'lek dancer in a bar or by being crafters and such. Now, because of WoW, MMOs basically have the MOBA mentality of being all about combat and raids. MOBAs scratch the itch for the people that only care for PvP. It's the distilled experience of a WoW-style MMO down to the PvP aspect. For PvE, you still have stuff like WoW and FFXIV and such, not saying they don't have PvP but that they offer something that the MOBAs don't.
Even if the game is successful, the corpos will always want more. Which means is not enough to maintain a solid community of hardcore players that play the game. You have to "bring in new wallets". To that end, the constant content wheel must keep turning. At some point, the devs just can't figure out what to do next, so they "retool" their core mechanics, most of the times alienating their original core audience, in an effort to "refresh" the experience. Most of the times, it always comes down to dumbing things down for normies. Take WoW, for example. I remember back around Mists of Pandaria (iirc), that if you paid your sub they would gift you a max level character so you could jump right into the post-game. I may be wrong on the expansion but this most definitely happened around 2015-2016 or so.
We have to accept the reality that MMOs are just not a good a business model, if you want to make money. And I say this as someone that was a die hard fan of MMOs back in the day. I love the idea of an MMO but I understand its practically doomed to failure. And even if somehow the starts align and you get a runaway success, its only a matter of a couple of years before it starts to get "stale" and you need to hop on that content treadmill to "revamp" the game or else it's lights out.
BattleBit was fun at first, but then the idiot devs started catering to the sweaties and snipers.
Modified the movement system so that everyone was a parkour olympic runner.
If you were a sweaty prick, you didn't need squad teamwork anymore, you just played medic with an SMG and a pack full of C4 and spazzed around the map only healing yourself, or you played a sniper camped on the map edge a 5 minute run from the nearest enemy and popped heads as a sub-pixel they couldn't even see.
Sniper rifles somehow were (deliberately) coded to do more damage the further the bullet travelled, which encouraged this ****.
Vehicles were nearly useless, heavies were nearly useless and just got steamrolled, people even stopped talking on the voice or text chat.
Then, because they were lazy and cheap pricks, they not only stopped banning cheaters, but they promoted community servers that were then run by clans. You can guess what happened next: rampant cheating, especially by clans on clan servers.
They lost 99%+ of the players in six months.
Mad.
Stalcraft had a similar arc, but add in pay-to-win mechanics on top.
Last edited by Rand on November 12th, 2024, 23:57, edited 1 time in total.
You may as well not bother replying to my posts if it's to argue anything except concrete facts or your personal opinion. I still probably won't see it.
Reject your retarded-wing political programming and learn to think.
If you can.
Lack of fresh ideas and greed of developers who treat the game as a cash cow.
Not having an idea what makes the genre interesting to players and build air castles. Hi to Garriott and Tabula Rasa.
Playerbase of munchkins and soyjaks. Their ****** reddit like woke "fandom". Already listening to them can take the game down the wrong path.
Last edited by Trickster on November 12th, 2024, 23:58, edited 1 time in total.
When TBC Classic came out years before they changed all of the boss fights on the legacy servers starting with BWL(?). Nobody played it. Everybody moved on to the new old expansion that they'd already played before.
What happened to Tabula Rasa? I remember following news about it a very long time ago, but then I forgot about it, and, when I checked later, it was already dead.
What happened to Tabula Rasa? I remember following news about it a very long time ago, but then I forgot about it, and, when I checked later, it was already dead.
In every MMO in which (time+minimal effort=advantage), the game will be ruined. Botting and otherwise just sitting in front of the computer pressing 2 buttons for hours on end will destroy any game with an attempted economy.
Advancements should only come from group play or skill based single player situations.
I think that people that do make it as far as MMOs, want to keep making money, instead of keeping their passion high and greed in check.
This is why I am always interested in projects that are the passion project of a maximum of 5 people. RPGs like Kenshi, Serpent in the Staglands or Grimoire will be infinitely more interesting than anything else.
I remember back around Mists of Pandaria (iirc), that if you paid your sub they would gift you a max level character so you could jump right into the post-game.
I've seen similar in several games and it absolutely baffles me. Who is this for? Returning players can just log back in and continue with their high level characters. Do new players actually want to skip 90% of a game's content? I know I don't.
What happened to Tabula Rasa? I remember following news about it a very long time ago, but then I forgot about it, and, when I checked later, it was already dead.
Man, let me tell you, NCSoft and Richard Garriott had serious issues going on between them. There was a lot of big talk about what they wanted to do, and a lot of cool ideas, but the actual execution was a total mess. It was all about bad decision-making, production hell, and a bunch of finger-pointing and blaming. This led to the game's fall. They both blame each other – the publisher basically says Garriott is an out-of-touch idiot who doesn’t know how to make games and just likes to blow cash. And Garriott says that the publisher was interfering in the development process and killing his vision. Who knows what the truth really is? All that matters is looking at the final result, and not make the same mistakes they did.
Last edited by Trickster on November 13th, 2024, 00:40, edited 1 time in total.
The same thing happens to MMOs that you see with media franchises: the corporate franchise death cycle.
First phase: creation. Original book/comic/movie/game/whatever is created and is an unexpected hit, usually has a fairly low budget.
Second phase: explosion of popularity. The corporation begins to heavily invest in sequels.
Third phase: milking. Content is continuing to be made, but the corporation wants to increase profits by lowering costs, so the new stuff is lower budget. A lot of the original creators and writers have disappeared, usually because they've been making the same thing over and over for years and want to move on, or are being stifled by the suits behind the scenes. Writers and producers leaving is the first sign of the end. Visible people like actors leaving the show usually comes deep into the decline.
Fourth phase: death. Audience interest has disappeared.
Fifth phase: reboot. Time has past and now it's time to cash in on nostalgia/brand name recognition.
World of Warcraft reached phase 3 very quickly. Much of the original WoW dev team was replaced within months of the game's launch. As the old talent left, new talent came in who wanted to do things their way rather than continue the original vision, hence why the game started going off the rails as soon as TBC, reducing raid sizes from 40 players to 25 players which in turn killed guild communities. Adding in flying which destroyed the challenge of traversing the world and avoiding the enemy faction. Adding LFR teleporting which further killed off the community. And so on. Also, due to WoW's explosive popularity, it started getting more attention from the accountants, and design by committee begins seeping in from there. Expansions continue to be produced, but you get less bang for your buck as they have fewer zones and features. We went from WotLK with 10 zones and loads of new features to Dragonflight and TWW, where you only get four zones. Also, expansions come out faster now so you are paying $50 more often for less content.
Guild Wars reached phase 3 during late stage GW1, when the devs got tired of the formula and could not realize Utopia within the constraints of GW1, and opted to create GW2. A lot of talent departed during this time. Like with WoW, Guild Wars had become big enough that the suits at NCsoft entered the kitchen and started controlling things. ArenaNet has also suffered at least two major rounds of layoffs (first one post launch, second one after season 4) in which veterans were axed, taking their experience and original vision with them. Also, expansions continue to get made, but you get less bang for your buck as they have less and less. Compare Heart of Thorns to the last two releases or even End of Dragons. Also, expansions come out faster, so you are now paying more often for less.
Final Fantasy 14 (Yoshi-P's version): FF was Square Enix's flagship series and it was decided that allowing 14 to shut down with a bad reception was unacceptable. It was all hands on deck and devs from multiple different SE teams were drafted to get the 2.0 relaunch out the door. During the early years, the new director and producer Naoki Yoshida would interact with the community on the (Japanese) forums and during livestream Q&As. By the time of the Heavensward patches, the talent poached from other teams went back to what they were doing before, and several key talent left FF14 to go create new teams (such as making FF16). As more times goes on, Yoshi-P became more complacent and stopped showing up on the forums to interact with people. Also, the English community managers were lying to Yoshi-P and not passing on basic information to him, leaving Yoshi-P embarrassed whenever he does interviews with the West when he finds out about the netcode delays or that people were actually paying attention to the narrative whiplash and he can't answer. Expansions continue to get made, but you get less bang for your buck. Shadowbringers did not have a roguelite dungeon, and only got 2 endgame grind zones (as opposed to Stormblood's four), and Endwalker didn't have any. We used to get three dungeons per patch, to two, and now only one. Etc. Also, the time between patches has been getting longer and longer, so you are paying for less content.
. I found myself wanting to play wildstar too. Maybe I'll go log into gw2 and check out the base building they added.
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