Ragnroak Online is supposed to be a 4000 times worse livel grind than Final Fantasy XI.
And I thought you could get exp in WoW just by not playing
You mean you go explore in mmorpgs? In FFXI and Everquest ONline Adventures you go straight to the grinding. And grinding is pretty much all you do
Kalius Culver and I still play. 60 Druid, 60 Warlock, 60 Rogue
I’ve got 5/8 NS, Onyxia Scale/Quickstrike/Don Julios, Perditions Blade and Vis’Kag the Bloodletter, and getting Bloodfang pants next time they drop. Kalius and Culver are also pretty geared up now too (Especially Culver, seeing as how there are like 6 or less active warlocks in the guild, damn lucky)
We’re progressing through Blackwing Lair and we can post some SSes of bosses/mobs/etc if people want to see.
And I actually really liked both RO and FFXI.
All this talk of MMORPG’s and not a single mention of the first. Just proves how pathetic it’s become. I haven’t played a truly good MMORPG in a long time. The truly good ones I have played have all turned to hell. I’m getting tired of bad games.
What about WoW makes it a bad game, in your opinion?
The players.
It’s not that hard to get into a good endgame guild without any idiots like that. Unless of course, you’re an idiot.
basically what makes all MMO’s bad?
Don’t insist Lanyx. You don’t want them on your server, now do you? 
Before I start explaining, read this quote from this guy’s blog. All credit is given to him blah blah blah.
Genre maturity leads to market consolidation
In past articles I’ve discussed two key concepts. The first is genre addiction and the second is the genre life cycle. These both have major market implications for both individual game developers, but also for the market as a whole.To briefly recap, genre addiction is the process by which:
Players become addicted to a specific set of game mechanics.
This group of players has a strong homogenous preference for this genre of games, creating a well defined, easily serviceable market segment.
Game developers who release games within a genre with a standardized set of play mechanics are most likely to capture the largest percentage of the pre-existing market.
Over time, the game mechanics defining the genre becomes rigidly defined, the tastes of the genre addicts become highly sophisticated and innovation within the genre is generally punished by the market place.
Genre life cycle is the concept that game genres go through distinct stages of market status as they mature:
Introduction: A new and addictive set of game mechanics are created.
Growth: The game mechanics are experimented with and genre addiction begins to spread.
Maturity: The game mechanics are standardized and genre addiction forms a strong market force. Product differentiation occurs primarily through higher layer design elements like plot, license, etc.
Decline: The market consolidates around the winners of the king-of-the-genre battles that occurred during the Maturity phase. New games genres begin stealing away the customer base. With less financial reward, less games are released.
Niche: A population of hardcore genre addicts provides both the development resources and audience for the continued development of games in the genre. Quality decreases.
What we see here is the consolidation of game designs over the life cycle of the genre. Early examples within a genre tend to have a wildly diverse spectrum of game mechanics that appeal to a broader spectrum of players. As the genre matures, the game mechanics become more standardized and the needs of the genre addicts more homogenized. As the market segment consolidates and standardizes, the majority of the players are well served. They get more polished games that have greater depth. Who could argue that a tightly polished game like Warcraft is a bad thing?
How maturity reduces the number of total game players
Goodbye people on the fringes: The people on the fringes, however, are left out. In the evolution of the RTS genre, there was an interesting offshoot in the form of the Ground Control games. These sported an interesting 3D perspective that was never truly adopted by the mainstream RTS producers. Most players within the identifiable RTS market segment did not enjoy these games and so it was not in the best interest of the game developers to include the innovative features in their designs.However, some players enjoyed these titles quite a lot. As the mechanics for RTS games become highly standardized, these fringe players were alienated by games in the mature genre. A 2D Warcraft title just didn’t provide the same rewards that this fringe group was looking for.
Some of those gamers left gaming. It may take being alienated from several genres, but eventually a few decided that there were better activities to spend their time on. The market was simply not serving their needs. This shrinks the market.
Goodbye semi-hardcore: The mainstream group, however, fares only a little better. When you recycle the same standardized game mechanics, you put players at severe risk of burnout on a genre. There are only so many FPS many people can play before they don’t want to play them any more. This is less of a problem for the super hardcore players. However, it is a substantial problem for the less hardcore players.
As the less hardcore players burn out on the game mechanics of their favorite genres, they too are at risk of leaving the game market. The result is a steady erosion of the genre’s population.
What is left is a very peculiar group of highly purified hardcore players. They demand rigorous standardization of game mechanics and have highly refined criteria for judging the quality of their titles. With each generation of titles in the genre, they weed out a few more of the weaker players.
This is a completely self-supporting process with strong social forces at work. Players form communities around their hardcore nature. They happily eject those who do not fit the ideal player mold. They defend the validity of their lifestyle with a primitive tribal passion.
There is no internal force within a genre lifecycle that can break this cycle. Only external forces can do the trick. The question is, who would want to break this cycle and who wants to maintain it?
Who genre maturation is good for
Genre maturation is great for the very small minority of AAA developers that can serve the hardcore market. They release titles known as genre kings that are able to address the needs of a large percentage of an existing, well defined segment of genre addicts. Genre kings dominate a particular genre with impressive financial results. The amount of money genre kings such as Halo 2, Half Life, Warcraft, Grand Turismo and other rake in is an inspiration to both developers, gamers and publishers everywhere.Hardcore genre addicts easily pay for themselves. On average they are willing to spend substantially more on games than the casual or the fringe gamer. When a genre becomes standardized, there is literally an explosion of revenue that comes from successfully tapping into a uniform set of needs. This scalability is a basic attribute of software and is a major mechanic behind hit making in the game industry.
As long as new genres are being created and money gained from better capturing homogenous segments genre addicts is high, the industry as a whole grows with a few fat king of the genre companies taking in the majority of the money.
Who consolidation is bad for
However, when the majority of money and effort is spent on capturing existing markets and not enough is spent on seeding new genres, the natural erosion of less hardcore players begins to decrease the overall market size.It is easy to ignore this trend. Overall player numbers may decrease in certain genres, but remember that hardcore players spend more and flock to specific games in great numbers. So total revenues keep going up, and the revenues of hit titles keep going up. It seems silly to shout that the sky is falling when there are so many examples of over-the-top success. This is the current state of the American game market.
Only after the trend has been going on for some time does the erosion become too much to ignore. The substantial decreases in the overall revenue of the Japanese market place over the last five years provided a major warning signal. You could easily argue that similar erosion has occurred in the PC market.
People who are less likely to care:
Sony and Microsoft have built strong brands around servicing the hardcore players of existing genres. To say that the sky is falling shows a lack of faith in the hardcore market - that could be very damaging.
Major genre king developers like Blizzard, Valve, Epic and Square. Their bread is buttered. They own the mature genres and will milk them for many years to come.
People who are more likely to care
Companies that serve a diverse user bases: Oddly enough, both EA and Nintendo are in this group. They are broadly diversified such that major trends in industry directly affect their bottom line. Sony is in a bit of a pickle since they fit this definition as well. (Hence they’ll release the Eye Toy, but keep their main controller for the PS/3 as standard as humanly possible)
Companies that value brands over genres: People often look at Nintendo’s releases of a half dozen Mario games a year and assume that they are all clones. In fact, they are typically radically different games across a wide variety of genres. Nintendo gains their value from the Mario brand, not ownership of a specific genre. Brand-based companies rely on the creation of new genres since they can take that brand into the genre for a low risk profit opportunity.
The state of the MMORPG market is currently a very matured market. Sure, when you look at most MMORPG’s their graphics, sound, and gameplay aren’t really that bad. But the problem is that there’s nothing special about any of them. I haven’t seen a feature in an MMORPG that hasn’t been used before since MMORPG’s started. Customizable classes? Those have been there for a long time and they’re not even as ‘customizable’ as they’re implying. The first MMORPG was so customizable that anyone could combine any of the skills or stats they wanted to whether those skills were helpful like magery or completely useless like begging. Races? That’s been there since at least the NES days; it’s nothing new. It’s the same old stuff over and over again just rewritten to ‘look’ different.
On a side note, yeah, Ramza, once you get all this rare stuff, then what?
Lol, you’re right.
Getting the loot is a bonus, not the main thing I’m there for.
And Eternal-Blaze, I’m going to have to completely disagree with you. Name two MMOs that (people have actually heard of) are basically the same thing. I’m not saying I know everything about MMOs, but all the games I have played/seen have been radically different. FFXI, RO, WoW, EVE, CoH/V. And please don’t name a bunch of random Korean MMOs.
All of the above MMOs aside from their themes, Ramza, are not, I repeat, NOT radically different. In any sense of the word.
Maybe he means they are radically different compared to running Molten Core/BWL.
I’m wondering how they’re the same thing?
Edit: I’m sorry, but all I’ve heard so far is “They’re the same thing. Trust me, they’re the same thing.”
If you can’t recognize the lack of distinction between, say, DAoC and WoW (themes aside) then you should stop playing video games right now. >.>
What’s wrong with WoW is what’s wrong with all but two MMOs I’ve ever seen, and I only just realised what this was when I started playing EVE.
The two games on the surface look kind of similar. You have territories, contested areas and Places Newbies Do Not Go. The huge difference between the two though is that nothing in WoW is changable in any way. Darkshore will still be Alliance territory in five years time, Orgimmar will still be the Horde capital and Ashenvale will still be Contested no matter how many games of Warsong Gulch the Alliance win there. Even assuming you found a way around this the GMs would stamp you down before the day was out. In EVE though all those territories and alliances you see are completely controlled by players even to the prices in the market. In WoW you could maybe hold a town until the respawning NPCs beat you up, but in EVE you could walk into an area with enough force and control the entire area, from who enters and who leaves right down to the cost of the ammunition there that YOU produce with your factories. WoW has an auction house where you can fix prices but in EVE you can economically control entire solar systems and make billions doing it. The corp I’m in right now (GoonFleet) is at war with 3FA (3rd Front Alliance) on that map, and if we force them out then it’s entirely possible we could own those systems in a few weeks. And the GMs will do nothing about it, because EVE, much like Ultima Online before it, is all about letting the players do anything they want, and not just what the GMs want them to do. I wasn’t here for it (maybe Zero or someone was) but the GMs joined in the fun at one point rampaging through the systems with huge Jovian Battleships, and got beaten up for their troubles. I am reliably informed that it was a fucking blast for all concerned.
It’s the most newbie-unfriendly, love-it-or-hate-it game I’ve ever played, with a soul-destroying tutorial, but God the buzz you get from routing an armada of enemy ships is beyond incredible. Add the fact that skills train even when you’re not logged on and you can run courier missions/mine asteroids for ores in a window while browsing the net and you also have the ultimate casual MMO. Here’s a link to the two-week free trial if you’re interested.
I’m rambling here but at the end of the day what you can accomplish in WoW (get awesome loot from ancient beings and kill gods), while really really damn cool, is nothing compared to the scope of what you can accomplish in EVE (control a fleet of battleships and own the world).
And hell, can you ride out in something like this in WoW?
Fun fact; I paid for this ship by shooting players down in low-security space then stealing their stuff and by selling empty canisters ‘full of rare bookmarks’ for millions of ingame currency. Nobody cares. Except the players whose goods/money I took I guess. :\
edit; Zero your account will still be there. CCP never delete accounts.
I think the Merlin looks better.
<a href=“http://eve.klaki.net/screens/ganja/Merlin_Mordus001.jpg”>haha big picture</a>
I think EVE looks pretty damn cool, Pierson. And the fact that it’s run by the players makes it even better. I might try out the trial this weekend, a few friends at school also said it’s good.
And doesn’t explaining all of that show that MMOs aren’t all the same? I know that’s not what you were going for Pierson, but WoW and EVE and definitely different.
All I know about DAoC was that it was a ruthless zerg-fest, so I can’t really compare it to WoW.
I’m not really going to comment on WoW vs DAoC vs EQ or whatever, but I definately see where they’re coming from. From a distance after a certain point most MMOs look like they turn into a simple grind for better equipment or constant PvP, with no real objective except ‘kill the other guy’.
The best times I had in WoW where running instances with TD and Saladin. Hell if they still played I probably would as well. But when they left I just realised I didn’t really want to do any of it over and over again with people who had no interest in anything except loot. 
I think this is a major reason for playing an MMO. For those of you who can’t get friends, it can be a major loot grind.
