Rant: Guards!
What is it about MMO developers and their inability to implement guards in their games in a rational manner. Going all the way back to the very first MMOs, we have seen paranoid developers either use guards to try and stop their players from running amok in their games, or for merely decorative purposes.
I was playing Warhammer Online recently in one of the scenarios when I became witness to a guard from the other team going berserk killing most of my team. I think what bothers me is not so much that the guards attacked us, but the fact that the guards are level 55 champions! I mean seriously, what the fuck are there level 55 guards for?! These bad boys are handing out 30,000 damage a hit to a level 40.
The scenario “Serpent’s Passage” revolves around the idea of 2 boats crashed on the same island fighting over some salvage part to repair their ships and get off the island. That is all well and good, but if the task is that important and critical, why would you send out the level 40s to kill each other and not send the level 55 super hero guard?! Hell, I’ll take it a step further! Why don’t they send out this guy to single handedly win the entire war?! He hits for 30,000 damage a pop, which sure to be enough to bring most keep lords to their knees in a few hits, and probably decimate the enemy king.
What were they thinking? Developers are so paranoid that players might actually have some freedom or inconvenience the other team that they have to use this as a method to keep us contains from going out of bounds. It reminds me of people who play Dungeons and Dragons with a Dungeon Master who uses one of the box adventures instead of giving their players the freedom to make their own decision. Unfortunately this problem is not just limited to recent games.
As far back as Everquest 1 we have seen guards gone wild, but even worse were vendors! I remember when Everquest first came out that I would sometimes accidentally attack the baker selling rations by pressing the wrong button on the keyboard. The result was me getting obliterated for obscene amount of damage. This also made me wonder why this lady is selling bread and not out hunting dragons, and what she is doing with that loaf to cause so much damage.
Final Fantasy 11 took a different approach to guards as a PvE game. Their guards looked bad ass usually sporting some amazing looking armor. You would think if there was ever guard that should be doing massive damage it would be them. Unfortunately we will never know because they are merely decorative. I will never forget my first night in FFXI where a bunny rabbit crit me and chewed my face off while the nearby guard stood motionless as I clung to him for dear life. It’s a good thing the police in real life didn’t train at the Vana’diel police academy!
World of Warcraft took yet a different approach. Their guards did not do massive damage and were very much killable. The bad news is that there seemed to be more guards in the town then people whenever one is attacked. My guild used to attack Red Ridge when the game first came out, and more guards ran out of that place then there were people living there. They just magically seemed to appear out what must have been a mysterious portal that connected to the biggest barracks of all time.
Age of Conan gave us Funcom’s take on the idea. The guards were not super high level and they did not hit terribly hard. The bad news is that you could not hit them back! We used to murder people in the Noble District on the FFA server, at which time the guards would usually chase us. I found it ironic that my character had the will to murder innocent players in the street, but did not have the will to defend himself from the town guard. Players were often left to finding ways hide from the guards, but sometimes this would result in Funcom handing out a suspension. Clearly the Funcom CSRs thought it as more important to prosecute people hiding from guards instead of those exploiting the raid content in the game, nice work there!
Can we please stop having developers try to box us in with guards? Let us have our freedom, these are RPGs after all. God forbid the players should do something the developers never thought imagined we would. God forbid another player might be inconvenienced by another on a free for all server. Look, there is nothing wrong with having guards in your game. I wouldn’t expect to be able to kill someone in real life without them coming, but be sensible about it. If you are a pure PvE game, then at least have the guards lend a hand if I am coughing up blood on them. If you are making a PvP game, the guards should be killable and in limited supply. The use of guards in most MMO’s so far has hurt immersion and has served as a virtual bitch slap by the devs to keep their players inside the box.
Paragus
Co-Leader of Inquisition
www.inqguild.com
Rant: Guards!
What is it about MMO developers and their inability to implement guards in their games in a rational manner. Going all the way back to the very first MMOs, we have seen paranoid developers either use guards to try and stop their players from running amok in their games, or for merely decorative purposes.
I was playing Warhammer Online recently in one of the scenarios when I became witness to a guard from the other team going berserk killing most of my team. I think what bothers me is not so much that the guards attacked us, but the fact that the guards are level 55 champions! I mean seriously, what the fuck are there level 55 guards for?! These bad boys are handing out 30,000 damage a hit to a level 40.
The scenario “Serpent’s Passage” revolves around the idea of 2 boats crashed on the same island fighting over some salvage part to repair their ships and get off the island. That is all well and good, but if the task is that important and critical, why would you send out the level 40s to kill each other and not send the level 55 super hero guard?! Hell, I’ll take it a step further! Why don’t they send out this guy to single handedly win the entire war?! He hits for 30,000 damage a pop, which sure to be enough to bring most keep lords to their knees in a few hits, and probably decimate the enemy king.
What were they thinking? Developers are so paranoid that players might actually have some freedom or inconvenience the other team that they have to use this as a method to keep us contains from going out of bounds. It reminds me of people who play Dungeons and Dragons with a Dungeon Master who uses one of the box adventures instead of giving their players the freedom to make their own decision. Unfortunately this problem is not just limited to recent games.
As far back as Everquest 1 we have seen guards gone wild, but even worse were vendors! I remember when Everquest first came out that I would sometimes accidentally attack the baker selling rations by pressing the wrong button on the keyboard. The result was me getting obliterated for obscene amount of damage. This also made me wonder why this lady is selling bread and not out hunting dragons, and what she is doing with that loaf to cause so much damage.
Final Fantasy 11 took a different approach to guards as a PvE game. Their guards looked bad ass usually sporting some amazing looking armor. You would think if there was ever guard that should be doing massive damage it would be them. Unfortunately we will never know because they are merely decorative. I will never forget my first night in FFXI where a bunny rabbit crit me and chewed my face off while the nearby guard stood motionless as I clung to him for dear life. It’s a good thing the police in real life didn’t train at the Vana’diel police academy!
World of Warcraft took yet a different approach. Their guards did not do massive damage and were very much killable. The bad news is that there seemed to be more guards in the town then people whenever one is attacked. My guild used to attack Red Ridge when the game first came out, and more guards ran out of that place then there were people living there. They just magically seemed to appear out what must have been a mysterious portal that connected to the biggest barracks of all time.
Age of Conan gave us Funcom’s take on the idea. The guards were not super high level and they did not hit terribly hard. The bad news is that you could not hit them back! We used to murder people in the Noble District on the FFA server, at which time the guards would usually chase us. I found it ironic that my character had the will to murder innocent players in the street, but did not have the will to defend himself from the town guard. Players were often left to finding ways hide from the guards, but sometimes this would result in Funcom handing out a suspension. Clearly the Funcom CSRs thought it as more important to prosecute people hiding from guards instead of those exploiting the raid content in the game, nice work there!
Can we please stop having developers try to box us in with guards? Let us have our freedom, these are RPGs after all. God forbid the players should do something the developers never thought imagined we would. God forbid another player might be inconvenienced by another on a free for all server. Look, there is nothing wrong with having guards in your game. I wouldn’t expect to be able to kill someone in real life without them coming, but be sensible about it. If you are a pure PvE game, then at least have the guards lend a hand if I am coughing up blood on them. If you are making a PvP game, the guards should be killable and in limited supply. The use of guards in most MMO’s so far has hurt immersion and has served as a virtual bitch slap by the devs to keep their players inside the box.
Paragus
Co-Leader of Inquisition
www.inqguild.com
Blizzard Entering Powerleveling, Account and Gold Selling Market?
In a recent post at Worldofwar.net, they mentioned something about “Paid Character Customization” which frankly I’m surprised more people haven’t been talking about.
Jay Allen Brack was asked about the Paid Character Customisation that has been found in the game files. At first, he dismissed the question, and would not comment on it, then a few minutes later, he brought up the subject and said that there is going to be paid character customisation. No details yet though.
Now the big question is what exactly does this mean? For me the first thing that came to mind is that I would be able to literarily buy a customized character directly from Blizzard. Lev 70 Warlock with full epic gear and 50 Gold, baaam done! Could this possibly be what Blizzard is planning? I mean after all the powerleveling, account and gold selling services are big business and if Blizzard can’t beat them, then why not join them.
In essence Blizzard would be doing more positive then harm. For one, there would be no more gold farmers and in-game spam. Blizzard can just click a button and add 100 gold to whoever pays for it. Same goes for powerleveling. If you want your lev 32 toon boosted to the max, pay a bit and two seconds later you have a lev 70 character. Not only would it make in-game experience more pleasant by elimitation gold farmers and spam, but it would be safer for players that decided to participate in these types of transactions. The’re going to do it anyway, so why not do it with Blizzard where you know you’re safe. The only gap that would be left open would be users that want to sell WoW accounts. Perhaps Blizzard will eventually open a service where users can sell and trade accounts to each other.
If this is what Blizzard is planning it would be interesting to see how the community reacts as up until now most people seem to despise they types of services. Or I could be way off base and what Jay Allen Brack really meant was that you customize your character with new clothes, items, etc, in a purely cosmetic way that would not effect gameplay at all.
Blizzard Entering Powerleveling, Account and Gold Selling Market?
In a recent post at Worldofwar.net, they mentioned something about “Paid Character Customization” which frankly I’m surprised more people haven’t been talking about.
Jay Allen Brack was asked about the Paid Character Customisation that has been found in the game files. At first, he dismissed the question, and would not comment on it, then a few minutes later, he brought up the subject and said that there is going to be paid character customisation. No details yet though.
Now the big question is what exactly does this mean? For me the first thing that came to mind is that I would be able to literarily buy a customized character directly from Blizzard. Lev 70 Warlock with full epic gear and 50 Gold, baaam done! Could this possibly be what Blizzard is planning? I mean after all the powerleveling, account and gold selling services are big business and if Blizzard can’t beat them, then why not join them.
In essence Blizzard would be doing more positive then harm. For one, there would be no more gold farmers and in-game spam. Blizzard can just click a button and add 100 gold to whoever pays for it. Same goes for powerleveling. If you want your lev 32 toon boosted to the max, pay a bit and two seconds later you have a lev 70 character. Not only would it make in-game experience more pleasant by elimitation gold farmers and spam, but it would be safer for players that decided to participate in these types of transactions. The’re going to do it anyway, so why not do it with Blizzard where you know you’re safe. The only gap that would be left open would be users that want to sell WoW accounts. Perhaps Blizzard will eventually open a service where users can sell and trade accounts to each other.
If this is what Blizzard is planning it would be interesting to see how the community reacts as up until now most people seem to despise they types of services. Or I could be way off base and what Jay Allen Brack really meant was that you customize your character with new clothes, items, etc, in a purely cosmetic way that would not effect gameplay at all.
Warcraft: the next generation.
So recently I really took notice that blizzard has slapped up some enticing rewards for recruiting a friend. As with most offers of it’s kind it is worded in a very general manner, almost slippery in a sense- like there’s fine print without there being any. Probably the most popular reward is bonus exp. You get triple experience points—- when you are in the party with your recruited friend. This means your getting about the same xp as before, just a little bit faster. However there IS one part of it that doesn’t have any catches, due to triple xp and the fact that when in a party you do not have to share quest experience you are provided straight up triple quest experience. Well as you can imagine, or can confirm from previous experience, this leads to some fast leveling. Just make sure that your friend can play according to your schedule or vice-versa. Don’t be fooled by the shiny levels though, this service has other pitfalls.
Don’t you just hate when you see a new level 70(cough* night elf hunters) or one that just has no idea how the hell to handle/play his or her class? It’s quite obvious really, just look for the most powerful, non-efficient moves in the game (sorry to all the lowbies/ noobies reading this). Well for those who agree with that last sentiment, I have news for you my friends, It’s about to become a lot worse. Fast leveling equates to learning to skills at a higher frequency, giving the player almost no time to learn and get used to their new skills. We end up back in gold shire looking at that stupid noob of a night-elf hunter, except he has even less of an idea of what to do than before!
So far this offer is mucking up our player base and community, let’s see what else it can do. Ooooh, if they stay for a month or two, I get a free epic land mount. Well let’s see that takes about 600 gold out of the economy’s pocket. If the players don’t have to work, why would they contribute and make money? This mount isn’t even that cool.
And finally With player- summoning the player will not have to travel and see the world he’s playing in, with this they won’t stumble upon realizations about the game and how to get here or there or anywhere, they’ll simply wait until their buddy logs on. These players are already going to be half-baked; blizzard at least give them some chance and let them grow a work-ethic!
P.S. Maybe this will add a more fun pvp experience for the Warcraft veteran?Easy kills anybody? Meh maybe not, their recruit‘ll just jump you.
Warcraft: the next generation.
So recently I really took notice that blizzard has slapped up some enticing rewards for recruiting a friend. As with most offers of it’s kind it is worded in a very general manner, almost slippery in a sense- like there’s fine print without there being any. Probably the most popular reward is bonus exp. You get triple experience points—- when you are in the party with your recruited friend. This means your getting about the same xp as before, just a little bit faster. However there IS one part of it that doesn’t have any catches, due to triple xp and the fact that when in a party you do not have to share quest experience you are provided straight up triple quest experience. Well as you can imagine, or can confirm from previous experience, this leads to some fast leveling. Just make sure that your friend can play according to your schedule or vice-versa. Don’t be fooled by the shiny levels though, this service has other pitfalls.
Don’t you just hate when you see a new level 70(cough* night elf hunters) or one that just has no idea how the hell to handle/play his or her class? It’s quite obvious really, just look for the most powerful, non-efficient moves in the game (sorry to all the lowbies/ noobies reading this). Well for those who agree with that last sentiment, I have news for you my friends, It’s about to become a lot worse. Fast leveling equates to learning to skills at a higher frequency, giving the player almost no time to learn and get used to their new skills. We end up back in gold shire looking at that stupid noob of a night-elf hunter, except he has even less of an idea of what to do than before!
So far this offer is mucking up our player base and community, let’s see what else it can do. Ooooh, if they stay for a month or two, I get a free epic land mount. Well let’s see that takes about 600 gold out of the economy’s pocket. If the players don’t have to work, why would they contribute and make money? This mount isn’t even that cool.
And finally With player- summoning the player will not have to travel and see the world he’s playing in, with this they won’t stumble upon realizations about the game and how to get here or there or anywhere, they’ll simply wait until their buddy logs on. These players are already going to be half-baked; blizzard at least give them some chance and let them grow a work-ethic!
P.S. Maybe this will add a more fun pvp experience for the Warcraft veteran?Easy kills anybody? Meh maybe not, their recruit‘ll just jump you.
How World of Warcraft Works
Imagine it’s the night before patch day. You’ve parked your level-70 character, decked out in epic gear, outside what will soon be the forest ruins of Zul’Aman. Right now, it’s just rocky pavilion with huge, wooden gates you can’t open. But tomorrow, it will become the entrance to a dungeon full of trolls. You and nine of your friends hope to be the first players on your server to go inside.
 ??2006 Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. All rights reserved. The Burning Crusade is a trademark, and World of Warcraft and Blizzard Entertainment are trademarks or registered trademarks of Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. in the U.S. and/or other countries. The gate to Zul’Aman, before the instance existed in World of Warcraft. |
It’s a risky proposition — and not just because Zul’Aman is full of enemies that are far more powerful than you are. Zul’Aman is an addition to the massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) “World of Warcraft,” or WoW. As anyone who plays the game can tell you, making additions or changes to such an immense, dynamic world can cause some problems. On patch day, players often experience everything from server instability to problems with their user interface (UI) and addons. Players did get into Zul’Aman the day its patch went live, but only after the servers were down for hours of extended maintenance.
Patch-day technical difficulties and the joy of exploring a new dungeon both come from the same basic source — the enormous collision of people and data. The game worlds of Azeroth and Outland include 50 regions spread out across three continents. Each region has its own landscape and inhabitants — both friendly and unfriendly — and sometimes its own weather. Then there are representations of players’ characters and everything they wear, carry and use. You can boil all of this down to ones and zeros stored on computer hard drives.
Players interact with all this data using their computers and an Internet connection. The players’ computers store some of the data, and a remote server provides the rest. As one player interacts with the world, the world changes for other players — the movement of data back and forth between the computer and the server allows this to happen.
Multiply this information by the thousands of players who can log on to a particular server at the same time, and the amount of traveling data becomes staggering. All the people playing the game also have the potential to make unpredictable decisions, making the exact interactions between players and the game hard to predict. When you think about the game in terms of so much traveling data, it’s not surprising that patches and updates can have far-reaching effects.
In this article, we’ll look at what it takes for data to become an interactive, persistent game world. We’ll also explore the game’s architecture and the people it takes to keep the game running. We’ll begin with the human factor — the people who play “World of Warcraft” and why they play it.
A Case for Sanity: Killing the WoW Killer Meme
Hi, I’m Daniel. You might remember me from such other MMO articles like “It was great except for the Elves with 5 o’clock shadows” and “Tits and Fatalities aside, Age of Conan sucks flaccid donkey genitals”. I’m new here; and bringing you a highly opinionated, wordy rant on the latest of MMO trends: the term “WoW Killer”.
The meme itself isn’t new: the first earliest recorded instance of this meme was by the scribe Pontus Sextus Alphonsus in 300 A.D, writing about the threat of an invasion from far eastern Empires into the vulnerable Roman empire. He referred to these savages as possibly the first “Rome-killer” - yeah, ok, I just made all of that up. The term “WoW Killer” has been kicking it around since WoW first became a success back in 2004. Any major MMO release since then has been plagued with this term: “Will this game be the WoW Killer? Will this game gain self-awareness, attack the Blizzard server farm with a targetted nuclear strike, then start searching for Sarah Connor? Does this game have the potential to learn kung-fu?”
No, it doesn’t. The term itself implies that WoW in fact can be killed, which it can’t. Sure, it can lose some subscribers: even for arguments purpose, it’s possible (though not likely) that games like Warhammer Online have more total active subscribers than WoW. Does that mean WoW has, in fact, been killed? No. It would still be the 2nd largest MMO subscriber game, and it would still be the all time biggest MMO in terms of subscribers. Even in this best case scenario, WoW would still have a piss-ton of subscribers by industry standards.
Many people say that the only thing that can kill WoW is WoW itself. I liken this to people watching too many Terminator movies as kids or possible temporal lobe damage from hearing the pre-pubescent screams of Eddie Furlong too many times. WoW can’t kill itself, but it’s supporting staff of humans can perhaps muck things up a bit. A lot of WoW subscribers were alienated or quit after the Burning Crusade expansion: WoW subscriptions were down to around 2 or 3 million actual subscribers and about 17 million chinese gold-farmer accounts. Wrath of the Lich King might do the same thing; and it’s good to theorize that if Warhammer Online provides as good of a PVP experience as everyone hopes it does, it will take a good deal of the “real PVPers” away from WoW (if any still play) - and WoW can be happy in deluding people that the little e-sport Arena games are “real PVP”. At the end of the day, though, there is still a core group of people that love WoW for what it is: whether it’s because it was their first MMO, the majority of their friends play, or even it’s cozy familiarity: people will always stay and play World of Warcraft, and in great numbers.
TL;DR version: WoW has too many loyal fans and addicts to ever be “killed” as a MMO. End of story.
Now that we’ve determined that WoW can’t be killed, it’s time to move on. Even though it can’t be terminated, it can still lose a lot of customers, or better yet, it *is* possible that another MMO has just as big of a following and playerbase as WoW does without stealing their customers. In fact, this latter scenario is the best scenario because it means that players have been gained from outside the genre and the industry has indeed grown. This can’t really happen with titles like Warhammer Online or Age of Conan because it’s still stuck in the same genre (Fantasy) and is really just a rehash of the same thing - and maybe niched to a certain demographic, like PVP/RVR with WAR or Nudity and … well, whatever for AoC.
So what can rival WoW in fanbase and subscribers? A non-fantasy, perhaps “non RPG” based MMO that is rock solid, using a known IP. Whether this is a MMOFPS or MMORTS (or even both) - this is really the only chance that the MMO industry has at ever producing something that rivals the beast of WoW in revenue and following. Using this logic, companies like Mythic, Funcom and 38 Studios actually hurt the MMO industry because they won’t be generating many new players (from outside the genre) and have instead been focusing on stealing other players away from other similar games. Meanwhile, hordes of fantatical FPS and RTS players are uncatered for in our over-saturated Fantasy MMORPG market.
I digress; in conclusion, let’s stop using this tired term “WoW Killer”. The term is just plain inaccurate; we need to be more creative and constructive in representing the MMO industry. So, let’s focus on objective reviews and previews of upcoming releases and advancing and expanding the industry, rather than throwing this lame meme into the mix with every new title that’s about to be released.
MMOS X: How the MMOs and the iPhone can meet.
Filed under: Opinion, Virtual worlds, MMOS XMMOS X is a bi-weekly column dedicated solely to gaming on the Macintosh natively. “Running Boot Camp or Parallels” is not an option here. This column is for people who want to get the most out of their Mac gaming, as meager as it is.Originally, this week’s column was going to be a technical how-to, but a series of snafus — not the least of which included me slapping my head and going, “You moron, combat logs changed after patch 2.4. That’s why this new analyzer you are looking at is barfing on your Karazhan logs from February.” However, my focus changed when, like many of the Faithful, I turned my attention to the West Monday to see what our Leader had to say.Frankly, all I wanted Jobs to say was, “with iPhone 2.0, now you can sync iCal tasks to the iPhone.” I didn’t get that. Instead, I got a bunch of technical jargon that went over my head. Really, who did he think he was talking to, a bunch of developers or something? When a couple of game developers got up to show off their new iPhone apps, a light bulb went off for this week’s late column.Continue reading MMOS X: How the MMOs and the iPhone can meet. Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments
A Case for Sanity: Killing the WoW Killer Meme
Hi, I’m Daniel. You might remember me from such other MMO articles like “It was great except for the Elves with 5 o’clock shadows” and “Tits and Fatalities aside, Age of Conan sucks flaccid donkey genitals”. I’m new here; and bringing you a highly opinionated, wordy rant on the latest of MMO trends: the term “WoW Killer”.
The meme itself isn’t new: the first earliest recorded instance of this meme was by the scribe Pontus Sextus Alphonsus in 300 A.D, writing about the threat of an invasion from far eastern Empires into the vulnerable Roman empire. He referred to these savages as possibly the first “Rome-killer” - yeah, ok, I just made all of that up. The term “WoW Killer” has been kicking it around since WoW first became a success back in 2004. Any major MMO release since then has been plagued with this term: “Will this game be the WoW Killer? Will this game gain self-awareness, attack the Blizzard server farm with a targetted nuclear strike, then start searching for Sarah Connor? Does this game have the potential to learn kung-fu?”
No, it doesn’t. The term itself implies that WoW in fact can be killed, which it can’t. Sure, it can lose some subscribers: even for arguments purpose, it’s possible (though not likely) that games like Warhammer Online have more total active subscribers than WoW. Does that mean WoW has, in fact, been killed? No. It would still be the 2nd largest MMO subscriber game, and it would still be the all time biggest MMO in terms of subscribers. Even in this best case scenario, WoW would still have a piss-ton of subscribers by industry standards.
Many people say that the only thing that can kill WoW is WoW itself. I liken this to people watching too many Terminator movies as kids or possible temporal lobe damage from hearing the pre-pubescent screams of Eddie Furlong too many times. WoW can’t kill itself, but it’s supporting staff of humans can perhaps muck things up a bit. A lot of WoW subscribers were alienated or quit after the Burning Crusade expansion: WoW subscriptions were down to around 2 or 3 million actual subscribers and about 17 million chinese gold-farmer accounts. Wrath of the Lich King might do the same thing; and it’s good to theorize that if Warhammer Online provides as good of a PVP experience as everyone hopes it does, it will take a good deal of the “real PVPers” away from WoW (if any still play) - and WoW can be happy in deluding people that the little e-sport Arena games are “real PVP”. At the end of the day, though, there is still a core group of people that love WoW for what it is: whether it’s because it was their first MMO, the majority of their friends play, or even it’s cozy familiarity: people will always stay and play World of Warcraft, and in great numbers.
TL;DR version: WoW has too many loyal fans and addicts to ever be “killed” as a MMO. End of story.
Now that we’ve determined that WoW can’t be killed, it’s time to move on. Even though it can’t be terminated, it can still lose a lot of customers, or better yet, it *is* possible that another MMO has just as big of a following and playerbase as WoW does without stealing their customers. In fact, this latter scenario is the best scenario because it means that players have been gained from outside the genre and the industry has indeed grown. This can’t really happen with titles like Warhammer Online or Age of Conan because it’s still stuck in the same genre (Fantasy) and is really just a rehash of the same thing - and maybe niched to a certain demographic, like PVP/RVR with WAR or Nudity and … well, whatever for AoC.
So what can rival WoW in fanbase and subscribers? A non-fantasy, perhaps “non RPG” based MMO that is rock solid, using a known IP. Whether this is a MMOFPS or MMORTS (or even both) - this is really the only chance that the MMO industry has at ever producing something that rivals the beast of WoW in revenue and following. Using this logic, companies like Mythic, Funcom and 38 Studios actually hurt the MMO industry because they won’t be generating many new players (from outside the genre) and have instead been focusing on stealing other players away from other similar games. Meanwhile, hordes of fantatical FPS and RTS players are uncatered for in our over-saturated Fantasy MMORPG market.
I digress; in conclusion, let’s stop using this tired term “WoW Killer”. The term is just plain inaccurate; we need to be more creative and constructive in representing the MMO industry. So, let’s focus on objective reviews and previews of upcoming releases and advancing and expanding the industry, rather than throwing this lame meme into the mix with every new title that’s about to be released.
