| People expect a lot more from a "Fantasy" MMO these days than tossing Gods and Dragons at them with little to no reason behind it other than, "Hey, it's Fantasy!" or worse....because your predecessor did it. It illustrates a complete lack of talent and imagination when you take a stale idea and try to make it palatable again and again, and again.... And the utter lack of innovation annoys the fuck out of me. Not to mention the bandwagon approach of "Hey WoW did it, so should we!". If it makes a few people happy and costs you nothing, fine.
Hate You is dead on in his belief that Warhammer is the "next big thing", for exactly the reasons stated above. Setting brings in the playerbase. Whether or not they can polish it up and continue to give quality content after release...aye there's the rub. If you remove EQ2 from the mix, SOE has put out some of the biggest bombs in history. I'd love to say that World of Warcraft had a gigantic license/setting, and that's why they had all those original subs. But I can't. Those original subs in turn led all of their friends and co-workers into MMO's through Warcraft. But once WoW died down for them they didn't find anything new or better in other games. Setting definitely brings in the subs, but you can't keep them without quality behind it. I mean for fuck sake how do you ruin Star Wars EPIV? See Raph Koster for more details.
But none the less, Hate You's post is pretty spot on. He's right. There's definitely some quality *individuals* at SOE, but as a unit they're like a Special Olympics when the ice-cream is handed out. Here's a good example of the clusterfuck that is their hierarchy:
I levelled a 70 on a PvP server which was far, far, FAR harder than doing it on a blue server. PvP died out almost entirely after a year, no...entirely. The top end guilds went from 7 to only 1. And I have neither the time or wont to level/faction/claymore/languages/etc... again on a regular server after spending an entire year playing this character. So I had only one option, goto Station Exchange or join a guild that's an entire year behind normal progression. NP, station exchange it is. Unfortunately there's no trial for that server and no way of knowing just how massively retarded the lone uberguild on that server really was. Doesn't matter if you buy/sell items. Once you're there you lose anything that's not no-drop (including 65% of the house items/trophies I had attained) and all your coin and items are stripped. Everything else (the no-drop) is reduced to 1copper worth each. Again, no problem as long as I can raid with competent folks. Sadly that wasn't the case, and to make matters worse I encountered a CS clusterfuck. After I transferred I lost my surname for the third time since starting EQ2. No big deal, the first two times a Senior GM gave it back to me with no problem. So I petitioned again and sure enough third time is a charm and the dipshit said "No". I sent him emails from the senior GM (This wasn't ancient, the last time I had asked for it back was only 3 months prior). And the response was "Well, I'm in charge here and I say No." Tough luck kid, move along. Sure, you have screenshots and you forwarded mail from GM's more senior than me, but I have the power and I'm here to enforce it!
I admit, I was getting bored with the game. But these guys took a guy on the edge of a cliff and rather than offer a hand to pull me back, they just pushed as hard as they could. Because of that I'm not bitter in the slightest. I could've levelled up with Braens guild, or took control of the guild'O'Retards on my last pvp server. But I just wasn't motivated after seeing EQ2 really hit a zenith only to fall back into every old cliche they could imagine.
EQ3 really isn't a bad idea at this point. We're several years into EQ2 and even the most basic question, the premise if you will, hasn't been addressed. The sinew of any good MMO is community, and SOE has never learned how to foster it, and I doubt they ever will. |