WoW now owns 50% of the MMORPG market

[Usha Starchild]

Tab Rassa will be big. It will be huge in Asia. CS is still played over here by EVERYONE, mix a game like CS + MMORPG and your gonna have retarded numbers in asia.

Actually just from my observations at the net bars of late people have been moving from WoW to another Chinese(korean?) made wow clone.

[wild_whiskey]

Chinese(korean?)

www.alllooksame.com

[fuffalo]

Originally Posted by zdonovan

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GemStone_IV

That is the only information I found regarding III (the III site redirects to IV) and honestly, I don't buy that they had 750,000 scrips when I read lines like During prime-time hours, the number of active players online ranges from 650 to over 1000

Gemstone III, not Gemstone IV

[Zaniel]

Originally Posted by Etadanik

Perhaps. However, there's something to be said about the fantastic aspect of MMOs and games in general. Sure, we have the Sims 2, but that's one game. We have EA Sports, but again, that's one division - and a rather tired and oft-criticized division, for that matter.

The rest of the gaming industry? First we have Fantasy. Science Fiction. Horror. In other words - the antithese of mundane life. And then we have the Crime games. The War games. The Bigger-Than-Life games. Life simulators? Not at all.

Online worlds may very well be the future, but I think it's a mistake to believe that the gaming industry is somehow moving towards life simulators. The MMO industry is about the fantastic not merely because PnP players and Mudders started it, but because people actually want something other than real life. The Sims Online, after all, bombed, and while one might attribute the failure to the game and not the concept, the popularity of Fantasy and Science Fiction in the gaming industry as a whole attests to the enduring influence of out-of-this-world genres.

He doesn't mean life simulators a la Sims he means functioning worlds even if they are still fantastical. Say a Sci-fi MMO where not everyone is a blaster jockey/pilot/Jedi. One where you can decide to be a racing driver and go race grav cars in the same game that you've got people flying fighters to blow up the death star. Or be a tycoon and run an interstellar trading cartel simply by stock manipulations in your Gordon Gecko Tower.

A world that might still be fantasy or sci-fi but offer massively varying game play types within the same universe. So when some fighter jock gets off his shift in deep space warfare and checks the vids he sees the grav racer sports results and notes that he won his bet on your performance in the race 6 systems away. He also sees some stock speculator bought his Omnitech shares at 3.05 unicreds a share.

[Zarcath]

Originally Posted by Usha Starchild

Tab Rassa will be big. It will be huge in Asia. CS is still played over here by EVERYONE, mix a game like CS + MMORPG and your gonna have retarded numbers in asia.

Actually just from my observations at the net bars of late people have been moving from WoW to another Chinese(korean?) made wow clone.

Probably Korean, Chinese MMOs rarely make it out of China.

[Akileese]

Originally Posted by WarderX

Fucking hell even the news articles just bitch on and on about casual vs. raid.

It's as bad as these boards

Casual vs. raid is the new seperation of church and state. There really is no right answer.

[Mkopec1]

Originally Posted by Akileese

Casual vs. raid is the new seperation of church and state. There really is no right answer.

Yeah there is, its called designing content for the majority of your playerbase, which is in fact casual, no matter what the game is.

You look at all past mmogs, such as EQ, AO etc.... They all have more single groupable content than they do raid type stuff. I rarely heard such asenine battles between casual and raid folks untill WoW came out.

There should be way more single groupable content in a mmorpg than raid shit, the balance should be around 70%-30% or even 80%-20%.

You even look at the past 2-3 EQ expansions and this is what you see, tons of single group shit, with a sprinkling of raid shit. Because even raiders want to experience the single group content, rather than just raid 24-7.

[...]

Non-raid. Casual doesn't describe a content type, but a play (time?) style. Raid, Small group, Small raid, huge raid, zerg raid, pvp, group pvp, zerg pvp, controlled enviroment pvp (random arena and warsong gulch), world pvp, grief-enabled world pvp, solo pve, moving mission (guildwars missions), instanced dungeons, and sandbox crap (player housing, customizations and such) are all content type.

I'm not one to go on a retardedly long rant, but casual players arn't the ones on the forums screaming like chimps. It's folks who want any of the above (other than raiding) who ramble on on the WoW forums. Casuals generaly play few hours here and there and don't go nuts on forums. Hell, you may even have casual raiders who only play during raid nights with their super raid guild which organizes, covers costs, gets there on time, and works like a finely tuned machine. It wouldn't have worked in eq1, but in the instance based world of WoW you can raid on a strict (and tiny) schedule. Some folks just don't like raiding.

[Etadanik]

Many people see raiding as the means to an end rather than an end in and of itself. What they really want is PvP ownage, or perhaps to shine in five-man groups, or to farm better, or simply to wave their purple e-penises around Ironforge. It's an ego thing, no more no less.

[Furism]

Originally Posted by Zaniel

A world that might still be fantasy or sci-fi but offer massively varying game play types within the same universe. So when some fighter jock gets off his shift in deep space warfare and checks the vids he sees the grav racer sports results and notes that he won his bet on your performance in the race 6 systems away. He also sees some stock speculator bought his Omnitech shares at 3.05 unicreds a share.

You pretty much described Eve Online. Pretty much because the game is not there yet, but the idea is there. You can be a pirate, a huge corporation CEO, a small corporation CEO, a mercenary, a trader, I'm pretty sure there are races setup over there, you can run a POS, you can have shares in companies, or you can just fly around looking at the big ships coming in and out of a solar system.

[Ukerric]

Originally Posted by Mkopec1

You look at all past mmogs, such as EQ, AO etc.... They all have more single groupable content than they do raid type stuff. I rarely heard such asenine battles between casual and raid folks untill WoW came out.

It didn't because, until WoW came out, we didn't had this slow distillation of new content every month/two month.

The only game that did that was AC1, and there wasn't any raid content (grouping was bolted on the game almost after the fact). Other than that, all the other games release their content in big batches, called expansions.

EQ almost had the same situation at launch, but they completed their zones quickly during the first year. Past that, the only thing that was broken was usually the end-raid zone of the expansion, which was there, but unworking.

There should be way more single groupable content in a mmorpg than raid shit, the balance should be around 70%-30% or even 80%-20%.

As I said somewhere else, it's a matter of time spent. Not /played, but real time.

Assuming perfect dispersion and perfect attendance, it would take at least 20 weeks to "fully farm" MC (based on the static "2 BP/robes" per raid from Golemagg... unfortunately, other drops have other items intruding in their loot table... by fully farm, I mean that, in a perfect world, each of your 40 raiders has their full T1).

Then, you need about 20 weeks as well to "finish farming" BWL (same for T2).

AQ is a bit weirder. Let's say it's shorter, like 10 or 15 weeks for farming the essentials of the sets.

Naxxaramas, if you assume 1 master item drop per boss, also gives you 20 weeks to finish farming.

You're looking at about 75 weeks of raid content.

If you do the same math for group content, and timmy the casual who does 2 instances per week, you end up with an average of 45 weeks of group content (~30 weeks if your Timmy does 3 instances a week).

If Burning Crusade has been "on time", for Christmas 2005, no one in the forums would have complained. One year of casual content is there. Over a year of raid content is there (for the hardcoremost, who will start farming an instance before they finished farming the previous). Problem, the expansion, with it's one year/one year of new content... isn't there.

Instead, you had all the casual content at launch or nearly, and the raid content distilled over time. I don't think the model of WoW is or was intended to be an AC1 with monthly content patches. The game model itself doesn't support that. It was intended to be an expansion-based game, with yearly massive infusion of content: dozens of dungeons for the casual, 3-4 raid zones for the raiders, 50 weeks of fun for everyone.

And the raiding got stretched over time, and the group part didn't get any after its year expired. And thus are legitimate complaints born.

[Chaid]

Originally Posted by fuffalo

Gemstones3 alone had over 750,000 paying subscribers.

Anyone who played GS would join me in calling bullshit. If you count up all the subscriptions over the 17-year history of GemStone (2-4), including all of the AOL, GEnie, Compuserve and Prodigy people that entered the game for 5 minutes, then this number might be plausible. In it's heydey at primetime, the population of all servers would max out around 5k total. Prior to AOL going unlimited hours in December 1996, and the web portal opening ~1 year later, the number of people online was far fewer than that due to the $4-6/hour cost.