Blizzard not evaluating AoC as a threat?

[Vehn]

no it doesn't...

[Vim]

I meant that WoW has flying combat and thus it fucking wins at everything for life.

[Blazemore]

Throw in Arcade "Joust" mini game and they will be set.

[Flight]

Originally Posted by Qhue

One of the more interesting aspects to WoW over the last 4 years has been Blizzard's tenacity in scheduling significant content releases to coincide with the arrival of any potential challengers to its marketshare.

OP is interesting and makes some good points. There are other things to consider.

You're all fed up of hearing me banging on about good management, organisation and QA missing from MMORPG development. Funcom have all of this, as I said a while ago. I'd say this is the first time an MMO development has had sufficient of these basic essential project abilities, going beyond even Blizzards - which I saw as the baseline and least acceptable, not in any way the standard to aim for. This to me is why AoC is working and going to carry on working.

Why shouldn't we have this in this industry ? The fact is the same old unprepared, unskilled names have been given guardianship of our hopes and dreams.

Anyways. without further waffling, my point is two-fold :

i) AoC isn't going to stand still; we can expect a lot more content, a lot more quickly from Funcom than Blizzard can deliver;

ii) Based on that AoC IS going to grow and it IS going to be more successful than many people are expecting.



Going on from that, this will sound cliched but its true, we can start having some hope for MMO's and games we enjoy again. Magic builds do exist, beta performance did suck because they were running masses of debug code and beta sucked because they were well organised and running a good beta (which sucked for the testers) rather than using it as a PR exercise.

Whackamole with XP will not sell games and neither will an IP, without a solid game. WAR has a lot to learn before its ready for release ....

[Vehn]

except pvp flying combat won't come out til next year so whatever

[Draegan]

Lamenting for your women > WOW?

[sachemsiouxx]

WoW has one major advantage over AoC : you dont need an "expensive" config to run it.
So yeah, couple of dudes are going to upgrade their computer for it, but I fear this might hurt them more than any game design flaw.
However, I aint no marketing exec and have no numbers to back anything I say.
Gluck to em anyway, even if i wont play it, competition is good.

[Vim]

Originally Posted by Blazemore

Throw in Arcade "Joust" mini game and they will be set.

I wouldn't be surprised if they add some pretty leet mini games. What they really need to add is ship combat! Muhahuahaha!

[Tarrant220]

I wish wow would have mounted combat like EQ2 does, where basically you never have to get off your mount and can use all your abilities from a mounted position.

The fact that it doesn't kinda turns me off of their whole concept of mounted combat really.

[Chrisb3]

Biggest threat to WoW is Starcraft 2.
How many people went from EQ -> WoW and how many went from Battlenet -> WoW?
I'll probally resub for the expansion content, but I'm not staying around for long when Starcraft 2 is there with the added bonus of being free. They have to pull off an amasing expansion as they are competing with themselves here.

[Skurd]

Originally Posted by sachemsiouxx

WoW has one major advantage over AoC : you dont need an "expensive" config to run it.

Neither does AoC, really.
I'm running my good ole' P4-3ghz with 2gb ram and a X850 which is like a 3y.o. config and AoC runs, albeit not flawlessly but neither does WoW.
Even at tweaked low settings I find AoC to be technically more impressive than WoW maxed and that's to be expected 2 years later.

Funcom aimed right and delivered, the game will expand tremendously and I would not be suprised at all to see AoC be the next "million active subscriber" game.

[RunningDog]

Originally Posted by Qhue

One of the more interesting aspects to WoW over the last 4 years has been Blizzard's tenacity in scheduling significant content releases to coincide with the arrival of any potential challengers to its marketshare. Someone even jokingly asked Scott Hartsman (Gallenite) to move up the release of the EQ2 Kunark expansion in order to get a major patch released for WoW.

Now in nearly every case the product that Blizzard counter-programmed against was not even remotely a threat to their established customer base or even a serious threat to their increasing market share, but nevertheless they still continued to counter-program and even seemed to pace out their content updates to match the other offerings from their competitors.

I don't go along with this theory. The only major content release that counts was the Burning Crusade expansion which is a sample of 1. Now we have the Wrath of the Lich King which is due for release later in the year, which we can take to be the holiday period. I would not be surprised if Warhammer also came out around the same time but that's purely down to the publishers pushing games at that time of year.

Blizzard might not release major patches very often but they do it frequently enough for it to seem to "coincide" with their competition regardless of intent.

[nyx]

The one thing the OP missed is the 'bordom' factor with WoW.
At this point, nothing WoW could release could make up for the rehash of the same mob models over and over (how many times can I kill a murloc? an earth elemental? a Naga?) or the same quest lines over and over (Nesingwary part 3 anyone?) Because you know they will reuse it all, because you know it will be the same. They could make everyone have flying combat on chickens for all I care, if the content is the same, the amount of time I invest will be short.

That is why AoC is going to do well atm. That is why when the WoW expansion comes out in November-Jan (like it always does) it will grab back its old subscribers for a few weeks, and then we will get bored..I really don't want to kill 30 space tigers for Nesingwary's great grandson, so I can equip my hunter's musket 3000....again.

It's like reading a book in a series. If the third book is the same as the first two, with mildly different elements, you put it down and look for something else to read.

[Chrisb3]

There is a faction opposing nesingwary this time, so do their hippy quests instead. I'm staying loyal and killing anything that moves.

[Lefazz]

Originally Posted by Sharmai

Also could release more SC2 details..

Starcraft 2 isn't an MMO. I bet a good chunk of WoW subscribers couldn't care less about SC2.