Maybe we don't know what we want

[Jaema]

The recent exodus from Aion has sparked a mini firestorm of comments in our email/chat. Today's TenTonHammer "Loading" column sounds like he's been eavesdropping on our gmail lately.
www.tentonhammer.com/node/76894


"You see, when it comes to MMOGs you and I have the attention spans of fruit flies. Oh, we’ll get starry-eyed while watching the development of a new game, but once it launches we’ll be losing interest exponentially for every month we pay a subscription fee. And that’s if we haven’t already cancelled our subscriptions by the time our free 30 day trials run out. We may have even hit a wall during open beta when we learned that the game we thought was The Second Coming of EverQuest (or Ultima Online, or Dark Age of Camelot, or whatever our first MMOG love was), the one we imagined would be the Next Great Game that we’d lose hours of our lives playing, has failed to impress us. We’ve burned out. And if we’re like many of today’s gamers, we’ve burned out quickly."

[Morreion]

That sounds soooooo familiar. I call it Jaded MMORPG Syndrome. More on this later (crazy at work here!)

[Oatik]

And then, after anticipation has ratcheted up our expectation levels, the game we’ve been looking forward to goes into open beta or launches. And the minute we log in we’re measuring the game against our hopes and dreams for it, and for every little thing that fails to satisfy, for every disappointment, however minor, we begin slowly losing interest.

I don't think this happens to me, judging from the MMO catch and release program I see going on I'd say it does apply to many people. Example, I'm a Star Trek fan but I have no expectation that the Star Trek MMO will be good, in fact I figure the opposite.

Maybe it's the forum boards...read enough posts about why a game is horrible and you'll start wondering what's wrong with you for having fun playing.

[Regolyth]

Nov 18, 2009 18:56:16 GMT -5 Oatik said:

Maybe it's the forum boards...read enough posts about why a game is horrible and you'll start wondering what's wrong with you for having fun playing.

I think this is a big problem with most people. I played DAoC for a long time, but was wanting a little more from my character. So I decided to retemplate him and maybe learn a new skill or two, so I went to the forums to see what was hot at that time. After reading the boards, I felt like I played the worst class in the game (and honestly, any archer was playing the worst class in the game). I read more and more posts in the forums and felt worse and worse about my character and the game.

Official/unofficial forums seem to be a cesspool for horribly, skewed views on a game. I'm not blaming it on the admins for the forum, it's just that people who love drama and whatnot tend to go there to just stir the pot, and people who actually like the game but are just trying to get the latest info, like us, are sucked in. Or at least, that was me. You have to take what is said on those things with a grain of salt, because one voice on a forum can sound like the sky is falling.

Okay, sorry... back on topic. I'm with Oatik, I don't really think that the above review applies to me. I'm not one to game-hop. I don't pick up a game if I don't think I'd like it, and I've played a lot of games, so I know what appeals to me. Now don't get me wrong, I won't say something is crap without giving it a fair chance, but until it proves itself one way or another, I probably won't buy it. I wouldn't have actually bought my preordered copy of Aion if Kul hadn't told me he did and that you guys were playing too. I played the beta and wasn't that impressed, but I thought it might get better, and with friends, bad games can sometimes be fun.

I also agree though, that most gamers are like the aforementioned. It's just the generation of gamers that have come to past these days. They want it all, that want it now, and they don't want to work to achieve it. Today's gamers want things on easy-mode. If it's too hard to get, they go to forums and complain until developers give in and change it, therefor screwing all of us that worked hard to achieve something - I know Kul agrees with me on this one, about MLs and stuff, right? I know back in the day I more time to spend on games (I was hardcore), I could achieve a lot, but now-a-days I can't do that. My wife would kill me if I spent as much time as I used to playing. So it is harder to achieve those things that I used to, but that's no excuse to make everything thing so dang easy to get (everything soloable or something to that extent).

Also, not only do they want it easy, they want everything. When great games like DAoC and WAR come out, Mythic specifically made the factions have different classes to give a different flavor to each. However people will whine and complain on forums all day long that class A does something that class B doesn't. They want the ability that their "mirror" has, while ignoring the fact that they have something the other side doesn't. Thus, the classes just get watered down into exact copies of each other. Blizzard did this with WoW. I hated it. The same factions were present on each side, and now, toons can sub-specialize in basically become two classes in one.

I'm sorry, I went off on a bit of a rant there. And I know that not everyone is like that, and sometimes things are changed for the better. But I do think that today's gamers are ruining their own games, due to their constant complaints and inability to be satisfied. So developers are scrambling to make a game that people enjoy, then the gamer doesn't like what they've helped to create, so they complain again. This is recently shown in Warhammer where Mythic has made the changes that people want, and now that they have, people aren't happy, because it threw other things out of balance.

Devs need to quit listening to the whining on the forums, and listen to their own experience. Or do like DAoC did, and take polls from their subscribers and focus on fixes/changes from that. I really liked that option.

[Morreion]

I agree that the MMO player base is different, and that with mass appeal comes a watering down of the genre. I remember the good old days fondly. I also agree that forums can on balance be potentially worse for a game than better, seeing how many of them are appalling.

But amidst all of the talk about how MMOs are different these days compared to the good old days looms a big issue in the background- perhaps after playing a few MMOs, we are jaded, we know pretty much how the games will go before we even play them, and we are inevitably disappointed when we can't recreate our first experiences that we so enjoyed. But those first games were based on the wonder and the not really knowing what lay ahead.

I remember being a Scout in DAoC and running around in a pick-up group; we all ran over a hill, wanting to see what landscape awaited us on the other side.

Perhaps it is hard to get that feeling back once you've made the journey several times. This may lie at the root of being regularly disappointed in new games.

[Regolyth]

Nov 19, 2009 10:16:21 GMT -5 Morreion said:

But amidst all of the talk about how MMOs are different these days compared to the good old days looms a big issue in the background- perhaps after playing a few MMOs, we are jaded, we know pretty much how the games will go before we even play them, and we are inevitably disappointed when we can't recreate our first experiences that we so enjoyed. But those first games were based on the wonder and the not really knowing what lay ahead.

That may be exactly where the rub lies. I've had a similar conversation with others before. I think that's probably what most people do when they go to their third or fourth MMO (the second is usually as shiny as the first, or more, since you're experienced). It's hard to get that first experience out of your head, and you can never duplicated it.