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Why MMO Fail?


fewfield.7802

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I just found this video it owned by a content creator called Nixxiom.i think it is very useful for any game developers.I would like to share it to Anet so that maybe they can come up with some new great idea for my beloved game.

Ps. There's no toxicity and whining inside the vid. Only facts inside, please feel free to watch it.

This is Asmongold (WoW steamer) 's Reaction to the vid

check it out

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Content: GW2 receives an adequate amount. Just because a percentage of players choose to rush through all of it within a day doesn’t mean there’s a lack of it.

Commitment: I’d say Anet is fairly committed to the game or at least producing new content. Fixing existing bugs, well...

On the player side, this is where it falters due to the casual players and how the game is targeted towards them.

Community: One of the reasons why not all content should be able to be done solo like a percentage of players would instead prefer

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Videos like these rarely explore the whole problem... or at best, explore one facet based on one game in proper depth. Different MMOs fail for different reasons, because different games fail for different reasons. What makes MMOs so prominent is the cross section they create by their attempts at broad market appeal. Ultimately there is no "objective" perception of an MMO (or games in general), nor are they merely "Subjective". They can't be properly perceived in isolation, because your entire sum of experiences influences that. WoW Classic is NOT the same WoW 1.2...... it can't be, because the you that played WoW 1.2 is different then the you that is playing WoW Classic today. Its why some games get better or worse as they age. Its why recapturing nostalgia is nigh impossible.

The video keeps going on and on about Community.... but its based on HIS concept of a Community. That doesn't have the same face value as the Community hes referring to, that existed 10 years ago. Its not even the same type of people that used to play these games 10 years ago. Casual players were not big into multiplayer games from the era I remember; and hardcore players formed small, but strong communities. But today, with the integration of social media into the fabric of daily life, the concept of an MMO or large scale multiplayer community is a no brainer.

Nix speaks as if its a matter of fact..... but hes barely scratching the surface of World of Warcraft's situation, much less MMOs as a market.

And mandatory hate for asmongold, a channel devoid of an original thought and is the lowest of low effort formats that still manages to trick youtube's algorithm.

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For me it's pretty simple. If you do not keep the game fresh by implementing new gameplay layers or entirely new game modes (which GW2 rarely ever did) and when you do not provide enough replayable content wich are continously rewarding (GW2 rarely adds replayable content and when they do it they are not really rewarding), then ppl will eventually get bored and leave.

GW2 focusses on one time only throw away content that a far too great percentage of ppl play for a few hours and then never again. Then ppl are only left with the same many years old replayable content that they always had.

And then on top of that, the reward structure in GW2 was always on the verge of being bad. For some time it was okayish and new cosmetics as the only rewards did the trick for most ppl. But we're now 7+ years in the product lifecycle and it seems that many ppl do no longer care for cosmetics, whether because the gemshop destroyed the rest of the reward structure by flooding the game with all sorts of skins, or because ppl simply already crafted all the legendaries that they wanted and already got all the skins and their character appearance nailed down or simply because they find the current armor styles that Anet is putting out lackluster.

It seems to me when I talk with many ppl that used to play GW2, that there is not one reward that can get them excited anymore to play the game.

So in short, no new gameplay layers, no new game modes, lack of replayable content, lacking rewards.

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Guess I'll be devils advocate here. There's something REALLY big that Nix is missing here: player demographics change. Market preferences move faster than ever, and sometimes in unpredictable ways. Staying the same is not a guarantee for success, but failure.

All of these moves toward greater convenience and less communication isn't just random. It was demanded of by the players. WoW's audience grew up, and now that they have countless responsibilities they no longer have time to manually organize a 40 man raid. Socializing takes time and energy that they just don't have to spare. In a completely different direction: the next generation (I-Gen) is riddled with social media and ADHD. They simply don't make the connections that everyone else does, and expect all social interaction to be convenient and short. Finally, the entire fantasy genre is played out. People aren't coming to the game to roleplay or because they have a deeply entrenched love of the lore of Warcraft. They're coming there to waste time, which means they aren't going to have the energy to commit.

Nix's perspective is backwards. He's working under the assumption that you keep players, until you drive them away. That's not how it works. The reality is that, by default, you're losing players until you figure out how to keep them. You can't stay new, fresh, and popular for 14 years. People get bored, or they find a newer, shinier thing to chase. The developers have to keep up, otherwise they'll lose everyone. Because of this, it is difficult to measure the success of every minute change. Because, really, you aren't trying to measure how much you grow, but how much you didn't shrink.

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@ugrakarma.9416 said:the real addiction of players is to combat mechanics, most MMos change everything except combat mechanics, so no matter how they throw new content, the veterans will start felling pressing the same keys in the same pattern.

it depends on each person, i don't really care much about it. I mean it's fun, but there are multiple things I care much more about.

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@Ayrilana.1396 said:Content: GW2 receives an adequate amount. Just because a percentage of players choose to rush through all of it within a day doesn’t mean there’s a lack of it.What if it takes you two days, a week, a month? Because you can take a month and still be waiting months for the next LS chapter for a small offering of content.

The problem is that MMOs need to offer enough content and enough of a variety of content because not everybody likes everything. All that LS chapters offer is a new map with a short story and then grinding tokens for certain rewards while repeating the same events or meta events ad infinitum. Someone who is not in a rush can still go through that content in a few weeks.

Now I understand you can't bring out new stuff every month like that. But you do need the game to be revitalized from time to time and that's what expansions do because they change the game in more fundamental ways than an LS chapter ever can do. It's been two years and no expansion. The game will suffer for that.

If it's enough for you that's great, but the problem is that it's not enough for a lot of other people. So I think that the announcement of a new LS season with Sagas that may not even add new maps is not going to convince a lot of people that the future is looking bright. Opinions will differ but the whole point if MMOs is that they can hold onto various player groups. The game doesn't need the population to dwindle at a faster rate I would think.

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@MrRuin.9740 said:

Content:
GW2 receives an adequate amount. Just because a percentage of players choose to rush through all of it within a day doesn’t mean there’s a lack of it.The flip side of this is that just because some players choose to stretch 3 hours worth of content over 3 days doesn't mean it's actually more content.

It's actually much more than three hours; there's no need to under-exaggerate. The point was there there are players that consume content within days of it being released and then complain when they're bored about not being anymore content. Anet could release new content every two to three months and they'd still complain because it's not enough to keep them occupied for months on end.

@Gehenna.3625 said:

Content:
GW2 receives an adequate amount. Just because a percentage of players choose to rush through all of it within a day doesn’t mean there’s a lack of it.What if it takes you two days, a week, a month? Because you can take a month and still be waiting months for the next LS chapter for a small offering of content.

The problem is that MMOs need to offer enough content and enough of a variety of content because not everybody likes everything. All that LS chapters offer is a new map with a short story and then grinding tokens for certain rewards while repeating the same events or meta events ad infinitum. Someone who is not in a rush can still go through that content in a few weeks.

Now I understand you can't bring out new stuff every month like that. But you do need the game to be revitalized from time to time and that's what expansions do because they change the game in more fundamental ways than an LS chapter ever can do. It's been two years and no expansion. The game will suffer for that.

If it's enough for you that's great, but the problem is that it's not enough for a lot of other people. So I think that the announcement of a new LS season with Sagas that may not even add new maps is not going to convince a lot of people that the future is looking bright. Opinions will differ but the whole point if MMOs is that they can hold onto various player groups. The game doesn't need the population to dwindle at a faster rate I would think.

The thing is that it's impossible to release enough content for those that rush through everything and then complain that there's nothing to do. We get almost half an expansion's worth of content every year through the living story. The only thing that an expansion does is give you all of the content upfront rather than it being split across an entire season. Elite specs can easily be added throughout a season if they have plans to add more.

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@Ayrilana.1396 said:

Content:
GW2 receives an adequate amount. Just because a percentage of players choose to rush through all of it within a day doesn’t mean there’s a lack of it.The flip side of this is that just because some players choose to stretch 3 hours worth of content over 3 days doesn't mean it's actually more content.

It's actually much more than three hours; there's no need to under-exaggerate. The point was there there are players that consume content within days of it being released and then complain when they're bored about not being anymore content.It was an example, not an attempt to actually measure the content. And the point still stands that the opposite of what you say is also true; that some players drag content out for much longer and claim there's more than enough content (or too much in some cases as they don't have time do all event achieves or whatever).It's very much a matter of perspective and subjective to peoples lifestyles and you are choosing to see only one. Just saying, what's 'adequate' to you isn't for others.
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@mindcircus.1506 said:I love when people see some video by an armchair dev and assume that the people who's livelihood depends on the product haven't though about these things.

We should start linking videos of science fair baking soda volcanoes for nuclear physicists too.I'm sure they haven't thought about the proper brand to use.

So much this.

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@SLOTH.5231 said:They fired everyone so there isn’t anyone left to do anything to the game outside of living world episodes.

This feels like a lot of misinformation to me. For example we swiss tournaments were announced for PvP, so there is obviously someone working on them. And while the Warclaw wasn't well received by a lot of WvWers, someone must have worked on it. In addition to that, most of the people fired weren't even working on Guild Wars 2 in the first place In addition to that, there's a new type of ten man content coming. Not sure why people say stuff like this that's demonstrably untrue.

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@SLOTH.5231 said:They fired everyone so there isn’t anyone left to do anything to the game outside of living world episodes.

I don't understand where this misinformation comes from and unfortunately I've read posts similar to this one a lot since the lay offs. That it gets thumbs up is another reason to worry. The game started with at most 200 employees back in 2012, went up to 220 (developers only) in 2016, reached 436 total in early 2019. 143 were laid off in March 2019 so 293 left working at Arenanet after that. They are at 296 now.

You can see that between release and Path of Fire the company doubled in size. Did we get content to justify double workforce? No. That's because more than likely those extra people were working on the cancelled projects and not Guild Wars 2. Even after the lay offs and the cancellation of their other projects, Arenanet still has more employees working now, than they had on release day and during Heart of Thorns.

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The creator forgot the 4th C -- Competition. Its all well and good to analyze based on isolating a game and looking at the internal elements that might cause failure. However, no game exists in a vacuum.

The audience that wants to sink tons of hours into the type of game he describes is smaller than the audience for all games. I'd argue that the audience for the "tons o' hours play time" games is a lot smaller. So, when you have a lot of companies trying for a slice of that market share, the one(s) with the best track record, biggest IP's and largest audience share over time are going to be ones to succeed. Competition is why some MMO's deviate from the MMO game plan the creator is discussing. They cannot compete with WoW at its own game unless they have the lure of a huge IP (like Final Fantasy, Star Wars, Elder Scrolls).

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Anyone who says they fired everyone needs to stop. They laid off only a fourth of all staff and that was the bulk of cancelled side projects and those who volunteered to be let go so that others could stay. What was left was even more staff to make the GW2 focused teams even bigger.

As for those who keep saying "only 3 hours of content" aren't actually playing the content outside the story instances. Usually players who focus competitive modes (god rest their souls) or raids which is almost the level of quality of LW chapters with a smaller team. Or they're streamers who try and stretch out content that really isn't watchable.

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his 3 Cs are totally on point, especially the final part of the final C, Community

a MMO is Massive Multiplayer, so most contents needs to have as many players to participate; hence i disagree with every thread complaining about lack of solo contents, and demands for more solo contents and features that promotes solo contents such as the henchmen system from GW1


here's another video from Asmon discussing mash's video critiquing the state of WoW that Anet can pick up some points from

one of the critical point that applies the the gaming industry overall that came up in the discussion, and Anet should take a good look ishow the game design had changed over the years, from the time the raise of the mobile gaming market, games back in the days prior to that was players needs to adapt to the game that they play to gain sense of achievementbut these days, games are designed to adapted to the player, allowing them to gain access to lots of high-end stuffs with minimum investment, or pay their way to it, giving them a quick adrenaline rush while the gaming company get a quick money grab ... but what comes after that initial adrenaline rush is gone? player leaves and dont look back

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@blade eyes.2034 said:community, guilds in gw2 are dead, guild mission has been the same since 2013. I don't care about world bosses with zerg of strangers that I don't know, who mindlessly farm for more gold.

Eh, communities aren't really dead. I think it just seems that way to a lot of people because of significant portion of the community interactions don't really happen in game. A lot of it is on discord, for example. Some on reddit, some on the forums, ect. You just gotta find it.

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