The Stagnation of MMO industry/genre and why

I also think SWTOR don't have lack of content. In fact, SWTOR has TONS of content. The problem is because SWTOR did not have the 4 principles that I mentioned, players cannot enjoy those content due to various restrictions.

I mean, can I do Eternity Vault in level 10/20/30/40? Why not?

Or, can I do Hammer Station at level 50 and still have the same challenge when I was 15? Why not?

Why can't I (a Jedi) team up with a light side Sith?

Why can't I (and imperial Agent) hire a smuggler to infiltrate this enemy location with me?

Why can't I play with another player in another server, just because we're both called Han? (can we even call ourselves Han? Or Luke?)

Very nice read. I enjoyed it and can say I fully agree with all of it. I have to say some of your ideas have been used or seem to be coming.

Sharding. Games like Guild Wars and Champions online dealt with this nicely by making each "shard" zone specific with a population cap. The result was almost every zone, town, city was booming with activity because each time you zoned you automatically went to the next shard in line to be filled up or like in CO you zoned to the shard your party is currently in.

Trinity: I am honestly on the fence about the holy trinity. I have seen it modified to more transparency and I have seen it completely done away with. Champions completely dropped the trinity idea and allowed players to build their own classes from ground up. The result? Dull dungeons. Who needs to be strategic and consider whose going to do what when we all can god mode this thing together with extremely high dps/heals/ and buffs. In the end we ran thru all the dungeons like we had a hot date on the other end. Not to mention what it did to pvp. Eww.

Then there was DCUO who took the trinity and beefed it up with more dps. This was a great Idea and made pvp/pve a lot of fun simply because any role considered worked well with others. My nature/archer could cut through mobs and players with the best of them and toss heals for last minute come backs when needed which made for some really exciting fighting. (And dont get me started on the amazing combo system)

Finally we have GW2 which so far promises a unique take on the trinity. No trinity. All classes are essentially dps with a stock of buffs, debuffs, and CC. That added with the "downed" system so players can pick up a team mate before they die, ,makes for a very interesting feel of combat. No more clueless dpsers skating thru high end content while tanks and healers have to gear up and know their role.

But yes I agree with you fully I just wanted to point out that there is hope and Devs seem to slowly be catching on to such ideas.

Good post.

im an older gamer and one thing i think that mmo developers are not doing is simple. It's the evolution. As a business owner who inherited a business years ago , my dad told me that every 8 to 10 years you have to change.

when WoW came out it captured alot of people and grew. The gaming world was taken by storm with mmo's, swg, eq, wow, etc..

Over the next 3-5 years the wave is at it's peak , people want to ride this wave, including bioware/ea. Building swtor like swg would not have made much of a difference, as there is a total lack of innovation on developers. This is why games like league of legends , and puzzle games etc are gaining more popularity. You now see more moba's coming out. THe mmo genre though hasn't seen any innovation in almost 10 years. What is happening is that people are doing the same thing expecting different results.

Bioware succeeded in making a storyline mmo, but they actually took steps backwards in the development evolution. Games that came out 5+ years ago had much better implementation to them than swtor. When you design something that you want people to subscribe to you want to make that longevity valuable.

I think bioware, made this game with the initial journey as too much of the focus. THe real journey is what keeps you going. This is where mmo's are ultimately failing these days. It is not just swtor. I am talking about a multitude of mmo's, every forum you go to the same topics are there. Nothing to do at max level.

Performance, sharding, cross que, open world. No matter what bioware does, this game will never "feel" like an mmo. The server clusters are too small. The servers cannot handle a very low cap of people. In fleet anything above 150 people causes screens to jitter and lag. As a tech person my first issue would have been to give everyone a smooth open world with the least amount of performance issues. Sharding and small cap servers, really ruined alot of the mmo feeling.

PvP. Neglecting this cost you more subscribers than you were ready for bioware. The reason is that pvp is end game, it's always different, it's always challenging, and it brings out the competitive nature of gamers. 99% of all gamers are competitive and thus , why the majority of gamers worldwide play mostly pvp oriented games. Tying back into the performance technology issue. Ilum was a disaster that could have been avoided , had some initial thought been put into the engine and how it will handle 40+ people on the same screen. Maybe you should have cut back on the multitude of rendering of textures and made some more simnple models of certain things, i don't know.

Raiding, dailies, crafting - I played wow in 2004 on release. I loved it to 60, i raided a bit, and i remember distinctively when i lost interest. TBC comes out, level again, new experience. I get to end game and there is one issue i am having. This dungeon, grinding. It gets old and nothing changes with it, ever. WoW succeeded in keeping up with the pvp crowd. So i moved over to pvp. Wrath comes out and its the same thing. Despite what people tell you, wow subs fall off pretty hard about 5 months after an expansion. This is due to the mindless grind.

WoW has a very strong social aspect that keeps it thriving. People can socialize much more freely. THe userinterface, performance, gameplay is very fluid and smooth. PvP is strong and a huge chunk of wow players are in it for the pvp. Dungeons, raids, grinds are being made with more variety and more options to make them more enjoyable.

WoW grew within itself, it was the originator of the mmo scene in terms of appealing to the masses. Games that come out now take a huge step back trying to emulate only a portion of what wow does and this is what is getting stale. If people want a "wow" they can play "wow".

Again, the buying point of mmo's is what keeps the person playing. Right now, i just don't see any interest in keeping playing something i've done 30 times before. Star wars fans in general, want an open, immersive feeling, with a star wars community. This game took a great idea, made an immersive story, and just simply stopped at how to keep people playing.

What sold me on SWTOR and still "selling: me are the stories. But they kinda splutter on this. I would like to see the story aspect fleshed out and made into a TV-series like structure. I *may* then continue to play SWTOR. If not, once I completed all 8 classes storyline, I will say my farewell to SWTOR. And I won't play any more MMO game is the basic design is still the same.

Isn't stagnation the goal of every MMO? The goal of an MMO game is to keep people playing your game for...well, forever. If your game is a success, people keep playing it. They don't move on.

So on the notion of "hit" MMOs, once you have a hit MMO, shouldn't it make the rest of the industry seem stagnant?

Someone mentioned this above, but the genre is stagnant because the consumer is happy. If the majority of MMO players really wanted innovation, then the innovative MMOs that have come out would have done much better.

Innovation matters in FPS so much because players will move on to the new shiny. They don't "lose" anything by upgrading a game. But MMOs is a much different beast. I played DDO for a while (sidenote: I play SWTOR now because I am sick to death of MMO-style grinding, and am greatly enjoying the immersive story-focused gameplay of SWTOR leveling), and when SWTOR came out, a lot of players bailed for it...then came back after a couple months. Why? Because they got to endgame and realized they could either grind SWTOR, where they would have to start grinding from scratch, or they could go back to DDO, where they already had a lot of progress in the grinding. Players are much less likely to jump MMOs because so much "work" is lost when they do switch games.

That's why a really successful MMO, like WoW, keeps players, and makes the rest of the industry seem stagnant--players won't leave a successful MMO for the new shiny.

Personally, I think SWTOR did it right. They gave players something new with the immersive character-driven story-based leveling, while still giving people a familiar MMO experience (the trinity, endgame grinding, etc), all while putting it in an interesting and fairly open part of the Star Wars universe. And I do think it's funny with how many people call the game a failure. At over a million subscribers still (last number I heard was 1.3 million), this game can hardly be called a bust.

Um, people called SWTOR a flop because it started with 2.4 million subs, and last we heard, in late march, it was 1.2 million subs.
And most call it a flop because it's a bad game, they don't even look at the subs. They only use the subs because you can't argue with numbers.

Except they do, in fact, have it easier from the perspective of skill required. In your situation, you require the DPS to do either of carefully monitor and manage the aggro between themselves, or chain taunt- which requires first a taunt *ability*, which not all DPS have, and second requires a higher level of skill than simply having one person tank it does.

Being able to kill it quicker doesn't equate to it being easier.

I agree with you on all points except the trinity.

It's here to stay. Sorry, bud.

The "trinity" will always be. It reaches all the way back to the basic foundations of our society. The Tank, DPS, and healer has a direct correlation to the builder, the warrior, and the farmer.

One could make the same argument there: the warrior get's to run off and have all the fun while the builder and the farmer stay home and to the work. Yet they still choose to do it. And if everyone became a warrior, the society would fall apart.

An anthropologist, a biologist, a sociologist, a physiologist, and a philosopher could all give you a different reason for how this came to be, but all are valid. And they all apply to something as simple as a gaming environment.

So, while a game focused solely on DPS would succeed on the novelty alone at first, it eventually would spiral into a disastrous clusterfudge. You thought pugs were bad now.?

People need that disambiguation that definitive roles give them.

I have to respectfully disagree. The foundation of society is male and female. The Ying and the Yang.

All others are just human construct.

In game terms, you just need the warrior and the wizard.