EverQuest, as a game, has been pronounced dead ever since its first expansion, but 10 years later and 16 expansions later, it's still doing relatively okay. Although nobody releases subscription numbers anymore, it can't really take that much money for the salary of the 3 designers that still work for EQ. If you've stuck around this long in EQ, you know that massive nerfs, broken events, and a whole mess of stuff isn't anything to get fazed over. I think no MMORPG around does slow-paced combat anywhere near as good as EQ. Granted all the big subscription games revolve around fast paced button mashing, but there's still a considerable niche of players who don't think playing well in a RPG means being able to never miss a GCD every 1.5 seconds.
Yet on the eve of its 17th expansion, I think someone has finally figured out how to kill the game unless a miracle happens in the next two weeks. It wasn't a bug or even a nerf, but rather the players that killed the game off for good. There's some content that's way too good RvR for the players and that's going to be nerfed. If you play MMORPG at all you know that's nothing new. But then what really made this different is that devs went on and posted that casual players do not deserve this loot because that's stuff they should never get, and by the way you'll never get that stuff in the next expansion either.
Now when you talk about EQ, people always think about it as a hardcore game. One of my friend who plays MMORPG was very surprised to find out that people suck in EQ, because he figured by now the guys who still play such a 'hardcore' game must be equiavlent of Jedi Masters of MMORPG who do not need to sleep and never log off from the game. Yet really the average guy in EQ is the guy you should don't want to be a pickup group with in WoW either. If you add for the fact that EQ's UI is clearly outdated and that a very significant of skill comes from modernized UIs, you can easily argue the average MMORPG player of any recent game is much better than the average player in EQ, simply because modern MMORPG have access to vastly more powerful UIs.
Yet the players don't realize this, and devs are convinced that what they have left in the game still the Jedi Masters of MMORPG. At the raid level, EQ has arguably become more hardcore over the years, despite a constantly shrinking population. It's funny when people say raids are too hard in EQ and you get a 'go to WoW' response. Well most of the guilds that succeed in EQ would do rather poorly in WoW because it's not a game where you can have a huge advantage by just playing hardcore hours (though it certainly helps). After all, no former EQ guild was anywhere near the top 100 guilds in WoW worldwide. EQ has a ~500K peak subscription versus ~5 million for NA+Europe in WoW, so statistically if people from EQ is even as good as the average, there should be some guild in the top 10 worldwide that was formerly from EQ, but I'm pretty sure this isn't the case.
On most failed MMORPG you can almost always say it's because the game didn't listen to the players, since it's a catch-all generic excuse that covers just about anything. But I think more games that started out as successful failed because they listened to the players as opposed to not. More and more I've come to realize the guys who give you feedback in MMORPG are not someone who can be trusted at all. There are just very few people who are interested in provide genuinely helpful feedback. Most are only looking for a way to make themselves more powerful, or put someone else down (which is sort of the same as being more powerful).
If you go to an average MMORPG's website and look at the forums there, clearly there are sometimes good ideas in there, but most are bad. You'll not get very far if you never listen to your players, but I can guaranteed that even a game like WoW can be crushed in one month if you started just believing all your players know what they're doing an implement feedback you see from say, the official forum.
I remember seeing an article about beta where the dev says really betas are not about player feedback, because your beta players are worthless anyway, so if you don't believe you know the game better than a bunch of guys who are just looking for a leg up or free playing time, then your game is doomed anyway. In fact, I'd say WoW's success seems to have largely to do with never listening to what its players have to say publicly.
Yet on the eve of its 17th expansion, I think someone has finally figured out how to kill the game unless a miracle happens in the next two weeks. It wasn't a bug or even a nerf, but rather the players that killed the game off for good. There's some content that's way too good RvR for the players and that's going to be nerfed. If you play MMORPG at all you know that's nothing new. But then what really made this different is that devs went on and posted that casual players do not deserve this loot because that's stuff they should never get, and by the way you'll never get that stuff in the next expansion either.
Now when you talk about EQ, people always think about it as a hardcore game. One of my friend who plays MMORPG was very surprised to find out that people suck in EQ, because he figured by now the guys who still play such a 'hardcore' game must be equiavlent of Jedi Masters of MMORPG who do not need to sleep and never log off from the game. Yet really the average guy in EQ is the guy you should don't want to be a pickup group with in WoW either. If you add for the fact that EQ's UI is clearly outdated and that a very significant of skill comes from modernized UIs, you can easily argue the average MMORPG player of any recent game is much better than the average player in EQ, simply because modern MMORPG have access to vastly more powerful UIs.
Yet the players don't realize this, and devs are convinced that what they have left in the game still the Jedi Masters of MMORPG. At the raid level, EQ has arguably become more hardcore over the years, despite a constantly shrinking population. It's funny when people say raids are too hard in EQ and you get a 'go to WoW' response. Well most of the guilds that succeed in EQ would do rather poorly in WoW because it's not a game where you can have a huge advantage by just playing hardcore hours (though it certainly helps). After all, no former EQ guild was anywhere near the top 100 guilds in WoW worldwide. EQ has a ~500K peak subscription versus ~5 million for NA+Europe in WoW, so statistically if people from EQ is even as good as the average, there should be some guild in the top 10 worldwide that was formerly from EQ, but I'm pretty sure this isn't the case.
On most failed MMORPG you can almost always say it's because the game didn't listen to the players, since it's a catch-all generic excuse that covers just about anything. But I think more games that started out as successful failed because they listened to the players as opposed to not. More and more I've come to realize the guys who give you feedback in MMORPG are not someone who can be trusted at all. There are just very few people who are interested in provide genuinely helpful feedback. Most are only looking for a way to make themselves more powerful, or put someone else down (which is sort of the same as being more powerful).
If you go to an average MMORPG's website and look at the forums there, clearly there are sometimes good ideas in there, but most are bad. You'll not get very far if you never listen to your players, but I can guaranteed that even a game like WoW can be crushed in one month if you started just believing all your players know what they're doing an implement feedback you see from say, the official forum.
I remember seeing an article about beta where the dev says really betas are not about player feedback, because your beta players are worthless anyway, so if you don't believe you know the game better than a bunch of guys who are just looking for a leg up or free playing time, then your game is doomed anyway. In fact, I'd say WoW's success seems to have largely to do with never listening to what its players have to say publicly.
