Former Mythic boss explains EA split

It sounds like Jacobs’ is saying that from the time EA bought Mythic, the direction of game design didn’t go the way he wanted or the way he felt was best.

Very interesting.

Perhaps this starts to show a little more insight into what went wrong with Warhammer Online.

Major Cancelled MMOs:

Motor City Online (EA): 2003
Earth & Beyond (Westwood/EA): 2004
Asheron’s Call 2 (Microsoft/Turbine): 2005
Matrix Online (Monolith): 2005 (effectively)
Shadowbane (Wolfpack): 2006
The Saga of Ryzom (Nevrax): 2006
Auto Assault (NCSoft): 2007
The Sims Online (EA): 2007
RF Online (CCR): 2008
Hellgate: London (Flagship): 2009
Tabula Rasa (NCSoft/Destination Games): 2009
Dungeon Runners (NCSoft): 2010
Mythos (Flagship): 2010
Earth Eternal (Sparkplay): 2010
APB: All Points Bulletin: 2010

Pre-Release Cancelations:

Dragon Empires (Codemasters): 2004
True Fantasy Live Online (Microsoft): 2004
Mythica (Microsoft): 2004
Ultima Online 2 (EA): 2004
Imperator (Mythic): 2005
Marvel Universe Online (Microsoft/Cryptic): 2008
Dark & Light (NPCube): 2008
Gods & Heroes: Rome Rising (Perpetual Entertainment): 2008
Stargate Worlds (Cheyenne Mountain/FireSky): 2010
The Agency (Sony): 2011

Studios/Companies Closed:

Westwood Studios: 2004
Wolfpack Studios: 2004
Nevrax: 2006
Perpetual Entertainment: 2008
NPCube: 2008
Destination Games: 2009
Flagship: 2010
Sparkplay: 2010
Realtime Worlds: 2010

1) “Designed by The Children’s Television Workshop” – He notes a failure to maintain the cool, original design of the Worgen, and “the Star Trek Ferengi inspired goblins with their ridiculously flamboyant starting zone that puts a stake through the heart of any semblance of high fantasy that WoW ever had.”

2) Trivialized Advancement: “1-85 being utterly devoid of any semblance of challenge or intensity. Mob density has been nerfed to almost nothing in outdoor zones and in those occasional outdoor mini-dungeons; killing these mobs takes zero skill as player power has reached all-time heights in WoW.”

3) No Challenge. “For the vast majority of what constitutes WoW, the following is true: the challenge is gone, the risk is gone, the suspense is gone. the wonder is gone, and the immersion — well it left town years ago. It’s one big Bacchanalian orgy of advancement and rewards. Eventually players become immune to this mindless routine and have realized that gear and levels mean nothing.”

4) Dungeon Finder: “Recently flawed design including the Trojan Horse of all MMO features — the Dungeon Finder — has resulted in the mechanization and trivialization of the beloved dungeon crawl. Dungeons have become nothing more than mob and loot conveyor belts designed to dole out instant gratification to mute loot addicted participants culled from various servers.”

This section leads to my favorite point he makes in the entire post, as it is one I have been making to people ever since I first heard about Dungeon Finder:

“Players are wise to the reality that being outgoing, friendly and polite has no value in WoW all thanks to the geniuses on the Dungeon Finder development team.”

One of these days I am going to write an entire blog post about this concept: making things easier and more convenient is not always better, and is very often worse.

Dungeon Finder seems like a great concept. It is super convenient and helps people do something they really want to do: dungeon crawl.

The problem is it absolutely killed the concept of a game world. It whisked you around the game universe instant-teleport style, and originally you didn’t even have to find the dungeon even once to be teleported to it.

Worst of all, it killed the necessity of making friends and allies in order to put together a solid tank-healer-dpsx3 team. You could be the biggest jerk in the world, but you still had the same dungeon timer queue time.

In the old days, jerks languished in misery as they couldn’t find groups while people with a decent, mature attitude reveled in fun and productive groups. That’s how it should be!

5) Culture of Entitlement. “The players through no fault of their own have become virtual slackers addicted to a steady drip feed of rewards. Shooting fish in a barrel would require too much skill for today’s average WoW player. People don’t want to work for anything anymore; they feel entitled.”

==============================================

With all of that out of the way, do I agree with his final conclusion? Do I think Cataclysm is the worst MMO expansion in history?

No, I do not. I believe that title still goes to Dark Age of Camelot: Trials of Atlantis (DAoC: ToA), and I don’t even think its a fair fight.

DAoC: ToA was released October 28, 2003, a year before WoW in a time where Everquest was the WoW of the MMO industry. It wasn’t the quality of the content that made Atlantis such an utter failure. It was the fact that DAoC used an entire expansion, all that budget and manpower, to create an expansion that essentially tryed to EQ-ify (in the same way games now try to WoW-ify themselves) the game.

ToA introduced massive raids – some of them requiring 12 hours of straight gameplay with groups 50-100 large. It introduced massively powerful artifacts that completely dominated the PvP (RvR) landscape. Within a few months, if you did not have a full complement of fully leveled up artifacts you simply couldn’t compete in RvR.

This was an absolutely titanic shift in the game. Before ToA, you could cap all your stats, resistances, etc. with crafted gear. It might be expensive, but it didn’t require any raiding or specific boss farming. People lovede this because it made PvP a level playing field where skill, team composition, etc. were everything.

ToA utterly ruined and destroyed this, and the shockwave was fast and brutal. Within a few months, this expansion caused DAoC to lose approximately two thirds of its userbase, and it never recovered. Even Mythic staff (including Mark Jacobs, the founder) eventually admitted ToA was a gigantic mistake.

Can you imagine investing millions of dollars and zillions of man hours into an expansion – all with the goal of GROWING your game – and the net effect is to lose TWO THIRDS of your customers? Spending the ToA money on guns and booze would have been more productive. In order to stop the exodus of players, they had to release non-ToA enabled servers. That’s right folks: ToA was so bad, people preferred servers WITHOUT it. The non-ToA servers were the most popular, and probably saved DAoC from completely shutting down.

For that reason, I believe Trials of Atlantis is still far and away the worst MMO expansion ever made, and I think it is unlikely it will ever be dethroned.

And maybe, also at that time, that’s just to where the internet — I hate to use that broad-based term in quotes — had gotten. Like, people love flaming. The whole thing is all — they want controversy. They’re going to say things. It’s like, “Hey, you don’t know who I really am. I can say whatever I want.” You see it in the press now.

He blames “the internet” and flaming, but still after all these years cannot admit it was their absolute despicable and deceitful business model.

Amazing.

Roper is like a drug addict. Until he admits his problem, you can’t deal with him.

Nobody in the world should hire this guy until he admits the #1 reason people hated Hellgate and Flagship with such a passion was their absolutely disgusting business model.

I talked to people in the industry, they thought, “I thought that was a great idea, especially at the time, for a business model.” “Hey, the game is free to play? Oh, but if I want to give you $10 a month, I’m going to get everything you ever do? Sure, I’m in.” But gamers hated the idea.

Clueless. He acts like everyone in the industry thought it was a good idea. Did he talk to idiots? Hellgate was roundly mocked for its business model months before it came out, and they didn’t do anything to change it.

How could he not understand that you’re either subscription or not. And even if you must go with some kind of weird partial-subscription system, you can’t TAKE AWAY the content people already paid for.

If my subscription gets me access to Zone X, you can’t take away Zone X when I stop subscribing. You can stop giving me new zones – fine. But taking away old ones I paid for? Stupid.

Or even worse, locking characters because they are one of the “subscriber only” classes? Or locking out gear? ANYONE thought that was smart? Really?

I think I was very disappointed that followed into going Cryptic. You know, people go, “Oh, great. Now this guy is going to come here and screw everything up.”

Which he did. The Cryptic “C-store” is an absolute abortion of a “freemium” attempt. The things you pay for are grossly overpriced, and they are charging extra for things that should be core gameplay elements.

We even at one point just realized, “We’re never going to make money off box sales. Even if this game sells multiple millions of copies, we might never make our money back on the box sales. We’re going to have to make our money on the back end, on the online.” Because that was a much lower nut to crack every month. But we just didn’t get the number of players.

Perhaps this explains the stupidity and the greed: desperation. They realized that the online/subscription method was their only hope to break even, so they got desperate and greedy. Instead of figuring out a Guild Wars type model where they charged a fixed price for chunks of content – or mini-expansions – they were hoping for the cash cow of subscriptions (and the free money from “sleepers”). Stupid move.

Bill Roper joined established MMO developer Cryptic Studios as design director in 2008.

Less than two years later, Roper would resign from the company after the launches of Champions Online and Star Trek Online, each of which was criticized by gamers and reviewers.

Reconcile that “resigned” part with the fact that he hasn’t been able to find a job – ANY job – for 8 months.

Translation: Roper was fired. This guy appears to be allergic to honesty.

Gamespy interview, Feb 2004:

Chris Lye (Microsoft product manager): The massively multiplayer genre is a hugely crowded and competitive space.

The Wikipedia entry notes: “Some commentators said at the time that the cancellation was evidence that the (English language) massively multiplayer market had become saturated.”

Hugely crowded huh? 10 months later, November 2004 would see the launch of World of Warcraft. I guess it wasn’t really all that crowded and saturated in Feb 2004, was it Chris and “commentators?”

And this part is just for amusement:

GameSpy: Based on the “evaluation of the MMORPG landscape,” in MS rethinking True Fantasy Live Online for Xbox as well?

Chris Lye: Plans for True Fantasy Live Online are the same as always. They are completely unaffected.

True Fantasy Live Online was cancelled less than 4 months later, on June 2, 2004.

Over the last decade or so, there have been a lot of horrendously wrong predictions and opinions about the MMO industry offered by insiders, media, commentators, etc. Please share some of your favorites!

Star Wars vs. Azeroth: Blizzard and Bioware talk competition

What do you think? Can SWTOR compete? If so, how? And more interestingly, what is your prediction?

Here is the Bright Hub Review of DCUO. That review is a mixed reaction. I’d love to hear from other people who may have played it.

But how do you strike a balance that maintains immersion without being needlessly annoying?

News articles like this are definitely a nail in the coffin of the subscription model: Turbine: Lord of the Rings Online Revenues Tripled As Free-To-Play Game.

It is a shame that SW:ToR decided to go with a subscription model. I remember early on in its development there were rumors they were going to be F2P/micros. I really wish they’d stuck with that. I think that would have given them a huge advantage over WoW once they released. Instead, they are now going to have to compete with WoW head-to-head for subscribers. I wish them luck.

This seems like a moderately huge disaster for Frogster

The short version is this. Some group of people claim to have obtained the login details of just about the entire customer base of Frogster’s games (not just Runes of Magic). They have been making demands that Frogster improve various things about their games.

Putting aside what a PR and business disaster this is for Frogster, I wonder about this:

1) What if this is successful? What if Frogster has to cave and make some or all of the fixes demanded by this group. Is that basically “negotiating with the terrorists”? And will that encourage more people to do such things?

2) How long until a group like this decides “wow, if it can happen to Frogster, maybe we can hit WoW.” Or heck, what if this group decides to one  up themselves and go after WoW.

3) What can MMO developers do to guard against this? I haven’t read anything yet that implied Frogster did anything particularly sloppy in its security measures.