Are MMORPGs returning to sanity?

Syncaine’s best when he’s acting as a devil’s advocate, and this week he’s had the chance to advance one of his most controversial yet well-thought-out points.

In a lengthy yet still interesting piece, he argues that MMORPG designers have been living in a dreamland for too long, but that we’re starting to see a correction back to more realistic expectations of the genre:

“It’s been almost 9 years since WoW has been released, and in those 9 years, how many titles and how much money has been spent without a single title even coming close to retaining a tenth of what WoW peaked at? No, today no one is using WoW as a yard stick, just like no new music record is using Thriller as the make-or-break point.

But the angst is understandable, because the slow confirmation is sinking in; those who enjoyed what WoW offered will be left out in the cold soon. That ‘mass market’ is, shockingly, just not profitable. The content is too expensive to produce, the players don’t stick around long enough, and even when you seem to get most things right, you still fall about ten million subs short of expectations.”

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Tagged as: subscriber numbers

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Do Bots Show That MMORPGs are Pointless?

That’s the bold claim that Tobold made last week – the prevalence of bots and botting in MMORPGs shows that they’re actually nothing more than repetitive, simple tasks.

It’s already been a controversial claim, but he does have a really interesting point:

“Apart from players wanting to bot a game activity, which shows that the activity isn’t all that interesting, the second problem is bots being so perfectly able at performing those activities, showing how repetitive and simple the things we are supposed to do in a MMORPG are in the first place. Douglas Adams’ book “Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency” contains a paragraph about the electric monk, “a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself”. Bots play tedious games for you, thus saving you the bother of playing the games yourself. What does it say about our games if we need labour-saving devices to do those tedious, repetitive, and trivial game activities for us?”

Read more here: The Problem With Botting

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