This language is just such a mess sometimes. I meant no offense.

The important part was below that anyway, right?

There, I’ve made my contribution to the reactionary chain. Hit a nerve?

/snark

…with the caveat that I don’t really care much for EQ2, but neither do I feel a need to critique it. It just… is, but whatever it is, it’s not my preference. To those who like it, though, hey, I’m glad that you are enjoying it.

I ended up playing WoW for two months and EQ2 … going on four years now.

No, EQ2 is not as polished as WoW. Yes they are stuck with a clunker of an engine and there is entirely too much zoning. But it absolutely pastes WoW in terms of sheer content. Reducing choices for players can IMO never be considered good game design even for MMO virgins. After all even that demographic are still gamers and I’m not convinced we (i.e. gamers) are so vapid that we need the amount of coddling and hand holding that Woflshead article suggests.

Anecdotally, the reason EQ2 doesn’t have more players is reputation. On the forums I read the opinion almost universally is “Oh, EQ? You can’t solo.” That and the clunky engine requires beefy hardware to put the bells and whistles on (which makes the game look *a lot* better, notwithstanding opinions on art direction.) Without those yeah the game can be fairly fugly.

But I can’t really parse which demographic is unable to deal with ‘too many’ character creation choices or crafting introduced at level 1. Seriously, teens, maybe? I really have no idea.

I have tried to find other MMO ‘homes’ in LoTRo and AoC, and while the formers art direction is far superior and the laters graphics are stunningly gorgeous niether ultimately ended up feeling as satisfying; this is in no small measure to the crafting/harvesting models of the respective games (and I’m a lightweight crafter compared to the folks in my guild ).

If you really want to examine the first 15 minutes with an MMO, it’s all about installing and patching. If you really believe that people make up their minds in the first 15 minutes, then no one would ever play any of these games!

Let’s shift gears and talk about Aion. I got into a beta weekend over 4th of July. I started the game, it was nicely polished. I really liked it in those first 15 minutes. But by the end of the weekend I’d decided not to pre-order it. The game didn’t hold up to my $50+$15/month scrutiny.

When you buy a new subscription-based MMO, you get a 30-day free ticket, and with all my heart, I don’t believe people give up on an MMO in the first 15 minutes if they’ve invested the time and money in getting it running, and have a 30-day pass. Yes, if you look hard enough you’ll find a few exceptions but no statistically significant number.

Everyone says “He’s absolutely right” that people make up their minds about MMOs in the first 15 minutes, but I see zero data to back this “fact” up. I don’t see any kind of ‘scientific’ data, and my anecdotal experience doesn’t back it up either.

TV shows? Sure. Free game demos? Sure. In a lot of things, people make those kinds of snap decisions. Even when a player rents an Xbox game. But once you’ve committed a non-trivial amount of money to buy the game, and the time to install it and get it running, I think that ’15 minutes’ goes out the window.

Part of the reaction to the back-and-forth, and I’ve kind of danced around this myself, is, well, the audacity that Wolfshead shows. He presents his ideas as Truth and in doing so, implicitly claims that he knows more about making games than the entire SOE dev team. When you put yourself up on that kind of pedestal you have to expect someone is going to try to knock you down.

Wolfshead also dismisses facts that don’t fit into his plans. Several folks have pointed out that some of his changes are regressions to the way things used to be, but he ignores the implications of that and charges on with his True Vision of how to fix EQ2.

So presumably, if he were running SOE, work on the next expansion would be put on hold and the team can go to work on undoing the changes they’ve made (thus pissing off the existing audience), re-creating character models and in turn, all the assets that go with that project, and reducing the size of the ESRB label, and filling the screen with glowy arrows that says “THIS IS NEW IN SHADOW ODYSSEY!!” and that would pull in more subscribers? How many loyal and on-going subscribers would they lose? (Yes, I’m being silly at this point… please read this with tongue firmly in cheek.)

But we have Longasc being the Champion of Wolfshead, so I guess we need for him to have a Nemesis or two, and I’m happy to volunteer.

This is why most of his points are minor – he’s talking polish. Polish is what you immediately see. If you’re at a restaurant and pick up your fork it’s either shiny, might have spots on it, might be dirty or might be rusty. How do you react to that? If it’s rusty or dirty you might decide to try a different restaurant.

It’s a first impression piece with suggestions to make it more appealing to new people. That is all his post is about. The only mistake Wolfshead is making is that he’s trying to defend his post to people who have emotional attachment to the subject matter. You know what they say about emotion and reason, right?

So once again, he’s focused on the first 15 minutes because, he absolutely right, most gamers (note the use of ‘gamers’) will decide if they want to play a game or not in the first little while. MMO players are a different breed who tend to be a little more forgiving about a game because they understand the game isn’t carved in stone and can change. Some hang on hoping things get fixed.

EQ2 is a prime example of players being forgiving. On release it was stable, but had *a lot* of flaws (I sort of liked some of them personally). A lot of classes were broken or had overpowered mechanics (Inquisitor chain stifle reducing red con content to chumps). After release they made a lot of changes – a lot. A fair number of them are for ‘polish’ reasons so they attract more players – like the revamps to the Isle of Refuge, addition of Neriak, etc.

Some people are misreading that as a “WoWify EQ2!” post which it isn’t. EQ2 has already gone through its WoWification stage (removal of spirit shards, shared XP debt, xp debt, heroic mobs in the outdoor zones, making players their class from level 1 and so on). It’s also had a huge number of necessary fixes and class revamps. EQ2 is already WoWified, if you don’t know that you weren’t there when EQ2 was released.

@Wolfshead: What wagons? *looks around* If you think the game is flawed enough that you or others would consider these flaws deal-breakers, hey, that’s ok by me. That’s your prerogative, and you’re welcome to it, and you’re of course free to shout that opinion from the rooftops. I’m not saying that EQ2 is the best game in the history of the universe, but I don’t believe you gave it a fair shake in your first post.

Again, many of the “fixes” you suggested were how things were when the game launched — and SOE changed them as the player base grew and the feedback and marketing data started rolling in. Good and evil characters used to have different character creations backgrounds, and I do believe the ESRB logo was much smaller, once upon a time. Crafting didn’t play a very big part in the newbie area, and there were a lot fewer harvesting nodes there. Quest text was shorter, there was no way whatsoever to harvest nodes faster, and you gained only one or two abilities when you leveled. I’m sure the decisions to change these things weren’t taken lightly and had good reasons behind them.

My shtick is basically this: Looks to me like you analyzed the game. That’s great if you’re a beta tester or something, but this is a living, evolving universe that is home to hundreds of thousands — maybe millions — of active characters and is, for all intents and purposes, “finished.” If you want to help make the game player-friendly, you have to PLAY it and go from there, and not just in 15-minute increments, and not nit-picking the details every time your view changes. Who bloody cares that the ESRB logo is hugenormous? Most of us just click through anyway. If you don’t want to harvest a zillion nodes on the newbie island, you can pretty safely ignore them…I’m pretty sure they won’t aggro.

Where are these numbers coming from? I can throw up some numbers without sources, but they wouldn’t have any more meaning than yours do.

And even if your figure is accurate, out of context, it is still meaningless. How many subscribers does EQ2 have compared to City of Heroes and Warhammer Online and Age of Conan and Tabula Ras…oh wait, forget that one.

Percentage of the total demographic in the world? Another meaningless statistic. What is its percentage of the demographic in regions where it is available? And more accurate, what is its percentage of the demographic among subscription-based MMOs where it is available?

What I see is SOE finding the game successful enough that they devote resources to producing regular retail expansion packs for it. So your implication that it is a failure is wrong, at least in their eyes.

All that said, and setting all those issues aside and assume for the moment that you are right. That EQ2 is struggling. Can you blame the fans of the game for wanting to defend it? Yes yes, you made a few positive comments about the game. But overall your post is going to dissuade new players from trying it.

If you thought you’d get any other reaction from fans of the game, you were being incredibly naive.