Behind the Curtain: How far is too far?
Filed under: World of Warcraft, Fantasy, Sci-fi, EverQuest, EverQuest II, Culture, Patches, Opinion, Star Wars Galaxies, Behind the Curtain
What would it take for you to cancel your subscription and jump ship to another MMO? If Blizzard announced World of Starcraft as their next-gen MMO at Blizzcon this year, would you stop playing World of Warcraft in favour of it?Let me share a little story with you. A few year ago, I was a fairly 'hardcore' Star Wars Galaxies player. My main character had a Master Doctor/Master Teras Kasi Artist spec, I was powering up through the Rebel ranks, and I was working my way through the quest chain to unlock my Jedi character. Then, in April of 2005, the Combat Upgrade came along. The Combat Upgrade completely changed how combat worked in Galaxies, and despite what the prevailing mood may have been at the time, it wasn't all bad. The Upgrade changed the HUD in the game, changed the way special attacks and actions were queued up and paid for (previously, you could kill or incapacitate your character through using certain moves too often) and also changed how mob and player level balanced out against one another; a side effect of which was that soloing suddenly became much harder than it had been before. Essentially, it completely changed the way combat on the ground worked.
Naturally the wailing and gnashing of teeth could be heard across the Internet. Most of this was brought on by gamers who were being made to relearn their favourite game almost from scratch. Players felt that their characters had been arbitrarily nerfed – combinations of weapons and armour that had previously been nigh-unbeatable had become almost worthless overnight. Not only that, but the release itself was plagued with bugs from the start, antagonising players further. Cooler heads maintained that the reason those combinations had been unbeatable was down to the previous combat system being ridiculously complicated and hard for the developers to balance, and pointed out that a major release like this was almost guaranteed to come with bugs. While some people listened and practised patience, others voted with their feet and left in droves.
This is probably the part where other, angrier, people would take the time to tear strips off SOE and blame John Smedley for everything that went wrong; but I'm not going to do that. SOE had valid reasons for making the changes they did, I think they just handled it badly. Personally, I think that they were feeling pressured by the success of World of Warcraft, and ended up rushing the Combat Upgrade out the door a little too soon, in an attempt to regain the players they were probably already losing.
WoW had been out for around six months at this point, and plenty of players had already chosen to try it out. More than one ex-player in my guild at the time suggested that SOE had tried to make Galaxies more like WoW and failed terribly, so why not just try the real thing? I didn't, and I stuck with Galaxies for a month or two more, but a voice in the back of my head had started whispering to me to walk away. A lot of the people I played with regularly had slipped away by then, my guild had fallen apart too, and Galaxies just wasn't the same game any more, and I eventually bit the bullet and cancelled my account. You could have argued that the game was 'better' than it had been in the past, and I might have agreed with you, but the game had simply lost its sparkle for me by then, and I couldn't help shake the feeling there were more changes to come. I was correct, and in November of 2005, SOE rolled out the 'New Game Enhancements' and enhanced the game beyond all recognition. To this day, I have yet to go back and play Galaxies again.
So, there's my story of heartbreak, betrayal and cancelled accounts. Well, maybe just the latter. Have any of you experienced something similar? Did the Combat Upgrade or New Game Enhancements drive you off? Did Everquest 2 drive you to cancel you Everquest account? Hit the comments below and share your stories, would you kindly?
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Scopique said on 10:07PM 5-29-2008
I had left SWG long before the NGE, but went back to see what it was all about. It wasn't the same game I had left, so I didn't stay.
Like a lot of things, people get used to experiences being static: if you like North House of Pizza's food better then South House of Pizza, you'll go to North far more frequently. You come to rely on the experience, and stick with it because you like it. When something changes (the sauce, the crust, the combat, etc), then it might not be what you WOULD HAVE CHOSEN had things been that way when you first discovered it.
MMOs -- like pizza -- become such personal rallying points when threatened with change because people spend so much time with them. Quite frankly, any MMO which takes on ANY major modifications outside of 6 months is playing with fire. At that point, people have gotten into the groove, so to speak, and have planned their ascension to the level cap to 3 decimal places (or more). When something changes to upset their balance, they go ballistic, and move on. That's why people left SWG, although many would simply badmouth the implimentation, because "I'm leaving because they wrecked my months of charting my character's progression in spreadsheet form" doesn't have the same gravitas.
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Xee said on 10:38PM 5-29-2008
Ironically your subject, for a lot of us, actually applies to WoW.
I had a huge friends list pre-BC. I pvp'ed to Field Marshal, and also belonged to a raiding guild. By June 2007, BC had driven away about 1/3 of my friends list (they found the new end game, with too many raid instances and too many consumable requirements, before effects were limited, to be way over the top). By November, my raiding guild was starting to have trouble getting people to show up for 25 mans (we were starting Hyjal). We were, at that point, shedding 1-3 people per week to account cancellations.
By February, we gave up. There were only 2 people left on my friends list from pre-BC. A few guildmates transferred to another server to try to find a raiding guild still progressing. The rest of us canceled our accounts in March.
Our server went from having 17 guilds (x40 people, plus fillers) progressing in BWL/AQ40 and three in Naxx, pre-BC, to having only 2 guilds able to progress to Hyjal/BT. In April, one of those two guilds disbanded and most of the players quit the game.
Anyway - instead of making the end game more accessible, Bliz made it more inaccessible to most people, via mechanics and a poorly planned implementation timeline that burned a lot of people out on the front end last year.
Currently, am playing LOTRO mostly. Trying AoC but not very impressed. Waiting for WAR as it will almost certainly kill WoW's pvp game. And since Bliz foolishly let the PvP game take over in the last year, and let raiding die a miserable death by making it too inaccessible to average players, WAR is going to hurt them some considerable amount, in the North American market.
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Charlie said on 9:27PM 6-03-2008
Huh. You're the first person to have said they maid it to inaccessable. You might want to try coming back to the game, they have adressed accesability.
Case in point, I skipped SSC/TK. I raided last summer, and I downed Mag/VR before i quit raiding heavily. Overtime I got into a guild that was just pogressing through ZA. I helped them with that whenever I could and got badge gear. Over half a year later I just joined a guild who is halfway through BT/Hyjal. With only downing VR and never stepping foot inside SSC, much less attuning for Hyjal, I am now only a few bosses away from looking up at Illidans and Archimondes smug grin and hopefully getting to KJ before Wrath launches.
If that aint' accessability i dont know what is.
Anyways, I do understand the whole depletion of the friends list. I know alot of people that came back for 1-2 months once bc came out then quit again. Sparring coming back to raid for a bit (pretty much what I have been doing for the past month). Everyone is spread out all over the friends place, different guilds, different progressions, different needs. We still talk, but nothing will replace raiding AQ with those guys.
Severius said on 10:53PM 5-29-2008
I had left SWG a few months before the CU. The holodebacle had all but killed the game but I was determined that SOE would fix the issues with the promised Combat Revamp. A month or so before the CU came about I decided to go back and give it a shot thinking that the CU and CR were one in the same.
When I got back in game most all of my friends had left and our old city, Ragnarok, on the Sunrunner server, was a ghost town. The couple of die-hards left had moved into a new city and guild and I was grabbed in within a few moments of logging in lol. Had some good times that weren't nearly as great as before but good people make bad situations bearable.
The CU came and many of us were annoyed. However it seemed they were actually trying to make the game better so we stuck through it, re-learned how to play and were actually having fun. I then was invited to the Obi-Wan beta and was very excited for the future of the game. Especially, as one of the first Master Creature Handlers in the game, with some of the promised loot that would make our professions closer to what they had been before the CU.
Then came the rumors. That the CU was a ruse and that they were throwing out most of the game and turning it into a complete farce of itself. For a week many of my friends and I sat outside the theed starport protesting the upcoming NGE. We were threatened with bans but nothing could dissuade us. When the NGE hit the game was completely and utterly destroyed.
Where tens of thousands of players left with the CU 150,000 or so of us left because of the NGE and moreso because of the complete disregard and utter dishonesty that was spewing out of the talking heads at SOE. When Smedley and others said that it was impossible for the game to work with the CU system our responses and evidence from the Obi-Wan beta were deleted from the SOE forums and from You-Tube (I had a dozen vids up there of hte expansion running VERY well under the CU system). Then mine and many others posting abilities were taken away from us by SOE.
Change can be good, but change for changes sake is never a good thing. SOE in an effort to draw back people instead drove far more away and because of their actions have doomed other games. Pirates of the Burning Sea, a very fun MMO in it's own right is harmed because of their connections to SOE. Anyone that ever pays to play any SOE game is telling Smedley and others that what they had done is acceptable. Smedley and others, TO THIS DAY, deny that what they had done was wrong, just the way that they went about it.
Pride comes before the fall as the old adage says. If Smed and others would admit that they royally screwed the pooch, that they were 100% wrong in their treatment of the player base (if people were dumb enough to buy year long subscriptions they could not get a refund), completely dishonest with the statements about the state of the game, and offered pre-nge servers then they might be able to earn back some of that which they lost. Until that day I know that I myself will NOT subscribe to ANY SOE game. Well, I might if they fired Smedley :).
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Greeen said on 3:01AM 5-30-2008
I entered right after the CU, so at the time I didn't understand what the problem was about. I did notice though that almost all guilds battled with mass-quitters. And that is what killed the game for me. I could have accepted the NGE, but without players, having to build relations every few months from scratch is not my picture of fun.
Today it is stable, but I just feel lost in SWG (tried it with the 40days free veteran), I had held on to my toons and my houses, thinking I might return after all. But, actually just yesterday, I deleted everything. I gave my valuable stuff away, filled up remaining city structures I still had access to and deleted my Jedi and my Architect.
That actually hurt more than the frustration after first guild collapse.
I am not a fan of emulators, and although if SWG really had a fully functioning pre-CU emu which I would like to test, how many would really play it for how long? I think Sandbox MMOs are dead, unfortunately, due to the popularity of Solo content stemming from Wow.
Considering Wow: As a non-raider, I actually don't have a problem with it, but with other options out there, needing something fresh.....
I still admire Ultima Online players that have been there for 5 or even 10 years now. Tending to their shop, questing a bit, enjoying helping others, etc. But there I somehow just couldn't cut it. Maybe too spoiled with modern graphics or interfaces (although I played U3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8). As I said, I think Sandbox MMOs still exist, but have no future. Consumers are too hungry for change ("fastfood generation"), why stick to one thing forever if there are alternatives?
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Thrush said on 10:04AM 5-30-2008
I'm sort of the reverse. I left SWG after playing for a month when it was first released. I just didnt like it. I found it very difficult to solo. I went back to give it another shot after the NGE and I liked it alot better and could see myself sticking with it, but by that time I was eyeballs-deep in WoW.
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swgchef said on 2:36AM 6-04-2008
It's amazing that SOE didn't realize the fanbase they alienated with the CU + NGE. The Starwars Galaxies PreCU Emulation Project is a perfect example of the dedication of the SWG fanbase.
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Andy said on 7:52AM 6-04-2008
It didn't take much to pull me out of SWG, but the WoW experience just hasn't gotten stale for me yet. I had to quit raiding a month or two ago (1/6 Sunwell at the time) due to my new grad school schedule, so my playtime decreased dramatically. Since starting school, I've settled in enough to play regularly, but not enough to be able to re-join the raid game.
As much as I miss playing with my Scarlet Crusade friends, the amount of time they have outside of raids is small, and tough to manage. I've taken to defecting Alliance side with my RL friends. We currently have Deadmines on farm, and it is keeping the game fresh for us (I've only ever mained Horde toons.)
WoW is a prime example of fantastic game design that keeps you coming back. It will take a KILLER game to bring me out, but I play the game for my friends when it comes down to it. I'm waiting on Warhammer (I'm in beta now) and my friends and I will assuredly move on to that, but for now there's enough to keep us in Azeroth.
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