Massively^™

Funny. I wrote this earlier today:

http://www.mmocrunch.com/2008/08/21/a-case-for-sanity-killing-the-wow-killer-mime/

And now this happens to appear on Massively.

Please, for the love that is all good and pure in this world...

STOP USING THIS TERM.

That is all.

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How many times do you think wow players will be excited for "increased lvl cap to X+10" (X=the last expansions cap) that makes all your gear obsolete and kills of your guild while waiting for the expansion.

And even if there would be a wow killer you wouldn't see that at the first month sales, it took them 4 years to reach 10 million.

Friedrich Nietzsche once said " woop the freaking doo I'm happy playing a game that's fun it dosen't have to be the biggest one on the market"

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You all have it wrong.

The true WoW killer is a well placed set of explosives at Blizzard HQ and at the various server farms. It all can be ended in a, well, arcane explosion of sorts.

Also, a deadly virus unleashed in Blizzard HQ might do it as well. It might do in the human race at the same time, but sure to kill WoW AND the subscriber base.

Finally, if everyone keeps playing these games instead of having a life, no one will be left to procreate and when this generation dies off, there will be no one left to play. At that point, it is just a matter of time until the unmanned powerstaions fail and bring down the entire Blizzard empire. All hail Blizzard!

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Competition is the key here. I really do hope - as an avid WoW player even - that WAR does extremely well and forces Blizzard to put it in high gear.

I think they've (Blizzard) have been able to coast for quite some time, and rest on the fact that they just have a better MMO all-around than anyone else out there.

I reaaaallllyyy hope WAR gives them some competition, and we see Blizzard and Mythic striving to outdo one another. This can only be good for the genre, and for gamers overall.

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Vlatch hit it right on the head. WoW needs some competition. Nothing's going to kill it (Mystic has even come out and said multiple times "WAR is not a WoW killer", the only people saying that are WoW haters and WAR fanatics), but something coming along and putting a noticable dent in Blizz's bottom line should be seen as a great thing for the industry.

WAR and WoW fanatics lose sight of this, in the end WAR doing well is a win-win situation for everyone playing both games.

I'm leaving WoW for awhile to play WAR, I'm loving the beta and I really hope that the game does well. Not to kill WoW, because I think WoW is an excellent PvE game - in order to continue pushing both companies to bring more and more content into their games. That's the payoff right there.

Everyone should be hoping for record high sales of WAR, for a good amount of subscriptions to stick, and for WotLK to fall short on its projected sales figures (though I won't hold my breath on the last one... ). If all that happens you'll be seeing plenty of great additions to both games in the years to come - mark my words.

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Kevin,

While you might be right of the futility of it, it doesn't do any good to be a part of the problem.

It doesn't make me want to claw my screen out, it just serves as a constant reminder of the MMO's genre to grasp onto anything, no matter how asinine or absurd.

Meh, I'm done now. ;)

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Blizzard is getting lazy, that takes nothing away from their accomplishments, but they do need some form of competition to crank it up a bit.

Enough with the model and texture recycling already, we know it makes sense financially, but they can definitely afford to make new ones. Enough with the cheap excuse for a PvP system that arenas and BGs are. Enough with the seemingly identical quests from one expansion to another (the joke of re-using Nessingwary yet-again for instance is just not funny, nobody likes those "kill me 400 birds, and collect a billion eggs" quest lines).

Despite all the hype surrounding WotLK, I am sadly not very excited about it after playing WoW for 3 years; TBC was just vanilla WoW on casual mode, scrapping the idea of adventure and challenge for yet-another 15 faction rep grind.

WotLK will be a lot of the same once again, Blizzard has it so easy by sitting alone at the top that they're barely trying, just busy squeezing the good old cash cow for every drop.

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Every time a journalist uses the term "WoW Killer", a kitten dies.

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The only thing that will kill WoW is time, even another blizzard MMO won't kill it. That said massively seems to use the term "WoW killer" every time a MMO is released. "KOTOR Online, will it be the next WoW killer" or "Star Trek Online announced, will it be the next WoW Killer" People need to get over it and accept the fact that WoW won't die (and I am not a WoW fan) No game, no matter how good, will kill WoW, 10 million players will take years to go away, they will suffer dents in subscriber base, but the next expansion of another 10 more levels, 1 bg and a new continent a quarter of the size of the last will bring it back up. I do hope WAR will be a great game (loved the beta) but it will not kill WoW, or an other game for that matter, games don't kill games, time does.

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I know who killed WoW!

It was Professor Plumb with the Candlestick!

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Ah, another WoW killer post - my answer to these. All of these:

http://gamezig.com/mmorpg/will-there-ever-be-a-wow-killer

Surprisingly, I agree with the Massively author on this one.

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Kevin,

I'm not getting personal. You say you're not a journalist, yet you are "writing" about the MMO genre. So, whatever you want to call that. ;)

Just because you see something "500 Billion times" in emails (shouldn't we be past the point of exaggeration? Oh, the might Massively and your plentiful email traffic, we bow to you.) -- doesn't mean you should use it. You have the power, by having the neat little Wordpress login and the authority to write posts about it. You can choose to embrace the term (which you have, even if it's out of disagreement) or just disregard the term as unworthy of being written.

I'll admit I'm a bit hypocritical here, as I've written an article about "Killing the Wow-killer Meme" - which is 20 minutes of my life I suppose I'll never have back. However, I think that many MMO gamers really don't understand how the market works or things like economics to know that this, as you and I both said, cannot actually happen.

In the end, we're in total agreement that the term is inaccurate and "lame" as a meme. Yet we, as the respective voices to our sites/blogs, have the power to change how this meme is viewed. By portraying it in a negative light, readers and other sites will be more hesitant to use it in a serious manner.

Anyway, I think we've both written enough about this subject. First beer is on me. ;)

-- Daedren

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If you think about it, even EQ II did not kill EQ :)

I went to EQ II my self from EQ and was happy for it, but still.

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