How to burn a bridge that is already on fire.

I just read a post on the ancient gaming noob about the EA employee that basically dragged out all the inside drama from Warhammer Online explaining how it pretty much was written off as a failure and how pretty much anything to do with that group was failure ...even bleeding off into SWTOR.

Gaming wise Warhammer online was very good, fun, fast paced. Its major flaw was twofold - no good endgame and no third realm. Pointed out among other things:  unrealistic goals, out of touch and lying management, a dramatically over optimistic public spokesperson, and bad marketing.

The most proud accomplishment in SWTOR was voice overs which I admit they were good ..movie quality even. I have never wanted a game to work more ...it kills me it failed. I believe had it been F2P to start with it may not be in its last days. But they spent soooo much money on production the IP is lost.

So here we are in MWO another tabletop, and a well known IP. F2P from the start selling a founders program that has made them over 5 million and the game isn't even in open beta. So far the glitches are worked on weekly. The advertising is not overly promising and they are listening to their testers.

They have great ambitions for things to come. Many, many people in the company are involved in the public.

So what do you guys thing ...are you so caught up in other games you do not know how much time you can invest in MWO or are you going all in?

I am enjoying MWO so much right now its hard to even concentrate on other games.

Open Beta begins 10-16 and what does it mean.

Wow  ... I mean we all knew it was happening at some point. Everthing I had read indicated that it was happening on Oct 16th; however, all the people I talked to in voice chat were like "No way, NO WAY will they open beta in the next month or even by the end of the year".

Timeline:
September 21st: PC Gamer cover announced with in game mech skin and bobblehead
October 3rd: NDA dropped and "Take Your Best Shot" contest announced
October 9th: CryEngine upgrade and new trial mech rotation and Open Beta announcement
October 16th: Rest economy and open beta begins and new skins and bobbleheads available.

They have a lot planned ...in fact, too much; in my opinion ...essentially with a F2P game going to open beta is the same as live (with the exception of the knowledge that everything can and probably will be reset again for go live). This is huge news; this will open the gates to noobs and lots of them.

The game on average has about 2500 players with open beta I expect that to triple (between 7 and 10k) at least, at first. Unless MWO fixes in game lounge or chat - pugs will be steamrolled until they hate the game. I remember when many games withheld the population numbers making it seem like they were bigger than they were or maybe to pretend to be smaller. I know while I was playing Warhammer Online there were many statements that if they open too many servers to meet demands then close or merge some it would be a sign of a dying game ...and it did seem to indicate that.

So what do you think? Do you think this is too soon? Do you think this is a huge mistake or one they had to do to grasp the momentum they have been working on?

BTW: Check out my video that I submitted for the contest. It is dubstep so if you hate that then just mute it. I would like more feedback.

What is success in a gaming MMO?

First
What is an MMO?
MASSIVE - Supporting Hundreds of players.
MULTI-PLAYER - must allow multiple people to play simultaneously in a persistent world
ONLINE - must be online to play

Second
What is success?
Well no one will give the same answer. The truth is success is a measurement of happiness and money. For example, if I owned my own business and barely made any money but I loved what I do - I would consider that a success. But say I had creditors ...then I owe money and I am also quite unhappy. What if I make enough to pay my creditor but cannot pay my employees what they deserve and they are unhappy.

Now look at the gaming industry MMOs in particular.
The most successful game in the history of gaming World of Warcraft. Even if you haven't played it I bet someone you know close to you has. WoW became the standard of what gaming companies thought they should be. So now every single game that comes out says well its like WoW but the setting is different or Wow doesn't include this we do.
When someone steps outside of what makes WoW successful they either fail, or are looked down on like a failure.
EQ2 has been running as long as WoW ...it has a deep lore, made players happy with wants and fulfilled many roles. Yet no where near the player base of WoW, gone free to play, yet no advertising.
Warhammer Online - huge opening day, too big in fact they underestimated the need for servers and had long queues. They resorted in opening new servers and after the newness wore off they had to shutdown and combine servers. While they had lots of testing they failed by not including a 3rd realm for combat and could not support huge battles when 300 people entered a combat zone the servers just could not handle the load.
SWTOR - after a huge bump and push to take over the top slot ...failed as of this writing it looks like they are combining ALL servers just to get a reign on population. Froogle
Guild Wars 2 - nothing truly original and yet, so far, highly successful. 2 million subscribers when it opened.

There is no magical formula. WoWs numbers are slipping even though they have a huge expansion coming out. Almost every game on the horizon is free to play. How much time are you willing to invest ... and how does that equate to money and success for the company making the game? Can they paid developers with that success? Do companies just keep making games as fast as possible and move to the next one until they make a successful self running game and then come back to it and "fix" it? At what point is it considered a success?

Do you get spam in your mail?

So yesterday, I see a tweet from Russ Bullock (President - Piranha Games Inc. - Developing MechWarrior Online ) that indicates that if you are not in the closed beta by now you are doing it all wrong.

"If your not in Closed Beta for #MechWarrior Online yet, why not? Is your Closed Beta profile at 100%.Make it so letting in huge numberss now"

Now maybe you did get in but it was marked as spam by your email reader so go check that first.

This leads me to a funny story (well atleast my friends think so) that we laugh about to this day.

When I say "we"; I mean "we" had this thing going about 3 years ago where a group of us from work played games together about once a week. We went through some games, if we liked it we kept playing but mostly each game lasted about 3 months. RL would get in the way or we would just get frustrated with trying to get together ...whatever, we burned out; collectively as a group.

We were playing Warhammer Online ...now its a great game, fun pvp, interesting classes, pretty easy to stay together. But it requires a lot of running back and forth if you want to stay in combat you must fight in one location and either sit and wait for combat or run to the next destination and pry it away from the other side. There is not much fun in waiting so you run.

We had just help turn the tide in a gruesome battle and were running to the next hotspot. Six of us ...on the way to the next location we stopped at a village to repair armor, bio break, grabbing a drink and whatnot.

Well you know how is it ...in a group ...one person is a bonehead. Todays bonehead was XXXXXXX (name changed to protect the innocent). It was an epic fail but everyone is getting ready to go we are all lined up to run to the next area. Except bonehead is not moving we are watching his icon on the minimap and he is just completely stopped. "Let's go," says our commander. Everyone says they are ready except bonehead. "Hey" he says "you get spam in your mail?!?" It makes me laugh everytime I hear someone say spam now ...it was aggravating then and it is funny as hell now (to us anyway).

Every once in a while while we are together you will hear someone say "hey, you get spam in you mail" for no reason at all. It is funny.

Future MMOs and PvP

http://kotaku.com/5938199/somebody-has-already-hit-level-80-in-guild-wars-2

Somebody Has Already Hit Level 80 In Guild Wars 2


Its amazing the game is barely out (launched on August 28th) and here we are - a person at level cap. In a pvp game; the comments indicate that crafting levels you faster than playing or doing pvp.

I am personally burnt out on fantasy style MMOs - for years I have logged in and played with friends and people I had met. What made this fun was it was world wide and I thought it was uber-cool to be playing with them one night and the next day at work discussing it ...yeah my friends in Austrailia or Russia said (whatever they said) that was cool to me.

I don't roleplay so maybe I am missing out on that but its just not me. In fact, I secretly laugh at those who do roleplay its awkward to invite other people when you got a very plain American trying to act British ...yeah awkward.

WoW in one corner and Everyone else in the other. You could say well WoW is not the leader anymore and I would agree with you. Worldwide it holds the largest population but does that mean its the best ....I would say not anymore. The formula mmorgp is not working anymore - people want something different and this is splitting gamers in every direction.

Warhammer to me was the pinaccle of pvp, however, a few broken patches and server consolidations, hardware issues with so many people in one zone and a lack of a third realm killed the game for me.

EQ2 held my attention the longest - even with no friends playing if you are bored in EQ2 you aren't doing it right. There is so much to do and so much to see the world is expansive and the quest are endless. The graphics are better than any game I have ever played with everything turned up all the way up you will find yourself turning them back down because it is too much input for your eyes. Imagine if everything you did casted a spell which turned on police lights and strobes your eyes would hate you.

DDO great game. In fact so close to tabletop DnD I cannot play it - I would rather do tabletop. Unless you want to run the same dungeons over and over.

So what does all this mean:

It means to stand out you have to think differently, try something new. Who will step up? What company will hire a visionary, an artist that is willing to make the next best thing. Will it be PC, console or a combo? Will it be pve, pvp, crafting, solo or team based or guild based, f2p or p2p or p2w? How will communications be handled?