Is Legion the best MMO on the market?

[kenn9530]

WoW is the best MMO on the market for the vast majority of people.

I hear ESO, GW2 and a few others come up but I feel they are ultimately niche picks.

there is a difference between best and most popular, reason why it has the most players is it was the first out of all the current MMOs and people have put years of work into the game and they don't want to lose all that work so they continue to play.

WoWs best days were in WotlK, it has gone downhill and any real accomplishment in the game has disappeared.

[Seefer]

Does revenue directly translate into enjoyment for the players? Does how much PROFIT a game is making actually mean anything in terms of player enjoyment? Maybe, depending on how much of that profit is funneled back into development. But the development budget isn't a guarantee of quality. Many mobile-phone games use predatory business models to make ridiculous amounts of profit, but are non-the-less terrible games.

People really need to stop using profits as a measure of fun or enjoyment they have with the game.

Well, it seems every other MMORPG out there copies WoWs style so *shrug*, even the beloved FF 14 copies the "Level, dungeon, raid, Tank/Healer/DPS" formula so they must be doing something right.

[WowIsDead64]

The most successful and the best - are two different things. Sole fact, that it still has biggest number of subs (even if it's just 3M of players) - doesn't mean it's the best. It just means, that Blizzard know, how to keep players subbed (via RNG, time-gating and grind). But Wow still misses many features, other MMOs have. Player housing - one of the most noticeable ones. MMO can't be considered to be "the best" without this feature, sorry. Open world - is the second one. Simply cuz bunch of small CRZed/Sharded pseudo-instances - just can't be called "open world". Also game is still way too PVP/competition-biased - in true PVE/cooperative game other players just can't be your enemies, especially when they're from your own faction. And Wow still misses such basic features, as implicit auto-grouping with other players. And many others, like armour dyeing.

[Deleted]

Thread title doesn't go well with the question you're asking in your post. I can't tell if few ppl in this thread either reply to your title or post.

[clevin]

The only people who could answer this are those who've played, recently, most of the other competitive MMOs. People who haven't simply don't have the experience to know one way or the other. And it needs to be recent play because what a game was like years ago isn't relevant anymore than saying "well I played WoW when Cata was current so I know what it's like now..."

[DesoPL]

"All I want is games to die that other people enjoy because I don't enjoy them." That's pretty one sided, I hate LoL and mobas in general, but I would never want them to die.

Remind me, when was any good MMO, nearly close good to WoW happend? And don't tell FFXIV, because this argument is too much lame lately because most people is using it.

[Onikaroshi]

Remind me, when was any good MMO, nearly close good to WoW happend? And don't tell FFXIV, because this argument is too much lame lately because most people is using it.

Just cause you don't like an argument doesn't make it a viable argument, FFXIV is successful with a large subscriber base. There is really only 2 full and popular subscription based MMOs on the market (there's some smaller MMOs that are subscriber based, but nothing big) so of course FFXIV gets brought up when talking about wow. Other that that, ESO is still very popular, the base game has sold over 8.5 million copies including 1.5 million between June 2016 and Morrowind release this year.

No MMO will ever reach WoW popularity, unless there somehow ends up being some RPO: OASIS style thing that replaces most mundane points of life. It has already been discussed how WoW on its own is an anomaly, it should have NEVER reached the 12 mil it once had, but it did.

Point being, there is plenty of successful MMO's out there, but MMO-C and the MMO community in general deems it a failure if it doesn't reach WoW level subscribers, which is just silly.

For successful (as in still making new content) mmos we have: WoW, ESO, FFXIV, Tera, Defiance, The Secret World: Legends, Skyforge, Blade and Soul, Runescapes still kicking, Neverwinter, EVE online if you like spreadsheets (:P), SWTOR is still kicking, GW2, and probably more that hold enough people to make content doable, and that's all you need, I only play with maybe 40 people a week out of the millions subscribed.

You can't just base success of a game off if it reaches WoW levels, because no one ever will, MMOs are becoming niche again.

[HitRefresh]

I'm not sure I follow your reasoning.

World of Warcraft: Legion is the current iteration of the game. Even if you don't buy the expansion which grants access to the Legion content, you are still playing Legion.

The difference isn't even semantics. They're the same thing.

Well, you could talk about playing on private servers of previous expansions (especially if official classic servers became a reality), but I agree with what you're saying.

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Player housing - one of the most noticeable ones. MMO can't be considered to be "the best" without this feature, sorry.

Why? Because you can't have your shitty Sims within your MMO that drops the quality? Player housing is a side feature just like pet battles, it's not essential to the gameplay.

[G3istly]

Why? Because you can't have your shitty Sims within your MMO that drops the quality? Player housing is a side feature just like pet battles, it's not essential to the gameplay.

For you, maybe, but the fact that this is supposed to be an RPG but they've stripped away any actual role-playing elements is an insult to anyone who craves depth to their game and not a mindless grind for randomly dropping "Legendary" items.

[SirCowdog]

Don't you think that WoW is pretty much a known quantity by now? Doesn't infrastructure matter? Is 100K players on a server a completely different thing than 20K scattered across five realms? The point: Your game experience is not necessarily determined by overall population numbers and the value of knowing them decreases as a game becomes a known quantity.

That's a fair point, and one that I sort of hinted at in a reply to another poster when I said that most MMOs generally only need 20 regular players logged on at the same time in order to experience the content.

But who is Blizzard/Activision really talking to when they have their quarterly calls? They are talking to business people. Players have co-opted and weaponized the information in those calls for their own purposes but the calls aren't really for us. Activision/Blizzard has now picked a metric for user engagement that represents their entire product line instead of a fragmented strategy in which one game is reported out one way and other in a completely different way. This makes complete sense. Complaining that the AVTI quarterly stock calls are trying to make their business look good is just mind-boggling. That's exactly what they're for. What sense does it make for a company to push out some wildly varying cyclic metric for a single game that doesn't demonstrate--and can mislead--how the overall entity called Activision/Blizzard is really doing?

First, I wasn't complaining. I was simply pointing out that the information wasn't as useful to players as subscription numbers. As you rightly pointed out, subscription numbers ultimately weren't all the useful to players either. But when it's all we have to work with, it shouldn't be surprising that it gets misused.

My overarching point being that players should have more useful information. Things like server activity and overall population can be used to determine which server to play on, or what times of day to play, etc. This is especially important when a server transfer costs as much or more than a month of subscription. So it's not necessarily that I think MAUs are bad, or that Blizzard is bad for using them instead of subscription numbers. In a perfect world they'd be giving out that info for business purposes, but also making other more player-centric info available as well.

Blizzard has every interest in not reporting subscription numbers in exactly the same way that none of their competition reports subscription numbers. No one else does it that I know of. If you make a decision to go play FFXIV you do it without having even an official clue as to how many paid subscribers they have in a month. If you decide to sample any of the F2P offerings (Rifts, SW:TOR, and others) you do so without having any idea at all how many people have subscribed to their monthly "premium" plans (which most of them have). What Blizzard has done is to fall into line with the business practice of most every other MMO out there.

And that's a sad statement of the practices of the market, IMO. As I said before, Blizzard is a leader in the market and should be setting a good example, not falling in line with the companies that are trying to play catch-up to them.

And subscriptions should not, in the end, have anything to do with a personal call as to what the "best" MMO on the market is. Neither does it have anything to do with whatever personal metric you use to determine what your best or favorite MMO is. Saying something like "World of Warcraft is the best MMO on the planet because of X subscriptions" is just dumb. It's like saying "You know that Transformers Movie that everyone went to see? I believe that it's a great movie because everyone went to see it."

Hmm...I don't necessarily know that I agree with that. At the very least a canny consumer will take notice that something is extremely popular and take a look at the data to determine if it's something they might be interested in. Especially when talking about MMOs, where community and population are very important aspects of the genre, the number of subs the overall game has could potentially be very useful information. But like I said, I think that it's only one piece of info, and more should be available in a general sense.

I also agree that WoW is a pretty good game. But as I've said several times, I think it should be setting a better example. And that game companies, in general, should be a little more consumer friendly.

[Trond]

World of Warcraft is

[SirCowdog]

Well, it seems every other MMORPG out there copies WoWs style so *shrug*, even the beloved FF 14 copies the "Level, dungeon, raid, Tank/Healer/DPS" formula so they must be doing something right.

Does the design template have ANYTHING to do with the profits being made, though? Maybe, in the sense that whichever game is making the most profits is probably setting the example for the rest. That much is obvious. But does that translate somehow to whether or not you, as a player, enjoy the game? Does the simple fact that WoW makes more profit than FFXIV determine which of the two games you enjoy most?

I can appreciate a higher-end discussion about what business practices effect game development, and thus gameplay, as a ramification of those practices. That's an argument that actually makes sense. But when when someone uses profits as a defense of why they like a certain aspect of a game more than another, my bullshit-radar starts going off. WoW is not a "better" game for players simply because it's the leader in the market.

[Dystemper]

Why would they end something that is continually profitable for them just because you dislike it?

Also there aren't many MMOs that require full on effort anymore. Most if not all are accessible to anyone.

Because its a company run by share holders and a Board. It could still be slightly profitable but if the decline keeps going and increases, they will kill it for fear of it harming the companies Brand® Happens quite a lot. This is not the same company it once was. As the game gets older it actually costs more to maintain and service. Everything from servers to the coding. They already fired the Musical composer who was responsible for most of the games great scores in a cost cutting move.

[huth]

Because its a company run by share holders and a Board. It could still be slightly profitable but if the decline keeps going and increases, they will kill it for fear of it harming the companies Brand® Happens quite a lot. This is not the same company it once was. As the game gets older it actually costs more to maintain and service. Everything from servers to the coding. They already fired the Musical composer who was responsible for most of the games great scores in a cost cutting move.

That must surely be why they massively enlarged the WoW team before Legion, as well. A cost cutting measure.

[Seramore]

I'm not playing it so no.

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If you're not playing WoW, why are you even in this thread?

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Because its a company run by share holders and a Board. It could still be slightly profitable but if the decline keeps going and increases, they will kill it for fear of it harming the companies Brand® Happens quite a lot. This is not the same company it once was. As the game gets older it actually costs more to maintain and service. Everything from servers to the coding. They already fired the Musical composer who was responsible for most of the games great scores in a cost cutting move.

WoW is doing fine, they won't cut it off any time soon. It's honestly cute that you think money could be a potential issue in the future development wise. There are six franchises that Blizzard is making money off of, if money ever becomes a concern then there will be more to worry about than WoW shutting down.

[Lazuli]

WoW is the best MMO on the market for the vast majority of people.

I hear ESO, GW2 and a few others come up but I feel they are ultimately niche picks.

Imo they are niche because they usually have 1 or 2 things they do much better than WoW but that's the only focus point, as a whole the other MMOs are shallow compared to this game. At least that's how I see it.

[Dystemper]

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If you're not playing WoW, why are you even in this thread?

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WoW is doing fine, they won't cut it off any time soon. It's honestly cute that you think money could be a potential issue in the future development wise. There are six franchises that Blizzard is making money off of, if money ever becomes a concern then there will be more to worry about than WoW shutting down.

Slightly better then WOD at the same time is not doing better. WOW makes money because of cash shop items and player services and now the wow Token. If they continue like they have done for the past 2 expansions then no the game wont be supported. It is a almost 14 year old game. They have been bleeding subs since the end of WOTLK. WOD hastened it, legion brouht a few back but was unable to keep them subbed. I exp[ect to seea rather large shake up announced before the next expansion lands

[caervek]

Just asking if Legion is the best MMO on the market currently?

Nope, my local video game store still have a copy of WotLK for sale XD