MMORPG's do not survive in this era of gaming

[Kittahsmash]

Oh I see. Thanks for educating me. I personally like ffxiv's approach better, that they try to keep the general public from having the story spoiled. Gave patch days a much bigger community feel in my eyes. Like we were all logging on and experiencing the story together.

I agree! Not having to worry about story spoilers is great Though as someone who DOES do datamining...I've come across some pictures by accident during a patch (like the pictures that show up during the credits after the MSQ) that completely spoiled something for me T_T Never fun to have that happen, and it would suck to have someone else pull a move like that on me out in the wild.

I'm glad that (most) of the people who do datamining seem to have at least a small amount of ethics when it comes to that stuff. Not like in WoW, where the second a PTR gets datamined and posted people are blabbing about stuff everywhere with no regard for anything...they seem to go by the logic of "well I don't care about the story, so nobody else does either"

[AcidicSyn]

I do remember

member feeling safe?

[Florena]

Is it? WoW is, surprisingly, but are the other games really doing that well? Maybe FFXIV.

The way I took OP is that the games have subs to a greater or lesser degree but they're not really MMo RPGs if by that we mean 'large persistent worlds that the player discoverd via exploration' because people don't do that as much as they did 15-20 years ago.

This isn't anyone's fault either. It's the nature of the beast. We're not going to NOT use YouTube, Wowhead and the like.

NOTE: I would define a thriving genre as one that continually gets new entrants because people see opportunity to both do something new and to make money there. What's the last new MMO that is still around with, say, over 100k active players? ESO, maybe?

The games are what they are regardless of whether players look at things on youtube etc.

FFXIV it doing well and is on the tail end of its most successful expansion yet, though of course it's not pulling crazy peak WOW numbers from WOTLK etc.

[Wilfire]

Vanilla world was designed with exploration in mind

This hasn't been the case since MoP

[Scarnage86]

I think OP miss his only valid point, it's not the datamining that ruins the game but "the internet"
We got to much information analazyed and checked to perfection that any sense of freedom and choice we get from the game is crushed under the data analyze, simulation, theorycrafter, forum, expert and go on...
Think what happen if we remove....
Site guide
Site forum
Datamining
Theorycraft
Addons
Streaming

And the only information u can get is from some ppl in your guild, or by the simple and oldest "try, error, fix, retry" method

[Wangming]

Yeah, it's not going to happen with WoW. The information was always available to us - it was just a question about how intensely and slavishly we'd pursue that knowledge.

That being said, FFXIV's process did manage to preserve just a hint of that mystery - that thrill of booting up an MMO for the first time.

It is these small details that allow multiple MMOs to stay alive. Maybe not to flourish, but to stay alive. Granted FFXIV does more than stay alive, but for instance I really like how campires work in TERA, how the free to play system and the mail system works in SWTOR.

[Drusin]

Seems like an MMO to me

- - - Updated - - -

I think OP miss his only valid point, it's not the datamining that ruins the game but "the internet"
We got to much information analazyed and checked to perfection that any sense of freedom and choice we get from the game is crushed under the data analyze, simulation, theorycrafter, forum, expert and go on...
Think what happen if we remove....
Site guide
Site forum
Datamining
Theorycraft
Addons
Streaming

And the only information u can get is from some ppl in your guild, or by the simple and oldest "try, error, fix, retry" method

The game would reduce itself down in complexity to meet the lowest common denominator. Similar to what would happen if Blizz banned DBM or WeakAuras

[ethuun]

I was excited to dive into this thread to talk about the inevitable takeover of mobile gaming, or maybe the tech-side of this will servers and sharding, or even the MMORPG business model of monthly subscriptions versus microtransactions. Instead we're talking about... datamining? You may be right about MMORPGs not having as large of a hold on this era, but leaks and datamines have no horse in this race.

[pacotaco]

The games are what they are regardless of whether players look at things on youtube etc.

FFXIV it doing well and is on the tail end of its most successful expansion yet, though of course it's not pulling crazy peak WOW numbers from WOTLK etc.

Yeah, I think there's a false sense of "genre death" around MMORPGs. This is in part WoW's "fault".

Why WoW came to be so popular:
- Blizzard had a very good standing with its fans, so the hype was high.
- The genre was niche, so not much competition.
- The MMORPGs were subscription based, that limits the amount of other games your players play.
- Blizzard way of making genres more accessible and popular outside of their niche.
- WoW made critical mass with player population, everyone wanted to play because they knew anyone that played it (it reached 12mill players, when before it a MMORPG was successful if it had around 100k players).

Why the competition flopped and the genre crashed:
- They flooded the market with hundreds of clones just to jump in the car.
- They though they could steal Blizzard players with subpar products.
- They ignored the fact that people just can spent a set amount of cash and time on a hobby.


It's the same thing that happened with MOBAs and LoL and it's happening with TV streaming services and Netflix.

[Bumkin]

tbc was the best expansion and we will soon get it back, its gonna be amazing, we going home boys

[Mehrunes Dagon]

With increasing internet speeds for everyone, cloud gaming will be the solution to the datamining problem - if that is a problem for folks. All the information is in Blizzard's servers and players just stream the game. There will be no downloading all content to players' machines before content release; not even for expansions. The whole population and data-gatherers resort to sharing information organically: wikis with verification, chat platforms, streamers, etc. Current databases like MMOC and WoWHead will suffer a great scarcity of content, as all information will need to be crowdsourced. We'll all go back to screenshots if we want to see what a model looks instead of getting the actual 3D model on our browsers.

[Otimus]

WoW has always been a glorified lobby of instanced stuff. You just had to do a little more work to get to the instanced stuff.

Yes, I do believe that an MMORPG almost entirely relying on instances for the bulk of it's content while ignoring anything of worth in it's actual world is bad form for the genre, and WoW is responsible for basically murdering the genre, but it's not like WoW used to be one way and is now another. It's always been heavily instance based.

Far more harmful to the genre has been trying to think you need millions of subs to thrive and trying to superficially appeal to everyone. Also WoW's fault (but not maliciously. It's not like it's it's fault it got super popular by having a big name and appealing to the lowest common denominator and everyone tried to copy that). Now the genre is wrapped in so much baggage on all sorts of levels.. most people would probably just rather play a different, more fun genre that apes all the dopamine rushes that an MMORPG can give, without being an MMORPG, because almost every online game now has that sort of stuff. Levels, loot, experience, parties, etc. Most people aren't going to sit and deal with a game where they can't even fully attempt to play it without some other people allowing them to. That sort of baggage.


Also, MMOs that aren't WoW or the Final Fantasy one are thriving because of whales. They'll keep thriving because of whales. What is dead are the huge budget ones, probably outside of those IPs, that take many years of development and tons of cash.

[MoanaLisa]

WoW is no longer an MMORPG technically...

Massive
Multi-player
Online

No, it still qualifies. You don't get to define industry terms just to suit your complaints. I might agree that it's not much of an RPG any longer but even there, it still qualifies.

Most MMO's that have been around for a while are doing OK. You can't measure MMO 'success' by the freakish early response to WoW, which has never even been close to equaled by anyone.

I'll agree that the genre is in a tougher place than it used to be but hardly for any of the reasons to be found in the OP. That said, I loathe data mining but a clever company can use it to their advantage; keep hidden the stuff they want, expose what they imagine will help sell games. I presume that since you're against any of the game being exposed ahead of time you want public betas to stop too. Not a great idea.

EDIT: Completely sign on to Finata's post at #2.