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Posted: Nov 7th 2009 8:37AM Wisdomandlore said

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The "Give it time!"and "You can't possibly judge an MMO in a month!" crowds are the fallback defense of fanboys and lazy designers. Certainly many MMOs get better as you progress, but that's exactly the problem in the industry. I shouldn't have to grind through 25 boring levels in Aion to get to the real fun. I shouldn't have to wait weeks or months for bugs to be fixed or a promised feature to be implemented. Developers need to treat an MMO launch like any other product. 95% of things should work. Players should actually be able to log into the game. And the things promised on the box should be available from day one.

The sooner we can get away from the "Give it time!" argument, the sooner we can have quality MMOs again.

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Posted: Nov 7th 2009 10:38AM MrGutts said

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Well said. Way to many people are taking the "Give it time" as the norm now. The paying customer base is now brain washed into thinking it.. Sorry but if your selling a product as a business, then your product needs to be at ready to go, if not then push the release and wait till it is.
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Posted: Nov 7th 2009 3:55PM (Unverified) said

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My 2nd fav MMO of all time I did not get into until a year after its release. LOTRO really took time to mature, but I also think it had a solid base built into it. I have played alot of MMO's in the 10 years I've been an MMO player, I feel that I have a pretty good handle on what I think works for me. I think Warhammer has extreme potential in being a good game, will it ever draw the crowds they hoped? I don't think so. The game itself is not so flawed.

Age of Conan on the other hand is nothing like they advertised it for so long. Do they have a working game now? Apparently. Though if you compared what it is now to what their websites were hyping a year before it was finally released, you will realize its a flawed base with band aids.

While I think there are many people who give a game the first month and leave it for silly reasons, or because its not as polished and content heavy as a 5+ year old game, I think there are several veterans out there now that can just judge a game by their experiences. The market IS getting mature, there is no longer any room for the "get whatever out there" guys like Funcom. Its antiquated business tactics that used to work in this industry.

With the increase of veteran players choosing their games wisely for the right reasons, also comes the rise in percentage of people choosing to leave games for the right reasons. For every person playing WoW just because they've invested so much time in it, there's people playing WoW because they actually love the mechanics. For every person that left Warhammer just because it wasn't polished as much as WoW, there were people leaving Warhammer because they did not like the look of a PVP grind. For every person that left Aion because it was too cartoony, there were people that left because they disliked the narrative.

Its reaching a point to where I really do think there can finally be games that pull people away from WoW due to the fanbase of MMO's finally re-maturing. The sad part is that there are not alot of developers that believe this. There's still alot of Atari ET's coming down the road. MMO's take so much resources, and it seems like they believe they can just throw whatever they want into a game, add in a long experience progression and boom they'll have a success. Sadly instead of improving their game concepts, people like Bill Roper seem more interested in maximizing the amount of money they can squeeze out of their subscribers in a short amount of time, instead of trying to make new games that are good enough to keep people loyal.
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