Week in Review: Spoiled by war

@Doran7
The significant bit is that subscriptions are flat since around WotLK's launch. WoW stopped growing, which opens a HUGE window of opportunity for competing games to firm themselves on the market and try to gain part of the market share WoW is losing.

@Kyizen
Cant wait, looks amazing :)

@(Unverified)

Despite people ranking your post down, you are correct.

People are leaving Rift at an incredibly fast pace. Their numbers are dropping and they will continue to drop. The game is one giant redundant task and there are a whole 4 warfronts to keep PvPers busy (BTW you will have to run each BG over 100 times to try and get to rank 6 prestige just to be on even ground with the PvPers so by the time you are competitive in PvP you are more that bored with it).

The game pulled people in because they were bored at the time, across all MMOs. Since it was fairly polished (the first week I only ran into a couple quest bugs that prevented me from completeing them. But the game has no substance, no feel of being alive, and most importantly, no fun.

@SnarlingWolf

Really? I've noticed servers are getting more crowded each day. A week or two ago, there were typically three or four servers marked High population while the rest were Medium. Now, I've seen three to four Full with 300+ server queues, several more marked Full, and the rest Medium. Any chart on overall server population has shown a gradual increase in population over the past few weeks.

Maybe before commenting you should check out the data.

@(Unverified)
There marketting was a swipe at all the bashers who claimed that Rift was simply a WoW clone. Had there been no idiotic bashing of that nature, the advertising campaign would have made no sense.

If you don't like something, that's fine, just realize that boycotting something because of their defending against unfair attacks, rather than because you don't actually like the game, is pretty ridiculous. People like that can't be taken seriously.

@Haldurson

The marketing was not a swipe at the bashers. Are you kidding me?

Do you really think the high level marketing exec's troll around forums going "Oh guys, they say this is a WoW clone, let's make fun of it?!"

Of course not. Dont be dumb.

They clearly identified who their target audience was long before the game was even mentioned by forum posters. That target audience was the WoW Player. The marketing was in the works long before Rift was played in Beta and got that reputation.

Its similar to the recent car commercials where they say why bother getting a car that "compares" to a Camry? Why not just get a Camry?

Why would anyone get a MMO that "compares" to WoW? Why not just get WoW?

Market your game on its OWN merits. Market it for why its DIFFERENT and UNIQUE. You dont need marketing hype, if your game is good enough forum hype will be created for you.

@Puremallace

Yes let's misconstrue what he said. He never said rift will "fail" nor did he say the WoW players will come "crawling" back.

Good lord get rid of your petty and skewed biases and learn the english language.

Just because wow is back down to 11.4 million subs, does not mean rift is the sole reason to blame either.

You can hypothesize that rift launch may have lured some people away from WoW, but guess what, wow loses subs a few months after each expansion anyways. But the fact of the matter is WoW is still reaching new subscriber landmarks every once in a while, each expansion is obviously bringing even more players in. Yes people get bored for a while after they play an expansion, and then they unsubscribe while they are inactive, and then guess what, the next expansion hits and many of them resubscribe.

Rift is a bad game, it is hemorrhaging subscribers left and right. And trion is a mediocre company at best. The product they put out was mediocre, their false advertising is mediocre. Their constant references to wow are mediocre... and their revenue is probably mediocre.

@dinhosaur

LOL 'mediocre at best' is probably the single most commonly used expression when a person tries to sound intelligent. Point of fact, Trion has done a great job with bringing more to the table at launch than any MMO ever has, and WoW is not excluded from that list.

If people don't like RIFT, or they are WoW fanboys, or they're just burnt out on MMOs or even sick of the fantasy genre - nobody can fault them for their opinions, but the FACT is that RIFT has the mark of high quality development in many areas in both the technical and gameplay camps, and never before (the closest MMO being WoW which was still not this smooth nor successful a launch), has a game released with no many positives and still enough content and other important staples to keep players interested and NOT "hemorrhage subs" like crazy.

Any losses Trion has suffered have been much less than the drop-offs seen by AoC and WAR, and even Aion if you're talking percentage-based values. Trion has fixed many of my original complaints about the game, and keeping in mind that it is still a brand-spankin' new MMO at only 2 months of age, it is in top-shape. The main problem is that the MMO market isn't comprised of gamers anymore, it's comprised primarily of WoW-kids and a bunch of people who play one game and think they're a gamer because they have an active MMO sub. These people have no respect for the development process, no interest in particulars and just want what they want, and they want it yesterday.

They have no patience for game development, but especially in MMOs where a game will change often drastically - though at small increments - over the course of its lifespan. They want a game to come out, it has to be versatile and complex, full of content with no bugs and perfectly balanced but deep with lots of choices and technically proficient in every aspect. This describes basically no MMO, past or present or likely even future, and is just plain unrealistic.

We gamers (yes, some of us still exist - though most of us are mid-20s or older) know that because of all of the facets of gameplay that come into play in an MMO, and because the game is driven primarily by player interaction, that there is a TON to sort out as developers in any MMO project, which when combined with your new-school noob's extreme lack of conviction or patience and overwhelming sense of entitlement, equals impossible demands on account of ignorance. In all of these ways, RIFT has actually over-delivered, and I know that there are many players like myself who know that even though there may be things I want to see changed or issues I have with the game, that Trion has done a bang-up job so far (while not perfect, as nobody ever has), and my sheer faith in this growing company will keep me paying until they do something unforgivable to shake my faith.

@(Unverified)

First, it's almost impossible to release a new subscription MMO without trying to steal WoW subscribers. WoW has too large a market share, and it's sheer size makes it a competitor to almost any other subscription MMO out there.

Second, I actually like it very much when I see other MMOs that aims for roughly the same niche as WoW, but does things somewhat different. In great part because MMOs can't have mods the way single player games can; so, the player can't change small gameplay details that they disagree with. While WoW is a great game, a few of the design choices Blizzard has made I either flat out disagree or think were better done in other games. With Rift, for example, while I have not played the game, I really liked the idea of every class being a hybrid (i.e., capable of fullfilling more than one role), the 5 saved specs (whereas WoW only has 2), the apparently better solo capability of that game (due to the rifts, where players can go alone and simply help whichever players were already there), appearance tab, being able to change the gear's color, and so on. Each one of those is but a detail, but they each add to my fun, and I will often gladly take fun over polish or history.

@NeverDeath

While I commend your post, there are flaws to what you present.

1. You can not compare rift at launch to wow at launch, why? Because wow's launch was over 6 years ago. Rift is enterting the market now, it is cloning WoW based on WoW's many years of existence, it is not only cloning wow as it was at launch.

2. High quality development team? Have you seen how inefficient their graphics + engine are?

3. They are in fact hemorrhaging subs, players that actively play can tell the drastic decrease in population from launch til now, to claim otherwise is just denial.

4. The dropoff in rift isn't as bad as aoc or WAR? Rift has been out a few months and is already a ghost town on many servers. I wouldn't even be surprised if AOC and WAR had larger initial sales than rift. Trion seems to be scared of releasing their figures as they understand poor figures would add to the concept that their game was a flop.

@dinhosaur

1. WoW has innovated very little in the mechanics aspect in the last 6+ years, when you think about it. Adding vehicles, abusing the hell out of phasing, and adding WG/TB are the only real innovations to the core mechanics of WoW that have been made. They have improved their tech, yes, but most of those improvements have been quality of life improvements and making the game more "accessible." RIFT has many of these same types of QOL features implemented as of 1.2 as well. At the same time, RIFT has different things that WoW doesn't have like rifts and invasions. Regardless of if you like them or not, this is what sets it apart from WoW.

Compared to other recent games such as WAR, AoC, and FF14: I personally believe RIFT is overall a better game than them and had a better late beta and launch period. In comparing the game with other similar "theme park titles," I feel that it is solidly better than most of them. The only title I think that you could even argue is better is WoW.

And personally I still am enjoying RIFT more than WoW right now. I enjoy the rifts and invasions personally. If you hate those types of things then I can see why you like WoW better.

2. It could use some improvement but the game is perfectly playable for me on a 3 year old machine on reasonable settings. The only true performance issues I seem to have is when there are multiple raid groups converging in one spot (such as major events in zones).

Not the most efficient game, more than likely, but older games have performed worse on my machine.

3./4. I see no evidence they are hemorrhaging subs. All claims that this is a fact are dubious at best because I don't see any true data. Right now, NO subscription game but WoW seems to like releasing their sub numbers because it isn't an abhorrently large number. Without official numbers, NOBODY can truly say how many subs there are. Trion seems to be doing the same thing everyone else is doing in regards to subscription number disclosure: not releasing any data.

As far as anecdotal info, I have yet to see evidence of my server becoming a "ghost town." I can't speak for any other servers, but Byriel has seemed pretty active these past couple weeks. I don't even play during peak times, and Stillmoore was still pretty crowded. The Raising Kain event was triggered multiple times, which was pretty awesome, and I saw other major events going on in zones.

In addition, the guild I'm in seems to be growing every day. Hardly seems to be dying from my POV.

Now you could chalk this up to being temporary renewed interest because of 1.2, of course. I could say the same thing about the population variances in WoW during major content patches.

For another set of anecdotal experiences, I saw other players very infrequently while flying around Twilight Highlands and gathering. Based on this experience, I could have easily declared my WoW server a Ghost Town and that the game is dying, but that isn't exactly true even with the loss of 500,000 subscribers. The fact is that there is nothing of value to do in the zone aside from gathering and the Wildhammer dailies, so people simply aren't there. I would say overall that RIFT zones seem more active than WoW zones (aside from major cities) due to the events that can occur. In WoW everyone is either in TB, in town waiting for a queue, or in an instance of some sort.

@NeverDeath

+1 to you, sir.

@Rialle

You can say WoW innovated very little but I fear you have shot yourself in the foot with your own post. It may not constantly be innovating, and it may not have been innovative at launch, but they have slowly integrated features and set standards for those features that the entire industry follows. Things like how they used instancing, phasing, LFD finder, battlegrounds, arena etc.

You can find some of these features in games predating the time in which wow implemented them, but WoW almost always implemented them in a smoother and better developed way and set the standard.

2. This is where your bias comes into play "perfectly" playable on "reasonable" settings is subjective. The game either looks like trash, or it looks good, to make it look good you need a machine that is better than should be required of an mmo that wants any sort of longevity.

3. The evidence is on the servers... where many have become ghost towns, and even the highest populated ones have shown a severe drop in active population. You can be in denial of this, if you are biased, but that's simply the reality of things.

@dinhosaur

1. I didn't say that the industry wasn't copying WoW on several things, what I am saying is that WoW hasn't really changed the core fundamental gameplay aspects since it's inception. It is simply adding QOL features which, of course, other games are going to copy because they want their games to be as accessible as everyone else. (A lot of the QOL features I'm not fond of, personally, because I feel they dumb MMOs down.) This does seem to be part of an overall larger trend in gaming to aim for casual friendliness.

Blizzard tends to be very good at taking other people's ideas, and yes sometimes they are able to deliver them at a higher level of polish. It would not surprise me that they copy features which are very reminiscient of rifts, invasions, PQ's, etc. in their next expansion. Of course, many will probably rave about how innovative WoW's new feature is.

2. I seem to recall acknowledging that the graphics engine could probably be better optimized. By "perfectly" I mean that performance degredation, while it may exist, doesn't cause me to be unable to play. To clarify what I mean because "perfectly" was probably a poor choice of wording, I use midranged settings and find the game to be playable. The frame rate tends to suffer when there are a large number of players near me, but I can still functionally play the game in its current state (for me the performance is better than in beta). Other players may have a different experience depending on their computers. I also personally think that on mid-ranged settings, RIFT looks better than many other MMOs (including WoW).

Of course WoW, a six year old game that purposefully uses cartoony graphics is going to perform better. Just like Quake 3 will perform better than Crysis on current systems.

3. What server do/did you play on? It appears our ancedotal experiences are in contradiction... probably because they are ancedotal! As expected the game isn't super crowded at all times of day like it was at launch... but neither is WoW. From my experience, over the past few months it seems that I am more likely to run into and (more importantly) actually interact with other players in Stillmoore, IPP, and Shimmersand than I am in any WoW zone except for Tol Barad and sitting around in town. I would hardly consider my RIFT server a ghost town by any measure, because I still regularly see and group with other players. Now there may very well be some servers (lower population ones) that are really suffering. I could say the same of several WoW low pop severs. The crossrealm dungeon finder, of course, helps prevent Blizzard from ever having to merge servers.

Stating I am in "denial" when I've seen what I consider to be high player activity over the past two weeks seems a bit short sighted of you. The fact is that neither of us cannot know for sure how many subscribers RIFT has without Trion explicitly stating a figure or if they start merging servers. There is a possibility they really have lost a lot of subscribers, but there is also a possibility that fewer subscribers are logging in every waking hour like they did at launch.