Best MMORPG?

[Zenslinger]

I don't care about profit.  I care about getting my money's worth out of a game I buy.  That's not going to happen with MMORPGs.

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If you were playing it 70-80 hours a month (and some people are way up over 100 hours), you would be getting your money's worth. Two or three cents an hour?

[trulez]

I vote for EVE Online because it's revolutionary graphics(beats many offline games by a mile) and fresh take on MMOPRGs(not another fantasy sword swinger).

 

WoW is so....plastic, eww.

[mkreku]

I don't care about profit.  I care about getting my money's worth out of a game I buy.  That's not going to happen with MMORPGs.

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If you were playing it 70-80 hours a month (and some people are way up over 100 hours), you would be getting your money's worth. Two or three cents an hour?

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Remember, you pay no cents per hour in a single player RPG (unless you include the purchase price).. That sure beats whatever cents per hour of a MMORPG.

[EnderAndrew]

Everquest 2 is the best looking MMO I've ever seen, graphically speaking.

[Dhruin]

I never really thought too much about the profit aspect, but just to put it in perspective:

 

WoW sold 240,000 copies in 24 hours (http://ve3d.ign.com/articles/569/569851p1.html), if just those users stay on for 1 month @ $15 that's 3.6 million per/month. 

 

I work  for a company which creates online courses for various trades.  We have now 82 servers in an offsite datacenter running all the online content we have.  Our yearly cost is just under 1.1 million, plus salaries and such to run those courses.

 

That's a ton of cash per month to be hauling in ... makes that $15 I'm shelling out p/month seem a bit less resonable.  I would love to see those internal numbers for Blizzard.  I know they started with 40 servers and expanded to over 80 now, but they still have to making a pretty decent profit on all this.

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Shouldn't you amortize the cost of development? Microsoft pulled the plug on Mythica at ~$40 million and that was still a fair way from market, so let's use that as a rough yardstick. How long should they have to operate before they get a return on investment, taking into account the risk that it will succeed in the first place and the costs of continued development?

 

Anway, I think MMOs are pretty reasonable value if you have the time to invest. Can't say which is the best but I had the most fun with A Tale in the Desert and the least with Eve Online but I'm not much of a MMO player.

[Zaine]

Ive played Star wars galaxies. That got boring too fast. It has nothing to make you keep wanting to play. FFXI was fun for a month, having to do odd jobs for gil(like fishing or making armor or weapons for the auction house) got annoying pretty fast. Being forced to team up with people was another downside. At the moment Im playing City Of Heros. Been playing for about 2 months and I havnt gotten bored of it yet. Id suggest giving it a try, and come this March hopefully City Of Villians will be hitting stores. Now that should be good times.

[Azazis]

I'm getting WoW. Followed it for the last few years and it looks amazing. Normally I wouldn't buy any MMO game for a monthly fee, but this one seems worth it. And people pondering about why MMO have monthly fees should start think for a change.

[EnderAndrew]

Not only did Blizzard have to pay for the cost of development, but many of those initial accounts were beta testers on free accounts.

 

How much does Blizzard pay in marketing?

 

How much does Blizzard pay to GMs?

 

How much does Blizzard pay in tech support?

 

How much does Blizzard pay for bandwidth?

 

How much of the $15 really hits Blizzard's bank accounts?

[213374U]

How much of the $15 really hits Blizzard's bank accounts?

That only depends on the number of people they manage to fool into wasting their money.

 

No one said that making MMORPGs is cheap OR profitable. Yet another reason NOT to.

[EnderAndrew]

Blizzard has the capital to take that risk. That's their call.

 

Either way, I don't think companies are out of line for what they charge for an MMO, especially Blizzard. I've heard nothing but good things about WoW. Most MMO's launch with bugs, lag, and general pains in the butt. Blizzard paid lots of money upfront for far more GMs and servers than they believed they needed.

 

They wanted to protect the initial investments of launch players. That says something.

[mkreku]

Their problem has always been that they've underestimated their own product: when they let people apply for beta-testing in Europe, they expected 3000 applications. They got 30,000! When they released the game, they counted on around 100,000 people creating accounts the first day. There were 250,000 accounts the first day! Uhm, that sounds too much.. Maybe it was the first weekend? I wrote a news article about it, but it slipped my mind. Anyhow, you get my point, just don't trust the account numbers with your lives

[Darque]

OMG, I wonder if the servers handled it.

[Llyranor]

I've observed my brother play in the WoW beta for many hours. Never had I seen anything remotely approaching what I consider fun.

 

Fetch quests != fun.

 

Pointless leveling != fun.

 

Socializing with morons != fun.

 

I wouldn't play this game even if it didn't have a monthly fee. Heck, with my precious limited gaming time, I wouldn't play it if I was PAID.

 

Guild Wars, on the other hand, as already provided me with hours of fun during the beta. My guild is going very smoothly, and guild battles have been truly epic. I've spent countless hours simply planning my character (which I do for sp RPGs too anyway).

 

Bias > u

[Ginthaeriel]

My friends all play WOW, so that's what I'm going to play.

 

Having friends play the same game as you makes whatever game it is approximately 10,000% more fun.

 

Of course, you don't have any friends do you, Visc, seeing as how you live in Iowa?

 

ZING!!!

 

Just kidding, sorry, I had to say that one. It was too good to hold in.

[romeo_longsword]

One of the asspect of a MMORPG is that, they get you hooked from the player interaction.

 

I did expressed that I would not pay to play as in a monthly fee, but I have actaully played 2 online games of these type, UO and Asheorn;s Call(sp), both of them got really boring after about 2 weeks, but during this time I got to hook up with some good people and were doing guild things. Its quite evil how they use this vertual friendship to get you hooked.

[213374U]

Socializing with morons != fun.

Priceless.

 

Perhaps you don't realize the relevance of that statement, but alas, that's what MMORPGs are all about. If you remove that, there would be no difference between a MMORPG and a SP CRPG. But since day after day the gaming community becomes less and less immature and is ever increasingly moronic, odds are, you will find 3 f*ckwads for each good player. I'd rather not waste my time searching for good players in a sea of f*ckwads.

 

There is still the issue of the 'sense of purpose' which a MMORPG lacks altogether. When I play a game, I want the game objective to be clear from the beginning. But since a MMORPG has no objective whatsoever other than 'keep going' for the most part, that also conflicts with my definition of fun. Perhaps some other people with a whole lot more of time on their hands would enjoy wasting their time in such fashion, but I do not.

[Azazis]

I'm playing WoW with a group of people I know. That eliminates the search for f*ckwads. ( already found them =p )

 

That said. MMO's aren't for everyone. No problem. I personally despise DDR, platform and racing games. But you won't find me posting in a "best racing game" thread about why I despise them and why I think they shouldn't play them. ^_^

 

( Then again. I will do so with DDR threads. DDR trully is the spawn of evil. Its like a mixture of Bush, yaoi, slash and blinding pink *shivers* )

[Llyranor]

Perhaps that's why I love Guild Wars so much, seeing as I'm playing it with people I know. We don't play with randoms ever anymore, unless it's in PvP where our goal is to kill said morons.

 

And I am certainly not playing it for the 'roleplaying' aspect. Nope, I'm playing it for the same reason I would play an action game online. And with guildplay, it's a good blend of cooperative and competitive gameplay.

[trulez]

Again, I say Tabula Rasa may be worth a look.

 

Tabula Rasa looks....weird, to say at least.

[Judge Hades]

Socializing with morons != fun.

Priceless.

 

Perhaps you don't realize the relevance of that statement, but alas, that's what MMORPGs are all about. If you remove that, there would be no difference between a MMORPG and a SP CRPG. But since day after day the gaming community becomes less and less immature and is ever increasingly moronic, odds are, you will find 3 f*ckwads for each good player. I'd rather not waste my time searching for good players in a sea of f*ckwads.

 

There is still the issue of the 'sense of purpose' which a MMORPG lacks altogether. When I play a game, I want the game objective to be clear from the beginning. But since a MMORPG has no objective whatsoever other than 'keep going' for the most part, that also conflicts with my definition of fun. Perhaps some other people with a whole lot more of time on their hands would enjoy wasting their time in such fashion, but I do not.

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You could socialize with people who aren't morons.

[213374U]

Provided you could find them.

[mkreku]

At least you american WoW-players don't have to put up with morons trying to insult each other in broken english!

 

"Your a pusy!"

"Shut, or ill fuk of you!"

Etc.

[Percival]

At least you american WoW-players don't have to put up with morons trying to insult each other in broken english!

 

"Your a pusy!"

"Shut, or ill fuk of you!"

Etc.

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I take it you never had contact with the battle.net crowd to claim something like that? You might want to reconsider the "good" fortunes of the american players - take a look at their forums to see just how wonderful the native english speaking players vocabulary is.

[Ginthaeriel]

I guess in the end, MMORPGs are fun as long as the people you are playing with are people you like. It seems, more and more, MMORPGs seems to be heading back to a multiplayer style CRPG type game in terms of evolution. You don't *have* to party with anyone in nextgen MMORPGs, which allows you to only party with your friends. Forced grouping is becoming passe.

 

Which is why Final Fantasy XI sucks spiced hog balls slathered in pickled human turd. But I digress.

 

Everything is being played in instances- so that you don't have to fight with strangers for the monsters. Hell, PvP based MMORPGs are becoming more and more niche (Lineage 2 or Shadowbane) and everyone seems to play MMORPGs for the PvE. And even if you do want to play PvP, no longer is it focused on random ganking, which was abundant in UO and that was the game directly responsible for the term "carebears" anyways. It's all about group fights (6v6 in Guildwars) which is really no different from starting up a game of counterstrike. It's considered normal for PvP to require consent now, the hardcore players who like the random ganks are being seperated into "PvP servers". Massive wars that pit a crapload of players vs. another crapload of players (such as sieges in Lineage 2 or battlegrounds in World of Warcraft) are the only real "Massive" things to do in "Massively Multiplayer" RPGs that really remain. That, and large scale PvE that only exists in the endgame. And these things are, half the time, not even implemented until the game is at least a year old, and even then only a slim minority of the players get to participate.

 

I will seriously laugh if in the future, what is considered an "MMORPG" plays almost exactly like Diablo or multiplayer Baldur's Gate.

[Aponez]

At least you american WoW-players don't have to put up with morons trying to insult each other in broken english!

 

"Your a pusy!"

"Shut, or ill fuk of you!"

Etc.

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It isn't only in WoW, it's in almost all online games