Quote:
Originally Posted by TheBig3KilledMyRainDog
I had a huge point written up for this, but Everquest was (as far as I know) the first, but Blizzard cleared it from the map because of the attention to systems.
I think Sony Kowtows to its clients a lot more, at the sacrafice of its own game. Now servers are barren and you can hire NPC's from what I hear to run with you. At this point you can bump it down to a platform game and sell it to the consoles.
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actually Ultima:Online was the first commercial MMO.
regardless of who invented that wheel, what do you mean by 'attention to systems'?
all MMOs have been very scalable from the get-go to encourage as many players to join up without having to buy a new pc. what i really saw Blizzard accomplish with WoW was a way to get around the stigma of paying to play a game, it sold the product in a way that non-hardcore gamers wanted it. that's what gave them the edge over everyone else. it's a game for the kind of people who 'play' on Facebook for 5 hours at a time.
as for Sony how do you figure they're kowtowing? most rpgs offer an NPC service (whether it's an MMO or not). the state of their servers is probably still up in the air and initially established based on peak EQ popularity, or global markets and not properly reflected back to the players. it's something that's bothered me significantly since the first MMO i tried. there's always a page for 'server status' (on/offline) but it never gives you details like how many players are logged in, from what area they're logging in from, the status of the characters, max capacity for the server, etc.
it's frustrating as hell to start a new character when all the other players on that server are reaching the final tier of levels and are all based out of southern asia, or having to trial by error your way into finding out that the next server in the list was packed with noobs from the west coast of north america.
it's not that WoW really handles it's player / server info any better (or maybe they started semi-recently), just that there are so many WoW users that it doesn't matter when or where you login.