Greedy Goblin

Tuesday, April 25, 2017

New MMOs must be competitive and fair because of WoW/WoT

I wish for a competitive and fair MMO for long. And I'm going to get it. Not the tooth fairy will save me from the evil, corrupted, unfair, unethical baddies, but free market will. Every single unfair and "don't care just have fun" game is doomed to fail, simply because World of Warcraft and World of Tanks are killing them.

These games have huge budget to develop, great code and servers to run smooth and large existing playerbase to form a community around a "have fun lol" game. They are optimized around the "I sit down and save the World/pwn som n00bz in 15 minutes" gameplay. You log in WoW and you get a bunch of achievements and your missions are completed with awesome rewards and your l33t gear is awaiting for you in your box and you are called the one hero by every NPC. You log in WoT and you are instantly in a battle where you blow up enemy tanks - or you are blown up and you grab your next tank and you're back in blowing up enemy tanks.

Everyone knows that WoW has no difficulty and epicslegendaries fall from the sky. Everyone knows that
But they don't care, because it's flashy and beautiful and releases endorphin on demand for a few bucks. If you just can't care less and want to have fun, these are your games. 150 million players testify it (estimated from 2016 WoT and 2014 WoW stats)!

There is no way in hell that a new game will beat them without a billion dollars of development and marketing costs. Everyone who tried, failed. These devs have no shame, they are putting in anything that sells, no matter how embarrassing, childish or offensive it is. There is no limit how far they wouldn't go for one more dollar of revenue. If you enter the "dirty" arena, you are already beaten.

On the other hand there is a clear demand and empty niche for a fair, non-rigged, competitive MMO. Devs promise it will be theirs, just to be caught rigging and their game abandoned, no matter what they do. No, going free-to-play won't save them, trust is something you can only lose once:

20 comments:

Anonymous said...

@Gevlon
> Everyone knows that World of Tanks is bad/rigged

Nitpick: Google's search results are personalized. "Rigged" doesn't even appear in the autocomplete list when I type "World of Tanks is ". So perhaps everyone in the world does NOT yet know about this, and you need to fight harder to spread the truth :)

Anonymous said...

If you actually have actual proof of devs rigging games, send it to places that published you before.
Send it to the media. They love big dramatic stories. If you really believe Devs are corrupt in the games you mentioned, send them your proof.

You left eve for many reasons, depending on the day you were writing. Once Falcon made those two posts on Reddit, you decided there was a dev conspiracy against you. That was it. There was no other proof, just that you decided he must be trying to support Goons (despite all evidence to the contrary), and therefore he must hate you and want to destroy you.

The best revenge it is said, is being successful. You still come back to eve over a year later. Perhaps you should just start a new character. Although giving away all your ISK and extracting SP probably makes that too tricky.

Anonymous said...


I agree "there is a clear demand and empty niche for a fair, non-rigged, competitive MMO." I disagree with the idea that there is enough of demand to make it economically viable. Most competitive people want a game not an MMO world. They don't want the person who has been playing 5 years to have better gear than someone who started 5 seconds ago. They tend to want victory conditions, who won, who lost.

And MMOs are expensive to produce and getting more so. There are so many more "must have", expected features than a decade ago. What sort of developers make the most expensive type of game, MMO, for a quite small segment of the MMO market? These days, it is Kickstarter devs and they are in the business of getting KS donations, not making sustainable MMOs.

In 2013, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick says his company is staying away from MMOs outside of Asia because they're just not worth the effort. It partnered with Tencent in China for games like NBA 2K Online, but you won't see them cross the Pacific, GameSpot reports.

"We're actively investing in online MMOs; we're not doing it in the U.S. Why? Because MMOs don't work here," Zenick said


Funcom recently exited the MMO business and the Funcom CEO said "We do see that some players have gotten a bit of fatigue from the very large time commitment that these games tend to require and are moving on to our online social gaming experiences"

There is a long lead time on MMOs, so I think we currently know everything that will launch through 2019. I can't think of anything non-trivial that would meet your criteria happening before then, except for perhaps the existing AA and upcoming CU, CF, or LiF.

Gevlon said...

@First anon: "world of tanks is rigged" give 4.4M hits, with a Rock Paper Shotgun article on top.

@Next anon: no, they don't like big dramatic stories. They like money from the game companies PR department. Check out this cautionary tale (read comments, the "journalist" commented) http://greedygoblin.blogspot.hu/2016/04/a-letter-to-massivelyop.html

I've never said there is a dev conspiracy against me. I've said that there is (was) a dev conspiracy for Goons. I was simply an obstacle to clear up from the way of Goons. Some evidences:
- Mittani was saved from ban after organizing a mass bully campaign to push someone into suicide as OFFICIAL PRESENTATION
- The monument vandals were saved from the justice system and were not even banned
- Falcon lied to protect the reputation of the vandals
- Sion was allowed to brag about how they vandalized the monument and how Falcon protected them
- The cyberbully campaign of Falcon against me when I dared to evict them from some systems
- CCP officials doing PR work for the Goon propaganda book, trying to persuade players to give $150000 to Goons

There is no possible way for me to be successful in EVE. Falcon is a god there, he can ban anyone, he can remove or add assets as he pleases. Even if back then it was just business (he wanted to protect Goons from eviction), now it's surely personal after I dared to call him a corrupted piece of shit publicly

@Next anon: Albion defied all the "must have" features. Their graphics and controls are Age of Empires 1 level and it's not at all obtrusive or bad. I'd gladly play Albion if not for the Gold speculation.

Anonymous said...

"I've never said there is a dev conspiracy against me"

This is just a blatant lie.

You said that falcon could and would disconnect you at any given critical moment and when pressed about how a shitty community manager would be able to do that you went with "them laughing at the watercooler about you". If you insist on denieing, i will source it.

Furthermore postulating that blizzard wow is evil, greedy, while beeing one of the less abusive skinner boxes (roll +15?) makes for a bad axiom given the content if your post

Gevlon said...

@Anon: I've said that Falcon could and would disconnect ANYONE at any given critical moment and then laugh about it at the watercooler. It was a reference to the extremely abusive and corrupt culture within CCP. While I was a prominent target of his harassment, simply because of my visibility, I wouldn't consider myself special. For example, I was completely non-existent in this abuse: http://greedygoblin.blogspot.hu/2013/11/the-largest-awox-in-history-of-eve.html

Where did I postulate that Blizzard WoW is evil? I've said that it's a shameless catering to "fun" with no respect to any fairness or integrity. "Evil" would need victims. No one is victim of WoW any more than the drunkards are victims of the bar.



RV said...

I was there for this "largest awox". How is it an awox when CCP had anounced 20 jumps in advance that you're going to a nullsec system? How is it an awox when they even announced that the gate was bubbled and camped? Everyone knew what they were getting into at that point. Everyone had the opportunity to call it quits right there and not jump into the camped gate. That is not an awox, you had a clear idea of what you were getting into.

Was it a terribly managed event? Hell yes. Probably the worst CCP has ever done. Incidentally they haven't done events like this since then. They know they really fucked up.


And I would hardly call two Falcon posts on reddit a 'cyberbully campaign against you'.

Gevlon said...

@RV: fleet members rightfully expect fleet commanders to call targets, give an anchor point and fight. The size of the fleets (even if composition is not) was adequate to put up a fight. Instead, some GMs were dead silent after jump, others gave the suicidal order to burn out of the bubbles and warp to the event NPCs. That's a clear awox.

That were actually 4 reddit posts. Also, he just had to give his blessing, the reddit crew and the Goons (including an official SOTA) quoted and multiplied his post. Imagine if some important figure berates you once and then his minions placate the whole city with this quote and the TV broadcasts it multiple times a day.

Darkgold said...

It looks like there was a big spike right before the EvE event, and now it's settling back to baseline

RV said...

That's simply not true. The entire point of that particular fleet was to get to the live event location and then participate in the event against pirate NPCs. It was not meant to fight anyone along the way, and definitely not an insurmountable number of nullsec players who were set up perfectly at their optimal ranges around a gate.

So yes, the FC gave the order to burn out of the bubble and warp to a planet. Thanks to spies in fleet, that location too was bubbled and even more of the fleet died. It's a case of players being enormous dicks to eachother, not a case of CCP being malicious.

Gevlon said...

@Darkgold: that's not an event, that's going free to play https://www.engadget.com/2016/11/16/eve-online-is-now-free-to-play/

@RV: the NPC objective can be considered a "timer battle" like taking a moon or citadel. If an FC orders his nullsec fleet to jump into a bubbled gate, ignore being shot at and go to the also bubbled tower and shoot it ignoring defenders massacring his fleet, wouldn't you call him an awoxer?

The only reasonable actions by CCP devs in this situation were:
- calling of the event, blueballing the griefers
- fixing their fleets and fight back and either win or go down in a battle.

Instead, they opted to just let them be slaughtered without a single shot fired at them. This is an awox.

Anonymous said...

Here's some numbers on how small the PH market actually is: https://www.adam4eve.eu/market_hubs.php

The 0% broker's fee market is about twice as popular as PH's, and the most popular player market is owned by a high sec trader/character trader/SP farmer that has negotiated/bribed his way to the top. Goons' Keepstar market in Delve probably pulls in more ISK in broker's fees because their broker's fee is a lot higher and there's no alternative.

Gevlon said...

@Anon: The page you link is neither a CCP one, nor some established site like dotlan. It's probably giving false info, just like those ISK doubler API sites. Unfortunately for you I have official data and on Thursday you can see how much the highsec citadel owners book. Spoiler: over 1T/month

Anonymous said...

use something like https://eve-central.com/dumps/
eve-central is very established

Anonymous said...

@Gevlon
>"world of tanks is rigged" give 4.4M hits, with a Rock Paper Shotgun article on top.

"world of tanks is-2" gives 14.4M results
"world of tanks is best gun" gives 15.6M results

I'm not saying that your opinions are wrong. I'm saying that your search results are personalized. Therefore when you see a prominent result on the autocomplete list, you should not assume that it's a widely-known fact.

Anonymous said...

"@Anon: The page you link is neither a CCP one, nor some established site like dotlan. It's probably giving false info, just like those ISK doubler API sites. Unfortunately for you I have official data and on Thursday you can see how much the highsec citadel owners book. Spoiler: over 1T/month"

Actually, the Forge citadel owners have 148T going through them per month. 0.001% of 148T = 148b per month.

In order to have 1T going through them, they would need to have 10x the volume, so, 1000T going through citadels, when the total for the forge including stations is 602T.
CCPs data says 450T or so.

You can verify the data on the linked site by pulling CREST yourself.


SPOILER: Goons make double what the highsec citadels do in their home region.

Anonymous said...

If you think it's giving false info then you should report it as falsifying CCP provided data is no longer allowed. However, you have access to the same data they claim to be using, CREST, and can verify their numbers which I'm pretty sure are correct. It's easy to see that even if they ALL of the RMT item buy orders placed in their citadels, which they don't, that with the 0.1% broker's fees they currently have set (which is quite recent and probably won't last long), that their income doesn't even come near 1T/month.

community.eveonline.com/news/news-channels/eve-online-news/notice-concerning-scams-citing-the-wallet-api/

Adam4EVE uses CREST as stated on their website:-

"Ingame market orders are regularly pulled from CREST aswell as on-demand. An increasing spectrum of filters allow to exactly view what your searching for. And URL parameters allow you to bookmark your request for quick revisiting."

And when using CREST you must abide by the Developer License Agreement (https://developers.eveonline.com/resource/license-agreement) which states:-

"Developer acknowledges and agrees that no Application shall be used [...](d) as a means to misappropriate a Player's in-game items or other information, or to otherwise cheat, scam, or defraud Players who subscribe to the Application [...]"

Anonymous said...

I am looking forward to your official data, which can't be third party, as that can be falsified according to you, so, it must be CCP data. It also cannot be CREST data as you have just rejected that.

Therefore, I am looking forward to your explanation of how you have official CCP data that the playerbase does not have access to because the Economic data released by CCP has not been including citadels.

Bobbins said...

@RV @Gevlon
If memory serves me correctly some of the players who were leading the CCP organisised player groups, after leading the players into the trap/bubbles changed sides to the nulseccers. This required the people leading the groups to prepare in advance exactly what they did.
There were also rumours that CCP had discussed the event with some nulsec players (in the developer/player chat) in advance allowing them to prepare the trap. A lot of the old large alliance leaders are very close to the certain devs.

Sacula said...

WoT just completely rebuilt it's matchmaking. It released on the NA server last week in patch 9.18 and being released on EU and RU this week.

https://worldoftanks.com/en/news/general-news/update-918/