The subs are only valuable if they last. If your economic model relies on 500k subs or more for the long term to be profitable, that is riskier than a model that relies on selling 3m boxes to be profitable. Of course, if you are WoW and have millions of subs, that's obviously superior, but otherwise it very much depends on how much you spent to make the game (and this one was very expensive to make, by all accounts), and what that implies in terms of you break-even point in terms of box sales + subs. If the subs never materialize, or, as is fairly common, subside faster than you planned, you're going to be waiting much longer to be profitable than a game that has its profit model based on selling a couple of million boxes.

But what A-net is doing is less risky, because they really just need to sell boxes. Once you have the box, they don't really care how much you play or how long you play for -- so it's a lot less tricky than a subscription model where you have to keep that carrot dangling.

I think Guild Wars 1, which was B2P, like GW2 will be, did not have a "performance"-related cash shop. There were aesthetic things you could purchase, but not power-ups. Most of the money they made was on box sales -- it's not a bad model, really, because server upkeep is not really that expensive, and you charge people for new content in xpacs. I agree that the F2P Asian grinder games have "evil" cash shops, but it doesn't have to be done that way, as GW1 shows. The main difference is from the perspective of the gaming company's revenue stream, and greed. That's where subscription games are actually much more greedy, because you are typically paying a monthly fee to play the same content over and over again. Oh, they release new content during the course of the game prior to the next expansion, but that's really just a way of spreading the rollout of stuff that was likely mostly finished at the time the main content release was done. Server upkeep costs are low, and the profit margin on subscriptions is very high, generally. Gaming companies are chasing subscription games now as a way to get "steady revenues", as compared with box sale revenue which tends to be "lumpier" -- basically to get you to keep paying for the same content. I honestly don't think that the subscription model is sustainable for expensive budget games moving forward.

Actually what you need to do in EVE is be a player that started in 2003 or 2004, have a bunch of researched T2+ BPOs, and sell BPCs and T2 ships and gear at a good profit. Of course, the issue is most players don't have access to that. Not all sandboxes are designed like EVE, though. SWG was a sandbox and you weren't grinding credits nonstop 24/7 to fund your PvP credit sink.

Definitely. I think if A-net does a good job with GW2 (not holding my breath, as I never do with new MMOs), that may wake up the market to the reality that the subscription model may very well be on the way out.

The thing to remember about the "older" sandboxes is that they cost very little to make compared to a contemporary AAA MMO. Even Rift cost ~100m to make. With those kinds of costs, you don't want to be "aiming" for a "niche" market -- the ROI is too long given the capital required to make the game. And, of course, there *have* been sandboxes made over the past several years by indie developers with smaller budgets. Darkfall and Mortal Online come to mind. And, of course, they suffer from the kinds of things that happen when your game doesn't have a bigger budget. I think it will be a long, long time before we have a AAA sandbox MMO, to be quite honest. More likely, we're going to see things moving in the B2P/F2P direction, with cheaper development budgets, because the business model of trying to siphon off WoW's market is failing again and again and again.

I agree generally. I think games *could* be designed the way the OP describes if they had GW's business model of basing revenue and profit from box sales/DLC only, and not subs.

So, TF2 is an MMORPG?

Which makes the review pretty much useless due to not being able to distinguish between bias against the genre and a review of the game as compared with the rest of the genre. It's like someone who doesn't like first person shooters very much reviewing Battlefield 3. It doesn't tell you much, really.

If this was happening, you probably need to find a new hobby. 23s are bolstered in HP and mana only not in skills. You had level 49 skills, and you got beat up by someone with 1/2 as many skills. Looks like skillz were the issue here, not the game.

I'm in that target as well, and will be around for a while. Good to see like-minded people.

This explains pretty much exactly who the core customer target of this game was and is.

The thing is that "community"-oriented MMOs are a thing of the past. MMOs today are mass market games, and, as such, are primarily about the gaming experience of most players, which is shortish gaming sessions based on limited play time. This is the majority of the market -- much bigger than the "community" oriented players who are more old school. What happened was that the MMO market became much bigger, became mainstream, and basically swamped the old school MMO players in size, and so the games began to be designed to cater to the larger market. That's not going to change, really.

Something I posted on this yesterday in a different thread: Pre-WoW games were either sandbox (SWG, EVE) or quite hard in terms of time-consumption. This made them less casual friendly (no logging in for an hour or two and running 2-3 instances), and therefore less popular, but much more community-oriented. Not saying that was better (was bad for people who were time-poor), but everything was community-dependent. There was no badge system -- there were only item drops. Heck in Everquest the dungeons were not instanced, so you had groups competing for mob spawns in dungeons. There were some mobs that only spawned once every 24 hours, and had needed gear drops and so on. It was just completely different. Post-WoW it became more oriented towards "getting things done in an hour or two", which made it more friendly to more people (hence the explosion in player populations in MMORPGs), but also made the community increasingly "optional" and, for many players, outright disliked outside their guilds (references to other players as "pubbies", turning off chat other than guild chat and so on). Neither is better or worse, each has pluses and minuses, but there is no going back to the old way. The new way is here to stay. And the new way isn't about community, it's about a manageable gaming session for the average player who has limited time. This is why LFD/LFR is popular -- it's much more efficient. And that makes sense, because the "cost" to community is overblown --> WoW really didn't have a great "community", or much of a community to speak of at all, prior to LFD, so the concern about community is mostly misplaced. All it does is make pugging easier and more anonymous and for the average player, trying to make a bit of progress with limited time to play, it's a big advantage over any system that is more time consuming or "community"-dependent.

Playing alone together, in other words. It's basically what WoW's system has perfected. I think it does very much meet the needs of most of the players, because most players just want a quick in and out gaming experience in the limited time they have to play (vast majority of players have very limited play time). So the model of playing alone together is popular -- you are playing multiplayer, but in a very casual, easy-in/easy-out way. The vast majority of players do not want to take the time to socialize in a video game -- the people who were into that in the early MMOs were a self-selecting niche of people who had generally quite a bit of time on their hands and/or were virtual world enthusiasts. Most players today are just looking for a bit of fun and entertainment in a limited time frame in the evenings -- not to socialize or do a virtual world or anything of the sort. This is how it is today, because this is the market today. And so the games are set up (at least the successful ones are) to satisfy the needs of this market. It makes sense.

Good, constructive post.

I think the era of "community"-oriented MMOs is finished. Too expensive to make for too little return due to too few players interested in that kind of playstyle. AS you say, rightly I think, communities are built by adversity -- by need. That's not a very popular playstyle as compared with a more convenience oriented approach, and given how expensive these games are to make, I don't see big budget titles being developed for the more hardcore/difficulty/community oriented set. Indie developers may continue to explore these kinds of games, but their success will continue to be mixed due to their limited budgets, which therefore limits the talent and spend they can afford (Darkfall and Mortal Online are only two examples of this). GW2 is a bit of a different market, because it is B2P. In fact, if it is any good at all, it may begin what I think is the inevitable move in the MMO market away from the P2P/subscription model towards a more diverse group of economic/financial models. The subscription model is becoming an unattainable El Dorado for everyone but Activision, in terms of ROI, to be honest.

Actually I think that's very hard to do. The first wave of MMOs reflected the "old internet" in many ways, where people enjoyed making anonymous internet friendships, and things were kept very separate from real life. This informed the older MMOs, as well as other older virtual worlds like Second Life. When Web 2.0 hit, it became the rage to be yourself on the internet, and people's interest in socializing with strangers under anonymity waned to a large degree. The virtual world socialization model, based on anonymity or a separate identity, waned and was replaced with things like Facebook and the like. I think this has also directly impacted socialization in MMOs (they are a part of internet culture as much as anything else, and subject to it as well). MMOs became less virtual worlds for socializing and more online games for gaming, which I think suits what most users want, because they no longer are as interested in forming virtual friendships with people they meet on the internet under the guise of anonymity. So I guess I am not sure that the receding importance of community in these games represents a failure, or means that something is not working. It very well could be that things are simply progressing as many people prefer -- that is, gaming on the internet is for gaming, and socializing is for social sites. Guilds are the exception to this, but in recent years MMO guilds have mostly fallen into two types: (1) older multi-game communities that feature relationships that have spanned quite a few years of time and (2) guilds where people know each other in real life, and are therefore an extension of that for the most part, perhaps with a few outsiders in the mix. This again would reflect the pattern of people relying on other means to socialize online than through games. There is a lot of angst about this in the MMO world, as we can see from the debate about tools like LFD, because there are some people of the old mindset playing still. And merging the two kinds of internet -- making people also play these games as their real world identity -- went over like a lead balloon when Blizzard tried to implement it, indicating, I think, that people want these two worlds -- their online gaming world, and their online socializing world -- to be distinct in many cases. So I guess I think it may be working as well as it can, and in a way that meets the needs of most of the players of these games, really.

The golden rule of MMOs is you never know how well they are going to play until release. No, not even in beta, although there may be signs there, good and bad. Things change after beta for better or worse in most games. You really don't know until it releases. GW2's advantage is that it is B2P, so a different market from a subscription game, and has a much bigger potential because of that. It remains to be seen whether it can capitalize on that opportunity. Time will tell. Current YouTube videos don't interest me much -- many games have looked much better on YouTube videos during beta stage than they ended up actually playing when you were the one driving the character. We'll have to see how it is when it eventually launches.

Yeah I mentioned EQ a line or two later, but should have mentioned it in a parallel parenthetical in the first line to avoid the confusion this caused. I agree. That was then, this is now. There is no going back. Current games don't have that kind of "community" anyway, so not allowing people to have a tool like this for that kind of reason doesn't make sense to me.

That era in gaming is finished. Gaming is now mainstream. MMOs are very expensive to make (much more than when the first ones were made), and publishers and other investors are not going to finance a proper MMO which has a small audience as its target. The era of the "hard", time-consuming MMO is finished. It's possible that an indie developer may take a stab at something like that (already happened with Darkfall, Mortal Online, both of which suffered from what you see when you don't have AAA budget investment), but no AAA budget MMO is going to be made again which is geared towards the smallish hardcore audience.

Pre-WoW games were either sandbox (SWG, EVE) or quite hard in terms of time-consumption. This made them less casual friendly (no logging in for an hour or two and running 2-3 instances), and therefore less popular, but much more community-oriented. Not saying that was better (was bad for people who were time-poor), but everything was community-dependent. There was no badge system -- there were only item drops. Heck in Everquest the dungeons were not instanced, so you had groups competing for mob spawns in dungeons. There were some mobs that only spawned once every 24 hours, and had needed gear drops and so on. It was just completely different. Post-WoW it became more oriented towards "getting things done in an hour or two", which made it more friendly to more people (hence the explosion in player populations in MMORPGs), but also made the community increasingly "optional" and, for many players, outright disliked outside their guilds (references to other players as "pubbies", turning off chat other than guild chat and so on). Neither is better or worse, each has pluses and minuses, but there is no going back to the old way. The new way is here to stay. And the new way isn't about community, it's about a manageable gaming session for the average player who has limited time. This is why LFD/LFR is popular -- it's much more efficient. And that makes sense, because the "cost" to community is overblown --> WoW really didn't have a great "community", or much of a community to speak of at all, prior to LFD, so the concern about community is mostly misplaced. All it does is make pugging easier and more anonymous and for the average player, trying to make a bit of progress with limited time to play, it's a big advantage over any system that is more time consuming or "community"-dependent.

I think that the better argument is that there isn't really any community to speak of in theme park MMOs post-WoW outside of guilds, so the community reason is a weak one. Prior to WoW, MMOs were more like virtual worlds with communities. Post-WoW, MMOs are online games with players. Players are fungible, when it comes to people outside of your guild in PUGs. LFD basically just makes pugging easier. There is no community to harm, really, in games like these -- it doesn't exist, and hasn't existed for many years now.

You don't see all that many people in the open world on Imp side either, after the first planet or two, due to the sharding. As for overall population, caps will alienate people more than imbalances.

I'll certainly be playing ME3. Loved ME and ME2. ME2 was different from ME1, but still great in my opinion. My only disappointment with Bio so far has been DA2.