Golden Ticket

In response to “The Korean Invasion” from The Escapist Forum: Korean games don’t work in Western markets because of one very simple reason: Korean MMOGs actively encourage credit farming. Western players don’t like games in which their game experience is held hostage by folks who play for the express purpose of making money.

– Beery

In response to “The Korean Invasion” from The Escapist Forum: The thing with Korean games, I think, is that they have an unabashedly monotonous and elongated grind. The way you play when you sign in is consistent, and the novelty comes from the playstyles of the other people you’re with rather than from new circumstances. It’s more like Counter-Strike, then. Which means it’s very unsuitable for the more individualist Western audiences, who appreciate the value of a world populated by other living beings, but find it quite distasteful to depend on the competence of Random Internet Fuckheads to provide an interesting experience. (Or, at least, that’s what I think). When you make an MMO for Westerners, you need to make your world varied and interesting, so that the value of the options available to a given avatar depend less on strangers and more on the avatar’s history and location.

Being friends with people in the game completely invalidates all of that, but once you get ’em to that point, you’re left with the people who already made that decision.

– Bongo Bill

In response to “WoW’s Magic Number” from The Escapist Forum: Being one who has played many an MMO, and who has played and left WoW, I am still, to this day, flabbergasted at WoW’s popularity. I have many friends who have gone from general video game consumers to WoW-only zealots (one friend has a saying: “If it’s not WoW, it’s meh”), and I frequently ask them what it is that they do once they reach the “end game.” More often then not, when they vocalize their answer, their faces reveal that their explanation doesn’t even make much sense to them.

– Scopique

In response to “WoW’s Magic Number” from The Escapist Forum: This is not growing a genre. This is just growing the market. Essentially, WoW does nothing more than rehash the same old stuff with a minimal set of well-tied and polished simple rules. This makes it accessible, but extremely superficial, much more than the already average and stagnant pool of MMOs.

Well, anyway, to my eyes, this genre is just uninteresting and blight, a pure waste of time, and you can’t even count on the studios which have the bucks to make it evolve… to even do it.

MMOs are just like cigarettes.

– Arbre

In response to “Game Magazines Have Sucked for Forever” from The Escapist Daily: Even just a few years ago, you’d still see a few of the larger revelations broken in mags, despite the growth of online sites at that point. But now that element is weakening as well. It’s affecting sites, too, in some regards. Developers and publishers of said big games are realizing they don’t even need a middleman, they can have their own event (or previously use E3 as a soapbox) and release everything directly themselves online.

StarCraft 2 was the perfect example of this. The exclusives may follow, but the big revelation skipped the middleman. It went from Blizzard directly to the gamer.

– KyanMehwulfe