The success of an MMO relies solely on its community, Blizzard understood this back in 2004 because they made a game by gamers, for gamers. Retail is currently suffering because Blizzard strayed from this original agenda due to the influx of “Modern Gamers”.
Today the “Modern Gamer” is not one who genuinely wishes to binge play for hours on end. I have a friend, lets call him Mustard who is about 17 and him and many other people of his generation can’t play a single game for more than 3 hours without having to switch to another game, no matter how heated the game gets or how compelling it is he will find it bored and quit because that’s what they are wired into playing. This is why BR games are currently popular, they are fast-paced and are over after only 30 min.
Our generation was simply wired to Time+Effort=reward+value Meaning the longer the time and effort put into the game the bigger the reward and value we find in it. Today they would prefer the reward and value without hardly any time and effort, just fast-paced cycle of log into x, do the thing, open loot box, repeat tomorrow. I for one find this stale and unrewarding but the younger generation loves it… maybe I’m just old and stale… maybe WoW should just be a BR… or maybe these hypotheticals are getting out of line and I should get back on topic.
The casual log in get reward system works for BR games but not for MMO’s solely because MMO’s are supposed to be a time investment where you immerse yourself in a Massive Multiplayer Online Experience and are forced to join and work with communities in any hopes of getting any form of reward much like real life.
Now I am not saying its impossible, If we THE PLAYERS can prove our undying love to classic, its community, and its formula like we did in 2004 and PROVE the formula of MMO’s is not something that should be taken lightly then we could very well reset the market standard for what people expect in future MMORPG’s and maybe even inspire the younger generations to understand the importance of “Time+Effort=Reward+Value”.
If you want to read more about the importance of community, Click here.
If you want to see how you can inspire or help the community through videos, Click here.
And if you think BR games are dumb and should be purged for the safety of all Lordaeron click the heart button.