
Is the MMORPG Dying? - Fjolsvith
http://anewdomain.net/mmorpg-dying/
======
TheAceOfHearts
One problem with MMORPGs is that they just take so much time. As a young adult
working full time and trying to maintain a reasonably balanced lifestyle, I
don't know how to find a guild or establish friendships in a game while
acknowledging that I'm only gonna be putting in a couple hours a week. Heck, I
can't imagine how people with children manage to pull it off. I know I'm not
going to be that good, since I'm only interested in playing for fun.

I also find playing for long periods of time gets a bit exhausting. This means
that in recent years I've started to gravitate towards more linear stories.
I'm not usually interested in collecting stars or points, I just want to shut
my brain off for a few hours and kill stuff.

If you play with friends, it can become a bit frustrating too if some of them
are more in the "hardcore" side of things. Nobody wants to fight constantly
against someone they can never get a chance to beat. It can be fun when
playing certain co-op games, but anything highly competitive just gets too
overwhelming.

~~~
mhd
Isn't MMORPGs taking time very much a design issue? Not even inherent in the
genre itself, but enforced intentionally to bind users?

Tabletop RPGs have been getting by without "grinding" for decades, yet this is
the current focus of most CRPGs (even more so than some past examples).

There are plenty of activities that could be done with a more occasional time
investment (quests/dungeons that don't require groups/guilds, fiddling with
your own house/manor/hold etc.).

~~~
Elhana
Activities that could be done occasionally is basically a single player game -
go play skyrim or fallout 4 - you don't need MMO for that.

MMORPG should be left for the kids with enough spare time to raid 4+ hours a
day. Many would disagree, but from my experience it is friends that keep you
coming back every day and you can't make them this days with all this casual
queues and playing few hours a week.

~~~
sgt101
This - sorta... There are several different types of community that MMORPG's
can sustain, but the multi-player bit is the big ingredient. Folks can be
selling crafts, raiding or questing, but the critical bit is that n-people
should be needed. The bigger n is the more compelling the driver (I think).

WOW lost a lot of luster when 40 mans got retired...

~~~
marcus_holmes
I __hated __40-man raids. They just weren 't fun. Cat-herding 40 people, the
endless waiting, dc's, egos and fights. No fun at all.

My best memories of WoW raids were the drunken Friday night guild runs through
UBRS. We knew the bosses well enough so that they didn't really require any
effort or co-ordination and we were free to chat and talk crap amongst
ourselves. Our tank usually got so drunk by the time we got to the end that we
were glad the hunter had to kite the boss away.

I had to stop playing because the time commitment required to be an active
member of the raid group got ridiculous. Literally every evening and most of
every weekend. If you couldn't do that then you couldn't compete. Stuff that,
this is a hobby not a job.

------
BadassFractal
I've been trying to relive the incredible high of pre-expansion Everquest for
a while now, but nothing quite comes close to the massive amount of investment
you'd have to put into it, the total lack of help outside of the in-game
community (no guides, no in-game extensions, bare-bones UI), and the sheer
terror of death that the game would instill in you. UO folks probably can
relate to that as well. Those games felt like sandboxes where you'd be thrown
into the deep end with tons of real consequences for carelessness, decisions
felt meaningful, alliances with other players essential for survival. Nowadays
you can grind your way through an MMO on your own, everybody gets their
personal rollercoaster ride, everybody gets to win. Probably a big reason why
we've seen a resurgence in games like Dark Souls and rogue-likes.

I did "enjoy" EVE quite a bit too, although parts of it felt more like a job
rather this incredible treacherous journey through a magical and hostile
world. EVE was more about the politics and logistics than the game itself.

I agree with many other first-gen MMORPG old farts that we will simply never
be able to re-create that experience in the same format, that era is gone and
is best left as a positive memory. Perhaps as others pointed out VR will be
that next big leap forward that will allow us to suspend belief once again.

On a side-note, I really do hope that creators keep making titles where the
game world is a nasty, hostile, inscrutable place and you and the people
around you have to band together and figure it out, nothing is going to spoon-
fed you the solution. It makes such a big difference to the end-user
experience.

~~~
Fjolsvith
I reinstalled EQ recently to try to relive that experience, and was astonished
at how primative the game seemed. My recollection of it is vastly different.
16 years makes a huge difference.

~~~
snuxoll
I can get past the somewhat clunky UI and extremely dated graphics, but what
always throws me when I try to get back into EQ is the controls. After years
of playing EQ2, Guild Wars 2, FFXIV, etc. I've become so accustomed to
controls 'just working' out of the box including the ever-present RMB camera
controls that going back to the jank that is EQ drives me nuts.

It really stinks, because no modern MMO gives me the thrill I had playing EQ
as a teen. Maybe to an extent it's the rose-tinted glasses, but I really miss
having a real penalty for dying (and as much as I love this in EVE every time
I resub I quickly lose interest due to the time sink of refitting ships,
flying to a dozen different systems to pick up parts, etc.) and I think that
was the key. Oh, and not having NPC's just throw up a wall of text or a
cutscene to introduce a quest (SWTOR handles this well, and as much as I love
FFXIV's great cinematics I really wish they had any interactivity) - having a
conversation with an NPC to discover a new quest instead of having a marker
over their head made discovering new content actually feel like that, a
discovery.

~~~
euyyn
For those of us who never played: What made dying in Everquest different?

~~~
snuxoll
You didn't just suffer a minor penalty on EXP gained and durability loss, you
actually lost EXP (which was significantly harder to grind, losing a level
could happen and could set a high level player back days).

Before some of the mid life expansions you also lost your gear and had to make
the dreaded "corpse run" to retrieve it before it despawned (which took a long
time IIRC, 24 hours or more). They later gave you the ability to have an NPC
summon your corpse before removing the gear loss entirely.

Death in EQ was very serious in the old days as a result, and it was always
wise to have at least one other player that could drag your corpse to a safe
place if you were entering a challenging zone.

~~~
Fjolsvith
Ha, the corpse run. I forgot about that. We used terrain to try to get close
enough to our corpse to get it without attracting the monster's attention.
Basically, without your gear you could get beat down with a wet noodle.

~~~
snuxoll
As such it was always a wise idea to keep a spare set of gear in the bank,
even if it was objective "worse" than your main set - trying to run back to
your corpse naked is always scary, I still remember more than once having to
ask a high level guild mate to go drag my corpse out of areas I shouldn't have
been in at my level.

Oh, and one thing I forgot, while they added the corpse summoners in Planes of
Power (I think?) they weren't cheap at the time, costing anywhere from several
plat to close to 100 plat - so it was still usually a good idea to just make
the corpse run unless it was literally impossible for yourself or a
friend/guild mate/cheaper merc to get to your corpse.

------
sologoub
I played Ultima Online for over a decade. Missed the start by a year, but
after that pretty much saw it through the highs and the eventual decline.
Stopped playing during grad school as I just couldn't do the hours needed and
balance that with the career, school, relationships, etc.

UO started out brilliantly simple - not much of a story line, some basic rules
and a never ending cycle of PvP. This total risk of losing everything and
having to start over, including houses being robbed and such, actually
resulted in an almost life-like story line that players made themselves.

Guilds formed, turf was claimed, order maintained or chaos wrought. Playing
completely solo was really tough, just like surviving in the real world is
harder by yourself.

But the team managing the game seems to have decided that the difficulty and
PvP were liability and not assets. They tried to retrofit the quests and what
not to the game that really didn't need them. The result was, just as the
article laments of more modern games - boring, predictable, safe experience.
But what's the point?

After enough complaining by the "old guard" UO team made Seige Perilous shard
(server) with old style rules and punishingly tough economics. This kept me
playing for another 6 years...

I tried some newer games, but the safe/boring environment doesn't really let
human creativity/nature come out. There really isn't much of "role playing".

If I ever have time for games again, private UO servers with pre-trammel rules
will probably be it for me. If they still exist that is.

~~~
chongli
I played UO for years as well. I was on Lake Superior for a couple years until
they introduced Trammel. Then I tried Siege for a few weeks but didn't have
the foundation to get established with a group of people so it just turned out
brutal and frustrating.

Later on (early 2000s) I played on IPY, the extremely popular pre-Trammel free
shard. From the get-go I had a friend with me and he introduced me to a friend
of his from World of Warcraft. The 3 of us met another group of people and we
joined up to form a guild. We were so successful that we all became friends
and played on multiple subsequent free shards together. A few years ago I even
took a trip down to the Bay Area to stay with some of them; they've become
lifelong friends.

Playing UO with a group of people you know really well that know how to work
together as a team is a thrill like no other. Taking trips to a dungeon
together and getting into street battles along the Vesper strip is just
fantastic. On several occasions we found our whole group red (branded as
murderers) and being chased by a mob of people from town.

UO is the only MMORPG I'm aware of where you can actually steal items from
other people. I had a ton of fun playing a thief who could also cast spells.
So many people expected a thief to run away instead of fighting back! They got
a nasty surprise when they attacked me.

~~~
Outpox
A bit out of context but it reminds me how I met my current team 8 years ago
on Crysis and the awesome memories I have with. We see each others for a full
week every year, and I'm even flatsharing with one of them.

------
AmVess
Largely an article devoid of content. He sums it up by saying. "The next
successful massively multiplayer online game, whatever that is, will have to
be innovative, it will have to be more compelling than collection quests, and
it will have to take risks."

He ignores all the MMO's that have been innovative and risk taking ventures.
EVE, Guild Wars 2 ,Black Desert, Wildstar - just to name a (very) few, all
have something different enough about them to make them reasonably unique.

Even World of Warcraft is evolving. The latest expansion offers more to do
than any other expansion that came before it, and they are adding more
dungeons and more story lines all the time. It still has Collect 10 Rat Asses
quests, but that's not the game's focus.

MMO's aren't dying; there's never been a greater choice of high quality
entertainment in this genre.

~~~
trentlott
Well, the genesis of his paragraph is that he played a game, which he wasn't
interested in enough to buy, for a weekend.

Why this piece got so far up I can't say, but I suppose interesting headlines
count the same as interesting writing.

------
ninjakeyboard
I think the question is more about our expectations. MMOs frequently cater to
the casual gamer now and so the hardcore experience we had when we were young
is virtually unattainable now. There are no fresh unique experiences in the
MMO. Where other genres bump up the bar, again and again, to thrill us in new
and more extreme ways, the MMO fails to make the same leaps so our sort of
"tolerance" to the MMO thrill doesn't get exceeded to produce a new peak
experience. MMOs have tried to change with games like Terra but ultimately
there isn't anything new to feel. For me, it was the way games forced me to
work together with other people that was enlightening. There will be a
revolution in design at some point as budgets creep up and a hole in the
market for something unique causes pent up demand to grow. It's only a matter
of time before someone really throws something new at us and we can burn
another 1000 hours in a game until that too seems stale. Perhaps VR will be
the advent that throws a curves that MMO need to produce immersive social
experiences. Who knows but there is pent up demand for sure.

~~~
shmerl
_> There are no fresh unique experiences in the MMO._

That's because multiplayer RPGs first became massive multiplayer RPGs, and
then became massive multiplayer [games]. You get the drift. Lot's of good
things that make roleplaying experience unique went down the drain in the
process, and even the name started reflecting it. The massive aspect itself
makes it challenging to preserve roleplaying environment. Proper scaling of
multiplayer roleplaying game is a tricky issue, and most don't address it well
and don't even want to, since it would mean limiting the audience and less
profits in result.

------
malloreon
This is a remarkably content free article.

Summary: are mmos dying? They could be, because they're repetitive and that's
boring. Write better stories.

~~~
ChuckMcM
I think the author is feeling pain and expressing it poorly. I think that
because I too grieved when WoW "died" for me (the Panda release was the last
straw). I respond a bit differently in that I tend to analyze the crap out of
things like affect me like that.

There is a sense of place, and to some extent community, in a multiplayer
game. Ones that hit the right notes in terms of complexity, variability, and
struggle tend to bring their communities together. Ones that tend to be
manipulative often alienate communities. I have fond memories of hanging out
with a Paladin and working through the content. We had compatible schedules
and ended up great friends in the game but to this day I have no idea who they
were in "real life."

So what I have come to understand is that a company stumbles upon a mix which
like an ensemble cast of unknown actors that just "clicks" makes for a place
where the content facilitates people getting to know each other, to help each
other, and to compete with each other without getting too much in the way of
the relationship side of things.

That gets them a bunch of customers but over time you can't relive the same
experiences over and over again and find them "new" any more. You really need
to mix it up somehow, and randomness helps but only goes so far. When the glow
starts to fade and people drift away, the owner of the place will try new
things to get people involved but at the end of the day, they eventually upset
the balance and even their more loyal visitors start to taper off and fade
away. And for people where the first time they completed a major quest line
with new friends, or overcame a raid boss, and remember that time fondly, they
can't go back. Just like you can't go back to being 15 again and riding around
on bikes in the neighborhood without a care in the world. Nostalgia sets in
and you move on, grieving what you lost.

I have played a number of MMOG's, and the RPGs are most notable because your
"character" has developed in game and has a gravitas all its own. So how do
you make a world where it is always fun to visit? You need a system where the
world has its challenges but it isn't static. WoW avoided _feeling_ static
because it had so much content, but if you take 10 - 20 'toons' from their
starting zone to the maximum character level you pretty much learn all there
is to know about the place. And it doesn't change over time. And while it had
a lot of variation at the beginning, over time successive updates homogenized
more and more of the features such that all the classes and races began to
feel like the tier 10, 11, and 12 armor sets which were exactly the same
artwork but with different texture maps.

I think the game that was Everquest and WoW and others in the MMORPG vein has
crested, the next version of that will have to be very different in order to
get the conversion rates those had. That said, once we have procedurally
generated worlds rather than scripted worlds I thing you'll find they will
remain engaging for a longer period of time.

~~~
vacri
> _the X was the last straw_

As someone who played WoW reasonably consistently from launch to a few months
after the expansion that gave level 70, people declaring they left because X
was so bad... they were there from day 1 (admittedly, early WoW was quite
buggy). WoW has always had people saying "well now, THIS is the last straw!".

But yes, you can only do the same thing for so long before moving on. Most
courses have a far greater 'intro' level and a much narrower set of ongoing
students who stick with it, for example. It's a problem MMOs have, because
they're predicated on people sticking around, and content is consumed much,
much faster than it can be created.

------
beloch
Older MMO's, like Everquest or World of Warcraft, were pretty blatant
skinner's boxes. You were lucky if a NPC sending you out to collect bat-wings
got a little bit chatty. Some more recent MMO's, such as Bioware's The Old
Republic or Cryptic's Star Trek Online, are much more story driven. STO, for
example, has enough single-player instanced story-driven content to reach the
maximum level, at which point you either quit or dive into the skinner's box
that passes for an endgame.

That being said, single player games still seem to set the bar for story-
driven content. It's a simple matter of how resources are spent. A MMO has to
be able to suck people in long-term and be interesting for at least some
players after they've put hundreds of hours into the game. A single-player
game can end after 30-40 hours and not be called "too short" by reviewers. The
budget for any given minute of gameplay is therefore much lower for MMO's than
for single player games.

We're probably going to see a blurring of lines between single player games
and MMO's in the near future. Games will have a high production value, story-
driven, single player component that's all a lot of people will want to play,
but they'll also have an open-ended MMO component. Some games will start
players out in single-player and, at the end, dump them into a MMO universe,
trained and equipped well past the newbie stage. The upcoming Star Citizen is
apparently going to use a model similar to this. This solves the newbie-
training problem that MMO's often struggle with while allowing players
enamored with a single-player game's universe to continue inhabiting it,
albeit by consuming content made with lower production values.

So, no, the MMORPG is not dying. It's just having lots of sex with single
player RPG's and producing mutant offspring.

~~~
iamdave
I think Ubisoft's "The Division" meets and melds some of the concepts you're
talking about in the direction MMO's seem to be going. You start out grabbing
a few solo missions, and the game procedurally teaches you elements of the
game by making you...well...go out there and kill bad guys. Periodically in
early game you'll be on a mission, pinned down when a bullet whizzes by from
out of nowhere, oh look another player walking by decided to come join.

That's when you learn about forming parties. So on and so forth. It's not a
perfect experience by any means (especially on PS4 which seems to both fall
behind in updates and seem to be the buggiest port), and it does get a bit
"grindy" at times, but for me it's been quite a unique experience. You can
very well solo some of the missions, but you _will_ be punished for it.

My main critique is that end game (the "Dark Zone") is essentially one giant
arena built for "let's see how far I can push the gear envelope today".

------
rednab
MMORPG publishers stopped releasing even approximate subscriber numbers years
ago, and the best you'll find with a Google query like "mmo subscriber
numbers" are statistics almost a decade old, heavily footnoted with notices
that numbers are educated guesses at best.

However, as far as anybody can tell, there is a definite downwards trend and
the biggest player, World of Warcraft, has been hemorrhaging subscribers for
years, currently down to an estimated 5.5 million from a peak of _12 million_
in 2010.¹)

It used to be that the MMO playerbase would migrate. A new MMO game would come
out and everybody flocked to the new hotness, and if the game was any good,
they'd stick. But World of Warcraft changed that. People still bought new MMOs
as they came out, but they played them precisely as long as the number of
months of free subscription included in the box, and then moved right back to
WoW, leaving the challenger to wilt and eventually switch to a free-to-play
model.

However, the droves that are leaving MMOs the last couple of year don't seem
to be going to other MMOs, they just evaporate.

The people that enjoy raid-style content with a large multiplayer component
probably end up in MOBAs²) like LoL (League of Legends) and DOTA (Defense of
the Ancients), which offer all of the tension and drama of typical MMO end-
game content without any of the boring grinding needed to unlock it. And
according to Steam, DOTA 2 is the most played PC game in the world.³)

Others have moved to MMO-FPS games like The Division on PC and Destiny on
consoles, and the rise of casual and mobile gaming coincides with the fall of
MMORPGs. But as far as I can tell that still leaves millions of players that
simply stopped playing.

My guess is that the world is just sick and tired of MMORPGs and I think it
will take the death of WoW and a few years without any big MMO releases before
a new generation of players can make any new MMO popular.

¹) [https://www.statista.com/statistics/276601/number-of-
world-o...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/276601/number-of-world-of-
warcraft-subscribers-by-quarter/)

²) Multiplayer Online Battle Arena.

³)
[http://store.steampowered.com/stats/](http://store.steampowered.com/stats/)

~~~
digi_owl
The impression i have of WoW is that over the year it has become IRC with
colorful avatars. People i used to do LAN parties with etc are virtually
impossible to reach online outside WoW.

------
digi_owl
I think there is a twin problem of too many convenience features added, and
the advent of Youtube and community wikis.

The former has turned the process of getting from one end of the map other,
and that of forming groups for dungeons and such, virtually effortless.

As best i recall, if you wanted to travel to another city without doing it
overland in EQ, you had to locate a player character wizard with the right
spell unlocked and the right reagents on hand. Similarly if you died far out
in the wilderness you had to rely on a PC necromancer services to recover the
corpse and gear.

These days you can just click a npc, pay some in game currency and presto,
either problem solved.

Similarly you can these days just put a checkmark next to the dungeons wanted,
hit "find group" and be teleported to the entrance.

The other issue is access to outside information.

Just about every puzzle and dungeon will have multiple video guides up on
Youtube etc within days of game launch or update. And most games these days
have wikis that are either officially or community maintained.

These things kill all sense of wonder and exploration, as one can always alt-
tab to the browser to tell what one need to do next.

edit: Never mind that most overland areas are specifically designed to be
soloed no matter what class or gear one have chosen. Just follow the virtual
breadcrumbs of quest markers and you will be max level and can start on
"endgame" before you know it. At that point the MMO turns into an overly
elaborate lobby game, as nobody ventures out into the overland areas ever
again.

And we can see this in how more recent MMOs are set up with quite elaborate
shard/instance load balancing. Meaning that they can scale the server farm up
or down without ever taking a whole "realm" or named server offline.

------
kriro
I think the MMORPG concept could get a nice boost from live AR
(Ingress/Pokemon Go). I think it would be pretty cool to form a group, walk
around and fight spawning mobs and play some sort of instances. Would probably
easy to monetize with in game purchases (I think the traditional monthly fee
wouldn't work as well). Blizzard is probably already working on something like
this :) There's also potential for a non-grindy version where quests span the
globe and unique NPCs are spread around the world (and the world could mirror
earth...northern Europe being Vikingy etc.)

I played DAOC a lot but due to that experience stayed away from the WoW crack
pipe. Still want to try EVE some day but that would probably require me being
retired :P

------
arca_vorago
My theory is that the time sink of life is impacting the time sink of MMOs,
but the way to solve time sink issues is through pure skill gameplay design,
which is inherently difficult to do in an mmo from an back end architecture
perspective. Increases in compute power are going to keep MMOs from dying
though, because it won't be long before someone merges the two. Its just that
the standard template for an mmo has infected designers minds, so few even
attempt to break the mold.

Bonus: for those of you missing UO and that dynamism, and hardcoreness, Mortal
Online is worth a look. (F2p skill cap of lvl 60)

~~~
ktsmith
WoW is currently trying to appeal to a wide audience rather than a specific
group of players that something like a pure skill system would require.
They've built in their time sink grinding that is always there but they've
also doubled down on the lore and immersion while breaking content into chunks
that are designed for players of different skill levels, time constraints and
interests. You can see this with the inclusion of much more voice acting,
artifact knowledge research, artifact weapons that grow with the player. There
are normal, heroic, mythic and looking for group dungeons and raids all of
which have different levels of difficulty and mechanics to overcome. For those
players looking for a skill based challenge without the time sink of raiding
the mythic + dungeon system is also new. In this system there are keys which
unlock a dungeon at a specific difficulty. As the level of the key increases
the difficulty of the dungeon increases and something called affixes are
added. These affixes change the way the dungeon operates from decreasing
healing to increasing mob difficulty overall or depending on how many are
engaged at one time and several others. Additionally as you move up the
difficulty you go from no affixes up to three affixes at once.

For the first time in a long time I find WoW to actually be compelling and
worth spending time in game. I'll likely only play through each of the classes
to max level and all of their story lines while experiencing the raid dungeons
from the very casual looking for group version but everything is accessible
and can be done at my own pace. Not all of the story lines are well done and I
think they need to consider if they are giving equal writing time to each
class but that's never been the strongest suit for Blizzard.

------
Fjolsvith
I submitted this as I've been feeling much the same way. I recently went
through a bunch of my old games trying to put my finger on what I miss about
them.

I re-installed Neverwinter Nights 2 and started going around some of the
persistent world servers out there, and I really enjoy the role-playing that
goes on among players. I've actually been considering resurrecting my DM gear
and finding some pencil and paper players.

------
mukundmr
I used to play bare bones EverQuest and World of Warcraft for a few years. I
dabble with Guild Wars 2 these days. Questing and exploration is fun. When it
comes to raiding and forming groups, that is where the pain starts. The time
investment required is high. All games become a grind one way or another as
players are able to consume content faster than developers can produce it. At
least with living world, Guild Wars 2 is able to keep kindling the interest of
the player base every now and then in between expansion packs.

------
Qantourisc
Other ideas and concept they can be using: \- Grinding for world
understanding/knowledge instead of XP (don't open use your browser ;D) \-
Allow player skill to have a larger effect on your performance. \- Make
interesting/hard to play classes. \- Make grinding fun, and thus battles
engaging. (Allowing people to have boring grinds can be achieved with
different classes.) \- Consider skill-based classes, rather then templates.

------
k__
I waited for so long for WoW to be released and when it finally came and it
continiously cost money to play, I didn't start with it, because I was poor.

This problably saved my life, lol.

2-3 years after the release I met so much people who lost jobs, dopped out of
university or destroyed their relationships with it.

On the other hand I also met a few that got jobs at Blizzard, starting with
being a GM and later getting into other things like admin stuff etc.

------
qwoppy2017
There are some MMORPGs out there that have attempted to innovate by
introducing elements from other genres. Some names off the top of my head,
Starbreak, Steambirds alliance, Blade & Soul.

Also, maybe those .io games, where you can just pick up and play have gotten
the attention of the younger generation? Especially since they are easier to
access and dont require downloading of a client nor signing up for an account

------
cowardlydragon
Procedural generation and perhaps some better AI will help a lot. No Man's Sky
was basically just a crude demo.

AI bots where you can model actual game theories, and dare I say,
philosophies, of people would be really cool, and I think would just take some
investment from a visionary company.

~~~
vacri
Procedural generation has proven to be something considerably less than a
silver bullet. Some games implement it well, and many do not. Spore was
another big launch that promised the world on the back of procedural
generation... and failed quite remarkably to deliver.

------
flukus
Were they ever alive? It seems like the market only ever had so much room to
begin with.

~~~
ramblerman
WOW had 12 million subscribers at its peak.

~~~
flukus
But they were one of the few winners amongst a lot of losers that could never
get critical mass.

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bigbugbag
How did this non starter got to HN front page ?

This "article" pretty much says nothing but stating the obvious. Playing the
same thing for 10 years grows old, WoW seized the MMORPG market preventing
innovating titles from commercial success. How can he not see that he is part
of the problem he writes about ?

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grzm
If you think a submission is inappropriate for HN, flag it and move on. The
community is made up of members with all kinds of different interests. This
submission has clearly attracted the interest of some.

