Dunno if I entirely agree with that. While brand recognition definitely plays a part, it doesn’t explain grandpa gamers and family guilds. That is word of mouth and accessibility. I mean, what percentage of the 6 million actually fit into a bnet stereotype? even if it’s 60%, that’s a heap of newcomers still. This isn’t just a shift of players to genre, this is generation of new players.

1. Your spoon fed your quests, you hardly have to think about where anything is or ask anybody question, just look around for someone with a “?” above thier heads. EQ you first talk to people and FIND the person giving the quest then ask a question with a responce that included the original bracketed word to find out more information.

2. Your given rest experience IF you log out in an Inn but can only accumulate a level and a half.

3. No death penelty which now gives people the right to do whatever they please without a real reserve, and no, AC costs are not much of a deterrent.

4. People literaly zurg to 60 in 3-4 months and then find that the game changes to almost EQ style raid content.

Its a fun game in a dumbed down way but I am looking forward to Vangaurd to fill the nitch for slower progression and more of a challenge than the spoonfeeding that WOW hands you. It litterally comes down to the fact that you dont have to think as much in WOW compared to previous released MMORPGs since there are no penelties.

As far as the CR goes, I have seen it as bad as EQ and as good as COH for the most part. (Like havint to repeat the Jailbreak part of the Ony quest line since 4 others of my party completed it and I did not yet I didnt die and was with the marshal at all times.

Says the person defending UO when compared to WoW? But, people always ignore all the other games that were out there at the time as well. Anyway, M59 was a really quality game held back by a inept company that had no idea how to market an online game. Such are the dangers of being a pioneer.

But, the quotes about WoW from the article show how it history simply repeats itself. When UO came out, it was the “only” game out. Then EQ became the “first”, with people ignoring games that came before it. I’ve said we’d get to a point where people would claim WoW “started it all”, and it looks like we’re pretty much there.

So, get used to people ignoring history. Again. UO will likely be remembered as “that sad game that couldn’t break even half a million worldwide” by people in a few years, just as people today are dismissive of earlier games like M59. So much for that type of gameplay ever making a comeback, eh?

Have fun,

Course if he hadn’t been such a dick to those of us who chose to RP sociopathic murderers maybe he woulda had a better time of it, just sayin.

As for the Blizzard rep amongst gamers…. Ultima, anyone anyone…. am I THAT fucking old? Warcraft was a great game but Ultima was like one of the top 10 games, with strong sequels to boot early on, in the decade before UO. Most hard core Ultima fans fled early on because the howling horde of UO newbs shredded Raphs early storyline content like a wet tissue. Not that their loss held UO back from a million. It has to be somthing else.

Maybe the market is just maturing. Kinda sad b/c minus the raving bunch of assholes that made up the playerbase UO was a better game during the early years of yore than WOW has ever been.

Welcome to earth, don’t eat the fish, its poisoned.

But hell, I remember it taking a half hour to an hour just to walk across Britain in UO on a regular basis, not to mention the inopportune times for a total server crash, after which you would almost certainly be dead and decayed if you were in anyplace remotely dangerous, which at one time was just about anydamnplace.

The angry, vocal, and probably unwashed masses go through these complaints with every game. Sometimes it is justified, mostly, it isn’t.

I can’t find it in myself to get too irate with Wow’s server issues. We still get things done. Far more often than not, our raids are succcessful with a minimum of issues. On the occasional problem, I just give the figurative polite nod to my frenzied guildmates and find something else to do. Even with its problems, it is cheap entertainment. I certainly don’t expect perfection – I expect basic usability on a reasonable scale. And it delivers that.

By contrast, EQ2 did not perform adequately when I played it near launch; therefore I quit. I played it through beta and for a few months after launch, and simply wasn’t satisfied with the performance.

Oh yeah, and paladins are just fine. All you need to do is know how to heal, res, and DI anyway, right?

If they really cared about these issues, they would have stopped paying for it by now. If they need the excuse of “there’s not competitor to WoW”, then they simply have no willpower. And that is just sad.