How Blizzard SOLVED The MMO Problem

The Forgotten Prince walks Tamriel, and chaos follows in her wake. Investigate the emergence of Ithelia and explore the Colovian region of West Weald in The Elder Scrolls Online: Gold Road. wehy.pe/y/2/PreachGaming

On a completely different side note, haven't watched you since the PG days and god damn have you lost some weight and look better dude.

The WoW bubble reminds me a lot of how Disney builds their parks. They fill it with everything they believe a customer could want with the intention that the customer never feels they need something from outside the park and thus spends all their money within.

ESO Sponsored this WoW commercial? Part 2 must be a banger

As someone who likes to watch multiple hours long video essays I was so surprised to hear that a 14 minute video is already very long lol

Maaan you mentioning Wildstar just opened up old wounds. They killed themselves off before it even had a chance to live. Coupled with financial issues from the publisher, all but sealed its fate.

Ironically enough, this solution for player retention is a nightmare to player acquisition. A curse in disguise.

I think the whole ecosystem Blizzard created might help with keeping the experienced people engaged, it doesnt help with the new player struggle or community behavior issue, as well as the boosting community situation.

No, don't remind me, that we don't have wildstar anymore 😢 Still my favourite mmo by far

all the fomo/seasonal stuff makes me not want to play. why on earth would i want to play something i might enjoy only to have it taken away?

I'm not sure I agree that WoW solved the MMO problem. Nothing has really changed, players are just spread across different versions of WoW, which isn't necessarily a good thing in the long run because it still leaves players to disconnect from their friends as they go about playing different versions from each other. Also, those versions of WoW still use the same formulas that WoW used for the last 20 years, just with some differences for special modes like SoD, etc. so the risk of burnout is still very much present. The main thing WoW has I think is nostalgia at this point. People who grew up on WoW have trouble enjoying other MMOs because they do certain things differently from WoW, so they always end up going back to WoW. It's not because other MMOs are bad or worse than WoW. The simple fact that those other MMOs are not like WoW is enough to discourage WoW players from playing them. But as someone who didn't grow up with WoW as their main MMO, trying to play WoW is often jarring because it feels like they've abandoned anyone that's not part of the existing core playerbase. With all that said, I think the MMO problem is unsolvable. The best you can do is to just delay the inevitable by delivering good content that makes players want to experience it.

I literally can't think of a one person I know that plays WoW who would play more than one version of the game at a time. Everyone I know is either playing retail and ditching classic or playing classic and ditching retail.

It's a great principle in theory... but it hinges on being interested in the WoW bubble to begin with, which a lot of people have sworn off. Great if you're a long term player who can pick their favourite era, but there's nothing really for new players/actual growth. And nothing for truly new content/a future for a lot of these ventures. I think the unspoken extra side of this is something a lot of people have feared with the Worldsoul Saga, essentially Retail is just getting big patches that can fit this new cadence. This is the slow, actual managed decline of WoW, where the themepark is no longer the zones but physically the MMO itself.

cata suffered as the classic team is not capable of working on classic and sod at the same time. Cata fixes have vanished as all focus is on saving sod from failure.

Let’s give RuneScape some credit for sparking this industry wide shift towards rehashing classic content

Isn't this too one-sided optimism without offering any counter arguments? Are we going to neglect the fact that having 4 different versions of WoW has divided an already segmented community even further? That the quality of all the game modes has lowered due to the fact that they must QA and develop 4x the amount of content? I get he is optimistic about Blizzard but a more balanced, unbias look at the pros and the cons of such an endeavor would have been more useful.

Life is full of choices, the choices offered at the end sounded a lot better than "I forgot to do Torghast". Having too many fun things to choose from is a waaaaay different problem than having too many chores to do.

The Nostalrius domino-effect is growing ever more consequential.

as someone who has tried to play all 3 versions of wow (retail, sod, cata) its very hard to avoid burnout and to me it comes down to personally deciding which versions to drop in favour of the others. i stopped playing sod and cata aside from logging in to level every now and then to avoid massive burnout. not to say all the blame is on players if theyre burned out b/c blizzard def does release a lot of things in a very short window which feels super stressful if you want to play all 3

I was NOT expecting to see Pure Pwnage clips this day