With the developers of WoW, LotRO, and AoC all churning away at content upgrades and improvements there shouldn't be much to complain about in terms of lack of stuff to explore. And if you throw in the upcoming games like Warhammer Online and Stargate Worlds plus "oldies" like Everquest II and EVE Online then it gets downright scary. So much content, so little time to play.
One side-effect of this abundance of content might become that fewer people will go for endgame treadmills such as raiding or faction grinding. For people who like to explore new stuff it makes sense to switch to another game when running out of easily accessible content. Some will find it impossible to resist the temptation of unexplored places.
Maybe it is the WoW burnout still affecting me, but I can't imagine ever going back to raiding 3-4 evenings a week. Raiding occasionally is still fun for me, but the constant farming of the same raid instances to gear up is not going to lure me back into hardcore raiding. And daily quests? I can't believe I thought these were a good idea.
Why should I do the same stuff over and over again? I could be off exploring in another game instead! If I run out of content in one game I stop my subscription for it and switch to another one that has had a content upgrade while I was away. Kind of a crop rotation system that prevents burnout with any single game.
I think the raiding guilds/kinships in WoW and LotRO are going to be in an especially rough spot for a few months. There will be a high outflux of experienced players.
Hopefully the game companies will adjust to the higher amount of competition. LotRO will probably be hit hard over the next few weeks while AoC is new and shiny. Later on this year AoC's player base will shrink when WHO hits and the other games release their expansions. And even for Blizzard the easy days of a growing playerbase without real effort might be nearing their end.
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2 comments:
I know just what you mean Kira - I currently have subscriptions to WoW, LotRO and AoC. WoW runs out on Monday (for the first time in over three years), and I cancelled the LotRO one in anticipation of AoC.
I'm enjoying AoC and I'll probably stump up for the first month's full charge at least, but I think in the future my MMO subscriptions will go the same way as Eve - I'll sign up for a month at a time, and then after that month expires I'll just resubscribe whenever the notion take me.
I've done the hardcore raider thing, if I'm honest with myself, six months of MC was enough to feel that I'd 'been there done that'. Guess these days I'm truly one of those 'second class citizen' casuals we read so much about =P
Oh and great blog btw, I really enjoyed reading it, and your written English puts mine to shame =)
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