Comments on: The Newbie Hose Continues to Spurt

By: multiboxing

multiboxing — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 20:41:36 +0000

I don’t suppose the blogger here has ever thought about dualboxing before?

By: Dead Again: Five Year Old Noob « Tish Tosh Tesh

Dead Again: Five Year Old Noob « Tish Tosh Tesh — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 12:57:25 +0000

[...] should be able to tame pets from the beginning. Apparently, there’s a not-insignificant number of characters who never get past level 10. Ignoring for the moment that such data tells us all of Jack Squat about retention, conversion, [...]

By: Cataclysm, Shmataclysm « Tish Tosh Tesh

Cataclysm, Shmataclysm « Tish Tosh Tesh — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 19:32:31 +0000

[...] Call it “PreCataclysm Azeroth” and watch it sell like hotcakes and introduce a new batch of newbies. It’s like a free trial on steroids… that you can charge for. Forget a piddling $1 [...]

By: Grand

Grand — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 07:29:54 +0000

Game devs need to grow some balls imo. It’s just horrible at the moments. They’re all out to beat WoW by being more WoW, which is ridiculous. We need more games like AO, EVE, AC, EQ etc. where the world is actually their own. Those games never felt like a copy of anything else. They made THEIR game and found a certain % of the market that liked their game.
Today it seems like people look at WoW and go “Whoa, we need to get those 10 mill (or whatever) subs!” and that’s just wrong. People don’t want a more WoW-er WoW. They’ve already played that game.. They want something new, something interesting.

If a game is good, has plenty of content and doesn’t try to suit every person on the planet and the launch isn’t rushed / screwed up, people will play it. You may not get 10 million subscribers but other games have done perfectly fine with a lot less. Setting the success-bar at WoW-numbers is ridiculous.

By: Harcon

Harcon — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 20:44:53 +0000

Eve Online is a decent game but you have to remember that this is how eve works.

Start with 1 account. Then as you progress you relise that having 1 account is seriously limiting. Its very difficult to generate income and pvp in a game with permanent loss, so most people buy a second account (one account to make money, another to have fun with etc). Some people even make a seperate miner account etc etc.

Any capital ship pilot NEEDS a second account due to how the cyno system works. Its just not feasable to have a single account and be a capital ship pilot.

Titan pilots need at least 4 accounts due to the nature of safe handeling of a titan.

In fact, its very common to see people with 3-4 accounts in eve. In wow, 1 account is more than enough for almost everyone. But eve lets you train skils afk though.

By: BryanM

BryanM — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 17:29:55 +0000

Guild Wars 2 will do pretty well for itself.

Cataclysm really did kind of surprise me – decades of those nightmarish night elf spider quests that no sane person ever would do more than once, and instead of just fixing the zone up a little, they go and refurnish the entire world.

It’s kind of nice to know that when Blizzard decides to do something, they won’t half-ass it. Gives me a sliver of hope for their less profitable properties, like Diablo 2…

By: Dave Rickey

Dave Rickey — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 02:46:45 +0000

Why is the newbie hose infinite? Because no *credible* contender has appeared. Nothing else has “captured” the mantle of being the “new hotness”. Over and over, we’ve seen contenders get over 1M beta signups, even move the better part of a million boxes, but fail to have legs. We saw the same thing with EQ1, until Camelot appeared. Main difference is that EQ1 didn’t hold it quite as long (3 years rather than 5 and counting), and the flow of that hose was a lot smaller back then.

If Eve isn’t AAA, neither was anything else that came out before WoW (it was squarely in the budget range of pre-WoW MMO’s). “WoW, but better” has proven to not be the best strategy, but nothing else has been tried since. Eve is growing an entirely different market, and has had it to itself since killing off Jumpgate1 and Earth and Beyond. We’ll see if Jumpgate2 can take that away from it (Eve does have a truly horrible newbie experience, and cruft plus design drift is hampering its incomparable PvP sandbox).

–Dave

By: Sandra

Sandra — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 20:31:18 +0000

The answer is that they’re going to have to come from the people who aren’t currently interested in MMOs or video games. If that happens what will that do to the caliber of the community?

I’m pretty sure it will improve the caliber of the community immensely. :>

By: Blizzard and SOE Agree: Improving the Newbie Experience Equals Success and Growth | Wolfshead Online

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 06:45:26 +0000

[...] spoke during last week’s Activision/Blizzard investors conference call about the completely revamped newbie experience that will be coming to WoW via their new Cataclysm expansion. He stated that the WoW newbie areas [...]

By: Wolfshead

Wolfshead — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 08:36:17 +0000

Nice article! Looks like it’s all about churn — ensuring that more people start playing your MMO then quit playing your MMO.

I can appreciate that much of this growth comes from: 1) every year there are more potential new WoW players coming of age and 2) the video game culture is becoming more pervasive in our culture.

Still, who has not hear of WoW yet that still hasn’t tried it? Where will these new subscribers come from?

The answer is that they’re going to have to come from the people who aren’t currently interested in MMOs or video games. If that happens what will that do to the caliber of the community? Seems to me that WoW is slouching toward a future where it’s going to be all about appealing to the lowest common denominator of people.

Interesting times are ahead.