Originally posted by hitech
Simple facts of online gamming.
1. Very few people play an online game for an "extended" period of time.
Customers of any online game have a life cycle.
Well that's true, but there's more. The
games themselves have a life cycle, and in many cases players leave because of changes in that life cycle, or because of changes in the composition of the player base over a given period of time in that life cycle, and the behaviour of the player base in that given period of time.
In both AH and WB before that, I have heard the seasoned vets proclaim that the glory days were in the 0.81 beta (substitute 0.81 with any positive decimal value less than 1.0 according to which game you played in beta).
All these games are in a pricing life cycle. I saw somewhere that one of the old DOS sims was $6.95/hour! Clearly, anyone paying that much would have to be very enthusiastic indeed. But times change. The game life cycle continues. No more do we pay hourly. AH has gone from being $30/month to $14.95/month, so now it's twice as affordable. Guess what that means for the composition of the player base?
A game mutates from having a small player base to a much larger one if the game is any good. In the beginning, the participants would have been mad keen with "this new game" that's just arrived. There might be only a handful of players, but life is good, and the players all know one another...
...but then, as the masses arrive, so do the bulletin board whines about gameplay.
"Perk this; move that; harden key targets; change XYZ flight model; gunnery sux; give us more maps; move the bases around; ;"...Suddenly, the game that the vets played in beta no longer exists. Have those vets changed? No, probably not. But many quit anyway when the game undergoes what they feel is one upgrade too many, or because the player base and/or the gameplay have changed beyond recognition from what they recall in the glory days.
I have fond memories of Brand-W c1998-2000, apart from the June 99 2.6 debacle.
But then came WB3. Here is a chronology of the events surrounding its release:
- It was hyped up to the nth degree during development.
- The focus was on "awesome" new graphics, but did bugger all about gameplay.
- In the time leading up to deployment, we were shown little tidbits - screenshots - like a dog being thrown a bone from the table - to keep us slavering...
- It was delivered late - much, much later than originally stated.
- After delivery, many players had enormous difficulties getting it to work.
- After delivery, a hard core of players became obsessed about graphic effects, and "skins" - as if nothing else mattered.
Does this ring any bells?
Players began leaving WB3, and many came here. Now many have left here, and who knows where they'll end up. Perhaps in the beta version of another fledgling flightsim. They'll be in there, having a great time, and maybe even the gameplay will bear some resemblance to a WW2 mission...
... but how long will it be before that game's BBS sees requests for target "hardness" to be changed, gunnery changes, damage model changes? How long before someone says "Waaah, I want an LA7"?
...and so the game cycle continues........
