There not afraid to brave the storm of everyone shouting “WoW Clone” because there mechanics are similar.

On console RPGs, player perception is very different and absent from the game to game fanboyism, preferring to stick to console wars, While on computers MMO’s face this fanboyism on a per game level.

But if you look at console RPG’s no one is shouting XXX-Clone loud enough to be heard. Yet, most RPG’s, on consoles share very similar mechanics.

Runes of Magic isn’t a clone, they have original(if not currently lacking in content) World Lore, and many cool elements(including the aggregator which allows you to take the stats of one piece of gear and transfer it to another- Which I think ALL MMO’s should adopt)

Of course there is a whole different attitude between subscriber based players and F2P players.

But now, so many games insist on matching the WoW default binding scheme and not give me any option to switch… that’s one of the big reasons I stopped playing Free Realms.

First off, I hate the term “WoW tourists”. It diminishes us MMO fans who play WoW. It’s ironic that Syncaine is now game-hopping while he waits for the US Darkfall server. Think the Van Hemlock podcast touched on the issue of Darkfall tourists.

As Centuri says very eloquently above it lets people fail and blame WoW. When I rebuilt my PC to play AoC, cancelled WoW and began playing with RL friends I was not a tourist, I was very committed. I was extremely disappointed that the game was so unsatisfying that I (and droves of others) gave up on it.

Most people aren’t tourists when we buy new games. We’re actually open to finding a new home should the game draw us in sufficiently.

The reason WOW keeps pulling them back is mainly because the games are obviously deficient in fundamental areas. Both War and AoC offered a massively multiplayer pvp experience without solving the lag problem. Interestingly WoW offered a spoiler massive pvp experience, Wintergrasp, as almost a throwaway extra and still did it better. If devs can’t achieve what their basic game raison d’etre is intended to do please don’t excuse them by pretending the millions of people cancelling wow, upgrading their pcs, buying the box, subscribing were just tourists visiting for a week.

In a new game we’re all tourists
– no we’re not. If we intend to make our home there we’re emigrants. Tourists are people who know they will be leaving soon.

Are WoW players different?
– no but our impact is different. If 25% of the Darkfall players check out a new release for a month then cancel it won’t hurt it. If 25% of WoW players try Warhammer for a month then cancel they have to close a hundred servers starting a failure cascade.

I do think developers must plan for the WoW tourist effect but they should be doing their utmost to make sure their game keeps potential emigrants rather than hold to the placebo that they were tourists who never wanted to stay anyway.

Bless

I miss the ‘real’ MMOs actually, there was a kind of awesome visionary thing about virtual worlds that a lot of the early MUD pioneers and players shared. But they lived in a world where it wasn’t trivial to hang out online with your mates on twitter, or googletalk, or facebook. Adopting a virtual persona and hanging out on a bboard or MUD or newsgroup was such a novel experience. Nothing else matched it. And a graphical world that you could walk around …

(When I say they, I mean ‘we’ really.) It was just so incredibly exciting to be part of an online world with real other people in it that we never thought that in a few years time, that particular aspect might become old hat. I believe that in many ways the internet itself has become a sort of MMO. It’s certainly persistent. It has locations. People have avatars.

I think WoW has been the rising tide. People do now understand the whole concept. But it may have risen beyond the ‘real’ MMOs and that makes me a bit sad too. And maybe the other devs forgot how attached people can get to their avatars and virtual homes. I’d love to see another successful non-PvP sandbox type game.

I think that’s where some of the frustration is. It’s not that WoW was successful, therefore other games can’t be, as Centuri implies that developer think. It’s more that WoW was supposed to be the rising tide that lifted all boats. Instead it’s turned into a whirlpool that has kept growing and making the waters unsafe for most other boats.

In this aspects MMOs have an unique property – in other community-dependent services , like e-Bay, Facebook, Skype, etc. … it’s hard to leave your current provider for a new one, because all your friends are in the old one and you will lose your contact with them .. so it’s very hard for a new start-up service to convince you to move.
But when new MMOs like AoC or WAR came out, a lot of people left WoW and went there … so, if the games were actually good, they would stay.

But the people buying WAR/AoC after playing WoW, did not go there with the tourist intention to stay for a month and then leave – they genuinely wanted to play something different and paid the initial investment of the new game box (in some cases even a collector’s edition), which was equal to at least 3-4 month subscription.