mmorpg's

RAWR!!! 

So, today I have a little story before my rant :D

Yesterday, we were shopping for Mexican food night ingredients, my gf, brother, and I, and the check out clerk was a young male, about 22 or 23. He noticed my LoL shirt, which says 'Don't Feed the Champions', and said, "Is that a gamer or a nerd reference?"
I responded, "Both, LoL".
He paused and then continued, "I was just wondering what game then."
I said, "League of Legends; LoL"
He said, "I didn't know if it was a Halo drop out of the map ref or LoL. I thought you might mean LoL, but then I didn't know if it was lol. Kinda like how WoW used to be, ya know, wow or WoW."
I nodded and then turned to my brother, remembering something I wanted to comment to him and hadn't yet. I told my bro that WoW only had 6mil players last year, and were losing an average of over 100k a month, and that a lot of mmo's, Rift amongst them, were gaining players in troves.
The guy behind the register interjected, "Doesn't surprise me at all about WoW. All mmo's will be obsolete in a couple years. If it isn't a game that has people combating, then it won't succeed, so mmo's are gonna be gone. Ya know what I mean about combat?"
I said, "games which include some form of PvP."
He finished with "Yeah, that."

We checked out, and went on our merry way to eat our yummy Mexican delights. But my brother said that guy was a moron. I shrugged and said maybe he didn't understand fully, but I understood what he meant, even if he hadn't.

Online gaming, the history, according to LyL (WoW was the first MMO!!! fail troll is fail):

With the dawn of the usefulness of the internet, also came the understanding that we could interact with others far away and feel warm and fuzzy inside. yay.

So we started making chat rooms and lo, we were bored with just talking. We were used to fun and wonderful games that we could type commands on and watch our pixelated little person do fun things, or lay a card or chess piece out and feel smart, or even pong our pong or roll our marbles through mazes of daring. So, online gaming began with three major flavors.
Flavor one was card/board games
Flavor two was puzzle games
Flavor three was Muds.

Now the first two are rather self explanatory, and you can find common examples of them everywhere, for they are still very much used, especially in the app world. I know of no tablet or pad that lacks such wonders as puzzle and card/board games, be it solitaire, poker, mahjong or chess. Likewise, who hasn't played something like candy crush saga, bejeweled, blah blah. You get it.

Muds were wonderfully diff. They were interactive, by making someone who represented yourself accomplish things. Whether it was traversing a maze while being hunted and hunting or it was fighting some creature with pure numbers, it was great.

These three things all had babies. Puzzle games and board games made wonderful babies with muds, such as 2d puzzle world games (example, puzzle pirates), the joys of pvp in larger ways, and combat games where you took on monsters like in a normal game, but with friends. First person shooters online appeared, right alongside Real time strats and dungeon games. But Muds also had their own baby on the side, the wonder of the mmo.

As general computer gaming moved from a King's Quest 4 where you typed command to King's Quest 5 where you clicked with your mouse, so did online gaming move forward, and started to have massively multiplayer online wonders, for some people began to want to escape to wonderful, large worlds, where you no longer felt like you were playing with someone, as much as engaging with a giant world with others you could meet. Early MMORPGs were things like Everquest and Ultima Online, places where you engaged in the joys of gaming with others, but also, could play the same game alone, and it was open ended, being a world for you to make whatever you wanted to happen, happen, if you were skilled and determined enough (with a decent helping of lots of time).
People say all mmorpg's copy one or another (WoW often by trolls just to get rises out of people) but the truth is that they all copy each other in bits, because they all came from the same place. Just like all people look more alike to other humans than other animals, because we all genetically came from one source (proven with science, whether you are religious or not), mmo's are the same. They have cores to their gameplay, that cause them to be mmo's

Now, the thing is, I DO NOT think mmo's are going anywhere. I DO think they are dropping down from their throne of 'most people who play online play us'.

Apps have jumped into first place, in my personal opinion. Fps's and moba's are doing amazing. The guy at the store was right in that mmo's are not the top dog of the internet as they used to be, but there will ALWAYS be core players hugging mmo's, and there will always be people who, as much as they enjoy pvp, will also be compulsive collectors and gatherers and Auction house players and want to do quests and raids and dungeons and so on. Mmo's are not going to be obsolete, so much as they helped birth new fun things just like every other type of game does.

Mmo's that will continue to be popular are the ones who adapt to the new way of gaming. Subscriptions, for instance, are becoming less common. Most games who do subs, start out with them, and then create a f2p model later. Free 2 play is just more of a money making cash cow. Most people want that. Subscriptions on a lot of games that are keeping them, are being reduced in price, because they cannot compete with the amount of FREE on the market. Games are including more novelty items and fru fru costumes to cover up gear. People don't care as much about showing off their leet top tier raid set as looking adorable or like the grim reaper. Having homes that you can decorate, mounts as unique as there are creatures in the world, things that do not grant prowess in combat at all, are becoming the norm.

People are turning into online hoarders. They can collect their games to one single log in, their movies, their music, to a solitary account username and password. If a game is not convenient, it won't matter that it is filled with new worlds each zone, engaging storylines, and deep character creation. Fun to play trumps graphics. Easy to learn overrules long term content. Endgame is more vital than any of the leveling it took to get there.

Games are not just about getting a new game anymore, but about keeping and gaining new players. The more who play your game for the longer a period of time, the less you have to spend developing a new one. Everyone wants to be the game everyone wants to play. And more and more games want to be part of MLG, including mmo's.

And why not? Sports make crazy money, so why not gaming competitions? Companies will go for what makes them the money, and MLG is internationally, good money. PvP is good money.

It is sad to me that mmo's are starting to not be the most talked about games out there, because I love them, and might choose one day to be part of that core who continues to play them til I die, but I don't disregard the new path of games, or the games that are being born just cuz I love the old.

Truth is truth. The true true is that gaming is growing again, and that is good, but there are some people who still play muds, still play puzzle and card/board games. There are still people who love retro, and tablets love older, low graphic games.

 Mmo's are more likely to become handheld than to become obsolete.

So don't cry, mmo lovers, they are not going anywhere. They just aren't king anymore.

RAWR! :)