Pan'Theon: Rise' of th'e Fal'Len - #1 Thread in MMO

Xadion said:

It's reconciled with, 500$ didn't give them a sword of dragon slaying item that one shots Naggy the Fallen, they still had to "earn" it "in game" with "normal" in game content accessible (later!) To everyone.

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No, but it gave them months (several years more likely given the pace of development) of time to figure out and strategize the most efficient way to get to that endpoint. It's like taking 11 guys off the street and putting them in a football match up against 11 guys who have been practicing, training and studying for their match the last year. And the inexperienced guys don't know the rules of the game and don't know where to get equipment at. Is the practiced team going to win? Of course they are.

Building off of this, the bigger challenge I see for this game is adverse selection of its customers. From what we've seen of the blueprint for the game so far, it looks to be catered towards the remaining fanatics of a 20 year old game (EverQuest). There are two problems with this demographic - 1) it's not very large and 2) it's incredibly insular and toxic. In other words, if this is the group of players you are targeting, hopefully you've considered this in your business model because it's not likely to grow beyond that.

orionTZ1998 said:

No, but it gave them months (several years more likely given the pace of development) of time to figure out and strategize the most efficient way to get to that endpoint. It's like taking 11 guys off the street and putting them in a football match up against 11 guys who have been practicing, training and studying for their match the last year. And the inexperienced guys don't know the rules of the game and don't know where to get equipment at. Is the practiced team going to win? Of course they are.

Building off of this, the bigger challenge I see for this game is adverse selection of its customers. From what we've seen of the blueprint for the game so far, it looks to be catered towards the remaining fanatics of a 20 year old game (EverQuest). There are two problems with this demographic - 1) it's not very large and 2) it's incredibly insular and toxic. In other words, if this is the group of players you are targeting, hopefully you've considered this in your business model because it's not likely to grow beyond that.

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Except that the number of people playing MMO's worldwide is about a thousand times larger than it was when EQ launched in 1999. So do the new math based on how many people currently play MMO's, and if even 5% of that world population wants to play a game like Pantheon, you have well over a million subs.

orionTZ1998 said:

No, but it gave them months (several years more likely given the pace of development) of time to figure out and strategize the most efficient way to get to that endpoint. It's like taking 11 guys off the street and putting them in a football match up against 11 guys who have been practicing, training and studying for their match the last year. And the inexperienced guys don't know the rules of the game and don't know where to get equipment at. Is the practiced team going to win? Of course they are.

Building off of this, the bigger challenge I see for this game is adverse selection of its customers. From what we've seen of the blueprint for the game so far, it looks to be catered towards the remaining fanatics of a 20 year old game (EverQuest). There are two problems with this demographic - 1) it's not very large and 2) it's incredibly insular and toxic. In other words, if this is the group of players you are targeting, hopefully you've considered this in your business model because it's not likely to grow beyond that.

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The same shit happens in tons of MMO's. Even in Everquest Vox and Nagafen were killed during Beta.

Regarding the goals for their customer base, here is a quote from Brad:

"And just so you don't think I'm too crazy, no, I don't think the vast majority of these audiences and demographics will all be magically drawn to the game. But, as I've posted before, we're not making a game that is all things to all people. If we can reach a reasonable percentage of those who already do love Pantheon AND those who would once given a chance to experience it, then we will have success, the game will grow, expansions with new content and crazy new features will be released, and we'll have another game on our hands that's still running even 17 years after launch. 15 million online gamers (a conservative number, btw)? 10% is still 1.5M. 1% is 150,000 gamers. EQ was very successful and profitable at 150,000 gamers, peaking at 550k. Small numbers yes when compared later to WoW, but plenty large enough to employ a dedicated dev team, live teams, expansion teams, support and GM/CS teams, etc. etc. Especially a company like Visionary Realms, where we run lean and mean. We don't have huge overheads, a publisher who takes a huge cut, needless bureaucracy, 9-5ers, people who won't wear multiple hats and do whatever it takes. "

etchazz said:

and if even 5% of that world population wants to play a game like Pantheon

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They don't.

By your logic, every corpse in the MMORPG graveyard should have hit million+ subscribers.

They want to play World of Warcraft - a game that is designed to allow a player to log on for whatever amount of time, make progress towards their goals and eventually fight the biggest monsters in the game. What they don't want: wasting their life playing a game where they are locked out of end-game content.

Zaide said:

The same shit happens in tons of MMO's. Even in Everquest Vox and Nagafen were killed during Beta.

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Right, but they did it without paying money to be there.

Regarding the goals for their customer base, here is a quote from Brad:

"And just so you don't think I'm too crazy, no, I don't think the vast majority of these audiences and demographics will all be magically drawn to the game. But, as I've posted before, we're not making a game that is all things to all people. If we can reach a reasonable percentage of those who already do love Pantheon AND those who would once given a chance to experience it, then we will have success, the game will grow, expansions with new content and crazy new features will be released, and we'll have another game on our hands that's still running even 17 years after launch. 15 million online gamers (a conservative number, btw)? 10% is still 1.5M. 1% is 150,000 gamers. EQ was very successful and profitable at 150,000 gamers, peaking at 550k. Small numbers yes when compared later to WoW, but plenty large enough to employ a dedicated dev team, live teams, expansion teams, support and GM/CS teams, etc. etc. Especially a company like Visionary Realms, where we run lean and mean. We don't have huge overheads, a publisher who takes a huge cut, needless bureaucracy, 9-5ers, people who won't wear multiple hats and do whatever it takes. "

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I'd wager that even 150k subs is a stretch given that this game will have no appeal to the Asian markets but it's good to see that he's at least somewhat realistic on what the scope of his game should be

Probably a few actually

looks better than wow so the engine has to be better

The problem MOST MMOs have today is staying power. People consume the content, and then just fade away. The challenge is not getting subs, it's keeping them longer than a month or two. For that the gameplay has to be fun. WoW crushed it in this regard, because playing WoW is still fun for a lot of people even today.. Games like TERA, SWOTOR, and others were fun initially, and then just lost people. In fact, SWOTOR was a FANTASTIC Star Wars game, but really never felt like an MMO to me.. It was a single player game with other people around, if that makes sense.

Hopefully Pantheon gets this part right.. Time will tell.

The unrivaled smoothness of WoW's combat engine is honestly a big part of what keeps me playing it 14 years later. Which is why it's baffling that they want to inject clunkiness into it with the BFA GCD changes.

orionTZ1998 said:

Right, but they did it without paying money to be there.

I'd wager that even 150k subs is a stretch given that this game will have no appeal to the Asian markets but it's good to see that he's at least somewhat realistic on what the scope of his game should be

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Every MMO has raid testing, who cares if they pay for testing? This happens in every mmo and has no bearing on real rankings when it comes down to it. Some WoW conglomerate led by the same guys who all hang out still will form and consume these raids as fast as humanly possible with no practice for the 10th game in a row. Even thats a stretch, they arent going to have 2 classes ready for launch I think I read? Why would you concern yourself over raiding with complex and scripted raids that would need to be completed pre-release for major testing.

Id be super happy with hard dungeons and just a clean game on release. Thats something we havent ever seen pretty much at all.

orionTZ1998 said:

They don't.

By your logic, every corpse in the MMORPG graveyard should have hit million+ subscribers.

They want to play World of Warcraft - a game that is designed to allow a player to log on for whatever amount of time, make progress towards their goals and eventually fight the biggest monsters in the game. What they don't want: wasting their life playing a game where they are locked out of end-game content.

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There are a fuckton of people who hate WoW and love mmo's. You don't speak for them. Don't even try.

H

Korrupt said:

That's the primary reason to even raid test, you get to expose your entire guild to mechanics and fights so when it releases its just executing something you've already done a hundred times. Generally the guilds who really need the practice never get world first even testing with weeks of practice so for the guilds interested in top 10 its moot who tests. It's actually good for the testing to have medium end or casual guilds because it shows them how normal people react to mechanics. If you had all WoW mythic raiders you wouldn't get anything but uber guild feedback which is .05% of a games population.

That shit is so far away anyway, we'd be incredibly lucky to get a raid zone on release considering how little is actually done in this game right now.

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Joppa did mention on one of the recent chats that the Amberfaet dungeon is a raid zone, so there's going to at least be one. I kind of hope they release at a minimum with sort of an early WoW dynamic where you had the more or less casual raid zone in Molten Core, with the far more difficult raid zone in Blackwing Lair for the hardcore crowd. Eventually the medium and casual crowd will move on to that raid, but it won't be for a long time. If they launch with something close to that at a minimum, everyone should be somewhat happy for a little while. Especially if they can slow down leveling to a significant degree.

orionTZ1998 said:

How do the die-hard supporters of this game - people who, from what I've seen, eschew games using "pay-to-win" mechanics and want everything to be "earned" - reconcile those beliefs with the fact that paying hundreds (thousands?) of dollars to receive early access to the game is one of the most egregious examples of pay-to-win we've seen thus far? Is your server first dragon kill still "earned" if you had to pay $500 and spend hundreds of hours in beta to develop the strategy to do it?

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Not really a die-hard supporter of the game, but I am looking forward to it so I'll throw in my two cents. I did pay $100 bucks for Alpha access awhile back, that's all I was willing to throw in with what they had at the time, which was very little. Might be more willing to throw more cash now if they had a more enticing tier.

But to respond, I don't view beta access as pay to win by any stretch. I've never really seen a game that had open world raid testing in beta, the closest for me was doing the raid testing in Vanguard beta, but those were just static mobs (in the form of clouds even) and we were just helping them test out abilities and approaches. I was in Friends and Family beta for EQ1 and EQ2, I don't remember anyone getting to test the raid mobs. I think they did that all in-house.

My guess would be that Pantheon might test raid mob abilities in a made up beta zone (essentially an arena) like they did in Vanguard. But, nobody will know the actual raid mob they are fighting (it will just be random_cloud_01), but doing that will help tune the abilities. And then at some point, probably just prior to launch, the Devs will place that mob in its spot in the world, which nobody will find until after launch. I don't see early testers as having much of a headstart and many of them won't be selected to participate in the raid mob attuning anyway. I think there were 30 of us in Vanguard. We did have some items named after us though, so that was cool.

They've said that their focus is primarily on the grouping game, and building fun/challenging content at that level. It's been emphasized that while raid mobs will exist it represents a very small minority for them because the game is about meaningful group level gameplay.

I don't really understand the concept of people saying they're launching without X number of classes though. I mean they're launching without infinite classes, like Blood Mage, Death Knight, Samurai any other shit you can think of. So does every game ever. The classes that people are talking about are Bard and Necromancer. Now they're saying that looking at current development they'll most likely have the Bard in for launch too. So really we're looking at just the Necromancer. Was there a time when Necromancer was listed as a class they'd have in at launch? If not I can't see the criticism because you could always choose to allocate more development resources and time into creating new classes.

Grim1 said:

There are a fuckton of people who hate WoW and love mmo's. You don't speak for them. Don't even try.

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There are also people who don't enjoy the taste of Coke and prefer the taste of their own piss. That doesn't mean it would be good business to design a product targeted at them.

*cue the Mountain Dew jokes*

BoozeCube said:

I think you under estimate just many subs a pre alpha bus stop marketing poster will bring in. This shit will reach 100 mil subs with money spent like that.

You know how many panties got soaked at that bus stop?

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I thought you were kidding at first but then I googled to be sure and... wow.