Having to roll only 4 toons to have er'thing. Switching holy trinity roles on the fly (OOC). It's a shame they diluted what was shaping up to be a very unique game in Heroes of Telara.
Where is the amalgam of WAR gfx & PQ, DAoC 3 faction/RvR abilities, WoW breadth, UI functionality & combat responsiveness, Conan titties & gore and finally, EQ's wondrous mysticism?
You'll notice that I don't include Rift in the above because it literally did nothing new. They tried to out-Blizzard Blizzard.
I believe only needing 4 toons to have every skill in the game was a dreadfully poor decision - given the implementation of how you obtained souls. Three weeks in and I had a lvl 50 of all four with all souls. That just blows goats and kills longevity, replayability and customer retention. I still play all the other big MMOs for a few months at a time on a random rotation because there's always something new to go back to. I haven't even considered playing Rift again because there's nothing unique or attractive about it.
If that is really true about Hartsman, and he was the guy who came in and made all those bad changes then that is pretty sad. I don't have that high of an opinion on him as some people but I always thought he was competent. He gets more credit for what he did with EQ2 than he deserves tho. But if it was just dev concensus then ya is it really surprising? It was obvious since beta that trion was full of timid fucks who wanted to make a wow clone and often would copy wow with no idea why wow even did what they did.
Scott is unquestionably an extremely good project manager. One of - if not the - best in the business. That's what he brought to EQ2. It had been a game riddled by poor leadership, poor decision making and constantly changing goals at Corporate level. It was in such a poor state because of this that hardly any of the dev team played it at launch.
Scott brought strong leadership, which was sometimes fractious (only because of poorly defined/overlapping leadership responsibilities). What he helped to do with EQ2 was good stuff compared to what came before it but it still wasn't a great game.
Again he did a terrific job in leadership and Project Management for Trion. Rift shipped in great shape and I would imagine he had some hard decisions to make to get it to launch and I have no doubt he is such a strong person that he didn't hesitate to make cuts and curtail design decision. If I set up a dev house I would have no hesitation in appointing Scott to bring the game to launch, handling co-ordination, communication and project management.
However :
i) I am not aware of any evidence whatsoever of his creativity or competence/lack of competence on the game design side.
ii) Scott is kidding himself to an extent as are other key people in the industry when they talk about F2P vrs subscription.
"Now players simply aren't willing to commit to the subscription model as large audiences
I disagree with this. What folks aren't willing to commit to is yet more shallow, unremarkable WoW clones.
Some interesting replies to the article at :
http://www.forbes.com/sites/danielta...re-of-mmorpgs/
Even Korea is seeing an increase in subscription based MMOs rather than the "Pay as you go" model that F2P came from. I now have new friends whom live in Korea whom I play EQ & EVE with that prefer this model over F2P or PAYG model that is currently in Korea as the "standard". It says a lot when even F2P can't hold ground in its own country of origin.
"One of the reasons people don't stick around anymore is because the quality has suffered greatly, and now MMOs are nothing more than shallow attempts at stealing your money."
This leads to the "Free-To-Play" movement being born. It came from Korea where sub-standard MMOs thrive. This model was built around pushing sub-standard products out the door, and then milking their customers for far more than a standard subscription product would bring in. However, that only happens for a short while before the product must become "Pay-To-Win", or adding incentives that you cannot earn legitimately in-game without paying real money for it.
Scotts view is surely tainted by his major MMO experiences :
1. Sony/EQ which has gone free to play based on the back of selling house items to female subscribers, mounts and 'Bayle' tokens which people use to pay for Mercs (though you still have to sub if you want to go past 1000 AA).
2. Rift which had enormous promise with its initial Rift system and class/soul system, which were both gutted before launch.
Scott and Trion need to look at themselves, consider that WoW still has 9 million subs and ask themselves are people unwilling to pay a sub or are they just unwilling to pay a sub for a half assed copy of what's already out there.