Also dont forget their dev team, comprised of failed products past. these people do not learn their lessons, they repeat them until propmoted. Then they move to another gaming company and preach the same failed mechanics, except now from a producers role.
That's absolutely true, but I still say that much of the blame for that rests with us, the players. The consumers. And especially those of us from FOH and now at RR. We've all played tons of MMOs I'd wager, yet think about all of the threads both past and present where people throw out ideas that ran against the current paradigm, and all of the QQing about those ideas. It's often the very same players that cry that developers rehash everything, have no creativity and that their MMO designs are so inbred that 'The Hills Have Eyes' could describe most MMOs as soon as they leave the drawing board, are the ones that then shie away from anything that's truly different. If you talk about a sandbox MMO, you have people crying about how that will lead to open-world PvP griefing even though that would depend on implementation. If you talk about getting away from a raiding endgame, people get their jimmies rustled because they can't imagine NOT having a raiding endgame because that's all they've ever known. If you mention a move away from gear progression, treadmills and purples, you have people that seem to have meltdowns as a result.
I can't really fault developers alone when they to some extent base their decisions on what will sell and be financially successful, and when you have gamers who refuse to consider alternatives and seem to want the same type of games "only better", what do people expect developers to do? People don't know what they fucking want lol, and sadly most Devs don't either.
I mean, how many of the people that universally panned just about every MMO out there, actually went ahead and played those MMOs anyways? STO, we knew that was going to be a shitshow, yet people bought it anyways, even after some serious discussion over how it was already failing in beta. And that's just one of many. That's the one thing that stills boggles my mind, is all the people that buy retail releases on the 1% chance that a game might be, maybe, contrary to all prior signs and portents and actually be worth the effort. And it isn't remotely plausible to me to expect developers to drastically change the paradigm when they get the messages from the gamers that they do. I'm a gigantic GW nerd and I refused to buy WHO because of the pre-release information that was out there, yet over a million people bought it anyways and look where it is now.
Meh, not ranting at you, just the topic itself I guess. It keeps coming up and it's always pretty much the same discussion.