Comments for MMO Tidbits

Comment on Project Management for Game Development by website developmentIT support

website developmentIT support — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 02:39:15 +0000

website developmentIT support…

[...]Project Management for Game Development « MMO Tidbits[...]…

Comment on Why MMOs Are Complicated by Mod Baker Responds (and Jiblix appears) « King Runite1's Blog

Mod Baker Responds (and Jiblix appears) « King Runite1's Blog — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 22:45:23 +0000

[...] You don’t have a seperate website and game team? I guess your designers never saw: http://mmotidbits.com/2011/03/09/why-mmos-are-complicated/‘s diagrams huh? Seriously, you should split it ASAP, if only so you can get a faster [...]

Comment on Beyond Fantasies & Licenses by Ulf

Ulf — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 03:30:31 +0000

Although I am a big fan of dark historic settings, I always wondered why the WW2 era setting seems to be underrepresented in MMOs, especially since it seems to meet the 4 criteria you introduced in the article pretty good. But then again, it makes sense if the target audience is “adult women”. If you can’t put Tom Hanks and Matt Damon into the MMO, it will probably fail to attract a lot of attention from the key audience – that’s at least my prediction, based on the gender distribution I see in the usual (WW2) FPS games, or even in (WW2) tabletop wargaming.

Anyway, thanks for sharing your thoughts, I think I gathered some insight from the article.

Comment on Why MMOs Are Complicated by Mike

Mike — Fri, 06 May 2011 15:04:55 +0000

Great article…thanks :)

Comment on Eating Your Babies: APB’s Essential Failure by Good Grief! Belated Blog Banter 20 « OMG! You're a Chick?!

Good Grief! Belated Blog Banter 20 « OMG! You're a Chick?! — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 11:44:46 +0000

[...] and be again killed. Again and again. That’s griefing. What one commentator calls “Baby Killing.” It’s destroying the game. It didn’t matter that their characters got guard [...]

Comment on Eating Your Babies: APB’s Essential Failure by How price sensitive are you?

How price sensitive are you? — Sat, 18 Sep 2010 04:19:48 +0000

[...] But I kept an eye out on reports which could shine some lights on that question. And I found this interesting analysis at MMO Tidbits which basically says that ganking killed [...]

Comment on Eating Your Babies: APB’s Essential Failure by Lichbane

Lichbane — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 02:48:21 +0000

Sadly, nothing will save APB. Servers are closing. It’s dead Jim.

Comment on Eating Your Babies: APB’s Essential Failure by MMORPG Info » Eating Babies

MMORPG Info » Eating Babies — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 13:25:12 +0000

[...] Eating Your Babies: APB’s Essential Failure A 64-bit Technical Success [...]

Comment on Eating Your Babies: APB’s Essential Failure by Neofit

Neofit — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 07:42:24 +0000

Nice article, but it explains why the game failed a month after launch, not why it started failing at launch too. And from the sales estimates that I am reading here and there, the game was a failure at launch too, when the sheep/babies weren’t even supposed know their fate.

IMHO this was due to RTW being too confident, and distributing tens of thousands of keys to the end of beta “Keys to the City” event. One had to have been away on vacation not to have gotten a key. I myself got three from RPS, for me and two colleagues. We saw cars as agile as torpedoes. We saw a totally unfathomable shooting system: did I hit, did I damage, for how much, what is happening, where is the feedback? We saw a rather confusing progression and unlock system. And as the article says, we were constantly slaughtered, we shoot, we don’t know what is happening, we see them shooting and we go down in 1-3 hits. After that none of us bought the box.

So, unless you are really really sure that your game is the best ever, don’t give the Keys to your City to each and every one of your potential customers. Had I not been in this demo, I wouldn’t have given much credit to people complaining on the Internet, someone is always complaining about something. Being an irredeemable sucker, I would have said, for the n-th time, “no way, how bad can it be?” and would have bought the box. I would love to see stats about the number of keys used during the KttC event vs the number of retail keys used.

But apparently the devs, or at least the decision-makers, were confident that they had solid gameplay there. I hope these people will work in another industry from now on.

Comment on Eating Your Babies: APB’s Essential Failure by SmakenDahed

SmakenDahed — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 15:20:49 +0000

“Baby eating” – nice! Really, it sounds like this game was designed to encourage people to play a lot and spend a lot of money to do so. They kissed balance goodbye in hopes that people would play a lot to become the big fish in the pond?

Very happy no one bit.

Social gaming will become saturated soon enough and people will start to realize they’re not really getting anything out of those types of games and move on to the next big thing.