Skip to main content

Quote of the day

Apologies to Syp who more usually does this sort of thing but I think Tipa deserves a gong for this one:

Simply put, World of Warcraft is not part of the MMORPG genre.

It is funny how much healthier the mmorpg scene looks if you do remove WOW from the picture. If you include WOW you see one all powerful market leader with a horde of failed wannabes. If you ignore WOW you can see a large variety of different and interesting games some good some bad some paying the bills some not.

But can we ignore WOW? Heaven knows that I and a lot of other former players would like to. I resent its overpowering influence on the market and I have more or less convinced myself that many many World of Warcraft players are not really gamers at all never mind mmorpgers. Me convincing myself doesn't mean its true though. WOW exists. It is big. Whether it really is an mmorpg or not it is kind of hard to ignore

Comments

Tesh said…
I think the point isn't necessarily to ignore it, but rather, to realize that it's a market in itself, and the MMO market at large really is this other tier of games competing for the 300k sub mark. Shooting for the moon by trying to compete directly with WoW out of the gates is suicide.
Thallian said…
Blizzard at launch prolly wouldn't even try to compete with what WoW is now. That's sillyness of course. But if companies make a good product they will have a good response. Always keep in mind that popular doesn't always mean best. Smoking was once popular. Bell bottoms were once popular. Monarchy was once popular. I rest my case your honor.

Popular posts from this blog

Android Tip 3: Sharing a Folder between multiple users of an Android device

Android has allowed multiple user logins for quite a while now. This is can be very useful for tablets which are shared by family members. Normally Android erects strict Chinese walls between users preventing them from using each others apps and viewing each others files. This is a useful security feature and ensures your kids don't mess up your work spreadsheets when screwing around on the tablet and should also prevent them from buying €1,000 worth of Clash of Candy coins on your account. Sometimes however you really do want to share stuff with other users and this can prove surprisingly difficult. For example on a recent holiday I realised that I wanted to share a folder full of travel documents with my wife. Here are some ways to achieve this. 1. If you have guaranteed internet access  then you can create a shared folder on either Dropbox or Google drive. Either of these has the great advantage of being able to access the files on any device and the great disadvantage of bein...

Portal 2 two screen coop on one PC.

I mentioned before that I intended to try Portal 2 in "unofficial split screen co-op mode. Well split screen on a small computer monitor is a recipe for a headache especially when the game defies gravity as much as portal. However a minor bit of extra fiddling allowed us to drive two seperate screens from one PC. The Steam forums describes a complicated method of doing this that I couldn't get working so this simpler method which worked for me might be of use to someone. 1. First I followed the instructions in this post to get split screen multi-player working: http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1847904 A minor issue not mentioned is that you need to enable the console from the keyboard/mouse options menu I am using keyboard and one wired Xbox360 controller as suggested. Getting the controller to switch to channel 2 was tricky at first but as Chameleon8 mentions plugging it out and in again during loading works. The trick for me was to do the plug / p...

If there is a God I think they are a God of fractals

Life is infinitely complex. In the language of mathematics it is everywhere continuous and nowhere differentiable. This is the definition of a fractal.  The thing about fractals is that you can zoom in as far as you like and it never gets any less complex. I think life is like that. At one level you see kings and emperors and their epoch defining movements. Zoom in and you see common people arguing over the price of corn. Zoom in further and it is just one person trying to decide what clothes to wear. I think that God, if there is a God inhabits all of these levels and all of the complexity that each entails.