» Tue Feb 11, 2014 10:13 pm There has been something that has always bothered me about peoples mindset towards MMO's, as if they are inherently a bad thing.
People seem to get livid when thinking about the idea of paying monthly to play a video game. They simply cannot grasp the concept that someone would willingly pay monthly to play a video game that they have already bought. I hope to debunk that false mindset with this thread, because it's simply irritating to see this constantly across the internet on hundreds of forums.
I'll get straight to the point here: an MMO is not a single player game. For the sake of argument, I am going to take two very popular and mainstream success games. World of Warcraft, and our beloved Skyrim.
Going to point out some differences here:
Skyrim is a SIngle Player game. World of Warcraft is a Massively Multiplayer Online game. Skyrim has 1 player. World of Warcraft has (currently) 7.8 million.
Skyrim has had 2 "large" content patches (Dawnguard and Dragonborn), both of which costed 19.99 I think, and added roughly 100 hours of content each. World of Warcraft has had 4 expansions, each of which offer hundreds of thousands of hours of content each. This varies depending on what you do, how much you choose to participate in, and your play style obviously. But the potential is definitely there.
Skyrim has had various patches that include updates, game changes, and new features, for free. World of Warcraft introduces at least 5 major content patches an expansion, all of which are free, and all of which add:
New quests
New Zones
New Raids
New Items
New Mounts
New Armor
New Weapons
New Vanity Items
New Toy Items
Etc, etc
World of Warcraft has an amazing developer team. They are constantly, day and night, working to balance things, to add things to the game, to fix bugs, on servers that cost millions of dollars a year to run, maintain, and create new ones. Every single day on Mmo-Champion.com, updates are being broadcasted about what the devs are doing THAT DAY to change, balance, and fix the game. It's a daily thing, literally, every single day updates are made to the game via hotfixes and patches.
-Major Content Patches are added on a semi-monthly basis
-Class Balance for PvE, Arena, BG's, etc are constantly monitored and hotfixed
-An in-game report and help system that requires constant monitoring to provide players with feedback, and help for their experience, REAL PEOPLE, no automated system
-Servers: Need I say more? World of Warcraft offers over 200 individual game servers that host 7.8 million players. I don't even need to explain how expensive that is
And to top all of that off, consider the amount of play/gametime you are getting for 15 dollars a month. You can play for an entire month. That is roughly 30 days, or 720 hours.
Can you please tell me where I can get 720 hours of entertainment in this day and age for 15 dollars? Really? You can't. I can play as much as I want or don't want in that 720 hours. And it cost me 15 dollars. For all that support, hotfixing, patching, content, and fun, 15 dollars. I'm sorry, but I really think that's a steal.
It doesn't matter that I've already bought the game. The amount of work and energy it takes Blizzard to upkeep the worlds leading and largest by an astronomical factor MMO game on the planet is huge and taxing, and they need to be compensated for that. I really don't get how people don't understand this.
