Summarizing:
-Too many players who think they can do/say what they want (complain about everything or blame the developers without really knowing the reason for their complaints)
-Too many players who do not bring positive things to the game.
-A false sense of security of the population.
-An out of control forum
-More toxicity than normal in an MMO
-Unforeseen changes in the meta of the MMO due to pressure from a majority that has not even played 50% of the game
-Quantity is not equal to quality
-Open pandora’s box = P2W/P2F/P2C
The vast majority of players who come to an F2P MMO are not players who really like MMOs, and of those players, very few stay in the MMO.
Instead of nurturing the MMO genre with players who actually want to play or learn about MMOs , when an MMO goes F2P the opposite happens , the quality of the MMO declines and that tends to affect other parts of the community ( forum , environment , economy , etc )
If LA is successful in Korea and Asia it is because in those regions they have a different mentality than ours, they first “learn and then kill” instead the mentality here is “if I don’t kill, I complain until I can kill”.
I am not speaking in general as I have met players who are not afraid to learn and strive to improve themselves, but I am speaking to the vast majority who think that complaining about everything is how an MMO player should be.
If you are going to continue complaining like children about P2W and the whales, remember these letters: F 2 P
F2P is synonyms with P2W lol
Might be different if they had some sort of barrier to entry where you had to buy the game and expansions like GW2 or ESO with optional subs.
If they provide a means to use $$$ to gear up faster, then yes this problem will exist in any game that allows that. GW/ESO doesn’t have to do that because they have a different source of revenue (some might call it more ethical :)) lol
For me, the most important thing is quality, it can be a niche MMO or an MMO to please everyone, but if the quality of its development is not optimal, then it does not matter what the focus of the MMO is, it will not emerge.
Let’s talk about this. This is the reason I asked the question. If it "depends on the perspective’, then how do you know these people don’t like MMOs? It seems like you need a fixed definition, and observations of mismatched expectations with respect to that definition to support your claim.
Good point, I appreciate you giving me this feedback.
I consider that the vast majority of “curious” do not like MMOs because the vast majority complain about the difficulty of LA, being for me LA an MMO without difficulty (to date), then if the players consider that This MMO is difficult , I can’t consider that the vast majority know about MMOs, therefore the vast majority fall into what I consider “curious” for a new genre.
Are MMOs meant to be difficult? Second Life is an MMO, is it difficult? What about Runescape? Everquest certainly wasn’t difficult, and people complained ad nauseum about Wrath of the Lich king being too easy, and yet that’s when WoW had its peak subscribers.
What is it about a massively multiplayer online game that entails said game ought to be difficult?
What is it about a massively multiplayer online game that entails said game ought to be difficult?
The difficulty in an MMO goes beyond not being able to complete a content because of its “difficulty” but rather what that content generates in you and makes it difficult, so you must find new ways to complete that content.
Sociability, guilds, fellowship, diversification, organization, friendship, learning, study, passion, etc.
All that is necessary to complete that content for its own sake is that that content is “difficult” not because it is “complicated” but because of what it does to you to complete it.
For example: Lineage II, knowing that killing someone could have consequences, knowing that if you die it will cost you not only experience but time and it is time you may have to share it with your friends who also died so that content not only covers the "difficulty " of not dying but encompasses the fact of knowing that the consequences have a price to pay.
The same with a modern game, Elden Ring, the difficulty is not in killing the bosses but in learning not to give up because eventually you will die (I have died more than 700 times), I don’t see myself complaining about it, I don’t ask you to download it the difficulty of the bosses for that reason, I know very well what my job is and that is to learn, improve to finish that content that pushes me to that “difficulty”.
All this says is that IF an MMO happens to be difficult, this is the ways in which it will be difficult unique to it being an MMO.
Nothing you’ve listed is an entailment from MMO to difficulty. So that’s a red flag. Let’s put that off to the side for a moment.
Does Lost Ark ask players to overcome its “difficulty” through sociability, guilds, fellowship, etc? Arguably no. The only axes on which LA is difficult could apply to any genre of game or real life endeavor, i.e. “it just takes a long time”. The issues with LA currently are issues that keep it from actually being a good MMO.
The player base was too fragmented to find guilds and intentionally organize. I tried to join 2 in the first month and they quickly split between pre 600 casuals and post 1300 with virtually no one in Tier 2. Which means all “socialization” comes from random party finder. But random party finder isn’t really an MMO mechanic, it’s a MOBA mechanic like LoL or an FPS mechanic like CoD matches. Throwing random people together for a boss fight isn’t a matter of intentional social organization.
So again, I don’t know what exactly the issue is here. No entailment from MMO to difficulty is provided, nor any examples of unique MMO modes of difficulty undermined by making this game F2P are provided.
Now, in the case of WOW WoTLK and other MMOs with massive success, its difficulty does not necessarily lie in “being a complicated content” but in the characteristics of the MMOs of the golden age, sociability, effort, perseverance, sense of differentiation , mastering, etc
I agree that many are not “difficult” in the good sense of the word but they have other parameters where they are.
Now if I see LA with all the facilities it gives us, not only in “difficulty” but in the other parameters that make an MMO an MMO, then from my perspective I can say that LA is a simple MMO.
I say all this based on my experience, without wanting to give people to believe that I am the best MMO player in the world, I am not, but what I really am is a passionate player for MMOs