I've always felt that our games community was one giant catch 22. One one hand we love talking about the community and how great people where relative to other games and how the CoH system didn't follow the great trifecta and how you can play how you want without other people (mostly) yelling at you. Then on the other hand people are always talking about how not enough money was ever spent on marketing and the game could have been so much bigger.
But in my eyes those two are mutually exclusive. If NCsoft had pulled in way more people we wouldn't have the community, it be much more wow-esque. Where TFLeader XxxWeedWizard420xxX doesn't take you because you are not an emp def or /kin etc.
I often think to myself, or even ramble about it RL(a problem I have due to my admittedly tense sanity, though no, I don't ramble when other people are nearby and stop anytime I hear someone within earshot), how much mmorpg players are like master of orion klackons. Klackons see, are bugs and are also very, very stupid as a species, litterally. Not so much in the first game, but the second one they were the "uncreative" race, meaning they were ludicrously narrow minded. They'd only see 1 tech in any field no matter how useful or useless it was, you couldn't choose what you researched, ever. Not to mention even dumber in MOO3.
MMORPG players are equally as narrow minded in that extreme way. If healing vs resistance buffing vs defense buffing were presented, they only saw healing and then drew a conclusion "THATS THE ONLY WAY AND THATS FINAL!". Every "tactic" I see in mmorpg forums are built around a trinity and the terms they often have are about as primitive and backwards as a person who thinks warfare is entirely on sword fighting and surround tactics. You never see them use the term force multiplier. You never see them use the term flank(it's adds instead). Or reinforcements even(adds is used interchangeably for that).
Like, really, have any of these players played strategy games? Or first person shooters? Or anything else? Often the answer is no. It's simply impossible to not see how narrow-minded many mmorpg players are. They suffer from a very obsessive one track mind, not just one track mind but obsessively one tracked. In that they HAVE to go with the first and only options they saw.
In analogy, heres how we tend to see strategic options.
Rule: You cannot have more then one type. If you research a second type, the previous one is removed due to obsolescence.
Our View and legitimate options:
50 XP
More healing | More resistance | more defense
150 XP
Crowd control | Damage Sponge | Medium debuffs
250 XP
Advanced Healing | Advanced REsistance | Advanced Defenses
600 XP
AoE Crowd Control | Improved Damage Sponge | Advanced Debuffs
We can easily choose "More HEaling", then take "Advanced Defenses". "Damage Sponge" followed by say "AoE Crowd control" or "Advanced Debuffs". In other words, we had freedom to choose and avoid redundancies.
The Average MMORPG player/game dev:
50XP
More Healing |
150 XP
Damage Sponge |
250 XP
Advanced Healing |
600 XP
Improved Damage Sponge |
Advanced Healing and Improved Damage sponge renders More Healing and Damage Sponge wasted slots.
Due to also possessing an often repulsive personality, they cannot trade for what we have either. They cannot avoid the crippling redundancies seen here nore solve them.
In short, they are ludicrously uncreative.
And MMORPGs have also not advanced beyond very very old mechanics, so they must also be feudal (-50% research speed) and -1 research. In other words, you have a game genre that is litterally stuck in the 1990s, and has only advanced technologically in gameplay only 1 year, at the most. Because the other "tech choices" they had were all graphics exclusively
.