Personally speaking, Mike's article (and the majority of responses to the rebuttal posted by The Devil's Advocate) irk me for a number of reasons. This could also be said of the usual peanut's gallery that hangs around every CoH article on Massively.
#1. Not everyone who is a long-time player of an MMO plays only
that MMO, and thus is not incapable or unwilling of trying new things. I tend to play MMOs in cycles. I might pay and play for one for a few months, then get on another, and come back to the original one a few months afterward. My love for games like City of Heroes didn't stop me at all from wanting to try out other new MMOs that interested me, and I highly resent the implication that being a loyal fan of an older MMO is mutually exclusive of trying new games out.
#2. I completely understand that MMOs require a steady flow of income to operate. They've got to pay the utulity bills at the very least. MMOs that can't support their own financial weight will collapse. There's a big difference between that and someone up in corporate kicking the whole thing down, though. Not that it seems to matter to Mike and the cruder naysayers the CoH community's had to endure. I get the impression that any MMO, regardless of how long it's lived (or how brief in many cases) or how much new content or revamps it was getting, is automatically seen by them as a worthless dinosaur that only people wearing nostalgia goggles could love.
More than that though, Mike's line of thinking fully embraces the idea of games are strictly a service and not a product. Before MMOs became a thing, games were nothing
but products. If you bought a copy, you owned that copy. It was yours. And provided you still have the hardware to play it, you can pull it out any time you like and enjoy the game once again. You can't do that when an MMO is killed off, unless the company either publicly releases server software to its community or does something else to ensure it lives on.
I think the most disturbing thing was seeing one of Mike's supporters commenting on Victor's rebuttal, showing their disapproval for people who fight to keep favorite MMOs alive by comparing them to historic buildings that "should" be knocked down to build something "new and better." I really don't want to see society adopt a Brave New World ephemeral mentality.
#3. The popular naysayers' mentality that "MMOs die, grow up and get over it, go play the latest new shiny" is only going to encourage publishing companies to treat
all games this way. Electronic Arts has already attempted this with the latest SimCity. Maxis tried to do PR damage control by announcing "
In many ways, we built an MMO."
I can't help but think that Electronic Arts is trying to take advantage of gamers' attitudes towards MMOs with a claim like that. Banking on people to forgive the unreliable servers, the bugs and glitches, the removal of features just to try and get the servers to manage the load properly just because they say it's an MMO. I don't think it'll stop there, either. If they decide to pull the plug on the SimCity servers a few years from now, no big deal! It was an MMO, MMOs die, that's a good thing! All you upset SimCity gamers should grow up and play with the latest shiny toy.