Quote:
Originally Posted by DreamWind
This is a fallacy that I keep seeing in this thread. The reality is we don't know what would have happened if Guild Wars had monthly fees. The reason being is because it probably would have been a completely different game with a completely different playerbase. All we DO know is how the game has been run now under the current model.
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Sure, it's speculation. This whole thread is speculation. However, I can offer you solid reasoning behind the speculation.
For a start, as you say, if we are talking about a subscription Guild Wars then we are talking about a game that is no longer Guild Wars. This community is not here, we may well be playing something else.
Issue numero uno, ArenaNet would have had to rely
hugely on NCSoft for funding. They would have been competing head-to-head with Blizzard in marketing costs and amount of content produced. To be able to release in a similar time frame to WoW they would have had to take on many more staff very quickly, which can lead to problems of it's own.
With NCSoft having much more of an investment in Guild Wars, they would certainly have wanted to have much more of a say in the design of the game. Imagine NCSoft Korea getting their hands on the 'skill over time' kernel of Guild Wars. It would have been butchered. You would have ended up with some abomination that was a cross between Lineage, EQ and whatever future ideas they might have had for Aion at that point.
Again, a subscription Guild Wars would not be the game we know and love. You can say "it could have been more succesful" until you are blue in the face, but it is not going to change the fact that you probably wouldn't be here playing it. The very fact that you are here implies that it couldn't have possibly been anything else. It's akin to saying "Damn, my life would be so much better if my Mom had married a rich guy instead" - Yeah of course, except for the fact that you wouldn't exist, or at least would lose the current context for the statement entirely entirely, rendering it meaningless.
So now we get on to the only part of the argument that actually merits any debate:
Could an MMO with the core principles of Guild Wars have competed with World of Warcraft?
I'll use a quote from an article I read fairly recently to illustrate:
"The problem is that WoW’s financial success is not tied directly to it’s design, but to the fact that it launched in 2004, at a time when what it offered was exactly what people wanted, SOE helped by pushing their established user base from EQ2 to WoW thanks to a disaster at launch, and the snowball rolled downhill after that." -
Syncaine
WoW had a big head-start at launch thanks to SOE, and for any MMO that is a huge benefit. These weren't any average player either, many of them had MMO experience, and perhaps had already been through a beta/launch phase already. They knew what they were in for, and would ride it out. Many of them fell in love with WoW and Blizzard from day one, simply for not screwing up the same way SOE did. You get enough people like that pushing through the bugs and lack of polish, enjoying the game and being vocal about it, they will carry newer players with them. They are a gauranteed baseline CCU that greases the axles. They are your core forum fanbase, giving your community a more positive tone. When everyone in global chat is crying about the game, they can be the ones saying "Eh, EQ was much worse at launch, this is fine."
Guild Wars had nothing like that, and couldn't have had it without abonding it's core principles. A large portion of the people there at launch had never played an MMO before. It's not just that people weighed Guild Wars up against WoW and chose the one without a subscription for better value, there were many that were simply unfamiliar and uncomfortable with paying a subscription regardless - because the people who were had already been pulled into WoW by their friends.
For every MMO release in recent years, WoW has been the benchmark, and none have come close to meeting it. People try a new MMO and don't like it? That's fine, there's always WoW. WoW is the dependable, reliable, vanilla, steretypical DIKU MMO. People who played EQ knew exactly what they were getting with WoW, where Guild Wars was revolutionary, breaking away drastically from the DIKU mould. Consider that players face a huge future investment (assuming for a minute here that we are imagining a subscription Guild Wars vs subscription WoW) in the game they choose, and to nobodies surprise they are going to go with the devil they know.