I don't want to come across like a Blizzard / WoW fanboy.
For one, I hate what it's done to the MMO market, simply because it's changed the measure of what a successful MMO is. Prior to WoW an MMO with a few hundred thousand subs was considered a great sucess. After WoW sub numbers like that are considered a flop.
Second, I (nerd) raged against Blizzard when WoW catered more and more to one playstyle (hardcore raiders). When we were essentially told "raid or quit", I chose quit, and stayed away for two years until I saw that Blizzard's attitude had changed.
Originally posted by: darkrisen2003
Wow only has a handful of races and classes. Everquest gives more of the pen and paper role-playing feel due to the large amount of races and classes to choose from. Wow forces you to play every class a certain way if you expect to get into end game adventures. Everquest has more versatility with the classes and players are not forced to play only a specific way to be able to excel.
It sounds like you haven't played WoW in a while. It's not like that at all anymore. I can't think of a class that doesn't have at least two different styles of play. Rogues and mages come to mind, but my friends that play them will tell you differently.
The ironic thing is that the era of WoW you're describing, where if you wanted to progress as <insert class> you had to play as <insert playstyle>, was primarily the result of Blizzard giving free reign for endgame design to a couple of former EQ players. They're still around, but they've either willingly changed directions or had their wings clipped by people above them.
Originally posted by: SMOGZINN
Does it matter if they are inflating equipment to get people to the new content or creating new content to get people inflated equipment? Either way we end up in mudflation. And it is unavoidable. An action RPG like almost all MMOs are character development driven. If your character stops developing it becomes boring. Once it becomes boring people move on to something else. The only way to keep the treadmill going is to keep the stats inflating. And as anyone that has played MUDs knows, this is the eventual downfall of the system.
I think Blizzard's ace-in-the-hole here is that they excel at content design, and have (mostly) avoided rehashing content. I'm sure there's someone screaming "NAXX" at me right now, but face it, it's brand new content to 95% of WoW's current and former players.
If the content is compelling, people will stay on the treadmill indefinately. If you're talking simple stat inflation, then boredom will set in quickly. I'll use SWG as an example since I played that for a couple of years... Diablo-style loot was added in an attempt to spice up what little PvE content there was, and when the loot trivialized the then-current content SOE simply increased the stats on the mobs without releasing any unique content to go along with it. There was character progression, but it was entirely hollow. People quit. Everyone knows what's become of SWG.
Where we agree that the inflation will kill them is more in the natural churn of subs. People are going to quit WoW for reasons unrelated to the game - family, work, new hobbies, etc - and now they're depending on new subs to replace them. Once the barrier to entry gets huge (personally I think it already is) there will be fewer new subs coming in to replace the natural shedding of veterans. This will be a slow process though, not an overnight plummet.
I also think folks are reading too much into people leaving for a new MMO. From what I've seen personally, it's often more to do with players feeling like they've got a better chance to make a name for themselves in a new game than it is wanting something entirely new. Going back to SWG, I knew a lot of players that were there at launch because they felt locked out of EQ's high-end content and were hoping to better their station in the virtual world in a new game.