Ironically, one of the worst things about MMO’s is the massive playerbase. You need all those players to play the game and maintain upkeep, but devs also listen to players. Players are .. I’m just going to say “kittenheads” (that was not corrected, I typed kitten deliberately). A few minutes of reading through this forum is evidence that most players just talk out of their kitten.
Almost every profession forum has “This profession sucks, all others rock” threads. The result? Game companies ACTUALLY LISTEN. They may not ‘fix’ things in the direction the players want, but they find their own solution. Then, all the players kitten about what was done. Players have this terrible mindset that absolutely everything needs to be fair. They’ve been conditioned to think they should be able to mash their face on their keyboards and get points and butterflies and fluffy clouds. Rewards for doing nothing.
Games are consistently getting “dumbed down” to accommodate the screaming children that come here and WHINE ENDLESSLY. It’s one flaw of having a bigger company with a larger audience. The problem is what I call the spotlight effect.
When a game company is new, it is able to be innovative and make flaws and they won’t get the world yelling at them because .. the world mostly doesn’t know about it. Look at WoW after they released their first expansion – it’s just “dumbing down” right down the line. Blizzard did the same thing with Diablo 3. You can expect this of all major game companies that listen to their audience. Obvious double edge sword.
The old saying “The bigger you are, the harder you fall” works pretty well here. Every single change ANet does will come under HORRIBLE scrutiny, so they’re forced to either
1) Give in to player demands for stuff to be carebear fluffy easymode or
2) Make changes so incredibly small that they don’t really matter… but then people still kitten about them.
Lose/lose situation all brought on by the fact that ANet lets us have an open forum to discuss it.
