Street Fighter 2 isn’t an MMORPG. Every time you turn the game on, you’re also starting from the beginning. Basically when you turn on street fighter, you have a goal. Tell me, when you’re charater is “finished” why even bother logging on?
Is it sinking in yet? This is an MMORPG where you can actually run out of stuff to do.
It’s not a losing strategy, it’s actually the only smart way to do this. There’s a reason why literally every single other MMORPG out there has some form of “endgame”. If your character is finished, you stop logging on. So either there needs to be new content, or you need new content to bring the people into wanting new skins or to do new dungeons or w/e.
No matter what, new content is going to be needed. And where did I say treadmill? Where? Show me? You idiots are obsessing with these ideas. You don’t need gear, but you need goals. You need a reason to want to log onto this game 2 years from now. It doesn’t have to be gear, it can be all horizontal progression, long as there’s content there. Long as there’s a goal to work towards.
You people just don’t get it. Imagine Street Fighter, but when you kill the last boss, that’s it, you can’t start over again, you can’t go back and fight him again, you can’t redo that level… You’re just done. That’s what Guild Wars 2 is currently. There’s no replay value to the game, and there’s no long term goals. It’s literally multiplayer skyrim.
First of all, SF2 survived for 15+ years because of competitive play. So we can say legitimately that PvP can be the one and only endgame for GW2. Of course, that would annoy a lot of people.
So let’s put that aside and talk about Tetris instead, which is singleplayer and yet is still being played for 20+ years.
The goal for all of these games is self-improvement of your player skill. You play Tetris to waste some time and have some fun, but if there is a goal, if there is a thing that rewards you and you work towards, it’s getting better at the game. It’s not steadily working towards a goal that you will eventually reach with enough time/grind.
You don’t need to add new maps to Tetris, or new blocks every 10 levels, or any other new content. You just need a way to measure player skill using the existing content. (in tetris, it gets faster.)
This is the only sustainable way to truly repeatable gameplay.
Does GW2 have this? Not at the moment. But adding more items, more levels, more zones, more “goals” will never get you repeatable gameplay. Sooner or later, you will get all the goals, and then, to quote you, “what is the point of logging on?”.
GW2 needs more ways to test and measure player skill using the existing content. Hard mode, Rankings for dungeons, being able to challenge yourself with additional downscaling, etc. And the gameplay needs to be fun enough and skill-based enough to make this meaningful.
This is how you get players to play for 15+ years, without new content, without new “goals”, without patches or changes. Make the game fun, and make the game require, measure and acknowlege player skill.
You made an interesting point when you said “SF2 starts you from scratch every time you start a game.” Because that’s exactly what “Endgame” is in an MMO – you have everything already, your character is “complete.”
Like an RTS, you have a singleplayer campaign that gradually adds new units, until by the end you have all the units. In an RTS, that’s “just the beginning” – you’re finally playing the proper game, with all the units. The campaign was just an extended tutorial mode. Now you play skirmish vs. harder and harder AI, or go online and play multiplayer.
So the proper solution to “endgame” in MMO’s is not extending the “tutorial mode” ie. the period where your character is incomplete, by adding more stuff to acquire. It’s to make lots of meaningful content for characters that are complete and static. When you have everything and every item is BiS, “what is the point of logging on?” – The point is, NOW you get to play the REAL game.
