As it is, I have to ask myself if playing WoW again is worth giving up EQ2.

Now SOE is asking, do I like Vanguard enough to give up EQ2? And after trying it out in beta, I decided… not yet. Maybe in a year, when Vanguard is finished, it is so wonderful that I want to play that. So EQ2 loses all my $15.

Maybe Warhammer or Conan is so compelling that I want to play those. I have to make that decision again, and this time I decide I like Warhammer more than whatever I’m playing now. Now SOE and Blizzard get NONE of my money, EA/Mythic gets it all.

No game is an island. We Western gamers go along with this model because it’s all we’ve known. Innovation is stifled because every game has to be all things to all people in order to grab a player’s entire MMO pie. Eastern gamers get better deals, they have hundreds of games to choose from in genres we can’t even guess at. Golf and tennis MMOs? MMOs about… I dunno… working in a hospital? Corporate politics?

Instead we get overblown games tossed out way before they’re ready which can’t focus on one or two specific areas they might do well but have to provide the entire package because the only business model the big players will accept is This Game Shall Be Your Only Game And Ye Shall Have No Other.

I wonder if Sigil ever stepped back and said, hey, we have this Diplomacy thing that has never been done in an MMO before, and we have all this generic fantasy crap that has been done a zillion times before. Raiders? Yeah, we have to have raids. Crafters? Yeah, we have to have crafting. Group play? Yeah, we gotta do that. Solo play? Yeah, we gotta do that because we want EVERYONE from WoW and EQ2 and DAoC and FFXI Online to be positive they will get to do everything they already did in some other game because we want them to stop playing that other game and play ours.

Why not… take that diplomacy idea… and MAKE a game based upon seizing control of cities via Diplomacy, making political parties, spreading rumors and increasing the sphere of control and set it in an innovative setting like Renaissance Italy? Along the Medicis and the Donatellos… and the Machiavellis… I mean, REALLY get into politics and hierarchies and famous families and diplomacy, assassination and war… The battles between the Church and State… Florence and Genoa and Venice and Rome…

Instead, it’s a minigame in a generic fantasy because they have to have it all and will in the end get something less than they want and due to its generic sameness will never stand out from the crowd.

The MMO world is in stagnation at the moment, and it’s largely (in my humble opinion) due at the root to an “all or nothing” business model.

At least Turbine is willing to let us try Lord of the Rings Online for a lesser price that makes it more economical for me to have only an EQ2 subscription AND a LotrO subscription than to have a Station Pass and not be able to afford to try out new games.

So to the sales department of though games is going to see it as a very bad thing.