@Anorii That’s right, it isn’t donating 50% of the proceeds from the Pet Store to the Make-a-Wish Foundation. Just 50% of the proceeds from sale of the Pandaren pet. And that pet is now “sold out”, so they’ve finished donating.

Spot on.

Agreed. Devs need to focus on what they are bringing to the table, not what WoW already *has* on the table. As much as I dislike Darkfall personally, I think they are a good model of appropriate planning, since they wholly embrace what they offer and unapologetically cater to their audience. EVE, Wizard 101 and Puzzle Pirates do the same thing; they do *their thing* and leave the WoW gorilla alone.

As others have said before, they’re isn’t an 11 million player market out there for other games to capture. It does NOT exist. That’s WOW’s market based on the timing, execution and unique combination of content they put in vanilla WOW, when it was first released. It’s not going to be repeated any time soon. I’m disillusioned by games that insist on trying to match that mark, failing and leaving another blight on the genre in general. WAR sized and designed for 300K players would have been a whole different situation I believe.

The single largest difference between the big time MMOs and WoW, when wow appeared on the scene, was that a casual player could jump in and actually play it. You could solo in WoW. Bottom line. People who played EQ or FFXI, or ever EQ2 in the early days will tell you that you HAD to group to do anything. This meant time spent forming and maintaining a group. WoW allowed more casual people, or people with time constraints the ability to jump in and jump out while making meaningful progress. A casual player might be enamored with EQ at first, but quickly they would see that a large chunk of your time was spent seeking a party and traveling to your destination at which point you would sit in the same spot all night, killing mobs pulled in from a short distance away by the puller.

I can’t honestly say that I don’t sometimes MISS those camping parties, but Blizzard saw that that style of grind and treadmill gameplay was costing games TONS of casual players who wanted a more exciting style of play while retaining the social aspects of the MMO game. Now, after the fact, game companies are looking at that and either making their own game as casual friendsly, or in the case of EQ2, completely changing their existing game to get in on that casual action.

Blizzard made/makes a killing precisely because they take a familiar design that people like, and make small improvements that will have a large impact on the player. For someone to come in and just COPY WoW shows that they are not only unwilling to try and innovate, but that they also fail to learn exactly what Blizzard did to be so successful in the first place.

Investors probably really want to be at the leading edge of innovation, just as Blizzard was when WoW took off. The challenge, then, is what’s the next big thing?

Perhaps it is the wording, as you say, that makes people draw comparisons. If wow is ‘massively multiplayer’ and lotro is ‘massively multiplayer’, then the one with the most players is the most successful, the one with fewer players, a failure.

You don’t get soft drinks that are called massively multidrinkers! No, they usually actually get evaluated for their taste. That’s actually another thing – what’s so great about ‘massively multiplayer’ anyway? How many people does anyone actually interact with or even just see in wow, even after years of play? Probably only a few hundred. As long as any new game has you interacting with and seeing as many other players as you do in WOW, it’s providing what wow does anyway. The whole massively multiplayer thing is just a big woop that’s irrelevant to user experience of the game, really.