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Endie, I think that’s another point a lot of DDO critics are making that has some justice in it–you want to make a game that requires grouping, you’d better have the absolutely most robust social tools ever seen in a MMOG, where the moment you put up an LFG flag specific to instance, bam! you’re matched.

But the big thing is that I just don’t get their content delivery model. It’s a game where content is the only hook they have over any competitor, and the content appears to be excrutiatingly difficult for them to rollout. Hell, they’ve STILL got some of the content that they had at launch offline due to pathing-exploit problems. Without a content-delivery innovation, this is a product that never should have gotten past prototype.

But hanging around with one other friend looking for group members was dreary, although not as horrible as us trying to do level 1 adventures with only two level one characters.

The social and matching tools aren’t bad per se – if you can find them – but they’re not so good that they can support a game you cannot play at all without grouping. They needed to be Warsong Gulch efficient: in you go, say hi to the strangers when you arrive if you didn’t already have a full group. I just went back to WoW to start yet another alt.

Having looked forward to it for ages, I’m verging on downcast that this one is going to fail (which, I am sure you are right to suggest, it will). And my fear over what Middle Earth Online will turn out like just ratcheted up a notch.

We really need to qualify this with “in the West.” WOW has indeed broken through, to become a hit on the scale of the Korean MMO blockbuster series Lineage/Lineage II.

(PS. I’m working here off numbers from http://www.mmogchart.com/ – which covers some issues in comparing Lineage numbers with those of games sold on the “traditional” Western model. It remains pretty clear that the Lineage series was and is immense.)

You write that Blizzard spent money on “relatively smooth technical functionality, art design, and the creation of huge amounts of content.” I would definitely agree with the latter – even the mundane “grinding” tends to have story elements in WoW. One of the major complaints about WoW, however, is that it has yet to manage adequately its maintenance and support issues (due in no small part, I would imagine, to the unexpected size of the subscriber base). As for art design, I will say that it is consistent (with itself and with previous Warcraft titles), but I’ve heard time and again from FFXI players that WoW is “butt-ugly.” (And keep in mind that FFXI used to be king of the hill.)

I feel that what makes WoW so successful is that it works well as an online game but also works just fine for an “offline” style of play. Solo play is viable in WoW, so that players aren’t forced to grind at a certain pace in order to be able to play with people whom they consider competent enough to group with. The casual gamer is also better served by WoW than by other MMORPGs for this reason. I suspect the drop-out rate for WoW is lower than for some other games, precisely because players don’t have to be there every single day and don’t have to wait around until they can find a group.

I used to play Runequest. Some guy and his wife took a couple years writting a computer game based on Runequest . They had the same problem in a more extreme form. It is kind of heartbreaking because they were able to produce the skeleton of a good game, but they couldn’t get the funds to do anything impressive graphically.