The Business: What A Normie-Hostile MMO Looks Like

Josh Stryfe Hayes plays bad Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games so you don't have to.

TLDR: This is a MMORPG that should never have been put into a Beta phase, let alone released.

Everything wrong with the genre is on display in this game. The coding is incompetent. The graphic design is incompetent. The user experience is non-existent, which means that neithe Normies nor Gamers will like it, the tone is dissonant, and so on. Josh saying "It feels like a knock-off of a knock-off" is exactly how it feels, as if it were made by a cargo cult that barely knows how to made an asset-flip game. The monetization is stupidly-aggressive and predatory. It's that bad.

Now, what's the sad thing? That this is what most MMOs are like when you take away the art budget and don't nigh-exactly copy a proven user interface. It's why most MMOs, especially after Everquest and World of Warcraft, feel like knock-offs. Just like most RPGs feel like D&D knock-offs because they are, most MMOs feel like EQ/WOW knock-offs becausse they are.

So why the knock-off problem? For the same reason you see it everywhere: folks see a thing breakthrough to big success and want a piece of that profit for themselves. What they are thinking is exactly this: "Someone has solved a known--but heretofore intractible--problem bothering people. I will copy this solution, customize the non-essential bits to make my iteration stand out, and enjoy similar success."

Why does this not work so often? Nevermind the whole "first mover" advantage. There is a far more fundamental issue, and this game on display shows it: not comprehending what the thing you're copying is, how it works, or why it works as it does. There is a big advantage is actually getting the thing you're copying, and there is no better example than the core of what allowed WOW to overtake EQ.

Asmongold said recently in one of his second-channel streams what it was: WOW took a good look at the useless bitchwork in EQ, identified a lot of it, and cut it out of their game. In short, what is now Vanilla WOW--Classic WOW--was the Normie-friendly MMORPG of 2004. EQ was the Gamer-catering incumbent, and what is now Stupid Irvine Game Company ate EQ's lunch (and took their top spot) by catering to Normies far better than the competition. This lesson got lost on the leadership sometime thereafter.

Most MMOs copy WOW without understanding WOW, and only due to a confluence of a competitor that does understand WOW--Final Fantasy XIV--combined with the incumbent's institutional incompetence reaching critical mass is WOW's dominance now being seriously threatened and a de-throning is actually possible. In turn, only by examining the changes to the model FF14 makes that make it even more Normie-friendly than WOW can any would-be competitor hope to successfully compete with it in turn.

TLDR: The more Normie-friendly/Normie-centric a MMORPG becomes, the more successful it becomes. Be Normie-friendly and win.

Now take another look at Josh's video. He's right that a Normie would have quit at the first crash, the first cash shop appearance, or after an hour at most. This game is hostile to Normies, and it shows in the user metrics. It's trash, and thus unworthy of your time unless you're wanting to make your own and you need to know what abject incompetence looks like.