I am extremely excited about getting into TESO. I have played most of the big MMO's and seen them come and go. I can only speculate as to why they failed but I don't have to speculate as to why I left them. So I just wanted to touch on a few pitfalls to avoid in the future.

1) Balancing rollercoasters - Rift had a huge balance problem. I remember standing on a bridge with a buffer friend of mine and blasting whole pvp armies away with just my pyromancer. While it was incredibly fun it began a roller coaster of balancing between the classes where every month one class became OP and another UP. There was no stability to your class, and eventually you got the feeling you had no control of your class and lived in constant fear of the game breaking Mega Nerf Bat waves.

Lesson - Make small changes first not large ones.

2) Free to Play - It only starts out all cute and cuddly. I have played Lotro for 5 years. Great Game, great RPG, great MMO. F2P opened the door for more players, and perhaps prolonged it's life span. It certainly made them a lot more profitable. It is still doing well but It lost touch with its original player base, it's slowly losing its soul. At some point that cute cuddly teddy bear gets it's financial paws wrapped around you and takes over.... Design starts to shift from the designers and moves toward the sales team. Rather than "what cool dungeon can we design" it becomes "Could we design a new horse and then sell that horse for more money". At some point it completely takes over and the sales team starts designing the game. The world that was originally made dies in a whimper and then all that is left is a Mall with a playground in the center.

Lesson - Designers, Programmers, you love the game you made. If you go F2P you will lose control of your IP…forever.

3) PvP Integrity - Honoring achievements is important. After playing lotro for 4 years I reached a pretty high and respected rank for my class. At which point the developers decided to inflate the ranking system, so that what took me 4 years is simply achievable in half a year. In addition, "multiboxing" legions (1 player controlling an army of characters simultaneously) and rampant "fightclubbing" (farming yourself for rank using two accounts) are left unchallenged by the administrators. With no integrity to an achievement or to gameplay it renders the entire endeavor worthless, and breaks the immersion. It makes the whole idea of that portion of gameplay a fraud and a sham.

Lesson - Hold to the intent of the game and protect every part of it from exploit. Each breach breaks the immersion. It causes a person to start thinking outside the game rather than in it. Instead of being immersed in a world, they become immersed in the reality of how broken and lawless it is. Protect the immersion.

4) Longevity - However long you think it will take a player to reach point X, he will legitimately reach it in half the time you think. When Rift came out they grossly underestimated how long it would take a player to reach the max pvp rank. To keep the players busy they kept breaking the ceiling, adding more ranks and absurd performance rewards (+X% pvp dmg, and -X% inc pvp dmg). Creating an ever increasing gap between the new player and the veteran. It quickly became untenable.

Lesson - Make your ceilings really high, then make them a little higher. Create an max allowable gap between your new pvper and your vet. Performance rewards are important, but don’t break the gap. Plan ahead, so that by the time you reach that gap it can be refreshed by a level cap increase expansion.

5) Buggy updates - Test, test, test, before release. Games are complex and we expect a certain amount of error, but it's important to keep a trustworthy reputation. I don't want to keep blasting the same games so I will speak anonymously for now. One game I played has a reputation for releasing content with bugs so obvious that it gives the impression that the content was either not even tested or they just don't care. What I mean here is obvious bugs like, the dungeon you just fought through doesn't give any loot, ever...!!!. (shocking as it may seem stupid bugs like that were expected in this games releases due to the reputation they built.)

Lesson - It's better to release late than ruin your reputation and the trust of you player base.

Those are some of the biggest pitfalls I have seen. Just a few things to keep in mind for the future. Looking forward to being a long time player and supporter.

Funny post, ye think that a "company" these days doesn't know?!

You should receive a job confirmation shortly.

(This is how ZOS gets all their staff, they wait for that one breakthrough on the forums once in a while and then hire him/her).

I think the most important points here are 1 and 3. Especially number 1. Number 1 was the entire reason I quit playing Age of Conan and Star Wars The Old Republic with number 3 being a secondary reason. However I have the hope that with the way the "classes" work in ESO it will be less likely for number 1 to be a major issue.

I agree with them all, if they stay true to their original plans and the lore, and not try to be the next big thing, they will be fine, if they try get millions on board, I think it won't do well at all.

A few decent things in that long ass post.

/agree. I doubt I'll ever try another F2P game after STO. And it basically went the same exact way the OP states above. Now, It's rampant P2W.

In fact, just bought a years sub to AO. Maybe it does have 10 year old graphics, but it was easily offset by 10 year old gameplay longevity.

I liked this post.

One thing I've recently hated about WoW, is similar to number 3, but for PvE. PvE has lost almost all Its integrity, simply because people who play videogames to 'pass the time' wanted everything the game had to offer. I hate using this phrase, but it was honestly a 'slap in the face' (lol) to raiding itself. I'm talking about LFR, of course.

Its PvP rollercoaster just annoyed me. While I liked the possibility of my class being buffed, and strong classes being balanced, there were simply too many huge changes; this kinda ruined the simplicity I've grown fond of within PvP videogames.

Agreed about F2P; developers lose far too much control over things with this, and players often feel like there's no point in playing unless they spend a lot of money at shops. If these MMO's were real life, then the money shops would be worth every penny...cause that'd be freaking awesome; but they're not.

Longevity: The 'best' grind I ever participated in, was the old WoW PvP ranking system. It would update ONCE a week, and that was on Tuesday. Know what this did? It made you excited to see what you achieved over the week. Yes, there were downfalls to it...such as needing to play too much if you chose to go above rank 10/11, but I think the general idea was incredible.

Buggy updates and releases are what kinda killed SWTOR, I think....I'm not sure if raiding was ever taken seriously in that game by anyone that I knew. The one or two raids I did were really cool, don't get me wrong...but it was the first time I've ever raided, with potentially cool mechanics bugging out and wiping us for no good reason.

Overall, you made a good post.

Thank you

I agree also with your post. All points you have here are only possible because Marketing manager who have no idea about games make such desicions and think they will make big money with that.

go ask BioWare about #5

Every time they update and patch SWTOR to fix something one of two things always happens. The original issue is made even worse, or the issue is fixed but it then goes to break something else, which in turn needs to be patched.

People claim many reason why SWTOR failed but number one is their inability to properly fix and release non-broken content. End Game raids were very broken and unplayable at launch, they slowly fixed em over time but was far too late by the time they did.

Theres a clear difference between "stuff happens nothing is perfect" and a clear and present inability and incompetence to properly develop and test your own game.

Balancing in large scale pvp is a different animal.

Either the dev's will try to balance things. OR they won't try to balance anything since every single player is so OP that it'll come down to player skill, and that trying to balance things in a 1v1 sense for giant battles involving 100's is pointless. Especially when siege engines are involved.

Very cool thread. Can we add mass appeal to the list? I get suspicious when an MMO promises something for everyone. Does PvP suffer if developers are dedicating resources to care bear play? Is anything lost when developers are putting time into solo content? Maybe not. I still wonder if we are looking at another "Jack of all trades" MMO.

p.s. I'm a total care bear. I mean no disrespect when I use the term.