MMO Rant

[3/3/2016 11:59:49 PM] Yugas: There are Eastern MMO's, which are the Asian ones. There are Western MMO's which are the American ones.
[12:00:04 AM] Yugas: There are no other MMO's that compete with a large enough playerbase to be a factor.
[12:00:26 AM] Yugas: The major differences between these two types of games are art style and time investment.
[12:00:56 AM] Yugas: Art style is subjective, and has nothing to do with if a large group of people will play a game or not. Time investment on the other hand is objective and can be measured.
[12:01:14 AM] Yugas: Asian MMO's are designed with much, much more time investment, and as a tradeoff have less variety.
[12:01:25 AM] Yugas: The Asian MMO market actually enjoys grinding, believe it or not.
[12:01:56 AM] Yugas: The American MMO market does not. They enjoy much less repetitive content, and having more of it.
[12:02:23 AM] Yugas: So in American MMO's like GW2 I can go and get a new weapon skin in like 2 hours, unless it's a really, really expensive or exclusive one.
[12:02:49 AM] Yugas: Then I can go and collect the other 300+ weapon skins for the same weapon type, multiply that by 12 weapon types, then add armor as well.
[12:02:55 AM] Yugas: This is just an example.
[12:03:45 AM] Yugas: So my time investment feels much more gratifying because I'm getting something more often. Asian MMO's, though, can have leveling alone take weeks, which BDO doesn't, it's actually very fast from what I played. But that logic applies to almost everything they do.
[12:04:12 AM] Yugas: Run this dungeon 1,000 times, kill this mob 10,000 times, gather this plant 5,000 times. It turns into a job.
[12:04:34 AM] Yugas: So this difference in design between games can easily be changed to go one way, but not the other.
[12:04:45 AM] Yugas: Sorry I'm typing a novel by the way, but this is really the only way to explain it.
[12:05:53 AM] Yugas: Guild Wars 2 released in China last year. ArenaNet had to add grind to the game in order to make any sales in China. When they did play testing in Asia originally, nobody liked it because there weren't enough menial tasks for players to do, as crazy as it sounds.
[12:06:34 AM] Yugas: So they made it take longer to level, made crafting cost more, slowed down time gated items, and even removed gathering nodes to make certain cooking ingredients more rare.
[12:07:28 AM] Yugas: Then they added a ton more stuff to the cash shop, and even introduced a monthly optional subscription system that gives you x-amount of gems per month, a title, and a fucking MASSIVE badge next to your character name. This is the stuff Asian players like having.
[12:09:20 AM] Yugas: Now, when you try to take an Asian MMO and bring it into the Western market you run into a problem. The game has been designed to take much longer to progress in. In a lot of cases, it's much harder to shorten the amount of time it takes to do things. You can make it faster to level, but you will run into issues with quests requiring far too much work, crafting items taking too many extra meaningless steps, dungeons having tons of trash mobs, and bosses having way too much health.
[12:09:56 AM] Yugas: This ends up turning into a balance nightmare for developers. Asian players are far more accepting of something taking them a long time to do. But an American player who thinks they are wasting their time will just stop playing the game.
[12:10:25 AM] Yugas: Because of that wall of text, that is why I think Black Desert will fail in the US.
[12:10:46 AM] Yugas: Just the same way almost every other Asian MMO has done in the last 5 years.
[12:11:19 AM] Yugas: Other than TERA, I cannot name one successful MMO that was launched in China or Korea before it was launched in North America.