Quote from: Bradford C. Walker;707174I've been a WOW player, and a raider (i.e. focused on end-game content),  since 2006.  I've kept up with the Diablo scene and its clones during this time; I'm speaking from first-hand experience and expertise here.  

Oh an expert in MMOs, well that's that then. Presumably you also have your shiny 64-bit crown from when you got elected spokesperson for the millions and millions of people who play MMOs. Because I'll be wanting to see that.

Quote from: Bradford C. Walker;707174They do not give a fuck.  They're here for the game, not for the environment or the story or any of that; all of that is secondary, at best, to raw gameplay and their ability to power-up their man as fast as they can.  All of the panels at Blizzcon are online at YouTube now; go watch them.  Not even the devs are that concerned anymore, including the story team because they know that it's not the thing that drives players in these media- iin terms of story, CRPG/MMO users prefer the same passive mode of consumption that they get from TV and film; they DO NOT WANT to be active agents in the narrative.  They say so, their actions say so, and their spending says so.

And of course all they ever do and ever will do for entertainment is play MMOs, because Bradford C. Walker says so. WoW - the daddy of MMOs - alone has dropped to half the numbers of its heyday, a grand total of three years ago.

If it seems like I'm making a mockery of you here, it's because I am, but I'll admit your argument is somewhat puzzling. You appear to be taking the idea of letting people know about the strengths of TTRPGs as an attack on CRPGs - why would you think so? People can after all play both.

Quote from: Bradford C. Walker;707174TRPGs looks like broken boardgames or wargames to them, and as such are not worth their time.

TTRPGs don't look like anything to them because they mostly aren't aware of them except very vaguely as a precursor to MMOs.

Quote from: Bradford C. Walker;707174Smart marketers do not waste resources on lost causes.  Targeting the CRPG segment is a lost cause.

You wouldn't know smart marketing from a hole in the wall, champ, take it from me.

Quote from: TristramEvans;707199From what Ive read regarding GW's Black Library line anyways, its generally more trouble than its worth with companies demanding rewrites go keep everything within "cannon"

Sounds like writing Star Wars novels to be canon or semi-canon, would be a huge nightmare.

Dunno what the "canonicity" is for other licensed novels, such as Star Trek, Doctor Who, etc ...  (Though IIRC, Star Trek novels were considered non-canon when Gene Roddenberry was still alive.  Dunno if this is still the case today).

Quote from: ggroy;707205Sounds like writing Star Wars novels to be canon or semi-canon, would be a huge nightmare.

Dunno what the "canonicity" is for other licensed novels, such as Star Trek, Doctor Who, etc ...  (Though IIRC, Star Trek novels were considered non-canon when Gene Roddenberry was still alive.  Dunno if this is still the case today).

I've heard BBC pays well for the Dr Who books

Oh and incidentally for those actual geek elitists who delight in disparaging the creative instinct of the general public, as of October 2013, Minecraft has sold over 12.5 million copies on PC and over 33 million copies across all platforms.

Gosh, it's almost as if people are spouting shite on subjects they are almost entirely uninformed about.

Honestly, I've just never encountered this demographic you think exists that are gamers (video gamers/board gamers, etc.) who don't know what TTRPGs are, and I do all three, so I'm around players of all of them.

Honestly for my personal enjoyment TTRPGs>Board Games>Video Games. But the amount of time I spend on each is the inverse. Video games I can fit in any time I have a spare moment, board games I can fit in any time I and at least one other person is in the same house with me and has a spare moment, and a TTRPG requires me to both plan for it (I generally GM) and find at least 3 other people with a spare few hours to spend in the same house with me..

Quote from: The Traveller;707210Oh and incidentally for those actual geek elitists who delight in disparaging the creative instinct of the general public, as of October 2013, Minecraft has sold over 12.5 million copies on PC and over 33 million copies across all platforms.

Gosh, it's almost as if people are spouting shite on subjects they are almost entirely uninformed about.

That's not a very compelling argument.

Lego sells pretty well too.

Quote from: TristramEvans;707220That's not a very compelling argument.

Yes, it is.

Quote from: Emperor Norton;707211Honestly for my personal enjoyment TTRPGs>Board Games>Video Games.

Same here too, these days.


Though when I was younger, it was the other way around for me:

Video Games>Board Games>TTRPGs.

But eventually I completely lost interest in video games, when fighting games became popular.  (ie. Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter 2, etc ...).

Quote from: The Traveller;707222Yes, it is.

OK, well, it didn't convince me (shrug) I just read it as false equivilance

Quote from: The Traveller;707210Oh and incidentally for those actual geek elitists who delight in disparaging the creative instinct of the general public, as of October 2013, Minecraft has sold over 12.5 million copies on PC and over 33 million copies across all platforms.

Gosh, it's almost as if people are spouting shite on subjects they are almost entirely uninformed about.

That's like saying Farmville shows there's enormous untapped potential in the video game market for TTRPGs.

Quote from: ggroy;707186Wonder if this can partially explain why some World of Warcraft, Diablo, Everquest, Mass Effect, Halo, etc ... branded novels are kinda boring generic reads.  (ie. Story being treated as a secondary or tertiary concern).

Yeah, it does.  I've read some of them.  They're best taken, for adult readers, as the written version of crap Syfy made-for-tv films or '80s shit fantasy flicks like the Deathstalker series or Ator the Fighting Eagle (i.e. worth of MST3K).

It does not help at all that the story lead is also an unapologetic fanboy for one of the major character (Metzen created Thrall, voices Thrall, and pretty much IS Thrall; this is why Orc Jesus, for the longest time, could do no wrong- only with making Garrosh his replacement as Warchief of the Horde did he seriously fuck up.) and acts accordingly both behind the scenes as well as in public.  (Also, totally a Dudebro type that can't be bothered to keep his continuity straight; Red Shirt Guy became a thing solely because of this fact.)

Quote from: The Traveller;707200Oh an expert in MMOs, well that's that then. Presumably you also have your shiny 64-bit crown from when you got elected spokesperson for the millions and millions of people who play MMOs. Because I'll be wanting to see that.

I'm on the scene and you're not.  I have context and you don't.  That makes me the expert and you the guy that ought to sit the fuck down, shut the fuck up and let the experts run the show.

QuoteAnd of course all they ever do and ever will do for entertainment is play MMOs, because Bradford C. Walker says so. WoW - the daddy of MMOs - alone has dropped to half the numbers of its heyday, a grand total of three years ago.

Most of which are losses in Asia (CONTEXT!), and most of those lost are folks who started while undergraduates in university who have since gotten married and had children (i.e. the time to play WOW as they did diminished); both are KNOWN ISSUES regularly mentioned at MMO-Champion, official forums of all MMOs worth mentioning (SWTOR, GW2, LOTRO, etc.), Gamebreaker and so on in the community.  That's a big reason for WOW's social tech changes, including the ones announced for the upcoming xpac.

Also, WOW STILL has more paying players than all others COMBINED.  It is to MMOs what D&D is to TRPGs: the only one worth talking about to outsiders, and the one that sets the standards against which others are measured (and EVE Online is the sole exception, a role that is not currently filled in TRPGs, for reasons that are also well-known).  Even ex-WOW devs can't make a MMO that can do to WOW what WOW did to the original Everquest: kill the market leader.

The devs focus on the gameplay, especially endgame gameplay (which is where rival MMOs always fall down and lose paying players, again with EVE being the sole exception because "endgame" is meaningless to EVE) where a player will spend the bulk of his time in a MMO worth a damn.  ("The game begins at the cap." is a meme for a reason.)  Making it easier to get where the action is, making it easier to master the game, cutting out the boring bullshit- this is a consistent pattern for WOW's development since launch (and, having been on the scene all this time, I have first-hand experience with this working as intended).

Go on, tell me again how you're going to successfully target a gaming segment that's treating RPGs as if it were a pick-up sporting group with appeals to things that they don't give a fuck about.  "You can be what you want!" means NOTHING; they already have what they want from MMOs and CRPGs.  "You can be the stars of your own story!" means NOTHING; they do not give a fuck about that because they don't care experiencing narrative in that fashion- this is the group that skips all the cutscenes because "they're gay".  (Their counterpart, on the other hand, goes to Youtube to look up videos of all the cutscenes editted into a single movie to skip "that shit gamey crap".)  "You can create content faster than you can for a MMO/CRPG!" means NOTHING; THEY DON'T WANT TO MAKE CONTENT- that's something people get paid to do; i.e. IT'S WORK and this is what they do for FUN.  Fun IS NOT work, and you can't sell them otherwise because the very nature of the TRPG medium LOOKS TOO MUCH LIKE WORK.

QuoteIf it seems like I'm making a mockery of you here, it's because I am, but I'll admit your argument is somewhat puzzling. You appear to be taking the idea of letting people know about the strengths of TTRPGs as an attack on CRPGs - why would you think so? People can after all play both.

Sure they can.  I do.  What I'm pointing out is that overlap is not large enough to be worth the resources that must be expended to produce any useful results.  In other words, the size of that overlap is too small to be useful.  How do I know this?  Because I'm on the scene; the MMO and CRPG people know that TRPGs exist; they reject TRPGs because of what they are, not out of ignorance of them.

QuoteTTRPGs don't look like anything to them because they mostly aren't aware of them except very vaguely as a precursor to MMOs.

Bullshit.  They DO know, and THEY DON'T WANT THEM.  You are wasting your time marketing to them.

Quote from: flyerfan1991;707277That's like saying Farmville shows there's enormous untapped potential in the video game market for TTRPGs.

No, that's like saying creative activities are just as interesting to quite a lot of people as FPSes.

Quote from: Bradford C. Walker;707309I'm on the scene and you're not.  I have context and you don't.  That makes me the expert and you the guy that ought to sit the fuck down, shut the fuck up and let the experts run the show.

Most of which are losses in Asia (CONTEXT!), and most of those lost are folks who started while undergraduates in university who have since gotten married and had children (i.e. the time to play WOW as they did diminished); both are KNOWN ISSUES regularly mentioned at MMO-Champion, official forums of all MMOs worth mentioning (SWTOR, GW2, LOTRO, etc.), Gamebreaker and so on in the community.  That's a big reason for WOW's social tech changes, including the ones announced for the upcoming xpac.

Also, WOW STILL has more paying players than all others COMBINED.  It is to MMOs what D&D is to TRPGs: the only one worth talking about to outsiders, and the one that sets the standards against which others are measured (and EVE Online is the sole exception, a role that is not currently filled in TRPGs, for reasons that are also well-known).  Even ex-WOW devs can't make a MMO that can do to WOW what WOW did to the original Everquest: kill the market leader.

The devs focus on the gameplay, especially endgame gameplay (which is where rival MMOs always fall down and lose paying players, again with EVE being the sole exception because "endgame" is meaningless to EVE) where a player will spend the bulk of his time in a MMO worth a damn.  ("The game begins at the cap." is a meme for a reason.)  Making it easier to get where the action is, making it easier to master the game, cutting out the boring bullshit- this is a consistent pattern for WOW's development since launch (and, having been on the scene all this time, I have first-hand experience with this working as intended).

Go on, tell me again how you're going to successfully target a gaming segment that's treating RPGs as if it were a pick-up sporting group with appeals to things that they don't give a fuck about.  "You can be what you want!" means NOTHING; they already have what they want from MMOs and CRPGs.  "You can be the stars of your own story!" means NOTHING; they do not give a fuck about that because they don't care experiencing narrative in that fashion- this is the group that skips all the cutscenes because "they're gay".  (Their counterpart, on the other hand, goes to Youtube to look up videos of all the cutscenes editted into a single movie to skip "that shit gamey crap".)  "You can create content faster than you can for a MMO/CRPG!" means NOTHING; THEY DON'T WANT TO MAKE CONTENT- that's something people get paid to do; i.e. IT'S WORK and this is what they do for FUN.  Fun IS NOT work, and you can't sell them otherwise because the very nature of the TRPG medium LOOKS TOO MUCH LIKE WORK.

Sure they can.  I do.  What I'm pointing out is that overlap is not large enough to be worth the resources that must be expended to produce any useful results.  In other words, the size of that overlap is too small to be useful.  How do I know this?  Because I'm on the scene; the MMO and CRPG people know that TRPGs exist; they reject TRPGs because of what they are, not out of ignorance of them.

Bullshit.  They DO know, and THEY DON'T WANT THEM.  You are wasting your time marketing to them.

See this is exactly what I was talking about, behold viral marketing in action.

Earlier in the thread I explicitly predicted that butthurt MMOers would be lining up at the complaints box, and here we are. He's not even sure what he's complaining about, he just needs to react. Multiply Brad here by about five million and you've got yourself a phenomenon.

Thanks Brad, you've been great.

Quote from: Bradford C. Walker;707309Go on, tell me again how you're going to successfully target a gaming segment that's treating RPGs as if it were a pick-up sporting group with appeals to things that they don't give a fuck about.  "You can be what you want!" means NOTHING; they already have what they want from MMOs and CRPGs.  "You can be the stars of your own story!" means NOTHING; they do not give a fuck about that because they don't care experiencing narrative in that fashion- this is the group that skips all the cutscenes because "they're gay".  (Their counterpart, on the other hand, goes to Youtube to look up videos of all the cutscenes editted into a single movie to skip "that shit gamey crap".)  "You can create content faster than you can for a MMO/CRPG!" means NOTHING; THEY DON'T WANT TO MAKE CONTENT- that's something people get paid to do; i.e. IT'S WORK and this is what they do for FUN.  Fun IS NOT work, and you can't sell them otherwise because the very nature of the TRPG medium LOOKS TOO MUCH LIKE WORK.

I'm reminded of the Capital One commercial where Alec Baldwin is a substitute teacher and he finds out they're teaching spelling:  "That's not a class, that's a program.  Spell check, right?"

MMOs are as much the direct descendent of Pac-Man as the stats came from D&D.

The vast majority of people who play WoW aren't there for the story.  If they were, they'd be in open revolt over the crap that Blizzard foists on people:  "Want to keep up with the story?  Buy the books!  You'll never see this stuff in-game!"  "Yeah, we're going back to Draenor!  Oh, well, we're time traveling, but kind of like an Earth-2 thing!"

The WoW story reads like a bad plotline from a C-grade movie, and the only way the devs get away with it is because people don't care.  They want raids.  (Speaking of which, Blizzard is still trying to make the WoW movie, which I've this feeling will end up being the D&D Movie's slightly younger and slightly hipper brother.)

Here's one way you know that the MMO demographic is different than TTRPGs:  Blizzard spends money on advertisements during sporting events, like NFL games.  When was the last time you saw WotC advertise D&D during an NFL playoff game?

Quote from: The Traveller;707135And why not, convenience is very convenient. However I've another truism for those who know the price of everything and the value of nothing - you get out of it what you put in.

Life is like a toilet, what you get out of it depends on what you put into it.  I will point to the popularity of television as a medium of entertainment... it's even less effort than playing a computer game.  But lots of people do it.  Lots of people apparently like passivity in their entertainment.