It seems both Tagn and Hardcore Casual have been reviewing their predictions from last year and it was interesting to see how their attempts faired so, why not have a go too. Last year I made a few cheeky predictions regarding the upcoming mmo’s and just how well their pvp experiences were going to be. A lot of stupid thoughts but mostly wrapped in a layer of truth that did have the potential to come true-ish. Well, end of year now so let’s look back a t how I did.
ESO
While it did see a fair few of the gw2 WvW crew leaving for greener pastures it wasn’t as many as I thought. I ended up not getting that invested in the game or the PvP, there was something about it that just wasn’t engaging for me. Might have been the skills and combat, maybe the mechanics. A lot to do with the huge quest going for Veteran Ranks. It just never grabbed me.
The group combat was kinda fun.
I believe it still does have a decent AvA population although I can neither confirm or deny that. Haven’t played it in many months. I was right in my snarky comment that a Arenanet would remain as silent as ever about a wvw population that is now but a fraction of its former self.
And the overall message around ESO
The game itself will receive moderate success and will stay subscription based for the remainder of the year. People will complain about how it’s not as good as Skyrim but play it nonetheless since its single player Skyrim with multi-player like they asked.
I would say that’s a decent guess. The fail train ran off the tracks a little earlier than expected but it seems they actually have it back on now and mostly heading in the right direction. Just wondering where the hell this console release is and how well it is going to do.
Wildstar
I think I gave Wildstar far more credit than it was due. I thought it would at least last 6 months yet it only really lasted 1. I was expecting a far bigger population too yet I don’t think it even broke a million sales.
So the quote
I predict Wildstar will actually steal a sizeable chunk of players from WoW that actually like the game and decide to stay…this is not a considerable amount but enough to perpetuate comparisons about every.. damn… mechanic to WoW every damn day.
Whaaaahhh wuuuuuuh… Big no
I even thought the arena and Warplots would do quite well but the Warplots were buggy and broken and didn’t see much interest and the arena play was a mess. Terrible class balance, buggy, terrible matchmaking, huge power differentials between gear and it was rather unresponsive for many making it’s “action” combat rather annoying.
I do miss my plushie bar though
Darkfall
I predict Darkfall will close down near the end of the year after the developers at Adventurine realise they suck at making mmo’s and start making a medieval day z clone
Yep, I predicted its demise over the year and surprisingly it’s still around. It still has no hope of recovering from its death spiral but at least it’s still scamming people for subs. That medieval day z clone still sounds cool, remind me to learn how to code.
CCP
Yup, eve is still eve and it seems the new regular patch style has seen mostly positive feedback.
I predict EvE will continue to be EvE with no successor and no challenger. CCP will realise they screwed up with Dust 514 but are too worried about their pride to abort this abomination, it’s their baby and they love it nonetheless. The amount of money this hideous love child sucks in will mean World of Darkness will be put on standby with a minimal crew
Sadly I kind of prophesied the demise of World of darkness but I didn’t see the project getting completely shut down. I think the Eve Valkyrie project sucked up a lot of funds too and we heard a lot of reports about ccp basically cannibalising many of the white wolf work force for many Eve projects
Everquest Next
No game and very little news about it over the year. No point predicting anything more from the title as I really don’t even see it releasing next year either
Star Citizen
So I Thought around 50 million for the year and they have 67, soooo absolutely smashed what I thought. A fool and his money I guess.
Anyway I did kind of suspect that due to the overflowing list of features it’s picked up by hitting so many stretch goals that the game would be severely delayed with only the arena mode making it out half-way through the year… Ding.
Can neither confirm nor deny Chris Roberts having a mental Breakdown though. All I can imagine going on there right now is this
The Repopulation
I thought it was going to release near the end of the year but it’s still in a alpha state with beta coming soon. I have been playing a little lately but yeh NDA soooo…. I’d still probably keep the same prediction for next year
I predict The Repopulation will see great success… for a sandbox mmo. It will garner a couple hundred thousand subscribers that will see it out through the new year and be reasonable happy with the game.
Camelot Unchained
Anndddddd
I predict they will continue to push out updates and lore stories throughout the year with only minor hiccups. Development progress will be steady but have slight delays. The first trials of the game proper, and not some trial mode of mechanics will be tested by kickstarter supporters around September and it will be a tragically boring affair… an alpha PvP mmo with minimal population doesn’t work. No-one will care how good or bad the alpha tests are and will continue to wait for this messiah mmo to bestow deliverance on us all
Ding. well mostly. It did hit larger delays than expected so we didn’t see alpha. I expected some play of the mechanics though and that’s what we got so far. Basic combat, spells and building but it’s something.
ArcheAge
I actually didn’t provide any thoughts in it last year. I had no idea when it would be released and XL games and Trion seemed to be taking there time bringing it here. I would say out of the new mmo’s it actually did the best in terms of PvP play. Open world was fun, the risk reward elements of trading created a fun environment and there were a few other elements there that made it quite addictive. Unfortunately they dun fucked it up. That seriously has to be a skill to have a game that might at least give several months or more of play and kill it in 3… achievement unlocked.
By the power of greyskull
So yeh. A rather shitty year for mmo pvp all round with the big release failing to fulfill their prophecies and the rest of the genre bot doing much else at all. Such fail. Much disappoint. I was rather sceptical anyway and knew they wouldn’t fulfill but I did still have a lot of great experiences so it wasn’t a complete loss.
4 thoughts on “MMO PvP in 2014: The Recap”
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Healing the masses 
Can’t speak for servers further down the chain but on Yak’s Bend WvW in 2014 has been thrilling, vital and compulsive. I’ve spent far more time in the borderlands than I rationally would have liked because there have been seemingly endless peaks of excitement and “got to be there” moments that I just couldn’t miss.
Season 2 was epic, even better than Season 1. Coming in as runner-up in both entirely against all predictions and due to sustained and heroic efforts by all concerned will remain as one (er…two) of my all-time most memorable MMO experiences. By comparison Season 3, which we won with a 100% success rate, was bit of an anticlimax. The longer I play competitive games the more I realize I get less pleasure from an easy win than a hard-fought loss.
The last two weeks have seen a sustained double-team campaign against us which has broken our three-month long wining streak and its been wonderful. I played almost nothing but WvW this weekend – probably 15 or 20 hours at least. Numbers on the field are very high. I see no sign whatsoever in Tier 2 of any decline in population or drop-off of interest and I see scores of the same names playing that I’ve been seeing for two years now.
In the end it comes down to Server Pride. WvW and all realm vs realm game modes just don’t work at all if the players aren’t emotionally committed to the flag they carry. On Yak’s Bend the motto is “Yaks Forever” and we have amazing server loyalty. Without that I doubt any of the excitement and thrill would exist at all.
I’m definitely not saying that the wvw was bad, quite the opposite. We, Nd by we I mean the guild and I had an amazing time in gw2 fighting for our server. Owning borderlands and contesting guilds. It was one of the more enjoyable and surprisingly rather tactical styles of gameplay I’ve enjoyed. My enjoyment lasted well over a year of quite serious play too without any decent updates to it as well. It was nigh on a year before the culling changes and even afterwards there was still a lot of server lag in large fights. Even threw all of that it was a lot of fun.
But nothing lasts forever and the eternal battlegrounds wasn’t enough to build back that interest. The just needed to do something a bit bigger to the mode in terms of updates. Just more reason for people and guilds to fight bar getting on the karma train. I don’t think ESO did to well in that regard either but haven’t that larger map does me it feel a lot better. If gw2 could improve its map to be that big and maybe the mechanics of castle building and singing than I think lot of people would come back.
It occurs to me that I don’t even know what happened with Archeage.
After ESO turned out to be even shittier than I imagined and laughing maniacally at my friends who tried to eke out an enjoyable experience in Wildstar I stuck my head into a pile of mobas, co-op games, and Warframe and haven’t really looked up since.
I was under the impression that Archeage had rather glowing initial reports.
Yeh it did but it was plagued with issues and incompetent management.
I had some amazing experience but slowly everything corrupts that positive view. Initial part was people using the cash shop to get a lot of the initial land. Then there was the exploits and hacks. Movement hacks that let people do trade packs instantly. Ah hacks to control the market. And land hacks to instantly claim available land before legitimate players. Boring and such was far worse than you’d think too. Just everywhere. And that’s not even going into it all.
Then after that was can shop idiocy. Labor pots were stupid but there were exploits around the rng boxes, turning apex into as much gold as you wanted and exploits around regarding weapons and armor to be more powerful.
They also actively screwed the economy with certain cas shop items. They even constantly rebalanced in game items to make them worse than new cash shop stuff. Without putting it in the patch ones of course.
Aurora was the dumbest shit ever. Huge log in issues screwed over a lot of guilds that could have owned a castle and now it’s almost impossible to win the castle siege due to shitty balancing of wall health.
Recent Trion being Trion thing is them outright lying about all aiming a 10% and being proven wrong
After all of this I think the worst thing is that the neither have the capabilities or the interest in solving most of the issues unless of course they might harm earnings from the cash shop.
It is honestly the worst managed mmo I’ve played.