What I meant is that in my opinion, Anet just screwed it up along the way and due to certain actions and unfullfilled promises dropped the ball majorly, losing the force on what might have lead to WoW's "downfall" if one would want to word it that way. I don't argue the initial success of the game, it just could have been so much more. They 'could' have been the often talked about "WoW killer", but they strayed from their path, made some strange design decisions that went directly against their players' opinion and lost a huge amount of momentum because of that.
I don't think any game developer has ever claimed to be a "WoW Killer", and if they did they were absolute
morons for doing so. That label gets thrown around a lot by people who, for whatever reason, want to see WoW fail. I've always just wanted something
different at roughly the same level of polish and support. Rift was close, but the gameplay was too similar (Trion really doesn't get enough credit for how well Rift launched, by the by, and their support was beastly before ArenaNet stepped up).
So I guess I wasn't too interested in seeing WoW get replaced, because the genre is littered with the corpses of games who tried. It's enough for me that they're sticking to their guns, aren't afraid to make major changes, and keep supporting the game like rabid, content-generating wombats. I think the game's success shows that approach is popular. Could they have done better? Sure. I dunno about losing momentum; they stumbled a bit early on while they were transitioning from "Development" to "Service", but it seems like they're
gaining momentum more than anything lately.
As far as "against player opinions"... I fall into the camp that thinks most gamers really don't know what they want, or even what they
think they want. See the Zelda cycle, every Official Forum Ever, etc.
This isn't really a heated discussion and it's not like there's any hot topics until next Tuesday. I'm curious what player feedback you think ArenaNet ignored or strange decisions they made. Not being antagonistic or anything, just genuinely curious. If you'd rather just move on, that's fine too, just say so and we'll change the subject.
Even in this thread it feels to me like 90% of posts come from the same 20-ish people, and in my personal gameplay experience, it feels like a huge lot of players have either returned to "their" old MMO or moved on to another one. I dunno, maybe it's all still personal disappointment.
See, I don't get that impression at all. There's always going to be a lot of folks who dominate a given thread just by virtue of their enthusiasm for the game. I think the last OTs had some unspeakably high views-to-posts ratio;
OT1: 20,077 Posts, 1,040,619 views
OT2: 19,994 Posts, 1,177,811 views
That's a lot of lurkers or people checking the game out. So yeah, there's the usual suspects in here chatting it up, but I think that's true of any community.
And for what it's worth, despite culling inactive members from the guild earlier this month, we're still sitting at about 400 members. That's 400 people who have logged in since at least May... so while I'm sure a lot of people have left or returned to their old MMOs, there's been enough new and returning players that the guild still flirts with being full.
Anecdotal evidence, of course, but what little we get to hear of ANet's internal numbers suggest that's happening across the board; 3m players as of January and recent interviews have implied they're getting close to 4.
I think the folks who stuck with it are genuinely happy, and there's enough of them that the game is able to expand well beyond anyone's expectations.
