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Boycott Open
or
SAME OLD SHIT, NEW PACKAGE
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The Wulfram II community goes through cycles, very much like any
game. You get a generational aspect to the playerbase. The
"vets" and the "noobs", and today's "noobs" evenually become tomorrow's
"vets" and today's "vets" become tomorrow's "dinosaurs". I've
progressed from noob (before noob was a word), to vet, to dino.
MOST of the players who reach "vet" status in a game will eventually
leave that game because you can only take so much of the same
content. This is especially the case with Wulfram II, which has
little variation in gameplay styles and few content updates.
To make this dynamic more complex in Wulfram
II's case, one generation consists of a flood of players, called the
"Sony Online Flood". The community doubled, possibly tripled or
quadrupled, in a matter of weeks.
The community before then primarily consisted
of highly practiced players who had played game forever. A small
trickle of new players filtered in, but they often didn't stick around
because it wasn't a very newbie friendly place. The old-timers
were very hostile, although often it was not blatant enough to earn
bans from the game. The "SOE Flood", called this because Sony
Online switched several of it's formerly free games to Pay-to-Play and
made a large portion of it's community leave, forced the small game to
adapt to this huge influx. A new generation of "noobs" is
born! And now, all those old-timers are dubbed "vets" by these
new players... really, a concept that never caught on before the SOE
invasion.
The vets at the time were not happy with these
newbies. They thought the new players were ruining the skill
level of the game dramatically. In fact, despite the training
system creation in October of that year, the complaints
continued. Over the course of the next year, while those "noobs"
slowly became a tight-nit group of "vets", the old vets left.
Except for a very small few that stuck around, the vast majority of old
players
thought the game was ruined and stopped playing. Many of these
now "dinos" are forum lurkers (like myself), who don't hop in more than
a few minutes before becoming bored or irritated. It's important
to note that the game didn't change all that much, or really get
ruined. They had just already reached the point that they had
become tired of the game, and they formed the connection that something
beyond normal progression toward boredom was the result.
It's the "SOE Flood" generation's turn for
this dynamic of the game. The group crying "Boycott Open" today
is very much the same as the group that no longer plays today.
Eventually, this "Boycott Open" group is going to become a group of
dinos that mostly forum lurk... if they haven't already. "These
new players are making the game horrible!" "The training system
is a joke!" "The game is going to die!" These are all the
things the vocal minority of the previous generation was yelling...
it's just the same ballgame with different players. This time,
rather than "Advanced Trainers aren't doing their jobs" it's "Open
Server isn't allowing new players to be trained"...
It remains to be seen if this group DOES just
"fade to black" like the previous generation, however. Most of
the names seen today are unrecognizable by me and folks from my
generation, many folks from the SOE generation don't play
already. However, a small group of people who had too many
opinions and too little sense about how to air those opinions
throughout their Wulfram II lifecycle are still clamoring that
something needs to be done... that the game is in trouble, that the new
players aren't getting trained well enough. It's the same book,
it's just been given a brand new shiny cover to replace the old one. |
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