Paper, Rock, Scissors ... online

#1 I take it you were unhappy with Magical Starsign...

#2 I'm not familiar with Magical Starsign, but a host of problems with WoW's PvP have been waved aside by the explanation, "Oh, It's Paper Rock Scissors" as if that somehow makes it ok. Now the subject is popping up in other places, like the recent Gamasutra article:

www.gamasutra.com/features/20070123/chelaru_01.shtml

My problem is that "RPS" as it is referred to in the article is effectively random unless you think you can read minds, and as applied to WoW it seems to justify extreme advantages of one class over another. Both reduce the amount of skill involved (in an attempt, I presume, to appeal to the masses who are turned off by games in which a skilled player can excel i.e. Tribes).

#3 The Massively in MMO necessitates mass appeal, regardless of how narrow the skill level. FPS's have an extremely narrow skill threshold which appeals to hardcore FPSer's. MMO's have to widen the threshold to keep the Massively in MMO.

#4 I'll put it in a different way, WoW is one of the worst MMORPGs ever created, but it is the most successfull. People use that success to say that it is a great game and it's not. It was successfull for a couple reasons, 1) it had a game company with a reputation for making good games behind it, 2) it was built aroung a world that already had a huge fanbase 3) because of 1&2 it got more markets then just the normal mmorpg market and made it ok to play an mmorpg for all those who felt it was too dorky to play one 4) came at a time when mmorpgs were the big hype and more and more people were accepting them 5) made it very kid/early teen friendly which is a massive game market.

If you talk to any person who has played mmorpgs before WoW and after they will almost all tell you they hated it, it was too simple, too cartoony and was just designed bad for pvp. WoW pulled off an interesting move it made a game in a genre where majority of the people who played that genre disliked it but millions who hated that genre before found it ok to play this game.

I find everything about WoW intersted just because of that, I love mmorpgs and have played way too many, and as you can guess I hated WoW with a passion and got bored in a month since that's how long it took to max level and the content was lame. My friends who played mmorpgs felt the same way, all my friends who decided to try out WoW having never played an mmorpg played it constantly for over a year straight thinking it was the most amazing thing ever. Having never played mmorpgs they never realised how big a game world could be and how many players could be involved.

I think most games prefer a more elaborate system for classes and skills etc. Those more complex games will always appeal to a certain market and the over simplified hack and slash repeat the same sequence of button presses for every battle will appeal to a certain market as well so I would expect to always see paper rock scissor games along with complex dynamic games

WoW is to mmorpg as the Halo series is to fps, an over simplified version that takes little thought to play