Over the past year and a half I’ve watched ArenaNet fall from grace. Their complete mismanagement of the Guild Wars franchise has caused me to lose trust in them as both a consumer and a player of their games. When I watched the EverQuest Next announcement, I felt confident that this was the light in the darkness I had been looking for: a game developed by professionals that was actively working with the community during the development of their next big title. By contrast, Guild Wars 2 was developed by amateurs with sloppy code and the company has gone out of their way to ignore their most loyal (and deep-pocketed) fanbase.

I had a certain reserved excitement about EverQuest Next. After being burned on GW2 I wasn’t ready to give completely into the hype, but I was enthusiastic nonetheless. I signed up for their beta, voted in their polls, and subscribed to their “Roundtable” channel on YouTube. But my level of enthusiasm for that game was quickly torn down by both the hardcore community and the development team’s offensively patronizing “Roundtable” videos. I had noticed that latter quality early-on, but was willing to cut the team some slack; only after repeatedly ignoring everything their community would vote for unless it aligned with their pre-existing development plans did I lose faith in their direction. The other side of that coin is that arguably the community was wrong and the developers were right to ignore them. So if they aren’t listening to the community, how are they different from ArenaNet?

In ArenaNet’s defense, original Guild Wars players threw a fit about nearly every major update in the game’s history. Almost all content was decried as “too hard” or was expected to “ruin the game” at its introduction, and vocal players threatened to take their business elsewhere (but didn’t) at nearly every turn. And here, the community was wrong too. That is, until they were eventually right. But the community had cried wolf one too many times and ArenaNet had stopped listening. Can you blame them?

The rabid EverQuest community isn’t any different, many of whom still play the original EQ. These players are genuinely hard-core, and are jumping at every opportunity to help build a game to their extreme tastes. This group of gamers is used to content being hard and they like it that way: it keeps a firm barrier between the game they love and the kind of casual players that ruin games. For example, a decent chunk of the EQN community was clamoring for “corpse-runs,” a system from the glory days of EverQuest, where if god-forbid your character was stupid enough to die, you’d have to depend on the kindness of other players to get back to the place that you died to successfully reclaim your body, loot, and gear. While undoubtedly some people have fond memories of corpse-runs, there’s a reason most MMOs don’t do that anymore: as a business, it is in the MMO’s interest to attract players and not penalize them so harshly when making mistakes.

So here I am, caught between the hard-core players and the casual ones. I’m an adult, I have a job, I don’t live with my parents, and I have precious little free-time. When I play MMOs, I like to play with my friends and I like to explore. Sometimes we get into trouble and learn not to do something again, or are forced to re-consider another strategy, and I like that, but there’s a fine balance where the penalties can quickly become too harsh and create a disincentive to playing the way that you like. Does a game need to give a penalty for dying in the game beyond resetting you to an earlier checkpoint? Do I need to be restricted in terms of where I can map-travel to? Do I need to farm for endless hours to get gear with the same stats that the hard-core players have? NO.

Corpse-runs, armor degradation, experience loss, restricted travel, and required farming are all exercises in tedium: they are game mechanics designed to keep players in the game and to deliberately slow progression. Is it good for a game company to keep people playing their game? Of course! But you can do all of that with content. Make me want to play your game. Make me care about what happens. All of the things mentioned above are just cheap mechanics intended to keep people playing when the content can’t otherwise stand on its own as compelling and enjoyable.

So, as always, the problem comes down to the community, which can’t be bothered to appreciate the points I’m making, and the developers who aren’t able to add content compelling enough to avoid the gimmicks.