Sometimes it is the thought
February 8, 2012 2 Comments
This morning, at 9:15 AM to be exact, I got an email from SW:ToR [aside: how do others pronounce that? I’ve been going with “Swo-tor” for some reason] congratulating me on my reaching level 10. It was a nice little blurb with links to more information about what I can look forward too in the near and far-run. It covered everything from choosing an advanced class to participation in warzones. A gamut of helpful of advice. All of it nearly completely useless to me, having done it all before in the beta, but it made me feel a warm fuzzy. I’m not sure what that says about me, that a completely automated process of simulated attention is enough to make me feel like a valued customer. Or does that say more about the gaming industry as a whole and it’s take on the service branch of their field.
I don’t know, early morning ramblings.
About Shadow
Shadow-war 
No news, several F2P games (e.g. Perfect World) do this for years. But yes, so BioWare actually did not only copy WoW, but took a very short glimpse at other MMOs, too.
It’s a good thing to take away from other games. There’s a huge derivation between the way subscription and F2P games have historically viewed their products (lol – internet time makes recent trends have historical behaviors). F2P have been more service driven, as there is a need to continually maintain a revenue stream that is enhanced by great customer relations. Subscription have instead focused on releasing a product that stood on it’s own merits to be worthy of a more dispersed purchase point.
I take this move as a hopeful shift in direction on the wider market to see subscription MMOs being viewed more consistently by all parties as a service instead of a product (old argument). Taking the bits and pieces that emphasize the customer::sales relationship to the same level as other business can only be a good thing as I see it.
As for the passing remark of copying, I’ll add only this. Traditionally (lol – also 20+ years is tradition) the DIKU model has been evolving continually. To lay the onus of the current questing/UI/world-interaction paradigm solely at the feet of WoW is to take a narrowly defined glance at the greater MMO landscape. As an example, you can see the general path the UI of these games were going to take by flipping through our EQ history books to glance at the user-created UIs of yore and notice the echoes of what we currently consider “standard”. [Note: I’m not saying at all that SW:TOR isn’t a tried and true DIKU-style MMO, merely that the claim of WoW being the culprit is misguided]
/ramble_off