JCatano wrote:
Gamefreak wrote:
Wait, what point are you actually trying to prove there?

Lineage I and II may not necessarily apply to the casual gamer, so to speak, but they do follow a very linear style of mmo gameplay. You buy power ups, you kill monsters, you level up. It's like a traditional korean grind fest. People who play mmos usually associate that sort of gameplay with them, not styles of gameplay found in EvE online, Darkfall, MO or Wurm to name a few.

What people need is assurance that the game they are preordering will be appealing. With no marketing, a different style of gameplay, no open beta and new types of gaming concepts, this assurance is going to be hard to come by.

EvE also has a more, how to put it, large development team? It also has many more things under its belt then xsyon can claim to have.

World of warcraft came off highly successful RTS games that made the series popular before it was even complete. So the assurance there was made before the game was already released. By assurance, I mean assurance in the sense people know it has a higher chance of being a successful game, rather than a failure.
You said if a game doesn't appeal to the casual gamer, it won't succeed. I gave you examples of ones that have. Pretty simple. All three of those are pretty darn hardcore. PK, loot, and grindy (even with EVE's time-based skill system.)

Lineage being linear is irrelevant.

EVE started with a team no bigger than Darkfall (30'ish). Xsyon's page shows 19 developers. Less, but not a massive difference.

With regard to WoW, I am speaking in terms of it being an MMO. Mass commercial marketing driven by popular icons is a huge reason they have almost 12 million subscriptions. While it likely would have still had a lot of subs without that type of marketing, it certainly wouldn't have been 12 million. Many, many people state WoW as their first MMO and you can bet it's because of Blizzard's marketing strategy for it.
You highlighted one part of my entire argument and tried to prove me wrong. That was one sentence out of two paragraphs ...

I'm not going to spend days trying to explain to you what I mean. Not being applicable to the casual gamer is only one of the reasons I listed for its marketing being in jeopardy. People know games that follow linear gameplay in terms of the "normality" of mmos tend to succeed, ones that do not, tend to not succeed so much. Once again, usually.

You listed games that have succeeded that were not designed for the casual gamer. This is, however, a very small portion of successful games. Most games that succeed are applicable to the casual gamer. Lets say for every 100 games, three that are not applicable to the average gamer succeed. Lets also say that out of 100 games, 60 that are applicable to the average gamer succeed. Are you going to model your game after the idea that has a 3% chance to succeed, or the one that has a 60% chance to succeed. Logic would seem to tell us to choose the one with a 60% chance. Also, this is not like betting on the underdog in a boxing match, if your game is less applicable to the casual gamer, you will attain less money per month because you attract less people. Thus there is no benefit for choosing a game that has no application to the casual gamer. Note that I am not claiming that my percents are anywhere near being accurate, however, the success rate for games that are applicable to the casual gamer is higher than the ones that are not. This was the purpose of the percentiles. So in short, your argument is no more valid than it was when you made your fist comment. That is, not at all.