Over at Hardcore Casual, Syncaine has a bit of a missive about what purchasing Aion says about you as an MMO player. He states that if you purchase a game like Aion, which from some general impressions is nothing innovative but highly polished, that you have basically said that you prefer its style of play and have thus surrendered your right to complain about it.
I enjoy and respect what Syncaine writes, much like anything else I read that’s sitting on my rss feed, but if I had a bizarro version of myself, or a villain nemesis, perhaps he would be it. Bizarro Me seems to imply a sense of cynicism, negativity, and a mildly felt sense of discontent with the MMO genre as a whole. One interpretation of what Syncaine writes here is that niche MMOs or those that do different things are lost in the inexorable sea of voices that are apparently shouting that they like more of the same Oliver Twist-flavored gruel.
Tut, tut! If I am so bold to see a villainous version of myself in a fellow blogger (which, by the way, either makes me hilariously silly, pretentious, or just plain crazy, take your pick), I do have to say it’s a rather bleak way of looking at things. The voice that people speak with when they choose an MMO is not a subscription to what they will experience in the next few months but rather what they may have experienced in beta and what they think they will experience as they play. Sometimes that impression is mistaken, as shown by the many folks who have already left Aion behind as another title that didn’t live up to the expectations they had by it. But by no means is someone saying, when they subscribe to an MMO, that they have the foresight to see completely what the experience will be like.
When someone subscribes to an MMO, I think that what they are buying into is a package that is comprised in part from the advertisement the game offers (in varying degrees, hence “buying into the hype” or not), someone’s ideal expectations of their regular MMO experience, and most of all, sharing that experience with others. They aren’t subscribing to a certain ideal or way of design – for any one person to understand fully the idea of a particular MMO’s design is a bit impossible – that’s why MMO developers are teams and not single people, after all. Better yet, they’re subbing to some degree to a leap of faith, a notion that for whatever reason, they’re going to have a decently good time playing. There’s nothing wrong with that kind of optimism, and someone shouldn’t lose the right to be able to criticize or complain about it when that optimism doesn’t pan out, simply because they didn’t forsee a company’s difficulties or core design elements.
Really, I think the voice with which we speak when we purchase an MMO is a very personal and subjective one – and bloggers like myself, Syncaine, or anyone else don’t really have a place in putting people’s words in their mouths for them when they speak with their credit cards for their favorite games. My voice for my subscriptions might fall in line with other, similar-sounding ones, but in the end, my reasons are my own, not of a genre as a whole. And as long as I’m enjoying myself, it really doesn’t matter, yes?