As a RuneScape player I'm astonished at how well Jagex have done to revive the old RS community by bringing back the old version of the game, and then polling in new features.
Hopefully Blizzard can take notes from this with WoW classic
Hopefully Blizzard can take notes from this with WoW classic
It's just astonishing how well they've managed to reclaim their market.
I know a couple maxers who still devote 10-20 hours a week to RS. I can't fathom how they find new ways to entertain themselves, but they do. It never gets old for them. I never got into RS but by all accounts they've perfected a genre.
It could work for Blizzard too, they share a customer base with similar outlooks and mentality... to put it politely.
As a result, the more fringe communities (which tend to be correlated both with emergent forms of gameplay and experience with the game; skilling and PvP being the big examples) get starved or actively harmed by the course of development. As a result, those players leave or become less engaged, furthering the cycle and leaving the game a less-interesting place.
Back in the day I never thought I'd whine about Jagex becoming better at listening. I guess it's sort of similar to issues that can be had with A/B testing - when engagement is the name of the game and you have easy access to knobs and feedback, you can end up overfitting. In the terminology of this thread, the bean-counter approach makes you long for the touch of the auteur.
disclaimer: 20k-hour multiply maxed get-off-my-lawn grump with several axes to grind