When does an MMO Jump the Shark?

Everything has a shelf life. Where Doom, Quake and Unreal were once the dominant first person shooters, Medal of Honor came along and tipped them off the perch, and it wasn't long before Call of Duty blew EA's signature World War II franchise into insignificance.

MMO's are no different, the have peaks and valleys, in their subscriber base. But like all games, they eventually fade into into distant memory.

Some burn fiercely, but briefly, like SOE's revolutionary, ambitious, and incredibly fun (for a time) Planetside.

Others, like Blizzard's genre benchmark, World of Warcraft, with its thousands of quests, tens of thousands of enemies, and millions of players all accumulating untold amounts of wow gold and xp, seem to have an interminable shelf life, but even the mighty wow's time will pass in time.

But has World of Warcraft already jumped the shark? The knee-jerk reaction is to scoff, “of course not!” With over eleven million active subscribers, a vocal, active community (as we recently learned following Blzzard's attempts to introduce a real name posting policy on their forums), highly praised expansions like Burning Crusade, Lich King, and the upcoming World of Warcraft Cataclysm, wow is still the most widely played pay to pay massively multiplayer online game ever made.

In fact, you'd be forgiven for thinking it was a question without merit. However, complacency is the first step to being replaced... just ask Sony Online Entertainment what happened between EverQuest I and the release of EverQuest II.

To many, the nature of Blizzard's latest proposed expansion, Cataclysm, offers the clearest clues that even Blizzard are aware of the fact that something needs to be done to shake up the long standing formula.

Are they worried that the phenomenon that is wow might be getting a little long in the tooth? Cataclysm is seen as a revitalization of the game, what's old is new in a sense, an attempt to bring in new players, and give jaded long time fans a reason to revisit paths long since trodden.

Visit the forums though, and you'll find a a vocal minority who insist World of Warcraft has already jumped the shark. Was it when the purchase of pets was introduced? Perhaps when mounts went on sale for real money trade instead of wow gold? Maybe it was way back when Blizzard first announced the staggering high price for character realm transfers? Others still will point to any of the numerous patches Blizzard has released over the past five years to balance the game. The doom brigade are quck to call “nerfing”, whether it exists or not.

In truth, this vocal minority is just that... a vocal minority. World of Warcraft, if the numbers are to be believed, and the excitement behind the impending release of Cataclysm any indication, has most definitely not jumped the shark.

So then, if we can't look at wow as an example of an MMO that's jumped the shark, what about something less successful, and much more troubled, say... Funcom's Age of Conan, itself the beneficiary of a recent shot in the am in the form of its first expansion, Rise of the Godslayer.

Before its launch, AoC was lauded as a possible “wow-killer”. It was a tremendously ambitious game, with extensive voice acting, a gritty, mature tone, stunning graphics, and a world built around the popular books written by Robert E. Howard.

Many would say that AoC jumped the shark right at launch. A game so broken that most couldn't fight their way off the starting area of Tortage, let alone roam the Stygian wastes searching for aoc gold, xp, and creatures to slay.

The broken mess that was Age of Conan at launch very nearly buried Funcom, so much so that drastic measures had to be taken to steady the ship. Measures including the firing of the game's director, and the hiring of another.

That said, Age of Conan cannot be said to have jumped the shark, the reason? The game got off to such a terrifically bad start that the only way to go was up. Going down would have meant that the game simply folded, a situation not unfamiliar to fans of the ill-fated Tabula Rasa.

If not Age of Conan and World of Warcraft, then which MMO can we point at as the definitive example of one which has jumped the shark?

Star Wars Galaxies. Needs no explanation does it? With Star Wars Galaxies, SOE got everything they could get wrong, wrong.

Perhaps the most frustrating thing is that when it launched, SWG was a fairly popular game. It wasn't the blockbuster knockout success SOE might have wanted, but it posted solid numbers and had a passionate community. Sadly, this wasn't enough for SOE, and incessant tinkering robbed the game of any unique flavour of individuality, before you could “Luke, I am your father”, Star Wars Galaxies had jumped the shark.

Why? The reasons are numerous, but at the very crux, we find a developer not happy with the game they created, and not confident enough in its own plans to see its vision through to fruition (a mistake Funcom did well to avoid with Age of Conan). SOE listened to player complaints, and without realising that the player is not always right, tried to implement wide sweeping changes, among the most controversial of which, was making it a lot easier to become a Jedi, thus making the months of work long time players had put in, completely irrelevant.

In the end, all MMO's get stale and lose their popularity, games like wow are the exception, not the rule, but the game's continued success, as well as the success of games live Eve Online, show that the secret to a long shelf life is constant reinvention and introspection.