Originally Posted by Slowthar
As with any MMORPG, the gimmick here is the "MMO" part. Things like the auction house, guilds, pvp, and large-scale raids are part of what makes the game unique from something like Neverwinter Nights. If I want to adventure with 5 guys I know in real life or met through a forum on the Internet, I can start up NWN, NWN 2, etc. Purely from a content mindset, those types of games can offer just as much, if not more, to the casual gamer. That's not what WoW is about.
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Be careful here -- don't extrapolate from yourself onto the general population. I and several people I know play WoW
in spite of it being an MMO, not
because it is.
For me, NWN can't be a substitute for even the soloing game in WoW. Where's the continuous stream of
professionally written content that's part of a single world/progression? It's not there in NWN. I do not want fan-written modules. Now, if NWN was fully set in the Forgotten Realms setting, and every month
the developers put out new professionally-written content that just plugged seamlessly right into the same world you'd already been playing in, that'd be a lot closer.
I think Jaxtrasi has an important insight here:
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Recently my opinion has changed from thinking that the designers are elitist raiders, to thinking that the designers are well-intentioned, extremely enthusiastic raiders who like many humans simply cannot get their head around the idea that other people don't like what they like. "Surely," they (or many others) would say, "If you'd only try it, you'd understand how much fun it is, and fall in love with it like we have." The folly of this ought to be self-evident.
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This is right! There are
plenty of players who don't care about the large-scale interactions, and who never will. Exposing them to that stuff turns them off the game.
It's not safe to say "the key to getting these people to like the things I like is simply getting them to try it", no matter
what those things are: large-scale raids, guild interactions, participating in the economy, PvP... no! (For my own self, I am
quite sure that I will never really enjoy any form of PvP.) There's stuff in the game for folks who don't like that stuff, and folks who don't like that stuff can get to level 70. And many of them
won't like that stuff, even after they've tried it.
That's not to say you refrain from getting them to try that stuff --
some of these people
will like it. Just make sure that participation isn't ever
forced, and make sure there are alternatives.