Red Kutai
What I can discern from your statement, however, appears to be that people want updates - and that's something that I certainly can understand. But I'm confident that even successful MMOs do not release areas, find themselves unimpressed with the returns on that investment, and then agree to repeat the same mistakes - because that sounds very much like the makings of an unsuccessful business model. Like any company that releases a product to underwhelming results, it would make vastly more sense for them to stop investing in an underwhelming product, and begin exploring ways in which they might improve that product for future releases. Continuing to invest blindly in a product while one does not understand how to make it profitable is the equivalent of throwing money into a hole - and most experts agree that that's a bad idea.
However, when with pre-DMS sales, the population of a game OVERWHELMINGLY EXCEEDS EXPECTATIONS, this is not the time to pull funding.
There was no misconception about what JK was saying, zOMG was on life support, has been for a long time, and we were told rather bluntly that the bloodstone amulets were the way to gauge interest and decide if it would get more updates.
The whole debate of "cover up", or rather "covering over previous claims", is a matter of timing. I do not believe that Gaia made such claims with the intent of deception, but having made these statements about the future of zOMG, and changed their mind later, they now want to brush it under the rug as if the statements were never made.
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The simple fact is, most game players are not game designers - the two have different goals, motivations, values, understandings, and expertise. While it would be throwing away a valuable resource to completely disregard player opinions, it is just as dangerous to overestimate the value of those opinions - DMS is, in actuality, an example of the latter.
Players - that is, the players the developers had most access to; the "squeaky wheels", as it were - routinely requested harder content. That's precisely what DMS was tailored to deliver; it is hard to level, hard to progress, and hard to complete. Everything about the area is hard. The problem? Hard content is not the same as fun content. The notion that harder content is necessarily more fun is a very common c** hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy among gamers, based on experiences with 'hard' gameplay - and it's important for a designer to recognise that.
Simply, the argument that "we weren't asking for it" necessarily makes it a bad idea isn't entirely sound - the whole job of a designer is to listen to what players are asking for, and instead give them what they really want. Curiously, our difference-in-opinion on this subject is that you feel DMS was not giving the players what they were asking for, whereas I feel it - mistakenly - was doing just that.
Aaaah, and herein lies the problem yet again.
I do not see DMS as hard. I see DMS as "broken scaling" early on, which is the ONLY thing that stops players from diving in and ruining the first few zones the same as we always have.
This continues to prove more broken than difficult, as the shadow orb drop rate is set ludicrously low compared to other orbs you are gaining around these levels, then a second slap in the face, as leveling past 11.0 begins to cost twice as many orbs, rather than keeping with current leveling patterns.
Calling DMS "hard" is like scaling a tall building via very, very slow elevator. While you need to wait around for 10 minutes at every floor for the damn thing to finally close the doors and lift you another floor, it's not really "hard" to get up the building, it's just slow, annoying, unsatisfying, irritating, etc. etc. etc. so that several weeks later when we finally make it to the top, we look back down, and are disappointed at how long it took to get there, for such little payoff. HARD would be if we had to take the stairs. It may only take us a day to scale the entire massive building, but after slamming through with so much force and resistance, your muscles burn and you feel accomplished!
To compare this more tangibly to zOMG, all of the enemies are the same weaklings as always, with new skins. They may have new tricks to beating them due to their broken scaling, but it's not really HARD to beat them, just time consuming.
A proper HARD area should have given us something new, something challenging, something that when we're the same level as the enemy and run across it, we don't think, "yawn, another one.", but instead "crap, this could get interesting!"
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The issue here appears to be that your definitions are not in line with Gaia's - that what you consider "large amounts of money" and "failed" games, they consider relatively insignificant amounts of money, and wildly successful games, respectively. A quick check reveals that MoGa currently has 1.3 million monthly players - which is very easily an order of magnitude more than zOMG! has ever had. Considering that that game is much more oriented around - and therefore much more successful at - converting players into profit, it follows that that order of magnitude more players are producing even more orders of magnitude more money. If only zOMG! could 'fail' like that, we wouldn't be in this position to begin with...
Ah, yes, my mistake by far. I mistakenly tried to lump facebook users in with normal people. Sadly, I suppose it's true, zOMG needs to be facebook compatible for us to be able to harvest the lifeless husk that is facebook. That would indeed solve our problems.
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