Horizons business model

[Finduilas]

The company I work for right now is currently in administration and will soon be liquidated due to mistakes made by the senior management. I believe some of them mirror the situation with HZ.

2 years ago a new chairman took over the company. He was faced with this challenge. My company had a reputation for selling high quality goods at a high price, but had a very loyal customer base prepared to pay for that quality. However that customer base had begun to dwindle, and with it profits, for 2 reasons.

1. The customers were mostly elderly, 60 plus, and a few eachmonth would die.
2. Increased competition from existing companies and new ones, such as those on the internet.

The challenge was to bring in new, much younger customers, that would stay with the store for years to come, without alienating the older ones.

The mistakes they made were these: they tried to change the products we sold to appeal to "young" people, by switching to selling fashions. They refused to cut prices to compete with others on heavy electrical, and so (because they were not selling any longer)stopped selling them. And they introduced a range of low quality goods, but continued to sell at a high price.

And they tried to do this too quickly.

The result? New customers were not attracted by the new crappy but expensive goods; "young" people continued to shop at trendier places that sold the same products for less, and had far more of them on display; and existing customers finally began to shop elsewhere because our company no longer sold what they wanted (the new products did not appeal to them), or if they did sell it, it was too expensive, and other stores had the same items for less, and a bigger range.


So, Tulga is faced with this problem; continue to provide product to existing, long term,loyal players; dragons, crafters, adventurers, which means high/higher end content and events.
At the same time release new content to attract new players, and keep them until they become long term, loyal customers.

I have my own opinion upon how successful AE were at this, and wait and see how successful Tulga will be.

What I can say is this. HorizonsWILL be cancelled, as my company is being, if the above lessons are not learned by Tulga. They need to stop players leaving, and bring more in(and keep them), or they will bleed to death, as my company did.

[Shimanyo]

My view on HZ differs from your description of what happened to your company. You said that your company has a clearly defined group of customers to whom the products did appeal and that were willing to pay for your products. In my opinion Hz was/is a potpourri of RPG with limited individualication options, Action-RPG (like Baldurs Gate) with limited Quests, Massive Multiplayer Game with limited Multiplayer capabilities (aka lag). The keypoint in selling a product is first to define a product such, that it does fit to the aimed customer group and then to become the market leader for that kind of products. According to your description your company had the problem that it has a well defined product for a certain customer group, but that group was vanishing. In my opinion Hz hasn't gone so far. On the other hand the last acitivities -better new player supportand the advertisement- made me much more optimistical than anything else I heard last year.

[Thorgat]

I agree with Shimanyo. Hz tries to play on too many parties and with the cut downs on staff they are even less capable of competing with the main player that specialized at one area. They can't beat power gamer with camping/work attitude mmorpgs like EQ that define themself by the items they got, those have too much market domination, experience and money to satisfy this group. They can't beat the quest and collecting monster for Baldurs Gate style lover, that is covered by WoW it seems. They can't cover the unique story/background and unknown lands mmorpg what I think is Ryzoms major selling point thought it is already a niche mmorpg. And they can't beat the pvp/siege oriented ones this covers Lineage for the item farming version and DAoC for the defined battlefield/enemy status.
What they CAN compete with thought in my eyes still and I really don't get why they never concentrated on that are the community/crafting/housing/fluff based group of people - aka UO player. But instead of broadening the gameplay with furniture, pets and other rp-elements soon, keeping the events that were a big part of the game too they still spread their manpower on all the fields and bleed away I think.
The only market position I see for Horizons is to be a home for people where they settle down and have a real second live, Hz is great for that with the zoneless world, ressource spreading type, non-instanced housing and community building. But the strong points never got really stressed, it always seemed just a byproduct of it.

[Shimanyo]

I'm still optimistic. The last actions we saw "The customers they aimed in their advertisement", "The better support for new players", "The little Teaser they showed us" gave me the feeling that there is now some kind of general concept for the game, its aimed customers and how to attract them. I have WoW lying on my desk for 3 weeks now and package is still sealed. I bought it in case my remaining guildmates would start to play that game. Infact all of us remaining three have a copy on their desk. However, currently none of us are going to start WoW. Infact we find and define goals for us in the world of Istaria every day and we still have enough evenings, where we split after some adventure by telling the others "Uuuhh that was fun today, didn't belive in the first case, that we would make it".

[refuse]

I agree with Thorgat, 100%.

[Finduilas]

Let me re-iterate my main point, since you missed it.

Tulga must provide content for the loyal older players, 6-12 month crowd, AND add stuff to attract and keep the new. Adding only only 1 of those will ultimately fail.

Now, an example.

I played an elf Ranger. After the merge, at which I was about level 64ish, I had pretty much nothing to do. I could grind out hours crafting, or do the same fighting. I crafted only to make gear for my char, or guild members.
So, ever since the merge, when the only quests I had were deleted or nerfed, I have had only 2 things to do, adventure wise. Go and explore, which I did for a month, until there was nowhere left to go (or re-go, as I'd already been there before) or grind out exp fighting.
I watched patches come and go and obversed LOADS of stuff added for the hardcore crafters, techs, item fixes, some great stuff for new players, none of which will help me, and dragon fixes, and updates. Currently the big project is focused on dragons, lairs and ARoP.
But 0 for me. I only wanted a plot to be able to build and elven house on it, but not possible, otherwise, crafting was of no interest to me.

THAT is the reason I quit in December, and have since seen nothing to bring me back. I know I am not the only player that quit, the absense of many familier names on these forums, and word from players in game on the low population these days.

And Shim, Thorgat; I don't think HZEVER tried to compete on many fronts. It never came near to EQ/DAOC etc. (let alone EQ2 or WoW)for it's level of content, be that quests, items, loot, monsters, areas, graphics, raids, you name it.

AE only ever really made a serious effort to put into HZ:

Dragons.
Crafting.
Events.(evolving storyline)
Mutliclassing.

Recently 99% of the patch/s content was focused on the first 2.

What Horizons never seriously tried to have was:

Quests.
PvP.
Racial Diversity (besides graphics)
Raids.
Vast range of monsters.
Vast number of different NPCs (merchants, innkeepers, etc.)
Good droppable loot.
Dungeons.
Many diverse locations to fight in.
Epic items, quests.
Triggered encounters.
Immense range of usable gear, in a myriad of styles.
Real water, boats, underwater adventure.
Adventure exp.

Horizons is STILL trying to improve itself in just a few limited areas.The last patch was moslty craft. The main work ahead is dragon content. And because it is ONLY focused on such a limited area it has lost many, many players, who wanted more.

[Nuldaan]

What Horizons never seriously tried to have was:

Quests.
PvP.
Racial Diversity (besides graphics)
Raids.
Vast range of monsters.
Vast number of different NPCs (merchants, innkeepers, etc.)
Good droppable loot.
Dungeons.
Many diverse locations to fight in.
Epic items, quests.
Triggered encounters.
Immense range of usable gear, in a myriad of styles.
Real water, boats, underwater adventure.
Adventure exp.

Horizons is STILL trying to improve itself in just a few limited areas.The last patch was moslty craft. The main work ahead is dragon content. And because it is ONLY focused on such a limited area it has lost many, many players, who wanted more.

This is my first post here so let me give a little background. I played Horizons for about a month, maybe two, right after release. I played a variety of classes and races although none past 20th level. I don't remember many of the specifics but suffice it to say that I tried a dragon as well as a number of melee and caster classes.

I recently received an email inviting me to come back and revist Horizons to check out the new improvements. Having done so, I'm not impressed. All of the things listed above are on my list of reasons for quitting in the first place and still have not been addressed.

While I played Horizons, I never felt like I had any real goals. While I did receive quests, I never felt like I was making any progress on them. For example, I received a quest with my dragon at level 1 to get 10 zombie nails/fingers/somethings. Five levels later, I'M STILL KILLING ZOMBIES FOR THIS SAME QUEST! It was not at all inspiring. Browsing the boards at the time showed that this quest behavior did not change at higher levels and, in fact, it only became worse.

By comparison, any other game on the market gives you at least one, generally multiple, easily completable quests right from the outset that give you both a sense of accomplishment and introduce various storyline elements. For example, I did no less than 10 quests (and probably closer to 15) in the starting area in WoW before receiving a quest to deliver a letter to an NPC in the next area. While some of these quests were of the 'kill x to get y' variety, others were delivery or exploration or even straight kill quests.The quests are each given a bit of back storythat introduces the background of the game as well as directing you to the next appropriately levelled area when you start to outlevel the newbie zone. EQ2, by comparison, isn't quite as good about it but still provides a wealth of tasks to a new player to immerse him in the game. Contrast that to, 'go get 10 zombie fingers because I said so'. The difference is obvious.

To make matters worse, what reason do you have to gut out those lower levels? The end game appears to be completely non-existant. Having an incredible crafting system is great provided there is a reason to craft anything. What's the point of crafting awesome gear if the only thing you are going to do with it is camp monsters outside like you have been for the previous 99 levels? Epic level quests, dungeons (more on this in a minute), and encounters are crucial to keeping high level players in the game and giving lower levels a reason to want to gain those levels.

As for dungeons, why does this game not have them? I read the arguments in the other post on this and here's my take. Instanced dungeons are the industry standard; they are essential to the game. First, it allows all players to enjoy a dungeon without having to deal with griefing and overcrowding. Second, it allows allplayers to have a real chance at fighting bosses and getting decent gear. Third, it allows for easily expandable content at both the high- and low-end of the scale. Even a static instanced dungeon is infinitely more enjoyable that running around outdoors killing mobs in a never-ending grind.

On a similar subject, there MUST be good dropped loot available throughout all levels of the game. (As a side note: I can't believe that it took a full year just to introduce upgraded loot and experience for named mobs.) Like or not, loot is a driving force in all games. It's an avenue of character advancement. It is easily controlled through drop rates and locations and it is much easier (and safer) to introduce new drops than it is to introduce new abilities and higher levels. Does this mean the people that play more will have better loot? Yes, it certainly does...just as they would have more levels and more gold without it. Does it mean that increasingly more powerful items must be introduced? Yes, it certainly does...just as more levels and more abilities must be introduced to give high levels a goalto attain. Does it mean thegame will ever become meaningless? Absolutely not...if anything, it drives players to keep playing to keep their gear up-to-par.

My overall experience with Horizons is that it just felt incomplete. It felt like I wasplaying in a first-stage beta and not a production-level game. Horizons reminds me of UO in many ways, however, UO is an old game. Today's market is well-advanced beyond what was acceptable whenUO was released. I'm sure it seems like I'm being overly critical but the reality is, my demands are not unique and I can play a myriad of games that provide exactly what I'm demanding. If Horizons wants to bring new players in or entice old players to come back, they need to at least meet the expectations of theaverage MMORPG player. Dragons and crafting are a great draw IF the rest of the game stacks up against it's competition. In all those other areas, the game just continues to languish and fall farther and farther behind this new generation of MMORPGs.