Why I quit MMOs

Getting a good number of company contacts but few interviews and no job offers so far. Hopefully something gives soon, and likely it will be a game company as they are the main companies hiring right now that I'm applying for.

I've kind of quit beta testing the MMO I've been playing. Not because the game is bad, but because some combat changes made it not fun to really test my main character and totally invalidated and made pointless my main alt. It is both good and bad for the game when it releases, but I just don't have the heart to put the work in to try and make the changes work in their current form.

But I did think I'd talk about why I quit prior MMOs I've played:

• Anarchy Online - quit this game due to a dying roleplay community, being harassed by one of their volunteers, and the tediousness of trying to advance my main character at all.
• Neocron - Develops decided to punish all their customers because a few exploited things they didn't like. Some of the exploiters were aided and abetted by GMs (wittingly or unwittingly) and it just made PvP not any fun to be beaten by exploits repeatedly.
• Saga of Ryzom - Despite a lot of warnings they went ahead with patches that destroyed a lot of people's characters and made the game unplayable. They didn't roll back the disaster either and I was among the people leaving in droves.
• World of Warcraft - Left because of drama with the immature community, being stuck raiding for character advancement, then having that raid gear completely redesigned at Blizzard's whim after working hard for it.
  
• Horizons - Bad company took over and killed it for me. The community died and there isn't enough storyline or interesting things to do for me to jump back into their second Tier character advancement. Plus frankly, it is hard going back to those graphics, glitches and sound effects after playing LotRO.
  
• Lord of the Rings Online - Mines of Moria killed it for me by completely screwing up their combat mechanics, redefining the role my chosen class played and making the endgame content both easy and pointless. Don't get me started on how they drove me away from their version of PvP.

I think the main lesson to learn is don't screw up why your customers are there. Don't do the Neocron, always be nice to your customers. Have something challenging and meaningful for when your characters have maxed out casual character advancement. Don't massively overhaul game content once you've launched it if people are still using it, it can be very upsetting. Don't sell your company the moment it starts to make a profit, and don't buy it from someone if the game has just changed around unless you're willing to put A LOT into it.

When you're a developer thinking about how game changes will impact the customer, use the Golden Rule.

Don't let your ego get in the way of doing what is Smart.