I think there is a direct correlation between the share of value in a service that is created by the users and the user’s sense of ownership – and by extension, the sense of outrage when an unpopular change is thrust upon them. Digg is 90+% user created content, Second Life is similar, leading to lots of in-service user “protests”. Neopets? Not so much.

Players get pretty heated about MMO changes, but they really aren’t as big of a deal as a meddling government. A class nerf, combat changes, crafter neglect, and so on, are pretty fleeting. I mean, will it really matter in a couple of years? On the other hand there are a whole lot of people who seem to be very angry about DRM and the DMCA (it probably extends to the RIAA, patent law, and copyrights as well), and this has been building for years and years.

I think what we are seeing is a large group of people who feel like they haven’t had a voice in government for a while (probably been decades since govenment hasn’t been bought off). That government came to tax them without representing them properly. That goverment seems to have slept through US History class in High School.

Actually, they’ve took the hit and they’re past it and growing again. It required (from what us players can tell) a near-complete management turnover on the SWG team to make it happen, but the current dev team for SWG is doing a better job of listening to actual players than has happened since Beta, and they’re also steadily either adding back features that should never have been removed (albeit retooled versions of those features), or coming up with new ideas to address long-standing problems, some of which go back even before the NGE. Within another year the NGE will just be a fading memory, and if they do something smart like make a killer expansion and market it well, they might actually succeed in making SWG really be competitive with other large MMO titles.

So I agree with Matt that it is very easy to make a bad decision and alienate a large portion of your userbase, but it is also possible to win them back afterwards, although the amount of work it takes is going to be exponential. In the case of Digg, all they may be doing is martyring themselves for the sake of their users, but time will tell.

–matt

I can imagine niche MMO’s that would be a little like that, but by and large I think players relate to an MMO publisher very differently than Digg’s user base does towards their members.

There is not much that Blizzard, say, could do, that would fundamentally betray any implicit promises. They certainly “set expectations” by rather abruptly modifying items retroactively, deleting forum posts simply because they didn’t much like them, etc, etc. For every whiner complaining on an MMO’s message board, there’s a player who knows and accepts that the virtual reality is an ephemeral playground provided for their amusement precisely as long as it suits the publisher.

I’m failing to precisely pinpoint the difference. :/ It’s simply a different relationship.