Open Sunday Thread

Tell me your thoughts and opinions about the games you are currently playing, and the game you are looking for! Or your ideas about games and features you would like to see. It's the open Sunday thread, the discussion post without a fixed subject.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (10) comments Links to this post

 
Why RMT discussion must fail

$1 is not worth the same thing to every person.

That might seem counterintutitive, but the value of $1 isn't absolute, by itself it is just a worthless piece of green paper. The value of that 1 dollar is determined by what you are going to buy with it. And that is pretty much depending on how many other dollars you have. Common Sense Gamer is furious about a permanent horse in Runes of Magic costing $10. Then he gets even more furious when nobody agrees. But the point is that there is no absolute answer to the question of whether $10 for a virtual horse is too expensive or not.

If you would otherwise use those $10 to buy food for your starving children, of course spending those $10 on a virtual horse instead is downright crazy. But if you have paid all your bills, done all your shopping, put aside enough money for your retirement, and you still have $10 left, whether you spend those on a virtual horse or on a cinema ticket or on a 13 shot venti soy hazelnut vanilla cinnamon white mocha with extra white mocha and caramel at Starbucks doesn't really matter.

What microtransactions do is put a fixed price on something which is at best a convenience, a luxury. There is no "true" value to anything on offer here, so discussing whether the price is fair or not just doesn't make sense. It is as pointless as discussing the price of a Luis Vutton handbag.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:26 AM Permanent Link  (19) comments Links to this post

 
Fallout 3 on Steam

I have an unopened box with the game Fallout 3 sitting on my shelf since it came out. For all I hear that is an excellent game, but I have too many other games to play, and not enough time, so I can't say from personal experience. Nevertheless I thought you might want to know that you can get Fallout 3 for half price on Steam this weekend. Nothing better to celebrate the 4th of July than battling in a postapocalyptic wasteland.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:44 AM Permanent Link  (12) comments Links to this post

 
The illusion of impact

The discussion in the last open Sunday thread was about making MMOs more dynamic, less static, with the players having an impact on changes in the world. In the current situation, players feel more like stuck in Groundhog Day, with them evolving every day, but the world around them always remaining the same. Why is that so?

The main reason why having a real impact on a virtual world is hard to implement is that it would affect other players. Imagine Hogger or Onyxia or Kel'Thuzad being permanently dead after the first players killed them, or mobs generally not respawning; after a few days the virtual world would be void of monsters. Game over. Imagine *players* not respawning after being killed in PvP. Game over. Imagine an RvR game in which one realm wins, there is no reset, and due to having control of everything the winning side keeps getting stronger and at some point can't be overthrown any more. Game over. Everything resets in order that the next player can still play the same game.

What we are left with the possibility to create an illusion of impact. In its most simple form that is created by the player moving through content and not coming back. You got the quest to kill Hogger, you go there and do the deed, you see Hogger lying on the ground and loot him, you go back and get your quest reward. As there is no real reason for you to go back to the little peninsula Hogger roams, you have the illusion of having killed Hogger, when in reality of course he respawned 5 minutes later.

The more advanced method of creating the illusion of impact is by using copies of parts of the game. If you killed Onyxia or Kel'Thuzad today, they will still be dead tomorrow. Unless it's Wednesday, and the raid dungeon reset and they are all back. This was much expanded in Wrath of the Lich King, so if you do the quest series in Conquest Hold in Grizzly Hills that leads to a different chieftain becoming the boss there, or if you do the Wrathgate event in Dragonblight, you will see these places permanently changed every time you go there. What you can't do is go there with a friend and show him "look what I have done", because your friend will see those places as they were before the quest, until he does the quest himself. In some cases that can also lead to two players being unable to cooperate on a quest, because they are in different phases, and see different things.

Another illusion of impact is a location that exists in two (usually) states, and alternates between those states based on player actions. In PvP that is places like Halaa in Nagrand, or keep battles in WAR. You conquer the keep, and it is yours! Then nothing happens. You get bored and log off. Then the other side comes and conquers the keep and it is theirs! And so on, ad infinitum, ad nauseam. That could theoretically be done for PvE too, for example questing for the villagers to chase away the wild animals from the forest, so the lumberjacks can log wood there; and other players later questing for the druids to chase away the lumberjacks from the forest to restore natural balance. I just can't think of any game that does this right now.

Thus the best possible case of a dynamic world is one where everything exists in several states, which are in some sort of dynamic equilibrium that can be influenced by the players. Fight a lot of orcs, and the village prospers. No players doing those quests for a while and the orcs burn down the village, opening up new quests to reconquer the place. Moving frontlines in PvP, with some balancing factors that prevent one side permanently dominating. We could have player run cities, that evolve with the actions of the players, but following certain rules. We could even have unique events planned by the devs in which the world is permanently changed, but following a script balanced by the developers. What we can do is to make the illusion of impact very good, very convincing. The question is whether players will be happy with that illusion.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (24) comments Links to this post

 
Aion beta EU authentication server down

So my Aion beta experience got off to a bad start, the authentication server for Aion Europe broke down, not that this is unheard of when a beta launches. The authentication server being down also means I can't log into the Aion beta forums. So how do I know what's going on? Aion has their CMs on Twitter. I'm usually not a big Twitter fan, and deleted my account there, but telling people over Twitter about tech problems when players can't get that information from the game or the forums is just brilliant.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:11 PM Permanent Link  (5) comments Links to this post

 
Are we still having fun?

Wolfshead runs a blog on which the post range from brilliant but grumpy to just grumpy. His latest brilliant but grumpy post is about tackling player inertia, in which he takes the 2008 WoW zombie invasion event as example to demonstrate how much MMO players hate change and anything unpredictable.

Over time we willingly trade the feeling of wonder and excitement for the security of the daily grind and the routine. We become like the cast of Cheers. We show up in our favorite MMOs each night, occupy our virtual bar stools and embrace the insanity of tedium and repetitiveness.

This leads him to the conclusion that if Raph Koster's Theory of Fun is correct, and we are having fun by learning things, we can't possibly have fun after having settled down into a routine of daily repetitive tasks. So the big question is:

Are we still having fun?

Right now the answer appears to be no. I'm not playing any major MMO at the moment, spending my time with single-player games and small niche MMOs instead. I've seen various reader comments on my blog from people either still playing but grumbling about it, or not playing any MMO and loudly proclaiming hate for them all (Which makes a MMORPG blog a strange place to hang out). The most positive excitement I hear nowadays is about games that haven't even been released yet. It is easier to find somebody saying nice things about Aion or SWTOR than somebody saying nice things about World of Warcraft or Warhammer Online or any other existing MMORPG.

And not only are we not having fun in the existing games, we also strongly resist any proposal to change them. Just watch the players recent reactions to the various changes that patch 3.2 brings to World of Warcraft: Every single one of them has been blasted as bad by the players.

But if we look beyond the world of blogs, comments, and forums, an explanation dawns: The games themselves are still full of millions of players, apparently still having enough fun in the game to not quit it. If unhappiness about MMORPGs were widespread, shouldn't the user numbers be dropping? So the alternative theory to "MMOs are not fun any more" is that the people who are having fun are so busy playing that they don't find the time to hang out in blogs or forums; while the people who stopped having fun also stopped playing, giving them more time to complain about the existing games, or to express hope for the future games. People writing on forums, blogs, or comments are not representative of the average MMORPG gamer. And increasingly the writing sub-part of the MMORPG community is far more negative than the non-writing part.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:29 AM Permanent Link  (31) comments Links to this post

 
Best economic system

I've been asked what MMO I thought had the best economic system. The sad answer is "none of them". Economic systems are often not at the heart of MMORPGs, and only added at a late stage of the development as an afterthought. Warhammer Online, for example, did not have an auction house for most of the beta, and when one was added just before release, it didn't work very well. Crafting in WoW is a joke, you can get from level 1 to the level cap in an hour once you bought the resources. And in nearly all games you are forced to craft a huge number of useless items to skill up. If we want to have a good economic system, we'll have to design one from scratch, taking highlights from various games:

Resource gathering: By far the most fun resource gathering I ever played in a MMORPG was in Star Wars Galaxies. In that game the location of resources change once per week, and resources have stats. So you go out exploring with a fun scanning system to find resources, manually extract one resource to find out its quality, and if that quality is to your liking, plant a harvester. Great system, with lots of advantages: Putting in more effort to find better quality resources pays off, but somebody not playing a lot can still have his harvesters running while he is offline, unlike most other games where you don't get anything if you're not online.

Trading: In the real world trade happens because certain goods are plentiful in one place, and rare in another. Thus transporting the good from A to B enables you to sell it at a profit. Very few MMORPGs have a system like that, and most of those who have are space flight games. In a game like WoW the auction house of lets say Undercity is linked with that of Thunder Bluff, thus the price of goods is the same regardless of location. And if that wasn't the case, transporting items by teleport would quickly remove all opportunity for trading. If we want to add trading to an economic MMORPG, we would need a system where teleporting and other fast transport is limited to characters and their equipment, while the transport of goods was much slower. Ideally transporting goods from A to B would have some adventure involved, so there would be an interest in a career as trader, transporting goods all over the world.

Crafting: The best crafting system I know is smithing a blade in A Tale in the Desert. There you start with a block of metal, and need to hammer it into the shape of the blade you want, using different types of hammers. The closer your block of metal resembles the target shape, the better the quality of your produced blade. Thus you can hammer out a cheap blade quickly, or spend an hour on a perfect product. And the whole process really feels like smithing, you're not just clicking a button, or playing Bejewelled to craft something.

Craft skilling: I'm still looking for a good system here. I do not like systems where you need to craft useless things to skill up to be allowed to craft useful things. Star Wars Galaxies at least had a sort of practice crafting, which used less resources, did not produce anything, but still gained you skill points. Systems where you can salvage a crafted item and get most of the resources back can also work to avoid markets being flooded with items only crafted for skilling.

Auction house: I much prefer blind auction houses like the one in Final Fantasy XI to the more common simple WoW AH system. In a blind AH you don't see for how much the seller has put up his goods, but you do see how many items are available, and for how much the last X items sold. Then you make a bid, and if there is a seller whose offer price is lower than your bid, you'll buy his item. In a WoW system you only see the price of the items that *didn't* sell, so the average computed by an addon like Auctioneer is systematically too high. Blind auction houses also prevent people from seeing at what price the competition offered their items, and then simply underbidding them by 5 copper. In addition to being blind, a better auction house system would also offer buy orders, not just sell orders.

Personal shops: I'm not totally against personal shops. I do however strongly dislike systems where there are ONLY personal shops, and no centralized system to find who is selling what, example Ragnarok Online. In such a system, whenever you want to buy anything, you need to visit every personal shop one by one to see whether what you want is on offer. Comparing prices takes forever, a really horrible system. Personal shops however can be a good addition to an auction house system, or you could design a system with only personal shops, but a centralized register to find who is selling what where at what price. Another suboptimal feature of many personal shop systems (mostly in Asian games) is the necessity to stay online to keep your shop open. That is a design based on the fact that in Asia you often pay per hour hour for these games. Thus keeping your shop up costs you real money, and earns the game company revenue, which is why they design it that way. In a monthly fee or Free2Play business model, the need to stay online to sell something is just annoying and serves no purpose. Nothing more annoying than to come back after having set up an afk shop and finding that you sold nothing, because for some reason you got disconnected shortly after going afk. A much better personal shop system is the one in Star Wars Galaxies, where there is player housing which can effectively be turned into a shop, the selling is done via vendor robots and works offline, you can even put up a display of the wares you want to sell, and over time you can get a reputation as a master crafter and good shop source for some type of item.

Inflation: One major problem of economic gameplay is the convention that a level 1 character killing a monster will earn currency or items worth only a few coppers. A high-level character killing a monster of his level, in spite of that being no more difficult than the level 1 character killing that level 1 monster, will get far more valuable loot. In World of Warcraft the reward for one daily quest at level 80 is sufficient for all the monetary needs of a character from level 1 to 20. That level based inflation is extremely destructive to economic systems. Nothing but the economic activity at the level cap really matters.

Rest of game: I mentioned before that economic systems are often added as an afterthought. While some people have a lot of fun doing economic activities like resource gathering, crafting, or trading, most games are designed in a way that these activities are not necessary. You can perfectly well get from level 1 to the level cap in World of Warcraft without ever visiting the auction house, gathering a single resource, or crafting a single item. Items never break permanently, they can always be repaired. The only items leaving the economy are those that are soulbound, being either bind on pickup, or bind on equip items that have been equipped, and where the owner got hold of a better item. So the old item gets vendored or disenchanted. Crafted items compete with all other sources of items, loot drops, quest rewards, PvP rewards, token items, etc. In a game where crafting and the player economy was to play a bigger role, crafting would have to become the major source of items. For example the raid boss would not drop epic loot, but only a resource that was needed to craft an epic item. All current non-crafting sources of items would give out resources or gold instead, and you'd have to take these resources to a crafter to get items made, or sell the resources and buy the items on the market. This is how Luminary works, which is why I'm playing that game now. Other game systems that encourage crafting are systems in which items break, and have to be replaced, or where repairing gets more and more expensive until buying a new item is simply cheaper.

So as you can see, elements of good economic gameplay are already existing in various games, but there isn't really one game where all the elements are good. One game has fun trading, but boring resource gathering. In another game crafting is fun, but there is no need for the items you crafted, and nobody buys them. No game is really a good economic simulation MMORPG with fun in all of the various aspects.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:08 AM Permanent Link  (44) comments Links to this post

 
Aion third beta event

The most reliable way for a MMO blogger to get into betas remains a Fileplanet subscription. Having that, I finally managed to get a beta key for Aion, valid for the third beta "event" (period in which the beta is open), starting this Thursday. So I'll have a look at the game, which will help me to decide whether I want to pre-order it or not. I'll tell you what I think next week.

What I could do up to now is use the Aion beta key on my NCSoft account, and download and install the NCSoft Launcher and the Aion beta client. Starting the Aion beta client only gets me to the login screen, where obviously any login attempt fails right now. What worries me a bit is that I have no cursor on the login screen, so the quit button is unuseable, and I have to shoot down the program with the task manager to end it. Anyone else having mouse cursor problem with Aion and Vista 64?

A more amusing error is contained in the NCSoft Launcher. If you click the "Store" button, there is advertising for various NCSoft games, including one asking you to buy Tabula Rasa. :) NCSoft might want to clean up their launcher a bit. :)
- posted by Tobold @ 10:13 AM Permanent Link  (11) comments Links to this post

 
Preventing asymmetric trade

For years I have been accusing all major MMORPG companies of hypocrisy: The all lament the practice of gold selling, but are not using the means at their disposal to actually stop it. Especially Blizzard is famous for using gold farmer bannings as a publicity stunt, doing nothing for months, and then banning them all at once with a big press release [a technique I copied for banning trolls from my blog :)]. But if gold selling becomes actually illegal, governments might come down like a ton of bricks on game companies, and tell them that putting a paragraph in the EULA and banning a few gold farmers twice a year is not sufficient. So lets explore the other options game companies have to stop gold selling.

The principal problem with stopping gold selling is that half of the transaction happens outside of the game, beyond the control of anyone. Not even a government could know whether player A gave player B $50 in cash in a dark alley, in return for player B giving player A 5,000 gold for an epic mount in World of Warcraft. (Sorry if the exchange rate is horribly off, I have no idea of the current price of WoW gold, and no desire to visit a gold selling site to find out). The only thing which is visible, and easily controlled is the transfer of gold in game. The reason why game companies do nothing about gold selling is that they want to allow player B giving player A 5,000 gold for free, for example if the two players are friends or relatives. They just don't want to allow player A giving $50 to player B. Thus the illegal half of the transaction is the one that is invisible. That policy can't possibly work.

Thus if the game companies were pushed to actually get serious about stopping gold selling, what they would have to do is to prevent asymmetric trades. That includes not only player B opening a trade window to player A and giving him 5,000 gold, but also player B sending the gold by mail, or player B "buying" one piece of copper ore from player A for 5,000 gold. It also includes removing any other means of transfer of wealth, like shared guild bank accounts.

As I said in the post about the Chinese government banning virtual currency trades, it is certainly feasible to simply remove all these features from a game like World of Warcraft. WoW would be a very different game without mailbox, auction house, trade windows, and guild banks, but it would still be completely playable.

But there are less drastic options than to remove all forms of trade. It would be sufficient to remove only the asymmetric trades between strangers. You could be allowed to exchange goods between alts, and even between different accounts from family members, as long as they are linked to the same credit card or other means of identification. Note that Blizzard is already allowing character transfers between accounts based on such a rule. All your linked accounts could for example have a shared bank, thus enabling you to give e.g. heirloom items to your alts, or exchange trade goods.

Between strangers it would still be possible to allow symmetric trades. Instead of players being able to put up an item for any price they want on an auction house, players could sell that item to an NPC merchant. But unlike with a current WoW vendor the item wouldn't simply disappear, but would be stocked by the NPC merchant, for resale to other players at a slightly higher price. The more of any item the NPC merchant has in stock, the less he will pay for it, but the cheaper he will also sell it. So it would still be possible for some players to farm items and sell them, and other players to buy those goods and craft something from them, reselling the product. But as all the transfers are indirect via an NPC merchant, asymmetric trades are prevented.

Designing a MMORPG with a player-run economy, but no asymmetric trades, and no gold selling, is completely feasible. But I'm afraid that unless there is government intervention, it will not happen. Despite all what they say publicly, game companies obviously aren't all that interested in stopping RMT. Developers are absolute gods over their virtual worlds, and have far more power over their creations than any government has over their citizens. Claims that they hate RMT and are just unable to stop it are simply bogus.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:23 AM Permanent Link  (47) comments Links to this post

 
China stops trade in virtual currency

This Monday the Ministry of Commerce of the People's Republic of China announced a prohibition of use of virtual money for trading in real goods. Note the order of the words! Of course this also prohibits the use of real money for trading in virtual currency, because real money is a real good. But the order of the words tells you that this isn't done because China is worried that their gold farmers might ruin World of Warcraft. The intention is a very different one, which they clearly state:

China has unveiled the first official rule on the use of virtual currency in the trade of real goods and services to limit its possible impact on the real financial system.

The intention is to prevent activities like money laundering via a transfer and back into virtual currency. But whatever the intentions are, it remains to be seen how this will actually be formulated into law, and what activities it affects. Will Chinese gold farmers playing on US servers of WoW become extinct, or at least driven underground?

One tricky part is the sales of virtual goods that aren't currency for real money. In the wording of the press release that appears not to be affected. But of course one could launder money not only buy buying virtual gold with it, but also by buying and reselling virtual epics or trade goods. But if you prohibit that, then the microtransaction business model also becomes illegal in China, and it is far more widespread there than in the US or Europe.

Even more interesting is the potential effect of this on future game design. It is possible that the Chinese government will hold game companies responsible to completely stop RMT. That is easier than you might think. You just need to completely eliminate the player economy and all forms of trade. For example in World of Warcraft you would need to eliminate the auction house, mailboxes, and direct trades. Then you'd better remove the current limit of 2 tradeskills, because everybody will need to be able to do everything, when there is no trade possible. You would also have to remove the shared guild banks, but could add shared banks limited to the characters on the same account, so people could still pass trade goods and heirloom items between alts. Of course that would be a rather significant change to World of Warcraft, but it would still be very playable like that. And as the goal here is to prevent harm to the greater financial system, I doubt that the Chinese government is too worried about the effect of that on game balance. We might even see games without player economy here in Europe and the US, if the game company wants to sell the same game everywhere.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (10) comments Links to this post

 
Weight Watchers: Slim your Tauren down to a Gnome

In a completely predictable move, after allowing you to change your name, server, sex, and look, Blizzard is now working on a system that lets you change your race in World of Warcraft, including changing a Horde character into an Alliance one and vice versa. Yes, you somewhat overweight Tauren can now do a diet and slim down in bulk and size until he is a Gnome. Details are still being worked out.

Some commenters accuse Blizzard of this being just another RMT option, as you'll have to pay to change. But I don't think the income of that is really going to have a big impact on the billion dollar annual revenue of World of Warcraft. I'd say the main motivation is to keep people playing after they got bored with one side, but don't want to abandon their old character.

And in WoW, unlike other RPGs, that is easier than it looks. Race has very, very little influence on your character, much less so than in other games. In many other systems a large race like the Tauren would be stronger, while a small race like a Gnome would be more agile or intelligent. In Everquest it was completely possible to gimp yourself by making a sub-optimal race / class combination. Not so in WoW. The Tauren warrior transformed into a Gnome warrior will not suddenly become less strong and more agile. The stats will only change minimally, or not at all.

What made this predictable was that it is just another step in the process of diluting character identity. That is a bad thing, because it weakens social cohesion, which isn't strong in WoW in the first place. Next up: The ability to change you character class.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:05 AM Permanent Link  (40) comments Links to this post

 
Anno 1404 and sandbox MMOs

My copy of Anno 1404 (Dawn of Discovery) arrived yesterday, and I've also been reading up on that game. The game appears to cause some confusion among some players and reviewers. At first glance there doesn't appear to be a tutorial. The campaign is somewhat short, only about 20 hours, and the difficulty settings for the campaign are limited, ranging from trivial to far too easy. What's going on? The answer is simple: The 20-hour campaign *IS* the tutorial. The actual game of Anno 1404 is the endless sandbox game, where a single game can take over 100 hours. And you can customize the sandbox part with a huge number of parameters, ranging from the completely peaceful to the highly military, and from the very easy to the ultra challenging.

Of course I couldn't help but notice that this is exactly how I would design a sandbox MMO: Have an extensive tutorial explaining really every aspect of the game, before releasing the players into a completely freeform game.

Complex sandbox games, like EVE, often suffer from the tutorial not explaining anything beyond the most basic functions. The EVE tutorial has much improved over the years, but many new players still feel extremely lost at the end of it. And of course there is the Tortage risk as seen in Age of Conan: Players like the guided gameplay of the tutorial more than the freeform gameplay afterwards. But I do think that is an issue of properly managing expectations: Tortage was heavy on story-telling, and light on obvious "tutorialness", so it was easy to confuse it with being the actual game. In Anno 1404 the campaign is more easily recognized as a tutorial, although maybe it should have been named differently. All the main quests are about using new game functions or building new buildings, and you frequently get advice in case things go wrong.

Ultimately the main problem of a sandbox game is how to make it complex enough for players to be occupied forever, but still be able to integrate new players without them feeling lost or unable to catch up. Linear advancement, quest-based games can get away with much simpler gameplay, as long as you provide thousands of "kill 10 foozles" quests that superficially look different from each other. A sandbox game in which there is nothing to do but kill foozles isn't likely to be a big success. An extended tutorial could lead players into the required complexity, by helping them to build something up which they then need to sustain in the freeform sandbox main part of the game.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:30 AM Permanent Link  (7) comments Links to this post