Instancing and Tailor-made Content

The best feature of MMORPG are other players, your guild, your friends, the people you log on for long after the game itself stopped holding you in thrall. The worst feature of MMORPG are other players, player killers, griefers, kill-stealers, ninja-looters, the guys camping your favorite hunting spot. Clever game designers try to maximize positive player interaction, while minimizing the negative aspects of other players.

Methods to limit negative player interaction by making specific actions impossible have had some limited success. Griefing by player killing has been eliminated from some games by eliminating PvP. But all tries to enable "fair" PvP and eliminate "unfair" PvP have up to now failed. The problem of kill-stealing hasn't been satisfactorily solved either. FFXI has a system in which nobody but your group can hurt a monster once combat is initiated, but the system fails in combats against multiple enemies. And in many games players feel a negative impact when they are in a zone with too many other players, either in the form of lag, or by zones getting over-hunted.

One possible solution to many of these problems is instancing, the creation of virtual places that are not persistent, but only appear on demand. One form of this, to my knowledge, exists only in City of Heroes: Instancing of whole zones. When too many players are trying to go to the same zone, a mirror image copy of that place is created. Thus the number of players in a zone can be limited, without shutting anybody out. You get less problems with lag, and the player to monster ratio doesn't get too high.

A more frequently observed instancing is the creation of random dungeons (already discussed last month), or instancing special encounters. The big advantage of a virtual world is that two players or groups going through the same cave entrance do not have to come out in the same cave. And the fact that the first group entering the cave did slay the dragon does not mean that there will be no more dragon to slay for the second group. Final Fantasy XI even had cut-scenes which only you could see when clicking on an NPC; everybody else just saw you standing there motionless in front of that NPC.

The trick to make instancing work against negative player interaction, without destroying positive player interaction, is to carefully study in which situations players want to meet other players, and where they would prefer not to. Players generally prefer cities or other meeting places to have a good number of other players in them, so they can chat and trade. City zone instancing should only happen if large number of players in that zone would otherwise cause heavy lag. CoH does that well. On the other extreme, if a player or a group is on a mission to kill a specific monster, they would much prefer not to see any other uninvited players there.

The intermediate situation, hunting of random monsters just for experience and random loot, is more difficult to handle, because it can have both positive and negative player interactions. It is very nice to have another passing player cast a heal or other beneficial spell on you while you are in a tough fight. Even having somebody else kill the monster you were fighting can be positive, if you had bitten off more than you could chew, and the other player came to your rescue. But from there to the negative interaction of kill-stealing is just a tiny step, and it is difficult to design a system which allows the one and forbids the other. The best solution is probably to offer hunting both in outdoor zones open to everybody, and in random dungeons open only to your group, so everybody could chose how much he wants to interact with other players.

Outdoor zones may need to be more dynamic and reactive to the presence of players. Currently in most games you have a fixed number of spawn points in a zone, with monsters spawning after a fixed number of minutes after having been killed. So if no player is present and no monsters get killed, there are exactly as many monsters as spawn points. The more players start killing monsters, the more the number of monsters drops. In the extreme case, all monsters are dead, and whenever one spawns, it gets killed immediately. Obviously in that situation everybody perceives the other players as competition, as negative influence, in spite of nobody actively trying to disrupt the others game play. The situation is better in games like CoH which are relatively abundant in spawn points. But a better system would be more dynamic, spawning monsters faster when the population is low. Or instance the whole zone, creating a mirror image to effectively double the monster population, and easing the competition between players for the "rare resource" of monsters.

Instancing zones is definitely needed for games in which players can build houses. Houses and furniture are usually good money sinks for MMORPG economies, with people taking immense pride in having earned a big house and having spent a lot of effort to decorate it. But that only works if housing is available to everybody, and if players are able to show their achievements to others. Having less housing spots than players, like in UO, unfairly frustrates the late-comers, as housing spots don't respawn like monsters do. But the solution of Anarchy Online and Final Fantasy XI, where unlimited instanced appartments are available, all reached through the same door, is eliminating house sizes and exteriors. It would be better if that door would lead to an empty, flat area, where people could build their houses, and would be able to show off with their big castle they worked hard for. That flat area would have a certain size, and when there is no more room, the next flat area is created. That would still give the game unlimited amounts of space, but you could visit your friends castle, he just would need to tell you that it is in residential area number 17.

A MMORPG should encourage people to interact, to play together, to chat, to help each other. Instancing should never go so far as to create a large number of single-player games on the same server. But as the world is a virtual one, there is no need to limit resources strictly by number, making one players gain another players loss. Resources have to be limited, but they can be limited by how much effort it takes to achieve them, not by how many other players are competing with you for that resource. Players can easily accept that they can't get the sword of uberness, because they are too weak to slay the dragon that holds the sword. But if they know they could kill the dragon, they don't want to stand in a queue waiting for it to be their turn. And they don't want other players to interfere unless invited once they fight the dragon. The heroic act is being able to fight a dragon, not being the first one to log on after a server reset.
- posted by Tobold @ 1:05 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
More equal than others

At first glance, MMORPG are very egalitarian. Everybody starts out from the same base, and your achievements are solely depending on your actions. Everybody is equal. But like in George Orwells Animal Farm, a closer look reveals than some players are "more equal than others", and you always find the same people in the top positions.

Now some of this is unavoidable, and actually positive. Different players have different skills, and it is good if skill makes a difference and the more skilled players advance faster. Different players also spend different amounts of time in the game, and in a game where people generally get richer and more powerful with time, the people spending the most time end up the most powerful.

It starts getting problematic as soon as a game has resources that are strictly limited. A typical example is housing in some games, where the number of plots on which a house can be built is far smaller than the number of players. Ultima Online was the first example, but Horizons seems to have the identical problem. From my own experience I know how frustrating it can be to have saved up the virtual money for a house deed in UO, and then be unable to place the house, because all spots are taken. In that case a player who plays more slowly than others, or has joined the game later than others, is not just reaching his goal later, he is not reaching it at all. Although he was able to reach the in-game threshold, the gold pieces required to buy the house deed, he is then excluded from the content by out-of-game facts on which he has no control, competition by other players.

A more frequent case is resources that are not limited absolutely, but that are very rare and for which the supply is far smaller than the demand. A dragon that only once per day drops the highly desirable sword of uberness. Again in that case the difficulty is not in-game, slaying the dragon, but out-of-game, other players having slain the dragon first. Again a huge source of player frustration, they know they could have slain the dragon, if only the others would let them. Final Fantasy XI drove that problem to extremes, by having very low level named monsters drop very valuable items very rarely. If you see players earnestly discussing on message boards how unfair it is that the servers are in Japan and Japanese players have 200 milliseconds faster reaction time, thereby always being faster in claiming the named monsters and getting the valuable loot, you know the game has a problem. And Everquest servers player communities organizing calendars where guilds have to book a time when they are allowed to go on a raid to kill a dragon are equally silly.

In these cases, the reward usually goes to the most dedicated people, the ones that don't mind camping the same spot for 12 hours. A bit like people camping a cinema 12 hours before the premiere of a new movie. Now that is okay if the reward (like in the cinema case) is that the more dedicated people get the content first. But the cinema will always schedule performances after that, making sure that the less dedicated people will be able at least to see the movie, even if they miss out on the premiere. In MMORPG the less dedicated people are often simply totally excluded. If you don't have the 12 hours to camp the dragon, you will never get the sword of uberness.

In a vicious circle, the frustration of being prevented from reaching an in-game goal by the competition from more dedicated players makes the casual player buy the sword of uberness for $50 on EBay. And the fact that you can sell the sword of uberness for $50 on EBay makes more people want to camp it for 12 hours, further preventing any casual players of ever reaching it by in-game means.

Another bad idea of game design is having different ranks, independant from experience points, where only the higher ranks have access to some of the games content. Biggest example are the Jedi in Star Wars Galaxies, already discussed. The game I'm currently playing, Puzzle Pirates, has captains, officers, and normal pirates. But the problem is always the same: If the highest rank has any advantage, everybody wants to be the higher rank, nobody wants to play the humble worker. Fortunately many games only have guild ranks, with higher ranks there often just meaning more responsability, with no added advantage. But as soon as the higher rank offers advantages, the problems begin.

In SWG the developers tried (and failed) to find a system where the Jedi rank could be reached by everybody in a fair manner, without everybody ending up as Jedi. In Puzzle Pirates the developers also made a mess out of ranks: Captains and officers are the only ones having access to the 2 navigation puzzles, and they determine how loot is distributed. A normal pirate often ends up with less than his fair share of the loot, for the same contribution to success, and he is possibly more bored because he can only access 4 of the 6 different games on a ship. The saving grace is that a good captain can distribute loot fairly and enable his pirates to navigate the ship at some occasions. But in general every pirate would much prefer to be captain himself, buys a ship at the earliest opportunity (which is not that hard), and you end up with a game in which there are too many too small crews, "too many chiefs, not enough indians". I never played Asherons Call 1, but it was said to have a vassal system which wasn't all that bad, so it seems possible to create ranks in a way that works.

Whether it is limited resources, rare items, or ranks, this is something developers will have to improve. I'll talk about instancing, tailoring a part of the game for individual players, in a future blog entry, but that is just one of the possible solutions. The basic principle is that it is better for a game if every player has the impression that he COULD reach all the content in the game, if he just played long enough. That makes the best business sense, driving people to stay in the game to achieve their goals. If, on the other hand, the casual players think they will never reach a certain goal, because it is reserved for the "more equal" players, they will either give up, or use out-of-game shortcuts like EBay to get where they want.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:29 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Subscription numbers

Sir Bruce did a lot of work collecting subscription numbers of different MMORPG, and publishing them in a chart. Quite interesting to look at.

Of course the chart only lists games available in the USA, so the record holder Lineage 1 with reportedly 4 million subscribers is not on the chart. Everquest seems to be losing subscribers faster than the rate of replacement, although the decline is still not very steep. The game with the most subscribers on the chart is FFXI, with over half a million. But if you exclude Asian games from the chart, counting the 300,000 Japanese FFXI players is somewhat distorting the picture.

There are quite a number of games with less than 50,000 subscribers, which doesn't bode well, seeing how EA shut down Earth and Beyond because of having less than 50,000 subscribers. On the other hand, a number of subscribers that is not profitable to EA might well be considered a huge success to a much smaller company, as their costs are much lower.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:05 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Experience Points

Players of MMORPG display an extremely wide range of behavior, much of it creative, surprising, and totally unexpected. But the majority of players, most of the time, are trying to achieve maximum reward for minimum effort. And so the game design, how rewards like experience points are distributed, has a very strong influence on general behavior of players.

A prime example would be how people hunt monsters in Everquest as opposed to City of Heroes. In Everquest spawns are highly static, the same 4 orcs always spawn around the same camp fire, exactly X minutes after having been killed the last time. Furthermore, experience points in EQ are highly concentrated, it is hard to kill a mob, but you don't need to kill all that many mobs to level up. So hunting in EQ consists of a group of players "camping" such a static spawn. They first "break" the spawn, by killing the 4 orcs with a deliberate delay between the kills. From then on, the orcs will spawn one by one, and are much easier to kill. As in EQ you need a lot of downtime to rest between fights anyway, the 4 orcs are enough to keep one group of 6 players busy for hours, without ever moving away from the camp spot.

Now if you tried the same strategy in City of Heroes, it wouldn't work at all. First of all, City of Heroes does not spawn monsters when a player is standing in view range of the spawn spot, so if you just wait at one spot, you'll never see any mobs. But maybe even more important is that experience points are a lot more diluted in City of Heroes. Monsters of the same level as the player are a lot easier to kill than in EQ, but you need to kill literally hundreds of them to level up. Furthermore, while there were 2 orc camps, plus some stray orcs, in the West Commons zone in Everquest, in City of Heroes you can find a group of street thugs at every corner. So hunting by moving around makes a lot more sense in CoH than in EQ, and that completely changes the players experience of the game. Moving around to hunt is a lot more fun than camping a static spawn.

Similar example is dungeons in EQ and CoH. Dungeons in EQ were fixed, but notoriously under-utilized, even when the devs introduced xp bonuses for hunting in them. The reason for this was that if you died in EQ, your corpse with all your items stayed at the place where you had died, while you respawned naked at your last bind point. Getting back to your corpse, the dreaded "corpse runs", was already difficult in outdoor zones, but downright impossible without help in dungeons. So the risk of hunting deep in dungeons was simply too great, as losing your corpse would lose you months of achievement. Compare that to City of Heroes: There are no corpse runs, so the risk is identical to hunting outdoors. And CoH dungeons are randomly created as part of a mission, meaning that the dungeon is an ideal hunting ground filled with monsters of your level, plus you get an xp bonus for finishing the mission. No wonder mission dungeons are highly popular in CoH.

Experience points not only determine where people hunt, but also how groups are formed. I already mentioned this as the big negative point of Final Fantasy XI, where the xp given for a monster only depend on the highest level character in a group. 5 level 20 players fighting against level 20 monsters would see their experience points halved if they invited a level 21 player, and reduced to a third if they invited a level 22, so obviously they won't invite these people. They would also not invite anybody below level 18, as lower level characters would be unable to hit a level 20 mob. In comparison to that, adding a character of level 21 to a group of level 20's has an insignificant effect on the xp of a group in most other games. And City of Heroes even has the possibility to add low level characters to such a group, by making them a "sidekick" (a Robin to your Batman), temporarily making the low level character hit as if he was just 1 level below.

It is interesting how a seemingly harmless decision on how to distribute experience points in a group can have severe social consequences. In FFXI this makes groups very hard to find, and difficult to set up, which then drives away a lot of casual players, who don't want to spend one or more hours looking for a group before they can start playing.

One thing that all games get wrong is risk/reward ratio of fighting against multiple enemies at once. In most games fighting 4 orcs at once gives the same amount of experience points than fighting 4 orcs one after the other, but the risk of fighting them one after the other is obviously a lot lower. FFXI gave a tiny bonus if you killed the orcs with less than 1 minute between the kills, but that only made you want to hurry between the single fights, not fight several monsters at once. City of Heroes only offers the solution that you are still quite capable of killing 4 enemies at once, and as you need kill many of them, doing them in groups saves you some running. But in general, you won't see a large group of adventurers storm an orc village and commence a huge battle in any game, as it is a lot easier to sneak to the village and try to snipe the orcs one by one, and you get the same reward for this not-so-heroic combat. It should be possible for a game to determine how many enemies are in a combat simultaneously with a group, and give them better xp if the odds are less in their favor.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:10 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Playing MMORPG for free

Playing a big commercial MMORPG for a year costs about $200. So as long as the MMORPG actually glues you to the screen for a year, saving you money for other games and other forms of entertainment, the total cost of entertainment is rather cheap. On the other hand, if you buy a MMORPG in a box for around $50, and after a week you find you don't like it, the cost of entertainment is rather high. And if you are very poor, paying $50 for a game plus up to $15 per month might already be too much. So you would want to play MMORPG for free.

One good option to play for free is beta testing. Thanks to Tagart for making be aware of www.betawatcher.com. That site does a good job of listing all the MMORPG that are currently in beta, including links where to sign up. Normally it is hard to get into a closed beta, but easy to get into an open beta, where the developers basically only test server load and just invite anybody. The only disadvantage is that open beta periods tend to be short, so without a site like betawatcher you could easily miss them.

Another good option to play for free is "free trial" versions of MMORPG. Even if it is as short as 1 week, at least you know how the game plays. Screenshots, or even a review, can't really tell you if you will like a game or not. Playing it for some hours will tell you, aside from the question of long-term motivation. The only problem is that free trials for MMORPG are not yet as common as free trials for single-player games. Usually free trials are a sign of the game either being a small afair from some independant company, or they are being offered when player numbers decrease. My personal impression that Everquest 1 is going downhill is based on me receiving several invites to play it for free from Verant/Sony. I do not know of a dedicated site listing free MMORPG trials, but you can look on Fileplanet or check all games at MMORPG.com.

Just be aware that you always get what you pay for, which isn't much if you don't pay anything. Beta versions are often buggy. Both open beta and free trials are limited in time and are more of a marketing device to get you hooked. And whatever game you can find that is totally free of charge, will be graphically inferior to modern commercial games. If you never want to pay anything, you might be forced to jump from beta to beta to free trial, changing games frequently and being at home nowhere. There are so many MMORPG games nowadays that this is certainly feasible. But I think the best way to use betas and free trials is to form an opinion on which game suits you best, and then pay for it, and stick with it for a couple of months.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:37 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Pitfalls of Virtual Property

I already mentioned my point of view on virtual property. I don't mind people buying and selling it, but I don't think it should be considered as real and permanent. And when I discuss a topic, I tend to write up to a whole page about it, which can be considered long for the medium weblog. But other people consider the issues surrounding virtual worlds worth a lot more than just one page. Dr. Richard Bartle (I mentioned the Bartle test which is based on his classification of players) published a 24-page paper about the Pitfalls of Virtual Property. Don't worry, it is surprisingly readable for a scientific paper.

As that paper pretty much covers all the arguments against considering virtual property as real, there is nothing left for me to say about this issue, unless there are news to report.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:10 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Need a translation?

You can find a translation of my blog to leet-speak here. This is at the lowest leet speak skill level, so if you want to try higher levels, you can do so by changing the skill parameter in the URL in your browsers address field.

In case you have no idea what I am talking about, I suggest you look "leet" up in Wikipedia. Speaking leet is a useful skill to have in a MMORPG, as some games are full of people that speak it, or rather a special MMORPG version of it. So don't be surprised if in EQ somebody speaks to you and says "h3y dr00d, u g0t s0w?".


- posted by Tobold @ 4:26 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
How persistent are MMORPG?

One of the main features of MMORPG is that they are "persistent". That means even if you log off, the game continues, and even evolves without you. But how persistent are these worlds really? While the game you are logging out of now will certainly still be there tomorrow, it is a lot less certain that it will still be there in a year or in ten years.

Earth and Beyond announced in March of this year that they will shut down all their servers in September of this year, after having run for 2 years. Official reason given was "in order to focus resources on future games", but that is just marketing speak for "this game didn't make enough money". A game that is not very successful can end up making a loss every month, if the running costs for servers and employees are higher than the income from subscribers.

But how about the more successful games? Are they persistent? I'm afraid not. Take a look at some data on Everquest after 5 years. EQ sold 2.5 million copies, and with 420,000 current subscribers is one of the biggest games around. But wait! What are 420,000 people doing with 2.5 million copies of the game? Even if some of these copies are expansion sets, the data also say that EQ averages 250,000 new subscribers every year, which in 5 years should add up to 1.25 million subscribers, and not 420,000. Obviously two thirds of these new subscribers are not current subscribers any more, but have stopped playing. There is a high player turn-over.

High turn-over not only means that in a year your friends might be gone from the otherwise persistent world. For Everquest the total number of subscribers hasn't changed since last year, so the 250,000 new subscribers just balanced the 250,000 people leaving EQ in the same year. 60% turnover per year is a lot, there is not much player retention in EQ any more. Furthermore I doubt that they can keep this rate of new subscribers up. Not only is there heavy competition from new games from other companies this year, with World of Warcraft being the most hyped one. But more significantly EQ2 is coming out this year, with current EQ subscribers being encouraged to switch over, offering them free beta access. It seems pretty obvious that in 5 years EQ1 will not be around any more.

Anyway, if you compare screenshots from EQ1 and EQ2, you see how long 5 years is in terms of computer graphics evolution. Attracting large numbers of new players to a 5 year old game with outdated graphics (even if they have been patched up a bit like in EQ) is not going to work. And it is likely that marketing will focus on getting players into EQ2, not EQ1.

MMORPG have a positive network effect. The more people play, the better it is. It gets easier to find groups, and there is a lot more traffic on message boards and fan sites discussing that game. Consequently a decrease in subscription numbers is self-accelerating. Your best friend stopped playing, your guild just dissolved, so you stop playing as well.

In summary, MMORPG being persistent can probably be translated as "being around for 2 to 10 years". In fact, looking up persistent in the online Webster dictionary reveals a definition of "existing for a long or longer than usual time or continuously", a MMORPG probably falls under the "longer than usual" part. People rarely play the same single-player game for years, and you have a hard time buying a video game that is a couple of years old in a store. Each individual MMORPG is around for a long time, but not forever.
- posted by Tobold @ 2:35 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Why I'm playing what I'm playing

I spent the whole weekend playing Puzzle Pirates. And then I asked myself: Why? I still have a subscription running for City of Heroes, and I'm not yet bored by that game. Why would I play a puzzle MMORPG with simplistic 2D graphics, if I could play a 3D superhero MMORPG instead? While thinking about that question, I came up with a number of reasons:

1) Puzzle Pirates is new to me. When I did the Bartle Test some time ago, my score leaned heavily (70%) on the Explorer side, which is the most frequent of the 4 Bartle types. That is bad news for game companies, becauses it means that player retention is always threatened by new games coming out, even if the new games aren't necessarily better than the old ones.

2) The server is in the right time zone. I'm European, and I subscribed to the local version of Puzzle Pirates (35 Euros for 6 months, cheap). City of Heroes doesn't have European servers. The main interest of playing a MMORPG over a single-player game is the interaction with the other players, especially with your guild of friends. Now my multi-gaming guild The Echelon in CoH is the nicest bunch of guys you could imagine, but the large majority of them lives 8 time zones ahead of me. When I log in on a weekday evening, they are still at work or school. When I log in on a weekend morning, they are just going to bed. And when they come back to play on a weekend afternoon, I'm just about to call it quits. Really frustrating. Nobody's fault, although I'll go with the pope and blame Gallileo for it, a flat earth wouldn't have time zones. :) And not only the time zone in which your guild mates live makes a difference (I was in a European guild on a US EQ server), the time zone where the server is located also makes a difference. If you play when it is prime time for the majority of players, it is a lot easier to find pickup groups, or people to trade with. And language also makes a difference, I often played FFXI when the Americans were sleeping and the Japanese were playing, but being in a group of people you can't chat with isn't all that much fun. So now in Puzzle Pirates I'm on a server in my time zone, speaking my native language.

3) Walking the talk. I always claimed that MMORPG should contain more mini-games, so now I'd better play the one game that offers them. :) Not only out of principle to stick to my word, but also because I knew it would be more fun. For example combat, which is the most game-like "basic repetitive unit" of a classic MMORPG, is still not much of a game. You have very few options which buttons you could press, and when, in a classic MMORPG combat. In Puzzle Pirates each combat, one-on-one or group-vs.-group, is a Tetris-like mini-game, lasting about 5 minutes. You try to build big blocks with falling sword blocks of the same color, and then shatter them, which sends pieces to your opponent, messing up his game. It is a lot more demanding than playing a tanker in CoH.

4) Player skill making a difference. Puzzle Pirates does not have levels. There is some character development through earning money, which then enables you to buy not only clothes, but also better swords (which give a slight advantage in combat), and ultimately your own ship, which opens up new puzzles (navigation related) and content (running a store and shipping goods). Even more money buys you even bigger ships. But the main factor influencing your success in Puzzle Pirates is your own skill. While I didn't "level up" this weekend, I noticed how my player skills in playing the different puzzles increased with practise, which is ultimately more satisfying. If you are skilled, your ship sails faster, and you can beat players in sword combat that have much better swords than you do.

5) Community. I already mentioned time zones, but even more important is what type of players a game attracts. A game that encourages griefing, like Lineage II, is consequently full of griefers. Games in which you can get to the highest levels if you just spend enough time playing, attract the "l33t d00dz", the type of player that can't even correctly spell a single phrase, and then looks down on you because his level is higher. And a game that is all about puzzles attracts people that like to think while playing. In Puzzle Pirates, griefing is nearly impossible. If you attack a ship weaker than yours, a ghost ship full of 100 skeletons can turn up, which is unbeatable and will take all your cargo. Of course all types of players exist in all games, other MMORPG have intelligent and mature gamers too, they are just harder to find there.

So I think I'll play Puzzle Pirates for a while, or switch back and forth between it and City of Heroes. In the end, for a Bartle type Explorer like me, it is all just temporary. There are a lot of "can't miss" games coming this year, World of Warcraft being the biggest one, but EQ2 coming close behind, so 2004 is not really the year in which to settle on one game permanently.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:49 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Puzzle Pirates

Arrrr, matey, how would you like a pirrrate MMORRRPG? Then you should have a look at Puzzle Pirates, also available in German and Chinese. Puzzle Pirates is a cheap game, the client is free, and you can play 10 times for free before having to pay just under $10 per month. But fortunately cheap doesn't have to mean bad, Puzzle Pirates is a thoroughly amusing and fun game for the whole family.

Graphics are simple, 2D, and your character looks a bit like a character from Lego or Playmobil. But for 2D, the graphics are nice enough, in a cartoonish style. The whole thing runs under Java, so you can play it under Windows, Linux, and even on a Mac.

You are playing a pirate, stranded on a small island with just a sword and some rags to name your own. Fortunately the tutorial ship comes along, picks you up, and shows you the ropes. (They are the lying coiled up on board of the ship, har, har!) This sets you off to a glorious career in the pirating business, which might end with you as a dreaded pirate captain.

As the name Puzzle Pirates suggests, the game is full of puzzle mini-games. In fact, everything in Puzzle Pirates is a mini-game. Sailing, fixing the ship, pumping the bilge, even sword-fighting. And tradeskills will be puzzles too, although just now only the brewing puzzle is implemented. The puzzles are of different kinds, several variants of Tetris, Reversi, sliding-puzzles, and "fit the piece in the hole" puzzles.

In spite of being simple, the game is surprisingly fun. Even the PvP (Pirate vs. Pirate) combat, a sort of multiplayer Tetris, is fun, and you can only lose and be robbed once, so griefing is not really an issue. And the community is one of the nicest I have met for a long time. Maybe because it is NOT that immersive, everybody is doing his best to piratify his language and do a bit of role-playing. Like many games, Puzzle Pirates is more fun if you are part of a group (crew), with everybody fulfilling a role on the ship, and then all joining in the ship-to-ship combat.

As you can try this game for free, I would really recommend you check it out. The download is small enough, and being able to log in 10 times before you have to pay is very fair in my opinion.
- posted by Tobold @ 12:24 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Shandalar

Shandalar is the perfect MMORPG. This is mainly due to the fact that it only exists as a rough concept in my head, which gets nicely around such real life problems as bugs, lag, or the quality of the graphics. Furthermore Shandalar is not highly original, even the name is stolen from an old Microprose game, which is now abandonware. The game is based upon different existing games, and some ideas I either read somewhere else (for example Hippopotenuse, see post below), or had fermenting in this blog for some time.

The basic concept of Shandalar is that it is a cross between MMORPG and trading card games, like Magic the Gathering. In the Microprose game, Shandalar was the name of a fantasy world which the player explored, battling the creatures he encountered by playing games of Magic against them. My Shandalar is a MMORPG with a classic 3D fantasy world, and the battles are graphically not unlike Everquest, as I think that visual 3D crossing of swords is a lot more popular than playing cards.

Another game I'm stealing ideas from is Lost Kingdoms 2 on the Gamecube. Shandalar combat is not unlike LK2 combat: You have a "deck" of "cards", each card representing a skill that can be used in combat, like an attack, a defensive move, or some sort of spell. The deck is "shuffled", randomized, and you can only see the top 4 cards. You fight by chosing one of the 4 cards as your next combat action. So you have some control during combat what you will do next, but sometimes you will simply not have the right card as one of the 4 open ones, and will have to do a move just to "discard" the card and "draw" a new one. Cards are not used up, but reshuffled into the deck after you used them.

There are no character classes in Shandalar. Every player starts with the same deck of cards, containing all sorts of skills you'd find in any traditional MMORPG in a basic form: standard attacks with different weapons, spells from different schools, and other typical combat actions like taunt. Cards that do similar things have the same color, for example all sword attacks have the same color, all blunt weapon attacks have the same color, all fire spells, all healing spells, and so on. In combat, using cards of the same color one after the other is faster than switching colors. If you switch colors, like first hitting with a sword, then using a fire spell, there is a short animation of you putting your sword in your belt and drawing your spell book, which slows you down a bit. So it is in the players interest to specialize, and have a deck with not so many different colors. Having two sword attack cards is better than one sword and one mace attack, even if both cards do the same damage, because you don't spend the time switching weapons.

To specialize, players have to modify their deck. But at the start they only got 40 cards, which happens to be the minimum size of a deck, so they either need to trade with other players, or acquire new cards. Getting new cards in game is relatively difficult, they drop as rare loot, or can be bought expensively from NPC for gold pieces, gold being a more common loot drop. But if that method of getting card is too time-consuming for you, you can also buy cards in random boosters from the game company for $1. These boosters contain 1 rare card, which can not be gained in game in any way, 2 uncommons, which correspond to very rare drops in game, and 4 common cards, which are the cards you have at the start, and which you can buy from NPC. There is no monthly fee, the client is freely downloadable, and setting up an account costs only $10 to cover the cost of your initial 40 cards. (Maybe give the player 1 booster for free after completing the tutorial, to get him started in deckbuilding.)

Uncommon and rare cards are not strictly better than common cards, but more specialized (and with better graphics effects). For example the common sword attack cards do the same damage to every mob. The uncommon and rare sword attacks do more damage to monsters with a special vulnerability against swords, but less damage against monsters with a resistance against swords. So if you have a large collection of uncommons and rares, you can custom tailor your deck for an expedition in an area where most of the mobs would be vulnerable to your attacks. Furthermore use of a card costs energy, and the rarer cards deal more damage for more energy. If you stack your deck with only rares, your likely to run out of energy during combat, which is a lot less likely with a all common deck. But the occasional more powerful rare attack is sure nice to have, driving sales of the boosters.

Shandalar is level-based, but your level only affects your hit-points, some sort of multiplier for the effect of your cards, and how much xp you get from what level of mob. Level progression, like in other MMORPG, forces you to move around and search for new hunting grounds. And of course the mobs in the next area won't have the same vulnerabilities, so your encouraged to change around your deck. Your skill in deck-building has a significant part in your success, neither your level alone, nor lots of rares will guarantee you win your fights. If you have sufficient cards in your collection, you can completely change your role in a group by changing your deck.

As Shandalar is only an idea, and I don't have means to transform it into a real MMORPG, I can only hope that some developer either has a similar idea, or feels free to borrow my concept. Given the financial success of trading card games, multiplying the card games higher profit per user with the MMORPGs higher number of users has obvious financial advantages for a game company. So I got some hope than in a couple of years I will see a MMORPG which is not totally unlike Shandalar.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:20 AM Permanent Link  (1) comments

 
Interesting read

A weblog, even with page view statistics and the ability to comment, is much more a monologue than a dialogue. It fulfills the authors need to express himself, but doesn't do much for the equally important need to exchange thoughts. So I am quite happy to have found somebody elses MMORPG weblog. Okay, two monologues don't make a dialogue, but it is interesting to read what somebody else writes about similar issues.

You can find weasels MMORPG weblog at hippopotenuse.blogspot.com. His blog is nearly exclusively about MMORPG game concepts, like "loot" or "content", so you can compare his opinions about these things with mine. He doesn't do MMORPG reviews. His essays are well-written and intelligent, although I not always agree with his opinion. But we seem to have had the same ideas at some occasions, like "tradeskills should be some sort of mini-game" (damn, he posted that one before me, I must be getting old).
- posted by Tobold @ 7:57 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
MMORPG business models

If you ask somebody only slightly acquainted with MMORPG what a MMORPG is, he is quite likely to answer "Oh, those are the games with the monthly fee!". In fact the variations of this business model in existing MMORPG seem to go no further than whether to let the players pay for both the client and the monthly fee, or give the client away and just take the monthly fee. And I think that this business model is sub-optimal.

A first problem is that this business model excludes a certain number of potential players. Not everybody has a credit card, especially not outside the USA, and only few games offer game time cards or other alternative modes of payment. And for some people $15 or so per month is simply too much.

On the other hand, gaming is becoming more and more socially acceptable, and the average age of the gamer is slowly increasing. That means that nowadays quite a number of potential MMORPG customers exist that have a job, and for whom $15 per month is a negligible cost, much less than what they pay for their other hobbies. But besides the doubtful advantage of opening a second account, current MMORPG do not offer these people any chance to spend more than $15 per month on the game of their choice. I already mentioned this as a driving force for the secondary MMORPG market, where virtual goods and information are traded for real world money.

GuildWars is an example of a game where the developers have recognized this twin problem of people having not enough or too much money. Once it comes out, people can buy the basic client, and play it for free, which makes the game accessible to everybody who can afford the price of a video game, without needing a credit card. Kids for who $50 or so is still too much can still receive GuildWars as a birthday present from grandma, provided they know how to persuade grandma not to give them socks instead. But the basic GuildWars client only gives access to a limited number of zones. And more zones will be available later, but you will need to pay for them. So the more you pay, the more game you get.

This solution also solves the third problem of the monthly fee business model: Player retention. Nowadays people rarely get back into a MMORPG that they stopped playing previously. Even if their interest just wanes a little bit, the monthly fee encourages them to cancel their account, which then makes it difficult to start playing again. A game like GuildWars could easily inform their players by e-mail that a new expansion with new zones has come out, and that would encourage people to get back playing that game.

The most successful online game in terms of earnings for the game company per player is Magic the Gathering Online, in spite of it having lots of problems with bugs and server stability since v2.0 came out. It is an online version of the tradeable card game, and works on the same business model: The client is free, no monthly fee, but if you want to play, you need cards, and those cost $3.69 for a pack of 15 random cards, out of over 3000 different ones. And it is incredible how much money people are willing to spend for these virtual cards, several hundred dollars on average per player, with some players spending thousands. I too spent far too much money on that game. But it is still on my hard disk, and I still have all these virtual cards, so I could restart playing any time. That is the sort of business model MMORPG should be dreaming of.

The question then is, what to sell to your players in a MMORPG. Access to zones? Virtual currency? Special items and equipment? Virtual land and houses? Given the economic potential, I'm sure some day somebody will figure out a viable solution to this question.

Now some players would certainly object to the ability of buying yourself power in a MMORPG with money. But fact is that the current system isn't much fairer: You buy yourself power in a MMORPG with time. Somebody who has more time than money, a "time-holder", will certainly prefer the current system. But other people have more money than time, and these "money-holders" probably would like a game in which they aren't always at the bottom of the ladder, just because they have a job and family that eats up their time. Somebody willing to buy EQ platinum on EBay would most certainly be even more willing to buy it directly from Sony, if the price is right. And the advantage to the game company of this model is obvious: A "time is power" system just encourages people to eat up more bandwith, while a "money is power" system (or just additional component) brings them cold, hard cash.

I'm not sure it will work for GuildWars. Buying access to zones only makes sense if you have explored all the existing zones and are getting bored with them. So the buyers need both time and money. Time will tell whether this concept is a success. I think some of the social virtual worlds (which are similar to MMORPG technically, but don't have a gameplay involving killing monsters and leveling your character), like There or Second Life, have alternative business models. I've heard of land sales in Second Life, for example. But I'm not really an expert on these kind of virtual worlds, so I don't know the details. But when something is found that people are willing to pay for in a virtual world, it will come to MMORPG fast enough.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:24 AM Permanent Link  (1) comments

 
MMORPG difficulty level

Many single-player games have options to adjust the level of difficulty. MMORPG do not have this option, everybody has to play at the same difficulty level. Your only option is to choose between different MMORPG with different difficulties, for example chose Everquest or Final Fantasy XI if you like very difficult games, but change to Star Wars Galaxies or City of Heroes if you like an easier setting. But how difficult should a MMORPG be to play?

Difficulty in MMORPG affects 3 different things: A) How long do I need to level up (or have another significant experience of success)? B) Can I play solo and still level up? C) And if I play in a group, how elaborate need the groups tactics be to beat the monsters?

A) How long people need to level up already causes the first big problems and conflicts of interest. Fact is that in a population of players the amount of hours spent online per week differs by a very wide margin. Some people play as little as 10 hours per week, others play up to 100 hours per week. Obviously the latter is an extreme, as 100 hours per week means you don't do anything else but sleep, eat, and play the MMORPG all day long. But there are quite a number of people that are on holiday, or unemployed, that spend this amount of time in a virtual world. And with a factor of 10 in hours per week between a casual gamer and a power-gamer, it is impossible to find a rate of advancement that pleases both. Achievement in a MMORPG is a product of skill multiplied by time spent in the game, and the skill factor is minor in comparison to the time factor. You can achieve anything in a MMORPG if you spend enough time on it.

The only game that ever offered a partial solution to this dilemma was Ultima Online, which had the "power hour". Every day, the first hour you were playing, you increased your skills at double the normal rate. That obviously gives a big boost to the advancement of people that can only play 1 or 2 hours per day, while not affecting people that play 10 hours a day very much. Most other games followed the example of Everquest, and used an experience point curve that gets steeper and steeper. So even a power gamer needs several months to reach the highest possible level. That suits the game company just fine, because they do not want people to quit p(l)aying, just because they reached the "end" of the game.

Unfortunately that approach excludes the more casual gamers from much of the "high-end" content. To level your first character up to the highest level in EQ takes approximately 2000 hours, which at 10 hours per week would take 4 years to complete, with leveling up only happening less than once per month in the end. Many people have correctly called that a treadmill, and simply refuse to play that way. A casual gamer can often have more fun by stopping somewhere at mid-level, and trying another character class instead. (Just for the record, I never made it past level 42 in EQ with my main character, with over 1000 hours played.)

Games after Everquest lowered the time requirement for reaching the highest level a bit. After all, the people playing 100 hours per week are just a minority (albeit a vocal one), and in financial terms they are not very interesting for the game company, as MMORPG are payed per month, not per hour. So somebody who plays 10 times more, pays the same fee, but uses 10 times the bandwith and computing power.

B) The ability to solo is also problematic. The art is to make soloing possible, but obviously inferior to grouping. In the really difficult games, like EQ and FFXI, it is often impossible for most character classes to solo beyond the initial levels. You either get no xp at all for the highest level mob you can kill on your own, or so little as to not make you advance in any meaningful time frame. But EQ had a few character classes that were able to solo using special tactics, like quad-kiting druids, and necromancers using skeleton pets. And these solo-enabled character classes were always far more popular than the other classes, with up to 20% of players on a server playing druids. That shows that there is a demand for soloing.

The other extreme is games where grouping does not give you significantly more experience points than soloing. Setting up a group requires a certain effort, which has to be rewarded. Otherwise people simply do not group, unconciously depriving themselves of one of the major fun aspects of MMORPG. A group should gain xp at about twice the rate of a soloing character, to make up for the time lost setting up the group, and the recurring interuptions from players coming and going.

The best would be, if all character classes would be able to solo. But unfortunately some character classes are support classes by design, and it is difficult to enable a character to solo, when his main purpose is healing, or crowd control. In games like City of Heroes, where your character is more defined by the skills you chose than by just his character class, you still have the problem that a healer that choses skills useful for soloing is making himself less useful in a group, and vice versa.

But nothing is worse for a player than having the feeling to be "stuck", because he is too weak to solo, and for some reason doesn't find a group. If a game progresses by giving the player missions, or if certain essential items or skills can only be reached by a quest, those missions and quests need to be soloable. Worst offender in this category is FFXI, where many essential gameplay features can only be opened up by quests requiring groups of 6 or more players.

C) The difficulty level of a MMORPG requiring special group tactics is a mixed blessing. On the one hand it is nice to know that the skill with which you play your character is making a difference. On the other hand the tactics needed to defeat a mob quickly become well known in the player community, and then begin to solidify into a set of unwritten rules that cause all sorts of problems. Most of these problems lead to people being excluded from joining a specific group, because they don't have the "right class", "right race", "right skills", and so on.

If the monsters of a game are unbeatable unless you have a tank with taunt, and a healer, and a damage dealer, and somebody with crowd control in your group (again EQ and FFXI), setting up a group gets really difficult. Especially if there are also limits on how much of a level difference the group members can have. If you combine that with B), you end up with a game in which you can not play alone, and setting up a group takes an hour. That strongly discourages people from playing at all, especially if they only have an hour or two for this play session.

In summary, over all three aspects, it remains difficult for game developers to set their game to a difficulty level that pleases everybody. If a game is no challenge, it is no fun. But if it is too much of a challenge, it only frustrates. And the mass market, where the money is, certainly requires games to be accessible for the casual gamer.

I wonder if one day a MMORPG comes out where the player can set his desired difficulty level at character creation, or by creating servers with different difficulty levels. Set difficulty to easy, and you can solo mobs easier, and gain more xp per hour. Set it to hard, and you need a lot of skill and determination to reach the highest level. Of course it would need to be highly visible which difficulty setting you have chosen, to motivate the achievers to play the game on hard, and be able to brag about it. And the casual gamers would gain access to the high-level content, at the cost of others knowing that you only got there by taking the easy way. But it can only be good if all the content of a game is available to all the players, it makes more players happy, and the higher rate of utilization of the high-level content makes coding more productive for the devs.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:37 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
.hack//Infection

.hack//Infection is part one of a 4-part single-player Playstation 2 game. So what the heck is it doing in a MMORPG blog? Glad you asked: .hack is a MMORPG simulation. You play a player of a MMORPG, as well as his avatar in "The World" MMORPG. So most of the gameplay is somehow similar to that of a MMORPG, but you also "play" logging out of the game, reading the games message boards, logging one step further to your "desktop", and reading news and e-mail.

.hack (pronounced "dot hack") plays in the near future, 2007. The internet exploded in 2005, due to hacking, and now the whole world uses a fictional secure operating system (this plot not sponsored by Bill Gates). Online entertainment was forbidden for a while, but now there is a MMORPG again, only one, and it has 20 million players. A friend introduces you to the game, but then strange things happen, you encounter monsters whose data have been corrupted, and the game crashes (sounds familiar?). Back in the real world you discover that your friend has fallen into a coma and is hospitalized. You decide to explore the cause of this further inside the game. Seems that "The World" is infected by a virus, and you have been given the tool to fight it. Who is behind the virus infection? And can a corrupted game make people fall into a coma in real life?

Gameplay of .hack most of the time is good simulation of a bad MMORPG. There is a town with shops, where you can buy and sell stuff, and you can encounter other "players" there, and trade or chat with them. Of course, this being a single-player game, the other players are also computer controlled. But they are well done, and the conversation with them falls into the same curious mix of real world and game issues that dominates conversation in games like Everquest. From the town you can reach many different areas full of monsters, dungeons, and treasures, by traveling through a chaos gate. The gate is controlled by entering keywords, which produce pseudo-random areas. You kill monsters, collect loot from treasure chests, level up, then come back to town, lather, rinse, repeat.

Graphics are sub-par, compared to modern MMORPG. Combat consists of hectic button mashing, interrupted by pauses when you open menus to select items or spells (which obviously wouldn't be possible in a real multi-player game). The areas and dungeons are simple affairs, but the monsters are quite okay. The whole thing is saved by the storyline which adds the additional layer of game around the game. If you don't just randomly visit areas to level up, but follow the keywords provided on the message boards and by e-mail, you follow the storyline of the games infection, and how you battle the sinister forces behind it. You also have to overcome the resistance of the games company, which wants to hide the fact that things are wrong in their game. So you have to hack yourself into forbidden game areas, which have simulated graphics glitches and bugged monsters, which you have to hack as well, to learn about the virus code.

Of course the story is over the top. But if you read typical real world MMORPG message boards, you will encounter a lot of paranoid people, who would feel right at home in .hack. While real MMORPG are not virus infected, they certainly contain bugs enough, and the game companies trying to hide unpleasant truths isn't exactly unthinkable.

I'm going to play .hack//Infection for a while. But I am certainly not going to buy the other 3 parts, which are basically the same game, with the storyline continueing. Nice try to introduce something like monthly fees into an offline game, but I don't think this will work.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:02 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Taking MMORPG Really Serious

MMORPG is big business. Quite a number of games have more than 100,000 players, topped by Lineage with 4 million South Korean players. Add it all up and you get (just a rough order of magnitude) a total of about 10 million players paying 1 billion dollars per year worldwide. Okay, mobile phone ringstones sales last year were 3.5 billion dollars in 2002, which should put that MMORPG sales number a bit into perspective. But 1 billion dollars is still a nice stack of money, and so it is not surprising that some people are beginning to take MMORPG really, really serious.

If you are into serious theoretical reading, you can head over to Terranova (a collaborative blog on virtual worlds) or Ludology.org ("an online resource for academic videogame researchers). You won't find much game reviews there, but instead more serious discussion about the legal and economic implications of virtual worlds, including MMORPG.

The problem is, that this discussion can get so serious, people start forgetting that we are talking about games here, a form of entertainment. If you stop seing it as a game, and start seeing it as a virtual world, and then apply real world concepts to these virtual worlds, you end up with very serious sounding discussion of total nonsense.

A major recurring theme is virtual property. Fact is that EBay has its own category for virtual item sales, with a sales volume of about 20 million dollars per year. The easy, logical, but false, conclusion from this fact is that virtual items have value, and can constitute property. But as lots of people accept this false conclusion (including a jury in a minor chinese court room), this can lead to a wide range of rather absurd speculations on the legal implications.

If you accept that virtual items are property with value based on EBay sales prices, you could then take seriously the calculations of Prof. Castronova (already mentioned several times in this blog as the worlds leading MMORPG economist) that the world of Norath from Everquest has a gross national product of $135 million, or $2,266 per capita, making it as rich as Russia. But then you should realize that Russia can not be switched off, Norath can. Earth and Beyond recently announced that they would switch off their world in September, and the same can happen any day to any MMORPG world. And then all the virtual property becomes totally worthless.

In fact items in MMORPG do not constitute property, but are more similar to services, like a haircut. They only have a very temporary value. If your virtual item later disappears due to a bug, or the game shutting down, you have the same chance of complaining as if you tell your barber that the haircut he sold you didn't last more than a month. In fact, some people on EBay are even declaring the virtual items they sell as service, to get around the legal small print from game companies declaring that all items in their game belong to the game company. So they sell "the time it took me to make X platinum pieces", instead of the actual platinum piece. If you buy virtual currency or an item in a game, you are hiring somebody to "work" for you, doing a boring part of the game that you yourself couldn't be bothered to do. You are not acquiring real world property rights which would hold up in a serious court of law.

Serious discussion about virtual worlds is possible. They do constitute models, simulations, of some parts of the real world. Real-world phenomena, be they social or economical, can be observed in MMORPG. If for some reason the supply of virtual currency goes up, inflation occurs in a MMORPG just like it would occur in the real world. So they are useful for observation and modeling. And there is an interface between the real world and virtual worlds, of which EBay is just one example. But this link is not a fixed link. Fortunately. Because, if you think of virtual worlds as being real, you just moved to a place where an autocratic, all-powerful government (the game company) can not only instantly take away your property, but can also kill (ban) you for offences as minor as using foul language. It is a lot healthier to regard MMORPG as the games they are.
- posted by Tobold @ 2:02 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Megatomix and Syndication

Megatomix is a commercial MMORPG information exchange site. You can subscribe for $25 per year to read other peoples unofficial hints and strategy advice on a range of popular MMORPG. You can then rate the advices usefulness, and the author gets paid if the advice was found extremely useful by a number of people. I can't tell you much more about them, as I didn't pay the $25, so I didn't get the opportunity to judge the quality of the content. And I have serious doubts about their claims how you can get rich by playing MMORPG and writing about it. But aside from that they look honest enough, you can even click on the names of the games and see the titles of the strategy guides on offer.

Syndication, I learned this week, is making your content available to others via a feed. This came up when the guys from Megatomix asked me whether I had such a feed, and I had to scramble to find out. :)

Fortunately it turns out that Blogger is offering this service automatically, so my feed can be reached under http://tobolds.blogspot.com/atom.xml. Sorry, no RSS feed, this more popular format is only offered to Blogger Pro users, and Blogger isn't selling Blogger Pro any more, which makes getting an RSS feed difficult for me. Blogger suggests using a site that converts Atom feeds into RSS feeds.

I am not an affiliate of Megatomix or any other site. Whatever content I write is free. You can use the Atom feed (which will only give you the first paragraph of my posts), or you can copy & paste from here. If you want to use my content on your site, all I ask for is a link, preferably something like "written by <a href="http://tobolds.blogspot.com">Tobold</a>".
- posted by Tobold @ 8:10 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Virtual Worlds Review

Just a short link to Virtual Worlds Review, a site I just discovered. This site gives an overview of the more social "virtual worlds", which are kind of the cousins of MMORPG. The best known example is probably The Sims Online. These virtual worlds contain less game elements, usually no combat, and are serving more as some sort of graphical chat room. Social interaction is the major driving force for visiting these virtual worlds.

Frankly, I tried The Sims Online during its beta test, and found it boring like hell, so I didn't look deeply into the other virtual worlds. Exploring fantastic landscapes gets a lot less interesting when they aren't populated by monsters. And bashing pinatas for hours just doesn't have the same appeal as bashing orcs for hours. So I'm leaving that field to the above mentioned site and stick to MMORPG over here.
- posted by Tobold @ 4:07 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Spending Money on MMORPG Information

Unlike other hobbies, playing MMORPG costs the same amount of money for everybody, rich or poor. In a capitalist world this strangely egalitarian state can not last. In the same way that a market exists for expensive televisions, or golf clubs, some people would like to spend more money on the MMORPG of their choice. And just as somebody buying expensive golf clubs does so in the hope of advancing his game, this sort of additional spending on MMORPG is fueled by the hope of advancing in the MMORPG. The previously mentioned trade in virtual goods is just a part of this market. Another major part is trade in MMORPG information.

Many classic MMORPG are heavily information based. You often look for a specific monster, or a specific item, or the place to go for a quest. And often you are just left to look for your target yourself, or ask other people, because the game itself will not tell you where you have to go, or what you have to do. This is probably designed to foster cooperation, but ends up making MMORPG information a marketable good.

The official part of this market is still underdeveloped. Companies like Prima, or Brady, are selling strategy guides to all major MMORPG. They are usually useful in getting started, as they contain a lot of basic information, as well as endless tables of monster statistics and similar data. Unfortunately MMORPG are changing rapidly, and a printed strategy guide based on information that was true just before the game launched risks to become outdated in many respects after only a few months. These strategy guides rely on information from the game developers themselves, so they are often overly optimistic, and you are unlikely to find the information that a certain character class sucks. Right now the MMORPG market isn't yet big enough to support a monthly magazine. I got issue 1 of a UK MMORPG magazine, but issue 2 never appeared. I've seen "online games" magazines, but they usually focus on online shooter games.

But for online role playing games, the logical place to buy information is obviously online, and not some print media. And there is a variety of forms under which this information is on offer. And a lot of information can even be got for free. In fact, if you had unlimited amounts of time, you could probably find all information about any game for free somewhere on the internet, hidden in many different obscure fan pages, and on message boards. Some sites like Allakhazam started offering high quality compilations of information for free, but then the resulting traffic forced the owners to sell "premium memberships", sell advertising space, or beg for money, because all this bandwith does not come for free. Again the information given away or sold by this sort of sites is usually data on monsters and items, but also often information about quests, if the game belongs to the large Everquest-like group of games where the game itself does not provide you enough information to solve the quest on your own.

Enter the name of your MMORPG plus "secrets" or "guide" into Google or EBay, and you see a lot of other offers. A lot of people want to sell you the virtual equivalent of get-rich-quick schemes. The problem is that you have no way of knowing what the quality of the information is, before having paid for it. So especially on EBay there are a lot of low quality guides sold to gullible people desperate for success in their MMORPG. Like buying virtual goods on EBay, buying information on EBay heavily exposes you to the risk of becoming victim of a scammer.

Of course the same risk exists if you buy your information from some web site. But as they have at least some hope of repeat custom from you, they are at least trying to sell you what they believe is useful information. This information is usually of the un-official kind. If your game has a bug that can be exploited to make large amounts of virtual currency or xp, these sites will sell you the information on how to use the exploit. But if it is really an exploit, it risks to be repaired in the next patch, and in the worst case you can get banned for using the exploit. And many of the better games are now at least bug free enough to not have any easy money exploits any more. So the information you are buying might just be some more or less good advice on how to make money or xp fast, which is hyped as some big "secret", but is in fact known to most of the better informed players. Nevertheless, if you don't have the time to search for game information on message boards and fan sites yourself, this might be not such a bad deal. Some sites are even offering some sort of information market, paying people for the best information they post, and then selling this information to others.

The best thing to do is check each offer with a critical eye. Especially for virtual currency you can find out to "going rate" easily enough. So if 20k gil from FFXI cost $20, why would somebody sell you the "secret to make 20k gil per hour" for $5? If it sounds too good to be true, it probably isn't. I only heard bad things about all sources offering to sell "cheats" or "secrets", and I never felt tempted to risk my money finding out how badly I can get scammed. If you are really lost in a MMORPG and don't feel like digging for the info yourself, buying some sort of game guide, printed or online, is probably the better option.
- posted by Tobold @ 2:19 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments