The reception of the early access in the MMORPG blogosphere is mixed, for obvious reasons: Those who are already in are delighted how smoothly everything is running. Those who aren't in yet are ranting that others are getting all the fun. Personally I think that the gated access is working well for the stability of the servers, and that giving access based on pre-order date is probably still the fairest method you can think of. Those who had the most faith in SWTOR and put their money where their mouth is several months in advance are being rewarded. Seeing how they even paid more for the privilege of pre-ordering, the reward is justified. Those who preferred to wait and see will have to wait a little bit longer. And really, it's just a week difference at maximum, that is not such a huge advantage.

I also discovered a lot about how crafting works. Counter-intuitively you can (and should) reverse engineer items you crafted yourself, using the button on top of your inventory window. Reverse engineering your crafted green items gives you a chance to get the schematic for a blue item, which then reverse engineer into purple items. At that point it becomes clear why you need 2 specific gathering skills for each crafting skill: For example for Biochem you need Bioanalysis to gather the regular components that make green items, while you need Diplomacy to gather the blue and purple components to make blue and purple items. I was quite pleased with myself when I was able to craft a purple medpack. It heals for the same amount as the green version, but doesn't get used up in the process, very useful.

My crafting made a lot of progress in Coruscant, because there are a surprising number of potted plants you can gather with Bioanalysis in the areas of the city where you fight mobs. I got Biochem up to over 60, which then opened up a lot more crafting recipes from the crew skill trainer. Biochem is essentially alchemy, so besides healing "potions" I can craft buffs that last for an hour. I can now also craft adrenals which give a big stat boost for 15 seconds, but I'm not quite convinced yet that these are really useful. If a fight is over in 15 seconds you probably didn't need a boost in the first place. Maybe I can get longer lasting ones through reverse engineering.

You might have noticed that I am *not* looking up the recipes in some database on the internet somewhere. That is deliberate. I think I will have more fun if I discover the recipes for myself, even if that is not the most efficient way. I always found that the discovery is more fun than the execution, but that is for everybody to decide for himself.

Among the new abilities my trooper got while leveling is a mortar volley which is surprisingly powerful. I didn't expect to be able to one-shot groups of 5 enemies in the final area of Ord Mantell. That somehow made up for the trooper getting his companion later than the other classes, which I wasn't too happy about. The smugglers that I shared the starting zone with all had companions for the final quests, while the troopers only get theirs right before leaving the planet, with no real opportunity of playing with them on the starting planet. Also I found the trooper's companion to be the least likable of all the companions I've seen so far, so up to now I'm underwhelmed by the companion feature for my trooper.

Next step in his adventures will be the first "flashpoint" or real group dungeon. I already did group missions with my guild on Ord Mantell, but on that planet the group missions are open world and not instanced like on Korriban. Having already played the Esseles flashpoint in the beta, I knew that it takes some time, so as it was getting late I rather saved this for the next play session. Instead I wandered around the Republic Fleet, learned my advanced class, talked with all the tradeskill trainers (each gives 450 xp), chose Bioanalysis, Biochem, and Diplomacy as tradeskills, and sent out my companion to gather the first components and craft the first medkit. I also looked at the Galactic Market AH, and found a cheap crafted blue item, as well as modifications for my new gun. I searched around endlessly for a modification station, until a guild mate told me that you don't need those any more and can just CTRL-click your weapon to modify it. Well, that explains why my trooper never got a quest explaining the modification stations, as my other classes got in the beta, although the mod station is still in Fort Garnik.

For many people the answer to this question is simple, because we tend to think in categories of theme park games versus sandbox games. SWTOR like WoW is definitively theme park, Skyrim is far more sandbox. But having played a lot of Skyrim between the SWTOR beta weekend and the early access, I couldn't help but notice that the reasons why I play Skyrim and not WoW are very similar to the reasons why I play SWTOR and not WoW: SWTOR and Skyrim are full of interesting stories, while WoW is more about execution and gimmicks. SWTOR and Skyrim have worlds that are coherent within themselves, WoW is far more of a mishmash spanning everything from jokes about goblin bling to dramatic high fantasy and science fiction in a single game. In short: In SWTOR and Skyrim I care about what happens, the characters, their motives, even my dialogue responses that aren't linked to any point gains. In WoW I just click accept without even reading the quests any more, and I visit dungeons without caring a bit about why these bosses are in there waiting for me.

Now part of this is certainly an effect of simply being new. I fear it is inevitable that sooner rather than later the theorycrafters will try to ruin SWTOR and tell everybody what morons they are if they aren't using the optimized talent builds they developed. The day you chose "boring talent A" over "fun talent B", just because talent A gives 1.7% more damage per second than B, is the day you effectively decided you care more about the game than about the world. At some point the decision of whether to go light side or dark side in SWTOR for some people will be made based on arguments like "but light side gives better gear for jedi knights". And then the lore and the stories stop mattering and we are back to World of Warcraft.

How fast and far this will develop probably depends very much on how difficult endgame "raid" instances in SWTOR will be. I get tons of negative comments every time I ask for MMORPGs to have relatively easy endgame raids, along the lines of "u r just too stupid to play hard raids". But fact is that the harder you make content to beat, the less options players have to beat that content. If players really *need* the 1.7% more dps from talent A to beat the typical raid boss, it is hard to blame them for all using the same cookie cutter build of the month. If the challenge is somewhat easier, different combinations of talents and tactics can all work, and we end up with a more interesting and varied MMOPRG because of that. One that allows us to still care about the world and our characters, and not only about our stats and performance.

Even if Star Wars: The Old Republic isn't exactly a sandbox game, I would certainly call it a "world" MMORPG, as opposed to the "game" MMORPGs like World of Warcraft. At least for the moment. We will see how this works out in the long term.

Thanks to having pre-ordered Star Wars: The Old Republic at an early date, I got my early access yesterday evening, on the first day of the early access period. That was a surprisingly painless process: I got a mail, started the launcher I still had from the open beta weekend end November, and after some short patching I was able to play. I did not have to visit a website and enter some code, which tends to be the weak point in MMORPG launches.

EA Bioware is ramping things up slowly, the server list showed server loads being either "light" or "standard", and I found myself in a starting zone with around 100 players. Thus an extremely smooth first day for me, got my trooper up to level 8 without any technical complications, bugs, or other nasty surprises. In fact the only thing that didn't go perfectly was the guild, who had decided *not* to use the server EA Bioware had assigned to us, and thus we were missing out on the automatic guild formation feature. I expect the guild to form tonight, when people reach level 10 and Coruscant.

Up to now I am very happy with my character choice of trooper. The abilities are just plain fun, especially the sticky grenade and the AoE knockback shot. Ord Mantell is somewhat less interesting as a starting zone than Korriban (where I played most of the beta weekend), but it is still okay, and it's only the first 10 levels. I'll see tonight how my character develops once I choose the advanced class, going for healer. I like the idea of a healer with a big gun. :)

But another form of cheating exists in World of Tanks, and it is not even forbidden by Wargaming.net: Hitbox tank skins. Basically in WoT your tank isn't equally vulnerable from all sides or in all locations. There are weak spots which are more likely to be penetrated, or where specific critical hit events can occur. Shoot at the first or last "wheel" of a tank's tracks, and you are more likely to shoot his tracks off than if you'd hit another part of them. As there are very many different tanks in World of Tanks, and besides some general rules it isn't easy to find and remember all the weak spots, some people use hitbox tank skins to point them out. Basically instead of seeing a tank in usual camouflage colors, the texture of the tank has been changed in some way to show either in black and white or with some color code the most vulnerable spots of the enemies. I've been aware of these skins for a while, as they are heatedly debated on the forums. And after a reader asked my opinion about them, I even went ahead and installed them to test them out, counting on patch 7.0 to reset them to normal afterwards.

Hitbox skins clearly are an advantage to the players using them. Legalistically you might claim they aren't "cheating", because there is no rule against them. But they are clearly unfair and against the spirit of the rules. Having said that, hitbox skins are not always useful. For example if you play artillery, the skins do strictly nothing, as your aiming circle is always bigger than the tank you want to hit, and you can't aim at a specific spot. For the same reason hitbox skins do not help if you shoot from some distance, or see the enemy tank only by his red outline behind a bush. Hitbox skins help most if you drive a medium or light tank, which is fast enough to get into a position close to an enemy tank where you can really aim at a weak spot. Seeing the best hitzones does help, but it isn't a huge cheat which makes you invincible.

Patch 7.0 promises new customizable tank skins, where the enemy sees the tank you *you* chose, even with a guild logo if you want to. So some people speculated that if the tank skins become server side, then the cheating with hitbox skins would stop. Unfortunately that isn't the case. The forums report that there is a workaround, where you make the individualized tank skins invisible, and thus the cheating hitbox skins visible. And Wargaming.net only enforces the use of regular textures in official WoT "e-sports" tournaments, claiming that using them makes you a worse player if you don't have them around to help you.

Personally, I don't consider hitzone skins a game breaker. You could even argue that they could have a legit use for people learning how to play the game. But ideally online PvP games should be completely without cheats of any kind, and it would be good if Wargaming.net could find a way to remove them.

There is a certain irony to the thought that with all the discussion about whether SWTOR is a "WoW-Killer", it could be that the MMORPGs actually killed by Star Wars: The Old Republic could be Warhammer Online and Star Wars Galaxies. You can't "kill" a *specific* other MMORPG by launching a more successful new one. Launching a successful new MMORPG will always draw some players from various other existing games, as well as hopefully draw in completely new players. That changes the market and the market shares, but not in a very directed manner. It is far easier to "kill" an already ailing game (even if it is from your own company) than the most successful product of the competition. I do think that SWTOR will have a significant effect on the MMORPG market, but not necessarily the one EA would most like.

I think we had a misunderstanding about my wishes as a customer with regards to treasure hunting in role-playing games. I appreciate your efforts to fill the virtual worlds I'm playing through with treasure, I really do. But I think you've gone too far, especially with recent games like Fallout 3 or Skyrim. I said I wanted treasure, not 270 pounds of brooms.

I think treasure is a lot more interesting when there are significant amounts of it at a few, hard to reach locations, so that the treasure feels like a reward. Having minor loot items everywhere, having 3 gold pieces hidden in every urn and barrel, having every monster drop a common weapon worth 10 gold, and having all dungeons filled up with lootable household items is not adding to my enjoyment of your games.

Instead these games start feeling like a chore, because I need to mouse-over or click on everything to check whether there are important or valuable things hidden among all that stuff. Or I end up walking back and forth between adventure areas and towns, just to haul all that medium value stuff and sell it. I'd much rather get the same amount of gold in one big pile at the end of the dungeon. As much as I like to watch Pawn Stars, I would like to play a heroic adventurer, not somebody searching heaps of junk for valuable bits and pieces.

Regards,

Tobold

• Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning
• Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures
• Vanguard: Saga of Heroes
• The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar
• Gods and Heroes: Rome Rising
• The Chronicles of Spellborn
• Pirates of the Burning Sea
• Hero's Journey
• Huxley
• 9Dragons
• Last Chaos
• Pirates of the Caribbean Online

I think it is safe to say that if you were actually anticipating the MMOs of 2007, you were in for a disappointment. Some of them never launched, some closed down, and the majority had rather limited success and went Free2Play. LotRO is still the best game on that list, and that one is Free2Play too.

My personal interpretation of the history of MMORPGs over the last years is that game companies saw the success of World of Warcraft, but failed to see that WoW, although far from being perfect, is a product of very high workmanship. Or "polish", if you want to use that term. Thus everybody thought they could get to a similar level of success with games that were significantly less well-made. And failed.

While this has filled some players with gloom and doom, I actually think that this phase of history is behind us. Star Wars: The Old Republic isn't a perfect game either. But nobody can accuse it of being cheap and not well made. During the beta I was positively surprised by the quality of the workmanship, lack of bugs, stability of the servers, and all that famous "polish".

I do think that EA is going to make a lot of money with SWTOR, and attract millions of players. Which moves the overall market forward from "nobody can make a successful MMORPG and WoW is just an exception" to "highly successful MMORPGs can be made if you invest a huge amount of money". 2007 was still the gold rush period of MMORPGs, and I'm actually happy that this is over.

Nearly 7 years ago, on the European launch day of World of Warcraft, I was one of the initial signatories of a guild I had met in the EQ2 beta. Except for some guild drama episodes, breaks from WoW, and characters created on other servers, I have been with that guild for all these years. So I am very happy to report that I will be playing Star Wars: The Old Republic with them, on an European RP-PvE server.

The most anti-social addons are things like Gearscore or various damage and performance meter addons. I wouldn't mind if SWTOR had a built-in functionality which would somehow show my performance, but only to myself, with the goal to improve myself. But in WoW these addons were primarily used to point a finger at people who for some reason had a slightly lower level of gear or damage output. They were exclusion devices, with people organizing raids asking for "minimum Gearscore 6785", which happened to be exactly their GS, so they could be carried by people with better gear. These ePeen measuring devices in my opinion did more harm than good to the community of World of Warcraft.

Another type of addon commonly seen is the performance-enhancing addon. A healing addon like Healbot makes group/raid healing a lot easier than the standard interface. And addons like Deadly Boss Mods give advance warning of incoming special abilities from boss mobs, which make the "dance" a lot easier. So what could be wrong with that? What is wrong is that by making these functionalities dependent on a third party addon, you can't be sure that everybody is at exactly the same level. Performance-enhancing addons are like performance-enhancing drugs in sports: You might consider them "fair" if you assume that everybody uses them, but as soon as you consider that some people for some reasons don't use them, it becomes obvious how distorting they are. If Healbot is strictly necessary to beat an encounter, then why isn't it part of the standard user interface? Performance-enhancing addons make balancing encounters very difficult, because developers will have to decide whether they balance the encounter with or without the assumption that these addons are used. And if you balance the encounter assuming that everybody has the addons, then you'll get the occasional case where somebody is unable to beat the encounter because for some reason he didn't have the addon he thought he had. Again, if an addon was necessary for an encounter, it should be part of the standard user interface, not a third-party addon. Fortunately Blizzard at least put legal measures in place which prevent people from selling their addons. Imagine there was a must-have raid addon that you had to pay an extra $20 to get.

The least harmful addons are those which allow players to customize the user interface. But frankly, in this day and age complicated games should have customization options for the user interface built in from the start. I don't see the advantage of doing that with addons. In the end all addons are just crutches for functions that the developers were either too lazy to build into the game itself, or for functions where the developers thought that the game shouldn't have them in the first place. Blizzard made theirs far too powerful, leading to addons that you can't perform without, and others which are mostly used to stroke ePeens and separate the community into "us" and "them". In the SWTOR beta somebody was joking "6K GS required" in general chat when he was looking for a group for a low-level dungeon. I so hope that this remains a joke and doesn't turn into reality in Star Wars: The Old Republic.

My character also died when trying to run through a cave full of mobs instead of carefully fighting them one by one. I died in a group at a boss which had a special attack that sucked everybody close to him and then hit us all with a point blank AoE. Thus we learned to move away as quickly as possible when the boss does that, and killed him on the next try. In fact, in pretty much all cases where I died it was clearly a case of me having done something in a sub-optimal fashion, and the death taught me how to do it better. And that is how it should be.

It is extremely difficult to unlearn skills in real life. Nils claims that the early game in WoW is actually quite hard, and only gets trivial past level 10 or so. But when I recently tried a new undead warlock in the free version of WoW (unlimited free play of WoW until level 20), I never felt in any danger, and quickly got bored. Unless you use the looking for group functionality to earn blue gear you don't need in low-level dungeons, it is rather likely that you play up to level 85 without a single death in World of Warcraft. Which not only is boring, but also fails to teach you how to play better.

I wouldn't want to play a game in which I need a dozen wipes before killing each simple quest mob. But the premise of these games is that you play a hero through his adventures, and if those adventures are completely safe, you don't feel much like a hero. Thus I do think that a game in which you can die if you risk too much is more attractive than a game which prevents you from taking risks. I find it stupid that in World of Warcraft you can't accept quests that are too high in level for you, and the xp rewards for killing higher level mobs are deliberately designed to give you less xp per hour than if you farm easy green mobs. If you give players a wider range of levels of quests and opponents to tackle, with rewards for trying the riskier stuff, you get a game in which everybody can play at exactly the difficulty level he wants. You don't need an "easy - normal - heroic" difficulty setting like for endgame raids now, you simply present the player with the option of doing quests below his level, at his level, or above his level, with rewards that are in line with the higher risk and time effort necessary to tackle the higher levels of difficulty.

I will have to see in how far this is possible in Star Wars: The Old Republic. But my first impression is that leveling is less trivial than in World of Warcraft, and that is a good thing.

As this blog has comment moderation, most readers moderate their own language, and I rarely have to actually delete a comment. But when Wargaming.net linked to my post about gold tanks from their World of Tanks Facebook page, I had to delete several comments full of hate, filled with insults and profanity directed against people spending money on World of Tanks. Wallet warriors was still the most polite term used.

I find that curious, because obviously if these players wouldn't pay for gold in World of Tanks, Wargaming.net would be broke, and World of Tanks would close down. While patch 7.0 will introduce the option to pay for skins and logos, up to now everything you can pay for in World of Tanks gives you some advantage: Faster advancement, access to tanks that earn credits faster, more penetrating ammo. Thus insulting somebody for having paid for an in-game advantage is insulting him for having paid at all, for having effectively paid the game for you. Insulting the guy who pays for your free game is about as intelligent as insulting the guy who pays for your free beer.

Apart from the social aspects, these insults are also getting the facts wrong. Most of them are along the lines of only bad players paying for stuff in Free2Play games. But numerous surveys and published data from game companies show just the opposite: New and casual players are not engaged enough with the game to want to pay much. The overwhelming majority of payments in Free2Play games come from the people who play the most, are the most experienced, and veteran. That is kind of logical: Somebody unwilling to even spend much time in a game is naturally unlikely to want to spend much money either. Somebody for whom a game has become a major part of his daily life is a lot more likely to also be willing to pay for a minor advantage. It is the top guilds that shoot with gold ammo in clan wars battles, not the noobs with tier 2 tanks in random battles.

No business model is perfect, and the Free2Play model isn't the perfect model either. But it certainly has the advantage that it allows people to play for free, financed by other players. Is it too much to ask from the people who play for free to have the basic decency not to insult the people who pay the game for them?

The scary thing about this is that it also works in the real world, and is actually one of the more likely outcome of the ongoing debt crisis. To see how this works, let's use a very extreme example: President Obama tells the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing to design a new 1-million dollar banknote (with his face on it), then lets print 300 million of these, and sends one of them to each citizen of the United States. As most Americans with debt have a debt below 1 million dollars, they would all immediately be able to repay all their debt. And a good part of the money would flow back to the local and federal government, where it could be used to pay all government debt as well. With one fell strike the debt crisis in the US would be over (the EU could do the same for theirs).

There are just some problems with that solution: It would result in a huge jump in inflation. If everybody is a millionaire, then a million isn't much money, and doesn't buy you much. And for every borrower having his debt wiped out, there is a lender having his savings wiped out. Basically the people who spent more than they could afford (which includes the government) are rewarded, and the people who did the prudent thing and saved are punished. Furthermore nobody will be willing to lend money to somebody else any more, as after such a precedence nobody could be sure any more that it wouldn't happen again. If the US wanted to borrow more money from the Chinese, the Chinese would insist that the debt would be in Yuan, and not in dollars, so the US can't devalue their debt away in the future.

But while the 1-million dollar Obama banknote isn't likely, a more stealthy version of the same solution is very likely. It even has already started, and been given a positive sounding name: Quantitative Easing. To put this into perspective, in the most recent US round of quantitative easing, nicknamed "QE2", the Federal Reserve created $600 billion of money out of nothing, and used it to pay back government debt, by buying treasury bonds. That is only $2,000 per US citizen, and thus doesn't create that much inflation as $1 million per person would. But the basic principle is exactly the same: More money flows into the economy, allowing people with debt to pay back some of it, while reducing the value and interest rates on savings.

The man who controls the machine which prints the money can never go bankrupt. But he can destroy the value of the currency and thus help debtors and punish savers. And if you think you aren't affected because you didn't lend money to anyone, have a look at your pension scheme: It is a promise to pay you a fixed amount of money in the future. If that fixed amount isn't worth much, your retirement might look a lot different than you imagined.

Crafting is the creation of items without the direct involvement of combat. That definition also tells you the principal problem of crafting in an MMORPG: It competes with getting items from looting. If you could craft the same epic item that some raid boss drops, there would be a diminished interest in raiding. But if you can't craft anything half decent, then why bother with crafting at all? Thus MMORPGs over the years have used a lot of half-baked crafting systems and always had problems getting the balance between items from crafting and items from adventuring right. One typical bad solution is to make crafting indirectly depending on combat: The epic you can craft needs a recipe or component that only drops from the raid boss. Unfortunately that of course removes all the interest in crafting from the people who were interested in it *because* they saw it as a chance to get good items without having to raid.

To allow a crafting system to produce items which are useful, the design of that crafting system has to contain some sort of obstacle to overcome; otherwise players can just mass-produce more of those items than anybody needs, and the value of crafted items tends towards zero. Many games use a system of crafting skill points and the difficulty of gathering resources as obstacles. That does not work very well, because at the same time gathered resources and crafted items are the basis for the player-run economy. Thus if armed with a sufficiently large stack of gold, a character can level up a crafting skill from zero to level cap epics in an afternoon, just running between auction house, mailbox, and crafting station. By making the obstacle based on a tradable currency, players can make crafting trivial by obtaining that currency via higher level characters or even from gold farmers.

So what obstacle, what non-tradable currency could be used to make it impossible to take shortcuts on crafting? Time! Time is the ultimate currency in all MMORPGs and other online games, because each of us only has 24 hours a day. While "time spent playing" can vary by an order of magnitude between players, that is still better than gold, which can vary by several orders of magnitude. And once you make the obstacle mostly real time instead of time spent playing, everybody is equal.

And this is how companion crafting in SWTOR works: To gather a resource or craft an item, you have to send your companion away for some time. I only experienced low level crafting in the beta weekend, where that time was some minutes. But that could easily be expanded to hours or even days for crafting an epic. As an added obstacle, you don't have your companion available to help you fighting as long as he is out crafting or gathering (although I don't know how that is handled once you get several companions. Can you craft with one and fight with the help of another?). Crafting also needs credits in SWTOR, but I would guess that the time requirement will be the main obstacle. While there will be undoubtedly "SWTOR crafting guides" to be found on the internet plotting the fastest path to maximum skill, somewhere in that guide it will say how many hours and days that takes minimum. And as there is no queuing of crafting commands, players will even take much longer than this minimum theoretical duration, because if their companion returns while they are offline, they can't send him again before logging in again. If you wanted half a dozen "crafting alts", you'd be busy all day just logging between characters.

I do think this is a very good system. Yes, it will annoy some people who want instant gratification. But it will allow others to actually craft items of value. And it will make crafting an important part of your main character, instead of being a task outsourced to an alt. I believe that crafting in SWTOR will be a lot more meaningful than in many other games. And that is quite an achievement.

While Raph Koster linked to the 3-part video history of the MMO, that series actually has 4 part. Part 4 is interesting, because it talks of today and the future, showing some upcoming games. It also contains some data that were new to me, saying that Rift peaked at 600,000 subscribers and is tapering off. But generally the outlook of that video is remarkably upbeat, even if the problems of having too many, too similar games is clearly outlined. I find the MMO blogosphere these days far less positive on the future of the genre.

Of course part of the problem is that the genre is already old enough to have a "history of" video series made. And some of us were around from the beginning. I played MUDs and UO and EQ and many other of the games mentioned in the videos. Thus the problem of gameplay in SWTOR not being fundamentally different from gameplay in Everquest is something which hurts me more than it affects a new player. The formula still *works*, even if its pull obviously gets weaker after a decade.

Thus if you, like the makers of the video, look at overall market size the future is in fact bright. While any individual player might get bored after years and drop out of the genre, he'll quickly be replaced by two or more new players. We are approaching a rather unusual situation for a market, because usually it is cheaper to retain an existing customer than to gain a new one. But that might well reverse for MMORPGs in the coming years, unless they come up with some radical innovation.

At several points in the past weeks I have come across in World of Tanks people complaining about the Type 59 Chinese tank, a tier 8 medium tank bought for gold (thus real money). These complaints, in game and on the forums, very much echo those made earlier about the Löwe tank, a tier 8 heavy "gold" tank. People who don't drive one often find these gold tanks "overpowered", based on having had problems against such tanks in battles. That is curious insofar as gold tanks are actually weaker than regular tanks that are fully equipped, because gold tanks only come in a stock variety that can't be upgraded. Thus at the same tier and type of tank, you can find better tanks, stat for stat, among the regular tanks. So why do people complain about the gold tanks? Is it just jealousy or a general hate against paid-for content?

It turns out that many people have a very wrong image about what kind of player is driving those gold tanks. They think that tier 8 gold tanks are driven by newbies who couldn't wait for leveling up their tanks the regular way. But in reality that isn't all that often the case. New players rarely spend $30 on a tank before they even know how to play and whether they like the game, it wouldn't be very rational behavior. But players who already leveled up their regular tanks to tier 8 and beyond are quite likely to end up buying a gold tank for the purpose of farming money. Gold tanks have a very low repair cost, and thus make more money than a regular tank of the same tier. Play the gold tank a while and you end up with far more money than a direct gold to money conversion would have given you. And as the high tier regular tanks make often lose money or barely break even, a gold tank for money farming is a not uncommon investment for a dedicated player.

That not only means that the driver of the gold tank opposing you isn't quite the noob you thought he would be. It also changes the incentives, and thus the behavior of the tank driver. People in their regular tanks often play rather defensively at higher tiers, as repair costs are high. But that is less of a concern for gold tank drivers. And if you drive that gold tank to farm money, you are aware that the money you make is a function of the damage you deal, thus you have all the incentives of playing your tank much more aggressively.

Thus it is very well possible that a gold tank enemy ends up being far more dangerous and annoying than an enemy in a regular tank of the same tier and level. The gold tank driver is simply more likely to use his tank far more aggressively, and thus cause greater damage. The gold tank isn't overpowered, it is the player of that tank who is playing in a different and more aggressive way, making that tank effectively more dangerous.

Tadhg Kelly of What Games Are is writing about The Maker's Lament, the idea that the age of the professional content creator is over, because too many amateurs create too much content for free, or too cheaply. Quote: "Or perhaps the maker’s lament is really about this: there is too much choice. Any market in which you can choose from a million works (such as ebooks, iPhone apps, albums, etc) is one where standing out is vastly harder than it used to be".

That is mainly a problem of barriers to entry. If the only way to distribute written words is printed on paper in a book or flyer, only those who feel strongly enough about an issue to pay for that flyer, or those who think they can sell that book enough to make a profit are going to write. But if you can distribute written words by signing up for a free blogging service, forum, or social network, many more people are going to write. Supply goes up, demand not necessarily so, and thus the monetary market value of the written word goes down.

Tadhg thinks that Free2Play games offer a business model which can deal with this, and would be just as applicable to other media. Quote: "You could possibly do the same thing with a comic, or an album, or a series of short films on Youtube. Or indeed a game. The idea is the same though: Get the customer over the choice question by making it a non-choice. Let them decide if they like your world before they pay for it. Then let them pay according to how far they want to, not a ticket price which is the same for everyone." I don't think that it is that easy in reality, because not all mediums have the structure required which make a Free2Play model viable.

Take for example this blog. There are thousands of people who like this blog enough to visit it repeatedly. They "decided they like my world", or my opinions, or the manner in which I write my opinions enough to check in regularly or add me to their newsreader. But very few of them are willing to pay for this content. I received a grand total of 17 "buy Tobold a coffee" donations this year. Those contributed a lot to me feeling appreciated, but if I was a professional content creator, I'd be starving by now. I don't think I could get people to pay for my content if I put in a "pay to read after the break" paywall on my blog. Although my blog already is Free2Read with an optional pay model, this isn't a money maker. Adding typical Free2Play store items to the blog (As in "Get a sparkly commenter's name for just $10!". NOT A REAL OFFER!) probably wouldn't work either. Unlike people paying for a Free2Play game, my readers simply aren't invested enough in my blog to make paying for it seem attractive. If given the choice between having to pay or leaving, nearly all would leave for other blogs.

In the book Tadhg is referring to, Free Ride, there is talk of the market value of anything dropping towards its "marginal production cost", unless the distribution is controlled. While that isn't valid for everything, it appears to be valid for content like written opinions. As everybody has an opinion, many people like to share theirs, and distributing them over the internet has become so easy, their marginal production cost and value trends towards zero. That is a problem for people trying to write their opinions for a living. I've recently read a lament about professional game reviewers, whose hourly pay is less than minimum wages if you consider both the time spent playing games and writing about them. That comes to no surprise to an economist, as there are obviously enough people around who are willing to perform the same work for free (and sometimes produce better reviews in the process).

But that doesn't mean that there is no future in being paid for creating content. It only means you can't get paid for creating content which isn't better than what any amateur is already creating. If you create content like Minecraft, you can still get paid millions. Lots of authors, musicians, and other content creators are still getting paid, and some of them rather well. That it is hard to make money with journalism is very much related to the fact that professional journalism is so hard to distinguish from amateur journalism, quality-wise. If gamers rather read blogs to hear whether a new game is any good than to buy a print magazine, it is because they feel they wouldn't get a better value (or more honest opinion) out of the professional games magazine. Where Tadhg is right is that this resembles the Free2Play business model: Free2Play games that aren't much good end up a financial failure as well. If a content creator has problems making a lot of money, he has to ask himself whether he is actually creating any added value.