I agree

As it doesn't happen all that often, I thought it would be worth posting that I completely agree with Nils' analysis of hotkey/macro-based combat: When the best strategy is to spam a few buttons as fast as possible without caring what those buttons are, there is something wrong with the combat system.

And just for the record: This isn't supposed to be an "anti Rift" post. The remark applies to WoW as well, even if WoW has slightly different macro restrictions. If carefully choosing the right button to press is a bad strategy, and quickly spamming keys in more or less the right order gives a better result, that just isn't a game for me.
- posted by Tobold @ 1:30 PM Permanent Link  (31) comments Links to this post

 
Progression and persistence

For me an ideal raid endgame would start with a dungeon that is relatively easy, and then get progressively harder with each following dungeon. As a consequence, players and guilds would spread out, with the best players advancing fastest, and the least good progressing very slowly, and that mostly through the inevitable gear accumulation. And all these raid dungeons would remain as they are throughout the expansion.

Blizzard's idea in Cataclysm appears to be to have a "current" dungeon set which is rather hard, and then nerf that set of raid dungeons when the next set of raid dungeons is patched in. Unfortunately the earlier version of this concept in Wrath of the Lich King shows that this simply doesn't work: The earlier raid dungeons just stood empty when a new set became "current". Instead of having persistent dungeon difficulty and a progression through them, the "add new and nerf old" concept just makes the old content irrelevant. If your guild doesn't happen to have finished their progression through the old content EXACTLY at the moment of the next content patch, you're screwed. If you are too fast, you have to wait around. If you are too slow, the boss kill you were looking forward to just got nerfed into being trivial and not fun any more.

If Blizzard thinks that by patch 4.2 they can get both the bored hardcore and the frustrated average players back into the game with one stroke, I'm afraid they will be severely disappointed. Some people will doubtlessly enjoy the new Firelands "personal development" daily quests. But their raid progression strategy is a complete dud that ends up making nobody happy.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (23) comments Links to this post

 
Every item in EVE is for sale for real money

Syncaine claims that CCP is doing item shops better than other games, because they announced a shop with vanity items only. You buy a PLEX, break it up into a new currency called Aurum, and buy items like monocles for your character, or paint jobs for your spaceship. So far, so good.

What Syncaine fails to mention is that of course the old PLEX against ISK trade is still there. And with ISK you can buy every single item in the game. Thus if you wanted, you could buy any item you want for real world money, although you might not have the skill to use it.

Sorry, I fail to see how that is "better than the rest of the genre". Other games have items which are exclusive for people who play, and other items you can buy. In EVE you don't know how the other player got his ship, whether he earned the ISK by playing, or just used his credit card.

So yeah, added vanity items are nice. But that doesn't distract from the fact that EVE has the most extreme "virtual item for real cash" system out there.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:34 AM Permanent Link  (48) comments Links to this post

 
Non-twitch will make you rich

World of Tanks continues to grow at a spectacular rate. Last night there were more "concurrent users" on the European server than EVE has on their world-wide server; WoT has American, Russian, and Chinese servers in addition to that, and only took 10 weeks to get that many players. The Chinese reported having made $2 million in the first 2 weeks, and the other servers are probably even more profitable. And that with a game which in spite of being called "World of" actually hasn't got any persistent world in it, and is not really a MMORPG. It is a tactical, team-based shooter with the ability to level up your tanks and crew.

But what makes World of Tanks different from most other games, MMORPG or otherwise, is that is works on a somewhat slower time-scale. A very fast gun takes 2 seconds to reload, a very slow one 20 seconds, and most guns somewhere in between. The speed with which you can turn your turret does not depend on the speed with which you can mouse-turn. In short: Sub-second reaction time and twitch skills aren't helping all that much in World of Tanks. Tactical thinking, and at a higher level strategic coordination with your team helps a lot more.

Being based on a different set of skills than other games attracts a different set of players. I just joined a clan and was surprised that while predominantly male like in every shooter, the average age was far higher. Lots of players are in their 40s, like me. World of Tanks is the one game in which a middle-aged guy isn't at a complete disadvantage against a teenager.

That different target audience has financial consequences. The middle-aged guy has a lot more disposable income than the teenager, and he long ago lost that youthful naivity about money somehow being an unfair advantage. The average revenue per user in a game full of middle-aged guys is significantly higher than in a game full of twitchy teenagers. It's like if you set up a showroom to sell cars: If that attracts only a lot of teenagers, your business is in trouble. The older customers might be a lot less visibly enthusiastic about your product, but they do have the moolah, and they aren't afraid to use it.

Video games have been around long enough that selling them to guys in their 40s isn't such a strange idea any more: They grew up with video games. But many developers haven't grasped the concept yet that an older audience might desire different features from a game than a younger one. Age not only slows down reflexes, it also makes you wiser about the "value" of virtual achievements. Time availability changes with age as well. But if a game takes all this into account, and is tailored to the needs of the middle-aged guy, it has the potential to be hugely profitable.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:35 AM Permanent Link  (27) comments Links to this post

 
This wouldn't happen if game companies sold virtual items

In a weird way this week's news about Chinese prisoner being forced to farm gold in MMORPGs ties in with my previous post about buying virtual items in MMORPGs: If game companies don't sell virtual property, and the only way to get that virtual property is by hard, grinding labor, then a black market which basically sells that hard labor is going to evolve. Whether that is a prison camp or a sweatshop, in China or in some other part of the world, they all sell virtual labor for real money, because virtual labor is the only thing that counts in MMORPGs without an item shop.

A game which has the option to buy virtual goods directly from the game company destroys the business model of the sweatshop gold farmer. Unlike real labor producing real goods, virtual labor to farm virtual goods is based on the artificial scarcity of those virtual goods. As this scarcity isn't real, the game company has total control over the supply, and can always produce virtual items for cheaper than a gold farmer can farm them for. By having legal ways to buy virtual goods, the illegal and morally wrong ways to these goods are made obsolete.
- posted by Tobold @ 5:04 PM Permanent Link  (41) comments Links to this post

 
MMORPGs are too cheap

The average American spends $58 per month on hobbies. The 90th percentile, which would be the kind of people with a college or higher degree and a good income, not the super-rich 99th percentile, spends $130 per month on hobbies. A dedicated stamp collector might spend $2000 to $4000 per year on his hobby. And in most hobbies the range of possible spending is wide, so a bicycling enthusiast might spend $400 for an okay bike, or $5000 for a top-of-the-line one.

Spending on hobbies is by definition "wasted". That's the point of having a hobby, a way to waste your time and money! While other people's hobbies tend to appear strange to us, we pursue our own hobbies with a lot of energy. In a world where less than half of employees are satisfied with their jobs, people who are more passionate about their hobbies than about their job aren't all that rare. Thus spending a considerable chunk of your disposable income on your hobby is pretty much normal.

In all this, MMORPGs as a hobby look somewhat strange: They are too cheap. Even if you buy a new game or expansion once a year, plus a monthly subscription, you end up with a lot of hours of entertainment for just $200 per year. Of course you could also count the cost of your PC and internet connection, but a game like World of Warcraft doesn't need a high-end PC, and you're likely to have internet in the house anyway.

Curiouser and curiouser, not only are MMORPGs very cheap, but there is a strong negative attitude towards even the *possibility* to pay more. People react with outrage if a game adds $10 mounts or $25 sparkly ponies. But fact is that there is a strong demand from players to be able to pay more for their MMORPG hobby. Which is why games that switch from a monthly subscription fee to a Free2Play model often significantly increase revenue. Some Free2Play games report average revenue per paying user (ARPPU) of $60 per month. Which is pretty much in line what the average American spends for his hobbies. Not counting the fact that MMORPGs are a somewhat geeky hobby which is more likely to attract those people with college degrees in the 90th percentile than those in the 10th.

Could you imagine a stamp collector complaining about another stamp collector having a better collection because the other guy spent more money, and demanding that spending on stamp collections should be limited? That sort of ridiculous notion only exists in MMORPGs. With MMORPGs being predominantly PvE, it is very hard to see how somebody elses purchase of a sparkly pony or "invite a friend from a different realm" feature has any negative effect on your own game experience. And even in a pure PvP game like World of Tanks it is possible to balance the game while selling $25 high-level tanks.

The whole argument against people spending money on MMORPGs has a whiff of communism: Everybody should be equal, and nobody should be allowed to stand out through money, even if he worked hard to get that money. Well, we all know what happened to communism. It is a doomed philosophy, because people work harder if they can earn money and spend that money in conspicuous consumption. It is time to bury MMORPG communism together with the real world equivalent. We need *more* ways to spend more money in MMORPG, we need luxury subscription options, and item shops in every game. A business model in which you reward unemployed basement-dwellers for playing all day while punishing hard-working family guys for having limited time to play available is simply not making business sense. If we want multi-million dollar quality games, we need to open up possibilities for game companies to earn those millions of dollars.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:09 AM Permanent Link  (75) comments Links to this post

 
Building up worlds

Glitch is still in early beta, and thus open usually only during the weekends. Nevertheless I got far enough in the game to get a first taste of the "endgame", which in Glitch is somewhat unusual: You work together with other players to open up new zones in the world. Basically you need to find a greyed out "street" and look in one of the neighboring streets for a "project", which you access at the vendor. A project consists of several stages, in each of which you can contribute either specific items, or labor. Usually you need specific skills for that, which is why I call it the "endgame", it's something to do when you are already further advanced.

Once all phases of a project are finished, the street opens up, and the world has grown a bit. Everybody who participated gets some rewards, although only the top contributors get a really big reward and will be listed on the streets loading screen.

I find that concept really interesting. Although the new streets don't offer anything fundamentally different from the existing ones, players over time can open up whole new regions. And building up the world feels satisfying, even if it isn't exactly "player created content". Players only perform set tasks to open up developer created content. Nevertheless the idea is neat, and I could imagine some interesting applications of that in a fantasy MMORPG.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (8) comments Links to this post

 
World of Tanks reaches "3 million players"

My apologies for the flood of posts, but somehow there are a lot of news this week. The game I am currently playing the most is World of Tanks, and they just announced "3 million players". Of course that number means absolutely nothing. The one thing the raving WoW-haters out there are good for is to constantly remind us that "a million players" means very little without looking at how much money each of these players pays. In the case of World of Tanks there are thus two major caveats: Only 1 million of these players are on European and North American servers, and of course WoT is Free2Play, thus the large majority of players pays absolutely nothing.

On the other hand the 3 million number actually appears to be underreported, as the other 2 million are said to be on "Russian servers". That leaves out the Chinese, where World of Tanks is distributed by KongZhong. And as luck will have it, KongZhong just published their Q1 2011 results, attributing a 53.3% increase of revenue to $6.3 million of the Internet Games business to "the strong initial performance of WoT or World of Tanks, which was launched commercially on March 15th." If a release mid-March can increase revenue for the whole quarter by two millions, and that in China, we can be pretty sure that World of Tanks is overall quite profitable.

And that isn't a surprise to people who play World of Tanks: WoT is an excellent game, the balance between what you can play for free and what you can get for paying is well done, and it is one of the most balanced and fairest PvP games I've ever seen. That is not to say that it can't be frustrating to end up with the weakest tank on the battlefield, with your shots bouncing off the armor of much heavier tanks. But you still get some experience points if your side loses horribly, and in the next battle you might be the strongest tank. Yesterday I played my tier V tank destroyer in two battles in series, losing horribly the first battle, and then having an incredible 7-kill win streak in the second. Getting 7 kills in a 15 vs. 15 battle means you killed nearly as many tanks as your 14 team mates together!

Not only does World of Tanks have those ups and downs, preventing you from becoming frustrated from permanently losing. It also offers weaker tanks in a battle the opportunity to do something useful, like "lighting up" the enemy for your artillery, and rewards you for these other activities. Yes, its hard to kill a heavier tank of a higher tier, but if you do you get a lot more xp than if you are in the bigger tank one-shotting the weaker ones.

One interesting development to further improve balance and fun for the more casual players is that Wargaming.net is working on a Clan Wars feature where powerful clans battle over a map of Europe. This removes the most powerful and organized players from the random battles, thus keeping them more balanced for the lesser mortals. Of course the downside of that is that if you don't have a very high tier tank, and strong committment, and are willing to install voice chat, you won't get an invite to a clan partipating in that Clan Wars. On the other hand that might just be as well, as the average player with a medium tier tank wouldn't last seconds in a hardcore clan battle.

So even as a not-so-hardcore player I am currently having a lot of fun in World of Tanks. There is a "double xp for your first victory" feature for every tank which helps people like me who rather play lots of different tanks with different roles instead of heading straight for the highest tier of a single tank type. And with the patches adding new maps and new tanks, I'm not yet growing bored of the game. Of course the combat being a lot more interesting than that of a MMORPG helps a lot here. So count me in among those "3 million players", and even among the minority who actually gives money to Wargaming.net.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:21 AM Permanent Link  (25) comments Links to this post

 
Free2Play barbarians

Age of Conan is going Free2Play with a not-so-unusual "hybrid" business model in which you can choose whether you want to just play for free, or pay for things in the item shop, or become a "premium" subscriber. The most remarkable bit about this news is how very unremarkable announcements like this have become. The usual reaction is "What? They were *still* subscription based?". Right now the only game which actually would surprise people if it went Free2Play is World of Warcraft.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:05 AM Permanent Link  (16) comments Links to this post

 
Judged by a jury of your peers

Riot Games sent out a press release to me and many game sites (and then curiously failed to post it on their own press release site) about launching their tribunal system for League of Legends. The tribunal is a system where reported cases of bad player behavior are being judged by a jury of other players, who take on the job of GMs to decide whether another player should receive a temporary ban as punishment. Jurors who vote with the majority (and thus are considered "reasonable") are even paid in influence points, the virtual currency of the game.

Player-controlled systems to weed out bad behavior is something that many people have been asking for. The reason why not more games have it is that previous implementations failed spectacularly, giving us for example The Sims Online mafia which extorted other players for money by threatening to blackball them. It is easy to see why a reputation point system would never work for example for solving the conflicts between tanks, healer, and dps in a World of Warcraft group: The dps would never admit that them pulling aggro or standing in the fire is not the tank's or healer's fault, and would just outvote them unless you gave the tank and healer 3 votes each.

Riot Games realized that the problem of most reputation systems is that the judgement is done by the people present at the scene, who are rarely impartial. Thus in the tribunal system the judgement is done by random strangers, who are provided complete chat logs and other relevant information to base their decision on. This much diminishes the chance of the jurors acting out of spite, or blackmailing the defendant.

I believe that their system has a chance to work much better than previous ideas because of the jurors not being the witnesses at the same time. The only flaw I can find in the system is that it is effectively asking players to perform a job for free which the company would otherwise have to pay GMs for. But as long as the players are more than willing to do so, and the response time for reporting bad behavior improves a lot due to that, the overall effect is probably positive. What do you think?
- posted by Tobold @ 6:56 AM Permanent Link  (23) comments Links to this post

 
Superior marketing

I am seriously impressed with Trion. Every MMORPG company I know is offering free server transfers from high-population servers to low-population servers. Only Rift manages to announce this exact same feature, a move to "select shards", and get widely praised for revolutionizing the MMORPG business model with free server transfers. Kudos! Well done, Trion!
- posted by Tobold @ 8:13 AM Permanent Link  (24) comments Links to this post

 
Pathetic

I find people who wish that other players have a worse experience in a game than they do pathetic.
- posted by Tobold @ 1:00 AM Permanent Link  (35) comments Links to this post

 
Removing the cap

Sven from Fail Pug has an interesting idea: What if World of Warcraft would remove the cap of how many people could enter a raid instance? Basically this solution would make the difficulty level of raids adjustable. Can't beat the dungeon with 10 people? Well, bring 20! And as Sven mentioned, you could even use very different tactics, for example zerging a boss without using a tank.

I'm very much a fan of variable difficulty levels, because it allows everybody access to the same content, instead of having a shard division between the leet and the noobs. Everybody could organize a "tourist raid", if he just got enough players together. Best of all, the risk-reward-ratio is self-adjusting: If the amount of epics that drop is constant, bringing more players diminishes the rewards per player. What do you think?
- posted by Tobold @ 2:22 PM Permanent Link  (48) comments Links to this post

 
Free games from Sony

Sony is giving me a whole new perspective on Free2Play games by offering me tons of games for free. And I mean *really* for free, not with an item shop attached. To "compensate" my non-existing suffering from the recent outage, and for having subscribed to various SOE games over the last decade, I received a free 45-day subscription to all of them: EQ, EQ2, SWG, Vanguard, Pirates of the Burning Sea, Free Realms, everything. But as Nils mentioned in the recent thread about cheaper MMORPGs, price isn't necessarily a determining factor in choosing which game one plays or doesn't play. Even for free I can't even be bothered to download and installed these SOE games. I'm currently in a phase where I can't stand questerrand-based games with hotkey-based combat, and that pretty much eliminates 90% of the MMORPGs out there.

Nevertheless I'd like to thank Sony for their generosity. Because I do own a PS3 and PSP, and the fake data I gave them were stolen, I will get two free games for each of these platforms when the Playstation Store comes back up, presumably this week. I looked at some reviews and decided to take LittleBigPlanet for both platforms, as well as Infamous for the PS3, and Killzone Liberation for the PSP. The other games on the list were mostly racing games, and I don't like those. The advantage of the free PS3/PSP games over the free subscription for SOE games is that I can download the console games now and play them much later; the SOE games I would have to play right now or never.

Overall I suffered no damages from the Sony hack, and got some free games, so I don't bear any ill will against them. The whole issue revolves around whether Sony "sufficiently" protected their network and their users data, and given just lots of rumours and having little technical knowledge in that area I simply can't say whether Sony is the villain or the victim in this story.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:20 AM Permanent Link  (21) comments Links to this post

 
Time vs. Money

If somebody who had never played World of Warcraft before were to buy an account with a max-level character equipped with the best possible gear, he still wouldn't be any good as a raider, because he would be lacking the skill. This example is widely used to show how getting a strong character by playing is good, while getting a strong character with real money is bad. Unfortunately the example is completely spurious: Somebody who had never played World of Warcraft before would feel no desire at all to buy an account with a maxed out character. The reality looks very different, and the moral questions aren't quite as black and white as some people would like.

By playing a game you get better at it. Somebody who played a lot more chess than me is probably better than me at chess, and very likely to beat me. But then my pawns haven't been upgraded with the Sword of Uberness or a Kalashnikov. In games with any sort of "character development", your overall power is a mix of skill and stats. The most skillful level 1 WoW character still can't harm the least skillful level 85 character in PvP. By how much exactly skill can make up for lack of stats depends on the game, but clearly skill isn't everything. Furthermore the learning of skills is very much a matter of diminishing returns: A few hours of play easily get you to 80%+ of the skill of a true master in most games, especially MMORPGs. In most games it takes considerably longer to get your character to maximum stats than it takes to get to a really good skill level.

When I last wrote about World of Tanks I mentioned that you could buy level V tanks for $5, but that this wasn't a very good option, because those tanks aren't very good. Meanwhile WoT has been patched to v0.6.4, and now you can buy level VIII tanks for $25. I still don't plan to buy any of these, and they still have the disadvantage that they are outside the tech tree, and can't be upgraded. But a n00b with a level VIII heavy tank has a very good chance of beating me (or even a more skilled player than me) in my level V Russian KV heavy tank I got from working my way up from the bottom.

Now World of Tanks players suffer from the same sort of jealousies than the players of other games and thus tend to dismiss people in these bought tanks as bad players. But again it is unlikely that somebody who never played World of Tanks before would feel any desire to buy a $25 tank before knowing whether he actually likes the game. And I can very much imagine somebody like me, having played WoT for 50+ hours and having played up to the first heavy tank in the regular way looking at 100+ hours it would take to get from there to a level VIII tank and deciding to take a $25 shortcut to there instead. That would probably still make him less skilled than somebody who put in those 100+ hours with heavy tanks to get to level VIII, but not by much. And if we are brutally honest for a second, we all know that in any MMORPG or other game with levels you can always find a way to "grind up" to a higher level without necessarily getting more skilled in the process. As much as we would like our level/gear/stats to be an reflection of our superior skills, in reality we are very well aware that this is at best a flawed image. We might not want to admit that about ourselves, but as soon as somebody else claims he is better than us because he has for example a higher gearscore, we immediately dismiss that notion as ridiculous.

So if time spent in game isn't really all that related to skill, is it really so bad to have the option to advance faster by paying real money? I didn't buy any tanks, but by taking the "subscription" option for about $8.50 for a month I'm advancing 50% faster than somebody not paying. I would need to seriously split hairs to argue that this is morally superior to buying a level VIII tank. I just decided to not skip ahead because I find leveling up to be fun (which appears to be a strange idea to many players in many games). Whether you get to a high-level tank or character with time or with money is ultimately no difference at all.

I would like World of Warcraft to have the option of buying level 85 characters with full iLevel 333 blue gear (the stuff you get from normal dungeons). Not because I necessarily would like to buy one. But because I feel Blizzard has tuned the leveling speed to a compromise between those players who level for fun, and those players who want to get to the "real game" at the level cap as fast as possible, and ended up making both groups unhappy. If players were able to skip ahead for $25, the leveling speed could be cut in half and be a lot more appropriate for people who enjoy that sort of leveling content. There will always be people complaining about the ability to buy your way up to the top, but behind all that acting morally superior there is often the simple fact that they just can't afford the money alternative. If your main advantage in a game is that you can spend a lot more time in it than the next guy, you don't want him to have the option of advancing by an alternate route.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:07 AM Permanent Link  (35) comments Links to this post

 
Has the MMO-lite model failed?

Atari announced they are ditching Cryptic Studios, maker of City of Heroes/Villains, Champions Online, and Star Trek Online, with Neverwinter in development. Cryptic has a rather peculiar business model, producing MMORPGs which have considerably less features than classic MMORPGs, but offer other genres than just fantasy. Apparently that wasn't a financial success, so Atari is looking to sell the studio they bought just two-and-a-half years ago.

That makes me wonder whether the feature-lite MMO is really viable at all. Measured by cost per hour of entertainment, MMORPGs aren't all that expensive even in their full-featured version. And there are some "WoW clones" out there which offer nearly the same amount of features as World of Warcraft and are free to play. So unlike other businesses, for example cars where a low-cost car with few features makes sense, a MMO-lite doesn't really appear to have a viable place in the market.

What do you think?
- posted by Tobold @ 8:15 AM Permanent Link  (30) comments Links to this post

 
Premium Dungeon Finder

Blizzard apparently announced a package of premium features, that is World of Warcraft features you can get by paying extra, which includes a cross-realm Dungeon Finder functionality with which you can invite RealID friends from other servers. I think the marketing department failed to do the proper research on this one: Most of my commenters would rather pay extra for their Dungeon Finder to be *not* cross-realm, but limited to their own server. Missed opportunity, Blizzard, missed opportunity. You could even have charged both groups extra!
- posted by Tobold @ 1:37 PM Permanent Link  (34) comments Links to this post

 
Timescales

Consider for a moment some of the actions we regularly do in a MMORPG, and compare how much time they take in the virtual world, and how much time they would take if that world was real. It is easy to see that MMORPGs work on an accelerated timescale: Traveling by boat from one continent to the next takes only minutes. So does crossing a continent on foot. A feast takes 30 seconds. That accelerated timescale is a design decision based on the realities of players' available time: Most players only play a few hours per day. But like all design decisions, this has consequences.

One of these consequences is that wars in MMORPGs are often getting quite silly, especially if the developers try to depict any sort of territorial conquest. If you only have 2 hours a day to play, you don't want to spend those 2 hours guarding a keep on the off chance that some invaders stop by. And the other 22 hours you aren't available for defense anyway. So instead of conquering and holding territories, there is a merry back and forth, with both sides attacking whatever point isn't defended. And even the weakest faction can always take a keep by attacking at 3 am, when there will only be NPCs to defend it. Not to mention that in many cases attacking is better rewarded than defending, so the two sides engage in win-trading instead of warfare.

And it's not only MMORPGs, but many other forms of online strategy games which suffer from the same problem: You get attacked while offline, and you attack when online. I don't know any game which has a realistic looking war of territorial conquest in a massively multiplayer online world.

One interesting discovery this year was playing Minethings, and seeing that games which a much slower pace are actually possible. If you move from one city to the next in Minethings, it takes hours, even a day if your transport is slow. And I was wondering if that much slower pace wouldn't result in much better strategy games of territorial conquest. Imagine you control an army which moves at the speed of an actual army on a continent the size of an actual continent. And lots of other players also controlled little armies, divided into several factions. Because the pace of the game would be very slow, it wouldn't really matter how many hours per day you are offline. The outcome of combat would be determined based on the strength of the armies encountering each other, geography, and strategies set up in advance by the players, and wouldn't change whether the players are online or offline. In such a game you could have meaningful territorial conquest. Players could communicate by in-game mail as well as chat, and try to arrange great strategies together.

The fast-paced action of modern games is good for many types of gameplay. But I do think that strategy games would profit from being made a lot slower. If you play a game for several months anyway, then why not slow the game down to a pace which avoids being impacted by players' online hours?
- posted by Tobold @ 8:27 AM Permanent Link  (12) comments Links to this post

 
Quests

One thing MMORPG players have surprisingly little difficulty with is cognitive dissonance: Most have no problem whatsoever to hold two or more conflicting ideas in their head. This shows up very well in the recent discussion in the blogosphere about quests: Complaining that World of Warcraft ruined the MMORPG genre by introducing a heavy reliance of gameplay on quests does not change the complainers opinion that WoW didn't innovate at all and is just a well-made clone of previous MMORPGs.

The truth is that World of Warcraft is considerably more innovative than most players give it credit for. And a lot of that innovation is in the area of quests. In spite of the name, players didn't "quest" in Everquest, and Ultima Online didn't have any quests at all, except for one gameplay element you might call an escort quest.

Now the people who dislike quests claim that without quests player would have infinite freedom to explore the world in whatever way they like. That is a noble sentiment, with absolutely no base in reality. Whether there are quests in a game or not, most players just want to advance in the fastest possible way. In a game with quests, the added reward for finishing the quest makes feasible to move around, follow the quests instructions to find and kill certain mobs, and then return to the quest hub for the next quest. Players end up visiting every corner of a zone, as long as all of those corners are covered by quests. In a game without quests, there is no incentive to move around. You gain experience points by killing mobs. And somewhere there is always a spot where killing mobs is slightly easier or more comfortable than elsewhere. The knowledge of those spots travels quickly, and then people set up camps in these spots and kill the same mobs over and over, without ever moving. That is the reason why EQ was also known as "Evercamp".

Now it is totally possible to solve that problem without the use of quests. But simply removing quests from MMORPGs will not lead to enjoyable games, but would be a step backward to static camps. Before you can remove quests from MMORPGs, you need to come up with another solution of how to keep players moving. My favorite solution would be replacing static spawns by dynamic spawns: If too many players kill wolves in the forest, those wolves will respawn slower and slower, until camping that spot becomes unprofitable. Another possible, and more individual solution would be diminishing returns: The 10th wolf simply gives significantly less xp than the first one.

Thus yes, quests can be improved upon or removed from MMORPGs altogether. Just don't claim than introducing permanently quest-guided gameplay wasn't a major change in the industry, or that you could remove quests without replacing them by something else.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:33 AM Permanent Link  (24) comments Links to this post

 
How to slow down leveling

My wife is a casual World of Warcraft player. She doesn't participate in any form of group content, neither dungeons, nor raids, nor PvP. In consequence there isn't much to do for her in the "endgame" besides daily quests, and thus she has tons of alts and spends most of her time leveling. And since Cataclysm, she isn't all that happy about her leveling speed: It goes too fast.

The problem is a design philosophy of Blizzard, who apparently decided to keep the overall leveling time up to the level cap more or less constant. So every time they add levels on top of the game, they need to make the lower levels faster by the same amount of time. Three expansions after vanilla this has led to downright silly leveling speed under 60. Thus if you are a casual player, and want to play through the quests of a zone, it is kind of annoying if you outlevel the quests before finishing them.

Thus me and my wife worked out how we could slow down her leveling speed to a more pleasurable pace. Now the first point would be to remove heirloom items that give xp bonuses, but my wife hasn't got any of those. The second strategy is deliberately logging off outside of cities and inns, so as to get less rest xp bonus. But ultimately the only thing that really works well is paying 10 gold to stop all xp gain. There is an NPC in the main city's PvP building which allows that. Stop gaining xp, play until the level of the quests and mobs rises higher than yours, then turn on xp gain again for another 10 gold.

This works, but in the end I still think that Blizzard has a design problem here. The needs of the players who think that the game begins at the level cap, and who want to level as fast as possible, clash with the needs of the casual players who want to have fun while questing and leveling. Leveling from 1 to 60 feels like watching a movie in fast forward, not a good speed if you are actually interested in enjoying the content. Sometimes I think it would be better to slow down leveling back to vanilla WoW speed, and simply sell people level 85 characters with BiS blue gear from normal dungeons for $20 if they desire to skip the leveling part.
- posted by Tobold @ 3:15 PM Permanent Link  (29) comments Links to this post

 
Voting with my wallet

In spite of spending a lot of time with elves and wizards, I am very well aware of the necessities of real life: Bills have to be paid at the end of the month, developers need to eat, and game companies need to make a profit to keep the developers employed and the games running. Which is why I don't mind paying for games, not even for those labeled "Free2Play". As long as I feel I am supporting a worthy game. And of course I like analyzing the various different models what kind of advantages you get for your money.

So now that it turned out that I like World of Tanks more than I thought I would, I did buy "gold", their store currency. That makes a huge difference. Fans will tell you that the gold tanks and ammo which are exclusive to people paying money aren't all that good, and I would agree. But the main effect of paying money is to get to everything much faster: Crew training normally takes ages, but by spending gold you get them to 100% immediately, which has a huge effect. Gold allows you convert the useless experience you gain with your lower level tanks into free experience you can use with your top of the line tanks. And you can buy "subscriptions" for various amounts of time with gold, and the 50% more experience points and credits speed things up considerably. Veterans tell me that at the higher levels it actually gets very hard to advance without gold, as repairs end up costing you all your income without the 50% bonus. Oh, and if you still need credits (the currency you can earn in game), you can always exchange gold for currency.

I also spent real money for buying credits in Glitch. Which isn't necessary at all, because you can only spend them on fluff, items that change your appearance. But as I would really like to see Glitch succeed, I don't mind forking out some cash to support them.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:08 AM Permanent Link  (12) comments Links to this post

 
Blogger ate my post

I didn't post earlier today, because Blogger was down. And when it came back up, my last post (the one about player segregation) had disappeared. Now it would be possible to restore the text, as it was sent out via Buzz and RSS as well, but all the comments are irretrievably lost. :( So as to not repeat the same discussion again, and in the hope that maybe Blogger restores the lost thread later, I'm not posting the same text again.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:52 PM Permanent Link  (10) comments Links to this post

 
Doubting the value of Apartheid

Both Nils and Klepsacovic have been arguing for player segregation in MMORPGs, separating the good players from the bad players by some game feature. I don't think that apartheid (the Afrikaans word for segregation) is a good idea. Not because it is like in the real world, where Apartheid didn't work all that well in South Afrika, or segregation in the US south; but because virtual worlds are NOT like the real world.

The idea of player segregation is based on a flawed premise, that there are two distinct sorts of players, the "good" and the "bad", or you could call them the "hardcore" and the "casual". That is almost certainly not true. If you plot any natural skill, talent, or intelligence of any population, you always get some sort of gaussian distribution, that is a bell curve in which most people are average, and few people are very good or very bad. For segregation to work, this would have to be a bimodal curve.

One well researched example of this is the IQ curve. In any population most people are of average intelligence, and there are equal, but small, numbers of geniuses and morons. But the IQ curve also shows that people are notoriously unable to have a realistic view of themselves. If you ask people to estimate their IQ, the average of the estimations is 120, which is significantly higher than the real average of 100.

Thus if you ask players whether they are good or bad, you will get pretty much everybody thinking that they are among the good players. If you make "easy" and "hard" servers, you'll find the easy servers standing empty, because nobody would even want to admit that he might not be top notch.

If self-segregation doesn't work, then how about forced segregation? Again that isn't quite as easy as in real life, where whether somebody is black or white is relatively obvious in most cases. If you look at the current population, there are obviously some players who have all the achievements of a top raider, but who did either buy their way into a top raiding guild like Gevlon did, or are the hardcore guild leader's girlfriend. On the other hand you'll have real top notch players who took a break, and are missing the gearscore and achievements you'd be looking for.

In principle some sort of player segregation is already on offer, the same dungeons exist in normal and heroic form. The huge amount of complaints this current system evokes shows that this isn't working well at all. The fundamental reason for that is shared responsibility, especially for the dps role where there are always other players fulfilling the same role. Any group content can only measure the performance of a team, and thus there is always room for a less good player to be "carried" by the rest of the team. If you wanted a working player segregation, you could only offer solo content.

And ultimately the idea of player segregation in virtual world is bad for the same moral and social reasons that segregation and apartheid are bad in the real world: The hardcore raidleader playing with his less competent girlfriend is *not* a failure of the system, but a symptom of MMORPGs being social games as well as games about performance. Segregating friends because they have different degrees of skill is a fundamentally flawed concept, and leads to less attractive, less social, less friendly games, which only the most unfeeling players would actually want to play.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:45 AM Permanent Link  (60) comments Links to this post

 
Losing power through leveling

One of the defining characteristics of a role-playing game, as opposed to let’s say an adventure game, is that your character gets more powerful over time. Whether that is by some sort of skill system or a leveling system, there is always some sort of “character development” mechanic with some numbers going up in value. Games that aren’t RPGs, but still have some similar character development mechanic are said to “contain role-playing elements”, a phrase that makes the kind of people who think role-playing means “acting in character” cringe. So I was playing World of Tanks, which has such a level-gaining system, and would like to discuss the comparison with leveling in MMORPGs here.

In World of Tanks you start with a level 1 tank. You gain a form of experience points, called research points in this game, which you can spend to research better equipment for your tank, like a better gun, or a better engine. And once you researched the prerequisites, you can also research access to level 2 tanks. But unlike a MMORPG, the level 2 tank doesn’t replace the level 1 tank; you simply end up owning both of them, until you sell one to make room in your garage. Now there is really no reason to keep that level 1 tank, it is just plain bad, and every nation just has one sort of them. But at level 2 there are already different types: light tanks, medium tanks (heavies come higher up in level), SPGs (artillery), and tank destroyers. Thus keeping several different level 2 tanks while only developing one branch further to level 3 and beyond makes more sense.

That is what I did, and after switching back and forth between level 2 and level 3 tanks a lot for a while, I noticed something curious: The higher level tank was less successful than the lower level tank of the same type. This is due to World of Tanks’ pairing algorithm: A level 2 tank is most likely to end up in battle against level 1 and 2 tanks, while a level 3 tank is most likely to end up in battle against level 3 to 10 tanks. Which means my fully equipped level 2 tank is the best possible tank in the battle of the level 1 and 2 tanks, while my not fully researched level 3 tank is the worst possible tank in the higher level battle. I need to keep playing the level 3 tank to get up to the higher levels; but playing the lower level tanks is plain more fun, and as I’m still getting *some* reward (credits, free experience) from playing the lower levels, I’ll keep doing that too.

Losing power by leveling is less obvious in a MMORPG, as you don’t keep your lower level character around after leveling up. The higher level simply overwrites the lower level, so you have no opportunity to compare them. In principle your higher level character is more powerful, thus if you had problems with some particular mob at some level, you’ll have a better chance of killing that same mob after leveling up. Only that isn’t what is actually happening: While leveling up you usually also move to the next zone, and battle against different mobs, which are also more powerful. And most games work a bit like World of Tanks here: The power of your opponents goes up faster than your own. If you made a statistic of all the character deaths on a server on any given day, you would find that by far the most deaths are incurred at the level cap. Getting your level 1 character killed is nearly impossible in most modern games.

As I mentioned before, another game I am currently playing when it is up is Glitch, a MMORPG without combat, which uses a skill-system which resembles the one of EVE. Now as there is no combat, your character development isn’t measured in how hard a monster you can beat. But that doesn’t mean Glitch doesn’t have challenges. The fundamental challenge in Glitch is balancing your energy, “storing” energy by cooking food, and then using that energy for energy-draining activities like mining. And in Glitch increasing a skill really means life gets easier for you. If you increase your mining skill you consume less energy while mining, if you increase your cooking skill you can make better kinds of food, and if you increase the various harvesting skills you get more food ingredients for less energy. And I must say that actually getting more powerful through character development is more fun than losing power through leveling.

Of course in World of Tanks, once you get past level 3, you’re also getting more powerful through leveling. But MMORPGs seem to be stuck in a design where your character is unlikely to die while leveling up, leading to an endgame where you scrape his remains of the floor every half hour. Most endgame activities in modern MMORPGs would be not feasible in a game with permadeath. The highest level characters are the most likely to die, and somehow that doesn’t feel all that epic or heroic to me. Even the whole MMO blogosphere and game forums community is obsessed with a permanent discussion of failure. Most bickering about the state of the community, fail PuGs, and guild drama, is caused by this game design where your character loses power through leveling up, and him failing a dozen times before any success is considered normal. Makes you wonder why you bothered leveling that character up, only to turn him from a hero to a permanent failure.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:37 AM Permanent Link  (31) comments Links to this post

 
SOE is doomed

Just one less humorous afterthought on MMORPG companies losing subscribers: Technically SOE has zero players for all their MMORPGs together right now. When these games will be back up at an unspecified future date, SOE will still not have any revenue for another month, because they are handing out free 30-day subscriptions to everybody affected. And after that they will have to see how many people still trust them with their credit card data.

I do think there is a non-negligible chance of SOE closing shop, or at least significantly down-sizing the company, before the end of the year.
- posted by Tobold @ 5:52 PM Permanent Link  (16) comments Links to this post

 
Blizzard is doomed

I just wanted to get this commentary in before the rest of the blogosphere jumps in on it: Blizzard is doomed, doomed I'm telling ya! They are losing subscribers to World of Warcraft! In yesterday's investors earning call they had to admit that instead of having 12 million subscribers, they are down to 11.4 million. That is a full 5% drop from the peak!!!! If they continue losing 150,000 subscribers per month, the last player will leave in summer 2017.

Clearly Blizzard is on the way to ruin, and the devs will soon have to sleep under bridges and warm themselves on campfires. Fortunately Activision has a lot of paper they can burn: 1,450,000,000 crispy dollar notes, their revenue for the last financial year. That should keep them warm for a while.

Oh, and the Diablo 3 beta will launch in Q3 of this year.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:59 AM Permanent Link  (44) comments Links to this post

 
"Playing" World of Tanks

I played World of Tanks a lot yesterday. I am not extremely good at this game, still learning a lot. I did not look up optimal specs or equipment, nor spent real money on consumables. I didn't read up on the best possible tactics, but just tried out all sorts of crazy tactics, most of which only got me killed. I just played, and had fun. When I got killed, I just hopped into the next tank and started the next game, so I got a lot of games done.

And in not a single one of these games did any of my fellow players criticize my gear, build, or performance. Go figure.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:46 AM Permanent Link  (40) comments Links to this post

 
Improving communities

Just a short poll: Which of the following measures would you implement into your MMORPG to improve community?

A) Make the game ultra-hard, to the point where only the l33t even survive the tutorial.

B) Raise the monthly subscription price to $50, and use the extra income to pay for more GMs moderating general chat.

C) Require a test of IQ, general education, and literacy before being allowed to play.

D) Other (Please state what)
- posted by Tobold @ 6:56 AM Permanent Link  (51) comments Links to this post

 
Extrapolating optimization

Different blogs / bloggers have different styles, often contributing to the same discussion in very different ways. One of the blogs I read regularly is Killed in a Smiling Accident, a blog specialized in a more humorous, satirical style of expression. And I must say Melmoth really nailed it in his contribution to the optimization discussion: If we say that it is better to use an optimized build, gear, spell rotation, and boss strategy from the internet than trying to figure out those things by ourselves, then why take the next step and make a bot program from the internet do the execution as well?

Going even further, I would rather play a game where I do the strategic and tactical decisions, and the actual combat is completely automated. I used to play board games like RoboRally or Diplomacy that worked like that: The players made all the decisions, wrote them down, and then the hidden commands were all revealed at the same time, and the execution performed without further input from the players. That should be even easier to implement in a computer game.

Now some people will say that the execution *is* the game in a MMORPG like World of Warcraft. But if that is the case, then why do we have things like talent trees and different spell choices in the game?

Thought experiment: If you slowed down the execution part of a game down by a factor of 10, would it still be fun? I believe that raiding in WoW fails that test: The decisions you take during raid encounters are often completely trivial and uninteresting, like whether to stand in the fire or not. If you had lots of time to execute your moves, the moves itself would be far too boring to interest anybody.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:35 AM Permanent Link  (67) comments Links to this post

 
A question of process

My post on the fear of the sub-optimal evoked a lot of echo, but the fans of the optimal mostly either misunderstood or misrepresented what I said. I am not deliberately trying to make my characters sub-optimal. In fact I believe that optimizing your character can be a lot of fun if it is done as part of the game. Basically you look at a bunch of complicated options, select one on your own, try it out, and see how it works. If it isn't fun and doesn't lead to good results, you discard it, and try something else. Ultimately you arrive at the optimum.

But that isn't how it works today. As spinks says: "Right now, far from having any fun with optimisation, if there was a button in the game that said ‘optimise my character’ that would tweak talent trees, inform the player of the optimal dps rotation, and assign some optimal gear for the current raid then most players would HAPPILY press it."

The problem is not the result of optimization, but the process leading to it. Yes, I want for example my priest in WoW to be optimal. But I would very much like to be able to make a build with lightwell, and see how it works out. Not only do I believe that trying out things for yourself is a lot more fun that looking them up on the internet, I also believe that ultimately the optimum you arrive at through experimentation is *better* than the optimum you looked up on EJ. Because EJ only has the numbers, and doesn't know anything about your personal preferences, strengths, and weaknesses. A build that is optimal on paper is in reality not optimal for everybody.

So I wonder how you guys read crime novels. Just like I want my characters to be optimal, I want to know who the murderer was at the end of that crime novel. I just object to the process of skipping ahead and directly reading the last page. Because the fun is in reading the novel, and guessing for yourself who the murderer is, even if that isn't the fastest or most optimal method. The same is true for MMORPGs: I want to *play* them, not skip them to reach the optimum state. And playing involves trying things out, which by necessity involves being in a sub-optimal state for part of the time.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:27 AM Permanent Link  (56) comments Links to this post

 
The value of virtual rewards

What would you rather have? A raid in which after much struggle you kill the boss, but he doesn't drop any loot? Or the loot without having to kill the boss?

Via Bio Break I stumbled upon The Babbling Gamer, a relatively new blog, where Warsyde is pondering this question of the value of virtual rewards vs. the experience of playing the game. I can only agree with his conclusion that the pixel rewards lost a lot of their attraction over time, and that I'd rather play for the entertainment experience.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (17) comments Links to this post

 
World of Tanks

You probably think that I don't like PvP. But absolute statements are rarely true, and the more nuanced truth is that I don't like how PvP is done in most MMORPGs: Twitch-based, and often asymmetrical and unbalanced. Give me a somewhat slower, more tactical, and well balanced PvP game, and I'll be having fun. Case in point: World of Tanks. A friend persuaded me to try it, and I found that game to be excellent entertainment. Maybe not something I'll play for months and months, but fun enough for some time.

Of course World of Tanks, in spite of the "World of" part of the name, is not a MMORPG at all. There actually isn't any world at all in the game. There are only PvP maps, 15 vs. 15 players, with various landscapes from WWII towns to North African desert. Other than that there is only your garage, storing tanks from various nations. There you click on "Start Battle", which usually gets you into a new battle within a minute or two, and the real game begins. You control a WWII tank in a group with 14 other players, against 15 opponent players. Forget historical realism, both sides use tanks from all nationalities. A battle can't last more than 15 minutes, and the side which either eliminates the other in that time, or holds the enemy flag point for 100 seconds wins. Win or lose, everybody leaves the battle with some experience points and credits. Experience can be used to "research" better equipment or other tanks, and then the credits can be used to buy those.

Unlike other multi-player shooters, there are no respawns in a World of Tank battle. If you're dead, you can only watch the rest of the battle (pressing the right mouse-button moves the camera to the next of your still active team mates). You can't even quit early, because then you don't get xp and credits [EDIT: It turns out you CAN quit, but your current tank will remain in battle, so you'd have to do the next battle in a different tank]. Thus there is an obvious advantage in playing carefully instead of gung ho. Tanks can hide behind walls or in bushes, and you need to find the enemy first before you can shoot him. Thus even light scout tanks have an important role, because without them the self-propelled-gun artillery tanks don't have anything to shoot at. Tactical combat, at a not too high speed, I love it! As a bonus, World of Tanks does an excellent job of balancing the two sides.

About the cost of all that I have two good news, and one bad one: The good news is that you can play for free, and that the game doesn't shove the payment options down your throat every two minutes. The bad news is that everything you can buy gives you serious advantages in game. You buy "gold", and can exchange that gold for tanks, better crew, the in-game currency, or even better ammo. You can also buy a subscription and get 50% more xp and credits from every fight. If you play for free you at least advance significantly slower, and some items like the better ammo you can't obtain at all without real money.

I'll keep playing this for a while, occasionally, but at the moment I'm not planning to spend money on the game. The battles are fun as they are even with my lowest level artillery tank, so I'm not tempted to spend money to "get faster to the fun part". Maybe the devs did a too good job balancing the game. ;)
- posted by Tobold @ 5:28 PM Permanent Link  (17) comments Links to this post

 
Achievement Porn

Just a quick link to an essay on Achievement Porn by Pete Michaud. I couldn't agree more, especially with the key quote of "Any achievement in a video game is a “fake achievement.”"
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (47) comments Links to this post

 
Fear of the sub-optimal

Having quit World of Warcraft, I now have a lot of time to play other games. Over the years I missed a lot of great single-player PC games, because I was too busy with MMORPGs. Thus it was only recently that I unpacked my still shrink-wrapped copy of Mass Effect 1 and installed it. I started playing, and very soon I had to make decisions on how to distribute skill points for my character. And for a moment I was paralyzed by fear: What if I click on the wrong skill to improve? I simply don’t know which is the “best build”, so what if I choose something sub-optimal?

I’ve been playing computer role-playing games since the days of the Amiga, and I’ve never had that sort of fear of the sub-optimal. It is something I acquired in MMORPGs. My very first Everquest character was a Halfling druid, and based on the in-game description of the stats I had distributed his starting stat points in part into intelligence. Of course “everybody knows” that A) Halflings aren’t the optimal race for druids in EQ and B) druid spells work on wisdom, not intelligence. Thus after playing that Halfling for weeks and learning how EQ works, I deleted him and replaced him by an Elven druid with the proper stats. It has been downhill from there for the next 10 years. One of the key moments that lead to the decision to quit WoW was one of my guild mates chiding me for wearing a sub-optimal piece of gear in a heroic.

There is a wide-spread cult of optimum efficiency towards a single goal in MMORPGs. If you don’t have the same goal, Gevlon will compare you to a pedophile. If you have the same goal but aren’t on the optimum path towards it and moving sufficiently fast, you’re only a moron & slacker. Now Gevlon is just the most disgustingly outspoken high priest of that cult, but the attitude is everywhere. “No, you’re doing it wrong” is something a MMORPG player gets told all the time. Unless you get vote kicked before anybody actually telling you what you do wrong.

The very definition of “playing” involves trying out stuff for fun. The absence of real consequences allows the player to experiment, because it is “play”, and not serious or “for real”. The fun is in learning what works and what doesn’t work, not in getting the answer from somewhere and just applying it. Good games allow you to play around, to make those famous “interesting decisions”, which are interesting because one solution is not obviously better than another. My fear of the sub-optimal in Mass Effect is unfounded: If I make a “wrong” decision, let’s say neglecting defense over offense, the game itself will give me gradual feedback, by making me notice that I’m more often heavily wounded. Until I get the clue and put points into defensive skills at the next level-up. It might even be totally viable to play the whole game through with very different builds.

In principle that isn’t much different in MMORPGs: I could try out different talent builds, and see what works best. The times of Everquest where I needed to reroll to respec are over, I have a lot more freedom to reconsider in modern MMORPGs. Unfortunately that only works in the less interesting single-player part of the game. The multi-player part is not only much harder and thus a lot less forgiving of sub-optimal alternatives, but it is also packed full of the harshest possible critics: Your fellow players. In the case of World of Warcraft, Blizzard made a serious mistake by arming those critics with the ability to inspect you in every detail. If players could opt out of the armory and their gear and build being inspected by others, at least some individuality would be possible. But with millions of players having crowdsourced the best solution, these days you simply aren’t allowed to “play” or think for yourself. The devious cult of efficiency is working in a vicious self-enforcing way: Efficiency makes players want to rush through that dungeon as fast as possible, and that forces them to require from all players in the group that they are optimally equipped and prepared. There is no room for experimentation or “learning how to play”, in spite of the sad fact that the single-player game spectacularly fails at teaching you the skills necessary for the multi-player part. There is no room for actual “playing”, you are just supposed to be a robot doing optimal moves in perfect execution. Where is the fun in that?

One escape from that trap is starting to play a brand new game. It takes the player base a while to figure out the optimal builds, and as long as nobody knows your build is sub-optimal, you can have fun trying out different things. But if the game is sufficiently popular, that happy state of affairs will only last a few months. Once the bulk of players arrives at the level cap, and challenging endgame content looms, players will get less and less forgiving of their group members doing anything sub-optimal. Thus to permanently escape from the cultists of efficiency, one needs to play either single-player games, or multi-player games which are less targeted at the Achiever Bartle-type. Which is why I’ll be playing single-player games or more exploration-based MMORPGs like Glitch in the coming months.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (75) comments Links to this post

 
What do you expect from SWTOR?

I had an interesting discussion with dwism on Buzz, after having linked to the extremely negative Bit Gamer preview of SWTOR. The question was whether such negative reviews are coming from too high expectations. And that is true for many MMORPGs, not just SWTOR.

MMORPG previews and even reviews are often full of hype. If somebody reads Darren's description of Rift as "the “Jesus” game you guys have been waiting for the last 5 years" and fully believes that claim, it is possible that he will end up disappointed. But if he believed something along the lines of "Rift is somewhat similar to WoW, but with some improved features", he is far less likely to be disappointed by actually playing the game, and might enjoy it far more.

The same is true for Star Wars: The Old Republic. My personal belief from various preview is that SWTOR will be somewhat similar to WoW in gameplay, with the added advantages of the Star Wars setting, and complete voice-overs. Assuming that I stay away from WoW and WoW-like games until SWTOR's release, I might actually be having fun in SWTOR. Even if, or maybe *because of*, I expect the voice-overs not telling stories much more involving than "kill ten womp rats". If you expect "kill ten womp rats", and you get "kill ten womp rats", you aren't disappointed. If you expect SWTOR to be the "Jesus game", or expect story-telling to be as good as in Knights of the Old Republic, you are more likely to be disappointed, and in consequence not enjoy SWTOR as much.

So I'd like to know what your expectations are for SWTOR. Do you think it will just be "kill ten womp rats", and would you be happy enough with such a game? Or have you set your hopes much higher?
- posted by Tobold @ 11:20 AM Permanent Link  (45) comments Links to this post

 
Glitch

This Saturday I had more fun in a MMORPG than I had for the whole year yet: I was playing the early beta of Glitch. What is Glitch? Well, the devs call it "a web-based massively-multiplayer game which takes place inside the minds of eleven peculiarly imaginative Giants". I'd describe it as a 2D non-violent MMORPG. And while this is still an early version, and not even yet open all of the time, I guess the 2D non-violent MMORPG part is going to stay. This is a very different game from classic MMORPGs, or as the devs say: "What's different? For starters, it's all one big world. Which means everyone is playing the same game and anyone's actions have the ability to affect every other player in the game. It also involves very little war, moats, spaceships, wizards, mafiosos, or people with implausibly large muscles."

If I had to make an educated guess, I'd say that most of you never played a MMORPG which doesn't have combat. But then again all that MMORPG combat you know doesn't really involve fighting; you just click on things or press keys. So I hope you believe me that clicking on things and pressing keys is also perfectly possible in a virtual world without combat. And what a world that is! 2D side-scrolling, yes, so don't expect photorealistic animations and textures. But those photorealistic animations and textures usually cost hundreds of millions, and then the investors want "something like WoW". So Tiny Speck, a small company, wisely decided to rather make a game with a lower budget (still several millions), and rather put that budget into developing an interesting world and good gameplay instead of top-notch graphics. So the world is big, full of creativity, open (there are no instances), and dynamic, with the players able to change things in the world.

But Glitch isn't just some "social" virtual world, there is a real MMORPG gameplay in there. You have levels, a skill system, and quests which are about teaching you about the many different activities in the game, and not repetitive "kill 10 foozles" affairs. Gameplay revolves around activities that consume energy, like gathering and crafting, and then getting that energy back by eating. But to eat, you need to get food first, and that involves farming, gathering, and cooking. There is a whole skill-tree just about making food! Glitch even has player housing, so one early big step forward in food procurement is getting a house with your own little "Farmville" garden in the back. But that is just one of many different gameplay activities. Don't let the cute, family-friendly look fool you: Glitch is actually quite a complex game; well, I guess you could just run around and explore if you feel like it, but if you want to get anything done, there is a lot of planning and optimization involved. The trailer on the Glitch homepage gives you a first idea on how many skills and recipes and activities there are.

As I said, Glitch is still in closed beta, with a release "sometime this summer", although that is the sort of flexible release date announcement which I wouldn't bet on. But when it will be out, it will be Free2Play, but with an item shops in which you can't "buy win". There are various clothing and outfits for sale, and the only non-fluff shop item rumored to be in development is teleportation tokens. There will also be premium accounts with a subscription with access to yet more fluff, if you prefer that method of payment.

I played all Saturday, and made it to a first house, and level 13. Now I'm really looking forward to be able to play again, at the next test session. The game already runs very well, but the devs are adding lots of new features all the time. If you want to check it out for yourself, right now the only thing you can do is sign up for the beta. Or wait for open beta and release. I'll keep you posted.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (6) comments Links to this post

 
Solo player endgame progression

In the current model of level-based MMORPGs, the game is stupidly divided into two very different parts: A leveling part which is mostly played solo, and an endgame part where progression is limited to group content like raiding. There is an increasing gap between the two, and developers are starting to think how to close it. Now I'd think it would be better to make the leveling game more group friendly, but given the extreme attitude against "forced grouping" some players have, the alternative would be to create an endgame progression for solo players. Thus while applying patch 4.1 to World of Warcraft, the developers already announced the Regrowth and Molten Front feature for patch 4.2.

This basically is a way for solo players to experience some sort of endgame progression which is completely their own. Unlike previous daily quest hubs, the progression this time isn't shared, but unique to every player. Players do daily quests for Marks of the World Tree, tokens which can not only be used to buy gear with, but also to unlock progression of the story.

The interesting part of that is that this personal progression is done without phasing. Thus while two players standing next to each other might see a different scene and different quest givers depending on how far they progressed, they will also see each other, and even be able to do quests together. While there probably isn't a perfect solution to the conflicting demands of people wanting to change virtual worlds, but them having to offer the same content for everybody, this is at least an interesting approach.

On the downside this sort of gameplay structure is still not very friendly to people with lots of alts. Not only will all your alts have to play through the Mount Hyjal regular quest chain, but the Molten Front progression will also be identical for each of them. 60 different daily quests is more than we used to get, but it still will involve a lot of repetition. And with patch 4.2 still being months away, this might well be a case of too little, too late. But then, lots of players might be back in WoW at the end of the year, if SWTOR is really such a dud as some previewers claim.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:22 AM Permanent Link  (28) comments Links to this post