Single-playerness

In the blogs I am reading, nobody mentions Rift any more. The last thing I heard was several bloggers complaining that as they had played the game less intensively than others, they got "left behind" in underpopulated zones, with everybody else playing at the level cap. The spontaneous multi-player experience of rift invasions was one of the major selling points of Rift in the early days. But it seems you had to *be* there in the early days, because by now you missed it.

So when Melmoth writes about Star Wars: The Old Republic: "I honestly can’t remember an MMO where getting in from the very beginning has made any difference to my experience", I don't agree. There have been a lot of MMOs where getting in from the very beginning has made a huge difference to my experience. Even in World of Warcraft I have fond memories of dungeon groups in the early days, a part of the game which then completely disappeared as people outleveled these zones, until the Dungeon Finder brought low-level dungeon groups back in a diminished form.

But then Melmoth sees the game as "SW:TOR seems to all intents and purposes a traditional single player Bioware RPG but with the option to bring friends along." And if you want to play a MMO in single-player mode, waiting for the first wave of players having rushed past is probably a good idea. The classic Star Wars line of "you are our only hope", even with voice-over, isn't going to make much sense if you're among 37 other jedi chasing the same quest mobs. In single-player mode other players in a MMORPG are just a distraction, or worse an obstacle.

So in the end whether it is a good idea to start a MMORPG on day one or rather to wait a couple of months is a function of the single-playerness of the game. I'm still hoping that SWTOR has enough things to do in multi-player game modes to make starting early worth it. And if there is really no sensible group activities in the game, I'm not going to play it very long anyway.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:30 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments Links to this post

 
EA Origin isn't working

There has been a lot of controversy regarding EA Origin. Crysis 2 being pulled from Steam and SWTOR being exclusive on EA Origin suggested that EA was trying to push customers towards their own platform, however they minced their words to explain it. SWTOR also got a lot of bad press already, and their 150 dollar/euro collectors edition didn't exactly help. But after all that, Heartless of course is right, and Star Wars: The Old Republic is a game most of us are going to buy anyway.

So I went and tried to pre-order Star Wars: The Old Republic on Origin. Keyword being "tried", because I didn't succeed yet. First of all directly after the announcement of the pre-order availability, Origin couldn't handle the rush. Well, it must be nice to know for EA that so many people want to pre-order their game. But Steam isn't crashing because lots of people want to buy or pre-order the latest game. A digital distribution platform not being able to handle a lot of customers is not exactly encouraging. How will they be able to handle people actually wanting to download the game on release if they can't even manage the pre-orders?

Then things got weirder and weirder. EA announced that the pre-order for the digital version of Star Wars: The Old Republic was limited. So first they said they needed at least a million players to be profitable, and then they are trying to limit the player numbers already at the time of the pre-order? How exactly does a digital pre-order run out of stock?

So they directed the people trying to pre-order to a separate page away from Origin. For putting in all your data and payment information they promised you to MAYBE allow you to pre-order the game, with the decision in a mail within 48 hours. The mail would also contain a code with which to register your pre-order access to the beta. So far so good. I fill out the form, and already an hour later get an order confirmation. No pre-order access code in that order confirmation though. The Origin customer service pages are a mess, but there is a function where you can check the status of your orders. Result: Origin isn't aware that I ordered anything from them, in spite of having confirmed my order with an e-mail. WTF?!?!?

At this point I could only try to contact customer service and give up. If I had tried again to pre-order, I risked to end up having to pay for two copies of the game. But now I have neither a solid confirmation of my order, no the beta access code I wanted to pre-order for in the first place! My contact with Origin is further complicated by their inability to let me choose a language: They insist on talking to me in the language determined be the IP address of from wherever I access the internet from. As I don't live in the country of my birth, and I am currently traveling, this results in me having mails from them in several different languages. All except English, because tothe only way to get English is to travel to the UK.

I don't care about the competition between Steam and Origin, or the price of the collector's edition, or the politics of digital distribution platforms. But as a customer my most basic requirement for a digital distribution platform is that it works. EA Origin isn't working. Maybe I'd better buy SWTOR as a box in a shop.

[EDIT: What apparently *is* working is their customer service. I got a response within 1 hour, and that on a Saturday afternoon, telling me that the mail with the pre-order access code would follow later in a separate e-mail from the order confirmation. Although the order confirmation mail said "use the access code above mentioned as serial number to register." The poor customer service representatives must be putting in extra hours to deal with this mess.]

[EDIT 2: Still no second e-mail with a code two days later. But a guild mate told me that checking your order status on the Origin website now works, and that I could find the pre-order code there. Yay! That worked. My pre-order code is now registered on the SWTOR site, hopefully giving me beta access later this year.]
- posted by Tobold @ 2:45 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments Links to this post

 
The forum lies

I finally got around to watching Benjamin Cousins' (EA) excellent but lengthy talk about paying to win. In great detail and with disarming honesty Ben tells the story of how Battlefield Heroes was changed in December 2009 from a Free2Play game with just fluff and convenience items to a "pay to win" game. Weapons for real money were introduced that were better than any weapons you could get by playing, and simultaneously it was made harder to play for free. The users on the forums were extremely upset, and the press echoed the forum posters feelings and declared that EA had ruined Battlefield Heroes.

And if we wouldn't have the data Ben revealed in his talk, this is what we might have believed, that EA ruined the game. But the data show something completely different: There was no measurable negative impact on player numbers from all that uproar, both the amount of new players coming in and of old players leaving remained constant. And financially the move was a huge success instantly doubling revenue of the game, and turning it from a game losing money to one making a healthy profit. Which also means turning it from a game threatened with closure to a game that will stick around.

Further data analysys showed that the forum posters only represented 2% of the player base, that they spend 10 times more money on the game than the average user, and that they lied when they said they'd quit over this move. Ben even shows some hate mail he got, where he tracked the players and found that in spite of the hate, the players spent more on the game after the change. Thus when the CEO of CCP recently commented the uproar of the EVE community on a similar issue with "I can tell you that this is one of the moments where we look at what our players do and less of what they say", he was completely right. The forum lies.

This goes beyond Anil Dash's insight that if your website's full of assholes, it's your fault, suggesting stronger forum moderation. It tells you that people posting on forums are passionate about their game to such a extreme, that what they are saying is actually not relevant any more. There is no connection between the outcry of the 2% of forum posters, and what the other 98% think. There isn't even a connection between what the 2% say and what they themselves do. Trying to get useful information about a game from a forum poster is like trying to get an overview of how some modern religion is from its most crazy religious nutters. The forum lies, and is not be taken seriously as a source.

And of course the same applies to blogs. Doubly, because bloggers aren't representative of the player base, and the commenters on a blog are neither representative of the players, nor even of the readers of that blog. Most simple statements you can read on a blog or its comment section, like this or that feature or this or that game "sucking", are completely irrelevant. The more visibly angry the poster is, the more likely it is that his rant isn't representative of anything except his own anger. Which might not even be related to the game he is ranting about. Where blogs beat forums on the other hand, is that on a blog you are more likely to find actual rational arguments for a point of view, or original thoughts. Even in the comments section sometimes. Maybe the opinion is not representative, but if somebody manages to pull of constructive criticism (a rarity on the internet), this can be a source for ideas on how to improve a game. But to know whether something works or doesn't work, you still have to try it out and watch what your players actually do, and how their behavior actually changes in response to the changes to the game.
- posted by Tobold @ 4:32 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments Links to this post

 
Predestined burnout in games of advancement

A while ago I talked about games of advancement, a wider term for games which have the player gain levels, skills, or stats over time. These are everywhere these days, and even when people discuss "gamification" of the real world they usually mean turning some aspect of the real world into a game of advancement. Advancement has been shown to be a very strong motivator, at least in the short term. But what about the long term? In the long term games of advancement very much suffer from problems with burnout.

The source of this burnout problem is one of limited resources: No game has infinite content unlockable through advancement. Being very well aware of that, developers design advancement with built-in diminishing returns: The further you advance in the game, the slower progress gets. The first levels are always gained the fastest, and then every further level takes a bit longer to reach. Or there are level caps, where further advancement is only possible by much slower methods, like gathering equipment.

At the same time the novelty value of the game constantly diminishes. Or as Raph Koster would say, the learning experience leading to fun in a game diminishes the more you already learned. Unless you get holy grail of gaming, the "easy to learn, hard to master" game, you learn less and less with each session.

The advancement part of games is designed to prolong the learning experience, by giving you access to new content to learn about over time. When there is really nothing left to learn about, developers hope you'll still be playing for the advancement. But with that advancement getting slower and slower, at some point the slow pace of advancement isn't fun enough to compensate for the diminished fun of the activity. At that point players start talking about "the grind", and from there to burnout it is just a short way.

I do think that the diminishing return design of games of advancement is a mistake. Rushing players through the early levels isn't all that helpful, and the lure of advancement stops working in the late levels when progress gets too slow. A system in which every level takes about the same amount of time would probably work better for long-time motivation. And both players and developers have to realize that no game is fun forever, so there is actually nothing wrong about a game over screen at the end. There are a lot of games where starting over is more fun than to keep playing at the highest power level. From the MMORPGs I know, only A Tale in the Desert does this, although there is also a reset rumored to be part of a "re-release" of Darkfall "2.0". Some Japanese single-player RPGs have systems where finishing the game once gives you new options for playing the game a second time. Maybe such an approach would work better for MMORPGs than letting player repeat the same dungeons and daily quests for months.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:37 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments Links to this post

 
A Google+ quote

Wilhelm Arcturus, The Ancient Gaming Noob, writes about Google+:

Because here is Google, which owns my email (gmail), my RSS feed reader (Google Reader), the RSS feed from my blogs (Feed Burner), my search history (just plain old Google), my news sources (plug-ins in iGoogle), and a pile of other stuff like Google Maps, YouTube, Google Books, Google Translate, and so on, none of which appears to be connected in any unique way to Google+.

If that doesn’t say something about Google, I don’t know what does.

I fully agree. Right now even Google Buzz is more useful to me than Google+, because Google Buzz automatically "streams" my blog posts, and Google+ doesn't. I'm currently also spending a part of my time on Facebook again, because Facebook has games, and Google+ doesn't. The only thing Google+ does in abundance is telling me that other people added me to their circles, which I usually respond to by adding them to my "following" circle.

For me these social networks are platforms. A platform all by itself is rather boring. There needs to be something happening on that platform. Personally I prefer games, but it could be something else as well. Being an extended Twitter with the ability to share photos and videos is probably useful to some, but I don't think this is the killer application yet.

[EDIT: While I wouldn't say this description is in any way not correctly describing Google+ in its current form, some readers let me know that there are unconfirmed rumors of Google games being in development for Google+, with a logo found in the source code, and Google having invested $100 million in Zynga.]
- posted by Tobold @ 9:15 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments Links to this post

 
Battling the Hive Mind

Come to think of it, the command and control structure of computer strategy games is often not very realistic: You usually play an all-seeing, all-powerful general commanding troops which have no free will of their own. At best your troops have some sort of morale system which makes them run away at some point, but that is about it. And I've only ever played one strategy game which had the possibility that your orders to your troops didn't arrive, or were misunderstood. It is safe to say that real warfare is a lot less organized. Which is one reason why I consider World of Tanks as interesting as a strategy game, and don't consider it just a shooter.

A typical game of World of Tanks either has no general at all, or has one or more people trying to suggest strategies, with only a part of the "troops" listening to them. That applies even more so on the European servers, where often the players in the game speak different languages, and not everybody necessarily even understands orders shouted in English. The battle plans you can communicate by pinging the map are limited.

But even if nobody even tries to play the "general", that doesn't mean that there is no strategy. Players of one side see all the tanks of their side within radio range, which at least at the start is everybody, and via the same radio-to-radio network they usually have the same limited information about the position of the enemy. They also often have the same experience from previous battles, knowing what strategies are suicidal, and which approaches are more likely to work. As a consequence something like a collective intelligence, a hive mind so to say, develops. Some players don't look much at what others do, some players tend to follow others, and a third group tends to see where everybody is going and deliberately goes in the other direction.

That hive mind isn't always very clever. For example a lot of players dislike the Malinovka map, so there is a chance that somebody decides to get out quickly by a suicide rush over the open field, and some other players seeing that follow him. That usually doesn't end well (although a planned rush 2 or 3 minutes into the game and with everybody participating is actually a winning strategy). But surprisingly often the hive mind intelligence results in players forming squadrons and distributing themselves over the various lanes the map offers in a way that a general couldn't have planned better.

Being aware of this hive mind can help you predict the movements of the enemy, and make the strategically optimal counter move. Of course then you run into the problem that you are only 1/15th of your team, and you need to learn how to influence your own team's hive mind. But while certainly not perfect, this is not as impossible as it looks. Your own actions influence the actions of your team, whether that is by advancing, or by scouting the enemy position. Pinging the map is the least effective way to influence your team, but even that works sometimes. You might not be the all-powerful general in World of Tanks, but by being aware what the other players see and how they are likely to react to what they see, you still have an influence on the strategy. And in the end this is probably closer to how it works in real warfare.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:10 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments Links to this post

 
Innovation as a problem

NowGamer has an article up in which they ask various game developers what the biggest problem of the game industry is. Quite a lot of them reply with variations of the same answer: Players say they want innovation, but then rather buy sequels than innovative games.

Quote from Josh Olin: "Too many developers who try new things are getting burned by “pundits” and angry entitled fans who look to be contrarian, sometimes simply for the sake of being contrarian."

Justin Richmond: "I think it’s hard to innovate and make money, which is the same in most industries. Right now the public is rewarding building franchises like we just talked about."

Paul Cuisset: "If you have the feeling of playing the same game year after year, it’s because there’s not much room left for games with a title that doesn’t end with a number."

Atsushi Inaba: "I think the biggest issue is that there is a definite sense that we can’t challenge new things anymore. There has been a sudden rise in development costs, which has made it incredibly difficult for game makers to try their hand at new things."

Now some players blame the devs for not being more innovative, but from the blog comments here I have first-hand experience of how hostile players can get towards any new idea. I think it has to do with the wide-spread attitude in which people take games way too serious, where they regard their achievements and standing in some video game as more important than real life. People who believe they excel at some game would rather have a boring sequel with few changes, so they are sure they'll be good at the new game too, than a completely new and innovative game in which they'd be "noobs" again.

In the end for a game company players are customers, and customers always get what they are most willing to pay for. Thus we end up with a choice between sequels and "new" games that are knock-offs of successful competitor's games. Because this is what are the guaranteed successes. There are actually quite a lot of innovative games out there, but usually very few people buy those. It is rare that some game comes along which is both innovative and successful. And then it is made into sequels and knock-offs.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:53 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments Links to this post

 
Getting microtransactions right

Spinks had a link to an Extra Credits video on microtransactions which I consider a very good overview on what are "good" and "bad" Free2Play models.

One difficulty when discussing good and bad is that different people tend to define these terms differently. Is something good if it works well, or is there an ethical dimension to it? And how ethical is it to take money from your customers? Opinions on that tend to differ widely.

For example, I am generally in favor of the idea of supermarkets. They provide goods at lower cost with a wider range of choice. Nevertheless I do recognize that supermarkets are using psychological tricks on their customers to make them buy more: Sweets near the checkout, promotions in the most visible spots, necessary items in the back forcing people to pass lots of other stuff. Is that "good" or "bad"?

Free2Play games also use psychological tricks to make players spend more. First of all there are very few games in which you can actually spend money directly on virtual items. In nearly all Free2Play games you first buy an intermediate currency, and then spend that currency on the virtual items. That almost always ends you up with leftover currency, encouraging you to spend more. It also makes the price less obvious, as the price tag for that monocle is now "12,000 Aurum" instead of "$68". Furthermore you have the impression that you can make a great deal by buying more virtual currency at once, as the exchange rate usually is more favorable if you do.

But even with all the tricks, I do believe that players aren't stupid. It is the basic economic theory of the homo economicus which predicts that somebody buys an item, even a virtual one, because that item gives him more utility than the money he spent on it. I most certainly had several cases where the microtransaction model or pricing of a game turned me off before I ever paid anything, while I'm not shy of paying in Free2Play games I have fun with.

That isn't to say that the games I do spend my money on always have gotten microtransactions perfectly right. For example World of Tanks gets microtransactions 95% right: The premium option, the gold tanks, and the conversion of blocked xp into free xp are all very well done, and fulfill the criteria in the Extra Credits video. I also liked Wargaming.net's recent announcement that their next game, World of Warplanes, will share the gold virtual currency with World of Tanks (and even the free xp). The one flaw in their microtransaction business model is the gold ammo, which is the only item which actually makes a player using it more powerful than an equally skilled player in the same tank without the ammo. Like EVE players do about the possibility to buy capital ships with real money, one could argue that gold ammo has too little impact for too much money to count as "pay to win", but the option being there is somewhat annoying.

In the end I am optimistic that this is a learning process. "Bad" microtransaction won't be accepted by the players, thus the games relying mostly on those bad options will fare badly and disappear. And the new games will copy those microtransaction options which have been shown to work. If EVE's new deluxe clothing line sells well at a cost per item similar to luxury real clothing, we'll see similar stuff in other games. But I suspect that Extra Credit got it right in his video: The best-selling stuff will always be items of convenience (faster advancement, more inventory, etc.), and not just status symbols or pure power.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments Links to this post

 
Dust / Eve integration

I've seen the A Future Vision video on the integration of EVE Online with Dust 514, and I think that is a lot of marketing with very little hope of actual realization. The video shows a character in EVE betraying a character in Dust 514, and I don't think such a thing is going to fly.

Dust 514 is a first-person console shooter on the PS3 and PS Vita, which will not run on a PC. It features 32 vs. 32 battles of limited duration. It is basically a competitor for games like Halo, whose latest version Halo: Reach sold over 3 million times. This is the kind of market CCP is shooting for. Compare that to the size of the market of "EVE players who also have a PS3 and want to play multiplayer shooters sometimes", and the inherent design problem becomes rather obvious: Dust 514 has to be as attractive as possible to the typical consoler shooter player, regardless of how attractive this makes the game to EVE players.

I do believe there will be *some* integration between EVE and Dust, like EVE players being able to pay Dust players as mercenaries for battles, and the Dust battles deciding planetary ownership in EVE. What I don't believe in is EVE players being able to influence Dust battles directly, not with air strikes and treachery as shown in the video. Imagine a group of 32 players close to winning a battle now losing it through an air strike directed by a player in a different game. There will be maybe 1 or 2 who "get" the connection between EVE and Dust and are okay with that, and 30 players who don't give a damn about EVE and are loudly complaining how unfair it is that their battle is decided by somebody not even playing the same game. Thus I don't think the integration will ever go this far. Slow motion MMORPGs like EVE and console multiplayer shooters are two worlds apart, and the amount of integration you can possibly implement without seriously hindering the success of the shooter game is small. It will be interesting to see what they can pull off, but I wouldn't put my hopes too high.
- posted by Tobold @ 2:24 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments Links to this post

 
More on WoT matchmaking

Two short bits in the aftermath of my World of Tanks matchmaking interview: A reader pointed me towards his interactive matchmaking table for World of Tanks. You mouseover the battle tiers your tank can be in, and it highlights your possible opponents.

The second thing is a full disclosure: Wargaming.net decided to thank me for my interview by giving me some in-game currency to "help you experience everything in the game more quickly". I didn't ask for that, but this is typically the kind of freebies I'm quite willing to accept from game companies. As always under full disclosure, both for reasons of personal ethic and US legal obligations.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:24 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments Links to this post

 
World of Tanks matchmaking interview

Today on Tobold’s MMORPG Blog we have something special: An interview with Chris Keeling, Military Advisor at Wargaming.net, developers of World of Tanks. Chris, I understand you are a military man, you have fought in Iraq, and then went on to work on various war games. What exactly is your position at Wargaming.net today?

Chris: I serve in a variety of roles – which is unusual for me because I am normally a writer or designer on a development team. I had the privilege of working with Wargaming.net on their previous World War II RTS, Order of War, acting as the game writer and also as their advisor on military and historical topics, American culture, and the English language, and have gone on to serve in similar capacities on World of Tanks. I am also involved with some of the communities that relate well with World of Tanks, including veterans, historians, tank modelers, and reenactors, and use my contacts there to evangelize the game in those areas.

Tobold: The specific subject I would like to talk about with you is matchmaking in World of Tanks. What can you tell us about the design philosophy behind World of Tank’s matchmaking algorithm?

Chris: For version 0.6.5, you can find the chart depicting the matchmaking system here. Note that this has changed from release to release as we have tweaked the balance due to player feedback and data we have collected from literally millions of battles. Part of the dichotomy between the way matchmaking works and the perception of unfair battles lies with the way we consider tanks to be balanced; we take the long view, of cost to maintain compared to average revenue (both experience and credits). Over the course of a player’s “career” from Tier I to Tier X, each vehicle at each Tier is balanced against other vehicles in that Tier in terms of their ability to generate income. Indeed, they are fairly and accurately balanced in that regard. However, as we have seen, the players expect a different kind of balance, and one which appears more reasonable on the surface. The players just want their tanks to be able to kill other tanks. As our internal data shows, even this is actually very well balanced across the system at each Tier (except for a few that slipped through, like the premium Löwe and Hotchkiss).

Tobold: While being extremely fast in getting you into a battle, World of Tanks accomplishes this by having a wide spread of different tank tiers in the same battle. Many players feel that getting paired against a tank 4 tiers above them (in some cases even more) results in them not even having a chance to contribute anything meaningful to the battle, as their guns are unable to penetrate the high-level enemies’ armor. Some reviewers of World of Tanks agree, I’ve seen matchmaking seen listed as weak point in several reviews. Would you say that matchmaking is something you are happy with in its current state, or is that something Wargaming.net is working on to improve?

Chris: We are always seeking to improve the game, in every aspect of its development and presentation. We know it can be frustrating to get thrown into a battle where you’re the lowest tank by several tiers, so matchmaking improvements are high on our radar. But we also know that players don’t just want to be killed once for each enemy tank they destroy, they want to dominate the battlefield. For true balance, this means that every time a player gets 5 kills, they should end five battles wrecked without having eliminated any enemy vehicles. Over the course of hundreds and thousands of battles, this does tend to average out, which means, sticking to the example, each player having five unenjoyable losses for every 5-kill streak of victory. Balancing this out so each player doesn’t have to suffer a miserable experience several times over for each impressive success is a lot more complex than just balancing armor and penetration values.

Tobold: From my experience with various online games the problem of matchmaking is to find the right balance between finding the perfect match, and doing so fast. But it appears to me that there is room on the time scale; playing at prime time means getting into a battle within seconds in World of Tanks at the moment. So how about a simple solution of reducing the matchmaking “spread” by one tier, so players will at worst be paired against tanks 3 levels above them? Have you considered matchmaking algorithms which take current server population into account? When there are lots of players, battles would have a narrower spread of tiers, but during off times the spread would widen to avoid long queues.

Chris: We’re considering a lot of things, and there have been some good suggestions from the community, including separate queues for “Quick Battle” (loose matchmaking, kind of like what we have now) and “Balanced Battle” (waiting for up to several minutes for a battle that has less Tier spread), reducing the spread of Tiers to no more than two above and two below (similar to your own suggestion), and possibly even allowing Premium players to start battles with specific parameters, such as Tier limits, vehicle type restrictions, and map selections (similar to the current Practice battles, but without private invitations and counting fully for experience and credits). We don’t know what, if any, changes we will make, but rest assured we are looking into all of these options carefully. And as far as the server population goes, the 150,000 players typically found on the Russian servers at any given moment ensure a quick battle with much less deviation than we get here – so if you can get about 135,000 of your closest friends to play on the NA servers, I think we can guarantee better matchmaking!

Tobold: Thank you for this interview, Chris. Is there anything else you would like to share?

Chris: Thank you for the opportunity to talk about the game! I love this game and I play it like everyone else, looking forward to the first x2 victory of the day, the x5 treats and other events, and I suffer through the same matchmaking, spotting, and lag issues as any other player. If you see me in chat or in the game, feel free to say hi! In-game, my nick is ChrisK. And please don’t shoot my son, ChrisKjr – he’s only 7, but he enjoys the game too!
- posted by Tobold @ 9:44 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments Links to this post

 
Friends, Civ World, and Empires & Allies

I once read a very nice definition on what a true friend is: "A friend is somebody who, when told that you are moving house, asks at what time he should turn up and help carry the furniture". We tend to have only a few friends like that. But social networks are built on "friends" connecting to each other, and in the process have very much diluted the meaning of the word. On Google+ I actually use the "Following" circle instead of the "Friends" circle for my already 134 connections. The term somehow is more appropriate.

I have 319 friends on Facebook, the large majority of which I wouldn't even recognize if I saw them, as we never met in real life. I kind of inverted the Facebook logic. Instead of inviting my real friends to play Facebook games with me, I'm inviting people interested in Facebook games to become my friends. That kind of changes the definition of what a true friend is to: "A friend is somebody who on receiving a gift in a Facebook game sends the same gift back."

I was trying out Civ World (beta) on Facebook, when somebody mentioned another Facebook game: Empires & Allies. Civ World makes very little use of your social connections, as it is subdivided into hundreds of "games", and you can only interact with the people in your game. Civ World has some interesting features you don't see very often in other Facebook games, like an actual win condition, or a $1 cap on how much real money you can spend on the game per day. But actual gameplay isn't all that interesting, and Civ World still has serious technical problems.

Empires & Allies on the other hand is a typical Zynga game. It makes massive use of your Facebook friends connections. Exchanging gifts with friends is Zynga's alternative to having to buy certain resources for cash. Obviously Zynga games have no cash spending cap, so you either advance slowly, or spend cash, or spam your friends. But "ethical" considerations like that apart, Empires & Allies is actually a better game than Civ World. Surprisingly Zynga came a long way from Farmville. In Empires & Allies you now build up an island empire with lots of different resources, use those to build up an army, navy, and air force, and then go battling either in PvE or PvP battles. PvP is limited to invading your friends and neighbors, leading to the weird situation that you'll want to visit your friends' islands to help them, only to invade that same island five minutes later. But building up your empire and battling your friends or the computer is fun enough. Hearts of Iron it isn't, but E&A is way more complex than Farmville. It just uses the same social core.

In a way these Facebook games create new social rules. If you play these games, you kind of have to accept these new rules and play by them. Thus there is a lot more spamming and begging going on in these games than would be socially acceptable in other environments. People realize that these games are built around these semi-automated messages, which makes them more acceptable. It wouldn't really make much sense to try to play these games but refuse to send out messages asking for help, or asking your friends to become your neighbors, or sending them gifts. These are essential gameplay elements which would be hard to avoid if you wanted to.

So if you are on Facebook as a friend of mine, and happen to play Empires & Allies, don't be surprised by all the spam I'm sending your way. If you're actively playing you probably need those liberty bonds like I do and exchanging them as gifts is the cheapest way to get them. If you aren't actually playing any more, just ignore me, or block E&A requests. The advantage of these Facebook friendships of convenience is that "unfriending" or ignoring people is less of an issue than it would be with real friends.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:26 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments Links to this post

 
Confusing platforms with games

Imagine somebody who only ever played games on consoles starting up a PC for the very first time, playing the most widely played PC games, that is Solitaire and Mine Sweeper, and declaring that "PC games suck". Unlikely? Well, this is pretty much what happened to Facebook. Ask anybody what they think about "Facebook games", and they will most likely give you a negative opinion based on games like Farmville and Mafia Wars.

Farmville is about as representative of Facebook games as Solitaire is of PC games. Millions of people play these games, because they are accessible to everyone. But that doesn't mean this is the best the PC or Facebook can do. Facebook is a game platform, like a PC or a console is a game platform, with certain technical limitations and built-in advantages (like social networking). And one has to look to other games to see what this platform can do.

Yesterday Sid Meier's Civ World went into open beta. Now Civ World is an order of magnitude or two less complex than Civilization V. But it sure is a far cry from Farmville. There is an actual game there, semi-massively multiplayer, with a beginning and an end, and a win condition. You can play Civ World against hundreds of people, and end up winning against them.

And that isn't the only example of more complex Facebook games. For example for role-playing there is Dragon Age Legends. Again obviously not quite comparable with the Dragon Age games on the PC, but far more complex than the average Zynga game. I've also played some nice strategy games on Facebook, again somewhere in complexity between Farmville and Hearts of Iron.

Facebook games do have an inherent problem in that the more complex games tend to be less well-known. That not only affects perception of Facebook games in general, but also reduces the chance of your Facebook friends actually playing the same games as you are. For a platform whose main selling point is the social networking capabilities, avid gamers see themselves confronted with an awkward choice between simple games where they can hang out with all their acquaintances, and complex games which only a few of their gamer friends also play them.

Nevertheless Facebook games shouldn't be underestimated in their potential. Nor as a selling point for a social network. I'm on Google+ too, but as I can neither play any games there, nor automatically share my blog posts, I end up using Facebook and Buzz more than Google+.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:18 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments Links to this post

 
Löwocalypse

Looking at my title I have to admit that it's not even coming close to spinks' Monocalypse. Sigh! Anyway, Wargaming.net with World of Tanks yesterday bravely stepped forward into the minefield that CCP with EVE is just trying to extract themselves from. As I mentioned previously, players with high-level tanks in World of Tanks have a cash flow problem, and need a gold farm tank. The best gold farming tank available is the Löwe, a German tier VIII "gold tank", currently available for 7,500 gold. That is €25 on European servers or $31 on US servers, at the best exchange rate. They also offer the KV-5 for the same price, a Russian tier VIII tank, which is better armored, but dealing less damage.

Now gold farming depends a lot on dealing damage, so the Löwe is the better gold farming tank. Wargaming.net realized that, and instead of changing the stats of the tanks to make them more equal, they decided to raise the price for the Löwe. In future it will cost 67% more, 12,500 gold or €41/$52. There is a grace period where you can still buy one for the old price. And players who already bought one aren't affected. Nevertheless this is a hefty price increase for future players, and the forums understandably aren't happy.

Capitalism is a curious thing with virtual goods. The laws of supply and demand normally would suggest that an item for which there is huge demand will go up in price. But that is to balance supply and demand, while in the case of virtual goods the supply is unlimited. Wargaming.net isn't increasing the price for the Löwe because they have trouble producing them fast enough. They increase the price because they think they can get away with it. Only if over 40% of people who would have bought the Löwe for 7,500 gold in the future decide not to buy it for 12,500 does Wargaming.net lose money.

Furthermore Wargaming.net probably doesn't mind selling less Löwes. Over time since release more and more players reached the higher levels, needed a gold farming tank, and the Löwe was simply by so far the best option that these days you see quite a lot of them around.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. World of Tanks doesn't have a Council of Stellar Management or a line as fuzzy separating devs from players as EVE has. Thus players have less of an expectation to be listened to. WoT does have bitter veterans (and that just 1 year after the start of the closed beta, which albeit tells you more about the players than about the game), but Free2Play games don't mind bitter veterans leaving all that much as subscription games do. The bitter veterans usually don't pay, or don't pay any more, so them leaving is pure win for the company.

What I would love to have is sales numbers before and after the price increase. How much does a 67% price increase of a virtual item decrease its sales? I will probably never know, but Wargaming.net certainly will. Then they can borrow a quote from CCP CEO Hilmar Veigar Petursson: "this is one of the moments where we look at what our players do and less of what they say". Ultimately economic theory tells us that what a virtual item is really worth is what people are willing to pay for it.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments Links to this post

 
Winning is not the purpose of playing

I spent my youth losing at video games. Not that I was worse at them than the other kids, but video games at the time were designed to make you lose all the time. They evolved from arcade games, where it was imperative that the player lost after some time and had to insert another quarter. It took nearly 20 years for the first person to "win" at Pac Man. Only later did game designers come to the surprising conclusion that most people prefer winning over losing, and these days most games offer at least some guaranteed win method, either in the form of an "easy" difficulty level, or built-in cheat modes.

Expecting to win has changed the attitudes of players, especially those who haven't experienced the "you always lose" era. People now quit games when they don't win. Even games which technically can't be won, like MMORPGs, these days carefully avoid to give anybody the impression that they just lost, especially to new players. Now I'm all for optional easy modes, but with MMORPGs usually offering only one difficulty level for most content this has led to abominations like the current World of Warcraft new player experience, where it has become actually extremely difficult to die. Making it possible for everybody or nearly everybody to win is a good idea. Making it impossible to lose isn't, as it takes all illusion of danger out of a game in which you are supposed to play a hero.

But by far the worst effect of this expectation to always win has been on PvP games. I've seen numerous forum posts from players of World of Tanks complaining that they win only half of their games. It is mathematically rather obvious that everybody winning half of their games is actually the theoretical optimum, the best you can reach, the perfect matchmaking. Any league or ladder system strives to reach exactly that. If any player wins more than half of his games, then another player necessarily has to lose more than half. If already losing half of your games is sufficient reason for a player for a "I quit" forum post, then what are the chances that the players losing more often than not will stick with a game? Games where some players consistently win more often and other consistently lose more often quickly move into a downward spiral in which the losers quit, making another group of players the new losers, until those too quit, until nobody is left.

Winning is not the purpose of playing. It certainly is an objective in any game with a win condition. But the success of games that can't be won shows that winning isn't strictly necessary to have fun. It is the playing itself which is the purpose of a game, not the winning.

A win to loss ratio of 50:50 is not only the best result any matchmaking algorithm can achieve. In games which have at least some influence of skill and aren't purely random, it also is the 50:50 win to loss ratio of a team at which the individual contribution of the single player is most likely to affect the outcome of match. If the match is unbalanced and near certain to be a win for one side, neither the players on the winning side nor on the losing side can actually do much about the outcome. If the outcome is on the knife's edge, a single outstanding action can cause the result to tip in one direction or the other. But as this outstanding action is equally likely to happen on either team, that doesn't change the overall 50:50 ratio.

Most players do not understand that. They believe that they are superior to the rest of the players, and that the only possible explanation for them not winning all the time is that skill isn't a factor at all, and that the result is purely random. But playing World of Tanks for a while you quickly realize that the team victory comes from the sum of the performances of the whole team. Luck and random chance plays a role, but an observant player always knows at the end of a match whether he personally did good or not. And the reward system helps by putting a larger emphasis on individual contribution than on team victory. You gain more xp by doing personally well and losing the match (as frustrating that might sometimes be), than by doing little and being part of a winning team. Furthermore the reward system is positive sum, so even a string of losses only results in you advancing slower. That is a lot less frustrating than a zero sum or negative sum PvP system where the loser is actually worse off after a battle.

By de-emphasizing the importance of winning, we get back to the true purpose of playing, the playing itself and having fun. A good match is one where you had fun, regardless whether you won or lost. If you manage to mentally disconnect having fun from winning, you can get a fun:unfun ratio of much better than 50:50, in spite of the perfectly balanced win:loss ratio.
- posted by Tobold @ 4:00 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments Links to this post

 
35 cents of profit per player per year

Zynga is planning to offer $1 billion of shares. To do so, they had to file a lot of information about their business with the SEC. SEC filings are always interesting, because companies have to be very truthful in them. One highlight I noticed was that in 2010 Zynga made $90.6 million of profit. From 262 million of players. That is just under 35 cents per player per year.

Also interesting is Zynga's profit margin: The $90.6 million net income stem from nearly $600 million of revenue, a profit margin of 15%. Compare that to Blizzard's 50% profit margin that World of Warcraft makes, about $500 million of profit from $1 billion of revenue and 11.4 million players. Blizzard makes over 100 times more profit per player per year.

I think the news of the death of the MMORPG in favor of the Facebook game are greatly exaggerated. You might argue that Blizzard isn't the typical MMORPG company, but then Zynga isn't the typical Facebook game company either. Both companies are miles ahead of their competitors, the second biggest Facebook company has 33 million players. Comparing the best in class in both fields is quite valid.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:47 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments Links to this post

 
Valuing time over money

I don't play golf. But if I did, and I'd tell my colleagues at the office that I spent €250 on a golf club, they would nod wisely and say that this is what a decent golf club costs. But if I told them I spent 2,500 hours on the driving range training, they would think I'm crazy. Online players think differently. They'd nod wisely if I told them I spent 2,500 hours in an online game, and think I'm crazy because I spent €250 on World of Tanks. I didn't spend 2,500 hours in WoT, but I did 2,500 battles, so well over 250 hours, which at less than 1€ per hour still is cheaper than most other forms of commercial entertainment.

I didn't pay to win. I don't like the idea of buying something which gives me a direct advantage in PvP. And even if I didn't mind that, I would probably not bother with WoT's gold ammo, which can easily cost 1€ per *battle*. No, nearly all the money went into what I'd call the "advancing faster" category. I bought an expensive gold tank to farm credits faster. I very often bought gold crew for my tanks, which comes with their basic skill at 100% instead of 50% or 75% for the crews you can buy for credits. And the biggest cost item probably was converting experience points from my "alt" tanks to free experience I can use to for my "progression" tanks.

Not only does this spending advance me faster, it also selectively skips the less fun part. Without spending money, whenever you reach a new tank in the tech tree, you find your new acquisition being seriously flawed. The stock equipment on a new tanks isn't good, and the crew isn't as skilled as they could be. Thus you need to drive around with that underpowered tank for a while to earn the xp to research better equipment, and get the skill of your crew to 100%. By spending money, I can get the 100% crew right away, and I can use the converted xp from my alts to research the most essential equipment, thus I can skip a good part of the underpowered phase.

The other advantage is that this allows me to indulge in being an altoholic. During a recent special offer I bought a bunch of garage slots at half price. Thus I can keep the old tanks I liked the most and drive them for fun, and to make credits and to-be-converted xp with them. With the first victory of the day usually giving double xp (this weekend even quintuple xp), having a lot of alts thus racks up the xp quickly. Great, as long as you don't mind paying for the conversion.

I don't need to spend this money to have fun in World of Tanks. But I'm having more fun spoiling myself this way. I can easily see myself continuing at somewhere close to €100 per month for a while after the holidays, at least until I reached the level cap. Not only do I not regret spending money on myself, I also think that the money is going to the right people. I'm quite impressed with Wargaming.net for the speed at which they update their game. In 2 months I already experienced two content patches, each adding 2 maps, redesigning other maps, and adding new tanks to the game. They are also obviously constantly working on balancing, although you wouldn't know that from reading the forums. Curiously everybody there is convinced that the tank he is driving is underpowered, while the tanks the other guys are driving are overpowered. Or how the saying goes: "Devs, this is scissors. Nerf rock, paper is fine."

Now I know that some people reading this will think that €250 is too much money for a video game, and that I shouldn't be able to use that money to advance faster. Boy, do I have bad news for you: This kind of gaming is only going to become more dominant in the future. The average video game player is 37 years old and has been playing games for 12 years already. The age where video games were considered to be for children, and thus as toys had to be cheap, is over. A modern game really is a competitor on the leisure market to the above mentioned golf club, and can be priced accordingly. Just walk through an average mall and see how much completely useless stuff people spend lots of money on. At least if you buy completely useless virtual stuff you don't have it taking space in your garage afterwards.

But is this future really so bad as some people say? Yes, World of Tanks definitively has a mode in which I can spend more money and less time. But it is me who freely chose this mode, because it better fits my personal valuation of time versus money. Somebody with less money and more time than me can choose the other mode, and get to exactly the same result. We both just simply spend the resource we have more of. That to me seems to be a very fair business model, which doesn't exclude anyone, and still manages to finance the development of patches and new games. If that pisses off the people who used to have all the advantages by spending the most time in a game, that is fine with me.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments Links to this post

 
My monocle theory

You might have noticed that my blog post on the monocle affair was extremely short. That was a typical case where I didn't say everything I had to say because of the obvious possibility that the combination of two very contentious subjects, EVE and RMT, would result in a flame war in the comment section. Now with comments turned off, I can say what I believe happened. I think that the EVE item shop is not a sudden decision, but a natural result from previous decisions by CCP on RMT.

In my opinion the whole story started years ago, when CCP introduced their PLEX RMT. For the players the PLEX system looks like an indirect way to buy any item in the game with cash: You buy a PLEX from CCP, exchange that PLEX for ISK in game, and buy whatever you want with the ISK. The obvious advantage is that the players who buy virtual goods for real cash this way support the in-game economy.

So does this make the PLEX system the ideal RMT system? Well, not from the point of view of the company: The PLEX system has the curious effect that regardless of how many players engage in RMT, CCP doesn't make any more money from their game than if they had no RMT at all. All they actually sell is subscriptions in advance. That increases the short term cash flow, but in the long term they still only make as much money as they would have with a regular subscription system. Originally there was no way for PLEX to disappear from the economy except for somebody paying his subscription with one. The more PLEX accumulate in game, the less likely it becomes that somebody pays for his subscription with cash. It's a bit like a mortgage: Get money now, but the obligation sticks with you for a long time. A PLEX is basically an IOU from CCP.

For CCP to make money, the PLEX had to be removed from the in-game economy. Their first attempt at that was making them destructible. That obviously wasn't a very reliable method of removing PLEX, and it tended to very much upset the player who got shot down with over $1,000 dollars worth of PLEX in his cargo hold.

So what CCP needed was a way for players to voluntarily destroy their PLEX. And that is where the item shop and the monocle come into play. The fundamental feature of EVE's new item shop is not that you can buy a monocle for $68. It is that to pay for items from the shop, you need to destroy PLEX by turning them into Aurum. Every PLEX destroyed means somebody at some point will have to pay for his subscription instead of using that PLEX.

I think that the plan in itself is a good one. What CCP failed at was the implementation. On the one side the vanity items are overpriced, on the other side they don't fulfill the most basic function of a vanity item: Showing off in front of other players. Nobody but you can see your avatar running around in the space station, so it doesn't really matter what he wears.

According to the leaked memo from CCP the next step will be selling items with some use in game for Aurum, like ships or modules. From the point of view of the buyer, that doesn't change much: Instead of exchanging PLEX for ISK and then the item you want, you now exchange PLEX for Aurum and then the item you want. From the point of view of CCP that is a huge difference: Any item bought via Aurum is an actual income for the company. CCP will finally be able to financially profit from the RMT they had going on already for a long time.

So why the outrage? Well, money tends to be a zero-sum game. If CCP gains more money from their RMT, somebody else has to be on the losing end. In this case the people who lose are those who used to pay for their subscription with PLEX they bought with ISK they earned in game, effectively the "Free2Play" players of EVE. Remove a lot of PLEX from the game, and their price in ISK goes up. It will become more difficult to finance your EVE subscription strictly through ISK earned in game.

Is that the end of EVE? Not bloody likely. As Raph Koster once pointed out, every MMORPG has the same shape of curve of subscriber numbers over time. Just the height of the peak and the width of the timescale changes. It is likely that EVE has peaked, and will now begin a slow decline, just like it is likely that WoW is now on the decline. But for games who took years to peak, it will also take years to decline. And it is rather common for companies with a product that already paid off its development cost and is slowly declining to milk that cash cow to the maximum. It isn't the milking that causes the decline, but the decline that causes the milking. The fans would like EVE to be a special snowflake, but in the end CCP is a company like any other and has to make money.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:55 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments Links to this post

 
Comments turned off

As announced, comments have been turned off until at least August 31st.

I had two differnt options on how to do that. The one I choose completely hides the commenting section, with the disadvantage of also hiding all old comments. The other option would have been to leave the comment section, but allow only me to post comments. After testing it turned out that the latter option wasn't good, because it created a comment window as usual, in which people could have typed in long comments only to find at the end that they weren't allowed to publish them to the blog.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:25 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments Links to this post