Speed

How fast is your computer? Having now received my new computer, I find that this question is very hard to answer. There is no universal measure for speed of computers, you can only measure the time it takes the computer to do a specific task. So I've been running benchmark programs like 3DMark and find that my new computer has a score of just under 24,000, compared to 14,500 for the old one. I can also measure the frames per second of games, for example World of Tanks at highest graphics settings going up from 60 fps to 100 fps. But practically these measures of speed don't mean much. If World of Tanks didn't have a small display for frames per second, you wouldn't even be able to notice the difference between 60 and 100.

So what I am left with is a computer which FEELS a lot faster. This is mainly due to the solid state hard drive on which the operating system and the programs are stored. That results in much less time passing between me clicking on an icon and the computer doing what I asked him to. There is less wait for the computer to boot up and shut down, for starting programs, and for loading screens in games. That makes the new computer much nicer to work with, but it would be hard to put a number on this gain in speed and comfort.

A similar issue exists when measuring internet speed. Ask somebody how fast his internet is, and he'll probably give you a number expresses in MBit per second. I have a 20 MBit/s VDSL internet connection. 20 MBit/s ends up being up to 2 Mbyte per second of download speed, so this speed measure is relevant the day I want for example to download my digital copy of Star Wars: The Old Republic, which will presumably be several gigabyte large. If the EA servers are able to send out data at that speed, being able to download 7 gigabyte per hour will be a big help. But for actually *playing* SWTOR the 20 MBit/s speed is irrelevant. For online games it is far more important how fast your "ping" is in milliseconds, because that determines how long you have to wait between you clicking and something appropriate happening. If you play on a server on a different continent, you might end up with half a second of ping, making your character react much slower than everybody else. It is hard to not stand in the fire if your ping is that high. Fortunately a lot of European servers for different games are situated in the area between Paris and the Netherlands, and I have 30 ms ping in many online games.

So, I have a really fast computer and a fast internet connection. Now I just need to decide what to use them for. I haven't even installed World of Warcraft on the new computer, only World of Tanks and Steam. And I don't really have any plans for MMORPGs before SWTOR. I just hope I can get into the beta soon. Apparently I'm not alone here, I see a lot of discussion of SWTOR, Guild Wars 2, and Diablo 3 in the blogosphere, and very little discussion of games that you can actually already play. Well, I have a large collection of games I bought in various Steam sales and haven't tried yet, maybe this is the opportunity to play them.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:40 AM Permanent Link  (11) comments Links to this post

 
Are you invested?

Virtual property is an interesting subject, because it causes problems that real property doesn't have. One of these problems is the perennity of virtual items you buy. If you buy a sparkly pony in World of Warcraft from Blizzard, you expect that mount to be around for a while. At least as long as you still want to play that game. But what happens if Blizzard decides that they want to shut down WoW? If you only pay subscriptions, you can't really complain if a game company says that they'll stop accepting subscription payments and will close down a game in 6 months (like SOE did with Star Wars Galaxies). But if the business model is Free2Play with an item shop, a game closing down effectively makes the items you bought in that shop disappear, which obviously leads to upset customers.

This is exactly the problem Google has at the moment. They bought a social apps company named Slide a year ago for $200 million, and now decided to shut it down, probably because they started their own social network Google+ now. But Slide had a Free2Play casual game called SuperPoke! Pets, and according to the Washington Post the players are threatening law suits because of the money they "invested" in that game. In some cases thousands of dollars.

Now players in general tend to get rather upset if they can't access their online games. I recently started playing The Sims Social, which is a nice version of The Sims for Facebook. And although I didn't invest any money in it, I'm annoyed that I can't access that game due to a bug which affects many players and which gets you stuck on the loading screen at 65%. But in that situation I obviously have no legal case, and anyway it probably is just a temporary inconvenience. In the case of Star Wars Galaxies I did pay money for a subscription a long time ago, but as I haven't played for years I'm not really bothered, and I don't consider the time and money spent as an "investment".

A game I am currently playing, and where I bought something from the item shop, is World of Tanks. Now WoT is doing great, and I don't expect them to shut down anytime soon. But I do admit that I never read the legalese text that undoubtedly exists somewhere telling me what exactly my property rights are on the Löwe tank I paid real money for. Presumably I clicked through a legal agreement telling me that I don't have any rights at all. And so did the players of SuperPoke! Pets. But the legality of click-through agreements is not yet universally accepted, although US courts tend to consider them legal. And in the case of virtual property it isn't quite clear whether certain laws about property rights or consumer protection don't override the license terms. So unless the SuperPoke! Pets players really sue Google and thus establish some precedence, it is very hard to say what your virtual property rights are. In China there have been several cases where courts considered that the buyers had some fundamental rights even with virtual property they bought.

I'd like to hear from you whether there are games in which you feel invested to a point where you would consider a law suit if the game and your virtual property was taken away from you. Do you accept that you have absolutely no rights at all? Or do you consider that the time and money you spent on an online game under certain conditions gives you certain rights, even if you clicked accept on some terms of service you never read?
- posted by Tobold @ 7:11 AM Permanent Link  (17) comments Links to this post

 
Sandbox is hard

Again I fully agree with Syncaine in that it is a lot easier to make a successful PvE theme park game than to make a successful PvP sandbox game. The market for PvE theme park games is obviously much bigger, and even a half-decent WoW clone like Rift can get 1 million customers (if not subscribers). Having said that, I think that Syncaine is wrong in attributing the difference to PvP vs. PvE. I believe that it is easier to make ANY theme park game, PvE OR PvP, than to make any sandbox game.

For example World of Tanks is up to 5 million players in a game with absolutely no PvE at all. But the PvP it has is very clearly structured, there is a clear narrative telling players where to go and what to do next. Meanwhile the excellent PvE sandbox game A Tale in the Desert has only a few thousand players.

It appears to me that the large majority of players likes to be told what to do, have a clear path of advancement with every step laid out in front of them. They gladly follow the instructions of "do A, then do B, then do C", but get confused if given the free choice of doing either A, B, or C, especially if told that these options aren't equally good. Even in a theme park PvE MMORPG, when given a choice, players hurry to find a guide or website telling them which option is the best. Anybody making a choice out of his own free will and ending up with the option that is 0.07% worse than the optimum is a clueless n00b. If you are forced to always make the absolutely best choice, you simply can't afford to think for yourself. And you have to avoid games that give you too many choices, aka sandbox games.

Sandbox is too hard for the players, thus too hard to make successful for the developers.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:55 AM Permanent Link  (24) comments Links to this post

 
Skill systems and character resets

To get the ball rolling on that Darkfall 2.0 character reset perfect harmony joint post between me and Syncaine, I thought I'd write up some thoughts on skill systems and character resets.

What I am talking about here is MMORPG systems in which you don't "level up" to increase your abilities, but where there is a more direct system in which you improve skills by using them. These sort of systems appeal to many due to them being more "immersive". There is a sort of easy-to-understand logic behind you getting better at wielding a sword by wielding a sword. After all, that is how you would do it in real life, right?

Unfortunately once you observe what people end up actually doing in MMORPGs with systems like these, it turns out that there are some obvious flaws. The game is often unable to distinguish between you exercising a skill for a normal game activity, and you exercising a skill for something silly to "grind" it. Thus if a game has a running skill, and an auto-run function, a player might place his avatar into a corner, and auto-run into that corner for hours, steadily increasing his running skill. Or if there is a skill to throw fireballs, the player might cast this spell against trees in complete safety to skill up. It's another fine example of players' tendency to optimize the fun out of games.

Now game developers are by definition idealists, otherwise they wouldn't work under the conditions prevalent in that industry. So games get released with skill systems that aren't robust against being manipulated by the players. And if you change the conditions later, as in you only gain fireball skill if your fireball actually deals damage to a mob that can hurt you, you end up with the problem of what to do with the people who already maxed out their skills in ways you hadn't anticipated.

Thus when Aventurine discussed a complete revamp of their skill system in Darkfall 2.0, the subject of character resets has turned up in the discussion. Probably not a "wipe", completely erasing all existing characters, but some sort of "skill reset". The problem being that in a game without levels, a skill reset is equivalent of resetting everybody to level 1, even if they keep their gear and other belongings.

Now people tend to care about their relative and absolute character status in a game a lot. MMORPGs are mostly static, that is not much in the virtual world changes through the actions of the players. The only thing that changes in every game is the virtual character itself, which makes his status a record of the personal history of that character which isn't recorded elsewhere in the world. Arthas might still sit on his frozen throne in Icecrown citadel, but you got the achievement, title, and possibly loot proving that you slew him. Reset the character, and there is nothing left of your virtual achievements. Your personal history is much more important to you than the game lore history, which only advances in patches and expansions, and then often has serious inconsistencies when playing through older content.

It is pretty obvious that if Blizzard tomorrow would announce that they will reset every character in World of Warcraft to level 1, they would lose millions of players immediately. So would a game like EVE, if they would reset everybody's skills to zero. If you play for the advancement of your character, and that advancement is taken away from you, that can be a good reason to quit playing. People clearly invest themselves less in betas where they know there will be a character reset (which is one of the reasons why developers get surprised by behavior of players after launch which is completely different to what they did in the beta).

On the other side of the medal are the obvious advantages of a reset: If players consider that others have gained "unfair" advantages through an exploit in the skill system, they might prefer a skill reset combined with a new skill system which is less easy to manipulate. And if the worst exploiters quit because of it, then so be it!

So what will happen if Darkfall 2.0 resets all skills is hard to predict. Being a niche game, Darkfall might benefit from having more dedicated players than a mainstream game. But that dedication might make these players even more angry about having lost their time "investment" in the game. And players hate major changes to games, so this could end up being the "NGE" of Darkfall, even if the new skill system is better and fairer than the old one. It sure will be interesting to watch what happens.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:16 AM Permanent Link  (11) comments Links to this post

 
Who are you, and what did you do with the Syncaine I know?

Friday is the traditional day for blog wars between me and Syncaine. Unfortunately it appears we will have to cancel that, because some doppelganger ate Syncaine and replaced him with somebody I agree with. That, or the guy is getting old and reasonable. Yesterday's post about how great it is to be able to spend $150 on a Free2Play game could have been written by me. And I completely agree with Syncaine's points on the greatness of turn-based strategy in general and Final Fantasy Tactics in particular.

Coming up: A joint post by Syncaine and Tobold on how the skill system in Darkfall 1.0 was completely messed up, and how good an idea it is from Aventurine to do a complete character reset in Darkfall 2.0.

Scary, isn't it?
- posted by Tobold @ 8:34 AM Permanent Link  (9) comments Links to this post

 
Video game stores are dying

It is surprising easy to spot dying industries: There appears to be an universal law that forces them to get increasingly nasty in their fight for survival on their way down. Thus this week's news that Gamestop is stealing OnLive coupons from boxes of Deus Ex: Human Revolution to "not promote the competition" isn't all that surprising.

Like everybody else I used to buy my video games in stores like Gamestop. Over the years that experience turned worse and worse: The selection of PC games available got worse every year, and it was rare to meet an employee who could give you better advice on what game to buy than what you could have learned from 5 minutes with Google. Boxed games further suffered from the interaction between game companies and pirates, both of which I hold responsible for the evolution of DRM systems which mainly inconvenience legal buyers. These days I buy nearly all my games on Steam.

The only reason video games stores aren't dead yet is that consoles are lagging the PC in digital distribution. But that is really just a question of time. There are already handheld consoles which can't use any physical media at all any more, and services like XBox Live and Playstation Network are growing, despite this year's problems with hackers.

As gamers are getting older and richer, being able to resell a game or copy it for your friends is becoming less of a priority when deciding what game to buy and how. There was always a large group of gamers which just bought games for themselves, without ever making them available to other people through reselling or piracy. In many markets broadband internet is so widespread now that digital distribution simply has more advantages than disadvantages for the majority of possible customers. So why bother leaving the house, going to a shop that might not have a copy of the game you want to buy, and being limited to a selection of the latest best-sellers?

Apart from digital distribution being more practical for many consumers, there are also financial aspects. Digital distribution is clearly cheaper than retail distribution. Thus either more money goes to the game developers, or games become cheaper, or a mix of both. Actually games already ARE cheaper, by a significant amount, if you look at all games, and not just the best-selling games' prices on release day. Good prices come to people who wait, either for Steam sales or permanent price reductions. Rift now is available for $4.99 (albeit without the usual 30 free days, thus effectively the price is $19.99). And unlike video game stores, these lower prices for older games have unlimited availability, no more searching of bargain bins in vain for a cheap game. Furthermore digital distribution platforms have more indie and low-budget games than video game stores, there are a lot of excellent games under $20 on Steam.

Gamestop opening boxes of games to remove coupons for online services isn't going to change all this. The business model of selling video games in a box is clearly on its way out.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:00 AM Permanent Link  (19) comments Links to this post

 
The Sims Social

Many years ago I played The Sims Online, which was not a big success. EA badly mangled the rather obvious idea of "The Sims as MMORPG" and created a game which wasn't all that much fun. But that never killed the general concept of transforming The Sims into a new game following the latest fad, so this month The Sims Social on Facebook was released. That fortunately turned out to be a better fit and easier to accomplish. While I only played a short while yet, I can already say that The Sims Social isn't all that bad for a Facebook game.

Basically the game takes many concepts from The Sims, like your avatar living in a house and having to take care of his needs for food, sleep, hygiene, and so on. And then adds many concepts from typical Facebook games, like the bar with your friends on the bottom of the screen, or planting and harvesting stuff in your garden. That mix works reasonably well.

The main problem is that the standards for Facebook games evolve over time, and EA obviously copied earlier iterations of Zynga games, which aren't top notch any more. For example there doesn't appear to be a filter in the gift / game request sending interface that would allow to only show your friends actually playing The Sims Social. Unless you don't mind spamming friends that don't play the game with game mails, you'll have to write down the names of your The Sims Social friends on a piece of paper, and then manually pick them from the list of all your friends whenever you want to ask your friends for help with something in the game. And as asking for help or exchanging gifts is a major part of social games, that gets annoying rather fast.

Just like in most other social games, your interaction with your friends in The Sims Social is asynchronous. That is you can visit your friends house and have social interactions with their avatars while your friends are offline. The gifts and help requests are actually the only part where in input of your friend is required. I haven't explored that concept further yet, but I wonder how the game handles the relationships between avatars in the long run. There appears to be options for romance and marriage, which seems odd to me if you pursue these options with a friends avatar without your friend having any input on this. I can't imagine you logging on and finding that your sim is now married or romantically involved with the sim of one of your friends without you even having been asked.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:54 AM Permanent Link  (3) comments Links to this post

 
Crowd control

I didn't go to Gamescom this weekend. I easily could have, it's less than 2 hours away by train, and neither train tickets nor entry tickets were prohibitively priced. But based on my experience with conventions and videos I saw from previous Gamescoms, I decided that it would probably be too crowded to be enjoyable for me. That turned out to be an accurate prediction, with people reporting dangerously crowded conditions at the entrance, and queues of up to 4 hours wait for the privilege of trying out a new game for 10 minutes on Sunday. I probably got more info staying at home and watching videos on various websites about the games presented in Cologne than what I would have seen if I had been there.

Now one of the videos I saw was Total Biscuit's 25 minutes of SWTOR commented gameplay. And one thing that struck me was that obviously there were problems in the starter zone shown with mobs not spawning fast enough for the handful of people trying to kill them for their quests. I got flashbacks to the best screenshot of World of Warcraft that I failed to take: 10 players in Elwynn Forest on launch days camping a level 1 kobold spawn spot.

Now the video also showed the main story line quest locations being instanced, and I'm not sure if you could simply skip all the side quests and play without being bothered too much by the inevitable crowding on the first days. But the whole thing makes me wonder whether there isn't a better way to start a new MMORPG.

The problem in this sort of game for the moment is that your location is linked to your level. There simply aren't all that many places where a level 1 character can go in these quest-based, level-based games. By choosing your faction and class, you automatically already chose the list of chores and errands disguised as "quests" that your character is going to do early on in his career. And on launch day, everybody is level 1, and thus has the same laundry list of stuff to do as those of the same class. "Kill 10 womp rats" type of quests are already by themselves not very interesting. But if the 10 womp rat spawn points are camped by 50 players, those quests are getting downright annoying. And even if the main story is instanced, you can't help but constantly run across other players which are obviously on the same story, which makes it hard to feel special.

Now ideally in an open world setting there would be a huge wilderness populated by low-level monsters, in which starting players would be randomly distributed. So players would be alone, would get quests not from NPCs but by some sort of long-distance communication, and would spend their early days learning how to fight mobs in the wilderness and getting towards a city somewhere in the center of it. But even that approach is probably not going to work if you consider SWTOR already having sold 350,000 pre-orders in the US alone.

So I question the value of having the start be open world in Star Wars: The Old Republic. Wouldn't it be better if the first 10 levels would be completely instanced before releasing players into an open world? It isn't as if they were likely to want to group for the low levels anyway. Somebody starting a new character half a year after launch is likely to play through an empty starter zone anyway, so why not offer that experience to everybody right from the start?
- posted by Tobold @ 9:08 AM Permanent Link  (20) comments Links to this post

 
World of Tanks controls

Picture the following situation: A German heavy tank, Tiger II, bunny-hops past you. Then he notices you, uses his leet mouse-turn skillz to turn around in a fraction of a second, and proceeds to circle-strafe you. Obviously all this would look extremely silly, which is why it can't happen in World of Tanks. There is no jumping, instant turning, or sideways movement with a tank. The controls are a bit more realistic than that.

The strange thing is that in the world of PvP games this is an exception. A plate-wearing tank with a huge two-handed sword in WoW isn't any more realistic than the Tiger II tank with his bunny-hops and other unrealistic moves. But it is what you see on every battleground. In fact, when people talk about how "skilled" they are in PvP, most of the time they are expressing how good they are at moving in a totally unrealistic way.

In World of Tanks you sometimes meet one of these "skilled" PvP players. They are easy to recognize, because they fire their gun in the first second of combat. Because that is what pressing both mouse buttons in WoT will do, not mouse-turn. Apart from the controls being different, the biggest difference is the speed. The Tiger II, with improved chains, will turn at 26 degrees per second, thus needs 7 seconds to turn 180 degrees. His stock turret turns at 34 degrees per second, and thus manages the 180 degrees in 5 seconds. While technically turning the turret could be considered a "mouse-turn" (you use the mouse for it, just without the buttons), it is pretty obvious that your speed in moving the mouse has no influence on the result.

Which means that if you don't want to get shot in the back in World of Tanks, you will have to watch where you are going, where the enemy is, predict his movements, and move in a way that doesn't expose your back to him. And that requires a lot of skill. It just isn't the same sort of skill people talk about in other PvP games. Which is why I'm playing World of Tanks.
- posted by Tobold @ 1:05 PM Permanent Link  (18) comments Links to this post

 
My lack of trust in humanity

Syp chimes in on the SWTOR morality debate with a very optimistic comment: "Plus, wouldn’t it be really cool if BioWare makes these choices and stories so compelling that it tears people away from grinding light/darkside points to do what they want to do?" Yes, Syp, that would be really cool. But, from my personal experience with gamers and developers, that isn't going to happen.

A "perfect" story for me would be one in which good and evil are so perfectly balanced that my natural choices would end me up somewhere in the grey area of the morality spectrum. That is where I see most people in real life ending up if judged by a jedi system of beliefs. I certainly am no un-emotional jedi of pure goodness and control over mind and body.

Unless Bioware adds grey morality gear to the game, which isn't planned, and frankly unlikely, following a grey story will disqualify players from wearing any morality gear. And I expect there to be some very cool morality gear which you can only wear if you are at the extreme ends of the scale. 99 out of 100 gamers will thus go into "let's optimize the fun out of this" mode. They won't even *read* the possible responses to some moral dilemma. They'll just automatically chose the one which is marked as giving the right points for the cool gear they are after. And that is where the story-based MMORPG gameplay will utterly fail.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:24 AM Permanent Link  (25) comments Links to this post

 
Story-based MMORPGs and morality

In the past weeks there have been several bits of preview information about Star Wars: The Old Republic which made me think about virtual morality. For example it was revealed that there are romance options with your NPC companions, but that pursuing these options as a jedi would yield you dark side points. Or in other words, jedi don't have sex, because sex is evil. No wonder they died out and lost the old republic to the sith, who apparently get stronger by having sex.

There are two problems here. One is having a morality system which is black and white, with just one form of neutral in between. If you are a jedi and take decisions in SWTOR, you will either get light side points, or dark side points, or neither. That doesn't leave much room for complex moral decisions. And a lot of people will end up making all the obvious choices, not for reasons of story or role-playing, but because you need so and so many light side points to be able to wield the glowing lightsaber of holiness.

The other problem is that by clearly attaching good and evil points to decisions, the players are bound to the ideas of morality of the developers. If developers say that romance is evil, then it is so in the game. If they wanted to make straight sex good and gay sex evil, they could do so as well. Unless you keep stories extremely simplistic, there are bound to be situations where a player believes he is doing the moral thing, only to get slapped with points that tell him that the devs consider his choice to have been evil.

I think we will see a lot of stories in the future about players complaining how SWTOR judged their actions and awarded the "wrong" kind of points to actions the player considered "clearly" moral/amoral.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:42 AM Permanent Link  (32) comments Links to this post

 
A first look at Games for Google+

This week I finally got access to Games for Google+, so I tried some of them to get a first impression. In particular I tried Angry Birds, City of Wonder, and Dragons of Atlantis. 3 games out of the 16 currently on offer.

Angry Birds on Google+ is like Angry Birds on every other platform. On Google+ your score gets compared to the scores of the people in your circles. And apparently there are multiplayer "maps". Not sure if these additions justify playing Angry Birds on Google+ instead of elsewhere.

Dragons of Atlantis appears to be one of these "build a city and attack your neighbors" games, like countless "browser strategy games" with names like Travian or Lords of Ultima. My principal problem with these games is that they do the opposite of intelligent matchmaking in a PvP game: Good matchmaking encourages players to fight other players of equal strength. By placing players randomly on a map and making it more advantageous to fight neighbors, you often end up with people having started earlier or playing more intensively completely crushing newer or more casual players without these even having a chance. Often that ends up with players hoping to make their neighbors quit, so they can have their cities "on farm", raiding them regularly for added resources. Unbalanced PvP does not a fun game make.

So in the end the game I spent the most time with ended up being City of Wonder. That is a city-building game with a Civilization theme. Curiously that ends up resembling Civilization more than the "official" social platform version of Civilization, Civ World on Facebook. On the other hand City of Wonder doesn't have much gameplay. It is just the basic Farmville principle of clicking on things in regular intervals. You'd advance fastest if you had City of Wonder running in the background while playing something else, and would ALT-TAB to it to click on some stuff every time the other game had some downtime. Compared to Farmville, City of Wonder is more complex, with a big technology tree, more different types of buildings, and more different factors like culture or happiness to optimize. But that just makes me want to play Civilization V instead, where I don't get constant advertising how I could improve my city by paying real money.

I will try some other Games for Google+, but up to now I can't say I have struck gold yet. Which isn't really surprising, as the competitor Facebook is also full of games which range from boring to just plain bad, with only a few pearls in between. If you haven't played it on Facebook, you might want to try Dragon Age Legends on Google+. That was one of the more decent games on Facebook, even if it obviously can't compare with the single-player Dragon Age games.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:51 AM Permanent Link  (2) comments Links to this post

 
The death of WoW

Tipa thinks that social platforms will kill the MMORPG. Syp thinks 2011 is the end of the WoW era. And quite a lot of other blogger interpreted the announcement of patch 4.3 as sign of World of Warcraft's imminent death. Which is curious, because the new features announced aren't actually all that special or stand out in any way compared to features introduced in previous patches. Sorry, an appearance tab, old armor storage, and a looking-for-raid functionality is pretty much par for the course, and way less change than for example the introduction of the Dungeon Finder was.

World of Warcraft is soon to be 7 years old. Any game gets boring after playing it for years and for thousands of hours. I'm bored of WoW. I'm bored of quest-based fantasy MMORPGs in general. But I know that this is something that happens in my head, and not some weird conspiracy that colluded to make all fantasy MMORPGs worse with every patch.

And yes, the games industry like many other entertainment industries has fashion cycles, where everybody appears to be running after the same holy grail for some time, only to give up on the chase and go after something completely different the next year. MMORPGs are not only out of fashion, they are already two generations out of fashions, with the social games that were supposed to kill them going out of fashion already. These days everybody is making lobby-based "always online" single-player and multi-player games, preferably with a Free2Play business model.

That doesn't mean that MMORPGs in general or WoW in particular are dead. Rift claims to be the number 2 MMORPG with 1 million "customers", carefully avoiding the term "subscribers". SWTOR has high hopes for attracting 3 million players. At the current rate of player loss, World of Warcraft will stop to be number 1 MMORPG in the year 2020. There is no reason whatsoever to believe that WoW won't still be around in 2020. And a bunch of other MMORPGs will also still be around. There will still be success stories, with some games like Guild Wars 2 looking quite promising, and people getting excited about the WildStar trailer.

The only thing that is dead is the MMORPG gold rush, and that is something to be thankful for. It only created a huge number of very bad games in the hope of getting rich quick. Surprise, surprise, video game players aren't total idiots, and bad games don't really do well. Especially not if you have a business model where you expect your customers to keep paying for a long time, instead of selling them a game they can't test first and running with the money before the customer finds out the game is bad. For all the possible objections one can have against the Free2Play model, it does force game developers to make games that are high quality, because otherwise the players never move past the free content.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:23 AM Permanent Link  (22) comments Links to this post

 
MODs and MORs

The basic principle of a MMORPG is that the player has access to a virtual world which offers very different activities for him. He can quest, he can farm monsters, he can socialize, he can PvP under different rulesets (battlegrounds, arenas, open world), he can engage in cooperative PvE in different group sizes and difficulties (dungeons, heroics, raids), he can gather resources, he can craft items, or he could just travel the virtual world as a tourist. Offering so many different things can be attractive, but it also has disadvantages: It is expensive to produce, and invariably some activities end up being much more popular than others; sometimes the various activities even hinder each other, for example the spell the developers would like to put in for PvE would unbalance PvP, or the ability to craft really good items would keep people from searching for loot in dungeons.

After many companies failed miserably at offering a popular MMORPG which has something for everybody, the game flavor of the day isn't the MMORPG any more, but the MOBA (multiplayer online battle arena), the lobby-based game of PvP in instanced battle arenas. There are various games like these based on the DotA real-time strategy / role-playing mix. There are many different shooter games; including World of Tanks and the other announced "World of" games, which is somewhat ironic because their main difference to a MMORPG is the absence of a world. As much as Trion claims that their MMORPG Rift is successful, their next game is a MOBA: End of Nations, a real-time strategy, lobby-based game. Even the ancient Age of Empires brand this week opened up Age of Empires Online, which also is a MOBA. And Mythic re-designed their failed MMORPG WAR as a MOBA too. Pretty much all of these are based on the Free2Play business model. And unlike the MMORPG business which has 10 failures for every successful game, most of the MOBAs appear to be making money. Lobby-based games concentrating on just one activity are obviously cheaper to make than MMORPGs, without being any less popular.

Many fans of the world aspects of MMORPGs already complain that tools like the Dungeon Finder enable players to run dungeons as if they were in a lobby-based game. Only that this creates an extremely expensive and badly balanced lobby-based game. The MOBAs are frequently PvP games, but for example Age of Empires Online also has an extensive PvE campaign. There is no reason why we couldn't have MODs (multiplayer online dungeons) or even MORs (multiplayer online raids). Judging by how the people who play dungeons and raids always complain about having to play the leveling game, or doing quests, or doing other activities to get consumables for raiding, it is quite likely that a lobby-based game with dungeons and/or raids would be extremely successful. Not to mention much cheaper to produce, and much better balanced. And on the other side of the equation we could have MMORPGs with better virtual worlds, more meaningful questing and leveling, without that annoying raid endgame tacked on the end. Make two games for the price of one, each one better than the compromise you get by bundling them together.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (14) comments Links to this post

 
Lowering tank responsibility

After 7 years of people discussing how the holy trinity of tank, healer, damage dealers is broken, after 7 years of tank shortages, after even the attempt to bribe people to tank failed, Blizzard is finally caving in. They are finally making a tank as easy to play as a damage dealer by making threat generation easier and automatic. To the point that "We expect the community to gradually stop using threat-tracking mods as players realize they don’t need them."

Now lots of people are going to discuss these changes in terms of "nerfing", "making WoW easier", etc. But the actual point of the changes is that it distributes the responsibility for success and failure more evenly in a group. If a large enough number of players would have actually liked to shoulder a higher responsibility, they had 7 years to express that by taking on one of the roles that tended to get all the blame in a group, tank or healer. It has been blindingly obvious that this wasn't the case, and that 80% to 90% of players preferred the less stressful, less responsible damage dealer role which was only foreseen for 60%. Even after handing out extra bribes for tanks, it was faster to find 3 damage dealers than 1 tank.

World of Warcraft always had the tools for a good group to share responsibility. Damage dealers always had the option to /assist, to throttle their damage, and in many cases help with crowd control or other aggro management abilities. People who only played in such good groups with highly skilled guild mates will probably fail to see the necessity of the announced changes. Unfortunately the reality of the Dungeon Finder and the pickup group was a very different one. The old model resulted in mediocre players of DPS classes to expect to be carried by overgeared tanks and good healers, throwing hissy fits if they happened to be grouped with a tank who wasn't geared and skilled any better if they were, or a healer who couldn't work miracles when the damage dealer's bad play resulted in drawing aggro. The old model channeled all the bad players into the damage dealer role.

In the end it was always the tank or healer who got blamed for a wipe, while the damage dealers measured their epeen in pure damage per second with zero regard for the survival of the group. As a social experiment of collaboration it was a complete failure, you can't have 2 people responsible for everybody surviving, and 3 responsible for "winning" by killing the mobs. You end up with 2 players either being blamed or being taking for granted, while the other 3 either do the blaming or congratulate themselves.

Note that while the threat changes principally affect tanks, there will be a corresponding strong effect on healers as well. If the tank holds aggro, a healer's role gets a lot easier than if the damage dealers constantly draw aggro and then blame the healer when they die.

The main disadvantage of the change is that it will move tactics back to where they were in Wrath, with the little restraint that damage dealers had in Cataclysm evaporating in an instant. It'll be AoE damage all the way, with DPS classes that aren't good at dealing area damage becoming less useful. But the alternative would have been a change which instead of lowering the responsibility of tanks and healers would have increased the responsibility of damage dealers, at which point group play would have become a niche activity. Making it easier for a tank to overcome the lack of tactical gameplay of the average damage dealer was probably the best option Blizzard had.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:04 AM Permanent Link  (31) comments Links to this post

 
Mythic says I'm right

So Mythic agreed with "Why do we PvP?" post and realized that all this virtual world nonsense and character advancement is only getting into the way of a good PvP game. So they are taking the Warhammer Online engine and are creating Warhammer Online: Wrath of Heroes with it. A lobby based, Free2Play, fantasy battle game with 3 factions.

In hindsight it appears obvious that this is the game they should have released in 2008. They would have become silly rich by now if they had done so. Instead they grafted an inferior WoW clone nobody liked on the fantasy battle game people actually wanted to play, wasted millions, and are widely regarded as a failure. It is good that they've realized now where the actual strength of their game is, even if by now the lobby-based battle game market is much more crowded. Nevertheless I expect WARWoH to do well, and to make the original WAR obsolete to the point of it closing down in a few years.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:31 AM Permanent Link  (17) comments Links to this post

 
Splungthrust: Tales of Flimbonia

In his usual brilliant but slightly weird style, Melmoth of Killed in a Smiling Accident describes Splungthrust: Tales of Flimbonia as

Perhaps the greatest MMO of all time, it had everything that MMO players wanted. Huge sandbox elements seamlessly merged with theme park areas for the perfect questing experience. A genre-busting world design, which incorporated fantasy, sci-fi, horror, romance, and the wild west. An incredibly expansive player housing system. Intricate crafting that produced powerful customisable items. Twenty races. Fifty classes. Perfectly balanced meaningful PvP. Complex NPC AI that created exciting and challenging escort quests. Over seven years of unique content through three hundred character levels, with zero grind. A world which would permanently change based on the players’ actions. An active combat system that allowed for tactical or twitch game-play based on player preference. A detailed character customisation model allowing for intricate body specifications, such as left toe tendon length and eyebrow hair population density. In short, it was a utopia of MMO design. Unfortunately during beta testing the players complained that mailboxes were painted blue when clearly they should be red; the developers didn’t listen, and so nobody played the game upon its release.

The chances that we will see anything like a Splungthrust: Tales of Flimbonia anytime soon are slim. But the chances that some up the upcoming MMORPGs are actually quite good, but will be criticized heavily for minor flaws are high. I think the MMORPG market has a arrived at a stage of maturity and cynicism that no game will ever again be launched to universal acclaim. Not even Splungthrust: Tales of Flimbonia.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (5) comments Links to this post

 
World of Battleships announced

I like World of Tanks. But when Wargaming.net announced World of Warplanes as a sequel, I wasn't impressed. Maybe the game will surprise me when I can play it, but instinctively I have doubts about applying what worked for WoT to a three-dimensional battlefield. I would have preferred a very different sequel. Fortunately Wargaming.net today announced the sequel I would have wished for: World of Battleships.

I am a huge fan of naval combat games, since Harpoon on the Amiga. And for me the big selling point of World of Tanks is that is is a non-twitchy shooter game. That is something that I can easily imagine being well reproduced in World of Battleships, while the higher speed and added complexity of the third dimension will presumably require faster reaction for World of Warplanes.

I am positively surprised about the speed of Wargaming.net. Official release date of World of Tanks was in April, 4 months later the website of World of Warplanes is up, and a playable alpha version of the game will be presented at Gamescom next weekend. And that is without neglecting their first game; WoT already has 3 content patches with new maps and new tanks added since I started playing in May. But even with all that display of speed, I would be quite surprised if World of Battleships would come out before 2013. Well, I'll be waiting.
- posted by Tobold @ 2:38 PM Permanent Link  (6) comments Links to this post

 
Social platform games

Apparently Games for Google+ launched last week in the USA, but isn't yet available world wide. I haven't got access to it yet, and my appeal to not get kicked out from Google+ is still pending, so I don't have first-hand experience of the Google games yet. But from what I read the games are mostly games that already run on Facebook, and I've been playing several Facebook games over the summer. So here are some thoughts on these social platform games, with examples.

My current favorite Facebook game is Kings Bounty: Legions by Nival. The original King's Bounty game from 1990 was the predecessor of the Heroes of Might and Magic series. In 2008 the brand was revived in a series of quite good single-player games, and now there is a Facebook version. What is remarkable is how close in quality the Facebook version is to the single-player games. If you go into full-screen mode, the only indication that you aren't playing a single-player game is the list of friends at the bottom of the screen. The hex-map turn-based combat is pretty much identical to that of the single-player games. There is no comparison with simple cow-clicking games, in fact the game is actually quite hard. Even just following the main quest line is fraught with danger, as you risk the level of your enemies rising faster than yours if you don't do various side quests and farm lower level battles.

The main issue with Kings Bounty: Legions is that there isn't really a good reason why that game should be on a social platform like Facebook in the first place. There are token social functions like sending gifts to your friends, but the game is clearly designed as a single-player experience with very little social interaction. You can PvP your friends, but only if both of you are online at the same time, unlike many other Facebook strategy games which allow asynchronous combat.

Another game I've been playing a lot on Facebook lately is Zynga's Empires & Allies. This is more classic Facebook game design, think Farmville meets strategy games. The social interaction between you and your Facebook friends is a lot stronger, in fact you don't advance much if you don't have at least half a dozen friends also playing, because all troop updates are based on exchanged gifts. If you don't get gifts from your friends, you would need to buy these for cash, and they aren't even cheap. But even if this is unmistakably a Zynga game, the evolution from earlier games is clearly visible as well. There is a combat system based on a rock-paper-scissors balance. You don't just click stuff to make your city grow, you level up, build new troops, upgrade them, and lead them to battle. There is a big PvE campaign and asynchronous PvP battles against your friends.

Recently I started a new Facebook game called Master Dealer, which is another example of the evolution of Facebook games. This one isn't from Zynga, but it is an evolution of Zynga's popular Mafia Wars. Instead of having a primitive progress bar where you advance just by clicking on a button, Master Dealer has a "trading card" turn-based combat system. In a somewhat weird variation of social gaming, Master Dealer is a PvE game, but puts the profile photos and names of your Facebook friends on the computer-controlled enemies. Even if these friends don't actually play Master Dealer themselves (and are thus totally unaware that you just crushed them in combat).

If I ever get to play Games for Google+, it will be interesting to see how they handle social gaming, and if it will evolve in a different direction than Facebook games. In Facebook all friendships are mutual, if I am your friend, you are also mine. That isn't the case in Google+, I can be in your circles without you being in mine, and different circles can indicate different levels of interaction.

I do think that while games on social platforms still have some obvious flaws, one shouldn't totally dismiss them without a closer look. I believe that some aspects of them would be well worth implementing into MMORPGs. For example I'd love to see guilds being able to cooperate in an asynchronous manner, with everybody contributing at his own pace and timing, for example by building a guild castle together over months. The current cooperative mode of MMORPGs, where people need to be there at the same time, for the same block of hours, and preferably at the same level of skill and gear, is far too limited. Social platform games might not be quite that hardcore, but they do have some interesting approaches how to get people to interact without being online at the same time and intensity.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:48 AM Permanent Link  (1) comments Links to this post

 
Why do we PvP?

Why do people PvP in a MMORPG? If you ask the fans, you will end up with one variation of the answer that fighting against another human is intrinsically more interesting than fighting a scripted AI mob. Which is pretty much the reason why I keep enjoying World of Tanks after over 3,000 battles. But if we observe what people actually do in a MMORPG, does this answer hold up?

It is known that given the chance PvP players in a MMORPG will engage in win trading. Recent examples are a rift PvP exploit in Rift or Tol Barad in World of Warcraft. And then there are countless stories from pretty much every PvP MMORPG in existence about how players went to extreme lengths to win PvP by means which have nothing whatsoever to do with actually playing the game: Denial of Service attacks on the enemy alliance's Teamspeak servers in EVE. Attacking the enemy keep at 3 am in the morning when all possible defenders are logged off in WAR or DAoC. And the list goes on and on. If people were actually interested in fighting a more intelligent opponent, then why would they trade wins or attack when only a token AI defending force is present?

I think the answer is that in a MMORPG the ultimate purpose of any activity (PvP or PvE) is always character advancement. And that character advancement purpose has the unfortunate habit to trump every other possible purpose. Frequently to the point where people choose advancement over fun. "Yeah, it would be more fun to actually battle the other faction over that PvP rift, but lets just trade wins to get more prestige per hour." Unless game developers succeed in the impossible task of every activity giving exactly the same amount of reward for the same effort, players will always look for shortcuts to faster advancement, regardless of whether that shortcut is actually fun to play.

The solution is to rather do PvP games which aren't strictly MMORPGs, and where the fun of the battle against an intelligent opponent beats out the draw of the character advancement. I've found mine with World of Tanks. I hear League of Legends also works that way. And Trion goes from Rift to End of Nations. I think we will see a lot more successful PvP in the future that aren't MMORPGs.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (20) comments Links to this post

 
At the borders of legal justice

Bernie Maddoff is in jail for the next 150 years. He misled investors with a Ponzi scheme, a scam in which you promise people a high return on investment, which you pay not with any real business, but with the money new investors give you. In real life, this is fraud, and if you are caught you will go to jail for it. In a game, for example if I offer you a dodgy deal for a street in Monopoly counting on the fact that you are bad with numbers, this is part of the game and I won't go to jail for it. It's just play money. But what of situations that are in between?

The big EVE news this week was about the biggest scam ever, a Ponzi scheme netting the fraudsters 1 trillion ISK. Now we can cite the monopoly example and consider that just play money. But ISK aren't just play money, they can be converted into real money. Depending on the exchange rate the 1 trillion ISK is worth between $38,000 and $52,000 of real money. A previous case of fraud in EVE was reported as somebody stealing ISK, who exchanged it for real money, and "used the cash to put down a deposit on a house and to pay medical bills". If you can pay your real world bills with it, it isn't play money any more.

From EVE to the EQII Station Exchange to the Diablo III real money auction house, the link between virtual items and real world dollar value is getting stronger all the time. And at some point the legal protection has to kick in. Running a ponzi scheme in a foreign currency won't protect you from the law, so why should it protect you if that currency is a virtual one? If money stopped to be in the jurisdiction of the real world as soon as you transformed it into virtual currency, we would have created a legal way to launder money. I do not think real world governments are going to agree.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:50 AM Permanent Link  (22) comments Links to this post

 
I am Tobold

People who are the victims of identity theft are understandably upset. Today I am even more upset, because Google wants not just to steal my identity, they want to completely erase it. I have this blog with nearly 5 million visitors, a Google+ page which 228 people added to their circles, 341 friends on my Facebook page, and 26 professional connection on my Linkedin profile. And Google+ just send notice that they think that I don't exist, and that unless I change my name in my Google profile, they will block my access to Google+, Buzz, Picasa, and even the Google newsreader. They didn't say anything about Blogger, but that would probably come next when they closer integrate blogs into Google+.

I am Tobold. This is not a "nickname", it is a complete identity. It is the name people know me under. It is the search term most frequently used to find my blog. After adding the family name to it, the name completely complies with the Google+ naming policy: "If you’re referred to by more than one name, only use the one that commonly identifies you". Tobold is the name that commonly identifies me. It is the name game companies contact me under when they want to show me their latest product or give me an interview.

The name that is printed on my photo ID does not commonly identify me on the internet. If you Google it, you'll find the website of somebody else who happens to have the same name as me. And if you find the traces of me with my real name, it will be of a very different aspect of me: You would find my patents, my scientific publications. Stuff I definitely do not want to get mixed up with my writing about games. I neither want the people who search my science stuff to find my games blog, nor do I want the people who search for my games stuff to find my work-related activities. I don't even know if it couldn't get me into all sorts of trouble at work if I mixed these two identities.

If Google kills the Tobold identity, I will let that identity die. It is an important part of my life, but not important enough to risk my livelihood for it. Lots of other creative people have pseudonyms, and if Google tells every writer and artist that they can't use the name they are known under, their social network will only be the poorer for it.

"Dear Sting! It has come to our attention that your real name is Gordon Matthew Thomas Sumner. Please change your page with the 3 million fans to your real name, or we will kick you from our social network!".
- posted by Tobold @ 8:32 AM Permanent Link  (43) comments Links to this post

 
Comparative review of books for guild leaders

Reviews of items that a blogger received as free sample always carry a whiff of writing for profit, and open up the question of whether the writer’s opinion was influenced by the gift. Fortunately I am a slacker, so I managed to accumulate two very similar items I received as review copies. That should hopefully make a comparative review more believably balanced.

The contenders are The Guild Leader’s Handbook, written by Scott F. Adams and published by No Starch Press and The Guild Leader’s Companion, written by Adam “Ferrel” Trzonkowski from Epic Slant, self-published by Epic Slant Press.

Before discussing content, some technical remarks: The Handbook clearly beats the Companion in technical quality. It is a professionally produced book, with better layout, more text per page, and all the bells and whistles like an index at the end. The Companion still is okay, but the layout is clearly less professional, the line spacing is oddly large, and there is no index. But then the Handbook has a list price of $24.95 including E-book (cheaper at Amazon without), and the Companion is $7.65.

Both books have the same purpose: Giving guidance to guild leaders. They talk about managing your guild, recruitment, successful raiding, loot distribution, how to deal with guild drama, and similar subjects. Anybody who has ever read a book about management will quickly realize that these guild leader books are essentially management advice books. The Companion even names his chapters after departments you’d find in a company, like human resources, accounting, public relations, and production. That is logical, because running a guild is essentially a management position. On the one side this means the books are full of advice you might have heard before if you ever visited some management training. On the other side you can read these books and pick up some useful tips about management situations in your job while reading about guilds in MMORPGs. Ferrel’s five guiding STAFF principles are sound advice to anybody being in any position of responsibility in his job.

Both books claim to cover all sorts of guilds, and the Handbook has an extra chapter on PvP and role-playing guilds. But the core of both guilds is the classic raiding guild, thus raiding and loot distribution are well covered. That is not a random choice: A raiding guild is quite obviously very much in need of good management, while some ultra-casual role-playing guild might be okay with some more free-wheeling governance.

From the writing style, the Handbook is the easier read. It is written in a lighter style, and breaks up the text with tables and flowcharts. It also frequently phrases its advice in a more detailed way, for example giving advice on how to name a guild, or how to host a guild website and voice chat. There is a more frequent use of publicly known examples of what happened with guilds in various online games, and other references to common knowledge. The Handbook is the more complete of the two guild leader’s books, with a better chance for you to find the information you need. The downside is that by presenting the issues in a light manner as an entertaining read, the advice is not always really practical. For example the chapter describing various types of people behavior you might encounter in your guild in terms of a system of character classes and specs is a good read, but not necessarily helpful in managing a guild.

The Companion is probably better suited for people who already have a bit of guild experience. It doesn’t cover quite as many subjects, but it covers them somewhat deeper. That leads to mixed results depending on what you are looking for, some people will enjoy 35 pages of annex with detailed written policy examples for guild rules, others will consider that a waste of space. The book is less entertaining to read, but ends up being more serious about guild leadership. There are fewer examples, and they usually come from Ferrel’s own experience, not from events you might already have read about elsewhere. The strength of the Companion is how obviously serious the author is taking guild leadership, but the downside of that is how this makes the Companion the far gloomier of the two books.

In a way the two books are complementary, so if you want the best possible preparation for becoming a guild leader you might consider reading both of them. If not, I’d recommend The Guild Leader’s Handbook for absolute beginners and people who just want to read something entertaining about the subject. The Guild Leader’s Companion I would recommend to those who already have some ideas about guild leadership but would like a deeper and more serious discussion of the subject.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (2) comments Links to this post

 
The Raid documentary

If you get a chance to watch the documentary The Raid, I can recommend watching it. It is not always pleasant, but realistic enough, and touches a lot of the issues and misconceptions about raiding. Also gives you the opportunity to watch a complete Icecrown raid, in case you never did one yourself.

What struck me most about film was how much it made raiding look like work. You have to be there at a specific time for a specific amount of hours, and you have to perform well during that time. Sounds a lot like my job.

What the film failed to show was how the guild involved got their raid team together, and who got excluded. No interviews with guild members who didn't get a raid spot or got kicked from the guild, although those undoubtedly exist. Succeeding involves synchronous excellence of execution, and that ends up being both the biggest strength and the biggest weakness of the system: Winning together leads to a strong team spirit to develop (shown in the film), but losing together risks people pointing fingers at whoever they perceive to have been the weak spot.

Real-world groups of friends often include people who aren't quite as bright or successful than the others. Raiding makes that difficult for groups of friends in virtual worlds. Selecting your friends by their gearscore and raid performance gives you greater virtual rewards than selecting them based on how nice they or, or sticking with them through thick and thin out of loyalty. I still hope that we will get some mainstream MMORPG one day which is about people working together without penalizing players for sticking with their under-performing friends. I think that would lead to greater social cohesion than the raid system.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:20 AM Permanent Link  (11) comments Links to this post

 
Failing hard drives

Hard drives fail. Several people commented on my thread about the new computer I ordered pointing out that solid state drives fail a lot more than classic hard drives, especially if in Raid 0 configuration. So I'm reconsidering the raid configuration, especially due to the TRIM issue. But the fundamental issue of the increased likelihood of my solid state hard drive failing doesn't bother me all that much, and here is why.

What exactly is the damage if your hard drive fails? Well, if it fails after the guarantee ran out, there is a financial loss. You need to buy a new one. But generally what people fear more is the loss of data. If that hard drive was the only place where you stored the photos of your children and now it's gone, you've lost something irreplaceable. If the hard drive that crashed contained the nearly finished thesis or book you were writing, you need to start over. And so on. I've been using hard drives for quarter a century now, at work and at home, and I've lost tons of data to hard drive crashes over the years.

Which is why my solid state drive(s) will not have any data of the sort I care about on them. For years already I have separated the drive containing the operating system and programs from the drive containing all the data. My new computer will have all my photos, documents, and other data I care about on the big regular hard drive. With one or two backups (depending on how much I care) on external hard drives, plus in some cases burned on DVD. I've implemented a solid backup strategy for home and work years ago, and haven't lost anything since.

Furthermore a lot of my data these days isn't even stored on my computer any more. I used to play single-player games where if you hard drive with your saved game crashed, my progress in the game would be lost. That isn't the case with MMORPGs. I can erase every trace of World of Warcraft from all my computers and drives, and if I ever restart WoW all my characters will still be there with all their possessions. (I just shouldn't throw away the authenticator.) The same is true for other online games I'm playing, like World of Tanks. My blog is stored somewhere in the Google cloud. So is all my e-mail. Right now Google going bankrupt would be a much bigger loss of data for me than if my main computer with all hard drives exploded.

Hard drives fail. But between data being stored off-site, and a good backup plan, that has stopped worrying me years ago. If my new solid state drives go belly-up in a year, it will not be a catastrophic loss. I just lose the price of the new one and an afternoon to re-install everything. And the next generation of drives will be cheaper and more stable again. The risk of crashing is the price I pay to be at the edge of technology.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:20 AM Permanent Link  (10) comments Links to this post

 
The politics of free stuff

The United States of America would not exist without riots. Nor would many other modern nations. Riots like the one 1770 in Boston are an integral part of revolutions, and most nations had some on their way from earlier more tyrannical forms of government to modern democracy. Having said that, the London rioters make for rather unlikely revolutionaries. As one lady in the middle of it said so correctly: "we are not all gathering together and fighting for a cause. We are running out of Footlocker and theifin shoes." Stories of rioters using Blackberries to text each other about where to get "free stuff" and mostly targeting brand clothing and electronics stores cast doubts on both the motivation and degree of poverty of the rioters.

Nevertheless British politicians dismissing the rioters as just criminals don't get the whole picture either. There were far too many of them to be just a criminal gang, it was more like a movement. And then you have to ask yourself why so many young people considered rioting and looting a better use of their time than what they were doing otherwise. Unemployment is not an excuse for criminal behavior, but often enough the root cause.

Of course rioting will not solve anything in the short term, and we are still a long way from a revolution. Nevertheless I wouldn't totally exclude the possibility of a revolution either, not if we continue like this. Politicians not only looked very helpless in face of these riots, they also offered only the full panoply of all the wrong solutions: The left thinks more welfare would calm the youths down, while the right wants to lock them all up and remove their benefits. The former plan of redistribution isn't economically sustainable, and the latter plan is the direct way into a police state. If you have 25% youth unemployment, you can't just lock them all up.

I believe the solution to be very different, not redistribution but a different distribution of the added value produced by companies right when they produce that value. And I believe the culprit who caused things to go wrong wasn't some politician, but an accountant hundreds of years ago, when the rules of company accounting were first invented. Let me explain:

Companies create value. They turn some lower value inputs like raw materials and energy into final products which have a higher value. Or they create value through services, like the distribution of goods. The added value the company creates is then flowing to the various stakeholders of a company, mostly the investors and the workers. A proper measure of how good a company works would calculate the added value created by the company by counting the value of the goods or services produced, and deducting the cost of the raw materials and energy consumed in the process.

Unfortunately real companies don't calculate like that. They do count the value of the good or services produced and deduce the cost, but at some point in time some accountant decided that salaries were a cost. That is an extremely narrow view, which is only true if you are the investor, and the only added value created that interests you is the one going into your own pocket. From a larger point of view, for society, it only matters how much total value is added, not whether that added value lands in the pocket of the investor, or in the pockets of the workforce.

This wrong way of accounting for investors profit instead of total added value over the centuries has led to companies doing their utmost to become "more efficient" by reducing labor cost. If money given to employees is a "loss", you strive to avoid that loss. What companies should have done instead is searching for the optimum number of workers which would maximize the total added value created by the company. It is pretty certain that this optimimum for total wealth creation would mean more employment, even if the share of the profits for investors would be somewhat smaller. But the benefit for society would be huge: Less unemployment, more value creation, and more money going towards people who actually spend that money, thus growing the economy even further. And ultimately less riots. Because if you can afford to shop for expensive trainers at Footlocker, you're less likely to go looting them.

Salaries are not a cost, they are an important part of the value created by a company.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:56 PM Permanent Link  (62) comments Links to this post

 
Ordered a new computer

Since decades now I buy a new computer every two years. I give my wife the 2-year old PC, and throw out her 4-year old one. The 2-year cycle used to be determined by the speed of technological development, and a necessity to play the latest games. That stopped to be strictly necessary a few years ago, but I'm keeping up the cycle out of self-indulgence. So I just ordered a new computer with the following specs:

Core i7 2600k 3.4G processor
8 GB DDR3 RAM
Asus P8P67 motherboard
Geforce GTX 570 graphics card (1280 MB memory)
2 x 120 GB Vertex SSD HD in Raid 0
Western Digital 2TB Caviar Black HD
DVD recorder 12x SATA
800W PSU
NZXT Tempest Evo case
Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit

The most visible speed improvement of this new computer will be the 240 GB solid state hard drive as the system drive. Whenever you actually wait for your computer to do something, like booting up, chances are the hard drive is the speed limiting factor these days. Solid state drives are still rather expensive (the 2 TB regular hard drive costs only 30% of the 240 GB SSD), but easily cut boot time in half. And I took one big enough to enable me to put some games on it, reducing load times.

I also asked specifically for a larger case this time. The previous computer only had 8" of space for the graphics card, and the newer cards can be 10" to 12" long. That came to haunt me when I wanted to upgrade my graphics card, so this time I wanted to make sure I have room for improvement. Literally.

The CPU and graphics card are rather high-end. Which is a bit silly if I consider what kind of games I'm currently playing or planning to play. This is way beyond the system requirements for SWTOR. But with computers being my main hobby, I might as well spoil myself. So what do you think of this system configuration?
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (30) comments Links to this post

 
A new hope

Samuel Johnson said: "A second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience.". So is a second MMORPG. Or a seventeenth. Actually I lost count. Nevertheless I do feel some hope towards Star Wars: The Old Republic being a fun enough game, which is why I pre-ordered it, in spite of my experience already now being able to point out some major flaws in the game. Like far more people wanting to play a "Jedi Knight" than a "Trooper". Or how you can invite a full group of jedi (which are all tank or healing classes) and still don't find anybody willing to tank or heal. Not to mention how there will be horrible queues and lag on launch day.

While the cynicism is based on experience and awareness of fundamental problems of the genre that SWTOR is unlikely to have solved, the hope is based on what is new in the game. Specifically the hope is that the improved story-telling will make us care about the story. Which is a tall order. World of Warcraft shipped with slow-scrolling quest text so that people would read the story, and one of the first addons widely used was the one that made the quest text appear immediately, so that you could just click accept without reading the story. I don't know if in SWTOR you will always have to hear the full voice-over or whether there is a way to cut it short. But I don't think that the voice-over alone is enough to engage the player more in the story.

Rowan thinks that our neocortex might be too small to care about all these NPCs. I'm not sure Dunbar's number theory really applies to that situation (I know more than 150 characters from books, films, and TV). But what is certainly true is that players tend to care mostly about themselves, and very little about NPC Farmer Brown's problem with the womp rats. Thus the part of the quest text they are interested in is what the reward for them is, and what they'll have to do to get it. Then they'll happily run off to kill those 10 womp rats, and come back for that reward. Why exactly Farmer Brown wanted those womp rats dead isn't of any importance for the player. Thus to succeed the stories of SWTOR have to be more about the player's character than about the NPC's various problems.

So my hope is that the "200 hours of story per class" that Bioware promises will be really about my character, and engaging enough to keep me interested. I hope that the stories are more than window-dressing for repetitive quests. I hope that "developing my character" means developing my avatar's *character*, and not just his stats. Because if it is 200 hours of running errands for Farmer Brown and killing womp rats for him, I know I'll quickly get bored with Star Wars: The Old Republic.

But even if SWTOR really has 200 hours of good story for each of the 8 character classes, the general fate of the game will be determined by the kind of people playing the game. If Bioware manages to attract a lot of new players, people who haven't played a lot of previous MMORPGs, or only ever played casually, they could succeed in a major way. 200 hours is a lot of content if you play casually, and by multiplying it with 8 alts you end up with something like 2 years worth of content for a casual player. On the other hand there will be people concentrating on just one character, believing the old "the game starts at the level cap" fallacy, and playing in a hurry. I bet you'll read about the first people having finished their 200-hour story arc before their free month is over. Soon after we'll hear the first complaints that the game shipped with not enough raid content, and that the raids are too easy anyway. You can never please the bitter veterans, and I'm not sure Bioware already has the wisdom already to not even try. I hope they realize that the unique selling point of Star Wars: The Old Republic is the story-telling, and that this isn't a feature hardcore players are likely to care about. The last thing the MMORPG market needs right now is yet another game in which people rush to the endgame only to find that this endgame doesn't offer enough entertainment for a large enough percentage of the player base to keep the game successful in the long term.

Well, if SWTOR fails there is always hope for Guild Wars 2.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:30 AM Permanent Link  (13) comments Links to this post

 
The Diablo III tax question

There are obvious dangers in getting your tax advice from a gaming blog instead from an expert, but Stabs has good advice on your tax liabilities from Diablo III RMT AH sales. He is completely right in stating that your taxes are your personal responsibility, not Blizzard's, and you should inform yourself whether you need to pay taxes on the money you make from selling Diablo III items for real money in the AH. It is quite likely that if you make serious money from this activity, you'll need to pay taxes on that.

The far more interesting question is whether you would have to pay taxes if you don't make any real money from Diablo III auction house sales. Basically it could be argued that if a virtual item is worth real money, gathering those virtual items is an income, and thus taxable. The horror scenario is that the legendary Sword of Uberness which is worth $1,000 on the AH drops for you, and you'd have to pay taxes on those $1,000 even if you never sold the sword.

Now I am not a lawyer, nor a tax accountant, but I find that scenario somewhat unlikely. For example there are Olympic medals for sale on EBay (I checked and saw a gold medal for sale for $15,000). Thus Olympic medals clearly have a monetary value if you'd chose to sell them. Nevertheless winners of Olympic medals aren't taxed on those medals as a form of income. They'd be taxed on the sales if they sold the medal, but not as long as the monetary value was hypothetical before any sale took place. Basically the question is at which point in time you actually made a taxable income, at the point where you gained the item you could sell, or at the point where you actually sold it. I'm pretty certain it is the latter. If you create a vase out of clay, you'd be taxed on selling it, not the moment you take the finished vase out of the oven.

Blizzard getting you in trouble by sending the list of the items and gold that dropped for you in Diablo III to the IRS is not going to happen. Blizzard getting you in trouble by sending a list of your real-money AH sales to the IRS is far more likely. And even there the trouble might only start the moment you cash out that real money. You might want to reconsider your plans of quitting your job and becoming a Diablo III item farmer. Or as Benjamin Franklin said: "in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes".
- posted by Tobold @ 10:13 AM Permanent Link  (23) comments Links to this post

 
Not separate features

Apparently everybody loves bullet points. Over the last week I've seen tons of posts on various blogs and websites reporting on Diablo 3, and they all have some variation of the following bullet point list:

• Diablo 3 will feature a real-money auction house.
• Diablo 3 will require always on internet connection.
• Diablo 3 will not allow any mods.

So what is wrong with that list? It suggests that we are talking about 3 separate features or news items here. But actually there is only one feature (real-money AH) and the fact that Blizzard isn't completely crazy.

Raph Koster once coined one of the laws of online games when he said that "The client is in the hands of the enemy.". The internet is full of cheats for games which involve players changing the data on their computer to give them an advantage in a game. Even mods are a form of changing the data to make a game easier, even if there is a valid point to be made that "it isn't cheating as long as it isn't explicitly forbidden". But just imagine for a second the difference in epic-collection speed of one guild using addons in WoW compared with another guild of equal skill not using any addons, and you will understand that mods do have a significant effect on a game economy too.

Earlier versions of Diablo were full of possibilities for cheating, with Diablo 1 having a serious bug enabling duping items right in the game, without even having to modify the data with an external tool. That didn't matter all that much as long as people were playing solo, but cheating is a huge annoyance in multiplayer online games. Adding the real-money auction house adds another level to this: By putting the Sword of Uberness on the AH you not only affect yourself or people in the same game as you, but everybody. Putting 1,000 duped Swords of Uberness on the AH would obviously pretty much kill the player economy.

Virtual items by definition have a marginal cost (the cost to produce one more of them) of very close to zero. In the real economy the price of any item for which there is plenty of supply drifts towards the marginal cost. For a virtual economy to function, the game company needs to artificially increase the marginal cost for the *players* to create an item. For the player the value of an item is roughly equivalent to what time it would take to farm another one. Thus an item with a low drop-rate at the end of a raid dungeon you need hours to get through is valuable, while an item you can farm dozens of in an hour is not. Duping or other forms of data manipulation, even mods, lowers the marginal cost of an item for the player. That first leads to imbalances (the cheating player gets an item for a low cost in time and sells it expensively to a non-cheating player for whom it would take a long time to farm that item), and then to market collapse as the cheat method spreads.

So when Blizzard says that: "Internally I don’t think [always-on DRM] ever actually came up when we talked about how we want connections to operate. Things that came up were always around the feature-set, the sanctity of the actual game systems like your characters. You’re guaranteeing that there are no hacks, no dupes.", I believe them. The real-money auction house *necessitates* all character and item data to be server-side, which can only be done with always-on internet connection. The connection requirement and the no-mods policy aren't separate features, but a logical consequence of the decision to enable real-money trade of virtual items.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:29 AM Permanent Link  (25) comments Links to this post

 
That hype train left without me

I understand there is some excitement in the gaming blogosphere about the upcoming release of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. They just announced a $150 collectors edition with a big plastic dragon. And people are hopeful that Skyrim will be a good role-playing game, based on their experience with Oblivion and Morrowind.

Unfortunately me personal experience with Oblivion and Morrowind was a rather bad one: I couldn't play them due to the user interface, cursor, and camera controls. The cursor was stuck to the middle of the screen, so every time you want to click on something you need to move the camera to show the item you want to click on in the center. As you click on a lot of things in a RPG, that necessitated a lot of camera movement, which in turn caused me video game nausea. I only get that with very few games, mainly those that have head bop or lots of vertical camera movement, but with the Elder Scrolls games up to now it was really bad. I don't assume they have completely changed the control scheme for Skyrim, so I'm not going to buy this.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:57 AM Permanent Link  (13) comments Links to this post

 
Age of Empires Online

I got a mail today inviting me to the pre-release version of Age of Empires Online, as reward for having participated in the beta. Release is on August 16. Age of Empires Online is a nice enough game, Free2Play, very accessible, with good-looking comic-style graphics, and I can only imagine it doing quite well. Personally I won't play all that much, but that is because I'm not a fan of real-time strategy games in general, and this shouldn't be counted against Age of Empires Online.

What I found interesting about Age of Empires Online is this trend which I would call the gamification of games. Age of Empires Online, like its offline predecessors, features real-time strategy battles on "instanced", not persistent maps. What is new in the online version is that there is now a persistent city you build up as well, complete with various building, resource gathering, a tech tree, and various quest givers. The quest givers are the link to the "classic" AoE RTS game, with each quest being a PvE or PvP RTS battle. Thus the RTS is the repeating core gameplay, and the persistent city is the game of advancement shell built around it.

There being a persistent part of the game allows Microsoft to sell you items in a shop like decorations for your city, which obviously wouldn't make sense otherwise in a RTS game. Who would bother to decorate his base on a RTS map, knowing that the map will disappear after the battle has ended? Your persistent city also permits the impression of permanent progress. A won battle no longer has zero effect on your future battles, because now you can use the rewards for winning a battle to craft gear for your troops, or advance in the tech tree.

This gamification of games, an outer shell which is persistent and works like a MMO game with permanent advancement and an inner core where gameplay is like it used to be, is quite popular these days. There are shooters, racing games, and pretty much every other sort of game you can imagine which now have an MMO-like outer shell part. If somebody were to make Super Mario or Pac-man these days, you'd see a persistent game of advancement between the levels of the game, with each level being a "quest".
- posted by Tobold @ 8:26 AM Permanent Link  (4) comments Links to this post

 
Diablo III mudflation

In case you aren't familiar with the term mudflation, it describes the drop in value of virtual items in a game over time, due to new items dropping every day. In economic speak this corresponds to a deflation, not inflation.

I keep reading blog posts and comments of people who believe that prices for rare drops and legendary items in Diablo III will be very high. I am sure that this could be the case for the very first legendary items that drop. But according to Blizzard, items in Diablo III will *not* become soulbound. That is the rare item you bought from the AH can be used by you, and then resold. Furthermore there is no virtual wear and tear, no item degradation. Thus items in Diablo III will suffer seriously from mudflation, because supply will constantly increase, while demand will stabilize over time. Pro tip: Legendary items on the Diablo III auction house are *not* a good investment opportunity. They will drop in value fast over time.

Of course Blizzard can over time introduce new items into Diablo III, which again *at the time of their release* will be very valuable. But however rare they make the drop, between millions of players there will always be a constant stream of these items coming into the economy, while the number of items leaving the economy (from closed accounts mainly) will be minor. It does not matter that there is maybe some Russian billionaire out there who would be willing to pay thousands of dollars for some legendary item; he'll only buy the first one, and because the number of Russian billionaires playing Diablo III won't increase much over time, prices will drop after the first bunch of crazy rich guys bought the first bunch of freshly dropped legendary items.

Virtual economies are subject to the same laws as real economies.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:23 AM Permanent Link  (16) comments Links to this post

 
The future of games is online

Imagine you invested millions of dollars to construct a roller coaster. It is quite successful with lots of people taking rides, but at the end of the month you find barely enough money in the till to pay your employees. Closer inspection reveals that you have one booth where paper tickets are sold, which people then just have to show to a guy at the entrance of the roller coaster. So people just photocopy your tickets, or resell used tickets that haven't been properly devalued.

Clearly the physical distribution of the tickets is a mistake. You just need to move the booth selling entry to your roller coaster directly to the entrance, and do away with the paper tickets. You might get some people complaining that not being able to buy physical tickets is less convenient, but those complaining loudest will probably be the people who used to photocopy the tickets. Mostly your new system has a lot of advantages for many people: For you, who will finally make money from your investment. For your employees, who will keep their job. And for your honest customers who will not only profit from you being able to pay for better maintenance on your existing roller coaster, but also from you making enough money to invest in a new roller coaster.

Physical distribution is also a problem for video games. Nobody reads the legal text which tells customers that they are in fact purchasing a roller coaster ride, an experience. People think they bought "the game", and imagine they have all sorts of rights to redistribute the game they bought, when in fact legally they only purchased a limited license to use that game (with reselling rights determined by local laws). But before broadband internet access was ubiquitous, putting a game on a physical medium was the only practical way to distribute it. And that physical distribution has tons of disadvantages: Not just piracy and reselling of used games, but also a "blockbuster or die" game industry developing due to limited shelf space, in which small and medium game companies couldn't compete, and where indie games were hard to sell, and older games hard to get hold of.

Thus the game industry is moving away from physical distribution. Digital online distribution is the future, with distribution platforms like Steam, Direct2Drive, Gamesload, or Origin. By linking games to an online account, piracy is if not eliminated at least made a lot harder. Getting last year's game at half price goes from being a lucky find in a bargain bin to becoming the norm. Indie games flourish. And game companies make enough money to stay in business and make more games.

Some games will require players to be always online, which obviously can be an inconvenience, but on the other hand has the advantage of eliminating cheating. Digital distribution systems which enable players to still play offline after downloading and validating ownership already exist, e.g. Steam has an offline mode. And the digital online distribution also enables different business models. No longer do you have to pay a game before knowing whether you like it. Digital distribution enables easier distribution of demo and free trial versions, or of Free2Play games in which the majority of players never pays anything. Games with a full price of $5 or even $1 become a possibility. A single guy making a brilliant indie game on his own can make millions of dollars with it.

We used to be discussing the imminent death of PC gaming. It turns out the only thing dying is the physical distribution of PC games. PC gaming is alive and well, up to a point where even a game blogger like me can't keep up with all the games being out there. Of course Sturgeon's Law applies, and a lot of games are crap. But if 90% of everything is crap, you need to increase the total amount of games to also increase the number of good games, and there are now more good games around as well. Consoles gaming, which was poised to kill PC gaming, is now rushing to get on the online distribution wagon too. Sony eliminated their physical medium (Universal Media Disk) for the Playstation Portable and went with digital distribution only for the PSP Go. The PS3 has the Playstation Network, and the XBox has the XBox Live for digital distribution of console games. Clearly physical distribution of video games is on its way out. The future of games is online.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:16 AM Permanent Link  (25) comments Links to this post

 
Time versus money in Diablo III

So the announcement that in Diablo III players will be able to buy any item in the game from other players for either in-game currency or real money caused some heads to explode and people to discuss the evil of "pay to win". Apparently nobody noticed, or at least chose to keep mum about, the fact that this is exactly like EVE Online. And the EVE fans have claimed for years that this isn't evil RMT, because you buy the items from other players, not from the game company. As usual MMO commentary is highly tribal, thus if one person's favorite game company does something it is a force of good, while if another game company does exactly the same it is a force of evil.

Nevertheless I find the system in Diablo III interesting, because it is safe to assume that a lot more people will play Diablo III than EVE. The more people participate in a market, the closer the actual prices on the market reflect what could be called the "true value". And I think this true value will be an eye-opener. And that is a good thing.

One of the curses of current games is that players often have a very unrealistic idea of the "value" of their virtual achievements and items. You might think that it is okay if people value virtual stuff however they like, but ultimately it is leading to stories like this Chinese couple selling their children to finance their online games. How we spend our time and money in online games *does* have some effect on the real world. The more common story is a student failing his exam due having played instead of studying, but even there it is obvious that the player got his priorities wrong.

By putting a realistic price tag on virtual items, Diablo III will give you a clearer idea of what this virtual stuff really is worth. Failing your exam to get hold of the Sword of Uberness might feel totally worth it initially. But once you see that same Sword of Uberness on the auction house for $5, you might reconsider. Some commenter complained about this "cheapening" your virtual achievements, but in fact it only tells you their true value, which wasn't much to begin with and you just totally overestimated it.

Virtual items in MMORPGs can usually be acquired by spending time. The auction house will put an hourly dollar value on that time. And this hourly dollar value will be significantly lower than minimum wage. Not just because the famous "Chinese gold farmer" might want to earn US/European minimum wages which are a fortune for him. But also because many players don't consider playing a game to be work. They'd do it for free, or even pay for the privilege. So getting paid cents for the hour is a great deal for these people, as long as they just sell the stuff they found while having fun playing. Lucky random drops might distort the image, but in the long run your virtual "work" is only worth cents to the hour. Let us hope that the Diablo III auction house will make more people realize this.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link  (27) comments Links to this post

 
Storybricks

Non-player characters in massively multiplayer online role-playing games are pretty dumb. Mobs you are supposed to kill have some very predictable artificial intelligence, and the other NPCs (quest givers, vendors, etc.) are even dumber. They usually just stand around to perform some user-interface functionality, they don't have anything resembling a life, or desires. In fact in many science fiction games these NPCs have been replaced by terminals, because that is all they are. By putting these user-interface functionalities on non-player characters, game developers actually manage to make the virtual worlds less believable.

The guys from Namaste are planning to change that with their Storybricks system, which they were kind enough to show me in advance of GenCon. You can read all about that on their blogs. But the basic idea behind the system is an artificial intelligence system for non-player characters which can be easily programmed by players, thus creating content for other players. It looks like this: As you can see the NPCs, their desires, locations, and properties are depicted as "bricks", which the user can build into the basis of a story. But unlike the stories of a classic MMORPG, this story isn't completely scripted, it only exists as a framework for players to interact with. There can be several different ways to resolve them. The goal is to give the players the freedom to interact as they wish with a virtual world, and have the NPCs of that virtual world react in a believable way to the actions of the players.

What this does is basically creating an experience for players of a MMORPG which resembles more a classic pen & paper role-playing game. It moves away from the classic "chore-based" MMORPG with its static worlds and canned content. Storybricks is still in a very early stage of development, where they are trying to get the tools right. Making the actual game comes after that. The game will have a developer-created core, to which the users can then add the stories they built with the Storybricks system. And just like a Dungeon Master in a pen & paper RPG, users creating content can then invite their friends to play through that content. You might even be interested to play through your own stories, because they will develop differently each time you behave differently. And that opens up the possibility of a game with infinite content, the holy grail of MMORPGs.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:15 AM Permanent Link  (11) comments Links to this post