A lot of blogs regularly publish the top keywords Google Analytics reports as having led people to the blog. Some people search for strange things, and so some of the search terms are either rather funny by themselves, or are funny because the blog is obviously not the good destination for that search term. As far as I can remember, I haven't posted a list of search terms for my blog in the 9+ years of its existence. Because every time I check my search terms, I don't find much that is funny about them. Here are the top 100 Google searches having led to my blog:

tobold, tobolds, world of tanks cheats, http://tobolds.blogspot.com/, everquest 3, swtor addons, diablo 3 gold guide, swtor slicing, tobold blog, kotor 3, swtor slicing nerf, win 7 internet security 2012, mmo blog, pirated ebooks, d&d next, tobolds blog, might & magic heroes vi dynasty, mmorpg blog, how to make money in guild wars 2, how to make money in gw2, dr bannermans password, swtor space combat, gw2 making money, tobold's, swtor system requirements, guild wars 2 making money, wot cheats, guild wars 2 how to make money, swtor subscription numbers, world of tanks cheat, tobolds blogspot, gw2 how to make money, blood elf porn, free2play bandwidth cost, guild wars 2 money making, slicing nerf, civ 5 starting strategy, guild wars 2 dying, gw2 money making, slicing swtor, skyrim challenges, tobold bastion, mmo blogg, everquest 3 release date, shandalar project, pirating ebooks, rift subscription numbers, diablo 3 rmah, diablo 3 no skill tree, how is swtor doing, making money in guild wars 2, cheats for world of tanks, age of conan sex, d&d 4e, swtor class balance, civilization 5 starting strategy, g tobold, real id av hk farming, tobolds blogspot com, is kickstarter legit, tobold's blog, skyrim online, guild wars 2 monthly achievements, reavers of harkenwold, world of tanks aimbot, swtor blog, world of tanks controls, swtor flashpoints, tobolds mmorpg, tobold mmo, diablo 3 rmah fees, how much is skyrim, world of tanks hitbox skins, making money in gw2, mop scenario loot, world of tanks blog, rmah, dnd next, diablo 3 beta difficulty, how to get rich in wow, fable, swtor addon, toboldgate, original wow realm, skyrim and nausea, scenario loot, rift subscription numbers 2012, wot cheat, wot hitbox skins installation, rmah fees, scenario loot table, tobolds.blogspot.com, swotr cant pick class, guild wars 2 make money, the secret world dr bannerman password, gw2 make money, the freezing jihad, swtor bugs, civ 5 opening strategy

The reason there isn't much to laugh about here is that I get so many visitors from searches. Even my 100th search term was used nearly a hundred times. To find the really strange and exotic stuff, I'd need to do a reverse listing and find all the keywords that were only used once to find my blog. There I get gems like somebody looking for "brutal sex girlz mmorpg" and somehow unexpectedly arriving on my blog. But there are nearly 5,000 keywords used only once, and the majority is still boring.

I guess that apart from the blood elf porn challenge I accepted from Gevlon once, I don't write using words that are likely to result in many funny searches. And ultimately it is a good thing if Google sends the people my way who are actually looking for the kind of content that is on offer here.

So we all survived the end of the world AND the Christmas holidays, and the year 2012 is nearing its end. I haven't been blogging much recently, being busy with family and playing Deus Ex. As most of my readers read my blog from their office computer, reader numbers during holidays are traditionally down anyways. So I was contemplating what to do with my blog in 2013.

I've already removed the "MMORPG" from my blog title, and general interest in MMORPGs is down by half from a peak in 2009. 2012 wasn't a great year for the genre, most games failed to meet expectations, and then switched to some sort of subscription-free business model. Guild Wars 2 was probably the best MMORPG of 2012, but failed to revive the genre. I don't expect any major breakthroughs in 2013, we'll probably get a few passable games, but nothing revolutionary.

There is a clear trend which I would call the democratization of games, where games move away from complicated time-eaters and move towards accessible games that are playable in short bursts. More Angry Birds, less World of Warcraft. More iOS and Android, less PC and console. The number of people playing computer games goes up, but the average hours played per player and month go down. And as much as some hardcore players will decry this, it is probably a rather healthy trend. At least if we want to end up in a society where the access to video games is less restricted than the access to assault rifles.

But the move away from MMORPGs and the lack of innovation in the genre leads to me not having much to write about. What do you write about yet another sequel or game which works nearly exactly like a previous game? We are at a point where getting your quests automatically instead of having to click on a guy with a golden exclamation mark counts as brilliant innovation. Where the biggest social development is making resource nodes non-competitive so people stop fighting over them. And where combat and the flow of gameplay haven't fundamentally changed in a decade. How do you blog about that without becoming as repetitive as the games you are covering?

I am still planning on using this blog as a public diary of the games I play, both on computers and with pen & paper. And I will write commentary to the game news that piques my interest. But I will probably move away from a daily posting schedule. Which in my experience will result in less readers and comments. But as the blog is approaching its 10th anniversary, with over 5 million visitors over the years, and over four thousand posts, I don't think I have anything left to prove.

I just wanted to wish a merry Christmas to all of you and your families! Take some time off the tech gadgets and games you received and celebrate with those nearest to you! That's what I will do.

After not having been very happy with Batman: Arkham City, I decided to play another game of the same genre: Call them "stealth games", "action adventures", or even "action RPGs", there isn't really a universally accepted term. These games are somewhere between shooters and RPGs, with you controlling a single character through a long linear main story with some side quests. The unique feature is that there are usually several different ways to get to the goal, including just sneaking past the enemies. And that liberty is something I appreciate.

After a handful of missions and side-quests in Deus Ex: Human Revolution I can already say that I like this game a lot better than Batman: Arkham City. It wasn't the genre I disliked with Batman, but his unique fighting style. Compare to Batman's beat-em-up button-mashing combat, Deus Ex plays more like a shooter. And unlike Batman, Adam Jenses gets the option of shooting his enemies in the head with a sniper rifle or shotgun. Now that freedom comes with a price: Shooting an enemy gives 10 points, using a stun gun or tranquilizer rifle 30 points, and sneaking up behind him and taking him down by hand gives 50 points, so the options aren't exactly equal. But as the points are proportional to the difficulty of the approach, I am fine with that. There is a logical relation there between options and consequences.

Furthermore it appears to me that Deus Ex has more options on how to get to your target. I took the time to explore every option to get into the backyard of the police department, and found that there are at least 3 non-violent ones. I assume I could also get there by going through the front door of the police department, killing everybody, and going out through the back door, but I didn't try that one. Many hidden ways give extra xp, and you get bonus xp if you managed your objective without ever alerting a guard or security system. I scored full points for that police department, while doing all side quests, so that was good.

When I'm not in a hurry, I like to approach Deus Ex a bit like a puzzle game: How do you sneak up on every guard in a room and take him down manually without ever alerting anyone else? That usually takes a few tries, but it is fun. When I get tired of that, I use the other options, like shooting people, and that is faster. But even with all these options I doubt that I will play Deus Ex: Human Revolution more than once: The linear main story gets into the way of replayability. But otherwise this is a very good game.

1. This is a lot of good games for the money
2. I already own most of the good games on that list, this bundle isn't for me.

I've been playing the recently released Battle of the Bulge on my iPad. The game has caused some excitement, because it is a somewhat curious beast: An accessible wargame. Usually wargames are made by grognards for grognards (official term for a veteran wargamer), and tend to come with 200 page manuals you need to read before you can start. Battle of the Bulge is playable for people with no experience in wargames whatsoever after just reading through 5 screens of basic instructions. If you need more hand-holding, there is a tutorial and even day-by-day strategy videos on YouTube.

While being accessible, Battle of the Bulge is very much a classic wargame in which you move your tanks and infantry over a map, attacking the enemy frontline, establishing supply lines, going for victory conditions. It is very well designed for the touchscreen, you just drag and drop your armies with your fingers. Rules and controls are easy, but the strategy isn't, which is how it should be.

Battle of the Bulge is $9.99 in the iTunes store, which is on the high end for an iPad game, but still cheap compared to a PC wargame. My only complaint is that there aren't many scenarios. In fact there is only one map, which can be played in a short game or a longer game, from both sides. After starting out with a few losses and a draw, I managed to win the short game from either side, so it is doable by people with a general interest in strategy games, without being wargame veterans. Recommended!

I'm still looking for the perfect software to help me write D&D adventures, from brainstorming ideas to creating all the encounters in detail. I can't say I have found it yet. One thing I like is Evernote, not because it has the best structure, but because it stores my notes in the cloud, where they can be accessed via a PC client, via a browser, or via my iPad. Masterplan on the other hand is better designed for a story flowchart with encounters, but only works on one fixed PC unless you use mail to ship your files around.

An adventure isn't just a series of encounters, although that is what the final product resembles to most. But at the start there are various ideas for the plot, for NPCs, or for specific items or events you want to include. For the brainstorming phase of gathering all those ideas I just discovered an iOS app called Stickyboard 2. It allows me to put my ideas of virtual sticky notes, arrange those notes on a virtual white board, and to draw on that whiteboard. Useful for sorting ideas, but it doesn't go beyond that.

I've been looking into mind mapping or similar software to create some sort of graph or chart connecting all the various ideas for the adventure, but haven't been able to find one I like. Anybody got a recommendation?

For the final step, producing the finished adventure with all the details, I'm boringly using Word. Monsters are copied from the WotC official D&D Adventure Tools monster builder. And I use either poster maps I have available, or create my own with Campaign Cartographer 3. And I just ordered some Gamemastery Face Cards as illustrations for my NPCs.

In the previous session the group killed the main villain of the adventure, Nazin Redthorn, the leader of the Iron Circle mercenaries in Harkenwold. That is one of the minor problems you get when running an adventure with some degree of freedom: It is possible to kill the main villain before the adventure is over. In this case there was still the old Baron of Harkenwold to free from the dungeon.

As usual the wizard would have preferred to take a long rest to recover his daily spells, but on checking the various doors they had barricaded when taking possession of the castle keep, the group noticed that the door to the dungeon was smouldering. Somebody was trying to burn his way out. So a short rest had to suffice. The warlord opened the door from the side, and the group found themselves facing another tar devil. The devil fled back downstairs, the group followed, and found themselves facing that devil, an iron circle mage, and two iron circle enforcers.

With this group of enemies being much weaker than the previous "boss fight", this final combat of the adventure ended up being somewhat anti-climatic. The group spread out and thus mostly avoided the mage's area attacks. The enforcers had lots of health, but didn't hit very often. The mage ended up hiding behind a closed door, and when the group had won the fight managed to negotiate safe passage in exchange for the baron's life.

The player's freed the baron, and thus successfully ended the adventure. Looking out of the castle keep they saw that the remaining mercenaries had fled, some of them having been killed in the process by the villager's rebel army. The player's were celebrated as heroes, and the baron gave them his treasure (which they could have looted earlier, but didn't). They also gained enough xp to gain a level.

With this short session ended our first year of the campaign, we'll continue next year. In one year the group made it from level 0 to 4, in 18 sessions. As I have an outline of the campaign up to level 8 already, I've got the next year more or less covered. As hint on what will happen next, I told the player's that on coming home to Fallcrest, a message was waiting for them: The mage Valthrun, counselor to Lord Padraig of Winterhaven, has written them that he had discovered the whereabouts of the demon Jaazzpaa. As the fighter of the group also found a scroll hinting of an artifact battleaxe last seen near Winterhaven, the group will head there next.

While I do have my favorite genres of computer games, sometimes I do like venture beyond those to see what is happening elsewhere. So this weekend I was playing Batman Arkham City, which I had picked up this year at some Steam sale for cheap. Many things were familiar: A RPG-like system of gaining experience and buying skills, a GTA-like structure of main story in a more or less open city. But what felt really weird was the combat: Why the heck am I bringing fists to a gunfight?

I am pretty sure that sort of non-lethal violence will make more sense to somebody who grew up with comic books in general, and Batman comics in particular. But then I assume even those comics didn't have Batman beat up a gang of thugs at every corner all day long. And what weird code of honor do you need to have to decide that it wouldn't be justified to shoot back if your enemies are shooting at you?

Overall I found Batman Arkham City very cinematic, but unfortunately showing a movie I didn't care for all that much. Another weird comic book story convention appears to be that there is a constant sequence of the villains capturing the heroes followed by the heroes capturing the villains, but without one side ever finally taking out a member of the other side. Instead Batman being captured is a cue for the forced transition of you playing Catwoman for a while.

Which brings me to the main issue I have with this game: While yes, you can explore Arkham City more or less freely and collect trophies and do side missions when you want, the main story of the game is extremely linear with no decisions to be taken at all. You have some freedom on how to tackle enemies, but as you are limited to fists and gadgets, and some rooms are full of enemies with guns, the silent takedown approach is usually the only viable option. In the end the whole thing feels very much like an interactive movie. Which isn't bad if you like interactive movies in general, and Batman in particular. But personally I wasn't all that enchanted by this game.

Is Blu-ray of digital streaming the future of entertainment? I solved the problem by buying a Samsung BD-E6100 which can do either. Blu-ray players with Wifi are obviously a bit more expensive than those without, but I don't mind paying a bit more for quality. I also picked up the James Bond 50th anniversary edition on Blu-ray some reader mentioned.

It'll all go under the Christmas tree of me and my wife, from "us" to "us". :) Pro tip for anybody considering a similar purchase: Buy a HDMI cable while you buy the Blu-ray player, it generally isn't included in the package.

There once was MMORPG which was so bad, it couldn't even get the 35.000 players which was said to be the break-even point. So the game shut down and most people forgot about it. That would have been the end of the story, if Turbine hadn't just announced that they are going to revive Asheron's Call 2 again, over 7 years after its closure. Presumably nobody worked on the game in the meantime. My best guess is that the game still sucks as much as I remember it to.

I think Turbine misunderstood the memo saying that zombie games were increasingly popular these days. Personally I think they would have a lot more success with a new version of Asheron's Call 1 with a new graphics engine than with a revived Asheron's Call 2.

I was looking for a Christmas present for my wife, the Star Wars Trilogy on DVD. To my surprise it turned out that this isn't produced any more. The last remaining Star Wars DVDs on the secondary market on Amazon go for over a 100 bucks. The only version still in production is Blu-ray. That of course makes me wonder if I need to switch over anytime soon.

Technically I do have a Blu-ray player, in the form of my PS3. I just never used it as such yet, and it isn't on the living room TV. I am not a specialist at all, but I would assume that an on-purpose Blu-ray player isn't all that expensive by now any more. And I would hope it would be able to play both DVDs and Blu-ray discs. One additional problem is that I own DVDs with different region codes, having sometimes imported them from the USA. I know most DVD players can be made "region free" with a few button presses on the remote. Does anyone know if the same is true for Blu-ray players?

Ultimately the question is whether Blu-ray is already confirmed as definitively being the future, so that in a few years time it won't be possible to get anything on DVD any more. I'd hate to invest in a future that doesn't come to pass, that would be like having bought a Betamax system. What do you think? Should I get a Blu-ray player for Christmas?

So Funcom surprised the world by *not* going Free2Play, but rather just dropping the subscription for The Secret World. You still need to buy the game to play, the same business model as Guild Wars 2 has. There aren't many subscription games left beyond World of Warcraft and Rift; and Trion is firing employees in time for Christmas, so you need to wonder whether they are next to give up subscriptions.

I find it somewhat ironic that MMORPGs are giving up subscriptions just as single-player games are trying to introduce them. We might very well end up in a situation where we buy our MMORPGs just once, while our single-player games demand regular payments for DLC.

When I read the news today that Darkfall: Unholy Wars would not as announced launch today, but that it would be postponed to January, I couldn't help but think "January of what year?". If Darkfall didn't exist, somebody would need to invent it just to serve as a bad example for the industry; the game has been such a consistent failure over all its history. No wonder Greece and Europe are in such financial troubles if Aventurine is an example of where they spend taxpayers' money on. If it wasn't propped up by public money, the company would have been broke for years.

When comparing the recent comments on my blog about the problems of Wurm Online with my experience with MMORPG with player housing (UO, SWG, ATiTD, ...) it struck me that a big part of the problem is that virtual houses aren't much lived in. Most players only spend something like 10% of their day online, and even then most activity in most games with player housing takes place away from your house. Virtual worlds with player housing often feel rather empty, and that visual isolation stands in the way of community building. No wonder people in a sandbox game often do selfish things, if they don't feel part of a community for which self-restraint in favor of the greater good would look like a good idea.

The player housing I felt most at home with was in A Tale in the Desert. You would build your house not too far from the schools you needed for various purposes, so that villages formed automatically. And half of your time in the game was usually spent doing crafting around your house, as you would construct your crafting structures around your house. You could make some of those structures public, for example the pottery wheels which are hard to get for new players, and you'd even have a stream of visitors. And of course the ability to join several guilds helped, as besides your main guild you would often join a local guild for some community project.

Compared to that the houses in Ultima Online or Star Wars Galaxies were much less lived in. But they did have one other feature which made them look less abandoned: The ability to set up your own NPC vendors there. Thus even if you weren't online, if you were known as a master smith, people would seek out your house to buy stuff. Features like that add to the sense of place, making player cities appear somewhat more real. Games like Everquest 2 or Lord of the Rings Online, with their instanced housing, manage to hide the fact that most houses are empty most of the time. But then these don't really feel like houses in the first place. Nobody sees when you are home doing crafting, and there really is no reason to even visit another house.

A reader recently recommended to me to watch the anime series Sword Art Online, which is about players being trapped 24/7 in a virtual reality MMORPG. That technology fortunately doesn't exist. But the consequence of that is that allowing players to make permanent changes to virtual worlds they only inhabit for a fraction of their time is fraught with problems. I don't think it is impossible, but I do think a working virtual world game would have to be built very differently, putting social structures in the foreground before letting players lose to deforest the landscape.

One trend I noticed in the second half of this year is game companies trying to sell season passes to players. A season pass means the player pays in advance for a bundle of downloadable content (DLC), basically a paid-for version of content patches for single-player games. And such a season pass isn't cheap, those for Borderlands 2 and Assassin's Creed 3 cost 30 Euro each, the Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 season pass even costs 50 Euro on Steam.

The thing that bothers me is that to price a season pass the game company basically needs to have the DLC already produced when the game is released. There have been cases where a so-called "DLC" wasn't actually downloadable content but was in fact already burned onto the DVD on which the game was delivered. What happens is that players end up paying full price for half a game, and are then asked to pay full price a second time for the other half of the game.

Game companies like DLC because it acts as a copy protection: Even if you can sell the game used, the DLC is legally treated as an account-bound service which isn't resellable. And I would be happy with the principle if a game company would sell me a game with limited content for a much reduced price, and I could then decide later whether I wanted to pay full price for a full game. But paying full price twice to get all the content that has already been planned and produced from the start sounds like a ripoff to me.

I am currently in the mood for more peaceful games, games in which you craft and build instead of kill and destroy. Looking for such games automatically leads me away from triple-A PC games and towards other platforms: Social games on Facebook, mobile games on iOS, and the like. There is a strong correlation between "casual" games and peaceful games.

Facebook games tend to two defining features: A limit on the number of clicks per session, and the need to bother your friends with requests. Many people simply consider Facebook games to be unplayable because of these two features. But as real life often means I have limited amounts of disposable time for playing, a limit of time spent per game session is actually not so bad. And I got around the friend bothering problem by making lots of fake friends on Facebook (to the point that Facebook is now growling at me when I want to add new friends, reminding me that Facebook is only for real life friends).

The early Facebook games often didn't have much gameplay, nor graphics. That fortunately has evolved. There is much more "game" to the new Farmville 2 or Cityville 2 than to their predecessors; and they look graphically a lot more appealing too. But even among Zynga games there is a range of different complexities: Farmville 2 is on the low side, needing not much resource management, and not much interaction with friends. Cityville 2 is comparatively a lot more complicated and in my opinion somewhat overdoes the friend request part. Fortunately I currently have a bug in Cityville 2 where I am not limited in how many times per day I can send out requests to my friends. That led to an explosive growth of my city, but the forums confirm this to be a bug and not a feature, with not everybody being affected. A MMORPG couldn't continue running with some players having such huge advantage over the others, but Zynga appears not to care too much, nor in a hurry to fix the bug.

If you can't stand the friend request principle, you can find similar peaceful games without the need for friends on the iOS. For example Hay Day is a sort of Farmville on the iPad/iPhone, but without the need to ask friends for stuff or a limitation on the number of clicks per session. Instead everything needs some time, which still leads to short play sessions in which you set everything up and then need to wait for crops to grow and items to be produced.

If you prefer games where you can play long sessions, Puzzle Craft might be a good option. Here collecting resources is a tile-matching puzzle mini-game. A farm puzzle provides food, hay, and wood, and then the food is used as fuel for a mining puzzle which provides stone and metal. Resources can also be used to build up your village with various building helping you with the puzzles, or to make tools. Overall a nice combination of puzzle game and crafting/building game.

Other than Puzzle Craft there often is no "game" to resource gathering, just a simple clicking and/or waiting. The game is in the resource management. The advantage of that is that these games generally aren't twitchy at all, and don't need fast reflexes. I find it interesting how closely slow games are correlated with peaceful games, while most games that need fast reflexes are about killing and destroying stuff. Presumably that is a question of demographics, with the fast killer games being targeted at a mostly male and adolescent target audience, while the peaceful games are more likely to appeal to female and/or older gamers. With the average age of gamers going up, I expect more peaceful games in the future. Including big budget PC games, like the new Sim City.

I found a beta key for Salem in my mail, so I went and tried it out. That turned out to be a big disappointment, the version that was available was in a state which I would consider essentially as being unplayable. It was more a proof of concept than an actual game.

I have a library of Steam games of which I haven't played half. I have lots of games installed on my iPad that I haven't had the time to play yet. I'm playing only a few Facebook games out of thousands available. My Playstation 3 is collecting dust, because I don't even keep up to date what games come out on that platform. And I don't even have an XBox or Wii. There are simply too many games coming out for me to play them all. We always talk about how the devs of one MMORPG can't possibly create content fast enough to please the contentivores, but in aggregate all game developers together are producing far more content and far more games than a person could possibly play.

For MMORPGs that has two major consequences, which are related: If you play just one MMORPG all the time, you are missing out on a lot of other games. And because people don't want to miss out on potentially fun new games while grinding in some MMORPG, MMORPGs can't seem to hold onto their players any more. It is the law of supply and demand, in this world of over-supply of games it becomes hard to make money with games. You can play a lot of games on various platforms for free, mobile games usually just cost a few bucks, and you can get PC games from this year at a Steam sale for half price or less.

Sooner or later this is going to end up in a huge crash like the one we had 30 years ago. Wikipedia says about the 1983 crash: "There were several reasons for the crash, but the main cause was supersaturation of the market with hundreds of mostly low-quality games which resulted in the loss of consumer confidence.". Doesn't that sound familiar? Only the "hundreds" part today has to be replaced by "thousands". There is simply a limited supply of people with money and time to spend on games, and too many companies producing too many games to go after that limited pool. And if you can't make big bucks with your big budget game any more, the budget of your next game will be smaller, and quality might get lower. At some point the market is so saturated by cheap Free2Play games, that another $300 million triple-A game is out of the question.

I'd say enjoy the affluence of cheap games while they last. But basic economics tells us that they won't last forever.

Warning! Installing the XCOM: Enemy Unknown Slingshot DLC is likely to break your save games, giving an error message saying: "INT?XComUIShell.UIFinalShell.m_strDLC_PackIN_Frie ndlyName?". Better finish your current game before getting the DLC.

Diminishing Returns is pondering the $50 hobby horse in LotRO, and thinks that it is like the tree in the forest philosophical dilemma: "Players’ rage is not directed at the actual horse (which they will rarely encounter) but the idea of the horse and what it represents." Most people agree that Free2Play designs in which the free players are armed with sticks while the paying players get mega-cannons are bad (I hear WarZ works like that). But what about items shops selling expensive fluff? Nobody really has an in-game advantage by buying an expensive mount or pet. So on the other side nobody really has an in-game disadvantage by some other player owning an expensive mount or pet. The only "hurt" it produces is jealousy.

Now being jealous of what other people have is a very natural reaction. In a way one could say that it is the force that powers the "American Dream". Of course the downside is that it also was the force behind the sub-prime mortgage financial disaster, because if you need to keep up with the Joneses you might make some unwise financial decisions. But ultimately that is a question of self-control. Are you really hurt by your neighbor driving a Rolls Royce? It doesn't make your car drive any worse, it only makes it look worse in comparison.

With Free2Play games there is another factor to consider: The people buying the $50 hobby horse are effectively financing the game for those who pay nothing. If everybody decided to pay nothing and just play for free, the game would be closed down after a few months. As much as the entitlement kids seem to think otherwise, game companies are not charities; they are businesses that need to make money to pay their employees and investors. If you see somebody with a $50 hobby horse in Lord of the Rings Online, you should /thank him instead of raging at him. It is him who is paying the game for you, and that merits some gratitude.

A reader wrote me with an interesting observation: Him and his friends are playing Free2Play Planetside 2, and they spent some money on their characters. But when asked whether they would switch servers or factions, his friends declined: They had spent some real money on their characters, and Planetside 2 doesn't have the option to switch servers or side. So to move you would have to restart a new character, and the money you spent would be lost. They didn't want that, although the amount of money wasn't that high.

That is a pretty typical example of loss aversion, the tendency of people to put a higher value on the possible loss of something than they would value the possible gain of it. It is already pretty strong in many MMORPG where people don't like the loss of the time spent to build up a character. But with a Free2Play model where you purchases are bound to a character and not an account, that loss of money can shackle a player even further.

Loss aversion is often not very rational. People tend to forget that sticking to something has a cost too, an opportunity cost. Of course it varies from case to case whether rationally the loss is worth more or less than the opportunity. But I think it happens a lot that people feel somewhat obliged to play a game just because of the money and time they already spent, even if they are way beyond the point of having fun. Loss aversion can end you up playing a game you don't enjoy any more, instead of switching to something that would be more fun to you.

For game companies of course player's loss aversion is brilliant, and frequently exploited in "come back" advertising. It is how free trials work: Let the player get attached to his character and become averse to losing it, and you'll gain a new subscriber. Character-bound real money items are just one more variation to that. Sometimes it is just better to have the ability to let go.

Stropp is asking: How Long Should A MMORPG Be Kept Alive? and answers it by "I’m of the opinion that a game should be kept going as long as it still has X number of players logging in every day, and the cost of keeping it going is not an undue burden on the company." There are two major problems with that answer: What is X? And what is an "undue burden"?

My answer is similar, also resulting in an X which is unknown to the players. But it would be an X which is known to the game company: I'm of the opinion that a game should be kept going as long as it's return on capital employed is higher than the cost of capital. Note that this is a higher barrier than saying "the game is profitable". A game could theoretically be "profitable" by having a profit of $1 per year. But as then the company would make considerably more money on their investment if they closed the game, pulled the money out and put it on a savings account, in my mind that constitutes an "undue burden" on the company.

Note that capital employed does not include the "sunk" cost of developments. So even if going by my answer, a game could still be a bad investment: It could make more money keeping it alive than killing it and paying your debts back, but the extra profit might not be big enough to pay back the sunk cost before a hundred years. I don't think a MMORPG should be abandoned just because it wasn't quite as much a money maker as expected. But it needs to make more money than the cost of capital to be not a financial burden to a company. Read up on the Japanese economy if you don't see what the harm is in keeping zombie companies and projects alive artificially.

The makers of City of Steam sent me a closed beta key, and I barely used it. My apologies! It isn't as if City of Steam was a bad game. In fact having a steam punk setting is a nice chance, and the game looks better than you'd expect a Free2Play browser game to look. There are also some interesting variations on the class/spec/talent system, with each class choosing one of three sub-classes right from the start, abilities in an ability tree, and passive talents being free choice. The reason I couldn't play City of Steam for more than a few hours was that apart from such variations, it is very much a classic MMORPG: You have your quests to descend into the sewer and kill ten rats, you have your hotkey bar combat, you have your healer, tank, and damage dealer classes/specs, everything you would expect.

I just don't want to play games like that any more for the moment. I want either MMOs that work very differently from this Progressquest type, or games that aren't MMORPGs. I can't help it, but right now an NPC that asks me to kill ten rats just makes me want to puke. I want games where what I do is fun *now*, and not a prerequisite for maybe fun later. And if MMORPGs can't offer that, I'm burned out of MMORPGs.

Solarian Tactics by haiku games is a fun little turn-based tactics game for the iOS. It costs only $2.99, no in-app purchases, but I got a review copy for free. What makes this game special is that it is "entry-level" difficulty. There aren't many of those games around, as turn-based strategy games have become somewhat niche, and many of the few games there are have been made for hardcore veterans. Solarian Tactics might be too easy for the hardcore, I played it through in one weekend. But for everybody else this is quite a good game.

There are 35 missions in this game, each unlocking the next one. But you can always go back an play through missions you already won. Both old and new missions earn you xp and levels, as well as gold for unlocking various abilities called "augments". Thus if a mission turns out to be too difficult for you, you can always do a couple of old missions to get stronger before trying again. The enemy is controlled by a decent AI, there is no multi-player. I prefer it that way, I found games like Hero Academy where you have to wait hours sometimes for your opponent to move not very engaging.

You start out with two characters, a rogue-type melee damage dealer and ranged damage dealer. Over the missions you pick up three more characters, a tank, and two characters able to move enemies around, one by pushing, one by pulling. The 5x9 squares battle maps are often crowded with obstacles, so that moving the enemy into position can make the difference. Levels unlock new augments that can be bought, which give new abilities to the characters.

The story and graphics are okay, but not really special. It really depends whether you like cartoonish Sci-Fi or not. But the tactical gameplay is solid, and not overly difficult. Even players new to the genre should be able to play this, while people with more strategy experience get through the game faster because they need less replays of old missions to succeed. For $2.99 with no additional hidden cost involved, the price is right for the amount of game you get.

The only thing that bothered me was that after I won the last mission I could only continue to play with my powerful group, but couldn't find an option to restart at level 1. I'm sure I can fix that by simply re-installing the game, but a reset option would have been nice.