Between subscription gaming services on the one side, and free or cheap game offers on Steam or Epic on the other side, it is possible to play a different game every day. Like a butterfly, you could flit from one game to the next, without ever staying anywhere very long. But it seems my gaming behavior is more like that of a bird, I build a nest somewhere and stay for quite some time. So most of my time is still spent playing World of Tanks, instead of trying out the many other games I have access to.

I am still subscribed to the Xbox Game Pass. I just installed two more games via that service, Phoenix Point and Age of Wonder: Planetfall. In other words, the Xbox Game Pass subscription service is adding games I am interested in faster than I can play them. My plan to be only subscribed for a few months, until I have "played through" the offer, is looking increasingly shaky. I might never escape ... :)

In a recent post on World of Tanks a reader asked why I would spend more on virtual items than it would cost to buy an AAA game. There are a lot of dimensions to the answer to this question, but ultimately it probably comes down to choosing depth over width.

I own a lot of computer games, 384 on Steam alone, of which only 112 were ever played. That is not unusual. More than half of all games bought on Steam get played rarely or not at all. Clearly the cost of games for most people is not a major obstacle. People spend more on a bottle of good wine than they spend on a computer game. For the cost of a one-week ski holiday you can buy enough games to entertain you all year long. The demographics of gaming have changed over the last decades, but the pricing hasn't followed. You now have customers that are adults with a certain disposable income buying games that are still priced like toys, not more expensive than a typical Christmas present for children. Some people buy a specific console just to be able to play one specific game, like buying a Switch just to play Zelda. As a hobby for adults, gaming is rather cheap.

So I could easily afford to play a different computer game every day of the year. But I don't. I don't think anybody does. Most games offer more hours of entertainment than I have disposable time per day, so even playing "through" a short game can take me several games. And then there are the evergreen games, I once called them lifestyle games, the sort of games you play every day for months or years. MMORPGs are typical examples. But this year my lifestyle game was World of Tanks. I played it most days of the year. I don't know exactly how many hours I played, but I went from 6k battles to 13k battles, so I played 7k battles this year, which probably took me around 1,000 hours. That is a lot, considering that I also have a full-time job. I would guess I spent more than half of my disposable time this year on World of Tanks.

And there you have all the ingredients you need for game monetization: Customers with a good disposable income spending the majority of their disposable time on a single game. If that single game sells you sparkly ponies for $100, these customers will buy a sparkly pony, rather than buying an AAA game. The question of whether that sparkly pony is an in-game advantage over a player who doesn't have a disposable income and is playing that same game for free is actually irrelevant. Does eating in a fine restaurant give you an in-life advantage over somebody eating at a fast food restaurant? Does driving an expensive car give you an in-street advantage over somebody driving a clapped-out second-hand car? The question isn't even necessarily part of the buying decision. You buy the sparkly pony because you want that sparkly pony, not because somebody else doesn't have it.

Imagine you had to explain the difference between the Diablo series of games and the Baldur's Gate series of games to a relative who doesn't know computer games very well. Would you talk about the differences in lore? Or would you rather explain that there is a big difference in gameplay, with Diablo being more action-oriented, while in Baldur's Gate there is more dialogue to read and tactical decisions to make? I would think that for most gamers the brands in video gaming are more related to gameplay. A turn-based version of Diablo would be as confusing to us as a Pokemon first-person shooter.

It seems that Wizards of the Coast hasn't understood that. They just revealed yet another Dungeons & Dragons computer game, Dark Alliance, which again clearly has nothing to do with the gameplay of Dungeons & Dragons. It's a co-op, action slasher game using characters from D&D lore. In the past years we had a idle clicker D&D game, a mobile gacha heroes collection game, and other abominations, none of which had anything to do with the gameplay of 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons. Weirdly enough the only game in the making that is actually based on D&D rules, Solasta: Crown of the Magister, is not supported by Wizards of the Coast, and is made independently.

Dungeons & Dragons as a brand is over 40 years old. People of all ages play 5th edition, which is a huge success. It is silly to think that computer versions of D&D need to be very simple and action-oriented, to appeal to a very young audience. This is not what the brand is about! If a D&D player wants to play a computer version of D&D, he is far more likely to want a turn-based game in which the computer replaces the DM. We want modern versions of the SSI Gold Box series, not Dark Alliance!

The previous post in this series was about session 2. I didn't write a post about sessions 3 and 4 for a number of reasons. While that includes lack of free time on my part, another reason was that sessions 3 and 4 pretty much went by the book, with the players following the events of the main story. The only notable deviation was at the end of session 4, where they had the option of fighting a high-level, but weakened, assassin in order to save the king's traitorous sister, so she could be brought to justice in a more legal way, and decided that this wasn't worth the hassle. With that ended the Island at the Axis of the World adventure.

In session 5 we started The Dying Skyseer adventure. This is one of the most complex adventures I've ever played, as it puts the players really in the role of a police force in a fantasy world. So in session 5 we didn't have a single combat. But we had a crime scene investigation yielding a huge amount of different clues leading in different directions. This will get more D&D-like, and some of the clues will lead to combat encounters. But this session played more like CSI than like Lord of the Rings.

Fortunately I was on top of things, having already played the adventure as the DM once in 4th edition. I had prepared lots of handouts, including a stack of cards with clues that the players could gather at the crime scene. We played for about 4 hours, and then we stopped, because the players felt they needed a break to sort through all this information. It is kind of a sandbox adventure, and that is a bit harder on players than the more linear ones. But I think I managed to DM this in a way that the world appears rich, alive, and full of mysteries. That's a success in my book.

I probably overdid that lootboxes event I talked about in my previous post. That has to do with the fact that I can't buy lootboxes in Belgium, I need to ask somebody from another country to "gift" them to me. So, buying a few for testing and then some more over time would have been complicated. Instead, I went for the big bundle of 75 lootboxes for €100. But I had underestimated the generosity of Wargaming, and ended up with a bigger haul than I would have thought. Here is what I got out of 75 large lootboxes:

• 6 tanks (actually it was 10 tanks, but 4 of them were double and got converted to gold)
• 10 garage slots
• 5 styles
• 5 female crew members (including the 4 snow maidens)
• 38 premium days
• 44k gold
• 4.3 M credits
• Enough decorations to easily get me to Festive Atmosphere level X
• The rewards for getting Festive Atmosphere level X, including 660 national fragments

Note that the gold alone is worth €145. And I did get lucky and got the two rare new tanks, including the double-barrelled one. After using my decorations, breaking up the excess decorations into shards, and using the decoder to get the 4 large decorations and a bunch more random ones, I am now also at +30% more credits for the remainder of the event. So I am pretty happy with my lootboxes. Were they strictly necessary? Certainly not! But sometimes I should spoil myself. :)

In other news, I turned the Anonymizer off again, because XVM blocks you from seeing other people's stats if you do. I think this is a first: I know of a lot of game companies that will ban you if you use a mod they don't allow, but this is the first time the makers of a mod ban me because I used a game feature they don't allow.

Holiday seasons are a big deal for games that make their money from purchases of in-game items. People play more, and feel more generous, so revenue tends to go up. So what is happening in World of Tanks, in general and specifically for me? Glad you asked!

Patch 1.7 just came out, and it was a non-event. It basically contained only two changes to the game, of which one (selling crew directives for credits) isn't really interesting for anybody, other than being another small brick in the Pay2Win wall. The other change is slightly more interesting, the anonymizer: In future you can play under a randomly assigned fake name, which makes it impossible for anybody else in the game to see whether you are a n00b or a veteran. As the new players were sometimes harassed in chat for being new players, and the best players were sometimes "trophy hunted", I can see why Wargaming would want to put that feature in. But of course it to some extent breaks the XVM mod everybody uses. And not all the uses of the anonymizer are really honorable, I've seen platoons of seal-clubbers hiding behind anonymity in low tier games. The really interesting change to the game, which unfortunately wasn't in the patch, is the complete change to hit points tanks have and damage that different types of ammo do, especially high explosive. Which, again, will break XVM as an unintended consequence. It remains to be seen if that mod can survive this double whammy of attacks. Right now the modders changed the mod so that if it detects that you have been using the anonymizer, you are blocked out from receiving data from XVM for 12 hours.

Somehow in the code of patch 1.7, but only starting this Friday, is the Holiday Ops event. That event does have parts where you can earn bonuses as a Free2Play player. However it also has lootboxes, which are only in the game during the holiday season. And unlike other games, lootboxes in World of Tanks have a rather high minimum content, 250 gold, which alone is worth about 1€. So if you buy a stack of lootboxes, you are pretty much guaranteed that the overall value of what you'll find will be worth more than what you paid. You still might be angry that you didn't get that one double-barreled tank you wanted, but it isn't like some games where you might spend a hundred bucks and receive nothing of value. Knowing that this would be coming, I didn't buy any gold recently, and will buy a stack of lootboxes. Some of the tanks that can be in them I already have, but in that case I'd get a rather generous compensation of over 10k gold. And I'm certainly not going to spend more than I want on the hope of getting one specific tank, I'm not much of a gambler.

The reason I re-started playing World of Tanks last Christmas was spending the holidays at my brother's house and realizing that he was still playing. As I will spend Christmas at his place again this year, I'm planning to bring my laptop and maybe we can play together while in the same room (we did play together in platoons sometimes over the year). Unfortunately that laptop is so old, it still had the original World of Tanks from 2011 on it, together with Windows 7. So I spent like two days to install Windows 10, update Windows 10, and to download and install World of Tanks. It now works, for small values of "works". With low resolution graphics and many graphics options turned way down, at least the game is running more or less smoothly. But it just doesn't feel the same on a 15" laptop screen in low resolution, compared to a 27" desktop screen at high resolution. But I'm not even sure it would look so great on a newer laptop, and I'm using the thing too seldom to be motivated to buy a new one.

According to Steam, I played XCOM 2 for over 200 hours. Thus it would not be strange to think that I might want to play Phoenix Point. Because, to not put too fine a point on it, Phoenix Point is pretty much an XCOM clone. Which is fine by me, better a good copy than a badly designed innovative game. But I still didn't buy the game, because of the strangeness of modern game distribution.

You see, Phoenix Point is not available on Steam. I would probably have bought it, if it was. But Phoenix Point is an Epic Games Store exclusive, and I am still resisting installing the Epic Games Store software and opening an account. Somebody has to! If we all follow this new trend of splintering game distribution over many different distribution platforms, we will end up with an incredible mess. For games that you bought a while ago and haven't installed, the day you want to play it, you will need to remember on which of those 37 distribution platforms you bought it. At some point we will need software that manages all the different stores and launcher software on our PCs.

So no Phoenix Point for me? Not so fast! Because, while there is some delay, Phoenix Point will be part of the Xbox Game Pass for PC. And I am still subscribed to that, for now €3.99 per month (the first month was just €1). At this price I can subscribe 10 months for what it would have cost me to buy Phoenix Point. And as Outer Worlds before and Phoenix Point now are not the only games I play on the Game Pass, this remains a great option. But companies aligning themselves into either the Steam camp or the anti-Steam camp leads to the curious situation that quite a lot of the games that are Epic Games Store exclusive and that would interest me end up being instead available to me for free on the Microsoft Game Pass. I can't help but think that the developers of Phoenix Point or Outer Worlds would have made more money of me if they had put their games on Steam.

I have to say that I like quests in general, if they are well made. So it was a disappointment to me when Wizards of the Coast recently removed daily quests from Magic Duels, and abandoned all support for it. I still don’t like its successor, Magic Arena, because it has far too limited PvE. So, although I already had all the cards, I was still doing Magic Duels quests, even if I couldn’t actually use the gold those earned. I just found it more interesting to play towards a more specific goals, rather than playing whatever.

In World of Tanks I also tend to do missions, rather than playing whatever tank I feel like. While this month there is no Top of the Tree event, which I tended to do every month this year, there are lots of other holiday events. I finished my Renegade “half a challenge” early and am now doing the tank rewards missions every day, although these are particularly easy. Now Wizards of the Coast gave every player all the cards of Magic Duels before removing the daily quests. And I was thinking that if Wargaming gave me every tank in World of Tanks and removed all missions, I would probably stop playing. Without these little goals these games are simply less fun to me. How about you?