- Turbine decided that they needed a monocle of their own. But since hobbits are naturally hesitant, they decided to try it out on their test server before letting it go live. The internet responded in a wholly even-handed and practical way, as only the internet can. Today, Turbine temporarily recovered from whatever insanity afflicted them. (I wonder if it is the same madness that brought us Incarna?) And now the fifty dollar hobby horse has gone back into the closet where it belongs.
- If you've come to the conclusion that things have come off the rails over at Turbine, I might be forced to agree. Even Green Armadillo has turned a skeptical eye to the company.
- The free-to-play model is no longer the panacea everyone assumed it would be. More and more companies are finding that, instead, free-to-play is a short term fix for a long term problem. For MMOs to operate, they need revenue. If you just let people play for free, there is no revenue. Someone has to pay, and companies like Turbine have to find things to sell. But most things in an MMO are finite. Unless you can convince people to continually purchase consumables, you have to come up with more and more things to sell. And the things have to be more powerful or more exotic to make them more enticing than the things people have already bought. Fifty dollar hobby horse.
- I for one, don't care if Turbine wants to sell a
ten twenty-five fifty dollar mount. It's just a symptom. When CCP started showing these symptoms, the community intervened and the game recovered. LoTRO seems to be too far gone.
© 2012 Marty Runyon. All rights reserved.
- Another vote for the "Syncaine was right" camp. Wired Game Life's Andrew Groen has an article up today titled "Star Wars’ Stumble Points to Free, Open Future for Online Worlds."
- Modern MMOs are broken and there is nothing to convince me that this line of thinking is wrong. Everyone has taken the wrong lessons from World of Warcraft. Yes, accessibility is a good thing for MMOs. But it needs to be the on ramp to something bigger, not the MMO itself. What worked about WoW is that Blizzard made a big, hard game, then let everyone else play anyway. And I know that the elites don't want to hear it, but EVE Online works because anyone can play, even if a bunch of them play in Empire space.
- There is no core to SWTOR or any number of failed experiments. I'm the biggest care bear there is, but I still want to be where the action is. Without that hardcore center, without that major challenge to strive for, there is no action. There are no stories to tell. Why play a mediocre RPG when there are plenty of better single player games on the market.
- The verdict is still out on Guild Wars 2. The systems are all kinds of decent, but I'm not hearing any stories yet.
© 2012 Marty Runyon. All rights reserved.
- MMO Gamer Chick had an interesting post up Wednesday that struck a nerve with me. In it, she reveals that she likely won't continue to play Star Wars: The Old Republic for much longer now that it is going free to play. I also prefer the subscription model, and I think for a similar reason.
- The pressure of a monthly subscription forces me to get the best use out of my gaming time. If I pay for a month and then fritter it away, I've wasted $15 dollars for no good reason. There is freedom in knowing that I have access to the entire game for my fifteen dollars, even if it is only for a month.
- But as soon as the game goes free-to-play, that pressure goes away. There is no incentive to use my time wisely if I'm not spending money, so I don't play at all. Oddly enough, I discovered something similar with my lifetime subscription to Champions Online. Once I got the value out the purchase, I drifted right away from the game.
- I don't really need to bring out my old prejudices again the Free To Play model. Especially when Wilhelm is already doing such a great job throwing up the caution flag. But that's always going to be in the back of my mind as well.
- I'll have more thoughts about the WoW Annual Pass in a couple months, so stay tuned. But until then, I'll stick with my subscriptions, thank you very much.
© 2012 Marty Runyon. All rights reserved.
- After reading about Leelu Butterfly's triumphant climb to the apex of LotRO leveling, I decided to take an inventory of MMOs where I've reached the level cap.
- World of Warcraft - Ashlynh (TBC 70, WotLK 80, & Cata 85) & Kyralahn (TBC 70 & WotLK 80)
- Champions Online - Arcfire (40)
- Huh. That can't be right, can it? I'll right back.
- Well, I just went over to Bio Break to read his MMO Timeline and I was right. There is not a single other game on that list where I've even approached the level cap. Unless you could Guild Wars. I don't count Guild Wars.
- Once upon a time, I expended a lot of effort to decry the state of the solo endgame in MMOs. Now, I wonder what all the fuss was about. There is no endgame worry about if you still have several levels ahead of you. I just went back to Rift recently. My first time through, I only ever saw three zones. How many more were available at launch? And then there's Ember Isles, which was added later? And how much of Everquest 2 is there to see? I've never even been to Freeport, the most iconic zone in the game.
- Am I alone in this? I need some insight, folks. And not just from my commenters. Everyone. I put a poll in the right hand column. I want to know how often you reach the level cap in your games. No, this is not a ploy to get blog hits. (Yes, it is.)
© 2012 Marty Runyon. All rights reserved.
- As always, when you need insight into the MMO business, there is no better source than the original ranter. Scott Jennings has a post discussing the collapse of 38 Studios and massive layoffs at Bioware.
- Back in January, I wrote a post saying that AAA MMO development was not only untenable, but actually detrimental to the growth of the genre. My argument was that games like SWTOR are not growing the MMO space, they are just making it more crowded with carbon copy games.
- No one wants to see people put out of a job. I'm sure that everyone at Bioware and 38 Studios was working as hard as possible to make a great game. It has been said many times before that no one sets out to make a bad game. However a constant churn of mediocre games is not helping anyone. The floor is going out from under Triple-A MMOs and I'm not so sure that is a bad thing.
- The way MMOs are developed now, that amount of money required, means that only the safest of designs will ever be okayed. Innovation is a luxury that they can't afford, even if innovation is the only thing that will get people to play. What I want is for MMOs to go indie. I want people like Eric Heimburg and his Project Gorgon to show us a new way. Sure, it's not going to be polished like a Blizzard game. But there will be character and inspiration that you can't get from a bog-standard WoW-alike. There will always be a future for MMOs. I'd rather they were guided by visionaries instead of businessmen.
- Of course, Keen has already beaten me to the punch, but that's fine. We need more voices shouting that it doesn't have to be this way.
© 2012 Marty Runyon. All rights reserved.
- Before I get into this, how come no one told me that Syl of Raging Monkey's was such a great blogger? I feel like you were hording her all for yourselves. Shame on you.
- So you've all heard of Tera, right? If not, let me sum up the game in three pictures.
Action Based Combat
Big-Ass Monsters
Pedophilia
- Do you understand the problem here? No, of course the game is not about pedophilia. But what am I supposed to think when the game world is populated with half dressed prepubescent girls? What am I supposed to tell my wife and daughter? That it really is a great game as long as you disregard the sexualized children? I mean, I already have to get around the hypersexualized women in every other game (which Tera in spades as well). How am I supposed to play this with a clear conscience about the message that it is giving?
- This is what the gaming industry thinks of us. This is what we get for being so complacent about sexual imagery in gaming. Good job, everyone.
© 2012 Marty Runyon. All rights reserved.
- Here is a backhanded compliment for Keen and Syncaine: every once in a while, those two actually write something worth reading. Today was such a day. What makes this so auspicious is that they are both making an argument to which I am becoming more sympathetic.
- Both have long bemoaned the downward spiral MMO development has followed ever since companies have started chasing the World of Warcraft audience. Both Keen and Syncaine, each in their own way, are shaking their fists at the shortsightedness of developers. Keen thinks that copycat MMOs have to launch fully featured or face comparison against their template game. Syncaine thinks that developers are spending too much time building content and not enough time providing tools for the player base to become the content.
- When I find myself agreeing with two bloggers whom I often disagree with, and both on the same day, it is time to take notice.
- There has to be a change. There can't be enough potential players in the world to sustain a new MMO releasing and converting to free-to-play every three to six months. Eventually even the free-to-play space will be saturated with WoW-alikes. Unless someone takes a chance and builds something different, something sustainable, MMO churn is all we will have. At least, until the whole system comes crashing down.
- In a way, I'm hoping that Star Wars: The Old Republic burns out sooner rather than later just to hasten the eventual collapse. Until companies stop throwing so much money into copycat MMOs, there will be no room for innovation.
- Maybe the collapse will take the genre out entirely. Maybe MMOs will go the way of the roguelike instead. If that is the future, then I will welcome it. If big companies can do it right, maybe we have to take the genre away from them and do it for ourselves.
© 2012 Marty Runyon. All rights reserved.
- I just left this as a reply to a comment from MMO Gamer Chick on my prior post, but I'm so enamored with it that I wanted to bring it to the fore. I'm curious what you think.
Of course, I'd also like to see Beast Mastery Hunters, Frost Mages, Combat Rogues, and Demonology Warlocks converted to tanks to give more options.
- One of the things that Rift gets right is that every class has option to fill multiple roles: warriors can tank, mages can heal, rogues and clerics can both tank and heal, and everyone can DPS. Not everyone takes advantage of it, but enough do that the tanking and healing population is much more healthy in the game.
- What if World of Warcraft did the same thing? Tanks are in such short supply partly because only four of the game's thirty specializations can even do it. If you bump that up to eight, I suspect that the tanking shortage goes away immediately. There will be some players who will dislike the change to their preferred specialization. But I think that an equal or greater number of players would love the new options. I know that if I could mage tank, I'd at least want to try it from time to time.
- It's never going to happen, but I wonder what you all think about the idea.
- Also, there are no original ideas. I'm willing to bet that this very idea has been posted somewhere before. If you blogged this sometime in the past, throw a link in the comments section. I'd love to see it.
© 2011 Marty Runyon. All rights reserved.
- Blizzard today announced a solution to the long Dungeon Finder queue times in World of Warcraft. Called Dungeon Finder: Call to Arms, the system will provide an incentive for whichever role is least represented (and let's be honest, it's for the tanks) to queue up for random dungeons more often. As a reward for completing the instance, the Call to Arms awards an extra loot bag with gold and the possibility of drawing an epic gem, flask or elixer, pet, or a rare mount.
- Both Tobold and Rohan refer to it as bribery, and that's what it has come to. Tanking and, to a lesser extent, healing are so unpopular (at least in a random setting) that people would rather play a wildly overrepresented role than deal with the pressure of that kind of responsibility. There would be two ways to deal with the issue: make tanking easier (negative reinforcement) or increasing the rewards (positive reinforcement). Blizzard stated that they like how tanking plays, so they are left handing out big bags of loot.
- I hate to beat a dead horse here (Oh, who am I kidding? Give me an expired equine and I'll beat it all day long.) but once again we have a demonstration of why the MMO Trinity fails as a system. The trinity was an abberation anyway, an artifact of the MUD days where players exploited the threat rules to control enemies. That this exploit was codified in MMOs and made the default combat paradigm in WoW and its successors is a tragedy. I blows my mind that ArenaNet seems to be the only high profile company to figure this out.
- Blizzard thinks that tanking should be a challenge. Back when it was an exploit, I could understand that. But now that every group is required to have a tank, it needs to be easy enough 16-20% of the population can do it. Tanking in Rift is not easy, but it's not a tightrope either. And three quarters of the classes can tank if they want. So either make it easier or change the fundamentals of your game so that tanking is not the correct way to manage an encounter.
- Yes, I'm asking for a lot. But if you are in the position where you have to bribe your customers to play the game right, do you not see that as a problem?
- I did not get enough sleep last night, so I want to blame this on how tired I am. But I know that I wasn't the only one to see this, so I did not dream it.
- I went out to lunch today. I overslept so I didn't have time to pack anything. Thankfully the building where I work shares a parking lot with several restauants. I didn't know where I would end up (I usually wait until I see which place has the shortest line) but everything is in the same direction anyway.
- As I exited the building, I saw some guy going the same direction about fifty feet ahead. Usually I don't pay attention to anyone else since I'm usually listening to a podcast and keeping to myself. But this guy was jumping up and down. Constantly. The entire time we were walking, he was leaping around like a crazy man. Sometimes he would leap from side to side, sometimes backward. But mostly he had just decided he was going to jump all the way to lunch.
- We both ended up at the same place (Chipotle). Since he was still ahead of me, he was in line first. But the entire time he was in line, he kept jumping in place. When it came his turn to order, instead of walking around the low wall that everyone else was waiting behind, this guy decides that he wants to leap it. So he's there jumping at the wall over and over again. Only, he can't make it so he's moving back and forth along this wall, jumping at it from different angles, as if he can find the one low point that will allow him to clear it instead of walking around like a sane person.
- Everyone in the restaurant stared at him like he was crazy. I suspect that was the point of the exercise. This guy desperately wanted attention, no matter how stupid he looked. The unsettling thing is that, by the time I got my order and left, two other guys thought this was a good idea and joined in. So now there are three people jumping around this Chipotle, getting in everyone's way and drawing attention to themselves.
- Is there something I'm missing here? Can someone explain to me what I missing about jumping everywhere?
© 2011 Marty Runyon. All rights reserved.
- Scarybooster's recent post about the current state of the Public Quest mechanic left me thinking about where MMOs are going in the future. My comment to his post was:
Excellent thoughts on the subject. I actually think PQs are a real innovation. It just needs the right iteration to find out how to make it work. I know nothing about DCUO's implementation (didn't even know they had one), but I like how Rift and GW2 are tinkering with the formula is their own ways. I'm interested to see who gets it right.
- When Mythic announced open groups and public quests for Warhammer Online, I knew I was seeing the future. As a classic "Alone Together" MMO player, their plan sounded like a perfect solution to overcome the social barriers that keep people from playing together. And when the populations were high and people were invested in the game, PQs actually did work. At least they worked until they didn't any more.
- Where the first version of public quests failed was in scalability and attraction. As long as there was a sufficient population, there were always enough people around to mask those flaws. But as soon as the people disappeared, you couldn't run a PQ to save your life. Because PQs did not scale, there was no way for a solo player or small group to complete them. And because there were so many PQs and many were so far out of the way, there was little chance that players would choose to run the same PQs at the same time. Thus, the promise PQs in WAR is largely unfulfilled.
- But that doesn't mean there isn't a great idea still in there. Cryptic certainly co-opted the idea for their Open Missions in Champions Online. They didn't address the scalability issue except in one case: the open mission at the end of the tutorial can be soloed because there is no failure condition. Otherwise, they do not scale at all. They did work on attraction primarily by cutting open missions to just a couple per zone. And with only 6 zones in the game, there are not that many to run between. But you still have to get lucky running into people for them to work. With such slight changes, CO's open missions did little to advance the concept.
- Now that we're seeing a new generation of games arriving, we finally have games that are iterating on the public quest design. The two greatest proponents are Rift and Guild Wars 2. Each of their attempts are fascinating in how differently they confront the challenges.
- Rift's Rifts are the more traditional implementation. Though there are evidently rifts that can be soloed to provide a small scale experience, the basic mechanic is meant to be attempted with a large group. But they have overcome the attraction problem by dumping rifts right on top of the players and letting the invasions disrupt standard quest play. There is no way to avoid participation if you want to play the rest of the game. Some might find that disruptive, but forcing the players to use the core mechanic of the game seems like a smart move to me.
- That is such a great idea that ArenaNet is taking it a step further by making Guild Wars 2's Dynamic Events the only open world content available. Outside of the instanced PvP and main storyline, all adventuring content is built around that system. So again, the attraction problem is null if it is unavoidable. But GW2 also answers the question of scalability by letting the events adjust to the number of players taking part. If done correctly, shifting populations could never cause their content to fail due to lack of available players.
- Funny thing in all of this, I have yet to see someone take the open group concept further. World of Warcraft has come the closest by assembling teams with their Random Dungeon Finder. Maybe dynamic grouping will be the next step forward in encouraging people to play together.
© 2011 Marty Runyon. All rights reserved.
- On the verge of the new expansion, I am compelled to point out that no one will be forced to play World of Warcraft. No one will think less of you for not renewing your subscription. Your paladin and druid won't be moping around Dalaran wishing you would come back and play with them. Blizzard won't be sending the Brute Squad around to collect the non-WoW-ites and put them into Cataclysm Indoctrination Centers.
- I feel like the point needs to be made because people are already defensive about all the WoW talk going on. And by defensive, I mean actively offensive about the game. Whenever talk comes around of WoW, all the usual suspects talk about how dumbed down it is, how real gamers play real games instead of baby games like WoW, and, of course, how they don't like playing on rails.
- Fine. Don't play. My enjoyment of the game is not contingent on your approval. The WoW you enjoyed before is gone, if it ever was the game you remember at all. There are hundreds of other games out there to champion. (Like Champions, for instance, which is my personal underdog.) I'd much rather see you write about the games you love than the games you hate.
- Anyway, you're all just jealous. Nyah, nyah, nyah.
- UPDATE: For a follow-up to this post, check out Random Shots: WoW Versus Everyone Else.
© 2010 Marty Runyon. All rights reserved.
- A great post over at Massively muses on how the introduction of heroes changed how Guild Wars is played. Many people decried how heroes destroyed grouping and turned it into a single player game. The reason I bring it up is because the lessons we learned from Guild Wars highlight a problem in MMOs at large.
- While the argument is that heroes destroyed the community, I believe that heroes just highlighted that the community had already failed. At least, the community that people want to imagine had failed and ArenaNet took steps to fill in the gaps. And they are not the only ones looking to correct the social problems posed by MMOs.
- One of the early aberrations in the MMO field was the notion that people had to play in groups to accomplish anything in the game. The most iconic was EverQuest. People learned how to solo in very specific instances, but that style of play was entirely counter to the design of the game. Nowadays, the most notorious example is Final Fantasy XI that has no solo options, while at the same time actively discouraging informal groups from forming any cohesion.
- The accepted wisdom among developers and players is that people have more fun when they play in groups. So to get people to play together, they designed games that required people to play together, assuming that forced grouping would somehow force them to have fun. Players reacted by forming static groups among real life friends so that they could all play together. And they banded together into guilds so that they would have a social structure that would make it easier to find groups. This obviously worked well for some people. It is these people who you see asking for greater amounts of group content to shore up the social structures that they've built.
- But if these options worked so well, no one would have created the term "pick up group". For many people (people like myself), these games are amazing experience that they want to participate in. They just do not have the ability to easily form or integrate into these social structures. Ad-hoc groups are formed to tackle group content and then broken up when the task is accomplished because otherwise they do not get to experience the game. And everyone hates pick-up groups, so some people would rather not group at all than deal with other random players.
- Forced grouping is a failed concept and developers have been moving away from that paradigm for years now. World of Warcraft was famous for letting anyone reach the level cap whether they group or not. But they also added the Random Dungeon tool to take the friction out of finding a group. Guild Wars launched with henchmen and heroes were just a refinement on the concept. And now Guild Wars 2 will have dynamically scaling events that allow any number of people to participate. Even Champions Online's adventure packs have embraced scaling content.
- I can understand why people who went to all the trouble of forming guilds so that they could play games might be upset as solo options become more prevalent. But that's what it is to most people: trouble. Players just want to play their games. They don't want to spend hours getting ready to have fun. Content scaling promises to let players of all social strata partake. But if MMOs want to get out of the niche they are in, they have to embrace all kinds of players. Forced grouping is an exclusionary practice that will prevent people from playing and enjoying the games that we love.
© 2010 Marty Runyon. All rights reserved.
- I've been waiting for someone to give me an excuse to write about this subject, and finally someone has stepped up to the plate. Ravious from Kill Ten Rats has a post up about player housing and the lack thereof in World of Warcraft. His question is why has Blizzard failed to implement player housing when other MMOs, before and since, found it important to do so? To answer the question, you only have to look as far as WoW's big competitors, Everquest 2 and Lord of the Rings Online.
- On one side of the equation, you have EQ2's guild halls. From all accounts, they can be filled with several amenities that make them the most convenient option for many of your non-adventuring needs. So convenient in fact that many people complain that the main cities are ghost towns.
- On the opposite side, LotRO tried to avoid some of the pitfalls of player housing with neighborhood instances. Unfortunately, those instances are almost entirely devoid of other players. So the houses end up as personal trophy rooms that very few, if any, other people will see. Neighborhoods seem like an interesting idea, but they have not ended up fostering a micro-community.
- Of course, none of this takes into account non-instanced housing like Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies. In both cases you end up with vast wastelands of empty buildings that no one cares about anymore. It is urban blight at its worst.
- In the face of all of that, what should World of Warcraft do? Blizzard have made it clear that they want people to congregate in their major cities. To this day, there are still large populations in Orgrimmar, Stormwind, and Ironforge, as well as Shattrath and Dalaran during their expansion cycles. And they don't need a personal trophy space because your character is the main trophy. And what is the point of having a museum if no one will see it. Your character is a walking record of your achievements and you need people around you so you can show off.
- Guild Wars 2 and Star Wars: The Old Republic offer player housing because they don't have the same design goals as WoW. In both cases, they involve heavily instanced personal storylines. Instanced housing will fit well with how they want you to play. Because the housing will be intertwined with the game systems, I'm sure they will be well received. In both games, there is multiplayer gaming involved, but only as one component of a large game.
- Not every game requires player housing. Housing must fill a need in the game design. Otherwise, at best, it becomes a minor diversion or, at worst, it destroys your community. Unless Blizzard finds the right reason to add it to the game, it would be like hammering a square peg into the round hole that is World of Warcraft.
© 2010 Marty Runyon. All rights reserved.
WoW is like the ring in Lord of the Rings, dude. And all the [other] developers are like fucking Gollum.
- Tyler Barber, Rebel FM Episode 64
© 2010 Marty Runyon. All rights reserved.
- I was not going to write anything in response to Darren's post over at The Common Sense Gamer because I figured he was just being his curmudgeonly self. But then when Tobold took up the same topic, I could not just let the thing lie.
- Way to miss the point, guys.
- You and your ilk are so set in your MMOing ways that you genuinely accept that there is no solution to the quest problem. The fact that people are clicking through quests is not a sign that no one wants stories in their MMOs. Blocks of text are just archaic ways to tell stories in a video game.
- I remember back when Wrath of the Lich King came out. Various bloggers declared that they would turn the Instant Quest Text option off so that they would take the time to savor the stories the game wanted to tell. And yet now we're cynically proclaiming that story is so inconsequential that we may as well skip the text altogether and just hand out quest blurbs that say "Kill ten rats", "Collect ten rat tails", or "Click the Glowing Thing" and that's all gamers need to keep grinding away.
- Games like The Old Republic and Guild Wars 2 are banking on the fact that people really will play for the story if you tell it the right way. And I think we should applaud them for the effort, not complain about how they are missing the point. Year in and year out, we complain about how there is not innovation in MMOs. Everyone is making a WoW clone and we're bored before we've even played it. But as soon as a developer puts one foot outside of our comfortable bounds, we tell them that they don't understand MMOs and it will never work. Shame on us.
- By the way, Zubon has already said all this much better and more succinctly over at Kill Ten Rats. I just want you to hide the link way down here at the bottom so you'd have to read everything before clicking away.
© 2010 Marty Runyon. All rights reserved.
- I don't always put a lot of thought into the characters I play in most video games. Most games are so linear that there does not seem to be much point in creating a story that's going to be contradicted within five minutes. But I'm glad there are other people who still bother.
- One excellent example is Blue Kae's recent biography of his Champions Online superhero, Silver Hunter. Between the bio and the story of how his character evolved of City of Heroes to Champions, he demonstrates the right way to weave your character into a game's story.
- The wrong way? I remember listening to an episode of The Instance where Randy Jordan was complaining about the Death Knight starter zone. That zone is widely hailed as one of the best stories in any MMO available. Randy's complain was that, because his character's story was that he was rebelling against the Lich King, he refused to do anything for him. Since he would not even talk to him, he literally could not do anything. His role-playing choice broke his enjoyment of the game. What makes this sad is that the death knight storyline is even better than the story he was trying to force. If he had just played along, he would have ended up it the same place but with greater depth for his character.
- It's the same thing I wrote about when I was playing Dragon Age: Origins. You can easily sabotage the game if you aren't willing to work along with the story you are offered. The game can only bend so much. We, as human beings, have much more capacity for flexibility. But even in the most constraining game, our flexibility can allow to find a story we want to tell.
- So be like Blue Kae. Find your story and build on that. Don't try to hammer one where it doesn't belong.
© 2010 Marty Runyon. All rights reserved.
- I apologize in advance for any rambling that's going on here. After Wednesday's pricing post and Friday's Allods Online news, I have a lot of thoughts going through my head. I'm hoping for coherency, but I'll settle for people just making it to the end without getting a headache.
- After the announcement of the twenty dollar bag, I logged into the game to check on a hunch I had. Sure enough, I have a level 7 quest called Almost For Free, the reward for which is a twenty-four slot bag. So gPotato wasn't kidding, you really can get cash shop items just by playing the game. I ran out the the adventuring area to try it out. I have yet to find a single quest item drop. Reading the horrible zone chat, people estimated that it took six hours of slaying quest mobs to get enough drops to finish the quest. That's when their logic set in. When staring down that awful of a grind, twenty dollars to save yourself six hours sounds like a balanced alternative. (For more coverage about Allods, make sure you're reading Keen's posts on the whole mess.)
- In the shower that night (because that's where I do all my best thinking), I came to an epiphany. Game companies aren't trying to price their products fairly. Their afraid that if they aim for the right price and hit to low, the community will balk at any attempt to raise those prices later. (Same thing with subscription fee. Just ask Mythic.) They would rather aim high, see if enough people bite, then lower the price if they do not. And I get that. From a business perspective, I really do understand.
- The problem with all this is that, when I like a game, I want to give the people making it money. I want to support them. That's why I dropped two hundred dollars on a lifetime subscription to Champions Online. That's why I buy printed editions of my favorite webcomics, even though their still available free online. My money is a vote of confidence in the creators that they will continue to do good work.
- But what I'm spending my money on has to make sense. Thus, the value proposition. If game companies don't treat me fairly, I don't want to support them at all. Even if the product if free otherwise, playing the game feels like supporting them with my continued presence.
- What I'm trying to say is there are two factors in the equation. On one hand, I'm going to evaluate games as price-conscious customer. But on the other hand, I am also a fan. I want to be excited about the game and I want to contribute to its success. Accurate pricing would let me do both.
© 2010 Marty Runyon. All rights reserved.
- One of the oldest discussions in the gaming community is the price of our games. The reason it keeps coming up (as it did recently on the Shut Up, We're Talking podcast) is that money shapes how we game in far reaching ways.
- One only has to look at Darren's ten dollar horse to see that cash shop business models effect people in extreme ways. When handled properly, cash shops give players the opportunity to support a game just to the extent that they care to. When handled poorly, players feel like their enjoyment of the game is predicated on how much money they dump into the game.
- Even more telling about the business of gaming comes from game companies charging for additional services. While originally such services were limited, there has been a veritable explosion of for-pay services that allow players to overcome in game limits. There are few games where you can't cough up cash for a sex change, name change, or server transfer. And while players may grumble about the price, they happily pay rather then being forced to reroll a character just because they've changed their mind about an earlier decision. Stargrace has moved her EQ2 characters so many times that I'm considering buying stock in Sony. Since these options are all outside of the standard game design, game companies would be stupid not to charge for additional conveniences.
- That can go too far, though. With any of these options, there is fear that developers will break their games with the intent to sell the pieces at a greater total cost. The skepticism over day one downloadable content is the latest eruption of gamers' distrust. When paid DLC shows up day-and-date along with the launch of the game, one has to wonder why it's not included on the disk in the first place. Dragon Age had the most egregious example with an NPC stationed in your base camp trying sell you an additional quest. He had to be encoded in the base game before launch in anticipation of the missing content.
- So while selling additional services has been accepted by the community, developers are still trying to figure out how to sell content without alienating their customers. Take the recent example of Cryptic Studios. Obviously not happy with the standard box price plus subscription fees, they've found other ways to sell parts of their game. Star Trek Online has two additional character races for sale. Champions Online allows you to buy additional costume pieces and minipets, as well extra character and costume slots. And most recently, they announced the Revelation content pack for the game. While this was intended to be a paid micro-expansion, their customers fury that the content was not being added for free caused Cryptic/Atari to back away from the plan. Customers might be willing to pay for non-essentials, but will balk at playing for content that is lacking in the base game. But would the same outcry occured if Cryptic/Atari burned the data on a disk and sold it in stores?
- Further compounding all of these questions comes from the standard fifteen dollar subscription fee required of most MMOs. There are wildly differing expectations for what should be provided for with the subscription. Fifteen dollars has been the standard for years. As long as World of Warcraft maintains that price, It is virtually impossible for any other company to buck the trend. But even Blizzard has been experimenting with additional revenue streams. Fifteen dollars may not mean the same thing to developers as it did five years ago, so microtransactions and paid services become ways of getting around that mental block.
- In the end, customers will always evaluate the value proposition of their games. Developers and publishers need to understand that if they do not make a clear and convincing case that the benefits of a purchase are equal to the cost, they are losing a customer. So while the company may see a ten dollar horse as a colorful way to avoid the monthly subscription problem, your customer sees it as a stupidly too expensive mount. As companies continue to experiment, some games are likely to fail based on their costs instead of their quality. And the debate will go ever on.
- Today is my three year blog anniversary, so thank you to everyone for reading, commenting, and encouraging me to continue. I can't wait to see where the next year takes us.
© 2010 Marty Runyon. All rights reserved.
- Were I any more of a narcissist, I would suspect that Damion Shubert's recent post at his excellent Zen of Design blog was aimed directly at me. It wasn't, of course. He's actually taking on Brian "Psychochild" Green's Trinity article which you really should read if you haven't. But no one minds if I stick my nose in, do they?
- The reason I want to dive back into this is because of Damion's contention that breaking up the trinity means homogenizing character classes. I call that a failure of imagination. But let's explain my personal feelings about the trinity before we try to fix it.
- I don't have trouble with healers, personally. My most recent WoW alt is a recently-respecked Holy Priest just so I can heal more effectively for random dungeons. And I really enjoyed playing a Monk during my Guild Wars days, back when the Prot Boon Healer was a decent build. My problem is that, of all gaming tropes, healing has the least fidelity to the fantasy genre. Or to any genre, really. How many movies have you seen where someone spends the entire time bandaging people up in the middle of a fight? How many books have you read where one person's entire job is to make holy light rain on people? Not very many, I'm sure.
- Healing is required in video games because developers have been doing it wrong for a long, long time.
This is where I go down the rabbit hole. If you can't follow me, I don't blame you. It's filthy down here.
- Damage should be a pressure mechanic in the game. It should be there to tell you that you're doing something wrong. If you're doing everything right and luck goes your way, your character should not be in jeopardy of dying. You should only take damage if you are going too slow or you make a mistake. That's why games like Mirror's Edge feel so weird. Your character is a bullet sponge. What should be happening is that your opponents attacks only hit if you're not doing what you should be.
- For all the crap that it was given, the morale system from Lord of the Rings Online actually fits better than health and healing. Having the characters' spirits bolstered during the battle makes sense. Having characters beat up and magically healed? Not so much. Of course, if you go back to the grandfather of RPGs, Dungeons & Dragons, hit points were about more than just how much punishment your character takes before they die. But healing was also not something the cleric spent every turn focused on. They were there to save your ass when something went very wrong, not because you were expected to expend five times your total hit points every battle.
- All that said, it's safe to say now that World of Warcraft has made the entire argument moot with its Dungeon Finder. As Darren from Common Sense Gamer (Welcome back! Now start podcasting again!) says, Blizzard has changed the MMO genre again. The trinity works when it's not getting in the way of grouping. By taking all of the friction of the system, grouping is fun and you can toss out all of my complaints and suggestions. I'm not disappointed about that. The beauty of game development (and MMO development in particular) is that there are so many ways to tackle a problem. This is why I love the genre so much. There is so much innovation still going on. It's just very easier to get jaded and forget how much fun there is to be had.
© 2010 Marty Runyon. All rights reserved.
