Monthly Archives: July 2012

SWTOR Going F2P

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It’s official!  Hell, I think I might play the game again once it goes live in November.

The features list is incredibly vague. Given that raids have a 1 week timeout already and there are only 3, wouldn’t the free people have an actual leg up on the paying people?  Limiting flashpoints is even weirder.  It’s like they want people to stop paying them.

So what’s left in the subscriber world?  The Secret World probably has 4-5 months before going F2P, the game seems built for it.  TERA has under a year.  RIFT’s expansion will decide it’s fate (currently has ~30 servers, over 1 year after launch).  WoW’s expansion will boost numbers to stupid levels due to pet battles but time will tell what the market says it should do.

So at the end of the day, there are only 2 MMOs that are subscriber based themeparks that I consider AAA.  WoW and RIFT.  Well near 50 games have come and gone.  Amazing.

Let's Talk About Raiding

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One of the best threads I have ever read about WoW can be found here.  It’s a very long thread, with reoccurring ideas but clearly a large divide between developer and player base.

The basic element in all of this is entitlement – or as alluded to later in the thread – prestige.  This e-peen mentality that “only I can” is so ridiculously absurd that I have great difficulty empathizing in any form.

I played WoW since launch.  I raided in every expansion and quit in every expansion.  Vanilla was impossible to organize and had huge walls (a-la EQ at the time).  TBC had gating, huge huge gating, that stopped many guilds from getting new players mid-expansion.  It was challenging, sure, but less than 1% of the entire population saw Sunwell at-level.  I’m not saying completed it, I’m saying stepped foot in it.  WotLK broke down gating and added challenge levels (heroic versions).  Raiding exploded, up to 10% of the player base completed all content at the hardest level.  We’re talking millions of more players seeing end game content than in the previous patch.   Cataclysm put in harsh raiding requirements and destroyed 25 man raids but they did bring in the LFR tool.  It went from 10% completing the content at hardest level to over 30% completing it at normal and 75% actually seeing the content in some form.

Now, I get the idea of prestige and that you want to be able to show that you did something more challenging than other people.  World firsts are for that.  I understand that the 5% debuff per month on last tier raiding annoys the uppers that have already done it as there’s no indication they didn’t have the buff outright.  I don’t understand why Blizz can’t just disable mount/title rewards for people that need the debuff to complete content at the hardest level.

I also don’t understand why this is such a big deal.  If you’re in guild ranked #130 in the world, who gives a flying heck.  Maybe the guild itself and those looking to move up.  That’s what, maybe 200 people out of 10,000,000?

It begs the question, who are you impressing exactly by beating content with the buff or without it?  If that list of people is under 100, then there’s no reason for Blizzard to look your way.  If it somehow impacts say, 5% of the playerbase, then ya, Blizzard should pay attention!

Tangentially, a SWTOR dev stated that the game failed because they listened to players.  I think this might be true in that the content from 1-50 was amazing. It was impossible to test end-game content (the stuff that’s broken) in beta as the game wipes happened every 2 weeks.  This meant that players that reached level 50 in beta were putting in 50+ hours a week to get there – not exactly who your target player base should be.  Anyhow, I think this is a great example of a company that had super success by listening to their players but did so at the wrong time and without the wrong tools.

When is it borrowing?

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An interesting article on IGN from a developer who has yet to be stolen from got me thinking.  Is there a point where you can say it’s stealing and not simply influence?

Watching Torchlight assets being stolen (along with misspelled file names) seems a rather clear event of theft.  Having Zynga use the same Tiny Tower play style and graphic styles for their Dream Heights game makes me think theft, but more so because Zynga is the one doing it and they’ve done it for every one of their games.  Uniloc suing Mojang for patent infringement though, that’s grey for me.  The entire patent industry is full of trolls just trying to find a big fish to make some cash and Uniloc has done it in the past.

I don’t think you can steal an idea but you can steal an implementation of that idea.  If I drew a black and white anomorphic mouse that talked, you bet Disney would be all over me.  If I drew him blue and pink, I’d be fine though.

In games, certainly there are limitations on the art assets of main characters.  Ezio in Assassin’s Creed and Marcus Phoenix are identifiable and likely people won’t try copying them.  But the secondary characters in both games are stereotypes that you’ll find in many others.  If I had 1000 characters in my game and took 200 of them from another – straight copy mind you – would that diminish the quality of my game?  At what point does it?

WoW made it’s success from being able to take existing systems and improve upon them.  They certainly innovated with the LFD/LFR tools and in-game flight but every other system clearly existing in another game first.  Rift further improved on those systems with dynamic content (to some degree) but it still used the same systems.  TOR is the same.

Back to the original story.  Borderlands is an amalgam of FPS and RPGs that has yet to be replicated.  I think it’s fair to say that it had success as 2 years later, the game still has a fairly solid multiplayer going on.  It’s surprising to me that no one has attempted this model again.  There is certainly some money to be made.

Perhaps there isn’t a defined line for theft and inspiration.  Maybe it’s up to the people to decide when it’s clear theft (Torchlight), system inspiration (Tiny Tower) and trolling (Mojang).  It sure does make for an interesting read.

Man of Steel

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Though Batman rules the box office right now, some new trailers are out for Man of Steel for us to take a look at.

There’s this thing about Batman and Superman, being two sides of the same coin.  Neither will kill, both have strong morals.  One is more brains than brawn, while the other is simply an unstoppable force.  Where they differ is in their “normal” selves.

Quentin Tarantino got it right in Kill Bill – Superman is not the disguise, Clark Kent is.  Where the symbol of Superman is who he is, Batman actually has to don a cape and mask to get the point across.  The sense of purity, of greatness, of infallibility is what makes Superman a superhero.  Though his actions speak loudly, who he is as a person is what people aspire to be.  He is truly a symbol of all that is good.

Batman differs in that his “normal” persona is actually nicer than his caped version.  A multi-billionaire philanthropist, Bruce Wayne is himself a beacon of good.  Batman, as a persona, is a vigilante, skirting the law in order to provide justice to the whole.  There is a darkness in that aspect, one that humans can relate to much more easily than they can Superman.  I suppose that’s why one is an alien and one is human.

In my off-line time, I have discussed these points for near on 20 years now with friends on late nights.  Comics on the whole are simply a social examination of the times and that today’s reflection of Batman is so dark (Dark Knight after all) is quite fitting.  Where the recent Superman film failed was in it’s approach to overall story and setting.  I do hope that Man of Steel can find the right social resonance to not only make Superman a hero once again but to make him relevant as well.  We, as a people, need that symbol.

EA Stock

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I mentioned a while back that EA was taking a drumming in terms of stock value.  Today’s stock number puts it at a 50% loss since SWTOR came out (along with the Mass Effect 3 plateau in March).

Now two things to note.  First, I don’t want the coders and testers and grunts to lose their jobs.  They are making an honest effort at quality.  They just don’t have a say in what that quality is, the executives do.  It’s an unfortunate aspect of the business but it’s also what’s causing a huge proliferation of independent developers after their corporate burnout.

Second, I want EA to lose even more money.  I want investors to destroy EA and Activision  so that the “for profit, not gamers” mentality dies a fiery death.  I want the days of Interplay, BioWare (pre-EA), Blizzard (pre-AV), Sierra et al. to come back.  We aren’t far from there right now, thanks to mobile gaming and cheap laptops with Steam.

I am sick and tires of another WoW, of another Call of Duty, another Madden.  There are hundreds of them out there, all fighting for the same piece of the pie.  My wife never games until I showed her Puzzle Quest a few years back.  No one is fighting for her to buy their games or for the 40 year old with 2 kids and a mortgage.

The good games are still out there, but the bad ones, damn, they are stinking up the place.

What's Fun?

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As with all gamers, I play for fun.  If I end up getting paid to do it, all the better, but the entire point of gaming is fun.  The kicker is what each person determines as fun for themselves and how that paradigm somehow should apply to every other soul playing the game.  At the conceptual level, this makes sense and it’s how developers pitch their game ideas.  At the logical level it gets quite a bit more complicated and cliques form.  At the physical level, the actual game mechanics themselves, this is where you have vocal minorities.

For me, I’ve always been fascinated by puzzles.  When I was a kid, I would marvel at the 6 piece wooden ones I had lying around.  I played Perfection until I had a system going that was 75% wins.  Operation was another one.  I then moved on to the 500 and 2000 piece puzzles, finally into the 3D puzzles when they were the craze in the 90s.  When I was in post secondary, I played a puzzle game everyday (usually on the Shockwave site) in order to get my brain going.  I still do the puzzles in the paper when I take the bus to work.  My brain simply needs some sort of challenge.

When video games came around the challenge was, at the start, dexterity based.  You could be the smartest player in the world but you would still get wiped with Battletoards or Ghosts and Goblins.  PC games were better as they were bigger and the RPG was where I found my solace.  The Ultima series, Bard’s Tale, Stonekeep, Quest for Glory and all those games had me coming back for more.  I even gave a shot at MUDs when the first came out.

Nearly all of my fun was in single player games.  When UO came out, I jumped in with a friend and got hooked.  The challenge was daily – staying alive, boosting skills, making stuff,  building a house.  There was always something to do and I did most of it.  I sold plenty of characters and I think I’m still living on the cash I made back then.  Come to think of it, I don’t think I’ve paid out of pocket for any gaming since I was 20, but that’s another matter.

UO was a pain with PvP though and I moved onto EQ.  EQ was full of puzzles and challenges but the time requirement was just plain stupid.  Waiting hours to get any progress done was hard and when WoW came out, 90% of the EQ players moved.  WoW had challenges but you could solo them.  Group stuff for me has never really worked, other than the social aspect.  I can’t get 4 hours straight to sit through something.

Now, I’m really into the F2P and indie scene.  The advantages, other than price point, are that I can get a whole lot of stuff done, at my own pace and the pieces are bite sized.  Rift does this well too, WoW is horrible at it and MoP looks to continue that trend  – which is fine.  TSW is another pretty good example of puzzles in small sized chunks.

I get the most fun solving puzzles and completing challenges that I can either do piecemeal or complete in a small step.  A 12 step attunement process to play with friends is not on that list.  A dedicated time and place for 4 hours is simply not possible.  It’s sort of like if I told you to complete a 500 piece puzzle, you had 15 minutes or I would burn all the pieces. Some people like that and I get it.  I don’t.

Thankfully with the indie scene, there is a massive proliferation of games that suit my needs.  Grimrock, Limbo and Braid are super examples.  This isn’t to say the MMO side is done for me (or gamers as a whole) but in the big picture, I know what I like and I like me some puzzles.

Another Exec Leaves BioWare

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From Gamasutra.

Yet another casualty in the BW/SWTOR saga.  This time the main project lead for the entire game.  Even if he left on his own accord, this is essentially the CEO of SWOTR saying bye-bye.

For a game with so much potential and so much money thrown at it, I don’t understand how it simply is not doing what is necessary to get financial success.  I cannot believe that it took 6 months to make an LFG tool (which is amazing by the way).  I can’t believe that they still don’t have functioning ranked PvP (which every competitor has).

They hedged their bets that there would be enough people who wanted to play alts to keep the game afloat long term.  They did say 500K subs would be enough and apparently they are still above that number.  Why there are massive lay-offs and cries for Free to Play from the developer is beyond me, other than EA screaming they need the money back.

SWTOR was the last great hope for a new AAA themepark with a subscription model.  Rift seems to be still doing strong, TSW is surely going to go F2P in a few months and then Elder Scrolls will fail in amazing fashion.  The genre is done

Tipping Point?

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When a game’s forums are being bombarded with hacks and exploit concerns and the devs have been silent for over a week, what exactly does that say to the players?

I read a lot of news for gaming and Diablo 3 is always interesting.  The devs have been missing since June, where you’d see a dozen posts a day.  Now the main forums are a solid chunk about the various hacks, scams, cheats and dupes plaguing the game.

The kicker here is that Blizzard makes money off every sale and if there are more sales, then they make more money.  It doesn’t take a whole lot of imagination for people to think that Blizzard is either actively adding items to the AH system and helping botters get gear to sell.

As a gamer, that’s so ridiculously offensive it boggles the mind.  As an investor, it makes you wonder how slippery that slope is and how long you can ride it until it turns about.

Power Scaling

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This is in relation to the Power series I had a while back.  This particular post will deal with the relationship between challenge, power and time.

In most games, there is some level of challenge to reach a goal.  Beating a boss requires specific move set, typically a given set of power and a set amount of time.  Older games (and some new ones) ignore the power portion and just make you memorize patterns.  In those games, the challenge is 100% on the player’s end.

Newer games, specifically adventure games (MMOs included) give you power over time (gear, skills, levels) in order to defeat larger and larger challenges. WoW’s raids are initially very difficult but as time goes by, people get better gear and the challenge is gone.  Some bosses (in Vanilla WoW certainly) were simply impossible without given power levels or skills.  Today, the best of the best can beat a boss with little to no power while the rest of us need power upgrades to get to the same point.  Those are multi-dimensional challenges where the more power you gain over time, the less skill you actually need.  This is hard to balance and the expectations from the developers need to be clear.

Even in those games, the acquisition of power is typically linear.  Rarely does any one person get a massive (10% or more) increase in power in a single event.  This allows competition between players an no one person feeling like they absolutely must do something in particular to advance.  This avoids the brick-wall effect from older games (EQ, WoW Vanilla/BC, etc…)

Now, in single player games this is a bit different as you’re competing against yourself.  Devs can give you huge boosts (Ninja Gaiden, FF series) and you’re only looking at the mirror.  When a dev takes a single player game and adds a multiplayer component (Diablo 3), the competition and scaling factor goes out the window.  Those walls can be circumvented rather easily through mechanics external to the game (the auction house) and those single player brick walls become massive road blocks with a pay wall.

Diablo 3 Inferno mode is a great example of poor planning.  If you played without the Auction House, you could reach Act 1 with a couple dozen runs for gear in Hell mode.  Act 2 and Act 3/4 are completely impossible without the auction house or dozens of people farming for you.

The power increase from level 1 to level 60 is as thus:

  • DPS : 1 to 5000
  • Armor: 0 to 1500
  • Resists: 0 to 0

The power increase to do Act 1 Inferno

  • DPS: 10,000
  • Armor: 4000
  • Resists: 400

Act 2 and Act 3/4

  • DPS: 25,0000 – 35,0000
  • Armor: 6000-8000
  • Resists: 600-800

These are exponential increases in power where a single item can add 10% or even 50% increase in power.  This means that if players want to progress, they need those items in order to do so.  Farming is simply inefficient as there is a less than 1 in 10,000 chance for any given item to be an upgrade and you need 5-6 new ones in order to move through the acts.

Instead, you play the game for money then use that money to buy power.  Enter the RMAH, the exact tool to make real money off that process.

I am not trying to be cynical here since you can still acquire power through in-game means and just as much power as with cash.  The difference is in the speed of acquisition of power.  Real money you have, in-game money you don’t.  This also means that any content the developers have put in goes 100% out the window once someone has enough power to beat the content.  Which once you have enough cash, happens instantly.  There is no long-term game to be had.

It is an interesting example of social gaming, marketing and profiteering that happened here and I plan to revisit it again in a few months once a major content patch hits D3.

 

There Goes My Summer

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Steam Summer Sale has begun.

I’m going to be completely honest, 95% of the games on sale as worth much, much more than what they are being offered at and well worth the time to give a shot.  The Original XCOM is 2.50$.  If for some reason you haven’t played Skyrim, 40$.  Grimrock? 6$.

And get the Indie Bundles.  The games in those packages are amazing.