Monthly Archives: September 2014

Gaming Value

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Syp has an article in related to Collector Edition costs.  Syncaine has one related to FF14’s long term subscriber benefits.  I know UO for the longest time had veteran rewards.  And with all this talk about F2P, one has to wonder how much value you’re actually getting for your money.  And not just in the MMO space.

Value per hour

Let’s not kid ourselves.  Gaming is a very cheap hobby, assuming you have the console/PC to run it.  Let’s say you don’t though.  A console is $500 with enough controllers and cables and crap, then $15 a month for multiplayer.  A PC is about $1500.  Both get you a solid 5 years before needing replacement if you game heavily.  So let’s say it costs about $280 a year for a console and $300 for a PC (closer than you thought I bet!).  That’s less than a dollar a day.

Games run $60.  People play about 22 minute a day, 22 hours a week, for a core gamer.  Games run all over the place in terms of completion time.  Single player games are around 8 hours, RPGs run 20+, multiplayer is all over the place so let’s guess at 100 and MMOs are even larger so let’s say 200 (3 months @ 22 hours) – but they also cost ~$15 a month in subscriptions.

So a singe player game is $7.5/h, RPG is $3/h, multiplayer is $0.6/h and MMOs are $0.3/h for F2P and $0.5/h for a 3 month subscription.  That’s pretty cheap if you think about it.

Value per event

Single player events are contained – you finish the game and you’re done.  Only a few have replay value and the number of people who just complete a game are below the 25% mark.  Multiplayer games are different, each session can be a new event.  You can join a tournament.  You could be grinding like a maniac, and I consider that a single event.  MMOs are quite a bit different.  Sandboxes make their own events, though they do have patches.  Burn Jita is an event that has nothing to do with the developer.  And the value of a sandbox event is typically higher due to the player’s sense of involvement – mind you they are more spread out.  I mean, you hear about a capital ship battle once every 3-6 months.

Themeparks have a set number of events (or rides I guess), usually dictated by the patch/expansion cycle.  I will take an example that is not WoW, but instead a patch cycle of 3 months of content, 18 months for expansions.  So launch, patch, patch, patch, patch, patch, expansion.  Now, expansions shouldn’t ever cost more than half of a launch price – so $30.  95% of the content is already there and the development has been fairly well subsidized by your previous payments.  It’s not a new game, it’s a big DLC.  The patches, content patches mind you, should as a whole equal half the content of an expansion pack.   By that I mean, content patches should have new zones, new events, new items, new systems, etc…What an expansion provides is a vertical progress (new levels) and a LARGE package of content (zones, events, etc…)

Value for extra content

And that’s just baseline content.  The original CE issue is that the prices are all over the place.  Early access, beta access, a pinky ring, some scarf that no one can see.  All of that junk makes no sense to me.  But hey, people still believe buying lottery tickets is a smart move.  A CE should have actual value.  Physical items (like coins, statues, maps, books), digital non-game items (soundtracks, art), digital in-game items (mounts, re-usable dyes, titles, costumes).  Why would you ever pay for $30 more for an item that has 2 hours of use (such as a ring that grants extra experience for 10 levels).

Player value

And this gets me to my final point, you the player.  You pump in quarters to the machine and get to play.  The developer gets money.  You are content for other players (certainly in F2P games).  The deal can be broken at any time and the reason to keep paying is a personal/social one.  FF14 (and a few others) have tweaked that a bit.  Play for X amount of time and get this bonus item (a mount, a trophy, etc…).  Or if you are a subscriber, get a significant discount on future items, including expansions.  I mean, you’ve subsidized the game this far, why keep paying?  Certainly in this age of instant themeparks, if you can get 3 months out and there’s no new events, why keep paying (outside of social circles).  You can just hop into another themepark and drop 3 months of cash and cycle through.  Games that treat you with respect as a client earn more business in the real world.  It’s about time the virtual one caught up.

Skill vs Time – A Visual Aid

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After reading Isey’s post on How to Lose an MMO Gamer in 10 Ways, and after pondering a bit more my previous post on Wildstar, I decided to draw out what I think is one of the larger hurdles for games to succeed – at least on a “massive” scale.  And that’s player skill.

Good game design is a series of meaningful choices.  I don’t think there’s any debate on that.  Where I think the kink in that comes from is in the ability for a person to have a an actual choice and appreciate the results (i.e. the ability to apply a skill and learn a new one).  I’ll go back in time a bit to vanilla Naxx and Heigan the Unclean.  This is the famous “avoid the fire spouts and you can solo me” boss – a dance really.  This was a massive twist in the traditional RPG space, where you just stood there pressing buttons.  Now you actually had to pay attention to the play space and move.  You couldn’t just absorb the damage.  I do know that many guilds at the time used it as a triage for recruits (combined with Thaddius) and it formed a massive skill wall for it’s day.   You either performed it perfectly, or you died.  That model, tried with a slight twist in BC, got the Ol’ Yeller treatment.  For good reason too, it wasn’t a meaningful choice and other than memorization and “no keyboard turners” there was little skill exploited.  WoW since then (with a blip in Cataclysm that they want to forget) has been more and more accessible at the lower end, with harder content for those who want the option.

To me, player progress is important.  Not only improvement itself but the opportunity for improvement and the evidence of improvement.  Huge spikes in difficulty is bad.  Difficult just to be difficult is bad.  No difficulty is bad.  A gradual increase in difficulty, where your progress is both evident and rewarded is the optimal solution.

On to the visual aid I promised!

skillvstime

What I did here was map the player skill required to complete tasks, assuming a time investment.  The skill portion is relative between games, where EvE is certainly the most challenging.  The remaining themeparks are ranked in difficulty, based on my play.  Over each in particular now.

EvE

Everyone has seen the EvE difficulty curve.  The game is rather simple to start, assuming you stay in high-sec and follow the themepark crumbs.  Try to move off that path, either through null-sec or mastering a trade and boom, welcome to excel online.  If you make the transition, you’re gold.  If you don’t, then you’re dead.  EvE has been able to succeed with a supremely polished game after the transition.

Wildstar

No game starts off harder than Wildstar.  Then you start dungeons and the difficulty starts to climb.  Reach max level and the attunement begins, with a massive climb in difficulty. There’s no help to transition between the stages, the difficult is very binary (you die in 1 shot or you take no damage) and the climb at the end is like no other themepark.

FF14

A game with a very gradual increase in difficulty due to skill unlocks being limited and the presence of force grouping at an early stage to progress on the solo train.  You learn to tank, heal, pull, DPS, stun, craft… everything.  And the change at max level is more along the lines of perfecting skills you’ve already acquired.  It’s a very good experience.

ESO

This one is a little odd, in that challenge as you level has no training and very little feedback but the skill level required is pretty low.  Given that there are actual “bad choices” the game design allows you to have a couple and still succeed.  If you make good decisions, then it’s like cutting Jell-O.  That said, at launch the game had a veteran system at level 50 that was significantly harder than the first portion of the game and accounted for 60% of the content.  Bad choices meant you were going to do.  Good choices gave you a 25% chance to die.  That system was drastically changed after 3 months to a more similar difficulty curve.

WoW

I could have drawn 1 line per expansion here but the power curve line is pretty close to this.  Today’s experience from 1 to 89.9 is a joke.  I leveled a Monk to 90 in a week and only died from falling damage.  Dungeons & LFR can be AFKed by 20% of the group and you’re still going to win.  Normal raids have some challenge but the real difficulty is in the heroic raids.  And not heroic raids because of the mechanics but because of the stats the players have on the content.  Remember that power curve line?  The difference in power between expansion launch and 2 months is nearly 25%.  People were clearing MoP raids in Cataclysm raid gear.

Others

I could have added other games, like LoTRO, STO, DCUO, Rift, Neverwinter and DDO where I’ve done the high level stuff.  They are all pretty similar to WoW, with the final spike happening earlier.  I can’t think of one that plateaus before max level – though TSW might be a candidate as it doesn’t really have a max level, just limited action sets.

Summary

I think the comparison between all the games is important for discussion.  Certainly each has their own variables but of you were to look at where players quit the game, I’d bet dollars to donuts it’s where you see a shift in the curve (assuming they get past a trial phase).  Difficulty is good.  Shifts in difficulty must be moderate.  The benefit of that difficulty increase must be evident.  All of the games listed have made changes since launch to their curves (yes, even EvE) except for Wildstar – but it’s also the youngest.  Here’s hoping they get the hint.

#Wildstar – 3 Months In

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I want to talk about the negativity around Wildstar – which I guess is sort of a Streisand effect…

First off, Massively isn’t a gaming news site.  It’s an editorial/opinion/re-posting web service.  It’s one of the more prominent sites but to claim that it holds any journalistic merit, well you couldn’t be much further.  What it does, it does well – in that it generates buzz/comments.  So when you read an article stating that Wildstar isn’t doing well, take it with a grain of salt.  It should hold as much weight as when BoK posts something similar.

So let’s start with the facts.

Some Wildstar servers are ghost towns.  As with any MMO, once you can’t find anyone to play with, you stop playing, so this is really just like watching water leave a drain.  To combat this, Carbine will be implementing Megaservers (like every other MMO in the past 4 years – including WoW).

The game has a much harder difficulty curve than any other themepark.  The wall is early and it is high and it gets bigger over time.  I won’t say the game is complex, outside of coordinating interrupts, but it is very unforgiving of mistakes.  This by nature reduces your potential client base.  There are no planned changes for this outside of a “learner” dungeon in the next patch.  More tools to teach without changing the core system.

Itemization/Runes/Power distribution is not aligned.  Right now, the melee classes get a larger benefit from stats than ranged players, which is causing them to have ~50% more damage output.  They just scale like crazy.  Rune slots are also an issue, where “optimal” runes are 2-3x better than a normal rune.  What this means today is that there is little choice at max level, and making anything but the correct choice is a massive penalty. Both of these issues are going to be addressed by Carbine – the first part by normalizing power and stat gains and the latter by spreading out runes across more slots.

The next part is my observation.

The end game is forked into two parts – the solo side of dailies (that each take 30+ days to cap), customization (armor and housing) and farming/crafting and the group side of adventures/dungeons/raids.  Elder Gems are the max level currency and right now, it only has a use for the latter group.  Solo folk need more content and the next patch has some more dailies.  However the game needs more types – shiphand missions are an easy target – and a better use for Elder Gems.  Carbine has stated they are working on this but there are no timelines.

The group folk have a completely different problem, in two parts.  First is the attunement wall.  Unless you already have a raiding guild who wants to pull you through content, you’re not going to get through it – in particular because of the world raid bosses.  It took WoW multiple content patches to create this attunement wall (BWL and BT come to mind) and caused enough problems that the entire model was scrapped.  That Wildstar implemented this wall at launch…very odd choice.  Carbine is making changes to reduce the requirements of attunement but without Megaservers or an existing raid group, people are still out of luck.  The second part is the reward structure around group play, in that it’s “gold or bust”.  Given the above mentioned difficulty, and the fact that adventures/dungeons provide a significant boost in rewards if you achieve a gold medal, any failure is met with a group disband.  This causes an “elite” culture and provides absolutely zero learning curve for players.  Carbine has made some changes to the rewards structure in that now even a bronze gives something but there is still too large a gap between bronze and gold. (To compare, Gold runs in Wildstar are akin to Gold Challenge runs in WoW).

The good news is that I’m still playing and having fun.  It isn’t a daily thing mind you, but every couple days I log on and run a few things.  The group thing is an issue for my playstyle.

Is Wildstar in a rough spot?  Certainly.  At the very least, it will continue to hemorrhage players until they can implement Megaservers. There should be no larger priority.  Aside from that, there are plenty of balance changes on the way to address some of the concerns above – and soon too.  As for the group play at max level, that is going to require more time and more thought.  Had Megaservers been there at the start, perhaps the attunement issue would be smaller as there would be a larger player base to get through it.  My opinion (since beta) is that focusing solely on 20/40 person raids is a mistake.  Time will tell if Carbine feels the same way.

Your Voice Matters

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I have a personal rule in my line of work, if no one says anything, then it’s approved.  I tried forcing people to approve things and nothing moved, so now everything has a disclaimer.

You have x days to provide comments, otherwise you’re indicating approval for the content.

It took 2 or 3 passes before people realized I wasn’t messing around and now feedback is quite quick.  It’s also something I use when talking to friends and politics comes up.  “Did you vote?  No?  Then shut up.”

The link to gaming, and actually more like social studies, is as follows.  A lack of action is an approval of another action.  In much simpler terms, if you’re not calling an asshat out, then you’re ok with their actions.  If you’re not /reporting someone for clear harassment, then you’re supporting them.

Now, people can make all sorts of excuses around that and that’s all they are, excuses.  If you aren’t standing up for something, then you’re standing up for nothing.  Things don’t change by just sitting there and looking at them.  They need action, they need people.

Greifer – someone who through their actions, costs you more than they pay into the system

I could care LESS about what people think about the UO Trammel split.  It was the solution, at the time, that was meant to stop greifing.  There was such a furor on the forums and in-game, people were simply just abandoning completely that Origin needed to make a drastic change.  You can blame the “carebears” if you want but the cause was always the greifers.  The solution… we can talk about that another time.

I won’t be linking to any hashtags or websites about the garbage going on today.  It’s really not that complicated.  There are a bunch of people who would rather stroke themselves and put everyone else down rather than share the ball.  I get that.  We used to call them schoolyard bullies.  They all ended up pumping gas for a living.

The gaming industry is undergoing a revolution.  The old days of pumping out shareware crap at Radio Shack are long gone.  The old guard of online games has long since retired or morphed into today’s MMO/online presence.  Today’s gaming must be inclusive.  It’s beyond financially irresponsible to ignore 50% of your market – it’s ignorant.  Gaming is a business, it needs to make money.  Focusing solely on greifers as your target audience is stupid.  XBOX One even has a cesspool of players with low score to avoid this problem.  If you want to be an asshole, that’s fine.  Go circle jerk with the rest and leave us alone.

There is a massive storm of ideas and mandates going on today.  It will not get better in the short term.  This is what happens when you want a revolution, people will get hurt, business will suffer and after what seems like an eternity, the industry will come out stronger.

But the only way this thing will change is if you use your voice, because every single one matters.

#Wildstar – Megaservers

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Quick post as I’ve been out away from a computer (heck, an internet connection) for a while now. Seems while I was gone Wildstar announced that Megaservers were coming to the game.

If you’ve played GW2, then you know what these are.  I’ve always found it odd that NCSoft didn’t apply that tech to Wildstar at the start…Anyhoo.  Megaservers are going to provide 2 main server rules, PvE and PvP.  The RP stuff is going bye-bye.  This is similar to what SWTOR did, DCUO too.  WoW still has front end servers when picking a place to play but the backend has nearly every single server tied to another (or more) through “merging”.  It just doesn’t make sense to have actual server anymore as there’s no real win to be had.

The only kink I see here is the naming conflicts.  There are still plenty of players and servers and for the love of poop, I am not giving up Asmiroth to anyone.  I liked WoW’s implementation (with server name as last name) but I’m sure as the weeks go by and they test it out some we’ll see progress.

Overall, quite happy with the news.  And looking forward to 1.3 as well!