Author Archives: Asmiroth

EA Financials and the Future

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As I quickly mentioned in the last post, EA’s stock price has dropped 50% in the past year, though most drastically since TOR’s launch period.  The total value lost is around 2 billion dollars.

The world 2nd largest gaming company (Activision being #1) lost half it’s value by hedging it’s bet on a game that was to compete with WoW and by all accounts has lost 90% of its playerbase in 6 months.  I guess they are praying that Madden and Battlefield can re-supply the coffers.  As an investor though, you really have to be wondering if the people leading the company are the ones that should be.

Let’s look at a couple misteps from EA over the years.  First and most obviously, is their inability to market any MMO.  They bought UO a few years after it’s prime, killed 3 expansion packs and have since left it alone.  The other ones that they’ve launched and failed are:

  • Motor City online
  • Earth and Beyond
  • Sims Online
  • Tiger Woods online
  • Warhammer Online
  • Star Wars Old Republic

I wouldn’t actually call any of their games real large successes but perhaps the Battlefield Heroes F2P game is the closest.  Even their Origin service has had issues.  First, they removed their games from Steam for no explained reason.  Then they launched a service that was always on, yet failed to connect.  Then they banned players who played storebought games through their service.  Then they simply had foot in mouth disease – lately the idea that Steam discounts are a bad idea while EA is simultaneously selling their games at 50% off.

Many of their new IPs have failed, for various reasons and those that have succeeded have been on a yearly pillage for some time now.   FIFA, NHL, Madden, Battlefield are all games with mediocre if barely noticeable improvements sold as a new game every year.  Any time there’s a small or medium company that makes decent games, EA will buy them up and turn them into a corporate beast.  BioWare is certainly the most prominent recent example where their quality games have been diluted to all new lows.

This coming from the company that used to send out amazing quality games, various IPs and always had people talking about them in a positive light.  10 years ago you’d be hard pressed to find someone who had something bad to say about EA.   Today’s it’s the complete opposite and investors have to be scratching their heads as to why that is.

What turn did EA take along the path that made the gamer base turn against them?  Was it a single step, did they take risks where inappropriate (Dante’s Inferno anyone?!), did they simply absorb the smaller companies and change the spirit of those games?  Is it possible for EA to turn the boat, the giant boat, so that they get back to their gaming roots and start giving us the quality games we know they are capable of producing?

As a gamer, you have to really worry when the #2 company loses half it’s value and is unable to turn out quality anymore.  That slope is getting slippery.

Did You Really Buy It?

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In a move that it sure to astound every gamer on the planet, Blizzard has decided to no longer honor your digital purchases for the first 72 hours.  Basically, you buy it and get to play the free-to-play version for up to 3 days.  I am pretty sure this amounts to fraud in some countries.

The irony of it all is that Blizzard (more specifically Activision) makes more money per day now on the RMAH than on box sales, so they can technically crap all over their playerbase as long as people are paying real cash for items.  And they get to take 15% off the top, twice.

Well, this just put Blizzard on my do-not-buy list.  Amazing that EA and Activision have managed to burn their bridges so effectively and rapidly.

On a side note, EA’s stock price has dropped 50% in the last year, more specifically since TOR’s launch.  A topic to expand on another post.

Fishing – The Marker of a Good MMO

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I started playing MMOs when UO launched.  It had fishing and it was an extremely basic version of the activity at first – basically fish and junk.  A while later they put in what I consider the most expansive fishing mini-game of all time – treasure chests.

I spent hours sailing across the sea fishing up all sorts of things.  Treasures chests, sea serpents, water elementals and finding more treasure maps.  I made a treasure hunter character just for this activity and it was awesome.  It was hard mind you, you could easily die when you dug up a level 5 chest but from start to finish, fishing was one of the main reasons I played UO for so long.

EQ had fishing but it was (and is?) still rather basic.  Pole, bait, find a lake each with different fish with different things to do.  I maxed it without question and still had fun filling in the dead spots waiting for the damn boats.

WoW had fishing as well and at first it was even simpler than EQs system.  It then added fishing pools, special fish, neat quests and amazing food.  Now we have pets.  I think I would put it as #2 in terms of fishing mini games for what I’ve played at least.

Rift recently (patch 1.7) put in fishing and after about 8 hours you can max what you need to.  There’s the inherent achievement/artifact mini game that comes along with it but fishing as a whole is a simple affair.  Perhaps they’ll put in some more stuff for people to do with it but I am finding myself fascinated with fishing once again.

It’s clear to me that I can’t stick with a game unless it has fishing and I think it’s one of those systems that shows that the rest of the game is solid enough for the devs to build something that’s nearly 100% flavor.  How well balanced does your game have to be before you have the cycles necessary to devote to such a skill set?

I wonder how many other MMOs that are trying to enter (or establish themselves) into the massive pool of games will take the effort to put in time wasters like fishing.  MMOs need time wasters with personal flavor.  Games without them are simply destined for niche markets.

Adventure RPGs, Where Are They Now?

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I’m in the middle of a Quest for Glory marathon – well slow-a-thon I think – and recently finished the 3rd game, arguably the weakest of the 5.  This series was the starting point for adventure RPGs and since then, we really haven’t see any strong outings.  Action RPGs are all over the place, were combat takes massive precedence over story.  At least recently, with Dragon Age 2 and Mass Effect 3 as good examples.  Where are the adventure games though?  The thrill of using your mind to solve something rather than your twitch muscles just seems like a lost art.

Where do I have to look now?  I can only find minor outings on mobile devices but a large game?  The last adventure game I can remember is Mist!  The main issue with adventure games is that there is typically only 1 solution to a given problem and that makes games have only 1 playthrough at best.  Heavy Rain sure did try to change this and had some moderate success but it felt more like a choose-your-adventure game rather than a true adventure.

I’d love to have a game with that Indiana Jones combination of brains and brawn once again.  Puzzles that have various solutions based not only on the tools available but on the skills you have.  If you’re a gunslinger, perhaps you can shoot the lights out in the room but if you’re an acrobat, you can sneak behind everyone instead.  And having your success based on a skill check too, with a failure bringing you back down to the common thread outcome – a fistfight.

I wonder who will take a stab at this niche in gaming that just isn’t seeing the love it deserves.

TOR Math

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Just a quicky. Let’s say that the TOR server merges are indicative of player population.  Let’s also say that at the peak, there were 1.7 million subscribers as EA/BW touted.

1.7 million over 211 servers = 8056 players per server

Now let’s use that number and go back to the current amount of servers, 23.

23 servers with 8056 players = 185,300.

A 90% drop in subscribers in under 6 months.  I am crossing my fingers that these numbers are wrong and that somehow BW has been able to boost those servers so that they can handle many more concurrent players.  Like 5 times more players.  Otherwise… holy jeez are we about to see one of the largest implosions in the history of online gaming.

Back Into the Rift

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I logged back into Rift last night and found my 4 characters just as I had left them.  Max Cleric and Warrior, mid range Mage and a started Rogue.   I hadn’t logged in for about 3 months and most of the characters had at least 1 soul build that was refunded.  This puts me in an interesting spot – the massive skill choices.

Most MMO games put you down a single path and you’re pretty much stuck in it until the game retires or you spend hours/days respecing to another role.  I don’t consider WoW’s 4 new skill talent trees as choice.  EvE has choice.  UO has choice.  Anyhoot, back to Rift.  With 66 points to spend across 8 trees, you have about 20 spots to put points each and 25 skills to unlock each.  You’re looking at hundreds of options per class, which to my knowledge, isn’t replicated in any other non-sandbox game.

I spent nearly 2 hours just fooling around, trying out new builds, reading about it and it got me thinking.  As high a the wall is to enter with a good build, you really have a lot of mid-range options for each class.  Sure, you’re going to find the super cleric build for solo work but you’re also able to find a variant that will work in 95% of the cases.  This is something that I miss from my games, the value of interesting and practical choices and a barrier of skill rather than builds.

Now the obvious argument here is that there are no baseline skills for classes and that will hundreds of options, casual players won’t be able to make heads or tails.  Trion has a nifty template system for players to get into the groove for advanced builds and it’s rather straightforward.  The templates are not optimal, in fact I would say they are middle of the pack but in their simplicity, you have access to all the skills you need to succeed.  If your class can perform “x role” then there’s a template that will give you the skills to do that and playing that template will teach you the actual role through the limited skills.  In that I mean that you won’t get a healing template with lots of DPS skill.  If you want that hybrid role, you have to make it yourself once you understand the core mechanics.

I plan on spending the majority of my time with my mage leveling up and trying different combinations of skills.  I made it there with a Necro pet but as I play I realize I can deal more damage and still heal with some other skills.  Tinkering is so much fun in Rift and I realize now how much I missed it.

Speak Up

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Found this on Girl vs MMO and it’s based on a current topic of how women are treated on the internet.  ‘Tis true that there are issues and more so that people tend to ignore it or jump on the bandwagon. The GIFT theory stands.  People as a whole need to stand up a bit more.

Back Into the Fray

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I have an ever insatiable itch to scratch when it comes to gaming.  It is my way of decompressing.  Well, next to hockey, working out, golf and family time that is.  Finishing the day with a game has just been a part of my routine for so long, it feels weird not to have it.

As I mentioned a few times now, Diablo 3 is no longer my back scratcher.  In fact, I’ve gone down quite a few paths that temporarily filled that hole.  TOR (which I might go back to in the fall), Grimrock (which is amazing and worth the price), Quest for Glory Anthology (I still get some sessions in, lots of fun) and D3 (just…disappointing).  Rift has always been on my map and I played it on and off for the first year.  I had unsubbed when I saw a good run of games coming down the pipe.

Time has come to jump back in!  On Greybriar on the Guardian side with the typical Asmiroth and alternate names if you want to give it a shot.  I am really looking forward to the expansion and getting ready for patch 1.9 with some cool new features.  I praise Trion for their ability to provide quality content at a very good pace so I might as well put my money where my mouth is.

I honestly think that they will be the gold standard for MMOs once MoP comes out and underwhelms the masses.  The kicker is that because of the D3/WoW 1 year deal, the sub numbers will be static but the actual servers will start merging in the fall.  Fingers crossed that when that happens, Blizzard can get back to making quality games for gamers rather than games for profit.  Trion has that part down solid.

Blizzard Design Philosophy

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When WoW first came out, it was designed mostly by hardcore EQ players.  There was a system-first mentality to the game where the player had to find their spot within the system.  This did make it hard to compete and had optimum builds but the system, once understood, was extremely solid and easy to tweak.

A lot of lessons were learned in Vanilla and Burning Crusade got rid of a lot of the stuff that didn’t work and built on some interesting ideas – factions, keys and varied combat mechanics.  A lot of people will say that BC was the high point of WoW and though I wasn’t able to fully participate in all of it, I agree with a lot of it.  Lich King basically took the BC model and opened it up to the masses but at the same time, they changed their dev team during development and started making very weird changes to the core mechanics.  No one disagrees that more accessible content is bad but the scaling of things was all wrong.  Armor Penetration was a god stat, Haste was a god stat and people were breaking the system because of incredibly poor design decisions.  The ICC debuff on tanks is a prime example of bad design.

Cataclysm kept going down this path of poor design – reactive design really.  A game with 10 million people playing cannot be reactively designed, it’s a recipe for failure.  You need core metrics and benchmarks for given points.  You can’t just put things in the game and then 2 months later realize that everyone is well beyond what you thought they could do.  You gave them the tools to do it!

Get players back into the game design process.  Real gamers, the ones who run through all the raid content in a day or 2 and track how they are playing.  Use that as the top level of your curve.

To finish, here’s a prime example of my issues with Blizzard over the past few years.  This is why I uninstalled Diablo 3 and got a refund.  The core issue is that Life Steal needs about 120,000 DPS to be on par with Life on Hit in Inferno and the design decision behind that.  Taken from a Reddit AMA.

mkautzm: This is fine and all but this line: “I think Life Steal will come into it’s own in the future, as it scales exceptionally well with gear – if a few months from now people still aren’t using Life Steal, we’ll probably make changes.” This makes me very nervous.

How difficult is it to put these numbers on paper and simply figure out with math when a stat will be ‘worth it’, when it will be ‘good’ and when it will be ‘broken’. The answer is that it’s not hard. How can you design the system for a game like D3 and not at least have a target in mind. something like “At this difficulty with this expected gear, we want players to steal up to X%/Y HP as a function of DPS Health/Z Health per second/shot/spell.” I understand that picking such a number can be pretty difficult but even that can be derived based on what you want the function of life steal to be.

See, it’s things like this that make me incredibly nervous. If your approach to balance and system design is, “Well, lets see if the stat is attractive to players and then nerf/buff based on that”, something is seriously broken in the decision-making phase of ‘making the numbers work’.

It’s phenomenally frustrating to see the developers in charge of the systems of game like this literally say, “If it’s not attractive, we’ll buff it”. No! That’s not how balance works. You should be able to tell me the value of life steal at 30k, at 60k at 120k DPS. You should be able to tell me what exactly those breakpoints you mentioned are and Youshould have already planned their existence, and their means. You should be able to look at Lifesteal and point to a number and say, “Here! This is when Lifesteal becomes attractive”. You should be able to take it a step further and say, “If you have this much health, this much damage and this much lifesteal, More DPS actually becomes more attractive than Effective HP as a survivability stat under these conditions.”

This isn’t what’s happening and it makes me both frustrated and nervous to play a game that’s built under that design philosophy.

 Wyatt Cheng:  Let me clarify. When I say “if a few months from now people still aren’t using Life Steal” what I mean is that I think people will be using it. But I could be wrong. Humans being fallible and all that.

I believe people will be using Life Steal months from now without us having to make any changes. I’ve done the math, I’ve got some spreadsheets, I’ve tested with chars. At the same time I’m not so arrogant as to say “You will ALL be using it ’cause I mathed it out!”. I’ve been wrong many times before, I could be wrong on Life Steal too.