Dinosaurs on the Dancefloor

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Dancing Dinosaurs

A must-read if I do say so, Wired interviews Peter Moore.

When you take an industry vet and put them in the task of predicting the future, you’re never sure what you’re going to get.  Moore is an interesting gent though, seemingly always on the cusp of pushing something new forward.  He’s the primary reason for EA opting out of Steam and setting up Origin (a profit generator, if not the most efficient path) and has quite the interesting view of the market as whole.  Of note.

It’s going to be a while before we can say, alright, here’s a 15-gig client for free. Although we’re getting there with Star Wars, which is the first change, although that’s an MMO world in which we can micro-transact.
I still think we still have 18 million people who are very willing to buy our FIFA game each iteration, and then I don’t even know what the pass through rate of that game is from used game sales. Ultimately, we don’t get to play in any of that revenue. But I could ultimately put my hand out and say 25 million people right now have experienced FIFA 12. Without a shadow of a doubt.

No disrespect to Zynga, but you don’t want to be so focused on Facebook that you don’t see mobile coming. All of a sudden you’re one platform, you’re so reliant on one company.

“I just didn’t want to pay $15 a month. I felt kind of locked in. I love the game, but I’m locked in,” and for a lot of people 15 bucks a month is a lot of money. So when we looked at the data that was streaming out of it…. It was very clear to us that if we could knock down that initial barrier to entry that is price, that we could blow out the funnel and instead of dealing with several hundred thousand people on a regular basis we could get into millions.

If I said to you for $15 a month you have access to most of that which EA has created over its history and everything that’s new coming in, like a Netflix model coming in, I believe a lot of people would pay for that for 15 bucks.

Quite a few nuggets in that interview.  F2P isn’t a simple switch.  TOR folks left because they didn’t think it was worth 15$ a month (not that 15$ was too much, but that it didn’t justify the cost), an EA streaming service is an option and of course, taking a massive dig at Zynga’s inability to play the big game.

It’s a rare thing to get an honest interview from EA about anything.  Moore somehow manages to hold the corporate line while giving a solid opinion.

Imagine That

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One of my favorite things in Rift is Instant Adventures.  You can start these practically at level 10 and they throw you into random quests with a group of people, up to 40 I think.  Could be escorting someone, could be protecting a specific area, could be killing a boss, could just be random attacks.  The point is, that in a small timeframe (well under a minute) you can join a group of people and have fun.  You can continue to do this all the way to 50.  Probably all the way to 60 with the expansion pack around the corner.  Rift is certainly defined by the ease of grouping.

WoW this expansion re-introduced group quests, called them scenarios, only allows 3 players in one group and locked them to level 90 only players.  It takes about a minute to start one and to complete one can take 5 minutes like it can take 20.  Plus, if you slack for 30 seconds, you could kill everyone around you.  No /afk for you!

The metric for short adventures is the “fun” stick.  Do I have fun?  In Rift, the answer is yes.  Each is different and the people make it fun to boot.  In WoW, the answer is yes, for now.  While the Rift rewards are always relevant, the WoW rewards stop being relevant once you have dungeon/faction equipment.  Since scenarios are fixed stories, once you’ve run each a few times, you know exactly how they will work out the next time.  Small groups made of players from different servers doesn’t make for community either.  Mind you, the people who DO select scenarios in the first place are people who aren’t necessarily gear hunting but looking for something different.

I do wish they were available before level 90 though.  They are such a nice addition to the game but they are put in such a place that people have to make a conscious decision to partake in the fun.  Do you run dailies for 15 minutes?  Do you run a dungeon for 45?  Do you run a scenario that only rewards cash (and story) for 15 minutes?  Or Raid, or pets, or god knows what else.

I’ll keep giving them a shot.

Damned If You Do

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Are you considering changing the reputation system?  So many dailies are burning us down from the game.  Tabards back?

When we tried limits, folks said we were playing nanny.  When we tried nothing, folks said they didn’t have anything to do.

Blizzard has an interesting problem at hand.  This quote from Ghostcrawler, has a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” mentality to it and I can empathize to some degree.  When you have nearly 10 million clients, you can’t keep them all happy.  When you integrate disparate systems, you’re going to upset some people.

Excluding Lich King, most of WoW’s trajectory has been aligned with the more hardcore activity crowd.  Tangible goals and rewards.  This makes sense in terms of accomplishment and sense of place – makes a bit less sense from a financial perspective if you want to keep 10 million people playing.  The casuals clearly are the majority in games (even 80% of EvE players have never touched NullSec) and therefore subsidize the activities of the hardcore.  Blizzard’s challenge over the past few years was expanding on that casual market – which is has in terms of player ratios.  Keeping them around is a challenge though, especially when you have quality competition on the market (F2P for one).

So for years the hardcore have had the upper hand in terms of game direction.  This expansion is clearly not aimed at their efforts.  Kung-Fu panda and pets does not scream hardcore.  Yet in order to keep that group occupied, they integrated hardcore activities into casual content.  The best raiders have a “need” – real or artificial – to complete casual content in order to progress on the hardcore front.  A true shoe-on-the-other-foot issue if I’ve ever seen one.

Who do you please?  The casual market who is bringing in the dollars?  The hardcore market which consumes the most and gives you the highest visibility?  I mean, does anyone in their right mind care that the Will of the Emperor is a raid boss MORE than the fact that there are hundreds of pets to collect in-game?  The battlefront seems to have changed and you’re never going to please the masses.

The Failings of /Ignore

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This post brought to you by the musings of Azuriel.

Back in the day, you had 1, maybe 2 characters in an online game.  Worlds were relatively small.  You couldn’t name change at will.  There were process barriers that limited your ability to be a dink online.  If you had a bad rep in EQ, you never grouped again.  If you had a bad rep in UO, you were camped.

Today’s PvE (and some PvP) games have an /ignore ability that essentially blocks all communication between your character and another.  Rarely does this list work at the account level (I can’t think of one off the top of my head).  Really though, if a person is a dink with one mask, they will be a dink with another.

What are the limitations of ignore?

  • only works per character, not account
  • only stops chat
  • it’s personal, no social reprocussions
  • most systems allow name changes, invalidating the ignore

What can be done about it?

  • make ignore block the account.
  • make it so that after X amounts of ignore, you get put in a penalty box.  Limit the chat ability, trade ability, grouping ability
  • make it meta.  LoL has a tribunal for serial trolls.  This system should exist everywhere.
  • ignored players cannot group with you, unless manually done (no LFD, LFR, PvP stuff)

All of this is for the negative side.  We could put in some benefits to being nice in game.

  • You have enough distinct +1 scores, you get a higher rating in the queue (up to a certain cap).
  • At a certain rating, you get mailed costumes for social events.
  • Players at a certain rating can run in-game events with in-game resources (weddings, races, etc…)

The social aspect of gaming has had so many barriers broken down that society can’t manage itself.  While it’s great that I can group with a friend from server X (having only 1 server is another story) is great the problem is the butt-heads from that server are also around.

It’s 2012.  We can do better.  We should do better.

When Wrong Enough is Good Enough

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Storm Legion comes out soon (2 weeks!) and a common question that I see is how Trion is able to balance all the souls.  The answer is simple, they don’t.  Rift has quite a few quirky mechanics that beg to be balanced but aren’t.  It won’t ever be an e-sport or try to (*cough*WoW*cough*).  It won’t have heroic raids.  It doesn’t put an arbitrary line in the sand and say “only the best of the best can do this”.

WoW’s largest flaw is also its largest pull – the generic homogenization of everything.  The outliers who specialize, Rogues and Warlocks namely, are massively shunned by the gaming populace.  I remember reading a population breakdown and with 10 classes, both combined were under 5%.  The generic classes (Druids and Paladins) took over the largest chunk by far.  WoW took the design decision to balance everything and so doing, made everything taste like Vanilla.  WoW gives you two talent sets because that’s enough.  I could give you 6 others, they’d be the same as the first two.

Rift is like the Harry Potter Jelly Beans.  You really don’t know exactly what you’re going to get.  Might be great, might be earwax.  It’s the reason they give you 6 talent builds and a very easy way to swap between them.  I’ve played a Bard with pets.  I’ve done a ranged tank warrior.  I’ve done melee mage (and will formally in the expansion).  I’ve DPS healed (before Monks made it cool).

I love Lego.  So does my daughter.  You can pick and choose what you want to use to build what you want.  Rift almost gets that but being a themepark, comes as close as possible.  It’s the possibility of failure, of spectacular and gut wrenching mistakes that makes the success so much more tasty.  When you can’t fail, you can’t really succeed.

Level 90 – At Last the Beginning!

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WoW Vale of Blossoms

So late Friday I hit 90, about 2-3 quests into Townlong Steppes.  Odd name that, for a zone that really has next to relation to actually steppes.  Those are supposed to be large expanses of fields, instead I get giant hills, caves, trees, swamps.  Still, 2 quests in and I had already unlocked the Vale of Eternal Blossoms, which is the final super zone, with the new islands’ capital-ish cities – or as I like to call the zone, daily-quest hub central.

Since in the end, reaching level 90 is really the beginning of the expansion.  I think only 1-2 dailies opened up during my travels but once I hit the magic number, it’s like an explosion of blue quests.  I can raise a dragon, I can maintain a farm, I can fish, I can cook, I can kill insects, I can collect flowers…I can be a professional go-fer.

I took the time to try out the last 2 zones and get a feel for their stories.  So let’s sum up the entire adventure a bit, knowing that I’m missing the final end pieces to two zones.

Jade Forest – A decent introduction to the denizens of Pandaria, with temples and mountains and lakes.  Jinyu (advanced Murlocs) play prominently, as to the actual Pandas.  There’s no real progress in the zone, barring 1 quest that has you destroy a giant statue.  Looks great, plays awkward as it’s the first time you’re using the new questing mechanics.

Four Winds – Basically you’re an animal killer throughout.  The entire zone is one giant farm.  Other than the quests on the west end, bordering Dread Wastes, there’s nothing of note here.  But those quests are amazing.  Also, quite short.

Karasang Wilds – Hello Stranglethorn Vale v. 5!  You finally get to see a town build up in phases, which is cool.  You also free another spirit, the Crane.  That portion is WAY too fast.  Like 5 quests and bam.  I didn’t understand this zone.

Kun Lai Summit – (well, there’s a mini zone with 3 quests before this).  This is the meat and potatoes zone.  You get to meet everyone, help build up a bunch of towns, see temples, explore the lore.  A couple quests in, all of a sudden I’m sent to 7 different hubs to try my luck helping.  The story is great, if disperse.  You really get an understanding of the workings of the population here.  Plus, there’s a Yak Wash.  You unlock the Tiger spirit here (cool in concept, horrible in execution).  You also need to complete this zone to unlock the Vale.

Townlong Steppes – This is a giant battlefield between the Pandas, the Sha and the Mantid insects from the south.  I’m about ¾ of the way through now.  I have a great dislike for everything in this zone, from the story, to the mechanics to the flow.  You’re supposed to unlock the Ox here (I can see him).

Dread Wastes – This is the insect home and you play with a faction that’s trying to restore order to the chaos.  If you’ve seen Starship Troopers, you know what to expect from the bugs.  There’s a central hub for the faction and everything just seems to “gel” throughout.  Seeing the links to the other zones is good too but the best part is the story. There’s a lore reason for everything here, meaning you actually have a purpose for the quests.  Refreshing.

Vale of Eternal Blossoms – Other than a small section in the middle for daily quests, this is a lore and city zone.  The picture above shows me standing in the fields.  Everything looks great.  Sadly, there’s a disconnect between why you’re here and what you’re doing.  What is cool though, is the Lore.  I learned more about Pandaria in 20 minutes than I learned over the 30 hours of leveling.  Who are the Mogu, why there’s a giant turtle, who are the Hozen, the Grummles and all the others.

Here’s my crystal ball though.  The Dread Wastes are going to be the main lore driver for the rest of the expansion.  The Mogu could not be more generic and are massively overused.  The Mantid – just wow.

Payment Models

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There’s a lot of talk about payment models lately.  Syncaine clearly has a disdain for the model.  Tobold is taking a development perspective. Rohan sees a systematic divide.  Syp just wants to play without paying.

At the fundamental level, it takes money to run a service.  The actual cost of that is dependent on the technology, people and process and therefore varies greatly from game to game.  We can assume that it costs less to run Rift than it does EvE – for various reasons.  When a game company offers a “free” service, they still have to charge people for something.

Rohan’s breakdown of payment methods strikes a cord with me.  Not all F2P (or sub games) are set up the same way.  Each has a different gating model and revenue generating possibilities.  While WoW is a sub model, the sparkle-pony sale generated somewhere in the region of 30 million dollars.  In such a fashion, you can break down the service offerings for each game.

The debate is less about the payment models and more about the perceived cost/benefit of spending money.  Is 15$ spent on WoW worth more than 15$ spent on Rift?  What would 15$ get me in F2P-TOR?  As I’ve mentioned a few times now, TOR is offering KOTOR3 for free.  Anything to do with the MMO portion is set up behind a pay wall.  This makes sense as the economy is at risk if all of a sudden the barrier to entry is nil.  Someone mentioned that Slicing is a net positive in cash flow.  Imagine setting up 100 accounts to bot slicing.  It would cost you the PC power (minimal) and you’d have a cash generating machine with nothing to stop it.  D3 has this problem, in another sort, but the devs actually take a cut of the cash sales, so they secretly endorse it.

Let’s add a bit of contrast here.  I spend 15$ after a hockey game with the guys having a beer.  I play hockey 2-3 times a week.  I get a cup of coffee every day, well over 15$ a month.  There are plenty of activities that I do that cost way more than 15$ per month and in actual fact, other than my internet access fee, I don’t have a better deal available to me.

From a business perspective, piecing out content makes sense.  You can easily point out where the best bang for the buck is.  People buy a lot of monocles?  Build more.  No one is buying dungeons?  Build less.  What should be free and what should cost money?

From a dev perspective, this segregation of systems adds overall complexity.  You can longer integrate systems as you can’t assume that the player has access.  The XBOX360 launched with an optional hard drive, meaning devs couldn’t assume players could save content.  You need to have a solid understanding of your foundation material.  Anything built on that cannot be dependent on another built component.

From a player perspective, we’re in an age of options.  Being able to pay for the options you want and not for the others is simply the way things will work from now on.  This adds complexities, depending on the division.  What if your friends don’t have the same content you do?  What if the content is packaged in such a way that it isn’t attractive (pay per use model, gambling model)?

This is far from a simple issue, as most bloggers can attest to.  As long as the dev is making money to sustain operations and make some profit for improvements and the players are content, then you can have success.  In the end though, it’s the player’s money and they get to decide where to put it.

 

Up to Kun Lai

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WoW Sha of Anger

So I moved up into Kun Lai which as a different feeling to it compared to the rest.  Plenty of temples and kung fu mystery.  It also has a slightly different flow as you start off with 2-3 quests and then you get shot around the entire map, at your own pace.

Quite a few fun quests along the way too.  One had me shooting flaming barrels at enemies.  Another one had me riding a giant yeti to smash some monkeys.  Plus, lots of hot air balloons.  It’s sort of like a bunch of mini-stories that try to tell a larger story.

What is most interesting is that I’m no longer slaughtering animals left right and center.  Now it’s hozen (monkeys) and trolls.  Lots and lots of trolls.

I also found the black market.  This is a single NPC that runs an on-going auction for rare (ish) items.  Be it mounts, pets, gear or what have you.  People bid against each other and once the time is up, someone wins it.  This is a giant money sink.  Some of the items are BoE, which means it is in direct competition with the Auction House but the majority are BoP, which is a nice boost – especially for mounts.

Finally, I find the power increases quite funny.  The Monk has an insta-death skill, as long as you have more hit points than your target.  Through most of my travels, I’ve always had more hit points after the first hit, so fights were about 2 seconds long.  I hit a dip from 86-87 where enemies seemed to have a lot more.  I’m back above that curve now, sticking with over 210K hit points.  The lowest level raid boss, Razoregore, has 400K hit points.  I am easily killing enemies with 1 million hit points right now.  I think it’s fair to say the power curve is such that I could solo any raid up until Cataclysm now and probably a fair amount of Cataclysm to boot!

WoW and Rift Targets, Over Time

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Using the Casual Hardcore argument, let’s take a look at two PvE MMOs:  WoW and Rift.  They are in direct competition with each other as they are both fantasy, themepark, PvE-primary MMOs.  WoW certainly has the massive lead with close to 10x the population levels but also 6+ years of a head start.

WoW Rift Compare

WoW Vanilla was built with old EQ gamers in mind.  They wanted the hardcore activities with a bit of the casual stuff thrown in.  Raids and PvP (other than world PvP) weren’t even in the launch client.  It was ambitious but at the time, they provided the only casual friendly fantasy themepark.  I don’t think we’d call it casual by today’s standards mind you, but back then it was certainly true.  Anyone who remembers the consumables-dance and resist gear-shuffle can attest to this.  Vanilla saw the largest player growth in terms of percentages.

WoW TBC focused heavily on the hardcore playstyle and activity set.  The gating system, factions, lots of raids, outdoor and inside along with a steep learning curve made it that if you wanted any level of success, you needed to play the game their way.  It provided some casual aspects of dungeon running for rep and rewards but even that gate was fairly difficult to traverse.  TBC saw decent player growth.

WoW LK flipped that around.  There were certainly raids but they removed the gating system, added tabards, hundreds of faction items, daily quest explosions and most glaringly, the LFD tool.  Every hardcore item, except for PvE raids (which added a heroic difficulty) was given a casual system.  Even the stat system was simplified.  LK saw the final player growth and cap at 12 million subs.  The sub drop was massive when Blizzard took a year between the final patch and the next expansion though.

WoW Cataclysm again flipped the target.  There were some casual aspects in the levelling game (which prevented you from grouping most often) but once you hit level cap, there was near nothing to do.  Only a couple factions actually had reasonable dailies and casual rewards (Ram’haken for one).  The focus was on the hardcore crowd up until patch 4.3 and the LFR tool.  Before that tool launched, less than 1% of the playerbase had completed a heroic raid, less than 20% had completed an at-level raid.  Subs peaked on launch but dropped continually until MoP.  The last numbers had the game at a 25% loss from their peak in LK – even with the year sub option for D3.  Which starts expiring this week.

WoW Pandaria is a casual approach, once more – plenty of dailies, a very good levelling system, a low gate of entry for dungeons, factions all over and the pet battle system.  The hardcore players have to navigate through this casual playground to get to their stuff though, making for some mad hardcore players.  Let’s see how that turns out.  I personally predict another 2-3 million player drop from now until March (when the D3 offer expired).

Clearly, WoW has been all over the map.  From a centrist idea to the outsides and back in either says that the market has changed drastically every 2 years or Blizzard’s strategic direction team doesn’t look farther than 2 years down the road.

RIFT now.  Rift launched with a mixed approach to casual and hardcore players.  Plenty of dailies, lots of rewards (pets and collections), factions, rifts, LFD and zone quests helped the casual folks.  A consistent approach to raiding and dungeons that required attention helped the hardcore crowd, though noticeably less than the casuals.  We’re 11 patches in though, which is where WoW was at the end of Lich King.  Many casual options have been sent out now; fishing, instant adventures, personal raids, LFGuild tool, mentoring, free character transfers, wardrobes, pre-built characters.  Hardcores have a new PvP setup, a new raid every other patch with quality content.

The Storm Legion expansion pack is certainly aimed at the most casual crowd though with player housing, triple land mass, new towns, new collectables.  Hardcore players will get more raids and a stat increase but no real new systems.

Though Rift only has one expansion pack on the graph, the 11 content patches all fit into the same general quadrant.  This shows consistent strategic direction, though certainly this is over a smaller time frame.  Rift has fit nearly 5 year’s worth of WoW content into 18 months.  We’ll see how the game does in a few more months.

Casual Hardcores

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Oxymoronic?  Not really.  I’m distinguishing between activities and personalities here.  A casual activity is something you can complete in a relatively short period of time, say under 10 minutes, with minimal conscious effort.  Most games have daily quests and each of those typically encompasses a casual activity – even the group dailies.  A hardcore activity is something that takes a combination of time and effort, where dedication is key.  Running an old raid might not require a lot of time now but it does require thought on some parts.  Running a new raid is certainly a hardcore activity.  Competitive PvP is hardcore too.  Running an auction house business comes up.

When we get to personalities we have the casual player who’s in it for the distraction and time wasting (in a good way).  They might log in here and there, no real big deal if they miss a few days.  Each session is different from the last, with no real disappointment if they didn’t reach their goal.  They play for fun, which is measured by the journey, not the goal.  Hardcore players have set goals and measures to reach them.  Dedicated playtimes are often par for the course and there’s a need to be “the best” at something, even if you’re the best in your small circle.  They also play for fun, but the journey has nothing to do with it, it’s all about the goal.  Here’s a Venn diagram to help explain it.

MMO Player Types

Most players exist primarily in 1 of the intersections.  I tend to fall into the casual activity, hardcore personality.  I rarely have the time or dedication for strenuous activities but I certainly take value in improvement and reaching my goals.  The inverse, hardcore activity and casual personality are in my opinion, the true gaming minority.  It is really hard to do a hardcore activity with a casual attitude in an MMO setting as the peer pressure can push you out.  Hardcore content usually requires a solid group effort and if you can’t put in what others can, then you get put on the sidelines.  Casual/hardcore raiders exist, but they need fairly strict rules for success and something outside the game to keep them going.

The other side of the coin is those who gel with their personality and activity.  Casual/casual tends to fit into the F2P model, where the journey/process is where the meat is, rather than the goals.  You don’t need to be the best pet trainer, you just need to get more pets.  These players existed in previous MMO models but had extremely limited options up until 5 years ago.  Facebook gaming exploded thanks to this group.  Zynga is failing at an epic pace because other groups, who have much more game development experience, are able to put out quality titles at the same price point now.

Finally, the hardcore/hardcore player.  EvE nullsec players are this group, though they apparently only account for 20% of the playerbase (if that).  Raiding guilds racing for world firsts fit here too.  Rank 1-10 PvP players.  FPS clans.  MLG is tailor made for this group.  For a very long time, this was the only gaming group that was catered too because their needs are simply.  The goal is organic to the game (be the best) so your reward system is simpler.  The obstacles to get there are “balance” in PvP games (which can be easy if it’s only PvP) or “pick 3-5 from this list of 100” for PvE games (a-la DnD) – again, easy.  This is by far the easiest group to please but they are also in the gaming minority today, especially in the MMO front.  EA has said that they won’t ever release a game without an online component again.  If you like the hardcore online stuff, you have way more options than any other player type.

I’m curious where people think they fit into this mix, if at all.