Alts.  The primary purpose of an alt is to provide a different experience due to the limitations of the primary character.   This is extremely applicable to class-based and level-based games, as the experience of a level 10 monk is much different than a level 40 wizard.  Skill-based games are a little different, depending on how they apply their cap.  Ultima Online for example, only allowed you to max out a subset of skills, while EvE allows to you max everything, if you play for 10 years.  People still end up specializing in skill-based games.  There are other reasons to play an alt, but these are really the most common ones.

The kink in this thought is the concept of an avatar, or a player representative rather than a character representative.  In 99% of games this is your game account, where you gain access through the character selection screen.  FF14 is the clear outlier, where a single character can complete all the content – alts are used for either cosmetic reasons (race/sex) or to play on a separate server.  All the game share a similar vein, where content is gated.  The warrior in WoW is generally separate from the Cleric – aside from pets, mounts and achievements.  FF14’s levels keep content separated, but quest progress is shared across the various jobs.  I’ll pick 5 games here to see where the similarities and differences lie.

WoW

After reading a bit more on the 6.2 dev Q+A for WoW had my thinking wheels going for a spin.  First though, I certainly can appreciate the candor in the responses.  Aside from the raiding progress, it’s fairly clear that the entire expansion had some serious core issues that were not addressed until 6.2.  (That certainly begs the question as to what they actually did for the 20 months between SoO and 6.2).  The second thing I noticed is how alts are mentioned as being the sort of evidence of many of these issues.  Rep grinding, garrisons, dungeons, professions and gold making are all linked in some form to alts.

Most telling is that using alts solely to farm gold (essentially just a 5 minute log on/off, and a weekly craft) is pretty clear that there are core issues with the content.  It means that the content available is of such poor quality that no one bothers to do it again, and that it has no relevance to the playerbase.

Rep grinding only being available from killing enemies is clearly a bad move.  It takes a long time to get through that and it’s eye-bleedingly boring.  6.2 addresses that.  So did the MoP rep commendations.

Garrisons were designed to be self-contained, in that you could level a character to 100 without stepping outside your gates (I did something quite like this with my Rogue).  Aside from companions and unlocking expansions to the garrison, there was no need to leave.  You could fully level and gear a player through the missions.  And supplement your main character with tons of gold from those missions.  I was making 500g per day in 5 minutes, with weekly spikes due to cooldowns.

Dungeons provided zero incentive to run outside of the story progress.  All the gear was supplanted by LFR or garrisons.

Professions were gated behind daily/weekly cooldowns, and could be done entirely in the garrison.  You’d complete as much in 1 minute as you would in an hour.

Wildstar

While there are more links between the characters in Wildstar (pets, mounts, linked housing) there’s still an issue with alt progression.  Unlocking raiding is still gated on a character basis, rather than a player basis.  Reputation grinds are there, locked behind daily quests that do not get faster with alts and gate items needed to do top end activities.  I do hear tell that both of the items are being changed for the F2P conversion though, so there’s some light at the end of that tunnel.

Crafting has cross-dependencies, more than most games, but still not terribly relevant once you get to veteran dungeons.

Ultima Online

Ok, I’ll admit I’m stretching back in time here as I haven’t been active in 10 years.  I did play (very) actively for a long time though, and made a habit of selling 7x GMs on ebay.  A typical account would have a miner/armorer/weaponsmith, a mage hunter, a tank, a treasure hunter and a house crafter.  Each filled a particular niche of the game, and each had dependencies on the others.  Due to the quick ramp up time of each skill, it was a relative simple matter to swap between characters at any given time.  And since there were no levels or content gates, a brand new character had access to the exact same content as 7x GM.  Their ability to excel at that content differed mind you, with is something EvE has in common here.

Rift

Rift is an outlier as it’s the mid-way point between distinct classes and distinct characters.  There are only 4 classes in the game, and each class can play each role (tank, heal, DPS, support) to relatively similar degrees.  It is certainly a different experience skill-wise to play a Rogue versus a Mage, but they still fill the same role, which is not the case in most other games. Most other games let you play 2 roles (DPS+other) for all the characters.  Crafting is different though, as you’re limited in which skills you can pick up.  There are few cross-dependencies though, so there’s little boosting of a primary character.  Planar attunement is even shared across all characters, which is a great incentive to play others characters.

FF14

This game shakes up the status quo and yet, maintains portions of it.  Content is gates through 2 mechanisms, level and progress through the main quest.  You only have to do the latter once and then it’s available for any other job on your character, assuming you have the job level to do it.  So my 51 White Mage has unlocked (most) everything before Heavensward, but my level 30 Dragon Knight can only access content available for characters 30 and below.

In an interesting twist, there’s a benefit to leveling multiple jobs through cross-class skills.  If my WM where to level a Black Mage to 26, he’d gain access to a skill that makes anything instant cast (like resurrection).  Crafting is similar, where there are clear benefits to raising everything to at least 15 to gain access to a host of skills that improve quality and future progress.  In fact, most crafting skills have a dependency on others, so either you have a really diverse guild, or you need to step up with your own materials.

Does an alt provide a benefit to the primary character?  Certainly.  But nearly all the content consumed by that alt is relevant to the player more so than the character.  All the jobs benefit more than the single one being pushed through.  And that’s a rather significant design shift compared to the rest of the market.

If you do have a “true” alt, in that I mean a separate character, then you’re in the same bucket as other MMOs.  It’s like you were a different person altogether, which is highly discouraged.

Sharing Alts

I would hazard to say that the shift away from distinct alts to shared alts is going to get more pronounced as games mature and come to market.  Or at least the game play would move away from a specific character and move to the actual player.  While level-based games will always provide some sort of gate to content, the majority of the game should be open to all alts once unlocked on a single character.  Having to “prove” yourself again and again makes little sense, outside of arbitrary padding to game content.

Tobold is a fixture on my RSS feed.  Sure, he feeds the trolls as much as anything but when you’re posting nearly twice a day, you can’t bat 100.  (Quick aside, his D&D posts I find the most interesting).  A recent post about hitting a milestone in WoW got me thinking.  He’s done everything required to get a flying mount to work in WoD, then realized the actual function won’t be available until a later patch.

For those in the dark, WoW disabled all flying in WoD but left the door open for a later option. Then closed that door a few weeks ago.  Then opened it again, with what is basically an attunement step.  The basic gist of that attunement is that you have to complete most of the solo-player achievements (exploration, reputation, treasures, etc…)  Given the complete lack of any material for solo-players since launch, I would think that nearly everyone playing today had 90% of that done, with the exception of the 6.2 Tanaan Jungle content.  That patch came out last week and required a reputation “grind” and a couple rare bosses to kill.  Well, Tobold did all of that in about a week and aside from a toe-dip into LFR, he’s never really been a fan of raiding.  So, more or less he’s completed the major milestones for the patch.  In a week.

I think even he would agree that he took that content at an accelerated pace, acting as a sort of content locust.  At the same time, you have to wonder what’s going on at Blizzard when people have “finished” months of work in a week.  Is there some sort of formula the devs use when making new content?  Some sort of line in the sand that says “this should take them at least 3 weeks to get through”?  I may not like artificial gating but I can sure as hell understand it from a dev perspective.  Daily/weekly caps, reputation grinds, drop rates & RNG… they all prolong content artificially but they also have the side effect of keeping the population active.  Which is sort of important in an MMO, no?

I’m not so much against quickly run content, there are plenty of games that offer DLC that lasts about 2 hours.  MMOs feel like they deserve more though, or at least a bit more thought.  I’d like to think Wildstar’s patches were well thought out, with content that was group and solo-based, with artificial gates around them (usually a form of reputation).  FF14 is certainly the shining example here, with classes and housing included in patches, at at a decent pace too.  SWTOR isn’t too far behind either.  Then there’s EvE, the content king.

I guess it’s a good thing that there are so many MMO options out there.  Not only can you find one that fits your basic tastes but likely in the case of a tie, you can pick the dev that provides content at an appreciable pace/length to boot.

To start the argument, one of the largest games on the planet (League of Legends) owes its ENTIRE EXISTENCE to mods.  DOTA was a mod for Warcraft 3 and birthed a genre.  Counterstrike is probably the most known about mod and still played professionally – now with scandals!  WoW wouldn’t work without mods and over the years, the most popular have been integrated into the core UI.  And the FPS wouldn’t be here today if it wasn’t for the Doom mods.

So, mods have been here for ages.  They have been free, for the wide majority.  The most popular have been worked on my dozens of people over the years, with it either being based on passion or as a sort of internship for an actual career.  There have always been donations as an option but nearly all of them have avoided the direct money transfer.  The main reason?  EULA.

Who Owns It

See, a mod is using a registered IP, which is owned by a company, who makes money off said game.  They tolerate mods as it keeps the game relevant and can greatly extend sales for minimal effort.  Some games are more restrictive on mods, since it impacts the experience.  If someone were to ask for payment for a mod, using someone else’s IP, then they would be in breach of contract (WoW’s glider mod is a famous example).  It gets even worse when a mod uses another set of mods and asks for money.  You eventually turn into a variant of a pyramid payment system.

A rather simple analogy is sampling in the music industry.  There was a precedent set this year that is going go spiral into all digital media at some point.  Using someone else’s material for your own gain, in part or in whole, is theft.  So you’re stuck with 2 options.  Either you do it for free, or you pay the company who owns the IP.  Option 1 is what we’ve seen for nearly 30 years.  Modding is getting more and more complex (as the games are) and there surely be someway to compensate a quality modder.

Mod Sales

While it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that Valve’s implementation of mod sales was flawed, the intent was solid.  Find a way for modders to get some money from their work, in a legitimate fashion.  The problems though, are quite similar to the app store for iOS and Android – quality and quantity.

Both of these systems use a curator model, where applications are tested/vetted and then put on sale.  That requires some overhead and time, naturally.  It also ends up filtering the junk, well some of the junk at least.  User ratings and black magic put games to the top of the list and there’s a search tool to help as well.  You can’t really say market forces are at play here, since Apple and Android hold all the rules.  If you have a complaint about copyright infringement, you can ask for some help.  Well, unless you’re talking about Zynga or EA….

To top it off, if a dev is paying a cut to someone else, that someone else has to earn that money. There’s a tiny drop of difference between the Steam Workshop and the Steam main page, so what exactly were modders paying Steam and Bethesda for?

Valve has never been very good at curating, they’ve always let the players decide on what’s valid.  Greenlight is an example of what works and doesn’t work in that regard.  I don’t think it’s even part of their psyche or business values to judge games on merit.  That conflict is the main reason they disabled mod sales, the water got too deep and too murky for their comfort level.

What Now

Solid question.  Mods are back to being free with donate buttons.  Bethesda and Valve are going back to the drawing board.  My gut would say that a new mechanism around donating (or having an optional price when downloading a mod) would be the next step.  Many modders put in hundreds of hours and I don’t think it’s unreasonable for them to get some compensation for their efforts.  After all, they are the main source of new game ideas…

I responded to Azuriel’s post about the recent updates in the online gaming world, taking issue with the paid beta aspect.  Actually, I’ve posted on a few spots about it.

I’ve been lucky enough to be able to beta test nearly every large online game since UO.  I had a “beta tester resume” for a long time.  For the longest time, it really was like being a beta tester.  You’d log in, do what you needed to do and send reports in.  There’d be a log on the forums about all the bugs and their status.  The reason they invited other people was that not everyone is practical and straightforward.  This was before “meta gaming” was a thing mind you, so internal test cases usually only focused on the “happy path”.  Beta testers were there to test everything else.  Like, what if I try levitating and walking across the ocean to fish.  Or finding a unique corner in a house where you could loot the neighbor.

Suffice to say, it was actual testing and there was noticeable progress until release of the game.  So when you actually were at launch, the majority of the issues were due to scaling, and only a few core bugs remained.

I remember beta testing WoW vanilla.  Even 3 months before launch, the game underwent a fair chunk of changes but nearly all of it was related to bug reports.  I filed a TON of reports on that game and only a couple remained at launch.  For those who were there, the game was highly polished but the servers took a break for 3 months.

It’s also important to note that it was at this point that I wrote guide for games, for profit.  I had written a lot before hand, FFXI in particular, but this was a turning point.

The Shift

I did the beta for most major MMOs from that point forward but the turning point for me is Star Trek Online.  Fall of 2009 I was in the beta group as I’m a fan of the IP and space battles are cool.  Earth and Beyond was a while back, so I was looking forward to it.  The content for beta only covered the first 2 zones up until December.  There was a kitchen sink patch that put in the rest of the game and they shut down the beta the week following, so that only early access folk could see it.  I was in EA as the guide company paid for it.

All through beta I had logged dozens of bug reports.  There were some core issues with the game, places where you just could not progress.  I think 2 of the bugs were fixed, everything else was still there.  Even during the EA portion the bugs were still present.  History has enough tracks as to what happened to the game.  After about a year, the practically rebuilt the game, outside of the art assets.

It was here where I realized that beta tests were obviously providing little benefit when the marketing folk wanted to get paid.

The Nail

The last beta I did was for SWTOR in 2011, or at least the last one where I consider it a beta.  The devs took feedback and chatted, they understood the issues.  I had mathcrafted DPS sheets for 2 classes, clearly showing issues with balance.  The community had provided a ton of feedback on needed changes.

I think Alacrity(haste) is going to be my stickler here.  Math is hard to argue against and math was clearly pointing out that it was a bad stat for almost everyone (knights and warriors were the exception).  And it’s not like this was raised just before launch, it was obvious months and months before.  Didn’t get fixed until patch 2.0!

The upper tier however had a different approach.  Every 2 weeks there’d be a full wipe and new content added.  You had to slosh through the early part again and again.  Imagine a day 1 launch happening every 2 weeks, that’s what beta testing was about.  Their PTR after launch didn’t have a character transfer or a boost to 50 and had wipes as well.  So you can guess how useful that thing was.  Top level content was seriously broken at launch and well… you know what happened next.

The Coffin

Betas today are not betas.  They are PR events and technical stress tests.  It allows companies to ensure that their network architecture works and to get some positive news before launch.  Where before you had to apply to get into beta, that overhead is gone now.  Instead there’s a paywall, which makes it easier for the dev to manage.  Since they are going to ignore everyone of your bug requests before launch anyhow, you aren’t of any actual value outside of stress testing and telling your friends about it.

What beta does provide is an easy out for the developer when things go bad.  “It’s just beta” used to be common on forums in the day and it was accurate too.  Since betas today have nothing to do except have the same name, it’s just an excuse to ignore you.

And that’s the kicker really.  Betas are just paid early access at a higher price point.  Like, you’re really eager to get into the door so you pay more.  If I wait a few months, I can get it for free (outside of box costs). So Heroes of the Storm is charging people for this and I’m ok with the process.  Just don’t call it beta.

Alphas…well let’s just be honest about that for a second.  You’re paying the developer on a promise of delivering something later.  Whether they listen to you or not.  You have no assurances that they will deliver on spec, or on time.  I personally think it’s more akin to venture capital than anything to do with gaming, except you have no voice in the matter.  The company already has your money and isn’t going to refund it.

“A fool and his money are soon parted.”

I thought it was a good title but it actually stems from an Observation Deck post about the Simpsons.  The theory, and one that applies more so to Doctor Who, is that any show of long duration isn’t actually a single show but rather a multitude of shows using the same basic premise/characters.  And really, if you spend a minute to think about it, this applies to nearly every single movie in the past 10 years.  Sequels and reboots.  But those get a clean slate.  Serials (TV shows) do not.

Doctor Who has had “clean breaks” because you know the Doctor dies and is regenerated, they can put in a new actor and a new spin on the character.  Eccleston was brooding, Tennant was like a brother, Smith was a nutter and Capaldi is aggressive.  All sharing the same name, all in the same setting, and all without a break between them.  So you end up with people having a favorite Doctor, one they identify with.  “Eccleston was great!” I can hear someone say.  “Sit down, you’re drunk.  Rose ran the show and you know it” I reply.

Any show that hits the 5 year mark is likely to go through this shift.  Actors change, plots close and open, people grow older.  The Simpsons is different as it’s animated.  Actors have been pretty much the same since the start, none of the characters have grown old.  It’s never been off the air.  26 years now.  It’s still shifted somewhat, with changes in writing staff, which has had a rather drastic impact on the storylines.

MMOs, the Change and the Reboot

Very few MMOs ever get a reboot and succeed.  Very few sequels ever succeed either.  FF14 is really the poster child for this since it was both a sequel and needed a reboot.  Most MMOs just putter along for years and years, hoping to find the right combination of people and fun.

But they change over the years.  Each patch by definition changes something.  Players won’t ever consider something an expansion if there isn’t some new mechanic or thing to do.  And it can’t really be more of the same all the time because player tastes evolve, technology evolves and the market evolves.

I think most would agree that expansions are the obvious point to look for change in direction within a game.  UO had the Trammel split.  SWG has the NGE.  EQ had PoK.  DAoC had Atlantis.  SWTOR had the swap to F2P.  There are more examples in each game and more games than I could list…

WoW… well WoW is delimited by each expansion plus the advent of LFG, LFR and Flex Raids, which were all mid-expansion changes – all affecting the social aspect of the game.

I mean, let’s take a high level look at the WoW expansions and the mid-strikes between.

• Vanilla – This was more or less a solo-friendly version of EQ2.  40 man raids.  8m peak players.
• BC – An integrated vision with a tight focus on raiding and achievements (without actual achievements).  All the systems worked together.  Flying introduced but only at max level.  10 and 25 man raids (mostly the latter). Gain to 11m players.
• WotLK – A split in many of the systems with the introduction of catch-up mechanics and heroic raids.  The best and worst raids were here: Uldar and Trials of the Crusader.  Flying at max level. Gain to 12m players.
• LFG introduction – this was a few patches in to WotLK and had a few iterations.  Dramatically changes the social aspect of the game and forced a simplification of many mechanics.
• Cataclysm – Gutting of the talent system, rebuild of the 1-60 experience/world, increase in overall difficulty, healing triage was introduced.  Flying from the start.  Most would see Cata as a major shift in direction for the game, where it tried to please the raiding and pro-difficulty crowd, when the market was heading another direction.  F2P MMOs were all over the place.  Also introduced Cross-Realm servers to address low pop zones.  Loss to 9m players.
• LFR introduction – Firelands raid notoriously had less than 1% of the players complete heroic.  LFR put in so people can play the raids, see the story and Blizz’s dev time on raids isn’t wasted on 20 people.
• MoP – Pet battles.  Daily quests everywhere.  Story that had zero links to any previous lore.  Farmville.  Many catch up mechanics and simplifications.  By this point, most systems had limited (if any) ties to other systems, meaning a player could do near every type of content without talking to another soul.   Merger of servers (connected realms).  Loss to 7m players.
• Flex Raid introduction.  In my opinion, the biggest positive change to MMOs in 10 years.  Removed many of the limitations for group sizes and benching people, allowing social guilds to raid successfully.
• WoD – Break of all ties to previous content/structure.  Sale of level 90 characters.  Garrisons which make most players self-sufficient and bypass most profession requirements.  The largest player boost since WotLK too.  Flex Raid for everyone!  No Flying.  Focus on world exploration and “dynamic” content.  As close to WoW 2.0 as we’ve seen so far.

Each person is likely to identify best with a given version of WoW.  You can read forums or other blogs and people will proclaim “BC was the best!”, “LFG killed WoW”, “AQ rules” (no one says this).  Rose colored glasses abound and few people, for any given form of media, will proclaim that today’s version is the best.  It takes time to digest what you have today and when it’s fresh, you really see the good and the bad.  When you look back on any memory, you tend to see the good in it rather than the bad.  If it was bad, you wouldn’t be thinking about it right?

Which I guess makes most of the 10 year anniversary MC runs look hilarious.  It’s pure chaos, with maybe a half dozen people running the whole show.  The difficulty is half of what it was once you’re in the zone and there’s no roster boss (actually finding 40 people to do it, getting them attuned and then having them travel to the instance).  It’s so different from what it was yet still people find it hard to get through.

Moving Forward

And honestly, in today’s market place of MMOs and games, you are at a great buffet of options and all sorts of price points and all sorts of mechanics.  If you can’t find something out there that pleases you, across hundreds of games, then maybe it’s not the market that’s the issue.  Maybe you’ve just graduated to grumpy ol’ bugger, sitting on the porch in a rocking chair, complaining about loud music the kids are playing these days.  We all know how much attention and credence those get.

Once people start to accept the fact that an MMO cannot be static and that a return to the past isn’t possible, maybe they’ll be ok with the fact that they are allowed to move on to another game.  Players tastes change with time.  Their schedules as well.  You finish school, get a job, then a career.  Maybe get married and have kids.  I read some of the guild invite spam and there’s always one that goes

Casual raiders wanted.  Schedule W-T-Su, 8-11.  Attendance is mandatory.

And I think to myself, I used to do that but I can’t anymore.  And when did that become casual?  I’ll try something else.  And I’ll have some fun.  ‘Cause that’s the reason we game in the first place, to have fun.