Three Predictions for 2012

Here are a few predictions on the state of MMO's in the coming year.  Ironically, though I hadn't planned it this way, the three topics I came up with address (albeit in a different order) Wilhelm's top three questions for 2012. 

Go Big, Go Small, Go Free, or Go Home
The subscription MMO isn't dead, but there are basically two very specific circumstances under which it can work:

1. Have a nine-figure budget like the reported $100 million in venture capital that founded Trion or the even larger figures that EA is rumored to have spent on SWTOR.  Ever notice how the three corporations able to foot this type of bill - Blizzard, Trion, and EA-Bioware - are the ones who are still touting the subscription model?
2. Serve an un-filled niche, such as sandbox PVP (see Eve, Darkfall, or perhaps the forthcoming Dominus) or old-school group MMO (see Vanguard, lots of room for a newcomer in this genre).  The big-budget one-size-fits-all MMO that includes solo, group, raid, and PVP has to make compromises  to fit all these activities under one roof.  This makes it possible for a more specialized game to offer something that the big guys cannot.  However, as CCP found out last year, this also means that your entire company lives or dies by its ability to continue to keep one segment of the market satisfied.

Note what's not on that list.  The best licensed IP's out there don't guarantee you $15 a month - see DCUO and LOTRO.  Neither does implementation of a specific feature in what's otherwise a one-size-fits-all MMO (e.g. RVR in Warhammer and PvPvE in Aion).  Even the huge budget is no guarantee of success - probably the most remarkable thing about Rift's progress is how much discipline the team has shown in implementing only what they can actually accomplish and accomplish well.

The bottom line is that if you have yet another fantasy MMO, you're not solidly in one of the two categories above, and your business plan depends on collecting a $15 monthly subscription - FFXIV and Tera come to mind, along with Copernicus if they're not thinking F2P - you are in for a rough time in today's crowded market.  Of course, you're also in for a tough time in the crowded free market, but at least the bar is lower to get potential customers to actually try your product.   

SWTOR will have high churn... and high revenue
Both sides of the discussion on SWTOR's longterm prospects tend to assume that the game will be a failure if there is a mass exodus by the 90 day mark.  Ironically, there has never been another MMO so well-positioned to handle a high rate of churn. 

Yes, the game has guilds and PVP and dungeons/raids, all the traditional MMO trappings that tend to do poorly with high churn.  As long as Bioware was spending whatever ungodly amount they spent on this game, there was no reason NOT to support these playstyles and collect the associated revenue.  However, the core thing that has everyone raving is the Bioware story.  With the past Bioware games, the customer pays once for the box, and maybe once more if the expansions/DLC are worth purchasing, no matter how long it takes the player to complete the game or how many times they replay it.  With the monthly fee, EA gets paid every month for every playthrough and replay, regardless of how little or how much content Bioware actually adds to the game in future patches.   

With such a focus on a highly replayable single player story, SWTOR doesn't need half a million year-round subscribers.  They can get the same effect with 1.5 million players who pay 4 months out of the year when new content is added - or when players choose to replay the old stuff.  I don't see how Bioware can lose here - which is probably why they got so much of EA's money to spend in the first place. 

Mists of Pandaria Will Ship This Summer, Or Heads Will Roll
Many intelligent people are predicting that Pandaria won't ship until Q4, and there is strong basis for making this call - Blizzard is not known for shipping its products on time.  This round, however, I think the stakes are higher. 

Blizzard spent 2011 losing subscribers by the millions - to Rift, or wherever else - and SWTOR will not help this situation.  No amount of spin about how the lost players are in the less lucrative Asian markets, or how players have returned to WoW after the launches of past competitors, can change the reality that Blizzard will continue to lose customers and money until something changes.  A scenario in which the content that was available in early December 2011 is still the only content available in early October 2012 is unacceptable. 

My guess is that we will see the paid closed beta phase of Pandaria (courtesy of the annual pass) kick off in May-June, with an aim for an early Q3 release.  Delaying this product further is not like delaying Starcraft II or Diablo III, which do not have monthly fees - every month means more subscribers lost from the current live WoW service.  I'm prepared to believe that Blizzard might let the expansion slip anyway, but I think that there will - and frankly should - be consequences if this occurs. 

What do you all think will happen in 2012?

Vacation News Roundup

I'm still on blog vacation for another week and a half, but I've noticed a few tidbits that I felt like commenting on anyway.  Comments remain moderated, though I expect to be able to approve them over the next few days.

• Disliking the fourth pillar
  Spinks' rundown of the SWTOR classes mentioned a detail that I hadn't considered.  Apparently, George Lucas is continuing to maintain that Jedi cannot get married without turning to the dark side.  This makes me less interested in the game - not because I really had my heart set on cyborz with my NPC's, but because the notorious forbidden love story from the second Star Wars prequel was not the one part of the Star Wars Universe that I've been dying to re-live in an MMO setting.  
  
  Specifics of this particular case aside, I see a potential issue with the "fourth pillar" approach here.  If you are going to put the story front and center, it becomes a bigger issue if players dislike the story you are trying to tell.  Moreover, I would imagine that Jedi who romance their NPC's are going to be the majority of players - the former because of the lore and the latter because that's what you do in Bioware games. If the gameplay impact of being a Republic-faction Jedi with Dark Side status turns out to be disadvantageous to game mechanics, Bioware will have some unhappy customers. 
  
  
• WoW 4.3 update
  This week, we're hearing details of WoW's patch 4.3.  The mega-patch will include the now industry-standard cosmetic gear option that Blizzard has been resisting for about five years now.  There's a new storage system that will save Blizzard disk space by having a vendor who will create a new copy of item number whatever upon request, rather than storing all the details of your existing item (e.g. enchant, crafted by, what bank slot it is located in).  There will be new five-mans, which was basically expected.
  
  The one thing that I find surprising is that the patch will feature the Deathwing raid, and therefore will presumably serve as the Cataclysm finale.  I had expected this to be bumped to next year to shorten the window between Deathwing and the expansion now believed to be Pandaria.  While it's not uncommon for the last raid of a WoW expansion to sit for 9-12 months, Cataclysm is already somewhat widely viewed as a failure and nothing from this list sounds especially game-changing.  Unless Blizzard can finally deliver a WoW expansion in 18 months instead of 23-24, 2012 may not be kind to the WoW subscription count. 
   
• Reinventing Warhammer
  Werit has the details of the free to play Warhammer spinoff. My view on this project echoes Tobold's.  Back in 2008, I genuinely enjoyed Warhammer's instanced "RVR" scenarios but generally found that the PVE game these battles were attached to did not compare favorably to the many other options out there.  On paper, ditching the PVE game allows Mythic to focus on balance, while opening up the door to more exotic races/classes/heroes/etc that might have been harder to fit into a holy trinity PVE game. 
  
  However, as Tobold suggests, this revamp almost certainly guarantees that I will never pay for the existing version of the game again.

Overall, it's been an interesting week.  We'll see if next week follows suit. 

Difficulty Versus Subscriber Retention

When it comes to MMO design decisions, the customer is not always right.  The challenge for the developer is that the "correct" decision sometimes makes it literally impossible for large portions of the market to play your game, no matter how well you do everything else. 

From Raid or Die to EZ-Zerg
The thing about WoW's ongoing dispute over 5-man dungeon difficulty is that we've been here before.  The year was 2007, and Blizzard had finally released the game's first expansion.  After years of complaints that the endgame was "raid or die", Blizzard's response was to offer smaller raids.  The cap was reduced from 40 players to 25, and TBC also offered both the 10-man Karazhan raid and the raid-like experience of heroic 5-man dungeons. 

Though these changes made some of the logistics simpler (and some, like trying to run two 10-man Karazhan lockouts in a 25-man guild, more difficult), the lower numbers left each player accountable for a greater portion of their group's performance.  Those of us who were below average in our old 40-man guilds no longer met the difficulty bar for this new, "more accessible" content.  In my old guild, about a third broke away to form a new raiding guild, a third disbanded and scattered to other guilds, and a third of us quit the game.

No one outside Irvine knows exactly what happened to WoW's retention numbers in the wake of TBC.  What we can see is how Blizzard reacted to those numbers with future development.  As I commented way back in 2008, my guess is that Blizzard did not like the trend they saw. 

Blizzard did not add another top tier raid to the game for 10 months after patch 2.1.  In the interim, they added gear inflation in the 10-man ZA and, as Sunwell arrived, with the first iteration of high end raid loot for heroic dungeon tokens.  Then Wrath arrived with zergable heroics (yes, even in the month the expansion launched) and raids so easy that even a PUG could complete them.  Then Blizzard made the already easy content even easier by rolling out the dungeon finder and bribing Icecrown raiders to run random dungeons once a day. 

It certainly appears from Blizzard's actions that they saw easier content as a way to draw more players into the endgame.

Ripping off the cast before healing the wound?
Making the game so easy was almost certainly the wrong call, and bringing the difficulty back up is most likely the right one (especially since the dungeons will only get easier as players overgear them).  The problem is, as Eric at Elder Game suggests, that it's hard to hurt your retention numbers by making the game easier.  By contrast, making the game harder because that's how things "should" be fails to address the core problem that got us to the Wrath era in the first place. 

Many players are not looking for the current level of difficulty in their PUG content.  Personally, I like the current dungeon difficulty, but the longer queue times (three times what we had in Wrath) are drastically limiting my ability to actually run dungeons.  With a 15-20 minute queue and a 20 minute dungeon zerg, I could run a Wrath heroic whenever I wanted - I was actually spending the majority of my WoW time in groups.  With a queue time of 45 minutes to an hour, and then about as long (or longer if things go poorly) to actually complete the instance, five-man content is a much larger commitment, which I can fit in maybe once a week. 

Things aren't as bad as they were back in 2007; with the dungeon finder, at least I can actually get an instance group when I do have several hours to burn, where this was nigh impossible for a lone DPS in much of the TBC era.  Even so, nothing in Blizzard's history since 2007 suggests that they're in the business of keeping players away from content though high difficulty.  Perhaps gear inflation will solve this problem for them whenever they get around to releasing patch 4.1.  Otherwise, it's going to be very interesting to see what gets changed. 

(As long as we're digging in my 2008 archives, I suppose we can expect some patch 4.1 news around the February 24th Rift Headstart, since that's how Blizzard treated Warhammer.) 

Are Dungeon Finder Leveling Dungeons WoW's Public Quests?

I've been saying some less than positive things about WoW's automated dungeon finder of late, so it seems only fair to give equal time to one area where I've been getting a lot of benefit from the system - groups for leveling dungeons.

The logistics of LFG
Historically, I've always simply skipped over leveling dungeons. The nebulous (generally lengthy) amount of time it would take to find a group before you even start the actual dungeon run was too much unpredictability for my schedule. On top of that, dungeons often represent the culmination of the storylines in a given zone, meaning that you will be out of stuff to do in the neighborhood by the time you have all the relevant quests. Though WoW did have dungeon summoning stones, at least two party members needed to travel to the stones (often as many as four of your party members may presume that someone else will summon them), and the greatest concentration of players looking for groups for a given area are often located in that zone's local chat.

The dungeon finder blows all of these concerns out of the water. As a DPS, you're going to be looking for something like 15-30 minutes, and you can do whatever you want with that time, as you will be teleported to the dungeon automatically when a group is assembled. As a result, my Warrior has been doing every dungeon in Northrend as soon as the relevant quests become available, earning significant gear upgrades in the process. I've even queued up for random dungeons when I feel like I could use a change of pace from solo questing - my warrior has already banked a handful of emblems and stone keeper shards from these efforts.

A different take on the public quest
When Warhammer Online was getting ready to launch, I was actually very excited about the concept of public quests. The idea, as Mythic described it, was for players to get to enjoy high quality group content without having to deal with group logistics. Unfortunately, because these quests were non-instanced events located in the outside world, population worked against them. You might show up at a PQ and discover that there weren't enough players there to complete it, or you might find that too many had shown up, making the content trivial. Worst of all, you had to travel to the quest areas on foot, and could arrive to find that the party was over.

The way that the random dungeon finder has worked out in WoW is very similar to the end goal of the Public Quest - but with much of the random chance and logistic inconvenience taken out. Your group will have the right number of people and correct balance of classes for the content (though they may or may not be overgeared). You do not need to worry about travel, or even knowing where it is that you should be going (though this can be a problem when players die and don't know how to get back to the instance).

There may be no removing the social downsides of working with strangers in group content. I also maintain that the system should do a better job of maintaining difficulty by using appropriately geared players when possible - one random Old Kingdom group, a level 74 dungeon, ended up with a level 80 tank for some reason. When it comes to the actual goal of making group content accessible to players as they level, though, this system is a huge success.

Warhammer Retrial Verdict

My 10-day Warhammer retrial concluded over the weekend. During that time, I leveled a new Zealot to rank 12/RVR rank 10. What have I learned about the game?

The Challenge of Keep Siege Numbers

On my last night in game, I finally managed to catch up with one of Mythic's heavily touted "open RVR" (read: non-instanced) keep sieges. Mechanically, the warfare was relatively simple; try to protect the players with the battering ram until they beat the door down, and then zerg up the stairs to kill the keep lord. Hold the keep, or various other objectives, for long enough and you can expect substantial exp and RVR exp.

Unfortunately, the non-instanced nature of the battle reared its head pretty quickly. With equal numbers, fights devolved into zerg-fests, with neither army able to make substantial progress. Otherwise, the team with the larger numbers won, waited for the victory bonuses, and went off to attack the next zone. The team with smaller numbers either tried to hide behind friendly NPC's or retreated to attack a different zone. The open warband I joined took a number of keeps and battlefield objectives, and failed to take a number of additional ones, but rarely found that perfect, ideally balanced fight.

PVE is still filler?


I was also able to participate in a fair amount of PVE content, including the Hunter's Vale group dungeon and various public quests. From the healer's perspective, this content was all relatively straight-forward. The production values were decent, but it occasionally felt a bit simplistic; some public quest bosses simply damaged the local tanks faster than I could heal them, while in other cases I ended up spending most of my time doing (minimal) DPS for lack of damage to heal.

Overall, the group PVE content is reasonably well done, but I'm not sure that I'd take it over group content in any of the other games that I play. I could see this content getting frustrating pretty quickly if you were forced to repeat it in search of drops (which was required for keep siege gear at the game's launch).

What Mythic has done right
As I noted previously, Mythic has removed logistical barriers to group content, and also managed to make group healing fun for a longtime solo veteran like myself.

Beyond that, I have been very impressed with Mythic's willingness to leave no stone unturned in the quest to improve the game. It can't have been an easy call to remove Fortress sieges from the game or start all new characters in a single racial pairing to ensure population, but someone made the call that these changes were for the best.


Unfortunately for Keriak, the "Vegas style" loot distribution is still in the game - I walked away from this siege empty-handed.

The Bottom Line
I won't be continuing with the game for now. I'm at a point in my personal gaming life where I'm looking to decrease the amount of time I spend on rehashing repeatable content instead of trying new things. By design, Warhammer makes heavy use of repeatable content in an attempt to encourage grouping.

Even so, I'm glad I took the time to come back and make my peace with Warhammer Online. Over the year since its launch, the game has actually delivered on most of its promise. If the game had been in its current state at launch, we might be looking at a very different MMORPG market today.

Group Logistics And The Perception Of The Grind

Over the year since its launch, Warhammer seems to have perfected no-hassle, instant access group content. On the map above, the glowing treasure chests are group public quests with at least two players present, and the crossed swords indicate where RVR battles are in progress. All you have to do is sign in, head for one of those spots, and pitch in.

Having a guild or a group are purely optional, as anyone can see where the action is and everyone who helps gets the appropriate share of the public quest rewards. You show up when you want, stay for however long you want, and get rewarded proportionally for your efforts. It's easy enough that I've spent about 75% of my time during the free retrial on group content, even though I'm gaming with limited time and have been known to spend the vast majority of my time solo (e.g. soloing from 1-73 in EQ2 without ever joining a group for any reason).

By contrast, World of Warcraft focuses on instanced PVE content with fixed parties (tank, healer, 3xDPS), so this sort of map wouldn't be effective. Instead, they're simply automating the process of group formation, so that players can click the "find group" button and instantly be transported to a dungeon with a (hopefully viable) full party to clear it out. It's less immersive but it may or may not be more effective in the long run, especially since the system works across multiple servers.



Is there a catch to instant access?
The issue with the Warhammer open RVR and public quests is that the options, though fun, are limited. At any given level/zone, you have maybe 3 public quests (one of which probably requires 9+ players and therefore can't be done with the available numbers) to choose from. Those three red shields on the Warhammer map represent the only three open RVR battlefield objectives in the zone, so players can expect to be battling over those for a dozen levels. You'll also have the same instanced scenario choices for that dozen level bracket.

(There are technically three zones per level bracket, each with its own PQ's and battlefield objectives, but there really isn't the population to support that number. Mythic made the decision to start all new characters in the human vs chaos zone as of the most recent patch, in the hopes of getting enough player in the same place to actually fight.)

All of this is a necessary feature of easy access to groups. The more choices a game offers, the more the population will spread out. (As I've discussed before, WoW will have sixteen 5-man instances in 3.3, but you can bet that half of them will be much more popular due to superior quality loot or ease of completion. The catch is that it starts to feel very grindy, very quickly. You finish a public quest and your choices for what to do next are one of the same 2-3 quests (if anyone else is doing them) or battling over the same small corner of the zone in RVR.

Losing the illusion of variety
In terms of actual gameplay experience, the solo PVE quest grind is no less repetitive; go somewhere, kill and loot the local mobs, repeat. The difference is that the frequent change in location creates the illusion that you are going to new places and doing new things. That illusion is gone when your only option is to turn around and do the same quest that you just did, or perhaps the quest before, depending on what you can find a group for.

When the dust settles on WoW's new automated system, I wonder if its five-man content will feel largely the same way. To a certain extent, the time it takes to actually assemble a group creates an impression of scarcity - the reaction when a group finally forms is "now I finally get to snag some emblems" and not "sigh, time to run one of the same old dungeons again". When finding a group is as easy as clicking a button, that anticipation may go along with it. (In much the same way, the 3-hour timer on Wintergrasp may be a blessing in that it physically prevents players from fighting again until the next match.)

Blizzard doesn't really have a choice in this matter - the 30+ minutes it takes to look for a group and travel to the instance the old fashioned way are 30 minutes that I don't really have these days. Even so, I can't help but wonder whether having increased access will increase the recognition that the dungeon grind is, in fact, grindy.

A Time for NOT Soloing?

Mythic's Jeff Hickman gave a talk at GDC with a list of things he feels Warhammer did wrong. In the talk, he suggests that making the game too easy for solo PVE was a bad idea because it removed the need, and thus the desire, for players to group. Syp disagrees, arguing that it would have been even worse if the game had broken players with brutal entry level content, and that he found plenty of groups just fine on his own thank you very much. I'm the guy who juggles three separate games for my solo PVE fix, so obviously I'm on Syp's side, right?

Not exactly. My biggest mistake in Warhammer is that I set out to play it as if it was World of Warcraft - solo PVE, with instanced scenarios on the side. I never added anyone to my friend's list and barely joined a guild a week before my time ran out, because I needed access to the guild tavern in order to get RVR reward gear.

The basic solo PVE quests weren't that interesting, but it wasn't really likely that, with dozens of PQ's littering the landscape, you'd happen to find one that people were actually working on beyond T1 (a guild would have helped with this). Open RVR areas were places I snuck into off-hours to try and complete a few quests without being ganked, patting myself on the back for cherry-picking the best rewards. (In my defense, basically none of the other access or reward mechanics around oRVR were actually in place at the time.)

Frankly, Warhammer's biggest problem was that they ran out of money and launched too early. That aside, I think it is somewhat fair to say that the mistake I made was somewhat encouraged by the way they set up the game. If I ever get back into Warhammer, I'm going to be looking for a guild from day one, sticking it out with that Rune Priest/Disciple that I liked (but chickened out of playing, because PUGS didn't do much of a good job of keeping me from being slaughtered), and doing as much RVR as possible. The fact that I happen to prefer solo PVE does NOT mean that EVERY game needs to be solo PVE even if that does not play to its strengths.

Perhaps encouraging community with less-soloable content would not have been enough to cover for the lack of finish. It certainly might have hurt their initial box sales. It's possible, however, that they wouldn't have lost 2/3 of their customers in the first few months (and thereby wouldn't have had to fold so many servers). Of course, they probably went down this road in the first place because they were hoping that making the game as WoW-like as possible would totally let them steal all of WoW's players. That didn't work out too well for them.

Patches, Patches Everywhere

It's been an unusually busy week in MMORPG patch news.

Sony is so confident that EQ2's Game Update 52 is ready that they sent out an email announcement declaring Tuesday as the patch's "expected live date". Amongst other things, the patch includes an invasion plotline the almost certainly confirms that this year's EQ2 Expansion will be Velious (a major continent in the original game).

Warhammer's Patch 1.3, including the long-awaited Land of the Dead contested zone, has gone to pre-download status, also expecting a launch on Tuesday. Mythic has once again launched a viral marketing campaign on the blogs - Ysh has a good summary. The campaign is so tasty, Syp can't help but sink his teeth into it.

LOTRO's Book 8 patch is also in the works, and Jairos posts about the new splash screen ad. Meanwhile, true to form, Blizzard has been rolling out patch 3.2 updates all week. The latest is a preview of the new battleground which basically sounds like a remake of Alterac Valley with vehicles. We could very easily see a PTR debut next week.

Overall, it's interesting that so many of the major current generation MMORPG's launching their latest at the same time. Perhaps there's now some level of competition to provide an answer to competitors' latest updates. Perhaps there are external factors - e.g. guilds having a harder time fielding raids with school out for the summer - that favor launching content now to help tide people over. Either way, we've got some interesting times ahead.

Would Warhammer Be Better Without Scenario Exp?

A Thought Experiment
Let's say that you were placed in charge of Warhammer development sometime prior to the game's September launch.

The basic rules are:
- You have foreknowledge, through some combination of thought experiment future vision and/or focus groups/playtesting, of what major problems the game would face when it went live.

- The game's launch cannot be delayed due to harsh financial reality.

- Locking Mark Jacobs in a closet somewhere for a few months so that he can't make promises his game won't be able to deliver on, though potentially satisfying on an emotional level, won't actually solve any problems.

- You can make two types of changes in the game.
The first are things that don't require major coding, such as changing the values of things that were in the game as of September 18th (such as exp rewards), which we'll presume that Mythic could have done freely.
The second are substitutions - new features (or ones that have subsequently been delivered in patches, such as oRVR influence) that require significant programming. These, however, would require reassigning programmers from elsewhere, and therefore cutting a similar sized feature elsewhere in the game.

Is there a single change that could have been made that might have left Warhammer in better shape today?

The Challenges
Two of Warhammer's biggest issues at launch were general client stability, which is presumably too big of a fish to fry for our little experiment, and World of Warcraft (specifically, having hundreds of thousands of bored WoW players slam the servers at launch, forcing the creation of new ones, only to leave those servers deserted when Wrath came out two months later), which is also beyond our fictional control. Cross those off the list, though, and it seems like the largest issue that people were talking about was how everyone was hidden away in instanced scenarios. This meant that no one was out in the non-instanced world to participate in open RVR, or the game's highly touted public quests.

Mythic has since attempted to address the RVR issues with increased incentives for open RVR via world events and a new influence system (though some people have argued that this has led to keep flipping). The public quests have proven a tougher nut to crack, and Mythic ultimately opted to rebalance some Public Quests for smaller groups to allow the smaller than expected outdoor PVE population to cope. However, presuming everything is wrapped up by March, these changes will reach live servers six months after the game's retail launch, and I can't even begin to guess where we could cut six months elsewhere from the development process to have any of them in place back in September.

An imperfect solution?
Those of you who read the subject of the post can figure out what I'm about to suggest here - what if Warhammer's scenarios did not award experience?

The essential issue, which I summed up back in October, is that you can get experience in either outdoor quest content or in instanced scenarios, but you can ONLY get reknown, Warhammer's PVP experience, in PVP content. Reknown doesn't just get you a head start on your RVR level, it ALSO gets you access to Reknown reward gear. This stuff isn't as good as public quest rewards, but there's also no "vegas style loot" roll to see who gets it, and no need to worry about whether there are enough players to beat the boss of the public quest. Just click "queue" and you'll get a group of players and a large chunk of both exp and reknown, win, lose, or draw. Why would you choose PVE for exp and gear when scenarios offered exp, reknown, gear, AND were more fun besides?

(We're ignoring non-instanced RVR for this thought experiment because it was underutilized until Mythic made the changes they made, and I'm not sure what could have been cut to cover it.)

If one imagines that experience from scenarios was reduced or eliminated, it might follow that players would choose to do more non-instanced quests to get levels. These players would then be out in the world in sufficient numbers to complete public quests and attack battlefield objectives. Could this change have made Warhammer less of the scenario grind players complained it became at launch, and more of the balanced game that Mythic had in mind when they created all the non-instanced content that ended up sitting around, underutilized?

The Catch...
For a counterpoint, I'm going to quote myself from last October:

"Meanwhile, they don't want to take an RVR game and force players to spend more time on PVE content (either by nerfing scenario exp or via greatly increasing PQ exp). They're marketing to PVP players who don't want to do PVE content, and, at any rate, boosting exp in PVE content would just encourage players to level to the cap and worry about reknown when they get there (in the process missing the best part of the game in the low-end scenarios).

... The best part of the game are the scenarios, so I don't see why it makes sense to work so hard at getting people to leave them."

Clearly, I would not have liked this change, had it appeared in a patch sometime mid September.

The charge of "forcing PVP players to do PVE" is one that I can't rebut, though the truth is that this may have happened anyway with Warhammer's current system of ward armor. There's also the issue that not having to PVE to PVP was one of the game's talking points in comparison to WoW, and taking away the RVR-only progression path might have encouraged players to compare the two games on solo-PVE content (where WoW generally wins, since that's arguably the game's main focus today).

There's also a secondary issue that many players were already concerned about the experience curve with the game as is, and removing a source of experience would exacerbate that problem. You could kind of attempt to bandage that by guesstimating that the average player gets X% of their experience from scenarios and reducing the experience requirement per level by that amount, but even determining that that number should be might be a more in-depth exercise than our thought experiment would allow us to carry out without cutting something else from the game.

Finally, it's worth noting that Mythic could always have reverted or adjusted this hypothetical change in a subsequent patch once the incentives for the rest of the game were done. "Our latest update delivers a major feature players are asking for, greater experience from scenarios...."

Effects on retention
Last week wasn't the best of times for Warhammer. EA finally released a subscriber number as of the end of the fourth quarter, and it was 300,000. Given that the game had 750,000 accounts by mid-October (and presumably continued to register additional accounts for the subsequent two and a half months, though no one is saying how many), the game's retention rate wasn't great. See a full Book of Grudges roundup for more community details, and /cheer that BOG is back up and writing. ;)

Some of those players were going to leave anyway. Some who stayed might have hated the change I'm suggesting here badly enough that they would have left. Still, the overabundance of incentives for the game's (thoroughly enjoyable) scenarios did not help Mythic showcase the game as it was intended to be during that crucial first month. Perhaps more drastic action might have made a difference.

Does anyone else have a better answer to my little thought experiment?


P.S. This post was inspired by a remark from Snafzg last week, on the game's financial situation:

"I really wish WAR would have delayed for more polish, but given EA’s Q3 losses, their books would have been hit even harder. I wonder if it was worth the trade off from a management point of view. Seems like a catch 22 to me..."

Abuse of the expansion

PVD studios is proud to announce the upcoming 200th blog expansion at Player vs Developer, scheduled for release next week! This post will probably add hundreds of words to the verbose archives of PVD, and will, in all liklihood, discuss the incentive structures in one or more online games. Additionally, the blog expansion will kick off our "ongoing blog expansion" event. PVD founder Green Armadillo has declared a goal of producing two hundred blog expansions in 2009. Best of all, this and all of the future planned blog expansions will be available to all current and future PVD readers (and random people who click a link somewhere) at no additional charge!

The Warhammer "Live Expansion"
Warhammer's recently announced "live expansion" is impressive and commendable. In stark contrast to Blizzard's stony wall of silence, Warhammer players now know what they can expect to get in the first half of 2009. It's an impressive slate - four world events, the return of the last two classes cut in the game's beta, and a new RVR dungeon zone based on an old DAOC staple that serious fans have wanted for Warhammer for a while now. It is likely to be more than Blizzard is going to deliver in the one content patch that most players expect them to produce during the same time frame.

However, the "live expansion" is neither "live" nor an "expansion". What we have here is a series of content patches that will be released over a period of months, half of which have nothing to do with each other, which do not collectively contain enough content to fill a paid expansion box. Mythic is applying some serious spin by grouping them together so they will look more impressive to anyone who doesn't notice that this is a half-year plan rather than the patch notes for tomorrow.

(As Common Sense Gamer points out, Mark Jacobs is also claiming that: "No other subscription-based MMORPG that I am aware of has ever added 4 new careers to its game as part of a regular update/addon/free expansion." I'd be curious to hear whether Mark knows any others that had to cut four classes in the final months of beta because they weren't going to be ready by launch day.)

Further abusing the word "expansion"
I was wandering a real live offline bookstore the other day when I saw that the Guinness Book of World Records is now selling a "Gamers' Edition". I was pretty sure that this book could not end well, and I opened it up to a random page in the onling gaming section to confirm my suspicions. The book informed me that City of Heroes holds the official record for most "free expansions", noting that, while the original EQ has released 14 expansions, they were paid expansions.

Let me preface my following comment by saying that I have never played EQ1, and I lasted about one evening in COH, so I might not know what I'm talking about here. That said, I would be shocked if any of COH's "issue" updates had a feature list comparable to a paid expansion to EQ1. Moreover, though Guinness will apparently print anything they can get their hands on if they think it will occupy part of a page in a book they can sell some idiot for cash, I don't recall the COH updates being remarkably more thorough than, say, EQ2's Game Updates. EQ2 has released more than 50 of them, Sony just didn't think of calling them "free expansions".

In short, can anyone tell me who the mythical competitor is that produces the game where they would be charging for the content that "free expansion" providers are graciously giving to their paying subscribers for free (if you ignore the "paying subscriber" part)?

PLZ FIND ANUTHER WURD KTHXBYE.
If there's any question of whether you need to tack another word onto it, such as "free", "live", or "blog", what you have is not, in fact, an expansion. So, my parting advice if there are any people in marketing reading this? Please stop acting like the cat who says "I am in thy library, executing a grammatical procedure of great destructive force against thy lexicon".

What can we learn from Warhammer population balance stats?

MMORPG companies are pretty notorious for never releasing statistics unless said numbers can be spun in a way that makes their product look good. As Mark Jacobs once put it, if the numbers are good, you release them.

For instance, Blizzard will happily mention that WoW has 11.5 million active players, but will never provide the breakdown of what portion of those players are located in Western markets that actually pay the full subscription fee. Funcom didn't release any subscriber retention figures for Age of Conan at all, they just yanked down more than half of their servers, suggesting that the numbers weren't all that good.

(Alternately, you can do what Turbine does, namely:
1. Release the number of characters created - yes, that number includes alts, characters on accounts that have since been canceled, and may or may not include characters from the FREE open beta
2. Hope some incompetent journalist thinks they can draw a line between that lone, misleading number and the number of unique accounts paying $15 a month
3. Sit back and whistle innocently about how you can't comment on the obviously inaccurate figures being posted in the press because you don't discuss numbers.)

Anyway, Mythic has chosen to release some numbers on faction population balance, a topic I discussed back in the days when the game wasn't out and us blog-types had nothing better to do then speculate on what would happen when it came out. What can we learn from the numbers?

Relative Balance
The closest to a hard number we get is for the server Monolith, described as having "the most noticeable population Faction difference", which is an "accounts active per faction" ratio of 44% order to 56% destruction. (In all fairness, I don't recall Blizzard ever releasing anything even this detailed for Alliance/Horde splits.) A few brief caveats apply. Mythic is defining "active" as "players who are currently gaining Experience and/or Renown Points". Also, players more familiar with WoW server rules should be aware that ALL Warhammer servers are one faction per server, so it's completely unambiguous whether an account is Order, Destruction, or Neither for a given server.

In practical terms, a 44:56 ratio would mean that, if 100 players showed up to a battle, Destruction would outnumber Order by 12 players, or two full 6-player groups. That's not bad for the worst server on the block, though it might still be enough to leave Order on the defensive nigh continuously. Unfortunately, the crucial second piece of the puzzle is the average number of player hours per account.

Let's say that a large number of the Order players are actually alts of Destruction players from other servers, who picked Monolith because the server select screen desperately requested that they do so. Those players might not show up for our hypothetical battle because they're off on their mains. There's also an underlying assumption that player faction choice is independent of player dedication - if more competitive players are choosing Order to get away from the incompetent unwashed masses playing on the Destruction side, for example, the trend could be dead even, as a smaller proportion of the total players who play Destruction might be online at any given time.

If that number looks murky, don't even bother with the reported 49/51 split for "accounts active per server" averaged across all US servers. We don't even know what that number is measuring. Does an account with an Order main on one server and Destruction alts on two other servers get counted once for Order (most /played), once for Destruction (more servers with active characters), once for Order and twice for Destruction (one point for each active server - I'm guessing this is the answer based on the post) or by some other method?

Incentive Balance
The other half of the numbers are a bunch of figures showing that Mythic has managed to balance things so that - both for the average and for the worst case server - the rates of exp/time are dead even. (On Monolith, the average exp/rp per character is slightly higher for Order, which may suggest a smaller number of more dedicated players, but the rate of exp gain over time is still even.)

This is one issue that I was a bit worried about - in WoW PVP, you really don't get much in the way of rewards if your side loses - and it's good to see that Mythic has managed to keep it from becoming a problem. Perhaps the game's much-maligned open-RVR-killing scenarios are saving the day by providing the out-numbered faction a safe haven in which they can continue to level and get all of the various good progress-related things that players of MMORPG's expect to be able to get as they play. Perhaps there's something else at work - between open-RVR influence and other changes that have gone into the game during the time since it's launch, I'm not 100% qualified to say whether Mythic has come up with some other means of helping the out-numbered side keep up. Either way, it's a good number.

What numbers should we see?
In the end, companies don't like to release these numbers because they don't want to reinforce any negative perceptions in the community. In Mythic's case, I'm sure that the churn rates for the game's first two months were not pretty. Reinforcing the idea that the game was not yet ready for prime time with a number that said that a majority of its players had left might have been a bad idea. Likewise, some players won't want to play on low population servers/factions for fear of not being able to find people to play with. Then again, refusal to disclose numbers, be they subscriber numbers or population balance numbers, can paint the devs into a corner.

For example, by many accounts, it sounds like the game desperately needed server merges to get enough players onto the same server to have real RVR battles. Unfortunately, server merges generate bad press by implying to the outside world that the server populations are low. (The inside world already knows that the population is low because they have a battle and no one shows up.) Instead, Mythic had to roll out a system that said "we really should be merging your server, but we don't want to be seen as the ones pulling the trigger, so here's a transfer tool". As I've noted previously, they're allowing inactive accounts to take part in server non-merge transfers, and Stargrace recently resubscribed to Warhammer only to be encouraged to leave her server before she even zoned into the game, presumably because its population was so low that Mythic did not feel it could be saved by encouraging new players to roll on that server.

Likewise, there is much speculation within the Warhammer community that, with many players having finished much of the WoW expansion, and with Mythic's efforts to add much-needed improvements to various parts of the game over the four months since it came out, the time is ripe for players to return. If this improvement to subscriber numbers does materialize, though, no one will know about it, because we don't know what the numbers were before things improved. (Mark Jacobs may actually have come around to this view of thinking, as he implies that EA will be releasing some figures at their next earnings call.)

In the end, numbers are just measures of reality. You might think you're doing yourself a favor by conceling the fact that half your servers are underpopulated, but it comes back to bite you in the rear end when new players blunder into a server, not knowing that it's deserted, don't find the level of community they want, and quit (in the process, missing out on your game). If things are bad, your problem is that things are bad, not the crippling fear that people might FIND OUT that things are bad. In an online world, they probably already know.

P.S. If anyone is looking to release more usage statistics to flesh out a post like the one Mythic put in their Herald post, the number I'd love to see is median hours /played per account (per week or whatever time unit you use). That plus the percentage Mythic did release, would probably have cleared up all the questions I asked. Thanks! ;)

Can Keep Warfare Overpopulation Be Fixed?

This week has seen both Mythic and Blizzard hard at work to deal with a fundamental problem with the design of keep seige warfare in MMORPG's - the seiges are TOO popular. This would seem to be a good problem to have, since it means that people are actually chosing to use the content. Unfortunately, MMORPG servers are built with the assumption that players are going to be spread out over the entire game world, and they tend to develop problems when hundreds of players are fighting it out for control of a single room. How can we deal with this?

Mythic: Throw the bums out (first)!
Mythic's approach is to add a new system that throws under-leveled players out of the keep to make room for max level players as the area becomes overcrowded. This isn't entirely without controversy on its own, as much of the draw of the Warhammer Public Quest approach is that anyone can come as they are, even under-leveled, and contribute to the battle, but I suppose most people will agree that max level characters will contribute the most.

Unfortunately, this alone is not enough to clear out server-crashing crowds, so the system will eventually lock down the entire area, punting even max level late-comers to the nearest warcamp. Players are concerned about what happens when you die and need to run back, amongst other details.

It'll be interesting to hear how this works in practice, but it does seem that "open world RVR" loses some of its lustre if it has to be partially locked down, even if this stops shy of actually instancing the keeps outright.

Blizzard: End the battle, end the lag: destroying Wintergrasp to save it
Blizzard is outright blaming Wintergrasp crowds for general server lag. As someone who is almost always actually in Wintergrasp when the battle is on, I think Wintergrasp may be falsely accused here - some of the worst outdoor lag I've seen has happened when Wintergrasp was NOT up and running. That said, it's certainly a problem when 300 people show up in peak hours and you can't actually see anything that's happening - I've been feared during the server lag and had the server freeze up for so long that my character physically ran clear through the keep wall before the server recovered.

In response, Blizzard added some balance tweaks in the January 7th PTR patch notes that appear to be aimed at ending the battle more quickly.

Without delving too deeply into the nitty gritty, there are three outer courtyards that the attacking team can go after, from which they attempt to break through to reach the one central courtyard. From the central courtyard, the attacking side has to batter down the final door to the keep, and one or more attackers has to go in and capture the orb, a 10 second channel that breaks on any damage. Under the new changes, the keep door will become much weaker and the orb will be captured instantly upon being clicked by an attacker.

I understand the problem that Blizzard is trying to address here - the initial stages of fighting spread out the battle across (or even outside) the keep, but the last stand against the door and in the orb room really force all the players to pack into a server-crippling mob. Once that happens, it may be in the server's best interest to end the battle quickly, and Blizzard has a clear preference for ending battles in favor of the offense so that the keep will change hands often.

The issue is that these changes, coupled with an increase in vehicle HP (which favors the attacking team, since they need vehicles to break through the walls), are going to vastly worsen a balance of power that already greatly favors the attacking team. Simply put, they may be destroying Wintergrasp to save it.

Can keep seiges work without crashing servers?
A large part of the problem may be due to the lack of options; WoW has only the single keep (and it is attackable on a fixed, if hard to keep track of, timer), while Warhammer's zone control system clearly indicates to players which fortresses are currently available for capture. If players COULD spread out to attack multiple fronts and still maintain some of the feel of the seige campaign, perhaps they would - I suggested incentives for just such an approach the last time I wrote on Wintergrasp crowding.

The other side of the problem, the technical one, though, may sadly be unsolvable. There is a lot of room for server optimization, perhaps including code that renders things at a lower resolution when the going gets rough, but the servers have a limited capacity. Eve recently asked players to schedule their invasions in advance, but Blizzard already knows when the Wintergrasp battles will occur, and that doesn't seem to be helping them fix the congestion. If two of the biggest guns in MMORPG's today can't fix this problem, perhaps MMORPG technology is still too new to fix this problem just yet. That's a real shame, because a good seige can be a lot of fun.

The Perils of Microtransactions, and the Wrath 3.0.8 PTR

UPDATE (3:10 PM EST): The line about DK appearences has been removed from the newer version of the notes, so there might NOT be any new textures beyond the ones introduced in the expansion launch. Take the relevant section of this post with a grain of salt.


Warhammer's getting a new patch today, and you know what that means: Breaking news from Blizzard! (This is why competition in the MMORPG marketplace is a good thing, even if you're never going to play another game beyond your own.) Some tidbits:

Paid Character Recustomization
The rumored paid character customization system was rolled out live with zero advance notice, perhaps figuring that any complaints would be lost in the storm over EQ2 exp potions. The changes are benign for the most part - $15 lets you change any portion of your character's appearance that does NOT affect gameplay, i.e. gender, face, skin color, name, etc. As Rohan notes, I don't expect there to be an Azeroth-shaking number of takers for this.

The only catch? The PTR patch notes are mentioning that:

Death Knights have access to unique death-knight only facial textures and skin tones. These can be selected at the character creation screen.

Ordinarily, I'm 100% behind companies raising a little revenue by offering cosmetic perks that don't affect gameplay. Catch is, Death Knights are one of the major features of the expansion, which is less than a month old.

Maybe there was no malicious intent, but it certainly looks suspicious to be adding in new appearances so soon after the expansion and charging a $15 fee to access them on existing characters. However, offering Death Knights a free do-over would set a precedent for future additions. This is exactly why adding microtransactions to an existing subscription game can be dangerous.

Fanservice from the PTR's
From the version of the PTR notes up on MMO Champion (I'm writing this off of the 15:30 CET update), there are some interesting tidbits about the new PTR, which is supposedly going up today (client is already out for download).

- I will be receiving the Loremaster of Kalimdor achievement retroactively, as they're cutting the quest requirement rather than taking the time to figure out what the problems are.

- Warlocks and Shadow Priests can rejoice, as DOT's and other debuffs will apparently tap enemies. I'm curious whether this means that every class will now have some form of instant-cast tapping spell.

- They've finally removed the race restrictions from mounts, so expect to see a bunch of Alliance on Mechanostriders and Tauren on, well, anything but a Kodo. This is one of those lore things that someone on the dev team apparently got worked up over late in the original beta, only to bend the rules for an increasing variety of rare mounts. I don't see why Blizzard would WANT to restrict players from timesinks, and apparently Blizzard finally agrees, four years later.

- That said, the racial mount change was almost certainly driven by the addition of new mount achievements. Basically, any mount achievement that a Tauren can manage is relatively easy for everyone else. There are new mount/minipet achievements up to 100 of each. I'm not sure that there even are 100 minipets in the game at the moment (Warcraft Pets lists 110, but that includes promotional pets that aren't even available anymore). After a skim through Warcraft Mounts, I'm pretty sure that 100 mounts will be similarly difficult/impossible without raid achievements, rare/raid drops, and possibly even the CCG mounts that cost real money. Expect many, many complaints on this front from the community if the version MMO-Champion is reporting is accurate. The reward here is not merely a different colored mount, but the elusive flying Dragonhawk mount used in the patch 2.4 dailies.

- There are a variety of interesting class changes. Slow Fall is now castable on other players, which opens the door for crazy mid-air battles. The confusing Feral Attack Power stat has been removed, with an overhaul to the underlying mechanics to get the same effect without having to create weapons that only one spec of one class wants. Fury Warriors get some buffs to Bloodthirst and Titan's Grip (no hit penalty!). Arcane mages are supposedly in for a bit of a revamp, as are hunters.

- Finally, MMO-Champion datamined a "pack mule" spell that summons a mule that lets you browse your bank. That's potentially pretty cool, if it isn't the reward for some insane combination of achievements or something.

Overall, nothing groundbreaking here that's really going to shake the post-80 game. Still, it looks like an interesting polish patch overall.

What can WoW learn from the LOTRO and EQ2 expansions?

I was pretty stunned when Turbine announced a Nov 18th launch date for the LOTRO expansion. Did they not know about the 11 million pound gorilla in the room? Had some fool of a Took pulled a Leeroy on their marketing effort? All their expansion hype was going to disappear into the dust left by millions of players tromping to Northrend!

A meeting of Turbine's marketing department?

Well, when I saw that EQ2 ALSO chose Nov 18th for their new expansion, I realized what was going on. These guys AREN'T trying to expand their playerbase by winning over former WoW players in the lull after players run out of Wrath content. Indeed, I'd venture a guess that most people who have stuck with EQ2 for four years now are relatively well aware of the contrast between their game and Blizzard's. Rather, they're trying to RETAIN existing players. And that means providing an expansion at the same time as everyone else is getting their new toys (just in time for the holidays).

So here we have two other MMORPG companies designing features that they hope will help retain players, in addition to recruiting new ones (which, one is forced to concede, probably dies down as a game ages). As long as we're discussing things WoW has borrowed from Warhammer, perhaps it's worth looking at the other two MMORPG expansions of November.

Complete Editions
Both Turbine and Sony have opted to provide so-called "complete editions" of their expansions - one $40 box gets a brand new player all the other expansions that came before (and even the first month's fee). Blizzard's reasons for not doing so right now are obvious - they were presumably raking in decent cash from sales of TBC right up until Nov 13, and hoping for even more as new accounts need to upgrade twice en route to 80. Still, that, on top of the monthly fee, is both a deterrent and an inconvenience to new accounts (or upgrading accounts of former players - my wife's account still isn't TBC-capable, and $70 in expansion fees over the course of 20 levels on top of the monthly fee is a hefty price tag for re-entry). Just because Blizzard CAN throw their weight around in this dept does not mean that they SHOULD.

More Iconic Lore
Turbine has a huge advantage in this department - everyone knows their lore, and actually seeing it play out has been described as "awesome sauce". Blizzard has their work cut out for them here. While they have been happy to release additional WoW lore in the form of novels and comics, most of the players who are familiar with the lore at all are probably familiar with the lore of the GAMES. By the end of this expansion, basically all of those major figures will be defeated, leaving a variety of less iconic options for the third expansion.

Horizontal Expansion?
I've often taken it for granted that Blizzard must always expand WoW vertically - i.e. every expansion must include both a level cap increase and a gear reset, to ensure that all players consume as much of the leveling content as possible. After seeing how Wrath has unfolded, with entry level raids that are actually aimed at entry level guilds, perhaps it would be possible to have an expansion WITHOUT a cap increase. And, indeed, EQ2 is doing just that.

EQ2's Shadow Odyssey does allow for player power inflation. The game's equivalent of talent points are earned via an alternate advancement system that awards additional points for various things (many of which also award exp). With the expansion, players will get more alternate advancement points to play with. There will presumably be some loot in the new non-raid content that players can use to help tackle the old raid content as well. One might argue that both of these things are simply more levels without actually raising the technical level cap. In some ways, that's accurate, and a problem since it makes it a lot harder for players to use their level to evaluate the strength of their characters relative to the enemy. Then again, Blizzard may need to look into some form of alternate advancement. There are a variety of balance problems that are going to come with tacking on more levels, more talent points, and more skills every expansion.

Item Advancement
LOTRO is introducing named item advancement, wherein your items can gain exp and be reforged into stronger items. This system is not without its flaws; there is a heavy randomization element that will make it very hard to obtain gear with the stats players want. Also, for some idiotic reason, leveling your first legendary weapon on old world content that isn't worth exp is a prerequisite for actually being allowed to enter the expansion. Still, this idea is in some ways attractive. It might be nice to feel like your trusty weapon has stuck with you without being left behind the damage curve.

Retooling the old world, and scaling
The EQ2 expansion includes a feature WoW players have been crying for - dungeons that scale from level 50 to level 80. A large portion of WoW's content, especially the old world instances, is very hard to experience anymore simply because there aren't enough players in that specific level range to run it. With scaling instances, players who do find a group have many more options. In fact, Sony also took the time to make leveling easier (needed because, even with a decent mentoring system, their game requires more time to level in), and even to add solo content for levels below the level cap - something Blizzard just doesn't have the time to do. Maybe it's because leveling takes longer, and/or because even max level players can get alternate advancements from low level stuff, but either way, it would be nice if Blizzard could somehow find the time.


Will any of these actually make it to Azeroth?
I have no idea. But I will bet that Blizzard will be watching, and it wouldn't surprise me if a few things from this list make their way into WoW sooner rather than later.

Will Wrath's answer to Warhammer's "RVR lakes" Work?

Warhammer online has areas within its regular PVE zones where players are flagged for RVR. These are referred to as "lakes", because they tend to be in valleys or other such places to make sure it's clear where the boundaries are, and the result looks like a lake on your minimap. Wrath has an outdoor non-instanced PVP zone, Lake Wintergrasp, that I haven't spent much time with yet, but they ALSO have a very close analogy to the RVR lake. The area around the river in the Grizzly hills (with the Lumber camp at one end and Venture Bay at the other) has a number of PVP quests in the middle of one of Wrath's PVE zones.



Since, unlike Warhammer, WoW doesn't really have a culture of occasionally giving players a countdown and then flagging them for PVP (unless it's zombie week), Blizzard handled this by implementing quests that flag players for PVP for as long as the player has the quest in their quest log. Completing these quests awards [Venture Coin], which are used to purchase a handful of items (notably ranged slot items for hybrid classes, and a pair of trinkets - click the coin link for the list). There's another "lake-equivalent" area in Icecrown, but I don't know if it has a currency.



Will it work? Well, it did lure me in there, but, in true WoW PVE form, I went first thing in the morning. All the objectives can be completed by killing enemy NPC's, and I was in and out in about half an hour with 44 coins. The most expensive item on the vendor costs 70, so this is a 2-3 visit endeavor for me. I encountered a single enemy player, who killed me while I was farming mobs and was gone before I got back.

Real world PVP in WoW? Sorry, Blizzard, not this time.

Warhammer exit poll

As you may have gathered from recent posting volume, I did not renew my subscription to Warhammer at the end of the month that comes with the box. (Brief aside: I don't understand why the online gaming community - not just Warhammer players mind you - calls this a "free" month, since you can't get it without buying a box that costs more than a month of the service.) I didn't feel this decision especially worth commenting on at the time, as it had more to do with wanting to play Wrath on my main (which I have been playing for four years now) than with NOT wanting to play Warhammer. As Syp describes, reports of the death of this game are greatly exaggerated by the timing of its launch. This is the tyranny of the monthly fee, I suppose - having more patience with the game literally costs money out of your pocket.



Well, Mythic sent out a poll to former subscribers to try and found out precisely how many of us aren't playing anymore because of Wrath. I figured that I'd cut them a little deal, by putting a little more thought into the survey than I otherwise would have, in exchange for providing me with material for a blog post. This way (hopefully ;)) at least someone is going to read it.

Question 1: Why did you decide to stop playing?

I have zero complaints about customer service, the general quality of the game, etc, etc. The two gameplay tickboxes I did click are the same ones I, and everyone else, has been talking about - the incentives herd players into scenarios, meaning that there aren't players around to participate in public quests or open RVR. And, ruh roh, I clicked the "went back to another game" box....

Question 2: You're leaving us for Wrath, aren't you?!

Lest there be any doubt about why this particular survey was sent out this particular week, note that they've allowed two separate checkboxes for World of Warcraft AND Wrath of the Lich King, just to make absolutely sure that they get everyone. Also note that they strangely do NOT list Lord of the Rings Online, which has an expansion coming out this week. I suppose you just don't talk about competitors that are smaller than you, for fear of giving them publicity.

Question 3: What makes that game experience better/different than Warhammer?
Response (my actual response to the form):
"Warhammer's scenarios are excellent, but the server population in my level bracket did not support open RVR or public quest content (which was good when players were available to participate). World of Warcraft offers superior solo quest content; though its PVP is inferior, I feel I am investing in a character I will use again in the next patch/expansion. I did not feel that item rewards from RVR/PQ's improved my performance sufficiently to be noticed in scenarios. Either there were other players supporting me and my side won, or we were disorganized and my side lost. This basically removed the incentive to participate in the non-scenario content, and thus most of the depth from the game."

Question 4: When you played Warhammer Online, how did you primarily play?
A: Solo RVR. Other options were solo, PQ's with an informal group, PQ's with a group you joined (I'm guessing this means finding a group first and then looking for a PQ, rather than joining whatever open group - if any - is already at the PQ when you arrive), Joined and played in a Guild, Scenario RVR, and joined a warband to crush my enemies. Yes, the crushing of enemies thing was actually in the survey. I suppose I could have ticked the Scenario RVR box instead, but I wasn't sure if they meant that to imply joining with a premade group.

Question 5: How likely would you be to play Warhammer again if your issues were addressed?
A: Definitely would consider (5 on a scale of 1 to 5), by which I mean that I'm almost certain I will get back to Warhammer sometime in the next year (though EA only cared about the number, rather than any additional commentary).

Question 6: What additional feature would influence you most to logging back in?

Honestly, there isn't that much wrong with the game's zones or creatures, the issue is that the incentives don't encourage players to use the above. Of the options, I felt the quest team was the closest one to blame, but this one could really have used a write-in.

Question 7: So, which one of our marketing people gets credit for selling you the game in the first place?

A: At least this time they included a write-in, so I made sure to give a shout-out to the blogosphere.

Question 8: What did you like most about the game?

A: This one was easy, RVR and exploring the world. I suppose I should have written in scenarios just in case they're listening to the people who want them gone from the game. Oh well.

Question 9: Are you allergic to the concept of paying monthly fees?

The actual question asks whether you've played MMO's before, but they break it out into subscription vs free to play. Inquiring minds at EA, home of microtransaction central, want to know!

Question 10: How many other MMO's did you subscribe to while playing Warhammer?
A: 1, choices were 0, 1, 2, and 3 or more. Perhaps they're following up on Mark Jacob's silly assertion that the idea that players only play one subscription game at a time is silly. Personally, it's not so much that I can't afford the second fee as that I don't have time to play more than one game, so I effectively vote with my virtual feet.

Question 11: Have you ever subscribed to the following MMORPG's?

Again, LOTRO, which was, as far as I know, arguably the number 2 North American MMO until Warhammer came along, is not even on the list. Can't risk reminding players about the competition I suppose. Technically speaking, one could argue that it isn't possible to "subscribe" to Guild Wars, whose entire business model is the lack of a monthly fee, but I suppose it's a bit much to expect the guys in EA marketing to do that much research. Also, I paid Square about $5 in pro-rated monthly fee before pulling the plug on their mandatory grouping based game, so I'm not sure that I really count as subscribing per se.

Question 12: What other systems that EA sells games for do you own?

The PC is the clear winner in terms of my gaming time, and I do occasionally stick my nose into the web-based Kingdom of Loathing (which I used to play a lot more seriously a few years ago). I wasn't sure which of my various consoles, none of which I've bought a new game for since March, to list in the number three slot. And, if I start getting email from EA regarding random Wii shovelware after clicking the Wii checkbox, I won't feel a moment's guilt in flagging it as spam.

Question 12: How much time do you spend gaming?
A: More than 10 hours/week. Actually, it's probably more like 10 on the nose, but 10 or more was the largest option in the poll. The others were less than 3, 3-5, 6-9, 10+, and "not sure". I'd be curious to see why they didn't ask about a higher number, given MMORPG stereotypes and all.

Questions 13-15: A/S/L?
A: Actually, they wanted my email instead of my location, and I would have thought that they already HAD my email since they sent me an invitation to take the survey. Go figure.



Strangely, they didn't actually ask me for any suggestions, other than the multiple choice "what would bring you back". If they HAD asked for a suggestion, I might have suggested some form of looking for guild interface, or *gasp* forum. I wasn't in a guild until the very end of my time in Warhammer, and, frankly, they were mostly active in the tier above my level bracket. (I might not have joined a guild at all, except I needed one to get at the RVR gear vendor.)

Overall, though, I didn't leave Warhammer with any hard feelings. Perhaps I would have gotten more tired of it if I'd spent more time doing nothing but scenarios (which were, at least in the quantities I did them, enjoyable). This way, Mythic can have more time to polish the game up, notably with the forthcoming Heavy Metal patch, and it should be ready to put its best foot forward when I decide I want a break from Wrath. Everyone wins. Well, except EA. They're very sad that I'm not paying them anymore. Sorry EA.

Warhammer World Event Incentives

My two most recent posts have been about world event incentives in WoW - specifically Hallow's End and the Zombie Plague. Each case came up lacking. Well, Mythic has a counter-offensive of sorts. Via Book of Grudges:

Witching Night (Halloween)
Witching Night is live now and sounds like it includes about what you'd expect - costumes, some tome of knowledge unlocks, and some new public quests. The new PQ's are located in the open PVP areas of the game, and supposedly have a longer than normal reset timer to make the quests more competitive. This could end poorly with population balance being what it is. Still, the game's fanbase is crying out for something, anything, to encourage world RVR, so this may be just the ticket.

At any rate, it beats fishing for random spawns from WoW's trick or treat bags. I got lucky and obtained my squashling on my main the night the drop change went live. Since then, I have been trick or treating about 3-4 times per day on my six alts, and none of them have been fortunate enough to obtain a squash. (I also don't understand how they ever thought the mask achievement was a good idea, but at least they acknowedged that one). Even if the Warhammer PQ's devolve to a mob-tapping zerg that gets locked down by the dominant faction, they're probably going to be an improvement over logging into characters for 10 seconds each to loot a treat bag and log off.

Heavy Metal
Mythic's first major content update is going to introduce the two tanking classes to the game. They wear heavy armor, and Mythic apparently likes puns, so they're holding a world event called Heavy Metal. Har har har. :P

Obviously, details are scarce, and the content that eventually appears on the servers is more important than the content that the press release claims is going to happen. That said, the Mythic approach sounds promising. There will be daily tasks of some sort, and players will get event influence (kind of like rep) for completing them. The top reward being promised is early access to the new classes, though it's unclear how they're going to implement this.

In practice, the event might turn out to be similar to WoW's world event achievements, only you're given the goals one per day instead of all-at-once. Also, throwing the entire server at a single goal (even if it's something like "perform a /metal emote over a fallen enemy player" that can be done anywhere) may be good or bad - there will certainly be others to work with, but it will become more important that each day's event is actually balanced/doable (since a large chunk of the population will be attacking it on that day, and that day only), and that whatever spawns/etc are used be able to handle the number of players who show up.

That said, this event definitely sounds on paper like it has some great potential. An event specific faction is a great approach that could add a lot to future world events. If Mythic can pull this off, they certainly deserve a /tip of the hat.

Wait, MORE scenario rewards?
One thing that puzzles me, though, is that the Metal event will feature a special event scenario, which will offer greater than usual reknown. I find this decision puzzling. I personally loved scenarios, but there's no denying that the narrative of Warhammer's first month has been dominated by complaints that players discovered how scenarios offer the best rate of advancement and haven't done anything else since - see Keen blasting the community for doing so.

I don't see why Mythic would think it's in their best interest to add yet another scenario with rewards even better than the rewards that are already better than everything else in the game. Did the people who thought ahead to put the Witching Night PQ's in open RVR zones not talk to the Metal event design team? Was this simply an unused scenario that Mythic had already developed and then cut for fear of players spending all their time in scenarios? It seems curious.

What's in store for World Events?
I suspect that both companies (and their competitors) are going to be watching closely to see how the current batch of world events play out. It's an interesting time in MMORPG history to see so many events in multiple games over such a narrow window. (One presumes that Turbine may also have something planned for the launch of the expansion no one is going to hear about, due to their decision to launch it the weekend after the 11 million pound gorilla.) Hopefully the best new ideas will win and get broader acceptance, so that we can all have better events down the road.