I went back and forth on whether to bother with New Year's resolutions and predictions this year. I play a bunch of different games, and I'm not going to change what game I'm playing just to comply with a post from late December - thus I usually end up with a handful of very specific goals that I know I will get done in the next few months and a bunch of vague/qualitative hand-waving for the remainder of the year. Likewise, it's hard to predict much of anything with any accuracy in MMO's since we don't really have the data we'd need to do so.
Instead, this year, here are some things that I'm curious about.
Will Marvel Heroes Pay Off?
I made a late-year-decision to pre-purchase $130-worth of upcoming characters for this game. So far, so good, but the year is young. My shortest-term goal is to get Cyclops to level 60 to start the synergy exp gravy train rolling. My mid-range goal is to have at least 10 characters to level 25 for the first tier stat synergy bonuses (currently 2 for Cyclops and Deadpool), and the long-term is to have at least 10 characters to level 50 for the upper tier stat bonuses (currently just Cyclops). If at least five of the Advance Pack characters make this roster then it's pretty safe to say that the purchase paid off for me.
Will TESO/Wildstar/EQ Next/Camelot Unchained customers revolt?
TESO and Wildstar have announced second quarter release dates, presumably with non-refundable pre-NDA-drop pre-purchase offers to follow. Western console players have not historically tolerated subscription business models, so it's hard to see how TESO does not have a business model re-launch this year. Wildstar at least has the sci-fi sub-genre going for it, but is it far enough outside the box to beat the non-subscription trend that has now claimed every AAA MMO since World of Warcraft? Or, will both products (intentionally or otherwise) charge early adopters $60 for their game box and upwards of $100 for pre-paid 6-12 month subscriptions, only to go F2P within the first year?
Meanwhile, SOE is hard at work pre-selling alpha access to Everquest Next Landmark - which sounds like an odd cross between the real Everquest Next and a paid public test server for EQN player studio content. Camelot Unchained won't launch this year, but paid alpha testing for potentially thousands of Kickstarter backers (mostly in the $200+ range, plus a smaller number who get earlier internal testing access) is supposed to begin this fall.
Thus, by the end of the year, there are scenarios where large numbers of players are dissatisfied with their pre-purchases. Will customers actually change their behavior in the future? Are we as a demographic just willing to accept this as the cost of being present for the launch of each online game? Are these games even catering to the traditional MMO demographic found on forums and blogs, or are they attempting/succeeding in broadening the market somehow?
Will a major title's F2P re-launch go under in 2014?
I strongly debated making this heading title "LOTRO" due to uncertainty about its license option years, my longstanding questions about whether revenue from Turbine's version of "free to play" is inherently front-loaded, and the curious decision NOT to develop an expansion pack for 2014. In fairness, longterm subscribers are correctly noting that with required annual expansions and diminishing restrictions on non-subscribers, it can feel like they're paying more for no good reason.
Bottom line here is that the closing of City of Heroes can be written off as the wrath of NCSoft, but another high profile F2P relaunch going down could have an effect on customer confidence. If not LOTRO, then perhaps Aion, Tera, or one of the Funcom titles? Or perhaps it just isn't possible to affect gamers' consumer confidence - see above discussion.
Any Late Year Surprises?
In 2013, the big expectations were for end-of-year TESO and Wildstar news, leaving the beginning of the year pretty quiet and the end of year similarly quiet once both titles punted to 2014. All these moves mean a relatively crowded schedule for the 2nd-3rd quarters (TESO, Wildstar, EQN:L, WoW's Warlords expansion)... and what precisely for the back end of the year? Syp's annual list notwithstanding, I don't see a ton of waves here. I know better than to suggest a Titan reveal will happen this year, but this could be a good platform for someone with something up their sleeves - SOE? Turbine? - to make some waves.
What are you curious about in 2014?
Showing posts with label COH. Show all posts
Showing posts with label COH. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 7, 2014
Monday, September 10, 2012
The Captive MMO Audience
Roger at Contains Moderate Peril suggests that MMO players tend to forget that they are also consumers. He notes that we are fast to blame for-profit companies that kill games for monetary reasons, but slow to hold service providers we are otherwise fond of accountable for failure to provide services. This sounds reasonable in the aggregate, but I don't find that I have either of these problems. I also spend almost none of my time doing social activities, like raiding or PVP, that would tie me down to a specific product. Perhaps these things are related?
At issue are delays to the Riders of Rohan pre-purchase compensation package. Roger correctly notes that Turbine accepted payment in full in advance for pre-purchase of a product with a promised date that Turbine failed to meet. This might in most other circumstances be considered breach of contract. Instead of complaining, I and various others actually praised the move as a way to deliver a more polished product at what may also be a more strategic time.
The guys at Penny Arcade once quipped that Blizzard had developed a business model in which they rent players' friends to them on a monthly basis. No matter how early or late, how buggy or how polished, everyone needs to buy the new content when it is released if they are to play together. (This part isn't unique to MMO's - I've seen friends pester each other to buy new maps for FPS's, and I don't believe any of them ever received a cut from the games' publishers for this peer pressure marketing campaign.) A player who does, as Roger suggests, feel that they are not getting acceptable service finds their friends held hostage - there may be various alternative games on the market, but the odds of reassembling the same group are low.
By contrast, I have the luxury of acting like a pure consumer because there's no one waiting on me to get the new content to fill out their raid group. I never considered pre-purchasing Rohan, because I know from past experience that Turbine will offer steep discounts within a month or two (the new date is not that far from Black Friday). I'm not thrilled with Turbine's decision to bundle in a bunch of extras I don't want to justify a higher price tag for the expansion package, but I don't need to pay the premium that will be required of the captive portion of the audience.
Ironically, the cost of expanding the MMO demographic beyond the traditional social, group-oriented player may have been that the market actually is less tolerant of the things that studios got away with in 2005 when it was a smaller but more loyal playerbase. For good or for ill, perhaps millions of players are now free to quit games like WoW and SWTOR precisely because less of the MMO audience are captives.
At issue are delays to the Riders of Rohan pre-purchase compensation package. Roger correctly notes that Turbine accepted payment in full in advance for pre-purchase of a product with a promised date that Turbine failed to meet. This might in most other circumstances be considered breach of contract. Instead of complaining, I and various others actually praised the move as a way to deliver a more polished product at what may also be a more strategic time.
The guys at Penny Arcade once quipped that Blizzard had developed a business model in which they rent players' friends to them on a monthly basis. No matter how early or late, how buggy or how polished, everyone needs to buy the new content when it is released if they are to play together. (This part isn't unique to MMO's - I've seen friends pester each other to buy new maps for FPS's, and I don't believe any of them ever received a cut from the games' publishers for this peer pressure marketing campaign.) A player who does, as Roger suggests, feel that they are not getting acceptable service finds their friends held hostage - there may be various alternative games on the market, but the odds of reassembling the same group are low.
By contrast, I have the luxury of acting like a pure consumer because there's no one waiting on me to get the new content to fill out their raid group. I never considered pre-purchasing Rohan, because I know from past experience that Turbine will offer steep discounts within a month or two (the new date is not that far from Black Friday). I'm not thrilled with Turbine's decision to bundle in a bunch of extras I don't want to justify a higher price tag for the expansion package, but I don't need to pay the premium that will be required of the captive portion of the audience.
Ironically, the cost of expanding the MMO demographic beyond the traditional social, group-oriented player may have been that the market actually is less tolerant of the things that studios got away with in 2005 when it was a smaller but more loyal playerbase. For good or for ill, perhaps millions of players are now free to quit games like WoW and SWTOR precisely because less of the MMO audience are captives.
Friday, August 31, 2012
What I've Been Working On: DCUO
DCUO gets the next slot in my Labor Day round-up in recognition of other news in comic MMORPG's. I picked up all of the remaining DLC's when I was dumping my now generally useless Station Cash. As a result, I now own the new Captain America shield weaponset for all characters, along with the Green/Yellow Lantern and the Earth powersets (if I make new characters), along with a few additional chunks of content.
One of the newer additions - I can't tell if this required DLC or not - are soloable daily quests that award two of the tier two dungeon tokens daily. On the plus side, this can help grind out the tokens needed to get the gear required to access some of the content I already owned - on the downside, this doesn't make the daily quest grind any less of a daily quest grind. I'm keeping an open mind, but overall I'm not spending much time in game.
If you'd told me that one superhero MMO had abruptly announced plans to close today, I would have guessed DCUO over City of Heroes/Villians. SOE is not NCsoft, but DCUO never really took off and is shackled with the costs of a licensed IP - the only significant scenario in which SOE has been forced to pull the plug on MMORPG's. By contrast, Paragon Studios' offering was an original IP that recently went free to play, and had an eight and a half year history behind it. I guess we finally have hard evidence that a business model change is not guaranteed to save every MMO that makes the attempt.
One of the newer additions - I can't tell if this required DLC or not - are soloable daily quests that award two of the tier two dungeon tokens daily. On the plus side, this can help grind out the tokens needed to get the gear required to access some of the content I already owned - on the downside, this doesn't make the daily quest grind any less of a daily quest grind. I'm keeping an open mind, but overall I'm not spending much time in game.
If you'd told me that one superhero MMO had abruptly announced plans to close today, I would have guessed DCUO over City of Heroes/Villians. SOE is not NCsoft, but DCUO never really took off and is shackled with the costs of a licensed IP - the only significant scenario in which SOE has been forced to pull the plug on MMORPG's. By contrast, Paragon Studios' offering was an original IP that recently went free to play, and had an eight and a half year history behind it. I guess we finally have hard evidence that a business model change is not guaranteed to save every MMO that makes the attempt.
Thursday, May 28, 2009
The Persistent Reward Is A Lie
The central tenet in most of the major MMORPG's these days is that time investment improves your persistent character. The persistence, not unlike the cake, is a lie. MMORPG's change all the time, whether through balance tweaks, addition of new content, or player behavior. A handful of extreme cases - the closing of AC2 and Tabula Rasa, or the complete redesign of Star Wars Galaxies - are notorious precisely because they drive home the truth that everything we have in an online game is far more temporary and fragile than we would like to believe.
In the last few weeks, we have seen an unusual number of significant mid-expansion balance changes that affect the value of incentive rewards that players have already obtained. Perhaps the changes are necessary, but that will come as little confort to players who already obtained the rewards, and are now about to discover just how temporary they were. A brief rundown:
As Blizzard discovered in their failed attempt to reset PVP honor pre-Wrath, reducing the value of player rewards/currencies by inflation is far more acceptable than taking the rewards away outright. This puts the developers in a tough spot when they launch content and discover that they screwed up.
Consumer Confidence in MMORPG Incentives
Eric at Elder Game took a look at the Cities of Heroes situation and writes that players aren't sure which content is "safe" to play since the only policy is that the GM who banned you was correct if Paragon wants them to be. The potential effects he describes on the game - millions in support costs, and a constant need for developers to band-aid the Architect system instead of creating new content - sound troubling. However, if the lack of a policy actually undermines player confidence in the whole reward structure of MMORPG's - time invested leading to improvements to your persistent character - that would be more of a Doomsday scenario.
Many raiding guilds already run into trouble at the end of an expansion cycle, when players decide that they're uninclined to invest a large amount of time and effort into raiding for gear that will be reset in a few weeks. The last thing developers need is for players to start making that kind of meta-game decision (are they going to nerf this mid-expansion?) year-round.
In the last few weeks, we have seen an unusual number of significant mid-expansion balance changes that affect the value of incentive rewards that players have already obtained. Perhaps the changes are necessary, but that will come as little confort to players who already obtained the rewards, and are now about to discover just how temporary they were. A brief rundown:
- WoW Jewelcrafters will have their profession-specific gems nerfed in the next major content patch, because the current versions are superior to other professions' self-only perks. Personally, I narrowly avoided getting burned by this one, as the gems were so good that I had been considering switching my own profession choices to get them.
- EQ2 is nerfing procs after finding that the current versions produced more damage and healing than intended.
- In the wake of problems with players exploiting City of Heroes' shiny new Mission Architect feature, the developers are removing kill badges that players had created custom missions to farm.
As Blizzard discovered in their failed attempt to reset PVP honor pre-Wrath, reducing the value of player rewards/currencies by inflation is far more acceptable than taking the rewards away outright. This puts the developers in a tough spot when they launch content and discover that they screwed up.
Consumer Confidence in MMORPG Incentives
Eric at Elder Game took a look at the Cities of Heroes situation and writes that players aren't sure which content is "safe" to play since the only policy is that the GM who banned you was correct if Paragon wants them to be. The potential effects he describes on the game - millions in support costs, and a constant need for developers to band-aid the Architect system instead of creating new content - sound troubling. However, if the lack of a policy actually undermines player confidence in the whole reward structure of MMORPG's - time invested leading to improvements to your persistent character - that would be more of a Doomsday scenario.
Many raiding guilds already run into trouble at the end of an expansion cycle, when players decide that they're uninclined to invest a large amount of time and effort into raiding for gear that will be reset in a few weeks. The last thing developers need is for players to start making that kind of meta-game decision (are they going to nerf this mid-expansion?) year-round.
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
The problem with player-created content and incentives...
I call my blog "Player Versus Developer" because there is an ongoing arms race of sorts between the two sides - players want to maximize their incentives over time by whatever means necessary, while developers want to maximize subscriptions by getting the limited content they can create to last a long time.
Now, on paper, allowing players to help with the content creation might sound like a good idea to alleviate the lack of things to do. What could possibly go wrong if you let players make their own content? Let's see what players of COH did when given the opportunity via the game's new Mission Architect feature....
Uh oh. Apparently, players are making custom levels full of carefully designed foes that appear to be strong enough for their level, but have a glaring weakness that the players' class is well suited to exploit. Then they run their characters through these trivial instances, gaining 20 levels in a single run. The devs, who were ever so proud of how much content players made (more in the first 24 hours than the devs had done in all the years since the game's release), have had to shift into damage control mode.
The head designer now claims that they ANTICIPATED exploitation. Not enough to actually, I don't know, announce that exploiters would be banned BEFORE rolling out the system - wouldn't want to rain on that press release - but they totally definitely knew that this would happen, and made a rational decision that they would rather roll the system out with no exploitation policy and ban people after the fact than articulate one in advance. (Seriously, guys, you're in uncharted territory here, there's no shame in admitting that it never occurred to you.)
Maybe player-created content is the future, but the future isn't quite here just yet.
Now, on paper, allowing players to help with the content creation might sound like a good idea to alleviate the lack of things to do. What could possibly go wrong if you let players make their own content? Let's see what players of COH did when given the opportunity via the game's new Mission Architect feature....
Uh oh. Apparently, players are making custom levels full of carefully designed foes that appear to be strong enough for their level, but have a glaring weakness that the players' class is well suited to exploit. Then they run their characters through these trivial instances, gaining 20 levels in a single run. The devs, who were ever so proud of how much content players made (more in the first 24 hours than the devs had done in all the years since the game's release), have had to shift into damage control mode.
The head designer now claims that they ANTICIPATED exploitation. Not enough to actually, I don't know, announce that exploiters would be banned BEFORE rolling out the system - wouldn't want to rain on that press release - but they totally definitely knew that this would happen, and made a rational decision that they would rather roll the system out with no exploitation policy and ban people after the fact than articulate one in advance. (Seriously, guys, you're in uncharted territory here, there's no shame in admitting that it never occurred to you.)
Maybe player-created content is the future, but the future isn't quite here just yet.
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