The Cost of Per-Hero Games

The Marvel Heroes "free to play MMO Action-RPG" is rolling out pre-launch prepurchase offers that include a $200 "Ultimate Pack" for access to all heroes and costumes announced for launch.  Traditional MMO's with a premium package this expensive have typically had to throw in a lifetime subscription. In the case of Marvel, the pack is very clear that it does not get you anything beyond the heroes announced for launch (some of which have since been delayed but will be included in the pack when they are completed).  Instead, they are marketing the $200 as a discounted price - "a $750 value" compared to what it would cost to buy the characters individually.

The sub-$10 character
Looking at Marvel Heroes' cheaper pre-launch packs, individual heroes are bundled with some costumes and exp potions for $20, but my guess is that you will be able to get your characters for less than the psychologically significant $10 price point to encourage impulse purchases post-launch.  There seems to be broad consensus around this type of price point across a variety of other games in a variety of genres.  A few examples:

• Champions in the MOBA League of Legends
• Mechs in the mech-based FPS Mechwarrior Online
• Heroes in the Warhammer Online Spin-off MOBA Wrath of Heroes
• Most monster player classes in LOTRO (free to those who take the optional subscription)
• Premade PVP "legends" characters in DCUO
• The $9 action figures that grant access to DLC characters in the popular Skylanders console game series

We live in an era of consumer objections to cash stores in MMORPG's and DLC's in console games.  In this context, it's remarkable how much customer acceptance there appears to be around business models in which companies sell access to individual pre-made characters for $5-10, even when this bumps the cost for access to the entire character roster into the hundreds of dollars. 

What you get for the money
A big part of the secret may be that you are getting something comparatively tangible for your money.  If you are playing the Marvel MMO then maybe it is worth $10 per head for you to pick up all of the Avengers who appeared in the movie.  Even the cosmetic costumes are potentially meaningful when you look at long-standing characters who have been depicted in dramatically different art styles over the decades.  Like DDO's paid content packs, it feels more rewarding to pay something to get something, compared to the model in various other games that charge players to remove restrictions that are added to make non-subscribers want to pay. 

This particular model isn't broadly transferable to traditional MMO's because our genre has focused more on vertical progression using a single character.  Games like Marvel Heroes that were designed from the ground up to take advantage of non-subscription payment methods also have a big advantage over MMO's that were designed for a subscription, only to be revamped when the market refused to tolerate that model. 

Even so, I find the concept vaguely compelling and perhaps even promising.  Most of the evidence from the last few years calls into question whether the prices the market is willing to pay are sufficient to support the development of the traditional MMO content model.  Meanwhile, here is an alternative in which studios are putting out regular, sustainable updates that customers are actually happy to pay for.  It's certainly not perfect, but it beats going out of business. 

Rift Expansion Sounds Like Guild Wars 2?

After hearing MMO Reporter's PAX Interview with Scott Hartsman, I'm struck by how his description of the leveling experience in the Rift expansion sounds like what I'm hearing others say about the leveling experience in Guild Wars 2.  Hartsman's declaration that MMO's should be about being able to play with all of your friends all of the time sounds like precisely what we've been hearing from ArenaNet. 

The Rift expansion will raise the level cap and add two new continents with solo quest content and a story quest arc.  However, Hartsman suggested that it would be more fun to do the other activities that focus more on exploration.  One example he gave was a quest alternative called "carnage" that does not require the intervention of a questgiver to get credit for killing mobs - a feature of Guild Wars 2 (and, as Tobold points out, something that Warhammer Online notoriously promised but largely failed to deliver).  Hartsman states that players will likely get the exp they need from completing one of the two continents, plus all of the side exploration and carnage bonuses and other activities.   

It's possible that Trion agrees with my speculation that GW2 may be a threat to their game due to some similar mechanics, and began planning a response well in advance of the competitor's launch.  If so, one potential downfall might be all of the currently existing content in the game.  Based on the interview it sounded like both continents were for the level 50+ crowd (though I'm not sure if this has been explicitly confirmed).  Trion's answer to GW2 cannot be gated behind 50 levels of old content if they want it to be effective. 

Gameplay Trumps Business Model

The conventional wisdom in discussions about the future of the subscription MMO is that the continued success of World of Warcraft proves that players are willing to pay each and every month for a quality product.  I think the quality of the product and the experience ultimately trumps the business model, which is precisely WHY I'm not buying this theory. 

What if the truth is that every MMO that has succeeded under the subscription model has done so because that game - at the time - offered a compelling experience that was not available elsewhere?  Looking at MMO history through this model, have games succeeded DESPITE the monthly fee - because players had nowhere else to go to get that particular experience - and not because of it?  What portions of the conventional wisdom survive under this alternate model for events, and which fall by the wayside?   

Survivors of the Subscription Era
According to MMORPG.com's list of all games by business model, there simply aren't that many MMORPG's with a mandatory subscription fee left on the market.  Many are either abandoned veterans that aren't worth the money it would cost to relaunch them or newbies that have yet to prove they can last under a subscription model.  Setting aside the 9.1 million subscriber gorilla for a moment, let's look at the highlights:

• Eve Online: Poster child for this model, whether it's space piracy, corporation scheming, hardcore PVP, or fully player-driven wars for galactic domination, Eve always has offered something that no other game on the market attempts.
  
• Rift: Technically speaking, having a well-produced game that sets and meets achievable goals and therefore delivers the most consistent update schedule in the industry isn't part of the in-game experience. 
  
  What I'd suggest is unique - based on my experience playing the game and comparing it to the other quest-based MMO's on the market - is the focus on playing with other people.  Soloing in Rift is 100% feasible and supported, but it just feels flavorless compared to all the other solo quest MMO's.  By contrast, Trion has made it easier than any other game to join groups, and I've had more fun grouping - including while leveling and even healing PUG's - than any other recent MMO I've played. 
  
  (Incidentally, if I'm correct, Guild Wars 2 may be a bigger threat to Rift than WoW, since its content is closer to what Trion does well.) 
  
• Darkfall: I don't know exactly what their state of financial success is, as the game is currently charging a reduced monthly fee and no price to create an account.  Again, though, the game offers hardcore sandbox PVP of a kind that "mainstream" games run screaming from.
  
• FFXI: Another title where I'm not so informed about current success.  In the past, though, this game has been the rear-guard of numerous old school mechanics like harsh death penalties, lengthy travel, and grinding mobs to level, but without the PVP focus of other more sandbox-ish games.  (FFXIV is harder to gauge because it only began charging a fee recently.) 
  
• Warhammer Online: At the risk of kicking a game that's down, I'd suggest that this demonstrates the flipside of the model.  Things like solo quests, group dungeons, and instanced PVP warfronts would NOT have been enough to sustain a subscription game because there were alternatives with these features on the market in 2009.  The unique portion that they did attempt to provide - RVR - proved less than compelling due to incentive and population balance issues.  

I'm not going to try and rehash this analysis for the heyday of every MMO in history, but a cursory examination looks promising.  Everquest brought the Diku MUD model into 3D.   Dark Age of Camelot did the open PVP thing correctly, with a third faction to balance populations.  LOTRO, back when it was moderately successful while charging a mandatory subscription, combined solo-accessability with a far more immersive story experience than the competition had to offer in 2007.  Games that failed to catch on often have a reason - poor execution (e.g. Vanguard) or lack of differentiation (DCUO versus similar action-based gameplay in non-subscription console games, many of which are even online these days). 

What about WoW?
All of which brings us back to WoW and the conventional wisdom.  At its launch, WoW fit the model to a T - it was the only game on the market offering the virtual world experience to players who wanted to solo or otherwise shed the inflexibility inherent in past group-oriented MMO's.  Today, though, every game that launches is derided as a "WoW Clone".  What is this dinosaur still doing if a subscription game indeed cannot endure viable competition?

I would suggest that modern WoW offers two things that its contemporaries don't:

1. Critical Mass.  While diminished by years of attrition, Blizzard's game still has the largest playerbase.  The success of Facebook does not mean that any competing social network can succeed simply by fielding a better product because the userbase is part of the value of the product.  In some ways, Blizzard's game remains an easy consensus choice because they successfully support the major forms of gameplay - solo, group, raid, PVP - under one roof.
   
2. Production Values.  No other game has the luxury of two-year expansion cycles with multiple months of non-NDA'ed public testing.  Many MMO's struggle for the resources to support all the major playstyles and ultimately end up doing one or more poorly.  It's very possible to fault Blizzard's decisions, and the game does still have the occasional bug or rough edge, but it's hard to fault Blizzard's execution in comparison to the rest of the market.

Do these things really add up to a compelling game experience not available elsewhere?  Both have their downsides - the broad playerbase makes it harder to please everyone, while the long development cycles mean lengthy droughts with no new content.  These are certainly not as big of a revolution as introducing solo play to the genre - and perhaps that's a part of the game's slow but inexorable decline.  

Back to the big picture
If the bottom line is that the game, and not the business model, defines success, how have we arrived at the era of the free to play conversion?  Entry barriers and flexibility are almost certainly part of the story - it's hard to be so worthless not to be a bargain at some reduced price.  For some games, like DDO, it's possible to have such a low profile that the free to play relaunch is actually many gamers' first chance to make a first impression.  Moreover, in the early days of the F2P switchover perhaps payment model flexibility was unique enough to be a selling point.

Today, however, many of the games that appear to have failed to compete at the price-level of the monthly fee have all made the switch.  Still charging a fee may or may not be a dealbreaker, but it's harder to spin the lack of a fee as a selling point (especially if the "optional" fee is not so optional).  In that case, the real question going forward is: When will we see a major F2P relaunch fold?  Perhaps not so soon, since many of these titles are owned by larger developers who can keep the lights on relatively indefinitely, especially propped up with a cash shop.  Still, if I'm right this question will begin to loom large in the coming years, because there just aren't that many subscription titles left to fail to sustain the subscription model. 

Blizzard's Response to Guild Wars

A few weeks back, I predicted that Blizzard would start the public testing of World of Warcraft's patch 5.0 around the August 28th launch of Guild Wars 2.  This seemed like a good bet given Blizzard's responses to Rift in 2010 and Warhammer in 2008.  For once, however, Blizzard actually moved faster than I expected.  Public testing went live last week, and the expansion now has a September 25th release date.  Working backwards, an August 21st launch date for patch 5.0, placing the new expansion's talent revamp and other features in players' hands before Guild Wars 2 can roll out (along with expansions in LOTRO and Rift), looks reasonably likely. 

I had a conversation with Spinks and Suicidal Zebra via Twitter about the release possibilities a few weeks ago.  I wonder if Blizzard felt they had to get the expansion out with non-zero time remaining in the annual passes of players (like myself) who signed up when the thing was first offered.  They never committed to doing so, but having a month of pre-expansion launch event and a month after the expansion arrives within that one-year window is a bit of a difference, since many of us would have paid for that time anyway.  Then again, perhaps the portion of the populace who are not annual pass subscribers - most likely the majority despite the surprisingly large number of annual subscribers - are the biggest flight risk.

Other than my lack of interest in Guild Wars 2, I suppose I'd be the kind of relatively inactive annual pass player that they might be targeting with this launch window.  I don't know that I would have changed plans based on the date, but I'll definitely to see how my characters fare with the new talent system.  As long as I have some Cataclysm-era stuff to wrap up anyway, there's no reason not to wait and combine that with test driving the new systems. 

Judging a Pre-Launch Game By Its Beta (Or At All)

MMOGC has a post up wondering about judging The Secret World too harshly based on its beta.  I can't speak to her experience, since I didn't really spend any time in TSW (before or after launch), but the story seems to run counter to the current trend. 

Mark Jacobs notoriously talked a big game about how keeping a beta NDA up within a month of the product's launch is a vote of non-confidence in the product, only to keep Warhammer's NDA up until four weeks before the launch date.  Today, four weeks is actually a comparatively generous amount of advance time for the closed beta NDA to be released.  (Exception - Blizzard is still holding closed testing that remains in progress but free from an NDA for multiple months.  Perhaps that's a quirk to their glacial development cycle?)

Instead, we see scheduled "beta events" which carefully manage what can be accessed by potential customers - or sometimes actual customers, since access to even these staged previews increasingly requires a non-refundable pre-purchase.  From a marketing standpoint, these events are no doubt a huge success.  Besides driving pre-sales, the limited and staged access fertilizes the grassroots, such that all the blogs are talking about the same parts of the same game at the same time for one weekend only.  Meanwhile, all of the information that a customer would need to make an informed purchasing decision about the product remains sealed away for as long as possible. 

I get what people are saying when they complain of feeling nigh persecuted for being overly enthusiastic about the upcoming hyped product.  As gamers, their anticipation is perfectly natural.  I think what we're seeing in this backlash is misplaced frustration on the part of each gamer that's also a consumer - trying to piece together enough information to tell whether to invest their time and money in a new product.  As consumers, we're put in a position where it is all too easy to make the wrong call, whether it's purchasing an unfinished product, or, in the rare and fortunate case of MMOGC et al, in writing it off too soon.

Level versus /played

Via Massively comes an interesting tidbit of Warhammer Online news.  Beyond the first fifteen levels, the game will now use the RVR Reknown level, rather than the PVE character level system for RVR scenario matchmaking.  Characters with a low PVE level will be bolstered up to some baseline while in the scenario, while higher PVE-level players with low reknown ranks will remain what's functionally a training bracket until they rank up. 

It's an interesting concept.  In PVP in general, player skill is going to play a larger role compared to /played time, and that effect is only amplified if the player spends their leveling time in (possibly solo) PVE content.  Depending on how well Warhammer has tamed the AFK problem, the time to Reknown rank 70 may actually be enough to train newbies to play with the veterans. 

On the downside, last I checked Reknown rank was character-specific rather than account-wide.  Players who really know what they are doing are potentially trapped in the training bracket for 69 levels - it's not clear to me from the patch notes whether level 40 players can group up with their friends and queue together as a group, or whether these folks will be split by reknown rank.  By the same token, someone who really likes steam-rolling newbies could presumably serially re-roll to stay in the entry level bracket and feast on the tears. 

This may be a moot point in the context of a game that's down to its last server (or two, I've lost track) simultaneously rolling out a stand-alone spinoff version of the scenario gameplay in a free to play somewhat-level-less MOBA.  Faults with the execution aside, though, separating players by some measure of skill rather than time /played may be a sound concept, especially for PVP, and it'll be interesting to see who steals it in the future. 

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?

F2P Assault on the Hard Drive

Yesterday, I posted a full run-down of five separate free to play games that are currently installed on my computer: LOTRO, DDO, EQ2X, Runes of Magic, and now DCUO.

In addition to these, I have clients for WoW (annual pass subscription), EQ2 Live (yes, this requires a separate full client install) and Rift (the latter two of which I do not want to uninstall because I want to be able to patch up quickly for free retrial weekends).

The net result of all these clients, all of which I could potentially use on short notice, is that my hard drive is 77% full and climbing rapidly.  Already gone from the hard drives of this and my previous machines are various games that I'm not actively playing, including Age of Conan (tried sometime last year pre-F2P, did not feel any particular desire to return), City of Heroes (tried back in 2007 or so), FFXI, Guild Wars, Torchlight, Warhammer, Free Realms, Vanguard, and Star Wars Galaxies (soon to be a moot point).  This does not include betas or test server clients (none of which I currently have.) 

In addition to all of the above, my post and the following comments identified half a dozen high quality F2P or formerly paid games that I have never played in any form, including: Champions Online, soon Star Trek Online, Fallen Earth, Pirates of the Burning Sea, Allods, and Wizard 101.  (Honorable mention to the soon to be closed Lego Universe.)  I'm sure there are plenty I've missed in that number, feel free to post shout-outs in the comments. 

A year or two back, I remember someone mentioning on a podcast that they had installed an MMO to an external hard drive and thinking that this was a weird call.  Now I'm vaguely considering whether I should add an external drive (perhaps SSD?) to my Christmas list, as hard drive capacity is about to become a limiting factor in my ability to try additional games.

Is anyone else's hard drive buckling under all the MMO clients, now that it is increasingly both possible and desirable to have so many at your disposal?  Any suggestions on creative or high quality external storage solutions? 

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. 

Lessons From Launch Queues

Rift Server Status Page, 9:15 PM EST, March 2nd 2011

Trion's Rift Server Status Page allows you to sort by number of players currently in the queue, which makes it easy to identify the game's most overcrowded servers.  At the time of the above screenshot, fifteen US servers had a queue.  The top twelve (the only ones in the triple digits at the time) were all amongst the seventeen servers whose names were announced prior to the beginning of the headstart.  The fact that the initial servers continue to make up such an overwhelming portion of the overpopulated list is potentially concerning. 

Chris has a post up on Rift Watchers comparing the game's queues, and addition of servers, to other game launches.  I was present for the launches of WoW and Warhammer, and can attest to the fact that they did indeed feature queues.  Blizzard, Mythic, and Trion all chose to launch with conservative numbers of servers and plans to expand rapidly if demand called for it.  The jury remains out on Rift, but I maintain that this tactic is a mistake.

The problem is that players who plan to show up in these games with their guilds are going to pick their server from the list that's available the night before launch, not the expanded list that's available after the queues hit.  The players who are able to change their server plans when they see a launch day queue are probably showing up on their own.

This means that the game's most dedicated players are going to end up stuck on a server with queues that may not get any better anytime soon.  Back in 2004, my guild opted to remain on one of the original 40 WoW servers, and we paid for that call many times over with multi-hour queues that persisted on and off for around three years.

Meanwhile, the servers that are added later fill up with players who have no social ties, making them more likely to change servers again or even leave the game outright (as Mythic discovered with Warhammer). Either way, I'd argue that having to double the number of servers after the fact is far more damaging than launching with a few servers too many. 

LOTRO aside
The one launch that seems to have gotten this question right is LOTRO.  The game had eleven servers during its open beta/headstart period, and it did not add or remove a single server until the free to play relaunch in 2010 (which added three new servers to the mix).  I was horrified when Turbine announced that they were not adding any new servers for the official retail launch, but they had gotten very reliable pre-order numbers and were able to make the correct call.

(The way the LOTRO headstart worked was that you could keep your characters from open beta, but ONLY if you pre-ordered by launch day.  By contrast, Trion's open beta was wiped before the headstart, so I'm guessing that players opted to wait for the final servers to arrive before submitting their pre-orders.)

Quick Rift Pre-launch Weekend Notes

I've gotten into the Rift Headstart, with a level 14 High Elf Cleric (14 Justicar, 2 Druid, 2 Sentinel) named Telhamat on the Byriel server.  Here's a few random thoughts from the weekend so far.

• Queue Queue Moar:
  The queues are probably the story of the game so far - many new servers have been added, and Trion is plaintively asking players to actually use them.  Either the problem will fix itself with players quitting by the one-month mark, or there are going to be chronically overcrowded servers (especially Faeblight) for a long time going forward, because no one wants to move once they're set up camp on a popular server.  Personally, I put the time in queue to productive use prank calling the Rift Watchers hotline.  (The gang plots my demise at minute 26 of the linked episode.) 
  
  
• Rifts/Invasions Are Everywhere
  People often compare Rifts to Warhammer Public Quests, but I think they've missed the broader point.  You might log in and find a quiet solo game that plays a fair amount like, well, Azeroth.  Come back in peak hours and you might be killed four times between the newbie camp and your faction's main city by level 18 invasions that are destroying the entire zone.  (This was my experience trekking across Silverwood on opening night to sign the charter for the Telara branch of Ferrel's guild, Iniquity.
  
  With Invasions, Trion has tried to create the "War is everywhere" feel that Mythic hoped RVR would bring to Warhammer.  It's not safe to AFK anywhere because invasions could get you (and it's not safe to log off, because the queue will get you - yes, going back to the character select screen sends you to the back of the line).  Because NPC's actually do what the developers want, in a way that players usually don't, it looks like they might suceed. 
  
  
• Wait, I just got all the souls?
  Having experimented in beta, I was sure I wanted to start with Justicar, Druid, and Sentinel.  My fourth pick would be easy, because I'd debated between Purifier and Sentinel for the healing slot, and it's good to have both for your healing role anyway.  I wasn't sure what I'd want next... but it turns out to be a moot point because you get all five of the souls you didn't start with almost immediately upon hitting level 13.  The "quest" to obtain these souls requires you to participate in beating any rift, and then fighting a mob version of your desired soul (which your public rift group will generally do for you, if you click the item immediately after the rift closes). 
  
  The good news is that it's now basically impossible to find yourself with a build
  you don't enjoy playing.  Also, I didn't really care about several of the souls, and might not have bothered to chase them down if they were hard to obtain.  Even so, it seems a bit anticlimactic to have all of the souls at such a low level.

Overall, I'd say the launch is going well.  That said, I think I can probably get to level 50 before that first monthly bill comes due.  It's going to be very interesting to watch mid-level populations (especially on the new servers) as the population moves to the cap.  

Cooperative Versus Contested Open World Content

Feldon's got a writeup of the EQ2 expansion beta.  One segment jumped out at me (underlined emphasis mine):

"Public Quests is a ripoff homage to Rifts and Warhammer and lets you wander into a field of Giants and Dwarves fighting and contribute to the battle. The events scale depending on how many people are in the area of the event. If you’re solo, you get solo rewards. If you are several players, even if you’re not grouped, you get a group reward. This is the OPPOSITE of contested mobs. Everyone gets to loot the chest, whether you are grouped or not. If 24 players show up, the raid loot starts dropping. Now, this loot doesn’t have all the effects and adornment slots on it you might be hoping for, but it could be a good stepping stone if you are behind on gearing up."

As a bit of background, contested open world raid content was the most prestigious content in EQ2 up until relatively recently.  In general, this content would be locked down by one or two top guilds - the nature of the beast is that guilds that might have the requisite skill to beat the content will never get the opportunity because they're not online at the random hours when the mob happens to respawn. 

Much as EQ1 veterans may like the old school contested approach, the fact is that the content - and associated rewards - might as well not have been in the game for the overwhelming majority of the server population.  The result is that the majority of players had no reason to waste their time trying, which made the non-instanced content no longer worth the development resources required to maintain it. 

After a year plus of this situation, SOE appears to have come up with a plan to reverse the trend.  While the Public Quest may not be an entirely original idea, the implementation is interesting.  Warhammer public quests dropped a greater quantity of loot when more players were present, but the content was relatively static - with too few players, it was more difficult, and with too many it could become too easy, but the highest quality of loot was constant in either case.  The result was relatively little incentive for players to congregate at any one public quest site. 

By contrast, the EQ2 version is, as Feldon says, the opposite of contested, but rather cooperative.  When players see a PQ up and running, they have an incentive to participate, and bring their friends in the hopes of getting otherwise unattainable loot.  Rather than being exclusive to a tiny minority, the goal is to be inclusive of a large enough population to actually justify its existence. 

I don't know whether the system will live up to its design in practice, but it's definitely a different perspective.  Players have complained that modern EQ2 offers too little content in the open world and too little reason for solo players to group up.  On paper, their take on the PQ might help address both issues.  Unfortunately for the EQ2 team's efforts, the feature arrives on the day that Rift launches with an entire game focused on this concept.  Somehow, I suspect that SOE's seeming rush to have Velious boxes in stores a week earlier (as Rift players happily log into their pre-order access) may be too little too late. 

Encourage Heals With Fun

Last night, I equipped my Discipline priest with all the heirlooms I don't usually use for solo content because they make things too easy.  I bought up some stacks of water (which I didn't end up needing), set some keybindings, and told my twitter followers that I'd miss them if I didn't make it out alive. Then I clicked the "healer" button on the dungeon finder, and signed up to be the healer in a WoW dungeon.

Healing through DPS



I was out to test the new smite-healing spec.  With a combination of talents and glyphs, the Discipline priest converts their smite spell from a modest nuke into a smart heal that never misses, can be spammed indefinitely, generates mana and a healing buff, and incidentally still does modest amounts of damage. 

The intent appears to be a character that plays like a DPS who is doing a bit of off-healing on the side.  The smite spam deals with topping off incidental damage to the party, so you're only watching for situations that require more attention (e.g. an instant Power Word: Shield followed by a Penace instant/channeled heal).  It's not any more difficult to play than being a DPS was back in my raiding days, when I had to keep myself out of the fire and occasionally watch the raid for curses to remove.  If anything, it was a bit too effective, in that I really could have coasted through the instance (Scarlet Monestary GY on level) by just spamming the smite key.

Incentives will not motivate DPS to heal...
Before Tobold dragged 18th century German Philosopher Immanuel Kant into a discussion on whether it's morally wrong to queue for WoW dungeons as a DPS, he suggested that "Blizzard isn't rewarding tanks and healers enough for taking their social responsibility".  I Kant say I'm qualified to evaluate the philosophical question, but the incentive question is more my area, and I don't think Tobold's idea is going to work.  

Tobold doesn't specify exactly what reward he would like Blizzard to hand out to good team players, but I'm presuming he means loot since tanks and healers already have shorter queue times, and since he suggests that Blizzard could alternately dock rewards for overpopulated roles (DPS).  The recent history of MMO's in general, and WoW in particular, suggests that loot is particularly ill-suited to this goal. 

For example, PVP rewards have been effective in getting players to AFK instanced battlegrounds, but have done very little to encourage players to cooperate with a team in the hopes of actually winning the battleground match.  In fact, just last month Blizzard managed to demonstrate that a large enough honor reward will convince players to deliberately throw world PVP matches without any in-game means of communicating their intent to do so to the other faction. 

Lest you think that this trend is specific to PVP, you need look no further than the PVE dungeon finder.  Raid quality loot was able to motivate players to zerg down trivial Wrath-era heroics with complete strangers each and every day for a year, but it did absolutely nothing to convince players that they want any part of this activity if it actually becomes difficult or time consuming.  (Thus, the current situation.)  In fairness, the minimal need to actually tank and heal the mob probably ensures that players won't be able to AFK their way to the Tobold bonus, but I have every confidence that WoW's exploitative community will find a way to subvert any system that Blizzard implemented in this department. 

(Perhaps a trio of hybrid characters can run the dungeon as DPS and votekick the tank and healer with the final boss at 1%, nominating themselves as the new tank and healers to ninja the bonus loot?  Stranger schemes have been tried.  A more pedestrian approach might simply be to ignore Heroics for a patch or two until they can be trivialized with raid gear, which seems to be more or less what's actually happening.)

... But making healing fun might.
All of which brings us back to WoW's discipline priest, which is actually in good company these days.  Rift has at least two souls that I'm aware of - the Rogue Bard and the Mage Chloromancer - that also heal by doing ranged DPS, and I think there's a melee healer in there somewhere.  Warhammer also put a fair amount of work into DPS-like healer archetypes.  I seem to recall hearing that Guild Wars 2 was going to eliminate dedicated healing altogether, though I haven't been following that plan closely enough to know if it's still being implemented. 

(Interestingly, the Warhammer Chaos Zealot is the only other class I've ever actually used to heal in an MMO, and it also focused on instant casts.  This makes me wonder if my main reservation about healing is a UI issue; let me ignore a few of the health bars with a smart heal, or remove some of the lag between when I notice someone is taking damage and when they start regaining HP by letting me use instant cast spells, and I actually start to enjoy healing..) 

As long as this particular spec remains viable, I am never going to queue this character as a DPS instead of a healer.  This is not because of the queue times (which don't bother me while leveling alts, since I can usually go level while I wait) or because of the incentives (which are identical), but because I enjoyed this particular style of healing more than DPS.  Somehow, approaching the tank and healer shortage by addressing the design issues that make these roles less fun to play seems more productive than branding the majority (60+%) of players as selfish and immoral for failing to enjoy the current design of tanking and healing in MMO's.

Immanuel Kant may or may not believe that it is immoral for a gnome mage to use the dungeon finder, because he cannot switch to another role to meet the group's needs. 

The Leaning Towers of Telara

Imagine that someone came to you looking for some money to build a giant stone tower, only they propose to build a tower that leans rather than extending straight upright.  Though this project might turn out well, the possibility that it might tip over is an obvious concern with the design, and you would want to see how the designer proposes to address this. 

As I've learned a bit more about the upcoming Rifts: Planes of Telara game, primarily through The Rift Podcast, I'm seeing a pair of leaning towers occupying some prime real estate in the game's design. 

Class Choice Versus Balance
Rift is offering a flexible class system - characters are locked into one of four callings (archetypes), but they customize their actual role within that archetype by picking three of eight available souls and dividing advancement points amongst the three as desired.  This sounds like a lot of fun on paper, and players who have tested the system at preview events have come away impressed. 

The potential concern is that someone needs to decide how difficult to make the actual game.  Do they balance things assuming the best possible DPS, healing, and tanking, leaving everyone who doesn't look up and adopt a cookie cutter build out in the cold?  When players show up with a full group of completely unpredictable characters, does a tough encounter suddenly become trivial because some obscure combination of abilities leaves the boss helpless? 

Though the issue is not necessarily insurmountable, most other MMO's struggle to balance as many as a dozen classes.  Unless the point is that players are supposed to swap into a different optimized role for every fight, it's going to be interesting to see how Trion handles this.

Dynamic Content Overload
The game's other heavily touted system is its dynamic content.  The namesake rifts open up around the world, allowing NPC's from the elemental planes to attack Telara.  If players fail to close the rifts in time, NPC invasion forces will spawn and march on towns (or even each other).  Again, players' first impressions of the system in limited preview events have been very positive due to the sheer novelty of the mechanic.

The concern here is what happens a month or two into the game's release, as everyone has shown up at least once to find their questgivers dead and had to repel an invasion to get their towns back.  (In some ways, it almost reminds me of Warhammer, with the non-instanced RVR replaced with NPC's who will conveniently show up in beatable numbers and can be counted on not to abandon their conquests because it is more profitable to allow the other side to retake each keep so that you can re-re-capture it.) 

Will midlevel players log in a few months down the line to find their towns demolished by armies of elementals, after the majority of the population has moved past that level range to the cap, with limited interest (or patience) in returning to bail out their new comrades?  As we saw with WoW's notorious zombie invasion, players will eventually give up on saving towns from attacks that will continue indefinitely no matter what players do. 

Toppling in 30 days?
These issues can be addressed given enough time.  The thing that concerns me is that both of these topics are things that will not be apparent in the first hour or day or even week of the game's release.  Endgame class imbalances and invasion fatigue will kick in only after players have had the chance to actually get that far into the game, which won't happen at a press event or a low level beta weekend session.  (For the same reason, it won't show up in press reviews, or even the opinions of real players during the first week of launch.) 

The true test comes at the 30 day mark when subscription fees come due.  If players are blindsided by these issues (or others) and leave en masse, the sharp negative turn in word of mouth can be more damaging than the actual in-game issues (which, in my view, we saw with Warhammer).  The longer the game goes without permitting sustained high level testing in an open, non-NDA environment, the greater the chances that the leaning towers will topple before they can be reinforced. 

Rifts To Use WoW-Style Questing

There seems to be a debate amongst the old-school blogosphere about whether Rifts or EQ:Next will be the new EQ1.  Personally, I'm not convinced that either title is likely because both projects are high profile, but I've generally refrained from commenting for lack of more thorough information. 

Over the weekend, I listened to episode 14 of the Rift Podcast, which featured an interview about the game's quest system, featuring the studio's Senior Design Director.  According to the guy in charge, the majority of quests will be solo or small group quests, with quest hubs that conveniently distribute overlapping quests to kill 10 rat-equivalents and loot 10 potato-equivalents from the same field.  The game will also offer daily quests, rep grinds, and the option for max level players to replay the dungeons they soloed past while leveling.  Overall, it sounds a lot more like an attempt at the next WoW than the next EQ1. 

Don't get me wrong, Trion has some talented people on board, and I would love for them to succeed.  Telling players what they want to hear requires that the developers first determine what it is that the players want, which is at least one step in the right direction.  Unfortunately, I feel like the hype mirrors Warhammer more closely than any other game in my albeit limited experience.  Yes, the game engine is working and polished enough to hold an encouraging demo for the press.  Beyond that, pretty pictures are everywhere, hype is high, and the game itself is whatever the reader would like it to be for lack of evidence to the contrary. 

Learning from the past?
Beyond the possibility of raising unrealistic expectations, the things that I'm hearing about this game do not reassure me that Trion has learned from the issues that others have faced.  For example, the "soul" system for building your own class sounds really neat, but nothing I've seen has addressed how they will actually balance a game in which the majority of character setups are useless, a few are overpowered, and a few are worthless except for the one encounter that becomes trivial because the designer didn't plan for a pet that can kite and is immune to stuns or whatever. 

More to the point, this idea of having players solo their way to the level cap and then switch over to some other form of play (generally group PVE, or PVP/RVR in Warhammer's case) really isn't panning out that well across the entire industry.  Yes, solo players will buy boxes and pay fees to level - assuming that you can beat solo-focused games like WoW, LOTRO, and others at their own genre.  However, time and time again we've seen that the majority of these players either can or will not shift to the more structured group format.  Meanwhile, if the real strength of this game is supposed to be its group PVE instances, it does not make sense to encourage players to do something else instead of dungeons/rifts for 49 levels (any more than it made sense for Warhammer to encourage players to solo and run instanced scenarios instead of doing open RVR).


The especially sad part is that I'm not even convinced that this will be an especially good solo game.  In between promising little tidbits - squirreling away some quests in obscure places for explorers or whatnot - it sounds like the game's two factions will have separate starting zones and then can expect to largely share the same content (either via neutral questgivers or through slightly varied versions of the same quest for the two factions).  This is not original territory, and the studio will have to execute it extremely well if they really mean to compete in the crowded fantasy solo-friendly MMO niche. 

Are MMO's Financially Sustainable?

Upon arriving back home from vacation, I've found a blogroll full of concerning news from the world of MMO financing.  A few hits:

• Scott Jennings reports on the practical demise of Earth Eternal, lamenting that "online gamers are saying with their dollars, yeah, we actually don’t want to play anything that isn’t World of Warcraft".  In the comments of that post, Psychochild suggests that the EE devs did not do enough to keep the time and cost of development (4+ years on a game that was still in beta) under control, arguing that "a smaller game absolutely needs to limit scope drastically".
• Complete Heal delivers some sad details from SOE's Fan Faire, where he learned that EQ2's subscription numbers have dwindled to the point where the game is about even with its predecessor from 1999, EQ1.  Echoing reports from earlier this year that EQ2 devs were pulled away from the game to work on Free Realms, CH mentions that EQ2 is now sharing at least one dev with the "EQ Next" team.  Against this backdrop, EQ2's next expansion sounds smaller than this year's (which was, in turn, smaller than the older ones).   
• Keen observes a "new MMO slump" on the horizon, as we've hit an era where new games have a shelf life of 3 months (if they're lucky) before burnout and disillusionment set in.  

The current generation of MMO's was built with the expectation that a million subscribers was an attainable goal.  This demanded that developers aim high, and has only exacerbated a trend of over-hype and under-delivery that has gutted the reputations of many high profile and otherwise decent games. 

When reality set in, we've seen dev teams decimated (e.g. Warhammer, Fallen Earth) to meet the new, lower revenue potential.  I would have named LOTRO and EQ2 as two of the more successful games of the current generation, and populations in both games are supposedly steady.  However, both have seen trends of less and less new content added in expansions as developer resources shift elsewhere, and both games are now hoping that dramatic shifts to free to play can bring in enough revenue to justify reversing that trend. 

Returning on investment
Until Psychochild gets enough player contributions to build a high quality MMO without relying on profit-driven investors, we're stuck with what those investors are willing to pay for.  The problem is not, as Keen suggests, that it somehow hasn't occurred to anyone that there's a market for games smaller than WoW.  The problem is that bringing in enough money to keep the servers on is very different from bringing in enough money to offer investors a profit on an initial outlay in the tens of millions of dollars. 

A game with 100K subscribers paying $200 per year brings in $20 million annually BEFORE expenses (servers, customer service, salaries for the live team).  Who's going to front the developers a $20 million budget in the hopes of being paid back in five years (after, say 3 years of development and two years of live service if all goes well, with any profit even further out in the future)?  The answer, apparently, is no one - the risk is only worthwhile if the prize is $200 million, but that would require a subscriber level that only one game in history has obtained. 

Rising Price Tags Ahead?
Though I'm sure that there are ways to cut costs and increase efficiency, I don't think we're anywhere near having a virtual world on the scale of Azeroth, Norrath, or Middle Earth built cheaply.  Meanwhile, the market is less and less tolerant of any perception that corners have been cut or left unpolished, which means that revenue will have to increase somehow. 

Unfortunately, the history of the genre argues that anyone counting on more than 300K subs to keep their game afloat is making a risky bet, so this goal cannot be the longterm plan for a game breaking even. If all this is true, the last variable in the equation is how much money each player is spending.  If our hobby is to go on in the manner in which we're accustomed, there may be significant price hikes in our future.  Whether those hikes are presented in the form of "optional" item shop transactions (the current trend, which has its pros and cons) or other less voluntary mechanisms remains to be seen, but I don't see how things can continue at their current pace. 

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.

The Honest Mistake Versus the Dishonesty Commission

Last week, Mythic's payment provider overbilled Warhammer customers. This week, rolled out an "offer wall" as a way to obtain Turbine Points for the DDO store. I'm a bit surprised by the difference in reaction between the two.

Billing players multiple times - hitting some players who pay for their subscription with a debit card with fees from their banks in the process - was the very last thing that Mythic wanted to do. I'm not saying that this absolves them of responsibility, but I genuinely believe that this was not intentional. At best, they will have to refund the over-billed charges and emerge with a PR black eye the game can ill afford. At worst, they could be out much-needed revenue in the form of canceled subscriptions and any bank fees they opt to reimburse players for (assuming that EA's lawyers don't make the payment provider cover them). Mythic has absolutely zero incentive to permit, much less encourage, this sort of debacle.

By contrast, the currency offer wall is exactly the system that has given Farmville such a bad name. At best, these offers tend to be ill-advised ("sign up for more credit cards!"), the majority will literally install some sort of spyware to track consumers' online activity, and the worst will commit fraud and identity theft. It is nigh inevitable that at least one bad apple will fall through the cracks - and neither Turbine nor their payment provider have any incentive short of consumer outrage to crack down on these lucrative scams, because each of them gets a cut.

Perhaps most telling is that the Turbine reps aren't even remarking about players posting proudly that they used some throw-away email address and intend to immediately cancel the services they signed up for in return for pennies worth of Turbine points. A legitimate business would have to march in and lay down the law with the clause about how defrauding the system is a bannable offense, etc. The scammers' real goal is the spyware installation, not the throwaway email addresses from people who think they're smart enough to scam a scammer.

Personally, I'd much rather forgive the honest mistake than the system that is built around exploiting the customers who fail to read - or understand - the consequences. Unfortunately, like most of these ever more aggressive monetization strategies, the only vote players who don't like it have is to give up the game entirely. Most players in that boat weren't paying for the game anyway, so their loss is more than offset by all the juicy offer revenue.

Can Word of Mouth Really Help?

On last week's episode of The Multiverse (where they also gave me a rather generous shout-out, thanks guys), Riknas' rant focuses on unknown free to play developers. As he says, some of the smaller - and most successful - free to play games are being made by studios that no one has heard of. Chris adds that, for players, supporting studios that we haven't heard of is the only way to drive real change. I don't disagree with either sentiment, but allow me to play devil's advocate.

Over the weekend, I got an out-of-the-blue apology email from a longtime commenter who felt in hindsight that he'd given me too much of a hard time for my take on his favorite MMO. The email said that he felt that defending the game against blog comments was necessary - i.e. that, if untrue claims were not countered, they could drive off new players and ultimately hurt the success of the game and its ability to continue. Personally, I don't think that any such apology is really needed - comes with the territory of expressing an opinion, especially if you're brave/foolish enough to play as many games as I do. It does drive home the point that the perceived stakes in the word of mouth business can be high. But is that really true?

Beyond the reach of Grassroots?
For those of us who aren't Curt Schilling, the fact is that our individual contributions don't make all that much of a difference in the fate of a game. (Schilling, incidentally, sounds like he's having a bit of buyer's remorse about having tied most of his net worth to his new studio.) A few players here or there, or even all of their friends, aren't going to make or break the success of a game with a multi-million dollar budget (that is to say, almost any game that could credibly deliver "massively multiplayer") in the short to medium term. The product either does or does not deliver, and the majority are going to base their payment decisions on that truth, rather than any matter of principle word of mouth crusades.

The paradox with supporting the studio that no one has heard of is that there is a factor that is correlated to whether the game can deliver - its development budget. No one is that worried about the mystery fourth Blizzard project, the supposed EQ3 at SOE, or the mystery possibly-Harry-Potter project at Turbine because these companies have the money to finish the development job. When you look at some studio that has yet to deliver a working product, like, say, Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment or Flagship Studios, it turns out that neither had the resources to actually produce the promised games.

CME's situation was so dire that they went under without ever launching their MMO (though they did try a non-MMO prototype that I'm gathering did not fare so well from the lack of fanfare). Hellgate's legendary launch failure brought down the studio, complete with the more promising Mythos project. Any additional funds that a player sent in the direction of those studios (e.g. purchasing additional copies just to support what the devs were doing) would have ended up in the pockets of creditors when the shops went under.

Is success pre-determined?
So here's a question - when we see a game that launches big and flames out - like, say, Warhammer or the two Cryptic games - versus a game that launches small and builds on positive buzz - perhaps Eve, Wizard 101, Runes of Magic, etc - can we really credit the word of mouth with that success? Or is the positive word of mouth just another effect caused by the games' success? Clearly, you can create a PR disaster bad enough to affect your reputation, but I'm less convinced that the effect in the opposite direction works enough to change outcomes.

Games live and die on their quality, and most of the work on that front isn't really something that can be patched in later because subscription numbers were 10% higher than expected.

Is the Small Guild Endangered?

In DDO's recent State of the Game address, Turbine writes:

The team is currently busy working on some great additions to the guild system that will let guild members work together to earn valuable rewards and rival guilds compete for status on each server. One of the biggest rewards players will work towards is access to an all new guild housing system, which we are implementing in a cool and unique way. Suffice it to say, we think you will really want to be part of a guild that has earned access to this feature!

We now know that the "unique way" means Guild Airships. Less clear are the specifics. When they say that guilds will compete for status, does this mean that there will be a limited number of airships per server? When they say that players will want to be in a guild with an airship, do they mean that airships will have significant effects on gameplay?

The Increasing Effect of Guilds on Games
It seems that there is an increasing push for guilds to have more of an effect on the actual game.

• Warhammer launched with a variety of perks, including a teleport and access to PVP gear vendors (who otherwise are only found in contested keeps that your faction might not control).
  
• EQ2 guild halls make a huge impact on the player experience, from crafting to travel - I honestly don't know how well the game would have stuck with me if I had remained unguilded, even though I spend the vast majority of my gaming time solo.
  
• WoW is revamping its guild system to have as-yet-undetermined effects, though these are not all that well defined as of yet.
  
• LOTRO guilds don't really do that much, other than allowing guild groups to meet up somewhere for a hunter to teleport them to their final destination, but that's probably more because they have yet to get around to it than because that's what they really want the system to do.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing - one could argue that the state of the guild prior to 2008 was too weak, encouraging players to think of guilds as expendable loot gathering platforms. On the other hand, it creates the real potential for drama and pressure.

Accommodating Diversity
In fairness, guilds are intended to be a collective endeavor. Sometimes that means the bar will need to be set at a level that a single player in a vanity guild cannot reach. I'm reasonably prepared to accept this.

The issue arises when we start looking at the small to medium sized guilds. My current EQ2 guild has about a dozen active players, and I don't think I'd ever leave them for anything. Fortunately, EQ2's guild halls don't really offer that many hard choices - the most important amenities are easy to agree on, and you'll get all of the major ones soon enough. (For example, Stargrace is apparently on her fifth level 30+ guild at the moment.) On the other hand, I could certainly see how a system that allows smallish guilds like ours to advance would make advancement trivial for the bigger guilds.

Meanwhile, size isn't all that matters. WoW's plan is for guild "talent points", which might seem to imply that your average guild won't be able to get all the bonuses. How will this affect guilds with players who have different preferences on how those points should be spent? Meanwhile, I'm told that Warhammer's guild system bases some portion of their (secret) guild advancement formula to the size of the guild. This sounds fair on paper, but it opens the door for players who aren't contributing "enough", whatever that level is, to actually deter the guild's progress (encouraging the guild to kick said players out, even if they would otherwise be welcome and generally not in anyone's way).

The large guild certainly has some advantages from the developer's standpoint. Large guilds are more likely to have critical mass to run group content, and may introduce players to more potential friends. Then again, sometimes a small, tight-knit group is just more what a player has in mind. That's why the way the DDO announcement is phrased has me reading a D20 to roll a saving throw against traps. Maybe nothing bad will come of it, but I'd rather not be caught flat-footed.