Technically Alpha Of The Storm

I've never heard of a "technical alpha" before an email from Blizzard indicating that I was now part of one for the upcoming MOBA Heroes of the Storm.  My first take was that it was a Phishing scam, as I had not heard of anyone else in this test, but I typed in battle.net by hand and sure enough, my account was flagged for what it described as a "beta".  There's probably a definition somewhere that isn't "this is what used to be called a beta, but that term now has so much marketing hype that we have to technically call it an alpha", but no matter.

(Also, despite being technically alpha, there is no NDA - Blizzard continues to show admirable lack of fear of showing their cards with extended public testing.)  

The Game
So far, I'm liking what I'm seeing.  I was never the core MOBA demographic, but for the occasional pop-in PVE against bots I can see little reason why I'd ever use League of Legends for that purpose now that Heroes of the Storm is arriving.  I'm sure the competitive players greatly enjoy the strategy of forcing the other player out of lane to heal or finding a time when it's safe to return to base to spend your accumulated gold on necessary item upgrades.  I'll take Heroes' talent system (pick one of several abilities every few levels) and healing fountains (which the enemy can destroy) any day. 

The engine is smooth, the UI is clean and polished, and the game is full of Blizzard's attention to detail and sense of humor.  In an era where we show players stories rather than telling them, I'd much rather be playing characters I know from over a decade of Blizzard's lore than possibly deep League backstories that never really intrude into the game itself. 

The game starts with a tutorial in which Uther explains quickly to Jim Raynor how he has ended up in a world of cross-franchise battles, and then it's off to the races. 

The Business

 

A testing bundle of ten heroes for just under $30

The "invite" (there was no key or I would have considered raffling it off, they automatically applied it to my account) is somewhat wasted on me due to how the game's incentives work.  Like Hearthstone and League of Legends, you earn rewards including an alternate currency for unlocking stuff as you play the game.  Thus, there's little to no reason why I'd invest significant time on this test only to see my progress reset when the game goes live.  Likewise, there is a partially functional cash shop up and running for in-game purchases, but these purchases will be "refunded" dollar for dollar in Blizzard credit; there's zero reason I'd take that deal since I might want to spend more or less money if offerings change between now and launch.  

What is in the cash shop will be relatively familiar to League players.  Characters run for $4-10 or some amount of in-game currency.  These are allegedly based in part on the complexity of the character and seemingly with little basis in popularity - Raynor and Malfurion sit in the $4 tier, most characters including Tassadar, Illidan, and Diablo sit at the $7.50 price point, and only a handful, most prominently Kerrigan, occupy the $10 tier.  Cosmetic skins are pricier, generally either $7.50 or, $10 and not available with in-game currency, but are reasonably well done and very clever.  In addition to minor or comedic variations, there are cross-franchise outfits -  Kerrigan as a WoW succubus, or Uther as a Starcraft Terran Medic - and alternate realities such as Arthas as a human and a fallen demonic Tyrael.  Once you own the skin, you can unlock color variants in-game only.  There are also apparently cosmetic mount variants (everyone gets a free basic horse), including a $20 rainbow unicorn, because why not. 

You can take the healbot out of Azeroth....

A promising first look....
It may be technically alpha, but it looks well polished.  League will survive fine due to its massive userbase, but I'd be very worried if I was running any less prominent MOBA when this game hits wider release. 

A Brief Return to Diablo III

A 100% bonus exp weekend was enough to get me back into Diablo III - a title I tried for a few days post launch and ultimately wrote off as a total failure of a purchase.  The good news about buy-to-play is that if you want more of the thing you didn't like, it doesn't cost you a renewed subscription fee.  In my case, I wanted to see the rest of the story I paid for, and I figured there would not be a better occasion to do so. 

I have no idea why this was the lone screenshot I took all weekend, but the bugged "marker location" text is vaguely amusing.

My old character was literally unplayable when I logged in, dying repeatedly to every trash mob I encountered.  I spend most of my time in an ARPG these days, so I was pretty sure the problem couldn't just be that I was suddenly a terrible player.  The issue is that I was level 22 and mid-way through Act II, but wearing gear an average of ten levels below my level and most of it at the lowest non-trash quality the game awarded.  Apparently the game was very stingy with loot back in the day in the misguided attempt to create scarcity for the real money auction house. 

It took surprisingly long to figure out how to backtrack far enough to a point where I would be able to survive.  (For the record, you have to log out and click on the "game properties" on the character select screen if you want to backtrack to a previous act.)  I died a few times to trash early in Act I as well, but then I replaced every single item on my character with higher quality gear within the space of a few fights that I actually survived.  Between that, speccing my Whirlwind Barbarian out like I have Colossus set up in Marvel Heroes, the rest of the game on normal mode difficulty went by pretty quickly.  I completed the story at level 44 with gear that appears from the tooltips to be vaguely level appropriate. 

Over than the overall rate of loot acquisition, it's hard for me to tell how much has changed versus how much I simply never got around to seeing the first time.  (There is an endgame alternate advancement system that was added post-launch, but I'm still not high enough to access this.) 

I will say that I was struck by how freaking depressing the game's setting is.  Maybe I just wasn't old enough to think about the horrors of war fifteen years ago as a student, maybe it's a matter of having a kid myself, or perhaps it's the game's use of voice-over to read lore updates to you as you continue the action.  It just seems like a staggering number of NPC's die - you periodically find and loot a letter from a dead soldier's wife about how their kid is growing up - in an eternal conflict that doesn't seem to have a point or any resolution.  Maybe this lore just worked better when the plot consisted of finding the village of Tristram dead and spending the rest of the time killing everything that moved because they were all demons. 

All that aside, I guess the weekend was a win for Blizzard.  This expansion moves on my watch list from "why would I pay for more of that game I never finished" to "maybe it'll be worth picking up on super sale next Black Friday".  Doesn't mitigate having paid full price for the game, but having written the purchase off as a total loss I guess that makes this a pleasant surprise windfall. 

Online Gaming Expenditures 2013

I've been tracking my MMO expenditures for a few years, and the top line makes this year look similar to last year - last year I spent $275 on MMO's and another $60 on Diablo III and this year I spent roughly $321 for online products including MMO's, MOBA's, TCG's, and ARPG's.  That said, the way in which I spent that money was a bit different.

• I was subscribed to a MMO for most of the year, but these expenses were significantly reduced due to various discounts from retailers.
• I was generally much more willing to experiment with things that cost $20-30, rather than try to tough out the business model without paying for anything.  

The latter definitely increased my bottom line spending, and some of the purchases are going down in the books as disappointments.  Then again, sometimes a comparatively small purchase made life significantly more fun.  As I have less and less time to spend on games, I'm guessing this trend will continue.

Subscription MMO's
I had a subscription to a traditional MMO for most of the year.  These games were typically, though not always, the go-to place I would go when I had time for an extended play session.  

World of Warcraft - $65 (Pandaria, 60 days timecard, 2x 30 days)
I did very well snagging discounts from retail stores.  This "should" have cost me $100.

FFXIV - $70 (PC + PS3 boxes)
The PC box cost $30 for the license plus a month of game time.  The PS3 box cost $40 for a second month of game time (the two stack) plus the license for the Playstation Network (reportedly to include the PS4 version, when it arrives next year).  I guess I should have taken the time to try the PS3 version in beta - playing on the PS3 was a cool novelty, but I had problems with targeting and would need to purchase a keyboard and mouse to make this work. 

SWTOR - $51 (two 60 day timecards at various discounts from retailers, $10 expansion)
Again, discounted time cards for the win here, "should" have paid $70. 

The Newcomers
In general, these are titles I play as a go-to for shorter play sessions. 

Marvel Heroes - $70 (starter pack, Cyclops, X-Force Bundle Black Friday Sale)
I hesitated until the very last minute on whether to pre-purchase a founder's pack, and I'm glad I pulled the trigger.  I like this game way more than Diablo III because it features characters from Marvel's comics.  It was worth the money to play the game with the character I most wanted to play rather than one of the less interesting starter characters.  I decided to throw them another $50 on Black Friday for an additional bundle of characters and some convenience perks.

Note that I'm counting the $130 Advance pack purchase against next year's budget, as is my longstanding practice for long-term subscriptions and content unlocks that won't be used (or in this case won't be available) until the year after I decided to shell out for them.   We'll see whether they've delivered all of the heroes by the time I publish next year's ledger, and how I feel about that purchase.

Hex - $20 (kickstarter)
Technically, this game isn't out yet, but I'm in the alpha as a backer, so I'm prepared to put this one on 2013's balance sheet.  I have concerns about the business model and was not impressed by a very brief visit to the very early alpha.  Even so, my assessment was that the time it's going to take to see whether or not I am going to like this game will be more fun starting with a minimal base of cards versus nothing. 

Guild Wars 2 - $30
I picked this up when the price finally dipped down to my new $30 impulse buy threshold.  I've logged in twice, so it could be argued this was a fail, but at least now I can play GW2 if I want to. 

League of Legends - $15 (gift cards)
I had some Best Buy reward certificates to burn, so I turned them into the $5 starter Champion pack and a $10 RP code to finally try League.  The purchases probably weren't necessary with my current playstyle - I'm currently enjoying trying whatever new champions are available each week.  Then again, the cost was comparatively low, since it's often hard to find things at Best Buy that aren't $15 overpriced to begin with.   

Played, not paid
TSW - I picked this up for $15 very late in 2012 and was still coasting on the month of included subscription time for most of January.

LOTRO and DDO - played a small amount of each using previously paid content, did not purchase either game's expansion (a first for LOTRO, despite a just-unveiled 50% off sale on their month-old expansion).

Hearthstone - Have not spent any money on the closed beta.

Not Played
Rift - Has an expansion that I got without paying courtesy of a promo and can now access freely due to the game's business model relaunch.  I logged in once or twice to preserve my character names, but I never really played.

EQ2 - SOE went the entire year without discounting the expansion from the fall of 2012, and now there's another full priced expansion box on the digital shelf.  The good news is that the new expansion purchase includes the one I skipped, and there aren't really any charges anymore for playing the content if/when I pay to unlock it, so maybe I will get around to this in 2014.

Grand Total
Total - $321

Incorrect Blizzcon Predictions for 2013

It's been so long since a Blizzcon that I've forgotten how I used to post my comically incorrect predictions before the show to see how badly they would turn out.  Coming in late means there are some gaps that have already been filled, but there's plenty of room for me to write stuff that we'll be mocking in a few weeks!

WoW

• New expansion is all-but confirmed and I'd say level 95 is a given - no reason they'd suddenly go back to 10 levels now, but I doubt they'd do fewer than 5.
• I suspect the foe will be the Burning Legion.  For one reason or another there seems to be a ton of nostalgia for TBC and we're running out of things that are on Azeroth that anyone has heard of but that we haven't fought before.  I'm suspicious that the end of the Garrosh raid leaves a loose end that the Burning Legion would be happy to tie up.  
• I'm going to go out on a limb and predict no new adventuring classes or races.  We had three races in the last two expansions, and Blizzard had historically said this was a huge load on the art people.  Meanwhile, with holy trinity imbalance being what it is, they cannot add any more classes that are unable to tank or heal, and at some point there are going to be unsustainable balance issues if they have to keep juggling more tanking and healing specs every expansion.  
• Instead, I'm going to predict a continuing focus on minigames and other things that offer progression but NOT direct adventuring advancement.  The Farmville minigame and Pet Battles have been two of Pandaria's best-regarded features.  A significant overhaul to professions, possibly including one or more new ones and profession-based content would make a ton of sense.
• Blizzard will NOT announce the game is going Free to Play.  The Blizzcon crowd is the demographic who signs up for the annual pass subscription, not the crowd that wants to pay less.  Even if WoW was going non-subscription, the news would NOT play well to this audience.  
• I don't expect to see any faster than Blizzard's normal 20-month time table, placing the expansion in summer 2014.  If they were to stand up for the keynote and say "oh by the way, beta starts on Monday and you're all in", that would certainly be the show-stealing headline, but Blizzcon has not been that good at show-stealing headlines.  

Diablo III

The expansion is already announced, will be playable (I think they've confirmed this?), and presumably going to be a big push of the show.  Ditto the console ports.  If there is any major Diablo news, it will be some sort of new cash shop or other form of ongoing revenue to replace the soon-to-be-closed real money auction house. 

Starcraft II

I haven't heard anything about the second expansion (a.k.a. third game in the trilogy, to justify a $60 price tag for a new game rather than a $40 price tag for an expansion).  I assume Blizzard will remedy this.

Heroes of the Storm

Blizzard re-titled their upcoming all-stars MOBA, suggesting that it is moving along.  There will probably be an early build playable.  I doubt this will be launchable anytime before mid 2014.

Hearthstone

Probably the closest launch window of Blizzard's projects, so I expect a fair amount of chatter, but probably not a lot of real news with the beta already well underway.  I predict that all attendees will be given closed beta invites. 

Titan

Nothing to see here (back in January, I'd predicted this would finally be the year).  

Cross-promotion
Say what you will about WoW's decline, but Blizzard actually has four separate projects that are in the plausibly live and charging money for something new in the next year (NOT counting SC2, but their expansion is recent by Blizzard standards).  They're pushing a new integrated launcher for all their games through the Hearthstone beta, using one Battle.net friends list across their entire platform, and handing out cross-title goodies in their Collector's Editions.

I predict they are going to go a step significantly further, to SOE's model with a single in-house currency shared across all the titles (probably re-branding Battle.net Balance and no longer expressing it in real world dollar amounts), and increased incentives to try multiple games. 

At a minimum, I expect the WoW subscription will include a nominal amount free gold in Hearthstone and possibly free gold or other cash store currency for DIII (if I'm right about expanding that game's cash shop) and Heroes of the Storm - WoW's own longstanding pet and mount shop may move onto this new model.  (Not innovative, SOE has done this for years, even before they were champions of non-subscription models.)  I don't expect to see a higher premium plan along the lines of SOE's All-Access plan because it's not clear what they would offer players of the non-subscription titles other than more Blizzard Bucks.   

What do you all think is coming in just over two weeks?  Are you likely to care? 

Rift Goes Pay-For-Others

Rift's newly announced "Free-to-Play" relaunch was so obvious that even I saw it coming.  One of their more interesting decisions harnesses an emerging trend in payment models - turning the traditional RMT incentive structure on its head with a system that encourages people who have money to pay for others to play the game. 

It's a subtle but important distinction that makes sense when you look at the incentives and motivations for why people pay real money for stuff in MMO's.  On paper, this approach could be much better for gamers than many of the other things that have been tried. 

Traditional RMT - Paying for Progress (to Win?)
Traditional "Real Money Transactions" (RMT) - people buying swords or accounts on Ebay, currency from illicit third party sites, or all of the above from official exchanges - is motivated by a desire not to play the game.  The buyer wants to obtain something - currency, a pre-leveled character, etc - that they could in principle earn in game.  For whatever reason - lack of time, unwillingness to group, lack of interest in timesinks that are a prerequisite for endgame, etc - they are unwilling or unable to earn their incentive the traditional way, but they have money they are willing to part with. 

Setting aside all of the logistics, legalities, ethics, and design issues that these systems inevitably raise, you are left with a fundamental problem - a game that people are willing to pay NOT to play.  Blizzard accidentally took this to the logical, absurd extreme in Diablo III, where it became so easy for players to buy gear with trivial amounts of gold on the auction house that nothing the player ever earned in game would be relevant. 

Unless you have designed your game in a way that requires one playstyle as a prerequisite for another - most commonly requiring people who want to raid with their friends to first grind out 90 levels solo and then run random PUG's to get the gear to be useful to the raid group - there is no scenario where the player who pays for progress isn't ultimately going to wash out that much faster for having done so. 

Paying for Others
Beyond the traditional RMT, we are seeing a growing trend - regardless of genre and type of payment model - towards games that somehow allow one player to pay another's way.  A few examples:

• EVE was the first game to my knowledge to implement a mechanism they dubbed PLEX, effectively an in-game time card that is bought with real money, can be consumed to extend your subscription time, and is also free to be bought, sold, bartered, stolen or destroyed like any other in-game item can be in EVE.  SOE has adopted the same system (minus the thievery and destruction) in EQ2, and I expect more will follow.
  
• SWTOR's free to play model didn't make a lot of sense to many people - myself included - in part because it did not seem to ever make sense for someone who is NOT subscribing to pay money for the game.  Weekly access to content like PVP added up to around $8/month, but you also had to pay significant one-time unlock fees for gear and other things you'd need before you could start on this discounted (but still hobbled) plan - and if you wanted to add in a second type of content unlock, such as raiding, you actually failed at math because you'd be paying more than the subscription but getting stuck with greater restrictions. 
  
  The difference in this model is that every single unlock in the cartel market can be resold for in-game credits on the auction house.  I was dead wrong when I assumed that this secondary market would be unsustainable because people would not pay real money for the paltry number of credits a non-subscriber can pay them.  Even the most expensive unlocks and items can be had for affordable prices because people are unwilling or unable to earn amounts of credits that I consider to be trivial - Bioware is even expanding this market by adding a consumable, resellable item that pulls credits out of non-subscribers' escrow accounts.  In a perverse way, it makes sense to be a non-subscriber who gets less for the money because it's someone else's money.  
  
  The real story with SWTOR is that the number three (optional) subscription MMO in the West is quietly convincing some demographic of players (probably casual Star Wars/Bioware fans who have money and aren't interested in learning to crew skill or farm dailies) to pay significantly more than the standard monthly fee in exchange for credits.
  
• Rift's new model will feature a variant of PLEX that awards not game time, but rather the game's new item shop currency.  It's not clear whether this currency can be used to purchase subscription time (which sounds unusually optional, though we need more details to be sure), but it can definitely be used to purchase all kinds of items.  Many free to play games offer some mechanism for gifting stuff from their cash shops - sometimes for resale to other players (and sometimes at the players' peril when it comes to scams) - but this is not a common mechanism and Rift is the highest profile F2P relaunch to do anything like this.

The difference between pay for others models and traditional RMT is subtle, but important.  One side of the demand curve is still driven by people who wish to trade real world money for in-game currency.  The other side of the demand curve is driven by people who want to play the game - presumably because they enjoy playing the game - but are unwilling or unable to pay for the game. Under a pay for others model, the person with the money can pay that person's way in exchange for their in game currency. 

Why making the non-payer valuable is a win for everyone
What happens to people who choose not to pay under the various payment models?

• Mandatory subscription fee: The player who is not willing to pay leaves, thereby ceasing to support the game and indirectly removing the incentive for the developer to address their concerns.  Meanwhile, the player with excess money has no legitimate way to spend it, as their $15 is all they can pay.
• Traditional free-to-play/buy-to-play: Assuming the system isn't so poorly monetized that no one pays and the game goes under, the player who is not willing to pay is still asked to pay and still leaves as a result.  The player who is willing to pay more than $15 can do so, and becomes disproportionately valuable to the developer as a result.  However, they can also lose in the long run, as the financial incentive for the developer is to find ways to "encourage" them to pay even more.
• Pay-for-others: Instead of leaving the game, the player who is not willing to pay becomes the incentive for the person with more than $15/month to spend their money.  Theoretically, this can keep all of the players within the community (good for their friends, paying and not), while retaining a financial incentive for the developer to support their whole community, not just the "whales".  

It will be interesting to see how this all plays out.  The one thing you cannot do is go back and restrict things that you gave away later if you're not happy with the revenue, and Rift is giving away so much stuff that they won't have much left to sell if this plan does not work.  They are also offering entry level gear for cash store (and thus indirectly in-game-currency) purchase, which could alleviate some of the entry barrier issues for new max level characters by letting them skip the much despised PUG grind and pay for what they need to join their friends in raid content. 

A final note - this change causes the ranks of mandatory subscription MMO's to dwindle further.  We will now have WoW (losing a million subscribers per quarter, with Activision predicting that the numbers will drop further by year end), EVE (which offers a very unique experience that can't be had anywhere else), the online Final Fantasies (assuming that 14 launches and survives) with their strong subscriber numbers from the Japanese market ... and then we're down to stragglers and titles on life support.  It would not surprise me to see some of these titles join EVE in offering some sort of mechanism for players to pay for others going forward, especially if Rift's new model works out. 

Mysterious Motivations of Players

Are players that hard to understand?  Two talks at this year's Game Developer's Conference, given by directors of high profile online games, suggest that we are still a mystery to people who spend tens (hundreds?) of millions of dollars making products to sell to us. 

• Former Diablo III director Jay Wilson stated that Blizzard dramatically underestimated how many players would use the game's auction house feature, how frequently they would use that feature, and what impact this would have on the game's gear incentive curve.  As Wilhelm notes, the game's loot table generally drops random junk under your level, while the auction houses allow players to get optimized loot for their level (the junk gets vendored) for affordable quantities of in-game gold (or cash if you're really so inclined). 
  
• Bioware's Creative Director on SWTOR James Ohlen indicated that they dramatically underestimated the speed with which players would consume content multiple times over.  He claims this crucial misjudgement led them to feel that they had more time work on endgame content than they had in reality.  The team was not prepared for the possibility of half a million players at endgame within the first month.  

I can understand when bugs/exploits or poorly thought design choices creep through the testing process.  The crowdsourced efforts of hundreds of thousands of players will inevitably find something that internal quality assurance could not, no matter how much time you have.  It's a bit harder to understand why, eight and a half years into the World of Warcraft era, developers are still underestimating player dedication in this way. 

The reality is we do exactly what the incentives tell us to do.  If grinding out gear is long and tedious and there is a way to skip to the end - Blizzard's motivation for the real money auction house in the first place was recognizing that this would occur and thinking it would be better to cut out the illicit middleman - players will go that route.  If the single biggest selling point of your product is the story, and the only way to get the next chapter of the story is to continue playing, players will continue to play (in the same way you might stay up all night watching a full season of a TV show or reading a good book). 

Perhaps the real failing in both designs is that the primary incentive - chasing gear or story - is so inherently limited in terms of time.  Once that time has run out, players apparently did not feel that the underlying game was worth continuing.  As we've learned time and time again, incentives are very effective at changing player behavior, especially in the short term, but they are very ineffective in changing player preferences in the long term. 

2012 MMO Expenditures

I've been keeping detailed logs of my MMO spending for roughly two years now, and I elected to publish them for the first time last year.  My experience probably isn't typical, as I spent a total of $275 on eight different MMO's in 2012, where most people probably stick to a smaller number of games.  That said, two broad observations:

• Game time for specific two subscription titles - WoW and SWTOR (well, it was) - represents about half of my total ($125, counting the first $15 of the SWTOR box cost as payment for the first 30 days).  This number is higher than it could have been due to the annual pass.  Even so, my spending on these two games EACH nearly doubles the next highest item on my ledger.  
• Setting aside those two subscription payments (WoW's was technically discounted), I did not pay full price for anything that I purchased this year - I'd estimate that I paid about half of the asking price overall.  Some of these savings come from retailers looking to dump stock, but many of them were provided directly from the publishers.  It's not accurate to look at all of this as lost revenue for the studios - some of the lower priority titles would not have made the cut at full price.  Even so, sales are a reality of the business, and are going to be a factor for anyone looking to base their business model primarily on one-time buy-to-play transactions.  As the number of games I play increases, it is easier and easier to wait for the sale before pulling the trigger, especially if there is any reason to be concerned about quality/polish.  

And now for the full ledger.  My accounting practice is to bill purchases of content and cash store currency in the year they were paid for, but to bill game time in the year in which it is actually used.  Titles are listed in chronological order.

World of Warcraft: $80 (+$60?) (+$35 to 2013)
I wrote an annual pass post-mortem when the year of game time I purchased through that promotion lapsed.  The short form is that I don't regret the approximately $80 for ten months of game time that I used in 2012, but the $60 Diablo III purchase (which I'm not counting against my MMO budget because it isn't an MMO) that I made in order to get that deal was a bit of a fail.

One big difference between this and past expansion cycles was the early availability of holiday discounts on the brand new expansion.  Through holiday sales and promos, I was able to snag the Pandaria box and a 6o day time card with which to play it for $35. (I have yet to use these things, so I'm counting them for next year.)

Rift: $10.72
As a brief recap, I had paid for the box at launch last year, ended the included month at level 36 or so, and leveled the rest of the way to the game's cap using Trion's frequent free retrial weekends.  Just when I was thinking of coming back for a month, I ran into a firesale on game time cards - 90 days for less than a single month.  Perhaps they were afraid they'd be stuck with unsold inventory if the game went free to play?  In principle, I still have some time left, though I'd have to purchase the expansion - even if I did want to re-roll, I'd probably want access to the new souls.

Star Trek Online: $11.40
I went foraging for an old retail box of this game to snag one month's subscription time.  This is useful because you get to keep any additional storage granted by being a subscriber at each rank (10 levels) tier.  I also spent $5 on the smallest quantity of Cryptic points so I could purchase an early increase to my duty officer cap.

SWTOR: $70
I waited until patch 1.2, which was widely viewed as the patch that was going to finish all of the odds and ends that didn't get done in time for release.  As a reward for my patience, I got the account key direct from EA for $40 instead of the list price of $60.  (I also somehow qualified for the "loyalty" bonus minipet that was granted to current subscribers for sticking with the game during the early months, despite having shown up that week.)  I subbed up for an additional month to get my first character to the level cap, and subbed up again just prior to the free to play relaunch in order to take advantage of some of the grandfathered perks former subscribers get.

EQ2 AND DCUO: $20
I don't remember exactly why I chose to throw $20 at a station cash sale sometime around April/May.  Through a series of sales so aggressive that they forced all content and game time out of SOE's in-game stores for good, I ended up turning that $20 into the $40 Age of Discovery expansion and 6 months of subscription time in EQ2 (I forget the exact discount you get for six month subs, probably $75ish).

(I also snagged the three DCUO DLC packs I did not already own at the time of the "we are taking DLC out of the cash store because our marketing people have broken the payment model" final sale in August, but I think that was from the Station Cash leftover from last year.)

Setting aside the absurdity of how long it took SOE to notice this was going on, I'll be the first to admit that the status quo could not continue.  EQ2 may also have finally tweaked its payment model to the point where paying on a non-subscription basis is worthwhile.  That said, some of EQ2's recent expansions have been so thin that there really wasn't much more than a month's worth of entertainment that a solo player could carve out of them.  It's hard to justify $50-60 for an expansion box plus either subscription time or unlocks if I'm going to get so little time out of them compared to all the other titles on this list - no wonder Smedley wants to get out of the content creation business.

LOTRO: $43
I paid $8 for a small Turbine Point bundle to snag the barter wallet upgrade.  It is irritating that Turbine is so heavily focused on charging for fixes to longstanding design issues (in this case, their addiction to non-stacking character-bound token rewards), and I probably could have earned the Turbine points in game, but I decided solving this problem was worth the $8.

Then Turbine decided that the first expansion to player inventory since 2007 would be exclusive to the $70 Rohan expansion bundle for several months.  Fortunately, Turbine can be counted on to discount expansions aggressively, so I just waited a few weeks and got the bags and whistles edition for 50% off, i.e. less than what people paid for the regular edition at launch.  This bundle also included a fair number of Turbine points, which I will no doubt need to spend on unlocking basic UI improvements over the next year.

DDO: $25
Speaking of Turbine expansion discounts, I also snagged the DDO expansion for 50% off through a Steam sale.  Apparently I was lacking in patience, as Turbine slashed the price further down to 75% off for Black Friday.  I hadn't spent any real world money on this game since mid-2010 (albeit only playing the game sporadically during that window), I suppose a few extra bucks isn't the end of the world.

One could argue whether I actually needed this expansion in the first place, as I do not have any high level characters.  The one thing that I have gotten a fair amount of use out of is one of the bonus throw-ins: a greater tome of learning.  I generally don't favor paying for experience boosts, but this particular bonus actually changes the way that you play the game by adding a hefty bonus to each quest the first time you complete it (reset if you true reincarnate).  This effectively removes the requirement to repeat midlevel content for exp.  I'm happy to repeat DDO's content eventually, but I'd rather not do it immediately, and now I don't have to.

The Secret World: $15
I was poised to skip every single MMO that launched in 2012 until a last minute switch in payment model, followed by an Amazon sale offering the newly buy-to-play title for $15, made TSW too intriguing to pass up.  I had initially passed on this title as much due to my crowded schedule and a few rough edges during my very brief visit to the beta as to anything on the game's merits (such as its subscription model).

The game-changer with the buy-to-play switch is not the amount of money, but rather the amount of time I would need to invest immediately to determine whether the product is worth future subscription payments.  I've spent a few hours with the game so far and it does show some promise, especially as a secondary title.  I can't see how my one-time payment suddenly props up the game's finances, but I suppose it couldn't hurt?

Grand Total: $275 (not counting DIII)
Subtotal for Content/Currency Purchases: $123 (includes $25 of the $40 SWTOR box price)
Subtotal for Game Time: $152

Accountability In the Post-Subscription Era

I've heard several generally insightful podcasters commenting on the relatively ban-happy policies of Guild Wars 2.  I'm disappointed that many people do not state the obvious - due to the lack of subscription fees, ArenaNet loses no recurring revenue when it bans a customer. 

We don't have the data to tell whether bannings in Guild Wars 2 is actually more prevalent in other games since none of the studios routinely publicize such numbers, but one can certainly imagine that removing the subscription fee removes a financial incentive NOT to ban a customer.  Sure, a banned player might eventually have opted to pay for microtransactions or expansions, but it's nowhere near the guaranteed revenue of someone who is happy to pay $15/monthly for the opportunity to troll.  Moreover, their conduct also affects the tone of the community in a way that might influence whether others stay and pay. 

Looking beyond this issue, we are in a somewhat unprecedented scenario in which two separate major titles - Diablo III and GW 2 - launched within a six month period never intending to collect a subscription fee.  Both sold seven digit numbers of copies at $60 a head.  We have some free to play games that have over a million users - few of whom are likely to have paid $60.  We have a small number of subscription MMO's that actually have a million former subscribers.  Neither category of game intentionally chose that outcome. 

Even if most players will never pay for additional transactions, both titles are franchises with at least some incentive not to ruin their respective brand names.  See, for example, Blizzard's scramble to add an alternate advancement system upon determining that the base game lacked staying power, when in principle they could have shrugged, secure in the knowledge that people who run out of stuff to do have already paid.  It will be interesting to see if anything more substantial than policies about banning people for abusing their group-mates in chat changes as this type of model becomes more common in online gaming. 

What Diablo III Is and Is Not

Reading over the blogs, I wonder if Blizzard's biggest mistake with Diablo III was keeping the name.  This is not to say that players have not cited valid reasons for their lack of enthusiasm, but it feels like a disproportionate amount of the commentary has focused on what the game is not. 

Diablo III is not (note: cited complaints are not the whole contents of the linked posts):

• Available offline (see: Syp amongst many others after the rocky launch week)
• Sufficiently different in scenery from DII.  (See: Wilhelm)
• Sufficiently similar in character skill design from DII.  (See Pete, more on this in a minute)
• A game, but more of an interactive movie (See: Gevlon)
• Being evaluated fairly by reviewers, but rather being given a bonus based on its title (See Tobold)
• Reasonable about unlocking difficulty - three complete playthroughs are required to unlock the highest difficulty (See: Spinks)
• Arriving in 2002, when the incremental improvements from DII would be more consistent with four years versus the fourteen it actually took.  (See: Ferrel)
• Torchlight 2 (Pete, Arbitrary, several others - I suppose a real credit to Runic that this was such a common observation.)

So far, I've only played through level 11, but from what I've seen so far DIII is a good quality, polished, and fun game.  In some ways, it reminds me of SWTOR - you are definitely experiencing someone else's story, between the heavy involvement of NPC's and the relatively non-customizeable player characters, but the story experience and production values have been excellent.  Two tidbits that I've especially enjoyed:

Voiceover Lore: Those lore tidbits normally found in books that I never read in game?  In DIII, they are saved to my journal and an NPC will read them to me as I continue on my path of destruction.  As a result, I've been exposed to far more lore than I would ordinarily be tracking this early in the game.  This system is a huge step forward from tweet-length boxes of quest text.  Every MMO that is not planning on Bioware-style branching dialog trees needs to look at this.

Skill system: I am solidly in Camp Spinks on this one.  DII had one of the worst implementations of a skill system that I can ever remember tolerating - with no respecs and no requirement to spend more than one point per low level skill, DII basically dictated that players not use any skill points until most of the way through the game's normal difficulty.  In its place, Blizzard has created a system that offers tactical versatility without the dead weight and false choices - many options and almost all of them bad.  With the new system, I'm re-building my character in some way almost every level, and it sounds like I'm not alone in that experience.

Do I expect to be playing DIII every day for months or years?  No.  But that's another thing that DIII is not and does not need to be - a MMO with a lengthy commitment. 

(P.S. My tag-thing for contacting me in game is pvdblog#1183.) 

Bypassing The Betas

There is a lot of beta going around these days, and I couldn't be less excited.  To name a few:

• I've had access to the Pandaria beta for several weeks now.  Downloaded the client, copied over characters, have yet to log in.
  
• The Diablo III open beta is this weekend.  In fairness, I suppose I would be more interested in this if I hadn't already made my purchasing decision on this game when I picked up the annual pass.  I've known for a while now exactly when my "invite" is arriving - the launch date of May 15th. 
  
• Tera has a complicated rollout schedule.  The game is in open beta this weekend, with a pre-order promo allowing players to retain one character per server into the headstart (which will open it up to the full eight character slots per server) and launch.  I don't see it written down anywhere whether open beta players who subsequently pre-order get to keep their character, but I assume this is likely.  So, at least this pre-head-start thing will potentially not be wiped.  Even so, I'm not in any hurry.  My decision to wait on SWTOR paid off with a more polished game, a lower price tag, and a clear choice of which server to pick after the dust settled on the launch.
  
• Further out on the horizon are more betas for games like Secret World and Guild Wars 2 (both of which are already distributing keys through various means), and more titles upcoming.

Don't get me wrong, I tip my cap to anyone who is still excited enough about some forthcoming MMO to spend their time dealing with bugs and crashes on a server that is going to be blanked before launch.  Personally, though, these things are making less and less sense for me as I juggle a large number of games that are already live, and as free trials become a required feature for even subscription games. 

The Tough 2012 Schedule Continues

I hadn't really planned on spending the better part of two months working on the level cap in Star Trek Online, which has probably another month or so left of content in the game between missions on my Federation and Klingon characters.  This detour, marking the fifth MMO where I have a current level capped character - only drives home a point about how crowded the MMO marketplace is these days.

• In LOTRO, I'm still working on Enedwaith, the pre-expansion content prior to the Isengard expansion.  Remaining in front of me are the entire Isengard expansion (which I already own access to) and the newly released pre-expansion content for this fall's Rohan expansion (which I would have to purchase with Turbine Points).  I hate to skip content in this game given that it's both high quality and relatively limited in quantity compared to other games.  That said, I'm already way over-level for Isengard as a result (currently 68 and climbing).  I'd say that finishing all of this content before Rohan hits is a top priority so that I can do the next expansion at the correct level. 
  
• EQ2 is rolling out a new zone next month with a two level increase to the game's cap.  While I continue to have misgivings about the direction this game is going, this content is effectively free to me, as I have enough Station Cash to pay for unlocking the new gear that will mostly likely come with the inevitable gear reset. 
  
• While I see no reason to be present for the inevitable week or so of bugs and issues with SWTOR's patch 1.2, that game remains high on my to do list.  I'm also still waiting for a graphics card, but again, high on my list.
  
• Diablo III lands on May 15th, and, well-advised or not, I own access to this thing on launch day courtesy of the WoW annual pass.  It also seems reasonably likely that the Pandaria beta will kick off at some point in the near future (less clear is how quickly annual pass customers will get in), though that was a comparatively small consideration in my annual pass purchase, and I never intended to spend large amounts of time on this.  I do expect to continue to duck into Azeroth proper intermittently, and have a larger chunk of time penciled in for after the expansion launches. 
  
• DDO's expansion lands in mid summer.  Realistically, I don't own a max level character in DDO, and I'm not near owning a max level character in DDO, so this is relatively a non-issue, but the emerging hoopla only reminds me that this game continues to be somewhere on my to do list. 
  
• Games where I have max level characters not yet mentioned in this post and no immediate plans include DCUO (where I have some shared Station Cash balance with EQ2) and Rift (where I have a pending time card). 
  
• Free to play or newly free to play games currently on my radar include Lineage 2, Aion, Allods, and possibly Forsaken World (or one of the other Perfect World F2P titles).  Major AAA releases scheduled for the remainder of the year include Guild Wars 2, Tera, Secret World, Wildstar, whatever they're calling Prime/Dominus these days, and Copernicus/Amalur. 

Overall, it's a pretty good time to be an MMO player, other than the potential for crippling indecision, and a really tough time to be competing for a share of players' attention.

Looting the Raid Finder

I took my third trip through the WoW Raid Finder this week, and I guess I must have been statistically due.  I won a glove token - which I gave away to another player when I won the ilvl 390 gloves off of Deathwing's back (don't ask) - a pair of shoulder pads, and enough Valor points to pick up the belt off the Valor vendor.  My PVE set now no longer has inappropriate items in it (e.g. PVP or spirit gear that was enough of an upgrade to be worth equipping despite suboptimal stats).  A few observations:

• For the most part, heroic 5-mans are now no more than a means to Valor points, as I no longer need any of the loot.  The only minor exception is a caster off-hand that I might want if I ended up winning and using the spell dagger from Deathwing (almost all off-hands are itemized with spirit for healers).
• Unless I move on to normal/heroic mode raiding, most of these items are things that I will not replace until the expansion.  Moreover, it doesn't feel like there are many choices - the challenge with effectively replacing all of the gear on all the characters in the game as many as four times in a single patch (the new 5-man dungeons, followed by raid finder, regular, and heroic mode of the Deathwing raid) is that there just isn't room for variety.
• Blizzard intentionally did not include weapons on the regular bosses in the easy raid finder mode (which generally offers loot that's half a tier above five-mans).  The final Deathwing encounter does offer weapons, which are a full tier above what you get in five-mans, but they seem oddly situational.  The two choices for mages are a staff which spends a lot of its budget on a proc that increases haste for some of your group members and a dagger with an uncontrollable AOE proc - something which should give pause to all but the most trigger-happy of DPS.  (If you want to use the dagger anyway, you need to go back to 5-mans for the aforementioned off-hand to carry with it.) 
• A second trinket is one area where I'm kind of lacking, and at the mercy of the random number generator.  There are three trinkets a mage can use in the raid finder, but one has another automatic AOE proc.  These are also hard to get because DPS melee shamen and druids (along with caster shamen, druids, shadow priests, and mages/warlocks) are allowed to roll need on these caster DPS-focused items, resulting in a lot of rolls when one does drop. 

Overall, it's a half-successful incentive.  I have run the thing three times now, and will probably do so a few more times between now and the expansion.  That said, I expect to hit diminishing returns on my time quickly, and it's likely a long wait between now and the next expansion.  Ironically, perhaps Blizzard's much discussed decision to offer Diablo III and the Pandaria beta with WoW's annual pass may have been motivated as much to keep WoW players happy by giving them something else to do as by nefarious plans to lock in revenue. 

2011 MMO Expenditures and Accomplishments

I'm never quite sure how to handle my New Year's/Canada Day resolution wrap-up for the year - realistically most of them are blown by July in any case, and the discussion invariably bleeds into what I'm planning for next year.  This year I'm going to try something different and focus solely on the past; what I spent on each title I played, and what I got for my money.  

For the sake of my sanity, I have chosen to bill content/currency purchases (expansions or free to play content packs) in the year that I actually paid for them (even though I may continue to consume it in future years), and to track subscription time in the year it was actually used (rather than paid for).  Games are listed in the order in which the accomplishments appeared in my twitter feed.  


WoW: $54.40

• Completed a tour of the newbie zones post-Cataclysm
• Advanced my mage the last level to 85, completed all Heroic dungeons (both Cataclysm launch and patch additions) at least once, still working on rep and gear but qualified for the looking for raid finder.
• Advanced warrior from level 82 to level 85, completed all of the holidays through mid-summer to obtain my second violet protodrake
• Actually healed some PUG 5-mans on a mid-level priest alt.

With Cataclysm launching in December 2010, I had just paid for the expansion and was on the tail end of a 90 day subscription at the beginning of January (approx $8.40 for 18 days).  I paid $30 for two months of time (around world events in late April and late June).

I signed up for the annual pass in late October - I'm choosing to account this as $16 for two months this year, with $60 for DIII and $80 for 10 months both applied to next year's budget.  This will either be a bargain or a budget buster depending on how much use I get out of it.  So far, I'm not spending nearly as much time per month under the discounted annual plan as I was when it was costing me $15, but I'm enjoying that time more because I don't feel that I have to force myself to grind day in and day out to maximize the value of the $15 one-month subscription. 

Rift: $48

• Playtested a bunch of alts during the paid beta phases
• Settled on Cleric, leveled from 1 to 48 (and 3/4).  
• Leveled alts to the 10-19 range on the other three callings.
• Actually healed some PUG's using the dungeon finder

I paid $48 for a digital collector's edition back in January, and have not paid since.  Note that this included access to the paid portions of the "closed" beta, as well as three extended retrial weekends.  

LOTRO: $20 in cash and $10 in gift card (which I value less than cash)

• Comleted solo-ified Volume II
• Currently working on Enedwaith and associated book of Volume III

I paid $20 for the Black Friday sale Isengard bundle, which came with 1000 TP's.   I wouldn't have paid $10 for 1000 TP's and a cosmetic outfit, but the half off sale made this a $5 upgrade.  I also turned a $10 gift card at a brick and mortar store into a 750 TP card (which is a terrible exchange rate, but the store had nothing else I wanted for $10).  I've used some of the TP for the Enedwaith quest pack, a second milestone destination, and the 30 minute milestone cooldown reduction for my main, which are collectively definitely worth the price of the points I paid for them.    

My remaining LOTRO playtime was in content that I paid to unlock via expansion purchases in 2009.

EQ2: $85

• Completed Lyriana's enervated mythical
• Advanced from 191 AA's to 267
• Beat first seven dungeons in the Velious progression, obtained about half of my T2 armor   

I paid $45 for three months of game time, and $40 for the DOV expansion.  I also received 45 days of compensation time for the hacking debacle (cost: my identify, dun dun dun).  Up until December, I occasionally used a silver EQ2X account (purchased last year with promotional Station Cash balances that I didn't pay for) that I occasionally used for world events or limited-time quests.

I was expecting to spend about $20+ to unlock my character after the free to play switchover, but SOE's decision to grandfather in existing characters meant that I only had to pay to unlock my current gear, which I was able to do out of my remaining promotional SC balance.  That said, I did decline to purchase the year's second expansion box, along with the $20 paid add-on race that arrived with Velious.  This game would have been exceptionally expensive for someone who actually stayed with it the full time and paid full price for stuff as it was released, were it not for all the freebies for being hacked and for changing the business model.. 
 
Runes of Magic: $15

• Advanced from 30 Druid/30 Rogue to 57 Druid/53 Warden/50 Rogue
• Test drove a bunch of alts into the 20/20/20 range

I spent $15 on diamond currency.  I purchased a mount and some daily quest tickets, and I have just over $5 left. 

Vanguard: $5

• Escaped the generic Isle of Dawn
• Leveled character to 11 Disciple/10 crafter/12 Diplomat

Spent $5 to upgrade my EQ2 subscription to Station Access for one month so I could extend my Vanguard free trial by a bit. 

DCUO: $10

• Reached level 30 on a hero, completed solo campaign
• Experimented with some alts on both factions, platforms 

I spent $10 in the December's triple Station Cash sale for 3000 SC and immediately spent 999 SC on the Lightning Strikes DLC pack, which unlocked the new powerset and upgraded my account to Premium.  I'd been considering paying the full $10 for the pack anyway, so it became an absolute no-brainer with an extra 2000 SC.

Note that some of this balance may eventually get spent on EQ2 instead of DCUO, such is the perk of SOE's unified account system.  I will also tip my hat to SOE for allowing players to purchase currency in any increment of $5, without getting hit with funky/punitive exchange rates. 

DDO: $0
No additional expenditures this year.  I spent $100 in 2010, and spent about $70 of that on unlocking the content and character options I continue to use sporadically.
 
Kingdom of Loathing: $0
No additional money spent, I did sink something like $20-30 in this game back in 2007-2008 or so.

PS3/PSP

• Beat Portal 2 ($35)
• Beat Infamous 1 (PSN hacking debacle freebie)
• Beat Uncharted 1 (Christmas present in 2010)
• Currently working on Assassin's Creed 2 ($10)
• Currently working on Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep (PSP, Christmas 2011 present)

These obviously really MMO purchases, and aren't included in the totals below, I just record them for the sake of perspective. 

Grand Total

All told, I spent basically $240, not counting the $10 gift card, the PS3 games or the $140 committed to Blizzard products next year.  (Nor, I suppose, do I count the amount of patience and attention it takes to await and grab some of the more substantial deals I got this year.)  When you consider that a single subscription MMO with a $40 expansion box and $15 in monthly fees will run you $220 annually, that's really not bad for what I'm getting for my money.

Speaking more generally, 2011 was the year when I actually learned to take advantage of non-subscription gaming models.  I spent a fair amount of time in non-subscription games in 2010, but I continued to play them the way I would approach a subscription game - focusing on one game at a time, playing it until I had completed everything I was aiming for and moving on.  As increasing numbers of games that I wanted to play anyway are offering more flexible options, I'm routinely logging into 3-5 games per week, and on rare occasions even per day.

Ironically, this hasn't blown my costs through the roof the way I wondered that it might when I started tracking what I was spending this year.  The "all-inclusive" subscription model has never included either the initial account nor the paid expansion boxes.  I'm definitely spending more on content than I was - and sometimes I'm putting up with irritating restrictions because I don't feel like paying to remove them - but I'm not then turning around and paying again to continue accessing the content I have paid to unlock.  I may or may not be paying more, but I'm certainly getting a lot more.

Looking ahead to next year, my totals will almost certainly be higher - if you budget the payments to Blizzard and likely boxes for both SWTOR and Pandaria, I already have about as much in total MMO expenses for next year as I did for this year.  Several of the non-subscription games I paid into this year may not require additional funds next year (in particular, EQ2 should be way down), but the fact that I'm already down for $60 on DIII - more than I spent on all but one MMO I played this year - is already looming as the potential difference between the budgets.  Guess we'll find out how this goes next year.

Which Blizzard Title Could Miss 2012?

I don't really care that much about the latest in WoW subscriber numbers, for the reasons that Tobold and Wilhelm describe.  While it is likely that some of the current losses represent a vote of no confidence in the Cataclysm, what happens in the next year will matter a lot more to the future of WoW than what happened in the last year.  It will take more than one down expansion to spell the doom of what is likely the world's most lucrative game.  Two expansions that are not well received, with 18-24 month dev cycles each, would leave the game in "unsatisfactory" status for 3+ years, which would be far harder to rebound from.   

In this context, I'm more interested in a separate tidbit from the call, reported by both Gamasutra and MMO-Champion: 2012 will see a "minimum of two highly-anticipated new titles from Blizzard Entertainment, including Diablo III". 

Assuming no one wants to quibble about whether Blizzard titles are "highly-anticipated", most people would probably agree that they expect three Blizzard titles in 2012 - DIII, the first Starcraft II expansion (Heart of the Swarm), and Mists of Pandaria.   So, which one of the two expansions could potentially miss 2012? 

It's possible that Bobby Kotick is simply being conservative - i.e. that both expansions are equally likely to launch comfortably within 2012, but that saying a "minimum of two" just provides insurance in case an asteroid destroys half of the Blizzard HQ.  Given that SCII was out six months earlier than Cataclysm, however, its expansion should be six months closer to completion.  The possible implication is that Heart of the Swarm is slated for a Q2 release with no reasonable possibility of being delayed to 2013, while Pandaria is penciled in for a Q3 2012 release - just close enough to the end of the year that Kotick doesn't want to go on the record promising that it won't slip into 2013. 

What we saw at Blizzcon seemed to be further along than past expansions at their unveiling, which had me thinking that a mid-late summer release might be on the table.  If my new guess is right, the plan is for Blizzard to respond to possibly the most serious threat in the game's life with the same leisurely 20+ month development cycle that they have always taken (and a release date of September or later).  This would be much more concerning than plus or minus a few hundred thousand customers to the subscription count. 

ROM Gear Lessons For Diablo III's Auction House

Much of the discussion of Blizzard's controversial decision to allow player-to-player item sales for real money in Diablo III has focused on the tired "pay to win" argument.  Like Ferrel, Keen, Rohan, and others, I'm not so interested in this side of the equation because how other players obtain their gear does not affect me directly.  I'm more concerned about the indirect effects of putting the developer in the business of making money when players replace their gear. 

Runes of Magic Gear Upgrades
The best example from my current experience is Runes of Magic and its cash store gear upgrades.  While both models do allow players to get what they want in-game with some (possibly prohibitive) amount of time investment, I would argue that the presence of gear boosts in the cash shop means that Runewaker/Frogster see more revenue specifically when new gear is added to the game, much as DIII's auction fees will almost certainly provide more revenue for Blizzard when new gear is added to the game.  Any MMO expects to make money off of new content somehow (box sales, renewed subscriptions, item shops), but this approach biases the payment model towards additions that replace players' gear.

If you look at ROM's content history, you'd see what my model predicts - compared to traditional subscription games, the ROM level cap has increased far more frequently, but with fewer additional levels at each increase, allowing players to park and farm up new gear at each new level range before the cap rises again.  There are benefits to this model - players get content more frequently, and all of the new content gets used while it is the current level cap, where games that raise the cap by 10 levels at a time often end up with underutilized content in the middle of that level range.   However, you also see insane vertical progression, with all the problems that this entails - my level 53 Druid has fewer than 3,000 HP in solo gear, while the Druid Encyclopedia recommends 5K-15K for dungeons in my level range. 

Moreover, you will also see dramatic swings in relative class balance.  The recently concluded Chapter 3 era saw Scouts topping the DPS charts by as much as 3-fold, while the talk in Chapter 4 is that Rogues are the new scouts, just as the game added a third class slot to let those disgruntled Scouts take up Rogue-ing.  Every game has class balance issues and flavor of the month builds.  Not every game makes more money when players replace their gear, and nothing makes ROM players replace their gear faster than changing archetypes outright. 

The Post DIII Era
Bobby Kotick's comments about exploiting his franchises aside, I don't expect that Blizzard would take this in a direction that immediately ruins a flagship product.  You can't sell virtual goods to people who aren't playing your game, and a game that's balanced assuming that players are fully decked out in the rarest of the low drop rate gear from the cash auction house will drive players away.  We can probably expect extremely rare items powerful enough to affect game balance, especially on higher difficulty levels, but that was a feature of the original game anyway. 

If anything, I think a fair number of would-be-Gevlons will waste a lot of time and real world money on posting fees - and, gods help them, attempts to buy low and sell high - as demand to get real cash for DIII loot outstrips willingness to pay real cash for all but the rarest of DIII loot.  That said, I think the longterm effects of having publishers demand the revenue from this feature will only worsen the vertical progression issues that are already causing huge problems in MMO's. 

Also, as Stabs points out, the legal implications are potentially staggering.  Can you sue a ninja looter?  How long before someone decides to test the EULA in court by suing Blizzard for a nerf or server crash that cost them real money?  Can Blizzard flag accounts to ensure that the rare drops go to people with a proven history of selling them, rather than keeping the loot and depriving Blizzard of their auction fees on an item that might not drop again for weeks?  Would they have to disclose it if they do so?  Is this system effectively online poker with the killing of monsters substituted for the random drawing of cards?

Though I don't think that pay to win is the direct problem, I think Scott Jennings is right when he says that this will take games in a direction that is bad for players, but that we've already lost the battle against it because the market will tolerate the new model.  It's not the apocalypse, but it's also not a good day for online gaming.