Unreasonable Player Expectations

Quoth Cryptic's Bill Roper, in an interview with Massively:

"If a game comes out and it's not what the players believed it was going to be, what they think they deserve, what they were promised -- the amount of rage associated with that is kind of frightening, to be honest."

Where do players get these crazy ideas from?

For example, imagine that a hypothetical producer was out making comments about how some equivalent for gameplay-effecting items in the real money item shop will be available through in-game means. Why would someone reading that statement be surprised if, less than six months post-launch, the game announces plans for a paid "expansion" that is no larger than the content patches that all of the other games on the market include in their monthly fees? No one promised that new content would be included in the monthly fee, regardless of whether or not it looks suspiciously like "content that didn't get finished in time for the game's full priced retail launch".

Besides, it's not like trust matters in the MMORPG marketplace or anything.

Leveling Pace And Quest Structure

Ferrel argues that MMORPG's would be better off if it took longer to reach the game's level cap, with an increased focus on the middle game to ensure that it was actually fun to remain at those level ranges. I agree, though I'd also argue that this is largely like saying that higher quality would make games better. The more interesting question is this - why have games strayed from that path in the first place?

Why Rush The Cap?
The current rush to level has more to do with the need to get new characters (whether newbies or veteran alts) up to where other players are for grouping than any intrinsic desire to have players hit cap quickly. At least until WoW's cross-server automated group finder, no developer had found an effective answer to the question of "who will the level 40's group with when the majority of the playerbase is level 80?"

The hope is that accelerated leveling will get newbies to the cap fast enough to help balance out attrition among endgame guilds. As an added, if secondary, bonus, less total time spent leveling means less time spent on those pesky middle levels, which tend to be the thinnest on content these days.

At the end of the day, the actual rate at which the arbitrary level number by the player's head advances doesn't really matter. What matters is whether the player is having fun while playing the game. This is where it's no accident that the rise of solo play coincided with the rise of the WoW-style quest.

The Solo Quest And the Grind
Ferrel finds the solo quest path boring - to be precise, he describes them as:
"Boring, mindless, pointless, chores that your boss gives you at work because he sees you sitting still for one minute and cannot handle that fact."
This is actually a tangentially related problem to the time it takes to reach the level cap.

Grinding in a group, like the EQ1 groups Ferrel reminisces about, provides both entertainment (e.g. joking with your friends) and unpredictability (e.g. someone screwed up and suddenly there are a dozen mobs eating your corpses) to an otherwise trivial task of chain pulling identical mobs. If you think solo quests are boring, you should try solo grinding (e.g. LOTRO's "kill 300 mobs for +2 agility" kill deeds) sometime.

In the absence of other players to supplement the fun, Blizzard came up with the guided tour of Azeroth. The point of the quest is straightforward - encourage the player to change the scenery before they can get bored of hacking away at the same mobs solo. The large chunk of experience for completing quests is basically reimbursement for players' travel time, while the hope is that slight variations in mobs and environments between quest areas will keep players entertained.

In terms of gameplay, this is no different from standing still in one location killing the mobs (or, for that matter, walking in a straight path killing mobs, as you will often find in a single player RPG), but - if and only if the developer has the resources to create a world large enough to sustain the model - the feeling is that the player is on a guided tour through a large world.

Supporting the world
Unfortunately, as I've written in the past, it is nigh impossible to actually generate content fast enough to sustain this model. If most players are spending an entire level grinding at a specific camp, the game only needs one or two grinding spots per level. In fact, having more choices can be problematic if it splits the grouping pool and makes it harder for players to agree on where they want to go. This leaves a lot of room to spare for optional content, exploration, while still producing way less content per level (and therefore spending less in development time/money).

By contrast, the entire point of the scenery-changing quest model is that players should change locations after some approximately fixed period of time before they get bored, no matter how many times that has to happen each level. This drives the resources needed to support that playstyle through the roof, to the point where not even Blizzard can fully support WoW style questing. (See the forthcoming Cataclysm expansion, which is, in part, motivated by the hope that sprinkling in new leveling content will encourage players to use the remaining older content in between revised areas.)

Ultimately, this is where the tangent of solo quest structure comes back to affect leveling pace. Some portion of the level acceleration comes because developers end up tuning the exp curve around players hitting max level by the time they run out of the game's limited content.

Mixing the solo and the group
Personally, I think there still is value for both sides in having solo and group players co-exist within the same game. Solo players get a larger world than is typically possible in a single player game, along with the option to access the multiplayer aspects of the world (especially a more robust economy) if they choose. Group players get the higher all-around production values that are made possible by a broader audience. That said, there is also room for conflict, a conflict only becomes more pronounced as aging games get less and less new content over time.

At the end of the day, I think that there is plenty of room in the market right now for a game to take the Darkfall approach to PVE. Players may need to adjust their expectations for such a game, bearing in mind that Darkfall's rocky launch was actually a FEATURE that allowed them to keep their development costs low enough to write off the solo market, but this should be well within possibility as long as the investors go in with realistic expectations and deep enough pockets.

If anything, I think that the resurgence of the group model with less total content and longer leveling times may have a brighter future in the short term than solo PVE. As many games have demonstrated over the last few years, just tacking on a few solo quests is not enough to retain players who expect both WoW-level quality and quantity from day one. This entry barrier may now be too high for anyone to overcome. If you can't do solo content better than WoW, you might very well be better off not trying to do it at all.

Trust and Living in the MMOment

Technology site Ars Technica has a problem - 40% of its tech-savvy readers use ad-blockers. Fundamentally, this is an issue of trust. Viewing the ads on Ars requires that readers allow a dozen various servers script access to their browsers, and fires up Flash for extra security vulnerability potential.

Unlike suspicious email attachments or phishing sites, the browser exploit is problematic because the viewer has missed their last opportunity to protect themselves by the time the page loads. If you do not run ad blockers, you are literally placing the security of your computer in the hands of every site you visit (and, more problematically, every third party advertising network they sell space to). Even the most reputable sites on the net, like the New York Times, make the occasional screwup that could cost users their credit card info (and, as us MMORPG players are all to well aware, our game accounts).

Losing Trust in Developers
Keen's latest Allods update is a bit telling on why us gamers are so suspicious. Inevitably, the game's publishers were forced to lower the costs on their most excessively overpriced items. To make up the difference, they turned around and increased the number of these items that players would need to consume. Apparently, the price tags they launched the store with were the more honest representation of what the publishers wanted to charge than their concerned apologies that followed the uproar, so it was only a matter of time before they found some way around their supposed concession.

Really, though, this is but the latest in a growing trend of cases that prove time and time again that gamers trust developers at the peril of their wallets. Inexplicably large numbers of players apparently expected Star Trek Online to launch relatively complete and relatively free from additional fees to unlock industry standard features, despite the fact that Cryptic had just finished launching Champions Online shy of both bars. Players who sunk their time and money in now discontinued games like Hellgate or Tabula Rasa with the expectation that those games would continue similarly lost out.

The sad truth is that players cannot trust anything that the developers or publishers say about games anymore. Their job is literally to lie about whether the game is finished and/or worth playing, if that's what it takes to sell copies. Because games are propriety products, developed behind closed doors, there are limits to the ability of journalists to protect us from this. The only alternative is not to trust anyone.

The Peril of Living in the MMOment
The lesson that the cynical observer walks away with is to live purely for the moment. Why put a long-term investment into a character in a game that might not be worth playing in a few months?

In my personal experience at the moment, I'm willing to run my LOTRO character through the newly solo-able epic books to experience the storyline, because that is fun right now. I'm not willing to farm the literally thousands of trivial mobs I would need to kill to max out all of my kill deed traits, even if having those bonuses might be fun later, because it would not be fun now and I cannot be confident that I will want to stick around long enough for that investment to pay off.

The problem is that a certain degree of repetition is all but essential to the MMORPG business model. There is never enough content to go around, but the game needs to provide something that justifies paying a monthly fee - resources that are ultimately needed to support the continued development of games of the size and quality that players have come to expect. The idea that players characters represent a longer term investment that would grant easier access to future content was part of the payoff that kept players around. Nowadays, even if the game is still around a year from now, the gear you worked for will probably have been leveled in a gear reset.

If you look at it purely as a business transaction, the player's choice is straightforward - consume the fun parts, skip the boring, and take your business elsewhere the moment you stop being entertained. The problem, as with the adblockers, is whether that plan leaves enough revenue to support the content.

The End of an Eriador Era

Imagine for a minute that, upon the December launch of Siege of Mirkwood, Turbine had come to you and confided that LOTRO was going to close. Now, Turbine wanted you to tell them how to spend their last months of development on one final swan song patch.

The recently released Volume 3, Book 1 patch would have been precisely the patch I would have asked for under those sad circumstances. Lacking the time to properly explore the lands of Rohan, Gondor, and Mordor, the best that a player could hope for would be a patch that cleans up lingering issues with the game, opens up as much existing content as possible to players who have not had the chance to see it, and offers a farewell tour of sorts through the game's content.

In reality, there is no evidence that Turbine plans to pull an Asheron's Call 2 (the studio holds the dubious distinction of having conducted probably the shortest window between "pay us for a new expansion box" and "sorry, game's closing" in a major MMORPG) on LOTRO. Even so, this patch has an inexplicable feel of farewell nostalgia.

The Farewell Tour
The Volume 3 patch is fundamentally about getting additional mileage out of existing content.

• A newly expanded "inspired greatness" buff is designed to allow players to solo previously group-only content from the original game. For me personally, this has meant a chance to see content that I just wasn't able to find groups for back in the day. I've completed Books 4, 5, and 8 of Volume 1 so far, and there's a fair amount of that story remaining that might as well not have been in the game, given how hard it was to find groups to access it.
  
  (In an ironic twist, one questline has the player traveling to Rivendell to forge a named sword for a Ranger. He does not immediately turn around and have a relic master break it down for relics - perhaps he wanted to get some item levels first, to improve the components he would get back in the process?)
  
  
• Several existing skirmishes have been opened up to additional group sizes. The bigger news in this department, though, is that all skirmishes are now available for two players. Apparently 40% of all 3-player skirmishes that anyone was trying prior to this patch were being attempted by a duo. When I mentioned this addition to my wife, she was shocked that it hadn't occurred to Turbine that players would need a duo feature before pushing the system live without one.
  
  
• With Aragorn off to Rohan, someone has to go round up the Rangers. That someone would be you, the player, in the one new quest chain of the patch. Basically, this entails traveling to every zone in the game where there was a ranger handing out quests, and running some minor errand locally to convince that ranger that it is safe for them to depart.
  
  (Elrond tells the player that only they can make the journey fast enough to reach all the rangers - given the lack of magical travel in Middle Earth, there's a valid question of whether it would even be possible for a single character to have done all of this in the time that the lore allows.)
  
  Make no mistake, this story involves more time in transit than dialog or combat. However, it gets by anyway on sheer nostalgia value - I remember clearing each of these zones back in the day (often with fewer swift travel options than the present game offers), and I'm fine with a nostalgia tour as long as it's so readily obvious that this is what we're up to.
  
  
  In a bit of an insult to the player's intelligence, each stage of the quest offers a choice between a single use teleport to the next NPC - often only one or two jumps away via swift travel - or a valuable scroll that would otherwise cost 25+ dungeon tokens.

What isn't here
At the same time, this patch is most notable for what isn't here. If you were hoping for a second single-group dungeon or a second raid (yes, the current level cap offers just one of each, though some players are still running stuff from the previous expansion), you're out of luck. New areas to explore (i.e. the long awaited expansion to Rohan)? Nope. Changes to the grindy legendary item and radiance gear mechanics? Not this patch.

For what it is - a filler patch designed to occupy time while Turbine saves the real content meat for the next paid expansion - the Volume 3 patch offers LOTRO's usual excellent quality. As always, though, the quantity comes up a bit shy. Improvements to crafting and content access are great as part of a patch, but here they make up basically the entire patch. If this is all that Turbine is prepared to add the game on a once every three months basis between paid content updates, one has to wonder whether that will hurt subscriber retention in the long run.

In the end, long months with mere morsels of content will be forgiven if Turbine can deliver Rohan, in a state that meets the bar they set with Moria, this year. In story terms, that shift may partially explain the farewell atmosphere of the current patch. The gathering of the Grey Company is really the last point in the story at which it makes sense for characters to still be running around Eriador.

The current landmass of the game will remain relevant for tourism - holiday festivals and whatnot - but the real meat of the story ahead lies in content that players have not yet seen. More than any content to date, Rohan needs to stand on its own. As much as us players may be nostalgic for the days of Eriador, one wonders if Turbine will miss the crutch of being able to throw together a patch like this one without the ability to lean on three years of existing content.

Gear Rentals Versus Gear Incentives

Aion has announced plans to allow players to rent gear in an upcoming patch. Given the central role that gear plays in modern MMORPG incentive structures, how does this model affect the game?

The Dual Roles of Gear
In most item-based MMORPG's, gear plays two roles. Gear determines what the player character looks like. It also determines the character's power level, and therefore what in-game goals the character can accomplish (generally "what can you kill?").

On the surface, the cosmetic question sounds less affected by gear rentals. All they have to do is ensure that the gear looks less desirable and the incentive to get the non-rental gear is preserved. The problem is how to reach that goal. If you make the gear look actively unattractive, some players will want it precisely because it is so garish. Meanwhile, Aion is a PVP game. If you make the rental gear look drab compared to the good stuff, some veterans might actively PREFER to disguise themselves as an undergeared newbie, rather than wearing a distinctive suit of armor that identifies them clearly as the biggest threat on the battlefield.

Meanwhile, the power level question is no easier. The fact is that many players prefer the persistent world MMORPG precisely because it is possible to reduce the difficulty of a challenge (be it a mob or a player) by obtaining superior gear. That appeal is eliminated if anyone who logs in can immediately rent top end gear. On the flip side, there is the risk of providing gear that is "good enough" to accomplish the player's goals. Once the player reaches that threshold, the value of further advancement is diminished.

The Goal And the Danger
In the end, leveling the playing field is precisely the point of this move. Aion is a bit of a young game to level the playing field by the more traditional route of gear inflation via a gear reset, and the rental plan is intended to help new characters (newbie and veteran alike) get their foot in the door.

That said, the problem with rental is that it removes the sense of ownership from player accomplishments. If I have to run a dungeon 10 times to get the gear to hit the next dungeon, I feel a sense of ownership of that gear. If I can jump into the next dungeon right away with rental gear, the only incentive to go back to the old dungeon is to stop paying rent on my rental gear. That might be a strong incentive if the activity I have to do to pay the rent is not-so-enjoyable (e.g. repetitive daily quests), but is the newbie who wants to run dungeons really better off when you tell them to do daily quests first to pay their rental fees?

Will Keyloggers Kill The Cataclysm Alpha?

Blizzard kicked off the week with a massive wall of text concerning the revamp of item stats that will be arriving in Cataclysm. Though I suppose that these details might be so fundamental that they're basically carved in stone at this point, usually this kind of information dump happens only very close to public testing of the changes in question. Historically, that would mean the Cataclysm alpha test, but there may be a big reason for Blizzard NOT to hold an external alpha test of this expansion.

Wrath's alpha non-disclosure agreement was basically a joke. Blizzard made the client publicly available to people who weren't in the alpha test, and all of the datamined changes promptly ended up on a wiki hosted by someone willing to thumb their noses at a Blizzard cease and desist letter. WoW Insider reposted the info, got hit with a cease and desist, and complied by replacing the posts in question with repeated direct links to the wiki, accompanied with "we can't post this ourselves but..." taunts to the lawyers. Blizzard could have stemmed much of that tide by password protecting the client download, but there probably still would have been some more conventional leaks to be had.

The problem is that nowadays we're in an era where hackers are taking out google ads against every WoW related search term imaginable, often with typo'ed URL's that direct inattentive players to keylogger sites. If Blizzard goes ahead with an alpha NDA, literally thousands of accounts will likely be compromised by the top search results for "cataclysm alpha leaks".

Realistically, is the testing feedback that Blizzard gets from the "friends and family" pool really worth all that? My guess is that it is not - if Blizzard did an external alpha of Starcraft II, I certainly didn't hear about it, so I don't see why they'd find a Cataclysm alpha any more necessary.

P.S. Bonus Cataclysm Beta Tea Leaf:
The Icecrown Citadel raid has begun nerfing itself as of today, with a 5% buff to player hp, damage, and healing. All of the encounters other than the heroic 25-man Lich King (with his 100 million hp) were beaten by the top guilds in the world without this buff, so one might conclude that Blizzard wants more players to complete the content sooner rather than later - something that would not be in their longterm interest if Cataclysm were somehow delayed and didn't arrive for a year.

The buff scales to 30% - if it increases by 5% per month, it would hit that cap in August. WoW expansion betas tend to run about four months, so the Cataclysm beta could start as late as early May and still make a September launch.

LOTRO Cooking: Your Timesink Or Your Life

LOTRO has a new patch out, and with it came a minor revamp of cooked foods. Previously, food had two purposes - it was something that you ate to fill up your HP immediately, but also something that gave a more long-lasting in-combat regeneration benefit. The good news with the patch is that the out of combat regen lasts longer. This means that you're not going to have to sit watching your health regenerate because you still have a regen buff that you don't want to waste by eating more before the old food expires. The bad news is that these two goals are now set in opposition to each other.

Now you have a "choice" in the type of food you eat. Do you want 50% more out of combat regeneration, decreasing the time it takes to recover your health after combat (generally spent doing nothing but watching the screen, unless you're in a very crowded area where you might be attacked)? Or do you want to double the amount of IN-COMBAT regeneration from your food? The latter stat can literally save your life in a tough situation. The former merely reduces your downtime.

Making trade-offs to improve your effectiveness in game is a reasonable place to put a gameplay choice. Previously, the choice was between health regen, power regen, or a combination of the two. This was an interesting choice, because tanks might just want health, non-tanks in a group setting might just need power, and soloers might want a mix of both.

Having a choice between "die because you didn't have enough in-combat regen" and "spend more time waiting for out of combat regen ticks" is not a strategically interesting choice - in the long run, the amount of time you will lose if you die because of incorrect food selection outweighs the increased regen, so the only reasonable choice is to spend more of your gaming time sitting and watching the screen while you wait for the slower out of combat recovery. More time non-interactively watching the screen is the very last thing that LOTRO needs.