I've been writing recently about what I see as a conflict between solo leveling and getting new characters to max level so they can join in group content. Solo players actually want to do the content, while group players find it a dull but time-consuming chore en route to endgame, and I'm starting to feel that both groups are getting the short end of the stick. Reading Ferrel's post about Rift's Expert Dungeon plaque changes in patch 1.2, I'm seeing some strong parallels.
From Ferrel's perspective as a guild leader trying to get his team geared up and ready to raid, decreased dungeon token income is a disaster, as it means that the guild has to spend more time farming content that has long since ceased to be interesting. He assumes that everyone who is farming expert dungeons is doing so for the same reason - to get the gear to be released from this purgatory as quickly as possible.
The reality is that there is a growing segment of the market for whom single group dungeon content is the end of the line. There's a big difference between clicking the automated group finder button at a time of your choosing to farm a 90 minute dungeon and committing days in advance to show up to a scheduled 3-4 hour raid. The old model of high difficulty, high reward dungeons does not serve Trion's long-term interest in retaining this demographic - infrequent players probably won't be able to find groups that can beat the content, and, if they do, they will run out of stuff to farm pretty quickly.
Developers are in a tough spot here. The majority of the content needs to be aimed at the majority of the customers - which means solo and maybe easy group content - because those customers have plenty of options to take their money elsewhere. However, taking the very top end of customers and letting them skip the 95% of content that is below their expertise is a good recipe for having those players run out of things to do exceptionally quickly. The result is what we have now - players forced to do things that they do not enjoy as a pre-requisite for things they would like to do, because that's the way the developers are getting paid.
Somehow, this does not seem like the best longterm plan.
Sunday, May 15, 2011
Saturday, May 14, 2011
Challenge As Intended
My last post stated that leveling content in WoW was too easy to be fun. A commenter called nonsense on this idea, arguing that part of being a soloist includes seeking out challenges. I agree, but I argue that this point actually proves mine.
(I would attribute this comment, but it is missing from the post, and I don't know whether the author removed it intentionally for some reason, or whether it was eaten by the Blogger outage this week.)
The new leveling game
The revised leveling content in WoW is highly linear. The intent is for players to do the quests of each zone (50-100 typically) one after another, using the gear awarded from previously completed quests. The problem is that, even without twinking or heirlooms or anything else, the exp curve makes it nigh impossible to complete a zone without over-leveling it, trivializing its content. You can try abandoning quests as you outlevel them, but this means missing out on the new storylines that, for me at least, are the reason why I was interested in leveling new alts in the first place.
I am not saying that there is no challenge to be found soloing in WoW. I am saying that playing the solo leveling content in the way it was designed and intended no longer produces a satisfactory level of challenge, which is a problem in an expansion that created so much of this content.
When intentionally sub-optimal becomes uninteresting
Late in the Wrath era, I spent about a thousand gold on BOE's and gems to assemble a melee set for my mage, because daily quests were so trivial at a 5000 Gearscore that I figured an autoattacking mage who did not use any damage spells could beat them. I was correct, and my choices did succeed in increasing the challenge of the quests, which took about 10 times longer as a result. I would argue, though, that the content no longer functions as intended when the only way to make it interesting is to have a caster who doesn't cast spells.
It is indeed always possible to make life more challenging for your character by making sub-optimal choices in game. You could argue that the entire existence of soloing in MMO's was originally based in part on skilled players choosing to see whether they could push their limits and defeat content intended for full parties. (Soloing old instances in WoW remains some of the most fun that I've had in MMO's.)
However, while we've always had naked warriors and melee hunters and characters who did not complete a single quest or kill a single mob, once upon a time you did not need to do these sorts of things to enjoy the leveling experience. At some point, you're no longer making interesting choices to challenge yourself. Instead, you're making bad choices to try and remedy a design issue in the game's difficulty. If you are the kind of player who enjoys making intelligent choices and being rewarded with greater success, this removes a huge part of the fun from the game experience.
(I would attribute this comment, but it is missing from the post, and I don't know whether the author removed it intentionally for some reason, or whether it was eaten by the Blogger outage this week.)
The new leveling game
The revised leveling content in WoW is highly linear. The intent is for players to do the quests of each zone (50-100 typically) one after another, using the gear awarded from previously completed quests. The problem is that, even without twinking or heirlooms or anything else, the exp curve makes it nigh impossible to complete a zone without over-leveling it, trivializing its content. You can try abandoning quests as you outlevel them, but this means missing out on the new storylines that, for me at least, are the reason why I was interested in leveling new alts in the first place.
I am not saying that there is no challenge to be found soloing in WoW. I am saying that playing the solo leveling content in the way it was designed and intended no longer produces a satisfactory level of challenge, which is a problem in an expansion that created so much of this content.
When intentionally sub-optimal becomes uninteresting
Late in the Wrath era, I spent about a thousand gold on BOE's and gems to assemble a melee set for my mage, because daily quests were so trivial at a 5000 Gearscore that I figured an autoattacking mage who did not use any damage spells could beat them. I was correct, and my choices did succeed in increasing the challenge of the quests, which took about 10 times longer as a result. I would argue, though, that the content no longer functions as intended when the only way to make it interesting is to have a caster who doesn't cast spells.
It is indeed always possible to make life more challenging for your character by making sub-optimal choices in game. You could argue that the entire existence of soloing in MMO's was originally based in part on skilled players choosing to see whether they could push their limits and defeat content intended for full parties. (Soloing old instances in WoW remains some of the most fun that I've had in MMO's.)
However, while we've always had naked warriors and melee hunters and characters who did not complete a single quest or kill a single mob, once upon a time you did not need to do these sorts of things to enjoy the leveling experience. At some point, you're no longer making interesting choices to challenge yourself. Instead, you're making bad choices to try and remedy a design issue in the game's difficulty. If you are the kind of player who enjoys making intelligent choices and being rewarded with greater success, this removes a huge part of the fun from the game experience.
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
Self-Reinforcing Cataclysm Subscriber Speculation
Over in the comments at Spinks' place, a blog-less poster named Simon Jones suggests that we're all treating news of WoW's subscriber blip as vindication that our personal complaints about the game are felt universally, and are responsible for the decline. Fair enough.
My personal pre-conceived concerns about Cataclysm are:
The interesting question is not what everyone with a blog thinks, but what other MMO developers think when they see Blizzard throwing cataclysmic amounts of money at revamping the neglected mid-game only to have endgame players run out of content and quit at a faster rate. My guess is that the odds of anyone else trying anything as ambitious as Cataclysm in the near future just went down.
My personal pre-conceived concerns about Cataclysm are:
- That the solo leveling content that Blizzard spent so much effort on is too easy to be fun for people who actually like solo leveling because group players need to be able to get it over with quickly to reach the cap.
- That the opportunity cost of spending all that time on low level content was less content available at max level. (This causes several additional problems - for example, dungeon difficulty gets harder to manage with fewer dungeons and therefore less room for difficulty tiers.)
The interesting question is not what everyone with a blog thinks, but what other MMO developers think when they see Blizzard throwing cataclysmic amounts of money at revamping the neglected mid-game only to have endgame players run out of content and quit at a faster rate. My guess is that the odds of anyone else trying anything as ambitious as Cataclysm in the near future just went down.
Monday, May 9, 2011
Triumph of the $5 Mount
It's been two years since Darren made Runes of Magic's $10 mount famous, and I've finally shelled out for a ride of my own in the game.
It happened that last weekend combined double exp (relevant only in that it got me back into the game in the first place) with a double "diamond" sale and half off permanent mounts. As a result, I was able to snag something significantly beyond what $10 bought back in 2009 - Darren's mount is a plain brown horse that goes at +55% speed, while my new ride goes at 70%, can supposedly carry a second passenger, has a fancier animated texture, and can hover over water without dismounting, all for $5 after the sales. As always, it pays to wait when cash shops are concerned.
In some ways, the way in which the deal got better drives home Darren's point about how arbitrary the digital horse sale is. On the other hand, the $10 I spent on a pre-paid card (which got me some bonus goodies, and ensured that no one involved has any credit card info they can cough up in the event of a hacking debacle) is the only money that I've spent on the game thus far, and I've gotten well more than that much entertainment out of it. For the most part, I'm regarding the money almost as a gratuity, with the fact that I no longer need to worry about 30-day mount promos expiring as an added bonus.
Revisiting the item shop
After the last time I wrote about ROM, I basically decided to take a step back from the experience rather than push forward and end up with burnout on the game. The experience is unapologetically a grind, which routinely offers nominally higher level quests that send you back to fight low level mobs you were grinding on a few quests back.
This is okay - sometimes it's fun to sign in and beat down several hundred mobs in a weekend with zero downtime and relatively little risk, just for a change of scenery. The problem is when the exp curve causes you to run out of even this content, and you're left with the frustrating experience of trying to beat higher level stuff you can't handle and incurring substantial death penalties in the process. Apparently, double exp from the bonus weekend was the difference between struggling, as I was the last time I played, and having fun for a weekend of gaining levels at a steady clip (10 levels of Rogue and 7 levels of Druid, ending at 40 Rogue /37 Druid).
If you're bent on never spending a dime on the game, this gets irritating really quickly. That said, now that I have a relatively firm idea of what the currency is worth and which bonuses I consider necessary to have a fun experience, it looks like a night's worth of solid entertainment in ROM will cost me about $1. That's more than the cost per night on a subscription MMO if you're playing every single day, but much less than you pay per night if you only play one or two weekends a month.
(None of this considers the prices on the game's potentially pricey cash store item enhancements, which I haven't needed for solo play thus far and would probably price me out of the market relatively quickly.)
Overall, I think this is a game I will revisit from time to time. In particular, I'm curious about the planned addition of a back-up secondary class to the game. My current balance of diamonds and potions (from promos etc) will see me through a fair chunk of that from the back of my blue winged $5 horse, so I'm not complaining.
P.S. The prepaid card I redeemed supposedly comes with a 30 day promo mount code that I now no longer need since I own a permanent mount. I make no promises that any of this functions as advertised (in particular, I'm pretty sure that this only works on the US servers) , but I will be happy to send the code to the first commenter on this post who wants it and provides instructions on where they want me to send it. The winner: it's Xax.
It happened that last weekend combined double exp (relevant only in that it got me back into the game in the first place) with a double "diamond" sale and half off permanent mounts. As a result, I was able to snag something significantly beyond what $10 bought back in 2009 - Darren's mount is a plain brown horse that goes at +55% speed, while my new ride goes at 70%, can supposedly carry a second passenger, has a fancier animated texture, and can hover over water without dismounting, all for $5 after the sales. As always, it pays to wait when cash shops are concerned.
In some ways, the way in which the deal got better drives home Darren's point about how arbitrary the digital horse sale is. On the other hand, the $10 I spent on a pre-paid card (which got me some bonus goodies, and ensured that no one involved has any credit card info they can cough up in the event of a hacking debacle) is the only money that I've spent on the game thus far, and I've gotten well more than that much entertainment out of it. For the most part, I'm regarding the money almost as a gratuity, with the fact that I no longer need to worry about 30-day mount promos expiring as an added bonus.
Revisiting the item shop
After the last time I wrote about ROM, I basically decided to take a step back from the experience rather than push forward and end up with burnout on the game. The experience is unapologetically a grind, which routinely offers nominally higher level quests that send you back to fight low level mobs you were grinding on a few quests back.
 |
| Read carefully, this text is your only warning that this particular quest may spawn an elite mob who will one-shot you and give you exp debt. |
If you're bent on never spending a dime on the game, this gets irritating really quickly. That said, now that I have a relatively firm idea of what the currency is worth and which bonuses I consider necessary to have a fun experience, it looks like a night's worth of solid entertainment in ROM will cost me about $1. That's more than the cost per night on a subscription MMO if you're playing every single day, but much less than you pay per night if you only play one or two weekends a month.
(None of this considers the prices on the game's potentially pricey cash store item enhancements, which I haven't needed for solo play thus far and would probably price me out of the market relatively quickly.)
Overall, I think this is a game I will revisit from time to time. In particular, I'm curious about the planned addition of a back-up secondary class to the game. My current balance of diamonds and potions (from promos etc) will see me through a fair chunk of that from the back of my blue winged $5 horse, so I'm not complaining.
P.S. The prepaid card I redeemed supposedly comes with a 30 day promo mount code that I now no longer need since I own a permanent mount.
 |
| On the plus side, ankle-deep water does not frighten this horse away. On the down side, after playing several games with real flying mounts that have less fancy wings than these, I occasionally expect my new ride to be able to take off. |
Friday, May 6, 2011
Dark Times For DCUO?
The DCUO Unlimited Podcast has a new episode up today, and the tale is a bit sad to listen to - it's only May, but it's looking like a shoe-in for roughest launch of 2011, if for no other reason than because of the sheer number of things that have gone wrong.
Back in December, I had moderate expectations for the game - I wasn't expecting it to have much content or staying power, but I figured that I would probably pick it up, play for the included month, and maybe come back for another month sometime later in the year after a few patches. However, the more I heard about the game - and, just as notably, the LESS I heard about the game as very few blogs I read covered it in any way - I began to think that the price tag was a bit high, especially given reports of lack of polish.
Wilhelm saved for posterity one of those John Smedley quotes that makes you wonder how this guy can still be allowed to talk to the media. Asking console players for a $15 monthly fee was always a tough sell, but Smedley insisted that SOE understood the obligation to provide players with "a lot of new content" for that price tag. First of all, SOE's current PC subscribers don't really get "a lot of new content" each and every month. More importantly, though, this kind of statement makes you look bad if your planned monthly patches immediately drop to six weeks in frequency. And that was the good news.
Then the DCUO team got hit with an undisclosed number of layoffs in the March bloodbath. Meanwhile, players must have concluded that they were not impressed with what was in Smedley's touted content patches, because the game opened this month testing plans to merge down to the bare minimum four servers - one for each platform (PC, PS3) in each region (US, EU). It's not even clear how they will handle PVP or not with that few servers remaining.
Of course, four servers will be four more than are available right now - as Wilhelm's new sidebar graphic notes, today is the 17th day of downtime for the Playstation Network (and all PS3 DCUO players) and the 4th day of downtime for SOE's PC players (who got to keep playing for the 13 additional days it took Sony to realize that SOE had been hit by the hacks as well).
(It is vaguely appropriate that Wilhelm is taking a page from Walter Cronkite's book - if you've lost Wilhelm, you've probably lost middle Blog-merica, as Lyndon Johnson supposedly said after Cronkite's famous editorial comment on the state of the Vietnam War.)
The downtime is not the fault of the DCUO devs, but, as the DCUO Unlimited gang noted in the discussion, the timing could not have been worse - some players who were on the fence to begin with may not be back after the hack debacle, and the incident does not inspire a lot of confidence in theoretically potential customers. Games that have limited amounts of content are simply a tough sell with a full price box ($60 for the PS3 version) and a full price sub ($15) given all the free to play and formerly pay to play options on the market today. You have to wonder how much the decision to launch the game at this price point may have hampered their long term potential.
Back in December, I had moderate expectations for the game - I wasn't expecting it to have much content or staying power, but I figured that I would probably pick it up, play for the included month, and maybe come back for another month sometime later in the year after a few patches. However, the more I heard about the game - and, just as notably, the LESS I heard about the game as very few blogs I read covered it in any way - I began to think that the price tag was a bit high, especially given reports of lack of polish.
Wilhelm saved for posterity one of those John Smedley quotes that makes you wonder how this guy can still be allowed to talk to the media. Asking console players for a $15 monthly fee was always a tough sell, but Smedley insisted that SOE understood the obligation to provide players with "a lot of new content" for that price tag. First of all, SOE's current PC subscribers don't really get "a lot of new content" each and every month. More importantly, though, this kind of statement makes you look bad if your planned monthly patches immediately drop to six weeks in frequency. And that was the good news.
Then the DCUO team got hit with an undisclosed number of layoffs in the March bloodbath. Meanwhile, players must have concluded that they were not impressed with what was in Smedley's touted content patches, because the game opened this month testing plans to merge down to the bare minimum four servers - one for each platform (PC, PS3) in each region (US, EU). It's not even clear how they will handle PVP or not with that few servers remaining.
Of course, four servers will be four more than are available right now - as Wilhelm's new sidebar graphic notes, today is the 17th day of downtime for the Playstation Network (and all PS3 DCUO players) and the 4th day of downtime for SOE's PC players (who got to keep playing for the 13 additional days it took Sony to realize that SOE had been hit by the hacks as well).
(It is vaguely appropriate that Wilhelm is taking a page from Walter Cronkite's book - if you've lost Wilhelm, you've probably lost middle Blog-merica, as Lyndon Johnson supposedly said after Cronkite's famous editorial comment on the state of the Vietnam War.)
The downtime is not the fault of the DCUO devs, but, as the DCUO Unlimited gang noted in the discussion, the timing could not have been worse - some players who were on the fence to begin with may not be back after the hack debacle, and the incident does not inspire a lot of confidence in theoretically potential customers. Games that have limited amounts of content are simply a tough sell with a full price box ($60 for the PS3 version) and a full price sub ($15) given all the free to play and formerly pay to play options on the market today. You have to wonder how much the decision to launch the game at this price point may have hampered their long term potential.
Tuesday, May 3, 2011
Children's Week Revisited
Children's Week is back and seemingly less impressive than in previous years. On the plus side, this week is good for as many as three separate minipets (with new options added to the classic and TBC editions this year) for anyone who collects them.
Of the six achievements, three are pretty trivial, and one requires only some pastry purchases from the AH and/or vendors. Of the two "real" achievements, one is the dreaded PVP battleground grind, which can go very poorly if your entire PUG is ignoring the match objectives in the hopes of getting the achievement (ironically making the achievement harder to snag for all concerned).
I made a point of not advancing my warrior from 84 to the current cap at 85, just so I could stay out of the max level PVP bracket for this achievement, and it looks like it paid off - I got all four battlegrounds done in a single match each and didn't even have to behave too badly in order to do so (excepting Eye of the Storm, there's really no sugar coating that one). It's still a bad idea for an achievement, but at least it wasn't actively painful - the Horde even won half the matches I fought. (Perhaps the numbers of people who still need this achievement are dropping over time?)
Ironically, the one I had the harder time with called for the death of King Ymiron in Utgarde Keep. This dungeon was popular and reasonably easy back in the Wrath era, but level 84 characters are too high level to queue for it, which makes it very challenging to find a group. I tried asking in general chat for a while. Then I tried soloing the place - I actually killed all the trash and Skadi on normal mode, but the final boss was more than I could take - perhaps with that last level and better gear I might have managed. Fortunately, I was able to identify a group of achievement-seekers with an empty slot (not many 80+ characters in that area anymore) and got the missing achievement.
Now my Warrior lacks only the Midsummer Fire Fest for my second Violet Proto-Drake.
I made a point of not advancing my warrior from 84 to the current cap at 85, just so I could stay out of the max level PVP bracket for this achievement, and it looks like it paid off - I got all four battlegrounds done in a single match each and didn't even have to behave too badly in order to do so (excepting Eye of the Storm, there's really no sugar coating that one). It's still a bad idea for an achievement, but at least it wasn't actively painful - the Horde even won half the matches I fought. (Perhaps the numbers of people who still need this achievement are dropping over time?)
Ironically, the one I had the harder time with called for the death of King Ymiron in Utgarde Keep. This dungeon was popular and reasonably easy back in the Wrath era, but level 84 characters are too high level to queue for it, which makes it very challenging to find a group. I tried asking in general chat for a while. Then I tried soloing the place - I actually killed all the trash and Skadi on normal mode, but the final boss was more than I could take - perhaps with that last level and better gear I might have managed. Fortunately, I was able to identify a group of achievement-seekers with an empty slot (not many 80+ characters in that area anymore) and got the missing achievement.
Now my Warrior lacks only the Midsummer Fire Fest for my second Violet Proto-Drake.
Monday, May 2, 2011
A Case For Paid Max Level Characters?
The blogosphere all jumped down Smokejumper's throat for the suggestion that EQ2 might give out max level characters, in no small part because we don't trust SOE not to monetize such an offer in ways that no one would enjoy. Looking back on the controversy, like Massively's Karen Bryan, I'm starting to wonder whether selling max level characters for cash would actually be less damaging than the current approach to vertical progression.
Solo content in big budget MMO's is not going anywhere so long as the majority of the revenue comes from players who would rather solo. At the same time, the communities that make MMO's worth a solo player's monthly fee are built around players who tackle repeatable group content week in and week out, and those communities seem increasingly threatened by the sheer number of barriers - server, faction, archetype and level - that stand in between players and the friends they would like to group with. Even solo content is suffering from constant reductions in difficulty that are needed to keep the leveling time for new group players in line.
We already have a de facto split where the leveling game is primarily solo and the endgame is primarily group-based. Perhaps it is time to make it official, allow group players to buy their way out of the "chores" they don't want to do anyway, and go back to balancing solo leveling content on its own merits, rather than on the basis of how much leveling it is fair to force group players to endure.
Solo content in big budget MMO's is not going anywhere so long as the majority of the revenue comes from players who would rather solo. At the same time, the communities that make MMO's worth a solo player's monthly fee are built around players who tackle repeatable group content week in and week out, and those communities seem increasingly threatened by the sheer number of barriers - server, faction, archetype and level - that stand in between players and the friends they would like to group with. Even solo content is suffering from constant reductions in difficulty that are needed to keep the leveling time for new group players in line.
We already have a de facto split where the leveling game is primarily solo and the endgame is primarily group-based. Perhaps it is time to make it official, allow group players to buy their way out of the "chores" they don't want to do anyway, and go back to balancing solo leveling content on its own merits, rather than on the basis of how much leveling it is fair to force group players to endure.
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