I've got a new poll up on the sidebar if you're actually reading this at my blog (http://playervsdeveloper.blogspot.com/), asking which of the games that I follow you all are actually interested in. I'm curious because I have always viewed this as a multi-game blog, but most of my traffic seems to be WoW-related (perhaps because most of my posts, in the aggregate, are WoW-related). It probably won't affect what I write about on a grand scale, but there are adjustments I can make to have posts be more relevant if it turns out that none of you care about certain games.
In other news, to save this from being a boring housekeeping post:
New Emblem of Heroism Heirlooms in Patch 3.1
Vaneras, one of the EU CM's, now says that there WILL be new Emblem of Heroism Heirloom Items in patch 3.1. Not really news, except that I've been operating under the opposite assumption based on blue posts as recent as last week that made it sound like they weren't planning on rolling out more Heroism rewards. Guess we'll have to wait and see what the new items are (perhaps relics/totems/librams might be a candidate, since those items don't exist in low level content?), if Blizzard doesn't change its mind again next week.
(I don't ordinarily go into old posts to update them, but I'm making an exception for last week's heirloom item advice in case people find it via google and are confused by the conflicting blue comments.)
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Passing 30 in Norrath
I started writing this to mark my EQ2 Dirge hitting level 30; she has since zipped on up to level 32, so time, like a winged Fae, is flying in Norrath. Various things I've observed over the past few levels....
Not your average Tolkein races
When showing my wife my characters the other day, she remarked that they seemed to have a bit more personality than WoW's choices. The list includes one boring human (they make good cooks), alongside a walking rat creature (the Ratonga), my winged Fae, a giant frog (Froglok), and a spiny lizard (Sarnak). This is a bit refreshing.
The fantasy genre is dominated by the four races of the Fellowship of the Ring, Humans, Elves, Dwarves, and short but not bearded peoples. When you start branching out into evil-looking races, you get orcs, goblins, evil humans and/or elves, and undead. Most of these races make their way into EQ2 as well, but they're joined by a more unusual menagerie of critters that add some flavor to the choices. The races don't play dramatically differently (the Fae can glide on their wings and the Frogloks are amphibious and can opt to walk on the bottom of bodies of water instead of swimming), but even a dedicated min-maxer like myself can appreciate having an agile, maneuverable race that actually looks the part.
Upgradeable Spells
One quirk that EQ2 has that I haven't seen in many other games (WoW, Warhammer, LOTRO, FFXI, and Guild Wars off the top of my head) is upgradeable spells. In EQ2 you get new versions of spells every so often, but there also quality grades for each level's spell.
You automatically gain the lowest grade, Apprentice 1, when you hit the appropriate level, and can quickly and cheaply upgrade to App 4 (which crafters will be making in bulk to level their tradeskills). From there it gets very expensive. In practical terms, going from the cheap App 4 scroll to the expensive Adept 3 (the best crafted rank, there is one higher that drops as very rare loot) boosted the base damage of one of my bread and butter spells by about 20% - some spells, especially with longer cooldowns, will see even larger increases.
The fun part is that getting an upgrade for a key spell can be exciting. A level 20 crafting quest (that's crafting level, not adventuring level) awarded me a rare recipe scroll that I was able to use with a rare item I harvested to make myself an upgrade that's going to last me for something like 12+ levels (until the next time I upgrade that spell). That's in some ways far more epic than a typical loot reward for a quest. The downside is that these things simply aren't priced at levels that a newer player than myself can afford - bored level 80's set the market for leveling spells, and it doesn't make sense to sink all my money into a spell rank that I'm going to outlevel in another week or two.
Sony's actually talking about adding NPC spell researchers to the game to make the higher quality upgrades a bit more attainable. This kind of upgrade is significant enough to the game's economy that they can't just give the highest quality versions away easily, but I hear that the prices for the raiding-relevant level 80 spells go through the roof. Allowing an NPC to help players with this would be one way to ease players into raiding, though that's still going to be a pretty long road if it takes a month per spell you want upgraded.
Do Guild Halls Kill Cities?
I've heard EQ2's guild housing described as "player cities". Your guild can hire NPC's for just about every service you can think of - banking, auction houses, vendors, tradeskill questgivers, or even an NPC druid to sit in your guild hall and open portals for you. Between the druid and other, inanimate forms of transportation, you can get from your guild hall to just about anywhere in the world instantly. On top of that, you get a second hearthstone ability that allows you to return to your guild hall every 15 minutes.
Overall, these perks are massively convenient, and they mean that you never need to weight the ability to teleport highly in your class decision-making process. That said, there's also increasingly little reason to actually leave your instanced guild hall and go into the city. That's not to say that the real cities of Norrath are deserted, but they certainly feel a bit sparsely populated. I guess this is why Blizzard insists on leaving auction houses and class trainers in the old, pre-expansion content in WoW.
Lyriana, in the deserted Fae home city
Not your average Tolkein races
When showing my wife my characters the other day, she remarked that they seemed to have a bit more personality than WoW's choices. The list includes one boring human (they make good cooks), alongside a walking rat creature (the Ratonga), my winged Fae, a giant frog (Froglok), and a spiny lizard (Sarnak). This is a bit refreshing.
The fantasy genre is dominated by the four races of the Fellowship of the Ring, Humans, Elves, Dwarves, and short but not bearded peoples. When you start branching out into evil-looking races, you get orcs, goblins, evil humans and/or elves, and undead. Most of these races make their way into EQ2 as well, but they're joined by a more unusual menagerie of critters that add some flavor to the choices. The races don't play dramatically differently (the Fae can glide on their wings and the Frogloks are amphibious and can opt to walk on the bottom of bodies of water instead of swimming), but even a dedicated min-maxer like myself can appreciate having an agile, maneuverable race that actually looks the part.
Upgradeable Spells
One quirk that EQ2 has that I haven't seen in many other games (WoW, Warhammer, LOTRO, FFXI, and Guild Wars off the top of my head) is upgradeable spells. In EQ2 you get new versions of spells every so often, but there also quality grades for each level's spell.
You automatically gain the lowest grade, Apprentice 1, when you hit the appropriate level, and can quickly and cheaply upgrade to App 4 (which crafters will be making in bulk to level their tradeskills). From there it gets very expensive. In practical terms, going from the cheap App 4 scroll to the expensive Adept 3 (the best crafted rank, there is one higher that drops as very rare loot) boosted the base damage of one of my bread and butter spells by about 20% - some spells, especially with longer cooldowns, will see even larger increases.
The fun part is that getting an upgrade for a key spell can be exciting. A level 20 crafting quest (that's crafting level, not adventuring level) awarded me a rare recipe scroll that I was able to use with a rare item I harvested to make myself an upgrade that's going to last me for something like 12+ levels (until the next time I upgrade that spell). That's in some ways far more epic than a typical loot reward for a quest. The downside is that these things simply aren't priced at levels that a newer player than myself can afford - bored level 80's set the market for leveling spells, and it doesn't make sense to sink all my money into a spell rank that I'm going to outlevel in another week or two.
Sony's actually talking about adding NPC spell researchers to the game to make the higher quality upgrades a bit more attainable. This kind of upgrade is significant enough to the game's economy that they can't just give the highest quality versions away easily, but I hear that the prices for the raiding-relevant level 80 spells go through the roof. Allowing an NPC to help players with this would be one way to ease players into raiding, though that's still going to be a pretty long road if it takes a month per spell you want upgraded.
Do Guild Halls Kill Cities?
I've heard EQ2's guild housing described as "player cities". Your guild can hire NPC's for just about every service you can think of - banking, auction houses, vendors, tradeskill questgivers, or even an NPC druid to sit in your guild hall and open portals for you. Between the druid and other, inanimate forms of transportation, you can get from your guild hall to just about anywhere in the world instantly. On top of that, you get a second hearthstone ability that allows you to return to your guild hall every 15 minutes.
Overall, these perks are massively convenient, and they mean that you never need to weight the ability to teleport highly in your class decision-making process. That said, there's also increasingly little reason to actually leave your instanced guild hall and go into the city. That's not to say that the real cities of Norrath are deserted, but they certainly feel a bit sparsely populated. I guess this is why Blizzard insists on leaving auction houses and class trainers in the old, pre-expansion content in WoW.
Lyriana, in the deserted Fae home city
Monday, March 9, 2009
Changing the Drake Rules Midway
[Binary Brew], like the other brews from the Brewfest Brew of the Month Club, has a 14 day duration. Knowing that the 3.0 patch was moderately likely to hit live realms on October 14th, 2008, I bought myself a brew late on the evening of September 30th. The patch did hit, as expected, and it was a very very rocky patch day. However, the servers came up for just long enough for me to drink a single binary brew, minutes before it expired.
My server, Hyjal-US, is on PST, which means that the servers coming up would have been too late had I been in any other time zone. As a result, if I don't cancel my account for more than a month between now and September, I will be probably one of very few people in the world eligible to obtain the much-maligned Brew of the Year achievement on August 1st.
I would still have needed to wait for Brewfest to finish the rest of the brewfest achievements and claim the proto-drake, but I suppose I would be able to link the date of the achievement on my armory page as something that most players won't be able to unlock for another month. That's all I'm going to get for my trouble, since the achievement in question has been removed from the requirements for the proto-drake.
Revising events in progress
I'm not sure that Blizzard designed the holiday achievements for what they have since turned into - a frantic scramble to complete some very short events, with all of the time that players have already invested in previous events on the line. The result has been an ongoing, year-long mess.
First, Hallow's End needed to be nerfed after players were not able to get the rare drops for Sinister Calling, which were low percentage items off of a boss that most characters will not get more than five shots at per day. Additionally, they launched the event including a mask achievement that they acknowledged was statistically ugly, and which they promised to remove in a subsequent patch.
Then we had the mess of a Valentine's event, which suffered from some of the same flaws as the Halloween masks from months earlier - perhaps it was more statistically feasible, but it was no less inconsiderate of players who have anything other than WoW they need to be doing with their time (especially in the context of the shorter holiday). Earlier in this PTR cycle, Blizzard reversed their repeated assurances that they were alright with the drop rate on the candy bags, and decided that the Be Mine achievement would require only 6 of the 8 candy hearts. This change would have been spared me pretty much my entire ordeal with that holiday - I had six hearts by the end of the first day, and now would have gotten the achievement by giving up. Instead, I spent the next three days logging as often as I could (I'd estimate 30 times) to loot more candy bags because Blizzard insisted that I would not get the achievement if I did not.
Looking ahead, they're completely redesigning the easter event, making it a week long, and adding it to the meta achievement. There's plenty of room for bugs and poorly thought out achievements here, since the patch is coming on a bit of a tight schedule. In addition, there could be achievement issues/bugs in the returning events. The Children's Week achievement currently requires that players be able to play on five consecutive days, which must, due to the length of the event, include May 3-5, and it's based on an achievement that has a long history of resetting itself due to bugs (which would kill a player's meta attempt if they happen during Children's week, due to the limited time). Brewfest still looms as a problem because they're leaving intact - for the moment - an achievement that requires a rare mount from the daily quest boss - yes, the very same mechanic that they already took out of the Halloween event.
Finally, to add insult to injury, Blizzard is not willing to confirm whether the reward mount is actually 310% speed, even though they are well aware that many players believe it is, and have made their choices to suffer though the events thus far based on that belief. The current game client treats the mount as a 310% speed mount, but there are rumblings that - after all of the nerfs - it would be far easier to obtain than the other 310% mounts in the game (which typically require a high arena PVP rating, or farming high end raid content). Though technically there is no promise on their part regarding the speed, changing the speed after players are already more than halfway through the achievement would be like having Arthas drop legendary shards of Frostmourne, only to reward players who collect enough shards with a mere epic item that is no better than what they might have obtained by other means.
How can you decide when the information changes?
Spinks has written that she doesn't get what drives "achievement junkies". As my wife puts it, you shouldn't be doing things in a game when they aren't fun. So why have I put my time into an event that has now forced me through an ordeal only to excuse people who didn't finish?
WoW and its like are, at their heart, relatively simple games. It's sufficiently easy to automate the basics of playing the game that people were able to make and sell botting programs (until Blizzard sued them into the ground), which wouldn't have been worth buying if they didn't work. The challenge, at least from my perspective, is finding a way to play smarter. Maybe, if I do these dozen things, I can gear my rogue alt with a full set of heirlooms and tackle content that is slightly tougher than I am, where the easy/boring approach would be to grind away at stuff that I can slaughter quickly and efficiently. These rewards cannot simply fall into my lap during the course of whatever I would be doing anyway - that reduces a game where I make reasoned choices about the best use for my time into a boring, thoughtless treadmill. The challenge is for the developers to come up with challenges that I am willing to tackle without having them actually ruin my day, just like the raid designers have to come up with raids that challenge players without simply slaughtering them automatically the moment they walk in.
All of which is why it is so problematic when Blizzard decides to change the rules midway through. The issue is not that the changes are bad - indeed, nothing Blizzard can do will go back and retroactively make the non-fun times I had better in hindsight, so they might as well focus on people they can still save from frustration. The issue is one of confidence. Maybe I shouldn't attempt this achievement, because Blizzard might remove it later - after all, they've reversed themselves several times in the past. Maybe I shouldn't attempt the entire rest of the holiday grind, in case Blizzard decides to nerf the reward. How can you make decisions if you can't trust the information that you're basing them on?
My server, Hyjal-US, is on PST, which means that the servers coming up would have been too late had I been in any other time zone. As a result, if I don't cancel my account for more than a month between now and September, I will be probably one of very few people in the world eligible to obtain the much-maligned Brew of the Year achievement on August 1st.
I would still have needed to wait for Brewfest to finish the rest of the brewfest achievements and claim the proto-drake, but I suppose I would be able to link the date of the achievement on my armory page as something that most players won't be able to unlock for another month. That's all I'm going to get for my trouble, since the achievement in question has been removed from the requirements for the proto-drake.
Revising events in progress
I'm not sure that Blizzard designed the holiday achievements for what they have since turned into - a frantic scramble to complete some very short events, with all of the time that players have already invested in previous events on the line. The result has been an ongoing, year-long mess.
First, Hallow's End needed to be nerfed after players were not able to get the rare drops for Sinister Calling, which were low percentage items off of a boss that most characters will not get more than five shots at per day. Additionally, they launched the event including a mask achievement that they acknowledged was statistically ugly, and which they promised to remove in a subsequent patch.
Then we had the mess of a Valentine's event, which suffered from some of the same flaws as the Halloween masks from months earlier - perhaps it was more statistically feasible, but it was no less inconsiderate of players who have anything other than WoW they need to be doing with their time (especially in the context of the shorter holiday). Earlier in this PTR cycle, Blizzard reversed their repeated assurances that they were alright with the drop rate on the candy bags, and decided that the Be Mine achievement would require only 6 of the 8 candy hearts. This change would have been spared me pretty much my entire ordeal with that holiday - I had six hearts by the end of the first day, and now would have gotten the achievement by giving up. Instead, I spent the next three days logging as often as I could (I'd estimate 30 times) to loot more candy bags because Blizzard insisted that I would not get the achievement if I did not.
Looking ahead, they're completely redesigning the easter event, making it a week long, and adding it to the meta achievement. There's plenty of room for bugs and poorly thought out achievements here, since the patch is coming on a bit of a tight schedule. In addition, there could be achievement issues/bugs in the returning events. The Children's Week achievement currently requires that players be able to play on five consecutive days, which must, due to the length of the event, include May 3-5, and it's based on an achievement that has a long history of resetting itself due to bugs (which would kill a player's meta attempt if they happen during Children's week, due to the limited time). Brewfest still looms as a problem because they're leaving intact - for the moment - an achievement that requires a rare mount from the daily quest boss - yes, the very same mechanic that they already took out of the Halloween event.
Finally, to add insult to injury, Blizzard is not willing to confirm whether the reward mount is actually 310% speed, even though they are well aware that many players believe it is, and have made their choices to suffer though the events thus far based on that belief. The current game client treats the mount as a 310% speed mount, but there are rumblings that - after all of the nerfs - it would be far easier to obtain than the other 310% mounts in the game (which typically require a high arena PVP rating, or farming high end raid content). Though technically there is no promise on their part regarding the speed, changing the speed after players are already more than halfway through the achievement would be like having Arthas drop legendary shards of Frostmourne, only to reward players who collect enough shards with a mere epic item that is no better than what they might have obtained by other means.
How can you decide when the information changes?
Spinks has written that she doesn't get what drives "achievement junkies". As my wife puts it, you shouldn't be doing things in a game when they aren't fun. So why have I put my time into an event that has now forced me through an ordeal only to excuse people who didn't finish?
WoW and its like are, at their heart, relatively simple games. It's sufficiently easy to automate the basics of playing the game that people were able to make and sell botting programs (until Blizzard sued them into the ground), which wouldn't have been worth buying if they didn't work. The challenge, at least from my perspective, is finding a way to play smarter. Maybe, if I do these dozen things, I can gear my rogue alt with a full set of heirlooms and tackle content that is slightly tougher than I am, where the easy/boring approach would be to grind away at stuff that I can slaughter quickly and efficiently. These rewards cannot simply fall into my lap during the course of whatever I would be doing anyway - that reduces a game where I make reasoned choices about the best use for my time into a boring, thoughtless treadmill. The challenge is for the developers to come up with challenges that I am willing to tackle without having them actually ruin my day, just like the raid designers have to come up with raids that challenge players without simply slaughtering them automatically the moment they walk in.
All of which is why it is so problematic when Blizzard decides to change the rules midway through. The issue is not that the changes are bad - indeed, nothing Blizzard can do will go back and retroactively make the non-fun times I had better in hindsight, so they might as well focus on people they can still save from frustration. The issue is one of confidence. Maybe I shouldn't attempt this achievement, because Blizzard might remove it later - after all, they've reversed themselves several times in the past. Maybe I shouldn't attempt the entire rest of the holiday grind, in case Blizzard decides to nerf the reward. How can you make decisions if you can't trust the information that you're basing them on?
Sunday, March 8, 2009
Gimmicks, Insolence, and Arrogance
Critical QQ points out that many Ulduar raid fights appear to be pretty gimmicky. The fact that the zone's first boss encounter involves players loading themselves into their catapults so they can launch themselves up onto the boss is amusing, but also the very definition of a gimmick.
Today's Daily Heroic Dungeon was the Oculus and I was finally able to complete the Experienced Drake Rider achievement. As I noted the last time I mentioned this dungeon, the final boss is a giant dragon and players need to ride on drakes (using Wrath's vehicle combat interface) to defeat it. There are, loosely speaking, a tanking drake (ruby), a healing drake (emerald), and a damage drake (amber), and players can choose which drakes to ride (i.e. you are not constrained by the makeup of your group when you arrive).
The achievement was for completing the fight as each of the three roles - ironically, each of my three successful groups used a different group setup (RRGBB, RRGGB, and RGGBB). The drakes are relatively simple, as they have to be since players don't get much opportunity to practice on them. Each drake has three abilities (see the wiki for details), and, in general, players will win relatively easily once they figure out what their abilities are for. It can be frustrating since your gear does not help you (indeed you can and arguably should strip naked for the fight, as you gear won't help your drake and will take damage if you die) and you're doing the practice in question on a boss fight, but it's definitely not designed to be overly challenging.
I guess more gimmicks are inevitable, since we're adding 14 raid encounters to the game, and almost all of them have to have an alternate "hard mode" that revolves around NOT taking advantage of a helpful fight gimmick. The only other way of increasing difficulty is to ramp up the raw damage/healing needed, and that route would get old relatively quickly. Still, one wonders how many variations Blizzard can produce on time-honored mechanics (e.g. "you WANT to poison yourself!") before things start getting over the top.
An aside on boss soundbytes
The Oculus boss has a lengthy speech about Insolence and Arrogance that he shouts to let the Bronze drake riders know that it's time to lock him down with time stop. This is going to happen several times per attempt, and it may take multiple attempts for the group to down the boss (yes, Mr. PUG Pally, when we told you that you need to move during the Planar Shift after the last time you got killed by the ORBS OF DEATH, we really did mean that you need to keep moving the ENTIRE time the ORBS OF DEATH are out, rather than deciding that you've moved far enough and stopping to let the ORBS OF DEATH kill you again).
My wife was in the room at the time, and she was getting pretty tired of the speech by the end. I pointed out that, had this been a raid boss, it probably would have taken way more than three attempts to kill it. Though "not annoying other people in the room with the computer (and/or the person actually playing the game)" shouldn't be the only consideration in MMORPG sound design, you'd think that they might consider how long and noisy a soundbyte needs to be if it's going to be playing repeatedly during a fight. As my wife pointed out, the boss could have just said "GRR!" to indicate that he was enraged. We even have an in-game raid warning system these days, designed for just such an occasion.
(Speaking of annoying sound effects, the designer who decided that the portable train set was a good idea should be locked in a room and forced to listen to what happens when some idiot drops one by the Wintergrasp portal NPC right before a battle. We can let him out again after he listens to the scene before every single Wintergrasp battle on every single server for a day or two. Someone does this without fail, and forcing 40+ players to make the /train emote noise is so loud that you really don't have a choice besides hitting the mute button on your speakers.)
Today's Daily Heroic Dungeon was the Oculus and I was finally able to complete the Experienced Drake Rider achievement. As I noted the last time I mentioned this dungeon, the final boss is a giant dragon and players need to ride on drakes (using Wrath's vehicle combat interface) to defeat it. There are, loosely speaking, a tanking drake (ruby), a healing drake (emerald), and a damage drake (amber), and players can choose which drakes to ride (i.e. you are not constrained by the makeup of your group when you arrive).
The achievement was for completing the fight as each of the three roles - ironically, each of my three successful groups used a different group setup (RRGBB, RRGGB, and RGGBB). The drakes are relatively simple, as they have to be since players don't get much opportunity to practice on them. Each drake has three abilities (see the wiki for details), and, in general, players will win relatively easily once they figure out what their abilities are for. It can be frustrating since your gear does not help you (indeed you can and arguably should strip naked for the fight, as you gear won't help your drake and will take damage if you die) and you're doing the practice in question on a boss fight, but it's definitely not designed to be overly challenging.
I guess more gimmicks are inevitable, since we're adding 14 raid encounters to the game, and almost all of them have to have an alternate "hard mode" that revolves around NOT taking advantage of a helpful fight gimmick. The only other way of increasing difficulty is to ramp up the raw damage/healing needed, and that route would get old relatively quickly. Still, one wonders how many variations Blizzard can produce on time-honored mechanics (e.g. "you WANT to poison yourself!") before things start getting over the top.
An aside on boss soundbytes
The Oculus boss has a lengthy speech about Insolence and Arrogance that he shouts to let the Bronze drake riders know that it's time to lock him down with time stop. This is going to happen several times per attempt, and it may take multiple attempts for the group to down the boss (yes, Mr. PUG Pally, when we told you that you need to move during the Planar Shift after the last time you got killed by the ORBS OF DEATH, we really did mean that you need to keep moving the ENTIRE time the ORBS OF DEATH are out, rather than deciding that you've moved far enough and stopping to let the ORBS OF DEATH kill you again).
My wife was in the room at the time, and she was getting pretty tired of the speech by the end. I pointed out that, had this been a raid boss, it probably would have taken way more than three attempts to kill it. Though "not annoying other people in the room with the computer (and/or the person actually playing the game)" shouldn't be the only consideration in MMORPG sound design, you'd think that they might consider how long and noisy a soundbyte needs to be if it's going to be playing repeatedly during a fight. As my wife pointed out, the boss could have just said "GRR!" to indicate that he was enraged. We even have an in-game raid warning system these days, designed for just such an occasion.
(Speaking of annoying sound effects, the designer who decided that the portable train set was a good idea should be locked in a room and forced to listen to what happens when some idiot drops one by the Wintergrasp portal NPC right before a battle. We can let him out again after he listens to the scene before every single Wintergrasp battle on every single server for a day or two. Someone does this without fail, and forcing 40+ players to make the /train emote noise is so loud that you really don't have a choice besides hitting the mute button on your speakers.)
Friday, March 6, 2009
Updates on Wintergrasp Vs Heroism Heirlooms
Update, 3/11: Blue posts a week later are now saying that there WILL be new heirlooms in 3.1. Guess we'll know for sure if/when the new items hit the PTR's, just wanted any readers who find this via Google to know that there may be new options in 3.1 that I didn't cover below because they didn't exist at the time. Original post follows.
Dallana asked me a question about my writeup on heirloom items from a few months ago - is it's worth buying the Wintergrasp heirlooms now, or waiting for the emblems to buy the Heroism versions? (Those of you who are pulling in 50 emblems a week farming raid content probably don't care about this question, but, if you're spending most of your time in 5-mans, shards are still easier to obtain than emblems.)
The answer to that question depends on a few things, such as what classes you intend to level in the future and therefore need heirlooms for. Still, I happen to be trying to answer it for myself in the face of the latest blue statement that we shoud not expect more options for spending Emblems of Heroism (which means that I might as well start spending surplus emblems on heirlooms myself). So, here's a re-examination of heirloom items with an eye towards figuring out which ones to buy with shards and which ones to wait on.
Wintergrasp Bargains
Wait for Emblems of Heroism
Personal Inventory
My main priority among alts right now is my rogue, and I decided to buy her both daggers to go with her Wintergrasp shoulders.
On the emblem side, I will definitely be targetting the Hand of Justice next (and will have it in the very near future), followed by either the Eye of the Beast, the Arcanite Reaper, or the Valor shoulders depending on what my next priority is alt-wise.
Over in Wintergrasp, the staff and the cloth mantle are my two priorities. The order doesn't matter much since I ultimately want to claim both, and I don't plan to actually spend the shards until I actually have an alt who needs the items. Though I prefer both Wintergrasp items, obtaining both would require a whopping 525 shards. Depending on how I spend my time, it's entirely possible that I might run out of stuff to spend emblems on before I can collect that many shards, in which case I might decide to take the Heroism staff.
The gun is a low priority because my hunter's life is already easy enough with an overpowered cat. It would be an okay stat stick for the rogue, but, if that's all I want it for, perhaps I should hold out for the emblem version. The caster items would have a huge impact on the caster alts in question, so it's definitely worth saving up to take care of them.
Dallana asked me a question about my writeup on heirloom items from a few months ago - is it's worth buying the Wintergrasp heirlooms now, or waiting for the emblems to buy the Heroism versions? (Those of you who are pulling in 50 emblems a week farming raid content probably don't care about this question, but, if you're spending most of your time in 5-mans, shards are still easier to obtain than emblems.)
The answer to that question depends on a few things, such as what classes you intend to level in the future and therefore need heirlooms for. Still, I happen to be trying to answer it for myself in the face of the latest blue statement that we shoud not expect more options for spending Emblems of Heroism (which means that I might as well start spending surplus emblems on heirlooms myself). So, here's a re-examination of heirloom items with an eye towards figuring out which ones to buy with shards and which ones to wait on.
Wintergrasp Bargains
- Sharpened Scarlet Kris
- At its face, the Kris looks questionable for the non-PVP player, since the Balanced Heartseeker has very attractive stats. What saves the Wintergrasp version is that half the classes that would want it will dual wield it. Dual wielding both heirloom daggers is a great option for Rogues and Hunters, and perhaps level 40+ Enhancement Shamen (who get to dual wield). Also, if you don't have a heirloom staff yet, your cloth-wearing casters might be willing to carry this thing for the durability stats - real live caster weapons are very uncommon prior to Outland. Overall, this one is a good investment, because you won't entirely discard it, even if you end up swimming in emblems with which to buy the PVE version.
- Caster Shoulders
- As you may have heard, the spirit stat is getting the nerf bat in patch 3.1. This strengthens the case for the cloth Exquisite Sunderseer Mantle over its Tattered Dreadmist Mantle counterpart. The added stamina and resilience on the PVP version will also help your durability a bit if you take the advice I gave in my last post and use the cloth version as your go-to shoulders for all caster alts (Balance Druids, Elemental Shamen lose only armor for doing so).
Also, if you do feel strongly that your post-dual spec Paladin alt needs to be able to heal instances, the Pristine Lightforge Spaulders actually don't have a PVE counterpart (Pally leveling builds generally don't itemize for spell power). This is not a piece that you're going to get a ton of milage out of, but it's a unique little niche in which it can't be beat. - Grand Staff of Jordan
- The Dignified Headmaster's Charge offers a lot of crit and intellect (which gives both mana and more crit). However, having your spells resisted can be devastating to a fragile low level caster, and hit rating is very hard to come by via quest rewards, all the way through to Northrend. By contrast, all of your other gear is typically going to have intellect on it. This one item will be your weapon of choice for all three cloth classes and caster specs of druids and shamen (technically, the healers can use the 1-handed maces, but they'll lose out on stats because there is no heirloom offhand), and the easier to obtain PVP version is arguably superior. That's a win in my book.
- Upgraded Dwarven Hand Cannon
- A brief caveat here - if your forthcoming alt is a Troll Hunter, the Heroism version of this item, the Charmed Ancient Bone Bow, is a better choice due to your racial bonus to crit with bows. For everyone else (especially Dwarf hunters, with a racial crit bonus for guns), the gun is a good choice. Perhaps your rogue would rather have the bow for the hit rating rather than crit, but it's not that much hit rating, and both of these items cost more than you'd expect because of their major effect on hunter DPS. If you're buying a ranged weapon, the gun may be the better value on price (even if it might not be better overall outside the Dwarf hunter crowd).
Wait for Emblems of Heroism
- Swift Hand of Justice
- Thanks to the miracle of unified spell and melee haste rating, and the general lack of trinkets of any kind prior to Outland, every single alt you make can and probably will get 57 levels worth of use out of this trinket. The Discerning Eye of the Beast is also a strong option for every class that has a mana bar (even if you don't cast spells, that mana regen will probably be the best benefit you get out of your second trinket slot until Outland, and the actual casters will continue to use the trinket for the spell power all the way through heroic 5-mans). Unless you're serious about twink PVP, there's no reason to buy an insignia just to put something in your trinket slot.
- Avoid the Reforged Truesilver Champion
- The first issue with the sword is that Enhancement Shamen cannot equip it, while they can use the Bloodied Arcanite Reaper. For that reason alone, I suggest that you avoid the sword unless you've already got a level 40+ Enhancement Shaman. That aside, you really don't need both items (I guess a Fury Warrior can dual wield them, but that's not until level 60, and Outland quest rewards aren't going to leave you horribly high and dry), and my guess is that the axe is significantly better.
- Melee Plate Shoulders
- If you're going to get a second pair of melee heirloom shoulders beyond the leather pair, you should go plate. Shamen and Hunters will be happy with the leather shoulders - neither class even gets mail armor until level 40, and both classes benefit from the stats on either version. (Which pair of leather shoulders to get is a bit of a judgement call - the hit rating on the Stained Shadowcraft Spaulders is very nice, but the agility on the Wintergrasp Exceptional Stormshroud Shoulders basically closes the gap on attack power for the leather and mail classes. Personally, I won't be switching because I have a now-illegal ZG shoulder enchant on my Wintergrasp shoulders. If I were picking from scratch starting now, I'd probably take the heroism version, but the difference isn't so huge that I'd put off the purchase for weeks if I wanted to level an alt now.)
By contrast, Plate classes don't get attack power from the agility found on the Wintergrasp version, and they do suffer a significant loss of armor going down to leather armor. So, I'd love to recommend the Wintergrasp Strengthened Stockade Pauldrons. Unfortunately, I just can't. The Polished Spaulders of Valor not only trade in the resilience for crit rating, they also have more total strength. That's a lot of damage potential to lose in the name of convenience.
Personal Inventory
My main priority among alts right now is my rogue, and I decided to buy her both daggers to go with her Wintergrasp shoulders.
On the emblem side, I will definitely be targetting the Hand of Justice next (and will have it in the very near future), followed by either the Eye of the Beast, the Arcanite Reaper, or the Valor shoulders depending on what my next priority is alt-wise.
Over in Wintergrasp, the staff and the cloth mantle are my two priorities. The order doesn't matter much since I ultimately want to claim both, and I don't plan to actually spend the shards until I actually have an alt who needs the items. Though I prefer both Wintergrasp items, obtaining both would require a whopping 525 shards. Depending on how I spend my time, it's entirely possible that I might run out of stuff to spend emblems on before I can collect that many shards, in which case I might decide to take the Heroism staff.
The gun is a low priority because my hunter's life is already easy enough with an overpowered cat. It would be an okay stat stick for the rogue, but, if that's all I want it for, perhaps I should hold out for the emblem version. The caster items would have a huge impact on the caster alts in question, so it's definitely worth saving up to take care of them.
Thursday, March 5, 2009
Companies Should Be - And Apparently Are - Ashamed of Their "Microtransaction" Prices
Elder Game has a great post up proclaiming that the subscription model should not be dead yet. He points out that it's comparatively easier for players to decide to do without optional microtransactions, and that your core business challenge is keeping both payers and non-payers happy.
From my perspective, the latter is the big problem. For example, I used to love to play collectable card games (CCG's), but I just can't justify the amount of money it takes to play a game where your ability to do things depends on how many booster packs you paid for. (The best part is how that $4 booster pack contains only one random "rare" card, which probably is not one that you wanted, AND also is not valuable enough to trade to another player for a card you DID want.) There is an amount of money that I'm willing to pay for a game, and, if the game is not fun for me at that level of spending, I won't play it.
All of which got me thinking - how much do these new-fangled, so-called "Free to Play" games cost anyway? Turns out that this question is a lot harder to answer than you'd think.
Wizard101
Official Site: https://www.wizard101.com/
Wizard 101 is a Harry Potter-esque MMORPG that uses CCG mechanics for combat. It is technically more what I would call "free to try" than "free to play". You get actually free access to 10 areas - I'm not clear on which of these are adventuring zones and which are basic towns etc - and then have the choice of either paying a monthly fee ($10/month, discounts for longer subscriptions, and a unique $7 per person per month "family plan") or going with an a la carte access pass.
The monthly fee gets you access to the entire game, and presumably that access (or maybe even your whole account, once you've opted to go the subscription route?) goes away if you stop paying. The access plan, on the other hand, allows you to permanently unlock specific areas for your no-monthly fee account. Prices appear to scale per level of the content you're unlocking, and range from 715 crowns to 1200 crowns.
Wait, back up, crowns? What's a crown?
Crowns are W101's "microtransaction" currency. At this point, I invite you to go to the site I linked above and try to figure what a crown is actually worth in real world dollars. I spent a pretty long time digging and I wasn't able to figure this out. Actually going to the store to see the prices appears to require that you create an account - apparently they don't WANT you to know what it costs to play the game until after you've tried it.
Fortunately, I have a blogroll. Tipa at West Karana has been playing W101, and comes to the rescue with a post on the game's launch. Apparently the lowest demonination of crowns is 2500 crowns for $5 (that's 5 crowns for 1 cent), while you can get a substantial bulk discount, up to 60,000 crowns for a whopping $80 (that's 7.5 crowns for one cent, and so far beyond the realm of what I'd call a "microtransaction" that I don't know what to say about it). That new area for 1200 crowns costs $2.40 at the worst exchange rate. There are 30 areas at that rate, some smaller number of areas at lower rates (again, the first few levels are free, the second few are cheap, and then they hit you with the large price tags), and they deliberately reserve the right to raise the prices on future content.
I guess the bottom line is that you could get a perpetual subscription to most of the content currently in the game for about what they want for a one year subscription to all of the content (including new stuff that they roll out over time). As tempting as it is to go no-fee, this probably would not be worth your while unless you're literally only playing for a few hours a month (and spending less than $10 monthly on crowns, including zone unlocks, during that time). Note that the discounted $80 for 1 year is significantly less that what you'd pay for a traditional subscription game box plus monthly fee (e.g. $40 for the box and first month and 11x$15 for the rest of the year, for a total of $205). Then again, you may or may not be getting less total game for that smaller price tag.
Anyway, the fun with crowns doesn't stop there. There's an ingame store for gear - experienced players point out that the gear starts at level 5, and paying for it at that level is a terrible deal because you will outlevel it so quickly - and those prices also don't appear to be viewable from out of game. Tipa to the rescue again, with a look at the high end crown items - the most expensive is just shy of 15,000 crowns, which is $20-30 depending on your crown exchange rate. That's IN ADDITION TO either the subscription or the access plan you paid for to get into the zone in the first place, and Tipa describes the high end item as "so amazingly powerful that it would be hard NOT to buy it".
On top of this, the game also apparently includes booster packs. Good luck finding out how much those cost, or what the odds are of getting a spell card that you want out of them - I haven't seen much mention of them amongst the blogs so I'm presuming that these are optional.
Incidentally, W101 is actually a game aimed at children, with pre-generated names, strict parental controls, and a generally kid-friendly atmosphere. The decisons to price these items in an arbitrary currency, rather than at their true dollar value, and to make it very very hard to determine what those prices are before you've agreed to let your kid start an account, is quite clearly deliberate.
Runes of Magic
Official Site: http://www.runesofmagic.com/
Runes of magic is a more WoW-like game (and has been mocked for having an area that looks a lot like WoW's human starting area, Elwynn Forest), with a slight Guild Wars-like twist where characters have two classes and can switch between the two, or mix and max class abilities. The good news is that it appears to ACTUALLY be free to play. However, they have to pay the bills somehow, and the answer is through an item store where your purchases are paid for in "diamonds".
What's a diamond cost, you might ask the official website? Again, good luck with that. Via google and forum fu, it appears that a diamond will run you somewhere between 4-5 cents. Why would you want to spend them? Perhaps you'd like extra bags? Not only do they charge for bagspace, but you can't even BUY bags - you have to RENT the right to have bags at approximately $11 per 30-slot bag per year. A mount (which you actually do get to keep) will run you $20. You can't actually buy weapons and armor directly, but you can buy items that create sockets in your gear, which you then spend more money to fill. One forum estimate says that it would cost $225 for a single set of best-in slot item enhancements, all of which would be permanently lost when you replace the gear you put them in.
Somehow, $15 a month is sounding like the best deal in gaming.
Charging for convenience or necessity?
Obviously, both games ultimately need to bring in money, both to pay for their initial development, and to recoup current operating costs (including servers, salaries of developers), not to mention actual profit for their investors. Though these two games share the obnoxious business practice of doing their best not to reveal their prices to prospective customers, they differ a bit in approach to that problem.
W101's approach is two-fold. With their subscription model, they're basically requiring a certain amount of money. Perhaps some players will bum around the newbie areas indefinitely on principle, but the vast majority will need to pay for one of the two means of access to additional content in order to continue enjoying the game. (And, realistically, only small children, or disinterested parents who don't want to take the time to do the math on what the access pass costs in the long run, are likely to benefit from skipping the monthly fee. Then again, perhaps a smart parent might use the access plan as a way to teach their kids the rudiments of how to manage a budget.) On top of that baseline level of income per user, they're hoping to collect extra via sales of optional, but convenient (and, in some cases, overpowered) gear and other perks.
The good news for players is that it sounds like many of these optional things are relatively optional, though the question of power inflation may become a huge balance issue for the game. Are the next set of items going to be even more overpowered, and going to cost even more than $20? The devs are going to have to walk a fine line in providing incentives to buy the optional stuff without making it so powerful that the subscribers who aren't willing to pay significant amounts on top of their monthly fee decide to punt. (Also, one would imagine that even the staunchest RMT proponents will balk at the prices someday if they keep going up every few levels.)
The Runes of Magic approach, on the other hand, sets no floor for what they can expect to make from their players, but also appears to have no ceiling. Their model really rests on having supposedly low prices for things that they think players will want, without having them technically be mandatory. The expensive things like that mount aside, they're focused on smaller ticket items like charging players for consumable teleport items, exp potions, and, yes, those absurd bag rental fees. The issue here is a bit more difficult than mere inflation.
The developer of the game is now ultimately in the business of trying to sell players perks. This means that their incentive is now to actually make it hard to play and enjoy the game without perks. For example, maybe monsters should now drop items that have to be vendored instead of carrying coin on their person, so that players have more need for extra bags and teleports back to the nearest vendor.
Does "optional" convenience mean optional fun?
I'm living another odd example of this over in EQ2. At the moment, EQ2's forums are full of complaints from players who are getting to maximum level without anywhere near the number of alternate advancement points (earned via quests, exploration, etc) they need for endgame content. This issue results from the fact that the devs chose to increase the speed of leveling - to a pace that is arguably too quick - while holding the rate of AA gain constant (and even increasing the number of AA's available, after players who have been around for previous expansions used up content that would have awarded them AA exp while stuck at the old cap). Now, perhaps SOE's motives here are honestly for honoring the time players have previously spent on gaining these achievements in the past. Then again, it is awful coincidental that they just so happen to have rolled out RMT AAXP potions.
(Unlike W101 and ROM, Sony is at least willing to admit that 1 station cash is 1 cent, and they've even passed on the opportunity to use a multiplier that forces you to pull out a calculator to figure out what things ACTUALLY cost. However, I can't find a list of prices of actual items on their official site, so half of that story is still missing.)
At the end of the day, there definitely are situations in which it makes sense to pay for convenience. If I could have paid Blizzard the $20 in real money ROM wants for a ground mount (presuming that said mount was faster than non-paid alternatives in WoW) back in 2004, I absolutely would have saved enough travel time between then and now to make it well worth my while. Perhaps paid exp potions would have made those painful grinding levels in the mid-40's in LOTRO (back before the Angmar revamp) actually fun. My ultimate caveat is, in some ways simply a different way of looking at the issue.
If I'm paying extra, I want it to be for something that makes the game more fun. If, instead, your microtransactions are deliberately shrouded in secrecy to conceal the fact that you have taken industry standard features (such as bagspace and hearthstone teleports) and slapped a real world price tag on them? Well, if you make me feel like you don't want me playing your game without paying for all the extras, the danger is that I might take you up on your offer. Perhaps that's still worth your while if there's a big spender who will pay you $30 for every $15 subscriber who leaves. Then again, as Elder Game points out, that means dealing with a smaller, and increasingly influential, minority of your playerbase that will begin to have a larger and larger impact on your bottom line.
From my perspective, the latter is the big problem. For example, I used to love to play collectable card games (CCG's), but I just can't justify the amount of money it takes to play a game where your ability to do things depends on how many booster packs you paid for. (The best part is how that $4 booster pack contains only one random "rare" card, which probably is not one that you wanted, AND also is not valuable enough to trade to another player for a card you DID want.) There is an amount of money that I'm willing to pay for a game, and, if the game is not fun for me at that level of spending, I won't play it.
All of which got me thinking - how much do these new-fangled, so-called "Free to Play" games cost anyway? Turns out that this question is a lot harder to answer than you'd think.
Wizard101
Official Site: https://www.wizard101.com/
Wizard 101 is a Harry Potter-esque MMORPG that uses CCG mechanics for combat. It is technically more what I would call "free to try" than "free to play". You get actually free access to 10 areas - I'm not clear on which of these are adventuring zones and which are basic towns etc - and then have the choice of either paying a monthly fee ($10/month, discounts for longer subscriptions, and a unique $7 per person per month "family plan") or going with an a la carte access pass.
The monthly fee gets you access to the entire game, and presumably that access (or maybe even your whole account, once you've opted to go the subscription route?) goes away if you stop paying. The access plan, on the other hand, allows you to permanently unlock specific areas for your no-monthly fee account. Prices appear to scale per level of the content you're unlocking, and range from 715 crowns to 1200 crowns.
Wait, back up, crowns? What's a crown?
Crowns are W101's "microtransaction" currency. At this point, I invite you to go to the site I linked above and try to figure what a crown is actually worth in real world dollars. I spent a pretty long time digging and I wasn't able to figure this out. Actually going to the store to see the prices appears to require that you create an account - apparently they don't WANT you to know what it costs to play the game until after you've tried it.
Fortunately, I have a blogroll. Tipa at West Karana has been playing W101, and comes to the rescue with a post on the game's launch. Apparently the lowest demonination of crowns is 2500 crowns for $5 (that's 5 crowns for 1 cent), while you can get a substantial bulk discount, up to 60,000 crowns for a whopping $80 (that's 7.5 crowns for one cent, and so far beyond the realm of what I'd call a "microtransaction" that I don't know what to say about it). That new area for 1200 crowns costs $2.40 at the worst exchange rate. There are 30 areas at that rate, some smaller number of areas at lower rates (again, the first few levels are free, the second few are cheap, and then they hit you with the large price tags), and they deliberately reserve the right to raise the prices on future content.
I guess the bottom line is that you could get a perpetual subscription to most of the content currently in the game for about what they want for a one year subscription to all of the content (including new stuff that they roll out over time). As tempting as it is to go no-fee, this probably would not be worth your while unless you're literally only playing for a few hours a month (and spending less than $10 monthly on crowns, including zone unlocks, during that time). Note that the discounted $80 for 1 year is significantly less that what you'd pay for a traditional subscription game box plus monthly fee (e.g. $40 for the box and first month and 11x$15 for the rest of the year, for a total of $205). Then again, you may or may not be getting less total game for that smaller price tag.
Anyway, the fun with crowns doesn't stop there. There's an ingame store for gear - experienced players point out that the gear starts at level 5, and paying for it at that level is a terrible deal because you will outlevel it so quickly - and those prices also don't appear to be viewable from out of game. Tipa to the rescue again, with a look at the high end crown items - the most expensive is just shy of 15,000 crowns, which is $20-30 depending on your crown exchange rate. That's IN ADDITION TO either the subscription or the access plan you paid for to get into the zone in the first place, and Tipa describes the high end item as "so amazingly powerful that it would be hard NOT to buy it".
On top of this, the game also apparently includes booster packs. Good luck finding out how much those cost, or what the odds are of getting a spell card that you want out of them - I haven't seen much mention of them amongst the blogs so I'm presuming that these are optional.
Incidentally, W101 is actually a game aimed at children, with pre-generated names, strict parental controls, and a generally kid-friendly atmosphere. The decisons to price these items in an arbitrary currency, rather than at their true dollar value, and to make it very very hard to determine what those prices are before you've agreed to let your kid start an account, is quite clearly deliberate.
Runes of Magic
Official Site: http://www.runesofmagic.com/
Runes of magic is a more WoW-like game (and has been mocked for having an area that looks a lot like WoW's human starting area, Elwynn Forest), with a slight Guild Wars-like twist where characters have two classes and can switch between the two, or mix and max class abilities. The good news is that it appears to ACTUALLY be free to play. However, they have to pay the bills somehow, and the answer is through an item store where your purchases are paid for in "diamonds".
What's a diamond cost, you might ask the official website? Again, good luck with that. Via google and forum fu, it appears that a diamond will run you somewhere between 4-5 cents. Why would you want to spend them? Perhaps you'd like extra bags? Not only do they charge for bagspace, but you can't even BUY bags - you have to RENT the right to have bags at approximately $11 per 30-slot bag per year. A mount (which you actually do get to keep) will run you $20. You can't actually buy weapons and armor directly, but you can buy items that create sockets in your gear, which you then spend more money to fill. One forum estimate says that it would cost $225 for a single set of best-in slot item enhancements, all of which would be permanently lost when you replace the gear you put them in.
Somehow, $15 a month is sounding like the best deal in gaming.
Charging for convenience or necessity?
Obviously, both games ultimately need to bring in money, both to pay for their initial development, and to recoup current operating costs (including servers, salaries of developers), not to mention actual profit for their investors. Though these two games share the obnoxious business practice of doing their best not to reveal their prices to prospective customers, they differ a bit in approach to that problem.
W101's approach is two-fold. With their subscription model, they're basically requiring a certain amount of money. Perhaps some players will bum around the newbie areas indefinitely on principle, but the vast majority will need to pay for one of the two means of access to additional content in order to continue enjoying the game. (And, realistically, only small children, or disinterested parents who don't want to take the time to do the math on what the access pass costs in the long run, are likely to benefit from skipping the monthly fee. Then again, perhaps a smart parent might use the access plan as a way to teach their kids the rudiments of how to manage a budget.) On top of that baseline level of income per user, they're hoping to collect extra via sales of optional, but convenient (and, in some cases, overpowered) gear and other perks.
The good news for players is that it sounds like many of these optional things are relatively optional, though the question of power inflation may become a huge balance issue for the game. Are the next set of items going to be even more overpowered, and going to cost even more than $20? The devs are going to have to walk a fine line in providing incentives to buy the optional stuff without making it so powerful that the subscribers who aren't willing to pay significant amounts on top of their monthly fee decide to punt. (Also, one would imagine that even the staunchest RMT proponents will balk at the prices someday if they keep going up every few levels.)
The Runes of Magic approach, on the other hand, sets no floor for what they can expect to make from their players, but also appears to have no ceiling. Their model really rests on having supposedly low prices for things that they think players will want, without having them technically be mandatory. The expensive things like that mount aside, they're focused on smaller ticket items like charging players for consumable teleport items, exp potions, and, yes, those absurd bag rental fees. The issue here is a bit more difficult than mere inflation.
The developer of the game is now ultimately in the business of trying to sell players perks. This means that their incentive is now to actually make it hard to play and enjoy the game without perks. For example, maybe monsters should now drop items that have to be vendored instead of carrying coin on their person, so that players have more need for extra bags and teleports back to the nearest vendor.
Does "optional" convenience mean optional fun?
I'm living another odd example of this over in EQ2. At the moment, EQ2's forums are full of complaints from players who are getting to maximum level without anywhere near the number of alternate advancement points (earned via quests, exploration, etc) they need for endgame content. This issue results from the fact that the devs chose to increase the speed of leveling - to a pace that is arguably too quick - while holding the rate of AA gain constant (and even increasing the number of AA's available, after players who have been around for previous expansions used up content that would have awarded them AA exp while stuck at the old cap). Now, perhaps SOE's motives here are honestly for honoring the time players have previously spent on gaining these achievements in the past. Then again, it is awful coincidental that they just so happen to have rolled out RMT AAXP potions.
(Unlike W101 and ROM, Sony is at least willing to admit that 1 station cash is 1 cent, and they've even passed on the opportunity to use a multiplier that forces you to pull out a calculator to figure out what things ACTUALLY cost. However, I can't find a list of prices of actual items on their official site, so half of that story is still missing.)
At the end of the day, there definitely are situations in which it makes sense to pay for convenience. If I could have paid Blizzard the $20 in real money ROM wants for a ground mount (presuming that said mount was faster than non-paid alternatives in WoW) back in 2004, I absolutely would have saved enough travel time between then and now to make it well worth my while. Perhaps paid exp potions would have made those painful grinding levels in the mid-40's in LOTRO (back before the Angmar revamp) actually fun. My ultimate caveat is, in some ways simply a different way of looking at the issue.
If I'm paying extra, I want it to be for something that makes the game more fun. If, instead, your microtransactions are deliberately shrouded in secrecy to conceal the fact that you have taken industry standard features (such as bagspace and hearthstone teleports) and slapped a real world price tag on them? Well, if you make me feel like you don't want me playing your game without paying for all the extras, the danger is that I might take you up on your offer. Perhaps that's still worth your while if there's a big spender who will pay you $30 for every $15 subscriber who leaves. Then again, as Elder Game points out, that means dealing with a smaller, and increasingly influential, minority of your playerbase that will begin to have a larger and larger impact on your bottom line.
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
A Non-Player's Perspective on Warhammer Patch 1.2
Certain people apparently feel that the timing of WoW's 3.1 PTR's is an attempt by Blizzard to overshadow the launch of Warhammer's 1.2 patch. I remain skeptical - when Blizzard decides to bury you in hype, it's generally a bit less subtle than having your top guys encourage players to try other games, and it's not like there's anytime in the next four months where Mythic doesn't have something planned - but I suppose it's only fair that I offer the Mythic crew a little publicity just in case.
It's a pretty massive patch, with many quality of life improvements and some big name features. (See Syp's summary if you want the cliff notes.) Wading through the notes, two things really stood out to me.
Closing the book on the cut classes
Last July, Mythic made the tough call to cut 4 of the 6 capitols, and 4 of the 24 classes from the game's launch. Judging from the size of Syp's blogroll that week, it's fair to say that the news made a huge impact on the community. With the new patch, six months after the game's launch, the four classes are back, and I'm not sure that anyone really misses the cities. In some ways, the patch today brings that hard chapter in the game's life to a close.
(At the time, I wrote, "the biggest MMORPG left on the horizon sounds like it's going to have more than six months worth of postponed development work after it launches". You know what they say about a stopped watch being right twice a day....)
In some ways, "these classes suck" might have been less damaging from a PR front than officially cutting the classes, but cutting them was the right call, and I salute Mythic for making it. Even if you don't give extra credit for restoring cut content, restoring the classes has been something concrete for the community to hold onto through the rocky launch months. As an extra bonus, the delay allowed them to come up with some excuse to swap out the under-whelming Hammerereruhruhruhr class out for the popular Dwarven Slayer. (In the lore, Slayers don't want to be revived after they find honorable death in battle, which is a problem for MMORPG characters - I haven't heard if there ever was a good explanation for how that got swept under the rug, but the result is for the best.)
The other thing we can say, in hindsight, is that Mythic having to make such a tough decision several months in advance of the game's release was a red flag in terms of the game's progress. As I pondered at the time, these things got cut precisely because there were other, more pressing problems lurking behind that pesky beta NDA.
Feeling Swindled by Mark Jacobs over Public Quests
If you've been reading my blog for a while, you may have noticed that I actually LIKE group PVE content. What I don't like is the logistics that this content often requires - planning my offline life around being online and uninterrupted for a certain block of time and spending hours of my gaming time in the looking for group channel looking for a group with which to play the game instead of actually playing the game. Warhammer's highly touted Public Quest feature promised to take care of all that stuff for me, so that all I had to do is show up whenever I wanted to, stay for however long I wanted to, and get to take part in the more elaborate content that becomes possible when you presume that a reasonable group is attempting it.
The only catch was, Mythic got the incentives wrong. Scenarios played a major role in this process, though I don't mean to blame them for all of the problems the game had. The bottom line was that they had balanced the public quests around certain assumptions about how many people would be on hand to work on them and those assumptions fell apart on live servers with persistent characters. As a result, Mythic set out to rebalance public quests three months ago, and are finally delivering at least one public quest per zone that's tuned for solo players and small groups in today's patch.
Personally, though, I needed accessible quests for players in the level 12+ range when I hit that level back in September. Looking back, there is a part of me that felt betrayed by that failure. Mark Jacobs talked and talked and talked about how revolutionary this feature was. His words convinced me, so I paid him $50 (off of a gift card I got as a graduation present when I finished my Ph.D.), only to discover that Mark could not deliver the feature that he promised, because there hadn't been enough time left to figure out that they needed content for smaller groups.
The side of me that is an actual player (in addition to a blogger, a role in which I walk away with something to write about whether or not I have a good time), who plays these games because I enjoy them, felt swindled. Something that had been promised simply wasn't delivered, in a way that it's very hard to get away with in any other industry outside of gaming. (Can you imagine hiring a contractor to install a swimming pool, only to have them tell you that they ran out of time, so the pool will only be usable if you have at least half a dozen people in it, but maybe they'll be able to fix that if you keep paying them for six more months?)
In hindsight, it was nothing personal. Mark Jacobs felt that his game's best chance at success was to talk a whole heck of a lot and hope that customers would overlook the portions of the game that weren't ready for prime time. In some ways, my decision not to continue to give him money was equally impersonal - a simple business transaction that I chose not to make because I felt that the product was not worth the price of the subscription at the time. Still, part of me wonders how different my experience with Warhammer would have been had I taken my own advice and waited until now to consider trying the game.
Best Wishes for Warhammer's second launch
You don't really ever get a second chance to make a first impression, but, in many ways, today is Warhammer's second launch. In addition to the two biggies I mentioned above, the game has added "chain" repeatable quests that send players to objectives in the game's open RVR areas, a "zone domination" system that allows large armies that are actually dominating a zone to gain control of it, and the option for low level characters to teleport to outdoor skirmishes in progress. (One wonders whether high level players will miss that feature when they level past it.)
Looking to the future, the game seems to have addressed the major nagging issues from launch, and is now free to focus on new and different things, including their upcoming RVR-focused dungeon. I certainly won't fault them for choosing not to work on reinstating the cut cities just yet - why add in more of the same when you've already got two perfectly good capitols and other, more interesting ideas for what to add next?
Though I suppose my own experience with Mythic's PR machine has left me with high hopes but low expectations, there's no reason why there shouldn't be good things ahead for this title. As Scott Jennings points out amidst his Darkfall coverage, the industry could really use a hit that isn't made by Blizzard, and one would like to think that it isn't too late for Warhammer to fill those shoes.
It's a pretty massive patch, with many quality of life improvements and some big name features. (See Syp's summary if you want the cliff notes.) Wading through the notes, two things really stood out to me.
Closing the book on the cut classes
Last July, Mythic made the tough call to cut 4 of the 6 capitols, and 4 of the 24 classes from the game's launch. Judging from the size of Syp's blogroll that week, it's fair to say that the news made a huge impact on the community. With the new patch, six months after the game's launch, the four classes are back, and I'm not sure that anyone really misses the cities. In some ways, the patch today brings that hard chapter in the game's life to a close.
(At the time, I wrote, "the biggest MMORPG left on the horizon sounds like it's going to have more than six months worth of postponed development work after it launches". You know what they say about a stopped watch being right twice a day....)
In some ways, "these classes suck" might have been less damaging from a PR front than officially cutting the classes, but cutting them was the right call, and I salute Mythic for making it. Even if you don't give extra credit for restoring cut content, restoring the classes has been something concrete for the community to hold onto through the rocky launch months. As an extra bonus, the delay allowed them to come up with some excuse to swap out the under-whelming Hammerereruhruhruhr class out for the popular Dwarven Slayer. (In the lore, Slayers don't want to be revived after they find honorable death in battle, which is a problem for MMORPG characters - I haven't heard if there ever was a good explanation for how that got swept under the rug, but the result is for the best.)
The other thing we can say, in hindsight, is that Mythic having to make such a tough decision several months in advance of the game's release was a red flag in terms of the game's progress. As I pondered at the time, these things got cut precisely because there were other, more pressing problems lurking behind that pesky beta NDA.
Feeling Swindled by Mark Jacobs over Public Quests
If you've been reading my blog for a while, you may have noticed that I actually LIKE group PVE content. What I don't like is the logistics that this content often requires - planning my offline life around being online and uninterrupted for a certain block of time and spending hours of my gaming time in the looking for group channel looking for a group with which to play the game instead of actually playing the game. Warhammer's highly touted Public Quest feature promised to take care of all that stuff for me, so that all I had to do is show up whenever I wanted to, stay for however long I wanted to, and get to take part in the more elaborate content that becomes possible when you presume that a reasonable group is attempting it.
The only catch was, Mythic got the incentives wrong. Scenarios played a major role in this process, though I don't mean to blame them for all of the problems the game had. The bottom line was that they had balanced the public quests around certain assumptions about how many people would be on hand to work on them and those assumptions fell apart on live servers with persistent characters. As a result, Mythic set out to rebalance public quests three months ago, and are finally delivering at least one public quest per zone that's tuned for solo players and small groups in today's patch.
Personally, though, I needed accessible quests for players in the level 12+ range when I hit that level back in September. Looking back, there is a part of me that felt betrayed by that failure. Mark Jacobs talked and talked and talked about how revolutionary this feature was. His words convinced me, so I paid him $50 (off of a gift card I got as a graduation present when I finished my Ph.D.), only to discover that Mark could not deliver the feature that he promised, because there hadn't been enough time left to figure out that they needed content for smaller groups.
The side of me that is an actual player (in addition to a blogger, a role in which I walk away with something to write about whether or not I have a good time), who plays these games because I enjoy them, felt swindled. Something that had been promised simply wasn't delivered, in a way that it's very hard to get away with in any other industry outside of gaming. (Can you imagine hiring a contractor to install a swimming pool, only to have them tell you that they ran out of time, so the pool will only be usable if you have at least half a dozen people in it, but maybe they'll be able to fix that if you keep paying them for six more months?)
In hindsight, it was nothing personal. Mark Jacobs felt that his game's best chance at success was to talk a whole heck of a lot and hope that customers would overlook the portions of the game that weren't ready for prime time. In some ways, my decision not to continue to give him money was equally impersonal - a simple business transaction that I chose not to make because I felt that the product was not worth the price of the subscription at the time. Still, part of me wonders how different my experience with Warhammer would have been had I taken my own advice and waited until now to consider trying the game.
Best Wishes for Warhammer's second launch
You don't really ever get a second chance to make a first impression, but, in many ways, today is Warhammer's second launch. In addition to the two biggies I mentioned above, the game has added "chain" repeatable quests that send players to objectives in the game's open RVR areas, a "zone domination" system that allows large armies that are actually dominating a zone to gain control of it, and the option for low level characters to teleport to outdoor skirmishes in progress. (One wonders whether high level players will miss that feature when they level past it.)
Looking to the future, the game seems to have addressed the major nagging issues from launch, and is now free to focus on new and different things, including their upcoming RVR-focused dungeon. I certainly won't fault them for choosing not to work on reinstating the cut cities just yet - why add in more of the same when you've already got two perfectly good capitols and other, more interesting ideas for what to add next?
Though I suppose my own experience with Mythic's PR machine has left me with high hopes but low expectations, there's no reason why there shouldn't be good things ahead for this title. As Scott Jennings points out amidst his Darkfall coverage, the industry could really use a hit that isn't made by Blizzard, and one would like to think that it isn't too late for Warhammer to fill those shoes.
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