Is the Small Guild Endangered?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Phyrric Victory Of the Additional Off-White Horse

Allarond finally completed LOTRO's Volume I, wrapping up the launch game's epic plot. Part of the reward package features a "grey steed". This horse is not only functionally identical to the rep reward horse I previously obtained in Lothlorien, it also looks nigh identical, other than different saddle blankets.


The Lothlorien rep version of the horse, both are "fast" mounts with 150 morale/hp

An Epic Fed Ex Run
The grand finale of the quest line was genuinely impressive, but it was unfortunately marred by the most idiotic Fed Ex-fest I've ever had the displeasure of playing. There's a large chunk of Volume 1, Book 15 in which players have to make no fewer than five round trips out to a questgiver located in the middle of nowhere in the Trollshaws, a swift travel route and then five minutes on a player mount away from town. In the most egregious stretch, the player leaves Rivendell only to have the quest giver ask them to return to Rivendell to ask the stable dude to send over their horse and then journey back to the wilderness to report on this one-line conversation.

All told, these five trips in and out of the Trollshaws, representing a solid hour of travel time for a player with all the relevant swift travel and recall skills (map, personal and kinship housing, racial teleport, reputation-gated swift travel routes), require the player to kill one mob and participate in one session play story flashback that isn't designed to be difficult. There is absolutely no reason why the player needs to do personally make the other three trips, other than to pad out the questline with an extra 30-40 minutes of travel time.

LOTRO has always been a high quality game, and the final instance dungeon at the end of all this travel time delivers. It also wraps up the storylines that players have been working on since level one, in a way that solo players have rarely been included in an MMORPG. Unfortunately, LOTRO's weakness - lack of quantity - spills over into diluting the quality of the questline as well. "Added one group dungeon" does not sound as impressive on the patch notes as "added a twelve stage epic book quest, including soloable content". As a result, everyone has to slog through a questline that feels like a waste of time.

Unintended Consequences of the DDO Item Shop Model

Despite my misgivings about parts of the payment model, there's no questioning that the PAX weekend deal (an extra $19 worth of points on top of the usual "bonus" for spending $50) was as good as it was likely to get in the near future. As such, it was off to Eberron to try and figure out whether the game was worth playing.

Rather than give a superficial rundown of the early gameplay, let's just say that I was reasonably convinced that I would eventually extract $50 worth of entertainment from the game. I did, however, observe some interesting quirks to the game's free to play system.

Intentional Community Scatter
If you're a chronic alt-o-holic, DDO is probably the first game I've ever seen that will actually PAY you to re-roll.

Each of the game's seven servers is treated as a separate community for the purposes of unlocking stuff. The bad news is that, if you do unlock a race or feature on your main server without paying in the item shop, you won't have access to the feature on any other servers you choose to visit. The good news is that you qualify for new player Turbine Point (the cash shop currency) awards once on every new server.

Within roughly 30-40 minutes, you can complete a handful of quests and walk away with 50 TP for the earliest reward. I went through half a dozen characters anyway, just auditioning playstyles, and ended up with 300 TP for my trouble. Of course, that's only $3 worth at the best exchange rate, but it's a nice little bonus gift. Your first 100 favor (think reputation, earned by completing quests) on each server is worth 150 TP, so that's actually a non-trivial boost if you repeat it seven times (which, again, many of us would have ended up doing anyway).

On the downside, I suspect that this system is why I've never before seen a game where it was so hard to find a character name that wasn't taken. Between the game being free to play and actively encouraging free players to go forth to multiple servers, I've really had to scrounge around to find available names. Also, obviously, rolling on multiple servers means being cut off from any friends and guildmates. You even have to physically close the game client and relaunch it if you want to switch.

What Do You Value?
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of having a currency wallet and all kinds of options in the store is that it really does come down to what the player wants to spend money on.

For example, one of the pricier items in the shop is the option to make 32-point character builds instead of 28-point builds, a perk that is priced at just shy of $15 worth of Turbine points (more at worse exchange rates). Though there's some debate in the community as to how useful this feature is, I personally value it pretty highly. One of the things I really enjoy about the Dungeons and Dragons character system is the ability to pair levels of literally any two classes in the game to create unique multi-class combinations. For example, my hypothetical dual-wielding Kensai(Fighter)/Warchanter(Bard) would want very high numbers for Dex and Cha, but neglecting Str would leave me doing relatively low amounts of damage per hit.

By contrast, just about every form of equipment or consumable item in the game can be purchased with Turbine points, but I can't help but wonder why anyone would choose to buy them. For the price of a stack of consumable potions, I can permanently unlock a new subzone that would be available to every future character I create. I suppose these sorts of perks are for people who are really pressed for real world time and therefore spending relatively larger amounts of money in the store.

The only thing I've bought so far is access to the Monk class, which is on sale this week. I expect that I'll pick up the 32-point builds, the drow race, and the Favored Soul class at some point, though I might as well sit and see if they go on sale since I've got other games I'm working on at the moment anyway. Even if I do ultimately pay sticker price for all of the above, I'd still be working with

The Something For Everyone Challenge
All that aside, the big challenge Turbine will face is continuing to add content. There is a certain amount of room for new races and classes - apparently the half-orc race is slated for later this year - but there are limits to how many races/classes players can be convinced that they need. Likewise, there is the question of content. Dungeons and Dragons isn't really designed for increasing the level cap, but at some point Turbine may run into difficulty if players have already unlocked enough of the game for free to play status to reach the cap.

We've seen a bit of a hint of that in their current efforts. All dungeons are available on multiple difficulty settings, often including a solo-only version and a raid version. Sure enough, the next major patch is slated to contain a leveling dungeon that has an end-game raiding version (similar to how Blizzard reuses leveling content as Heroic endgame stuff in WoW). But how long will this model hold up? I guess Turbine is going to find out.

How The DDO Exchange Rate Discourages Impulse Purchases

Massively has a post on playing DDO for free, which got me to take another look at the game, in particular the cash store that has helped their revenue out so much.

If there's one thing I hate as a gamer who prefers to stick to a budget, it's paying the same amount of money but ending up with less stuff because I didn't spend the money in the correct way. Unfortunately, DDO has my biggest item store pet peeve in this department.

Punitive Exchange Rate
Like many item shop games, DDO offers a better exchange rate for players who buy their currency in not-at-all micro portions. For example:
- Spending $50 gets you 5000 Turbine Points, the same exchange rate as Sony's station cash, and, incidentally, an easy to calculate cost of 100 points per dollar.
- Spending $6.50, the smallest increment Turbine will accept, gets you only 420 points, a mere 61.5 points per dollar.
In other words, the penalty for buying in the smaller increments is 1923 points (38.5%) if you spend $50 at the bad exchange rate, or a bit over $31 if you want to eventually get to get to the same 5000 Turbine points at the bad exchange rate.

Let's be clear here, they do this because they believe that making players carry a balance in their wallets helps trick players into spending faster than they intended to. The practical effect, though, is an exchange rate so punitive that it makes zero sense to pay them any money unless you're willing to pony up the full $50. Clearly, they believe this is worth it from a business perspective. But does it cost them something?

A Purchase Opportunity Lost
Let's say I wanted to jump in and try the game, but I decided that I wanted to play some exotic character like a Drow Monk. Both the race and the class are premium content that I would need to unlock to play, but I'm relatively willing to tolerate one-time fees like that if they're provided instead of an upfront fee for the game box. If I was able to get the good exchange rate, I'd be happy to sink $15-20 into the game for a starter package of sorts. Unfortunately, the way the store is set up, that would basically be wasted money if I ended up sticking with the game. So, if I do try DDO, it will probably be as a non-payer first, using a free-to-play character class/race.

Turbine can lose in several ways here.
- First, it might turn out that I would have hated the game no matter what, in which case they have basically declined to accept $20.
- Second, it might turn out that I never find a class that I like, but that I WOULD have stuck around and ultimately become a customer if only I had been able to play the class I wanted to play. (This may be less likely, but sometimes the class you play can really affect your enjoyment of the game - I've tried something like 18 of EQ2's 24 subclasses, and hated about 2/3 of them, with only one that I really love so far.)
-I might stick around but, after playing enough to decide I'm willing to invest in the game, decide that I no longer need that premium race/class. Maybe I'm happy with the character I started playing.
-Worst of all from Turbine's perspective, maybe I'm happy with the way the game treats non-paying customers and decide I don't need to spend at all.

Unfortunately, it appears that amount that Turbine and other item shop companies can extract from MAJOR impulse purchasers far exceeds what they can get from the little guy. They can even afford to blow the exchange rate through the roof for the occasional buy buy buy now now now sale (an additional 38% bonus, but only on the $50 package), because the kind of player who will jump on that deal is the kind of player who will use up the bonus cash and buy more at full price down the line. It's okay if this part of the model scares off the occasional cost-conscious consumer like myself, as long as they can make it up through the big spenders.

This, of course, is the kind of thing that has players distrusting item store games and playing it safe by sticking to the subscription.

When Alternate Currencies Go Too Far

Kairos describes the LOTRO economy in shambles - "most l.65 players are awash with money, and have nothing to spend it on."

I've noticed that the economy on Vilya is a bit quirky as well. I can sell raw crafting materials on the AH, and my gold stockpiles have been slowly increasing as a result, but prices are lower than I remember them from previous visits to Middle Earth. Why?

For those who have not made playing the AH their main goal in the game, the purpose of virtual money is to pay other players to do things you don't want to do, using currency you earned doing something you were more willing to do. It doesn't matter whether the activity you want to avoid is boring, difficult, or simply a bad use of your opportunity cost/time, only that you want out of it, and that the game allows this to occur.

Nothing to buy?
So what, precisely, does LOTRO allow players to buy their way out of? Very little. Here are the things that matter to an endgame player:

- Legendary Item Grind: Scrolls, exp runes, and most relics are all non-tradeable

- Radiance Gear: Nope, this entire mechanic exists to make players repeatedly re-run the game's limited number of dungeons, and Turbine will resist allowing any other means of obtaining it for as long as possible

- Unique Skirmish Rewards: Marks can't be traded, so you're going to need to run skirmishes yourself if you want soldier abilities, unique cosmetic rewards, etc

- Kill Deed Credit: Nope, you can't take out a contract on the 2000 mobs you need killed, though you can and probably should find someone else to team up with if possible

- Pre-SOM Rep: The reps in Lothlorien and Mirkwood (the one new rep of the current expansion) do not have trade-able barter items that players can turn in for rep, and even require bound quest reward tokens to purchase rewards. Most of the pre-Mirkwood reputations do have this sort of option, but none of those rewards really matter that much in the long run. Even if someone did really want a different colored horse, the price they'd be willing to pay for rep barter items has a ceiling because you can get the relevant rep tokens from mobs or skirmishes very quickly - I gained several thousand rep with the rangers of Evendim just from mob kill tokens while doing the epic books.

- Consumables: Sure, you can buy these. Prices don't seem to be very high, though, at least if you don't insist on higher quality crit consumables - players need to produce large quantities of these for crafting exp.

- Raw materials: As I said, this perennial MMORPG market is at least somewhat alive, but not thriving. Part of the problem is that the new mini-expansion did not provide a new crafting tier - if you were maxxed as of Moria, you're still at the cap. Also, common harvests are not needed in large quantities to produce stuff once you're done with exp, and the rarer items can be obtained quickly via skirmishes or easy daily quests. Finally, the crafter-only relic perk might not be sufficient to convince players that they really must sit AFK for hours, watching the progress bar advance to get them the required crafting exp.

The Paradoxical success of alternate currencies
On paper, LOTRO's ever expanding range of currencies sound like a great idea. From dungeon runs, to daily quests, to skirmishes, anything the player wants to do is likely to supply their character's needs with something from a token vendor.

The problem, beyond driving an increasingly desperate need for a currency tab to hold non-tradeable tokens, is that this feels like it comes at the expense of the player economy. There's nothing to buy because everything either can't be traded or can be obtained so easily that it's not worth paying for.

The irony is that LOTRO was once a game that demanded a certain degree of reliance on other characters, e.g. with crafting vocation combinations that prevent most characters from harvesting everything their character needs for crafting. Somehow, Turbine managed to streamline that interdependence out of the economy, to the detriment of the game and its community.

A Picture Is Not Worth A Thousand Mob Kills

Above is my deed log for the zone of Forochel in LOTRO. Each of the six kill deeds, in various states of completion, requires 150 kills to unlock the "advanced" followup kill deed, which requires 300 additional kills. I would need to kill over 2,000 mobs - trivial mobs 15 levels below me - to clear out the deed log for this zone alone. I'm mostly done with the grey quests of the zone, so it's not like I can fill in those deeds while working on something less mind-numbing.

Along the bottom of my deed log, you see twelve arrow-head looking things, signifying the dozen pre-Moria zones that have deeds. (The lower level zone kill deeds tend to be more reasonable - newbie zones are generally set at 30+60 - though some of these lower numbers are actually harder to get due to mobs that have placeholders that make them hard to find.) There are relatively few zones other than Forochel that would require 2,000 kills to clear out, but it wouldn't surprise me to hear that emptying the entire deed log would take 8-10K kills.

Of course, all of these deeds are "optional", if you don't care about the stat-boosting "virtues" that often cannot be capped out in any other way. Because I have chosen not to go after these 2,000 mobs, Allarond is running with several equipped virtues that are at rank 4 out of 10. Also, if I ever do level an alt beyond the teens, that alt would start with a completely empty deed log and have to repeat the process or similarly do without.

They say that the pen is mightier than the sword.
They also say that a picture is worth a thousand words.
It's too bad that posting a picture, worth a thousand words, which are produced by an implement that is more powerful than a mob-killing sword, won't get me credit for these pesky deeds.

Hydralisks: You Can Has Them

PVD held its second ever beta key contest over the weekend. (I once gave away a Wrath beta key by deliberately burying the contest details halfway down a lengthy post - my intent now, as then, was to reward my regular readers rather than get tons of one-time traffic from a contest that gets picked up and linked around the net.)

The contest was to determine how many hydralisks are in this picture. Overall, I'm pretty happy with the results.

The answer

The answer was that there were 90 hydralisks (see the picture of the soldier with the number 90 in the bottom left of the screenshot), 10 of whom were burrowed into the ground (the second group of 10 next to the 90). Yes, it's possible to make groups of 90+ units - the health panel only shows 24 per tab, but, as you can see, I currently have four tab pages worth of them in the 90-unit group.

There was technically a bit of an advantage for people who know their Starcraft - Hydralisks require two food points, and the food cap is 200, so there could not be any more than 100 Hydralisks in the image - slightly fewer in fact because I still had some drones and a few zerglings in my actual base. Fortunately, I got a range of guesses pretty quickly, and that avoided a potential situation where the first comment got it on the nose and everyone else just took their count and rolled the dice on getting the tie-breaker right.

Contest Design Post-Mortem
The tie-breaker happened because I was concerned that a simple counting problem might be too easy, but I didn't want the contest to come down purely to who happened to see the post first. From a design standpoint, I suppose "first correct answer" is somewhat random, slightly weighted towards more frequent readers, but I'm not a huge fan of a contest that you can only win by being online all the time.

So, I added a tiebreaker question that the viewer can't really know the answer to - how many of the units died in assaulting the hapless NPC base after I was done with the screenshot. The answer to that question was one lone hydralisk who decided to run ahead into the main enemy base while the rest of the pack demolished the enemy's expansion base. This is less a commentary on the power of the hydralisk (I did fully upgrade their attacks while I was setting up the screenshot) and more a commentary on how the PC had maybe a dozen ground troops total.

I had thought that burrowing some of the hydralisks would be a clever way of making it a bit harder than just sitting down with a marker and counting hydralisks. It actually turns out that it's really difficult to even tell which hydralisks are underground from a static screenshot of Zerg on creep - the player who actually owns the unit can see the top of its head, and the creep, the handful of drones, and the sheer size of the group makes it hard to see which hydras don't have torsos. When I was setting up the screenshot, I manually walked each burrow-ee over to the base first first and then directed the rest of the mob to move to the hatchery. If I'd done a video, the effect would be much more dramatic, as the horde kind of flows AROUND the spots in the ground where the buried hydralisks are.

There was also a minor point that I should have done differently, namely that I stated the deadline as "midnight". Pangoria correctly pointed out that the time can be read as 12:00 on the switch from Saturday to Sunday, when I had meant 11:59 PM on Sunday night. Things I'll keep in mind if I ever have more keys to give away for something.

The winnter
Otherwise, I'm pretty happy with the contest. I didn't want to do something that would take me a ton of time to set up, would require me to sit on the prize for a long period of time, or put me in the position of having to make a subjective judgment call on who won. Maybe there were ways to improve the design, but it all went pretty well for something I threw together on short notice.

Congrats to LOGAN, who guessed 87, off by only three. The tie-breaker didn't end up mattering since the next closest guess was Pangoria at 94, but Logan somehow nailed the tiebreaker exactly on the nose, and was one of the very first entries to boot. Logan, your prize is in the mail to the gmail on your blogger account.

Thanks to everyone for participating!