2014 Wrap-up: Resolutions, Expenditures, and Questions

2014 was a year when I moved to a new country, largely (though informally) dropped off from MMO blogging, and spent the majority of my time in a single game for the first time in years. (Perhaps 2008?)  I spent very little of that time in traditional MMO's and sat out the major MMO launch events of the year (which don't seem to have gone that well).  What did I plan to do, what did I actually do, and what did it cost? 

Marvel Heroes: $220

I started the year committed to a $130 pre-purchase of the thirteen hero Advance Pack and then added on $50 in cash store currency and a $40 team-up Advance Pack purchase.  I started the year still working on my first level 60 and something like 8 characters unlocked.  I ended it with 2175/2580 total levels, access to pretty much the entire current roster (all but one unlocked, solely because I haven't had time to play the latest two releases) and 32 out of 43 playable characters at level 60.  I might have been able to push through to cap everyone, but I saw no need to rush, especially with a few characters still waiting for their 52 reworks in the coming months. 

Having spent about as much time on this game as a traditional MMO, the amount I spent is mostly reasonable and the game treated me reasonably well.  The resources I did NOT spend unlocking all those heroes and team-ups sufficed to unlock the entire backlog of playable heroes from launch, and at least the next four new releases besides.  That said, with the current pricing strategy I did not have to think long before declining to "renew" the Advance Pack for 2015.  The discount sounds great on paper but it isn't large enough compared to all the frequent sales that don't require a year up-front commitment to bundles that include stuff you don't want. 

So, it'll be interesting to see where next year goes.  I think I will spend more than $0 and less than $220.  Probably some cash store currency, perhaps a bundle for the Avengers movie, it will depend on what's on offer and how the year is going.

Heroes of the Storm (technically alpha): $43
I was around for the alpha reset and bought up bundles containing a total of 14 heroes, 2 mounts, and a skin at a far greater discount than what Blizzard has offered since.  After trying the remaining characters during free weeks, I unlocked an additional 5 characters with gold.  Collectively, that's over half the roster (with gold remaining to unlock 2-4 more heroes depending on price point), and I have access to characters covering every combination of franchise/role currently implemented in game.  The goal was to get started with a budget around a retail game, and it looks like I'm good to go. 

World of Warcraft: $7.50 (discounted time card)
I used a pre-paid time card to tie up loose ends in Pandaria, including the pre-expansion event and somehow barely grabbing a LFR Garrosh kill before the pre-expansion talent revamp.  I liked Pandaria better when cherry-picking the fun parts at the end instead of trying to grind them them all on a deadline to try and jump the next hurdle.   

I've got some time penciled in for Draenor in a month or two.

Neverwinter: No Cash Spent
I own a level 60 character never paid Cryptic a cent.  Of course, the way this title works, actually gearing out that character would likely churn through a non-trivial amount of money.  Meanwhile, I spent significantly more time leveling and farming currency in the out-of-game portal than in-game, which in principle means that my Astral Diamonds helped encouraged someone to spend real money on Zen to sell me. 

SWTOR: No Cash Spent
I used a double exp weekend to finish up my Sith Warrior's class story.  The expansion presale campaign was a bit wasted on me, as I wasn't willing to clear out that particular month on my calendar to take advantage of it.  At this point I'm likely to leave SWTOR on the back burner for a few more months anyway, and perhaps they'll reduce or eliminate the expansion fee (as they did last round).

Dishonorable Mention: Hex ($20 Kickstarter contribution last year)
I'm not going to list out every game I've previously played and/or spent money on that didn't get my time and money in 2014.  Hex, however, earns special recognition in this category because the defining feature that convinced me to pledge to their Kickstarter in June 2013 remains unimplemented. The game's plans for PVE content were a huge focus of both the Kickstarter campaign and the accompanying website, but have seen repeated delays, most recently a somewhat-obvious late-year statement that PVE would not be added in 2014.

In the interim, they may or may not get wiped out by a lawsuit from Wizards of the Coast (that they may or may not deserve - I've seen completely convinced people on both sides, and doubt that the real legal meat is available to the public at the moment) that certainly wasn't listed as a budget contingency in their Kickstarter. 

I can't say who the dishonor actually falls on (perhaps myself for having decided to offer up $20 and considered paying more), but it's a typical tale for crowd-funded video game projects, and I wish all of you who backed various MMO-hopefuls better luck. 

PS3:
My relatively modest mop-up project on this front was mixed.  I did complete Uncharted 3, and I also tried Infamous 2 before concluding that I didn't like it and writing the thing off.  I also procured a copy of Batman: Arkham Origins that I'd like to finish someday, but decided not to let that stop me from getting a PS4 for Christmas.

2014 Releases:
I've actually spent a few hours, and zero dollars in the open beta/soft-launch for Infinite Crisis.

That aside, TESO and Wildstar both reached the end of 2014 with subscription business models intact.  Based on the incorrect assumption that the game would launch on consoles in 2014, I had assumed that TESO in particular was unlikely to make it.  Whether either makes it to their respective first anniversaries without replacing their business model is a separate question.  In a possibly related story, Massively reports you can no longer purchase a 6-month subscription to TESO; it would make a ton of sense for the game to rip the band-aid off BEFORE the unspecified console launch. 

I'd also asked if we would see any F2P-relaunched titles get the axe in 2014, and SOE of all people came through by killing several titles, including Vanguard.  I guess that means so long to my former low level Goblin creature, gone off to wherever the inhabitants of Telon have ended up. 

And that's 2014, on to another year. 

Pay Not To Play, Revan Style

"The sad truth with SWTOR is that I'd pay Bioware a fair amount of money - possibly as much as I've spent on the game during sporadic subscriptions - if they just removed the gameplay and offered an interactive movie version of the story in which my character just wins all the fights after I've chosen my dialog.  I suppose double exp is the next best thing in that at least I don't have to do any side quests, but this also does NOT motivate me to get back into the game when the exp drops back down to the normal rate."
- Me, back in March

Bioware has launched SWTOR's latest expansion pre-sale campaign with an odd pre-order exclusive - pay to get out of playing anything but your class story. Customers who pre-purchase the digital expansion for $20 and ALSO subscribe to the technically subscription-optional title will gain more than 12 times the usual rate of experience from their class story missions.  The boosted missions grant enough experience to reach the maximum level of 55 without doing any side-missions, PVP, dungeons, or other content to supplement their experience gain. 

Bioware's decision to offer eight distinct class stories - each with writing, production, and acting costs to rival a reasonably sized game - added significantly to SWTOR's notoriously high budget.  The investment largely failed to pay off, as players burned through the one-eighth of the story content available to their characters inside of a month and canceled their then-mandatory subscriptions.  The concept of movie-quality stories for each additional character sounded nice in principle, but in practice I was never able to get excited about taking characters to the same worlds in the same order to do (or work around) the same planetary storylines - sometimes with classes that played similarly - just to eventually earn a minute or two of conversation towards the class story plot. 

And thus the compromise - you still cannot get out of playing at least some SWTOR to see the story, but you can get out of playing most of SWTOR.  Only trouble is, that may still be more SWTOR than I'm willing to play, much less pay for.  Such is the peril of marketing NOT playing your title. 

Canada Day Resolutions for 2014

Despite not being Canadian, Canada Day Resolutions used to be a thing here on PVD, since I often found myself reviewing my progress on my New Year's resolutions on a day that coincided with the Canadian national holiday.  Last year I didn't cover Canada day due to being on summer vacation, and this year I was in the middle of an international move and didn't feel postured to write New Year's resolutions in January, but no need to let these details stand in the way of tradition.

Pursue 2580 Total Hero Levels In Marvel Heroes

Through a combination of purchases, promotions, and in-game awards, I'm rapidly closing on unlocking every hero in the game. Thirteen sit at max level and another five have hit at least level 50 for their second tier synergies.   Without specifically trying, this puts me over halfway to the game's current total level cap (2100 for the 35 current heroes at 60), and just shy of halfway when you include the eight announced characters (six remaining Advance Pack characters, Nova, and X-23 for a total of 2580). 

I'm hesitant to commit to this kind of goal for fear that I will get tired of it, and perhaps that's a fair concern, but clearly chain-leveling characters in Marvel Heroes has managed to hold my interest.  Meanwhile, later characters are definitely getting easier due to steadily increasing amounts of bonuses as the game keeps adding new systems.  We'll see how far I can get.

My current roster: I can immediately purchase four of the seven greyed out portraits, as I currently have 1400 splinters.  I will need 1000 more for the other three, plus 600 for Nova and X-23.

Neverwinter - To 60 But Actually Playing?
Level 30 in Neverwinter was enough of a headstart to get working on the several out-of-game minigames, similar to Star Trek Online's duty officer system.  These are good fun, and it seems highly likely that I will hit the game's level cap through experience gained from these mini-games alone.   A better, and unanswered, question is whether I will ever get back to playing the actual game, or just stick to the minigames as I did in STO.  Not sure if that's good or bad feedback for Cryptic, but there you have it. 

Clear out the PS3 line-up
I passed on the PS4 last year, in part because of looming move and in part because there wasn't much on the release calendar for the holidays that I couldn't just get for my existing PS3 instead.  A year later, the math is flipped - many of the older PS3 games I had yet to beat are now available in re-mastered editions on the PS4, so it's only a few last hold-outs between me and retiring my PS3, possibly for the shiny white bundle with Destiny.  The titles in question are the last few chapters of Uncharted 3 along with all of Infamous 2 (both of which I already own) and Batman: Arkham Origins (which I technically could purchase on the PC if push came to shove).

I have a new set of multi-platform gaming headphones, so I'm feeling good about my odds.

Other MMO's?
And then things are open ended. 

• I own some prepaid time for SWTOR that I won't use until the next mini-expansion that has adventuring content (apologies to those who are eagerly awaiting the housing mini-expansion).  
• Honestly, I'm more likely to jump on the Blizzard MOBA than the next WoW expansion, but I'll keep my eyes out for steep Black Friday discounts.  
• I won't look at either TESO or Wildstar until they offer a free trial, and honestly neither is likely to make the cut with me as a subscription title. 
• EQ2, Rift, TSW and the Turbine games also seem to be out by default.  EQ2 has the best shot at a come-back, but since they went digital only their expansions are no longer available at a discount, and I'd need to buy an expansion to continue playing my character.  
• FFXIV is a possible contender.  I left that game with generally favorable impressions, but also feeling that I was starting to need more structured group content to advance.  This would be a deal-killer with my schedule these days.  Maybe in a patch or two, as I hear they are going to have ninjas. 

Could actually be a year where I do almost nothing in traditional MMO's?  We'll see.

Happy Canada Day, and/or best mid-year wishes as appropriate!  

Content Reuse and Horizontal Progression

A thread on the Marvel Heroes forums over the weekend discusses how the game's priority has been to add new stuff to sell - playable heroes, costumes, and now new NPC "team-up" mercenary-like heroes - rather than new zones.  That part is obvious enough - you are what you sell, and Marvel Heroes is not in the business of selling new zones, nor could they make reasonable revenue doing so given how long content lasts in an ARPG.  The part of the discussion that I find more interesting is what they have done instead.

Since launch, the game has added a wide variety of new item slots or game systems that increase character power and are NOT tied to specific new zones.  Whether it's synergies for leveling additional characters through existing zones, runes and enchantments as world drops for farming existing zones, the new team-up characters to accompany you through the existing zones, almost nothing on offer requires a specific type of content (some of the rarest artifacts and rings are the exception). 

I'm not sure what to call this steady inflation to character power.  It's arguably not vertical progression since characters levels are staying the same and you aren't replacing one system with the next (i.e. you don't stop using synergies because you've gotten runes and those are better).  It's also arguably not horizontal progression in that the relative level of character power compared to the content - mobs have stayed at roughly the same stats and thus gotten progressively easier - is skyrocketing in a way that I find concerning.  Will players in 2017 zone into the newbie area, click their basic attack, and one-shot Dr. Doom from eight story chapters away?

There are many differences between an online ARPG like Marvel Heroes and a traditional MMO, but in some ways I wonder if this is the logical evolution of the theme park non-subscription model.  Don't be in the unsustainable business of trying to sell content - see version 1.0 of SWTOR.  Give away the content (roughly the equivalent of a single player console game) and make your money selling stuff to do in that environment.    Focus on replayability, accept that your most dedicated players will burn out and/or trivialize the game, but hopefully return after a break. 

Not saying this is better or worse, just different. 

Is a MOBA Crash Coming?

Are MOBA's in 2014-2015 heading for the kind of crash we saw in subscription WoW-like MMO's post 2009?  

I ask the question looking at the increasingly crowded slate of major and minor MOBA's of various flavors.  I'll probably play Blizzard's upcoming MOBA when it comes out.  Like WoW and Hearthstone before it, the game does not appear to have many revolutionary ideas, but it has some no-brainer quality of life improvements (e.g. try new champions in a closed practice environment for free) that you'd expect from Blizzard.  I may or may not ever get around to trying Turbine's DC Universe MOBA.  I almost certainly won't get around to trying the half a dozen other MOBA's in various stages of beta. 

All of which gets me thinking of the flood of MMO's that imitated WoW's basic design - support solo play and attempt to retain subscriptions with something for everyone.  Rather than grow the market with further success, the last five years have seen titles based on the WoW formula cannibalize each other.  The resulting drop in revenue has forced recent titles to downsize their staffs and ambitions at best, or close down at worst. 

The golden age of the subscription MMO's in the early 2000's was a virtual frontier in which every title enjoyed its own private captive audience.  Each title had something unique - soloing in WoW, RVR in DAOC, playing music in SWG cantinas, space piracy in EVE - that you could not get elsewhere, and even if you could find an adequate substitute you probably couldn't talk all of your friends into coming along for a change of game.  Thus, each title could count on its reliable subscription revenue to invest into further development of the game. 

We have this belief that choice and competition are good, and that the alternative is the parody video about the proposed Comcast merger.  The downside to an era with more choice is that the LACK of choice is what made the subscription model viable in MMO's and the subscription was what made the development of those MMO's financially possible.  In an era where your new title is competing with half a dozen games with similar budgets that have also had the benefit of years of polish and added content, new titles are getting cut off before they can get off the ground, as people choose to leave. 

Modern MOBA's aren't identical to subscription MMO's - in particular, the business model is much more suited to non-subscription payments than retrofitted monthly fee MMO's ever will manage.  League of Legends probably has the critical mass after five years to continue.  I'm just wondering if we're going to be looking at a bunch of failed MOBA's in a few years. 

Staying Power for Added Rewards

A few weekend events this month offered up rewards that seemed designed to encourage me to play.  Ironically, the side effects of this sugar rush sometimes leave me feeling even less inclined to try the content once the incentives have expired. 

• Two weekends ago, Marvel Heroes held an event in which certain terminal (think dungeon) bosses dropped four times the normal loot.   This event was actually inspired by a bug a few months back in which Kingpin summoned Electra and Bullseye to assist him as normal, but the game incorrectly considered the two adds as bosses and awarded loot accordingly, leading to much farming of Kingpin that weekend. 
  
  I typically don't spend much time in terminals, and when I do get a Legendary Quest sending me to one I almost always do the easier green difficulty so I can complete the quest faster.  During the event, I opted for the slightly harder red difficulty hoping for better rewards, did the scheduled bosses, and didn't get anything of note.  I guess this is a challenge that ARPG's face - when you're killing bosses every 10 minutes they can't drop loot that frequently, but having an experience like this one definitely sends the message that I shouldn't waste my time on harder difficulties. 
  
  
• SWTOR offered up double exp last weekend, which made it time to finally finish off my Sith Warrior.  The sad truth with SWTOR is that I'd pay Bioware a fair amount of money - possibly as much as I've spent on the game during sporadic subscriptions - if they just removed the gameplay and offered an interactive movie version of the story in which my character just wins all the fights after I've chosen my dialog.  I suppose double exp is the next best thing in that at least I don't have to do any side quests, but this also does NOT motivate me to get back into the game when the exp drops back down to the normal rate. 
  
  
• The Marvel Heroes event of the week (started on Thursday and runs through Thursday morning) offered up rainbows used to earn pots of leprechaun gold in honor of St. Patrick's Day.  The items aren't great for power gamers, but they're good for leveling alts, which is most of what I do in game. 
  
  Rainbows drop anywhere loot drops, and the best loot drop rates in the game are in a challenge mode called X-Defense.  This is the only mandatory group content in Marvel Heroes at the moment - random groups of five are assembled by the group finder, and the mode features infinite waves of increasingly tough foes until the group fails, with better loot for each wave.  The good news is that there was NOT a specific bonus to X-Defense this weekend, so what I saw was what I got.  The bad news is that ironically the rewards were perhaps too good. 
  
  I dusted off a character I wasn't really enjoying much in story mode and chewed through fifteen levels, gaining unique items (the game's top rarity) for three of my five gear slots and multiple duplicates besides.  People always swear that group content should be more rewarding than solo, and this definitely fit the bill.  And I didn't hate it, so that's good.  However, it's arguably so much better than playing the game the normal way that I've been playing it for the last three months that going back to story mode almost seems like wasting my time.  

I guess it's a hard balance -  how do you shake things up in a way that leads to sustained interest in something the player has not been doing, rather than a one-time blip and disappointment thereafter? 

The Common but Misleading Use of Free

The EU is making rumblings of cracking down on the use of the word free to market games that are in the business of making money.  The effort is aimed primarily at makers of cell phone games marketed for children, which have an unfortunate habit of encouraging kids to run up bills on their unsuspecting parents' stored payment information.  While I'm not thrilled at potentially hapless government intervention, removing the word free from titles that are clearly not intended to be free is a perfectly reasonable effort.   

To be clear, developing games or any other product costs money.  Many people are less than thrilled to discover how those costs are being recouped by companies like Facebook and Google that are in the business of not charging users and then re-selling their personal information.  Sometimes an independent developer will choose to absorb the entire "cost" (primarily their time) of developing a "free" application either because they aren't in it for the money or because they're looking to establish a portfolio for future paid work.  That all aside, I don't share Azuriel's view that it's somehow hard to determine whether or not a product is offered at zero cost to the consumer. 

Examples
While this discussion is primarily aimed at phone games, I think some pictures might help illustrate the point that, whether you technically have the ability to download the client and create an account for free, pretty much every title that uses the word free prominently in their marketing is actually not intended to be played at zero cost to the user. 

For LOTRO's splash page, "completely free" is literally the bottom line.  This claim hangs its hat on the concept that you can chain re-roll and delete alts to earn pennies' worth of Turbine points per hour and thus theoretically earn access to $40 expansion packs. 

I haven't gotten out my ruler to measure, but it sure looks like "Play Free Now" is in bigger font than the Star Wars title in SWTOR.  In fairness, you actually can play pretty much the entire game for free, subject to some time-exclusivity for paid mini-expansions and some significant and annoying restrictions that can only be lifted by subscribing. 

Wizard 101 has managed to reserve the largest text for their game's title, though FREE is the second word on the page and the "Play for free" button has the most prominent location (followed by two more uses of "free" in bullet points and sentence explanation of the product.  This title is marketed to kids, and its use of free is by far the biggest stretch because you can't even access the entire first world in the game without paying.  Having your kid's character available as a hostage before you discover that this "free" game costs money is literally the point of the business model.

A world without free 
One last picture for you, from the world's biggest MOBA:

Funny how there isn't the word Free anywhere on that page - there's a link for "play now" and another link for "download the game", neither of which discuss cost.  League is commonly called a "free to play" game, and it can be played as such, but most people would agree this title is not set up to be played at zero cost to the user.  Instead, it's a solid title that stands on its own merits and pricing without the need to abuse the word free. 

I get where Azuriel is coming from when he points out that companies will still bait and switch as best they can, even if forbidden to use the word Free.  I just don't accept the lack of a complete and permanent solution to the marketing problem as a reason why a small change that makes the advertising less misleading is a bad idea.  From the other side of the coin, we will probably still see players complaining that things in game cost money even if we did remove the intentionally misleading word free from the lexicon.  I still see the removal of a promise that no one ever intended to keep as a positive change. 

Online Gaming Expenditures 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Grand Total
Total - $321

Is this MMO Burnout?

December has returned, bringing us to that introspective window for the end of the year.  I think the term MMO Burnout is generally over-used and over-dramatized.  However, looking back at the year gone by, it looks like that may have crept up on me after all.  A few arguments for and against:

Things I have NOT done

• LOTRO: This was the year I finally gave up on even the token effort to maintain the level cap and epic story.  
• FFXIV: This is arguably the best pure MMO to (re-)launch in the last two years, there's nothing I would change about the game... and it hasn't made it to the top of my playlist, causing me to stall out midway through the level curve.  
• GW2: Bought, barely played
• TSW: Bought at the tail end of 2012, played a bit in early 2013 until the included VIP-time ran out
• Rift, EQ2, DDO: New expansions, haven't done either

Things I have focused on:

• SWTOR: Significant amounts of time subscribed here, including clearing the expansion on my main Trooper, finishing the class story for an Agent, and getting most of the way through a Sith Warrior.  That said, I'm playing this game primarily for the single player-like story experience.  I'd consider paying real money to trade the entire game in for an interactive movie where my character wins all the fights automatically and moves on to the next story scene, as I might actually like that product better.
• Marvel Heroes: Pure action RPG here, I've spent more time helping to sleuth out the hero release schedule on this game's forums than I've spent on several of the above games.  
• League of Legends: Instant action MOBA
• Hearthstone: Instant action card game

Overall, the trend appears to be towards instant action and gameplay experiences.  While there is still some progression in all these things, it's very different from the traditional vertical progression model for an MMO. 

Which brings us to the exception that proves the rule - I have spent significant amounts of time subscribed to and actually playing World of Warcraft.  I did technically hit the level cap, and farmed all of the gear out of the first 2-3 tiers of raid finder.  I also skipped the majority of the questing content in the expansion - and incidentally didn't even try to level until my lack of having leveled caused problems for my pet collecting efforts.  In many ways, Azeroth is actually a lobby that I use to access the pet battling minigame, the farming minigame, and sometimes even the daily quest or random dungeon minigame.  I'm arguably not using the game as an MMO.

Is this the new face of MMO burnout?  Or am I just in a rut waiting for the hypothetical next big thing? 

MMO Black Friday 2013

Another year, another round of sales - or not - in honor of the day after American Thanksgiving.  The things that are already announced are below, other observations are welcome.

• World of Warcraft: Base game (up to Cataclysm) for $5, Pandaria for $10, direct download from Blizzard; a total of $15 to get into the game, i.e. a single month's subscription.  I'm predicting now that the new expansion next year will be the first to go ahead and bundle in all the old content - with the new expansion featuring "one free level 90 character" to attract new and returning players, it isn't going to make sense to insist that players pay for a Pandaria box that they're never going to set foot in.
• Turbine Games: Standard "double bonus point" Turbine Point sale bundles are in effect in both LOTRO and DDO.  DDO's new expansion from last summer is 50% off, and all of its multiple tiers of upsells are also 50% off.  LOTRO's new expansion from last week is NOT included.  They've slashed the price as early as 5-6 weeks after the fact in the past, but apparently last week was a bridge too far.  They are bundling all of the previous expansions in one package for $20. 
• Guild Wars 2 is on sale for $30 again, which they are promoting as their "lowest price ever" even though it's the same price I paid a month ago.  I guess it's technically accurate that they haven't offered a lower price?
• Marvel Heroes is offering 25% off of almost everything in their cash store, other than two heroes who were released this month.  Storage stash tabs for general and crafting purposes are NOT included in the sale, and character specific storage tabs are only discounted indirectly if you purchase a bundle containing that character.  The main catch here is that, as with most cash shops, you may have a hard time purchasing exactly the right amount of currency to pick up the stuff you wanted.  There's also an in-game bonus of 50% exp, rare item find, and special item find for the weekend. 
• SWTOR is not doing any direct sales that they've announced yet, but they are running double exp through Sunday.  

UPDATES

• SOE Station Cash is 30% off… seems underwhelming since they often offer double SC, and since SC can't be used to purchase content anymore.
• FFXIV is 50% off from Square's website.  If you own a PS3/PS4, this is a great way to pick up a console key, as it's only $20 and includes 1 month of game time (i.e. $5 for the right to play on both consoles).  

What I personally bought:
Probably no surprise to folks who have been reading of late, but Marvel Heroes is my current surprise game of choice.  I've been waiting on this sale to decide what to buy, and I decided to splurge here.  I spent $50 for the G's to unlock:

• The X-Force bundle (Cable, Colossus, Deadpool, and Wolverine, with two extra costumes each, stash tabs for all four heroes, and some misc consumables), on sale for 4,500 G's, normally 6,000 G's.  (Can be purchased on the website for exactly $45, or you can buy 5500 G's for $50, which is what I did - an extra 1000 G's for $5 is a much better exchange rate than you'll get any other time.)
• A holographic crafter, summons an NPC who gives you access to your stash for storing the stuff you want to keep, and accepts donations (for crafting exp) of the junk you don't want to keep.  In my view a much more versatile purchase than the similar portable stash token, works in Castle Doom (where you can't teleport out to sell your stuff), and highly recommended for all players.  On sale for 700 G's.
• A crafting stash tab, NOT on sale, for 300 G's.  One crafting tab is nigh must-have for all players with as many as 40 slots worth of basic crafting materials - you can expand or compress that number but this is time-consuming, and you'll be hurting for the space if and when you go beyond a single character.  I don't begrudge the maybe 75 cents for buying it not on sale, though I might regret that stance if I come up precisely 75G's short of being able to buy something in the future, oh well.  

To be clear, I consider this as somewhat extravagant.  I could have cleaned out my existing currency balances to snag the bare minimum stuff I considered must-have - the crafting tab, the holographic crafter, and the hero unlock for Wolverine.  That said, the other three heroes were all on my "would play if I owned them" list, so I now have a nice diverse list of folks I will actually play (as compared to rolling the dice with the random hero box and getting additions I don't want).  I will use at least one of the costumes, and I can see how the hero-specific gear tabs may be useful when actively playing more than just the one character.

There's a good chance that I "overpaid" by paying for stuff that I ultimately won't use, but my total investment in this game is now up to $70 - just over what I paid for Diablo III, and I've gotten far more mileage out of this game than DIII.  Also, this way I've got my previous G balance and a growing stash of Eternity Splinters to spend on future releases.  I wouldn't say that a new player should expect to need to spend this much, but for me personally it's been worth it thus far. 

A Nomadic MMO Autumn

I've spent most of 2013 subscribed to one primary MMO and dabbling in maybe a single other non-subscription title at any given time.  For whatever reason, I ended up resolving to tackle some of the backlog and logging into seven different online games in the last week.  I dunno how folks routinely cover as many games as Syp or Chris from MMO Reporter manage this, because it's exhausting.  Anyway, what I've been up to:

• FFXIV: This game has quietly been my go-to since mid-September.  It's a good mix of keeping enough of the new school - public quests, group finder, and solo-ability - but with some old school elements that are a welcome change of pace.  I don't mind that I was playing for over a month before I qualified for a mount or that I'm less than half-way to level cap after six weeks.  In some ways, this game caused my current "crisis" by pushing everything else off the plate. 
  
• Guild Wars 2: This went on a one-day sale for $30, which is the price point at which I'm willing to snag a AAA buy-to-play game as an impulse buy.  I had a ton of trouble actually playing the game because their email authenticator would not work and it took seven CS tickets to get someone to read the ticket and agree to remove this feature.  (Aside: the only other MMO where I have ever needed an extended exchange of tickets due to new login restrictions that the provider added - Guild Wars 1.)  I spent an evening, gained a few levels, and it didn't leave much of an impression.  I definitely could have been looking in the wrong places, or this might just not be a title that I'm going to like (which was why I didn't buy it earlier).   Not going to rush this one, pinging some folks I trust for suggestions on where I should be looking before I spend more time heading in the wrong direction. 
  
• LOTRO: Turbine has turned on double exp for an entire month in advance of their upcoming expansion.  I've been behind on solo content in LOTRO since a few months after the game's launch, but 2013 has been the year when I haven't even managed the token effort to finish the epic story and hit the level cap.  At this point, my favorite part of the leveling game are the non-combat quests where I wander around the towns of Rohan doing things that feel like the belong in Middle Earth, but that interactive story isn't quite enough to convince me to come back.  Also, possibly odd decision by Turbine to try and bring back inactive players just before a major class revamp that is drawing much concern from current players - it might actually have been easier to get the new system if I didn't just take a refresher on how things used to be. 
  
• Hearthstone: I'm not playing this thing daily - maybe once or twice a week - and I'm still losing the overwhelming majority of my games, but I am at least starting to get a hang of which characters not to play or at least how to revamp their decks so that I might have a chance against the non-overpowered heroes.  Game imbalance may play a larger role in my mixed experience in this game than I initially realized.
  
• Rift: Not sure this one counts, but I did log into four characters long enough to tell Trion not to recycle all my names.  I sympathize with the intent, but I feel these drives are misguided - you're still not going to get the name DeathKnight because A) your current characters are already named and B) someone else is going to beat you to it if it does get freed up, which means you're going to have to go back to either spelling it wrong or adding non-English characters that will make it harder for normal players to type your name in a day or two at most. 
  
• Marvel Heroes: I forget why I popped back into this game - probably for the sole reason of continuing the "different game each day" trend that I had going.  Well, there was a bonus exp/loot weekend that kept me involved long enough to finish the story and explore all the improvements.  This game had a rocky launch week and I'm really impressed with how far they've come - both quality of service and quality of life are dramatically better for such a short time post-launch, and bode well for the team's ability to set and meet a schedule.  My biggest complaint now is that there are so many heroes in the queue that it's going to be months before the ones I really want get added to the game, and secondarily that you need to download a second 12 GB client to access the test server if you want to try before you buy.  That's not bad in the broader scheme of things.
  
• SWTOR: I've been mostly out of game for a few months now, and thus have missed two content patches.  The new stuff is great as always, but it doesn't seem like it's going to last that long.  I've also got an unfinished Sith Warrior about to tackle Hoth followed by his final story chapter, after which I may move a character over to play with the Ootinicast folks. 

Have you found yourself wandering the halls of multiple MMO's, or is it just me?  

Content Sales, or Lack Thereof in SWTOR

I've been having a conversation with the folks at Ootinicast, who are celebrating their 100th episode this week, about the latest changes to SWTOR.  My thoughts don't really fit into an email that anyone would want to hear read aloud on a podcast, and I've mangled them slightly by trying.

At a minimum, Bioware appears to feel that keeping players out of current endgame content is not worth the modest amounts of money they previously charged for access.  In the longer term, I think Bioware is trying as hard as they can to have more of their money come from people subscribing to partake in traditional MMO endgame staples that are more sustainable than the game's famous story content.

Content Sales, or lack thereof
The core of Bioware's re-launched model is to use their content to sell subscriptions, rather than selling their content.  Games that have succeeded on a content sales model are generally able to deliver small releases of highly repeatable content every 2-3 months.  If people are only paying you when you have content (new or old) that they want to play available - whether that's a one-time payment as in LOTRO and other games or a subscription that players only pay to see the next chapter in the Sith Warrior story - and you cannot maintain that release pace, you are going to have problems getting paid.

Bioware launched the game's first expansion - with the only significant new story content to date - back in April at a cost of $10 for subscribers and $20 for non-subscribers.  Five months later, subscribers get permanent access to the expansion for free (even after their subscription lapses), making it cheaper for non-subscribers to pay for a $15 one-month subscription (which includes 500 Cartel Coins) than purchase the expansion at full price.  This could be a routine mark-down/discount (albeit unusually early compared to other games' expansions), but I feel it's worth considering Bioware's patch strategy as well.

At the Free to Play relaunch, Bioware implemented a fee for non-subscribers to access Section X, a new daily quest area that also offered a new NPC companion.  This may not have been a great test case - as the Ootini crew point out, it's the least popular of the pre-expansion daily quest areas, and Bioware gave away the unlocks in random Cartel Packs to subscribers who had no use for them and therefore resold them for trivial prices on the auction house.  Good test case or not, though, there was no fee for a new daily quest area added in patch 2.3 and to my knowledge no fee planned for new content - including some story - scheduled for patch 2.4.

Towards the endgame
A for-profit company does not reduce or eliminate fees that are successfully generating revenue unless there is some other consideration.  If newly level 50 players were routinely taking out their credit cards and paying for the expansion then there'd be no need to change the pricing.  The alternative is that significant numbers of eligible accounts have declined to purchase the expansion.

Because the expansion is tied to a level cap increase, not paying that fee means not having access to current group content and not having access to new daily quests and revised world events in new patches.  Likewise, counterintuitive as it may seem, I believe you can be a subscriber and still represent short term revenue for Bioware if you are only paying to solo the story content.  Such a player is unlikely to pay extra for access to a daily quest area with little new story.  In both cases, Bioware may be hoping that the player will ultimately pay for more game time if given the content for free.

Making Money
Damien Schubert once told the Ootinicasters that he would like to develop Capital Ships as guild housing in SWTOR - during that conversation, he admitted that part of the development process would have to consider how Bioware could expect to make money off of the project.  This is why this seemingly academic question may matter to the game's full-time subscribers.

Endgame PVE can't suffer exactly the same fate as ranked 8-player warzones (axed after months of promises of attention to the format this fall) or craftable cosmetic gear (all reserved for the cash shop henceforth), but the level of emphasis it gets can definitely shift based on where the money is.  The less money Bioware can rake in at endgame, the larger the portion of their effort they will need to shift to stuff that is open at lower levels and thus able to be paid for by more of the playerbase.  Coincidence that the game is now working on a revamp to space combat that will very likely be open well before max level?  Time will tell.

Is SWTOR Space Combat a Good Idea?

SWTOR all but announced over the weekend that their long rumored "super secret space project (SSSP)" is a new off-rails space dogfighting minigame (see Ootinicast for a detailed summary of the event).  This idea is pretty universally popular (see Werit) - does that make expanding the game this far beyond its current scope a good idea?

The big trade-off when adding a major new game feature is the time that the developers weren't able to spend developing something else.  When your game already has instanced dungeons for 4-6 players including a tank and a healer, and you go to add instanced content for 3 players with no class restrictions, you are building something that is plausibly of interest to people who are already playing your game.

By contrast, we have EVE Online's decision to expand their space economy game into a First Person Shooter spin-off (that was platform exclusive to the PS3 for no reason that I've ever heard explained by anyone).  I haven't heard how this effort has done recently, this idea has always faced a challenge because of how far it strays from both its parent and its new genre.  Why would someone looking to play a new FPS want their battles to be dictated and decided by people playing a different space combat game? 

SWTOR's project isn't quite that extreme.  Space dogfights are a major part of the Star Wars lore and movies, and the game was widely criticized at launch for including an on-rails space combat game rather than a more open system.  That said, the current system is also completely optional - I never completed a single space combat mission (I did somehow fail the first one I tried about three times before giving up on the system for good), and it's even access-restricted for non-subscribers. 

Thus, the question remains - if you weren't willing to play the game before, why would you want to put up with an MMORPG as a condition of getting your space combat game?  If you are a current player but off-rails space combat was an absolute must-have deal-breaker feature, wouldn't you have quit SWTOR by now?  More likely, the question of whether this was a good use of Bioware's time will hinge on its ability to extract more revenue from existing players.  The sale of cosmetic ship appearances in the cash store gambling packs is an absolute certainty, and it remains to be seen what else they will have to tack on in terms of sales of power and/or access to recoup their investment.  I wonder if the system will be as popular when it's more than just a teaser video. 

Missed Events of August

It's been a busy month and I've missed a variety of things - some that I regret and some that I do not. 

• Golden Lotus Storyline: I was aware that Blizzard was removing the Vol'jin world event introduced in patch 5.3 when patch 5.4 launches, presumably next week.  I was not aware until very recently that the patch also blows up the entire Vale and with it removes a large chunk of the less-than-one-year-old Golden Lotus storyline from the expansion.  I scrambled when I found out, but it does not appear feasible for me to gain the required reputation in the time remaining.  As an aside, I'm gaining this rep nearly twice as fast as was possible when the expansion rolled out due to new mechanics (rep for scenarios, dungeons, and farming) and it still feels slow - no wonder people were less than thrilled with Pandaria's launch.
• FFXIV Open Beta: I'm frustrated that every studio insists that limited time events run on weekends.  Personally, I play most of my MMO's to unwind after work on week nights and have less time to spend on MMO's during the weekend.  In this case, that missing the party have been a good thing, as I've heard less than ideal things about how Square handled the inevitable soft launch server population issues.  (The open beta servers will NOT be wiped, and is followed by a headstart this week.)  That said, I have not heard anything about a free trial, so it's not clear whether there will be any mechanism to try before you buy for those of us who missed this weekend.  Not necessarily the best move for a game trying to shake a bad reputation.
• Hearthstone: Got into the beta direct from Blizzard.  Not sure what, if anything, I'll do with that access - why spend time unlocking stuff now when the final game will be F2P and the beta is going to be wiped?
• Patch 2.3 in SWTOR: New endgame content.  Guess it's not going anywhere.

I guess it's a good thing that the "slow" month of August hasn't been too painfully slow.  Anyone else feeling like they're having trouble keeping up? 

Gear Catch Up Versus Bolster

I've been spending some time working on the tips from Blizzard's official guide on "catching up to 5.3" to gather some of the endgame gear from the patches I didn't play at the time.  I'm enjoying most of the process and it's going reasonably quickly, but I can also see how a new player just looking to play current content with their friends would lose patience with even this significantly accelerated pace.  Is this system really better than just automatically bolstering characters up to the entry level gear - a mechanic we're seeing increasingly for PVP in other games?

The Catch Up Method
Blizzard's guide is helpful and I highly recommend it to anyone who does have a new max level character in World of Warcraft.  I also find it unfortunate that the developers of an MMO are in the position of having to write this document, and especially unusual that the authors are encouraging customers to skip so much of the content that Blizzard spent so much money developing.

To oversimplify greatly, the guide's main point is to get to the bare minimum gear level required for the computer to let you queue for the lowest level of the automated raid finder, and then take advantage of several mechanics that have made gearing up in these raids much faster than it was a year ago.   To this end, the authors identify several low-hanging fruit in the reward scale - the kind of advice that five years ago you'd read on a player site like Player Versus Developer, rather than having the developer themselves TELL you to do X content and not Y content because the rewards are better.  They even go so far as to suggest fooling their own queueing system by equipping easily obtained PVP gear - this stuff may actually be worse than the random quest rewards you already had on from leveling because some of its stat budget gets spent on PVP stuff, but the item level is high and this is all the group finder cares about. 

Personally, I don't feel that players who get something early, when doing so is hard, should have a right to demand that future players must work as hard for the same rewards.  However, when you consider how often WoW in particular resets its entire itemization curve, and how extreme the catch up curve is, it starts to seem like your accomplishments will be so temporary that it's hardly worth working for them - better to just show up at the end of the expansion, like I have, drive through quick to see all the sights once, and come back in a year or two for the end of the next expansion.  Meanwhile, the new or returning player is forced to spend time - the guide says a week or two but this appears to assume far more effort far more consistently than what I've been putting in - grinding dailies and running random groups until they have enough gear not to hinder their friends in current tier raid content. 

Bolster and other automated solutions
Just giving players the stats they need to do the content they want seems counterintuitive to a genre that is built on persistent character progression.  Then again, this has happened in a variety of settings - Guild Wars 2 in particular made a big deal of this feature - and in particular in PVP settings.

I'll pick on SWTOR for a moment because their situation has evolved - and brought with it some serious growing pains.  Like many games, SWTOR has a PVP-specific character statistic, which causes problems when placing new characters who do not have this stat against characters who are fully geared out - even if the newbie's gear is very good for normal gameplay, they will fare very poorly. 

Bioware's first attempt to solve this problem was to make the entry level PVP set available for relatively reasonable sums of credits.  Next, they moved to giving every new level 50 character a full set of entry level PVP gear for free (in the process significantly upgrading whatever random stuff you had on when you hit the cap).  In the new expansion, they started implementing an automated "bolster" system that is intended to scale your stats up to some baseline level.  There were many loopholes (i.e. better to go in naked than wearing mediocre gear, because this would get you an overcompensating bolster bonus) but it sounds like most of the issues have settled down.

The end result is that players show up in whatever gear they're wearing, but are boosted up to the amount of PVP stats found on the new entry-level set.  This begs the question of why that's a non-zero number to begin with, rather than just using the entry level as the baseline if you're going to set everyone to at least that number anyway.  Players can still spend PVP currency to get the entry level PVP gear - and I think the intent is for this to be slightly better than the automated bolstering - but the overall effect is that you should NOT need to go do something you do not want to do as a prerequisite to doing something you do want to do with your friends. 

The cost of NOT bolstering
Getting back to World of Warcraft for a moment, prior to the current expansion, the developers stated that about a third of the quests in the expansion pack were daily quests so that players working on any one faction would have a variety each day the logged in.  Today, the guidance straight from the developer is that all of this content is completely optional.  The 3-man scenarios and 5-man instances also seem to be things that you spend only brief time in if you really want to - the real rewards are quicker and easier if you somehow get into the raid finder.  

It just seems like such a waste.  Time and limited resources wasted by the developer on content that won't be worth doing in six months.  Time wasted by players grinding out gear, enchantments, etc, that will be blanked constantly.  Time spend playing but not enjoying the game in the notoriously reward motivated random groups (that would not exist if not for the daily rewards).  And - in my case as someone who actually likes small group content - entire chunks of the game that aren't worth doing because the raid finder is easier and more rewarding. 

Would it really be worse to take stats off of gear altogether, give everyone what they need to do the content they're trying to do, and let players spend as much time as possible doing what they want with the people they want? 

(P.S. Random speculation - a purely subscription game makes its money based on how long players spend playing, so it's especially odd to see the last big subscription game standing giving players advice on how to skip so much of the content.  Either the lost revenue for NOT handing out this advice is even worse - players burning out and quitting early - or perhaps Blizzard is thinking about laying the groundwork for a business model shift where their money is less proportional to time /played.) 

Things I Missed In Game

The downside to being away from MMO's for a month is that stuff happens when you're not around.  A few things I observed from afar:

• Another round of double exp weekends in SWTOR.  A bit disappointed to have sat this one out, the exp rate would have gotten my third character through their class story and made a decent dent in a fourth.  
• FFXIV's third closed beta phase (received invite).  Indifferent to having missed this, as characters were wiped at the end of beta 3, and supposedly characters will NOT be wiped at the end of the open beta/phase 4.  Not sure how they're going to have both a non-reset open beta and a pre-purchase headstart program, guess we'll know in a month or so. 
• Growing pains in Marvel Heroes.  The game's launch was a bit of a mess.  The patcher kept re-downloading the entire game client to the point where technical support was recommending that you install the game through Steam.  There were a variety of bugs and quality of life issues associated with quest rewards.  Perhaps most interesting, the studio has announced plans to move away from the completely random drop system for earning heroes in game and instead use a token unlock system.  Given that playing real characters from the IP is a central selling point of the title, I don't know if it's more puzzling that they refused to give ground on this point for so long, or that they reversed so suddenly.  Either way, the game looks like it's in much better shape than it was a month ago.  
• Other things I'm not tracking so closely include Rift's business model shift (came down just before I left, haven't really heard much discussion since) and TSW quietly putting out DLC at a decent clip after the game's relaunch and the relocation of its studios.  

It could have been worse, seems to have been a relatively quiet chunk of summer.  I also learned today that WoW's patch 5.3 world event is apparently going away in the next patch, but I'm hoping there's still time to catch that.  What else has been going on in game this summer? 

Adapting to MMO Churn

I enjoy the occasional time "offline" from my hobby reading and writing about MMO's.  It's a change of pace and a chance to get perspective on the way things have been going, both in my personal gaming life and in the bigger picture.  My thought, sitting back and observing the major discussions of the last month, is that this entire genre - players, developers, financiers - is still struggling to adapt to the current reality that MMO's are no longer a long-term commitment to a single title. 

• Business model discussions remain the hottest issue in MMO's, in part due to Blizzard's effort to create the infrastructure and groundwork for a significantly expanded cash shop in World of Warcraft.  The upcoming title Wildstar is actually announcing in advance that they intend to make a business model announcement in the future. This environment is affecting the direction of game development, as studios struggle to recoup ever rising costs, but no one seems to have found a solution that is as mutually acceptable to both producers and consumers as the monthly subscription was in the days where players stayed put for the long haul.   
  
• Increasing portions of the innovation that we're seeing in MMO's focuses on lowering entry barriers to combat the effects of churn on PVE groups and guilds.  WoW announced a new raid format with flexible group sizes in early June.  SWTOR is rolling out story mode flashpoints which remove the requirement for the holy trinity, and has also added guild bonuses that require players to be in guilds that have at least 25 active accounts.  Titles including FFXIV and WoW are adding instanced content intended to train players to function in groups.  These features simply weren't necessary in the old days where players stuck with games for the long haul and were forced to learn to group as they leveled. 
  
• Another topic of the day is the decline of MMO bloggers - especially blogs that focus on a single title.  In an era where more and more people are hopping in and out of games, the investment required to set up a dedicated blog for a single title is harder to justify and sustain.  The same seems true for single-game podcasts - the recently concluded 200-episode run of Casual Stroll to Mordor is the highest profile example, but I've been seeing both smaller numbers and shorter runs on game-specific podcasts for a while now.
  
• I think the story of the Pandaria era in WoW is that Blizzard attempted to use incentive design to replicate the level of daily engagement that players had in Azeroth back in the days where people stuck with the title for years.  My view is that people stuck with WoW in 2005-2006 largely because no other title on the market in that era was as focused on solo play, and that people formed legitimate social bonds that led to ongoing long-term engagement as an accidental consequence of not having anywhere else to go.  You can get players to log on for daily quests, dungeons, and raids, but you cannot replace genuine social ties with an alliance of convenience motivated purely by the fastest path to the daily incentive reward.  Instead, the artificial drive for commitment leads to faster burnout. 

People who lived through the old days and liked them continue to hold out hope that some future niche-focused title can recapture the level of stability that MMO's took for granted 8-10 years ago.  I wish them the best, but I see this outcome as highly unlikely.  The wide array of titles on the market today is a huge driver of player mobility, and a major challenge for retention - I believe a title that succeeded in this approach would need to be revolutionary, not merely evolutionary, such that no one who played the new title would be willing to return to anything we have today.  If the road back where we came isn't likely, and the place where we are now isn't financially sustainable, then the only hope is to adapt to modern demographics and find a way forward.  It's just not clear whether and how this can be done. 

Character Transfer Diservice

I picked a server a bit over a year ago, after consulting with three bloggers who I knew were playing the game.  All recommended the same server and even the same bloggers' guild.  The third party stats sites guesstimated that the server was the number three RP server in the region.  Unfortunately, the guild didn't really work out - all the members seem to have gone off to other games, and I haven't even been able to find people to get guild invites for my new alts, leaving me on a server where I don't know anyone.  I can name at least three other servers where I would rather be playing today, but for the not-so-minor issue of all the time and even money I have invested on the server with my six current characters.

If you really follow my games and guilds closely, you might have guessed that the unnamed game experience described above is in SWTOR.  Most of you were probably scratching your heads, because a highly similar scenario exists in many MMO's. 

SWTOR's transfers
After promising for the better part of a year that character transfers were finally coming - a year which saw 90% of the game's servers closed, including the seemingly healthy one I picked several months post launch - Bioware has announced its paid character transfer service.  Transfers will cost $14-18 per character (depending on how you purchase your cartel coins), and it looks to me like they will NOT be available for resale in the in-game auction house. 

Bear in mind that this is a game that specifically promoted making all of your alts on the same server though the game's legacy system.  My six characters cover all the crewskill professions and each has probably a million credits worth of in-game currency investment in terms of character-specific legacy perks, collection items, companion affection purchased with gifts, etc.  More importantly, these characters share a large array of server specific legacy unlocks, a few of which I even purchased in the cash shop using my subscriber point stipends. 

Despite all of these reasons why I opted to make this many characters in the first place and all the claims that the transfer service would be "legacy friendly", there is no discount for transferring multiple characters off of the same server.  I would either need to leave behind characters - and not get any credit for their future efforts towards my legacy on the new server - or else be prepared to fork over $80.  Even if I did move to a server that's better today (the Harbinger server, home to the Ootinicast crew, would otherwise be a top contender), I'd have no guarantees that I won't be in the same boat in a few months if the new server also goes belly up.

An industry-wide standard
In a related story, Blizzard is running a one-week only sale on its paid transfer services - Azuriel points out that even at 50% off these prices are still higher than the SWTOR prices.  At the time Blizzard announced the service, the stated justification for such high prices was to recoup the development costs for the transfer feature and to deter frequent use of the service to enable antisocial behavior.  Apparently both of these arguments can be dispensed with if it encourages more transfer fees.   Tera also apparently had a window for open transfers that is coming to an end, with a new fee starting next week.

I get that locking players into static servers worked great for the industry in 2004, in part because that's what the technology of the era could support.  It's not 2004 anymore, and I don't think it's reasonable to punish customers for choosing "wrong" months or years ago by charging them to play with their friends in a genre that's struggling to find ways to keep customers engaged in the product.  It's not good for my enjoyment of the game as a customer, and therefore it's also not good for Bioware's revenue when my poor experience leads to less money spent on their product. 

It doesn't have to be this way.  Many modern games offer single-shard or cross realm functions in one way or another (Cryptic games, GW2), and we also have the example of Rift, which offers free transfers between its more traditional servers. Unfortunately, this feedback falls on deaf ears when developers can rake in nearly six months' worth of sub fees by selling a single customer in my position on paying to solve a problem that was not the customer's fault. 

PVD @ Game On: Epic Slant Press Edition

Over the weekend, I put in a guest appearance on Game On: Epic Slant Press Edition.  Chris of Game by Night and Ferrel of Epic Slant are now hosting the official podcast of MMORPG.com and were kind enough to have me "back" on their show after two previous appearances on their old show, The Multiverse.  Topics of discussion included:

• Buying all of the cash store things for in game currency in SWTOR (my "what I've been doing" update)
• Camelot Unchained meeting its Kickstarter goal
• Neverwinter's soft launch
• Final Fantasy XIV's forthcoming relaunch (ironically, this game has now been in the news all three times Ferrel and company have had me on their show)
• Ferrel's upcoming card game, Havok & Hijincks

One of the things I like about podcasting with these gentlemen is how it's a reasonably casual conversation about MMO topics of the day.  That said, the new and popular short format (we covered all of that and more in under 35 minutes) does take some mental preparation, and I'm definitely appalled at how many vocal pauses I managed to fit into such a short time. 

A few bonus comments that didn't make it into the show one way or another:

• EA's quarterly earnings call confirmed that SWTOR is below half a million subscribers, which would make it the number three subscription MMO in the west behind WoW and Eve... before you count all the cash store revenue.  Players may or may not like the direction that future development takes, but I don't think there's much question in the short term that they're making money. 
• To clarify a comment I made on the show, I would hope that no one who backed Camelot Unchained is going to be surprised or impatient that the game is going to take two years to launch (which was clearly stated).  The point I was trying to make is how much patience players will need to have if we get to mid-2015 and the game still needs work.  There will be no possibility of delaying the launch because they won't have the money to keep paying their staff.  Meanwhile, thousands of people will have been playing the game in pre-alpha and alpha for over a year, many of them paying hundreds or even thousands of dollars to be allowed to do so. 
  
  If people aren't happy with what they're seeing by the middle of the beta, will they be patient, urge folks to keep the faith, and remain subscribed when the game launches (assuming they haven't already paid for lifetime subscriptions)?  Or will word of mouth take a sharp and unforgiving turn for the worse?  This is not a title that can afford to have its early adopters burned out or disillusioned before the game launches, and they will have to make the project work in an unusually public fashion due to how much access they sold as Kickstarter rewards. 

Hope you enjoy the show!  

Action, Interface, and Communication/Community

A few otherwise unrelated tidbits from podcasts have me thinking about how the design of current MMO's may be affecting their function.  Specifically:

• The folks at OotiniCast have been discussing gaming peripherals of late.  It started with a conversation about gaming mice with ever increasing numbers of buttons (I actually own one of these, a story for another day), keyboards with macro keys, use of controllers/gamepads to run your PC like a console, or even keypad replacements that move your non-mouse hand to a device that can't type.  The common thread is that all of these things take your hands off the typing keys - if you want to type in chat, you're literally taking your hands off the controls to do it.
  
• Action combat continues to be the buzzword in recent big budget MMO's.  Never mind that having ground effects players have to run out of has been in MMO's for years now.  Never mind that increasing numbers of games are taking away auto-attack features in favor of requiring a click or keypress for every single swing and adding in some sort of dodge-roll mechanic.  (Aside - if you're making a game, I get that you need to build hype, but don't expect me to be impressed if your game has the above features, since they are pretty standard these days.)
  
  The beta reviews of the FFXIV relaunch are remarking that the game's global cooldown - 2.5 entire seconds - feels long in an era where it's usually half that in other games.  The common thread is that the pace and level of interactivity required by modern MMO action combat makes it especially likely that you will pay if you do take your hands off the controls.

Some portion of this may be unavoidable.  Players are quick to criticize both combat systems that feel non-responsive and the downtime that gave players in eras gone by more opportunity to sit around and chat.  Perhaps the issue is that we're still working on the technology that would make integrated voice chat less bad - it's telling when so many people voluntarily install, run, and sometimes pay for third party voice software. 

Even so, I wonder if all of this isn't part of what is driving the sense of limited community in modern MMO's.  I've been running group flashpoints using the group finder on some of my low level alts in SWTOR, and I do make an effort to say some things in chat, but I'm very conscious that this is likely reducing my performance if anyone is watching that closely.  Maybe none of the characters in my groups are in guilds that are recruiting, or maybe my performance is that bad, but it does seem striking to me that I have yet to be offered a guild invite when grouping on an unguilded character. 

How can you have community if you can't communicate?