Aggressive pre-order campaigns aren't really anything new. It's all but standard for companies to offer some sort of bonus outfit, non-combat pet, or other minor bonus to pre-order customers. Case in point, Syp noticed that Star Trek Online preorders through Amazon will come with a free Borg crewman. (No word on whether they will try to assimilate you and/or your ship.)
Most likely, though, Cryptic isn't done yet. They launched Champions Online last month with a preorder discount on 6-month and lifetime plans (including a weird situation in which the plans "sold out" and then Cryptic decided that they'd take money people were extending in their direction after all) and guaranteed access to the Star Trek Online beta. Meanwhile, Turbine just went live with yet another Welcome Back Week in LOTRO, in part to promote at pre-order campaign in which current players generally don't have to pay for the upcoming expansion.
(As someone who juggles a tight time/money budget for MMORPG's, I had made a deliberate decision to let my subscription lapse until the pre-order deadline in case there was free welcome back time to be had. The winner: it's me.)
There are some good reasons for the pre-order model. For less-known games, strong pre-orders might help secure increasingly limited retail shelf space. (WoW is the only major release I can think of that does NOT go to any effort to secure your preorder business, perhaps because they don't need the help.) There's also a psychological hook to getting players to make the decision to purchase; you can cancel a pre-order with most retailers, but that requires you to actively change your mind.
The downside, of course, is that all of this creates a high pressure sales pitch. If you don't sign on the dotted line before the deadline, you miss out. The publisher is counting on the pressure to convert some maybe's into yes'es, but it can also convert wait-and-see into "oh well, missed it". Why would I jump onto Aion or Champions right now, having passed on their pre-order periods? Might as well let the server issues and launch patches settle out; there's sure to be a free trial at some point down the line, so I don't need to gamble $50 on the games sight unseen.
Now we're getting higher stakes. It turns out that the mount that was discussed as part of LOTRO's $20 RMT "adventure pack" is actually a pre-order item. After Oct 31, the pack will only include two character slots and the shared bank (which, in my view, will almost certainly be offered for purchase or expansion through some other venue - who codes that much GUI for a bank that only has 20 slots and will only be used by a small subset of players?). If I'm reading these two seemingly contradictory Turbine quotes correctly, the mount will be banished to a $40 bundle with the expansion (the one that current players generally wouldn't have to pay for) on October 31st. A permanent mount for all of your characters, which bypasses a pair of in-game gold price tags and a major rep grind in Moria proper, is now a pre-order bonus.
If any developers are wondering why us players are so distrustful of RMT, this sort of escalating pressure to spend more more more now now now, better act before it's gone, would be part of the reason.
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
A Harvesting Pet Peeve
In this picture, there are six harvesting nodes. You cannot
I'm somewhat okay with the chance to fail, even though this "feature" is not present in LOTRO or WoW. Failing and having to spend another five seconds watching the progress bar doesn't actually make the process any more difficult, but there is compensation. You have a chance at a skill point with every attempt (i.e. failing gives you extra chances to skill up), and a chance to harvest lots of any given resource on a single attempt (e.g. 10 common resources and a rare) that gets better as your skill improves.
You have five separate harvesting skills to maintain, four of which are needed in the screenshot. Those skills are capped at five times your level. (Actually, five times the HIGHER of your crafting or adventuring level, but that part isn't that relevant to this point.)
Here's where my pet peeve kicks in. As with WOW and LOTRO, EQ2's early levels go by very quickly. The most recent starting area doesn't even HAVE any harvesting nodes to harvest until players hit level 11 or so (at which point they will be stuck behind the curve at 5/55 in all five skills). The older areas do offer harvesting, but you will still be hard pressed to keep your harvesting skill up to par with your level.
Suddenly, that screen full of harvesting nodes is not a relatively quick string of watching a progress bar for 90 seconds worth of harvest attempts. It's more like three minutes or more of attempts that might lead to 15 skill points. If you're in the dreaded 5 x 5/55 hole, or worse, you're in for easily 30 minutes to an hour of watching the harvest progress bar in areas with trivial foes just to catch up.
Ironically, it isn't that hard or unpleasant to maintain your skill at appropriate levels once you've capped it. It's just odd that the game really goes out of its way to make sure that the single least fun experience in the crafting game is the bare minimal harvesting needed to get out of the newbie areas.
Friday, October 9, 2009
What Does Dual Faction Content Mean For Cataclysm?
Tobold has written a five year re-review of WoW, and has this to say on content:
What Is New Content?
WoW currently offers eight starting areas (1-10/12ish) and probably seven paths to level 20 (both Mulgore and Durotar feed into The Barrens and Stonetalon, and I'm not sure there's enough content there to reach level 20 twice without repeating anything).
The bottlenecks Tobold is talking about start to kick in during the dreaded level 21-58 range. Some of the content is offered by neutral faction NPC's, like the Steamwheedle Cartel, the Thorium Brotherhood, the Argent Dawn, and the Cenarion Circle. In particular, around level 50 I suspect that the Tobold Challenge starts to run into real issues because so many of the traditional zones - Ungoro, the Plaguelands, and Silithus - are populated almost entirely with neutral faction NPC's.
Once you get through to Outland and Northrend, you can get a bit closer to the Tobold challenge; I'm pretty sure you could get through three characters relatively easily, since I'm advancing my Tauren through Outland currently doing almost exclusively Horde-factioned quests. Character number three could really focus on the neutral faction stuff, but I'm not sure that there'd be much of anything left for the fourth guy.
Then again, what exactly are we counting as "new" content? The Alliance guy wants you to kill Old Ironjaw for fur trim on a cloak, while the Horde guy wants you to kill the same wolf to contact the ancestral wolf spirits, but both quests are functionally identical - go hunting for the wolf in question in Terokkar and kill him.
Each faction does have its own signature quest lines (e.g. Thrall and the Mag'har, the Alliance reuniting Muradin and Brann Bronzebeard), but Blizzard has been going out of their way to have more and more content shared between the factions; either you're working for a neutral third party, or the two factions will have identical quests with different flavor text.
Why does this matter?
The big advantage to shared content is that more players will see it, allowing Blizzard to spend more time on it. A random quest in the corner of one zone that is only used by one faction really can't eat too much dev time, because so few players will use it. By contrast, if you're sending everyone from both factions through the same area, you can afford to spend more time fleshing things out. If you're only going to play one character ever, shared content means more, higher quality choices. If you're going to play a second or a third, you can repeat your favorites while still having some new stuff to shake things up with.
The problem arises if, as in Cataclysm, Blizzard is counting on players to re-roll repeatedly. In the short run, the plan of literally blowing up and revamping large chunks of the old world will certainly freshen things up for longtime veterans. In the long run, though, the question is whether we will see more content that, as with Outland and Northrend, is designed to be used by both factions. When Blizzard revamped Dustwallow Marsh, the answer to this question was indeed a lot of high quality but almost entirely shared content.
That's a trend that could ultimately hurt WoW's touted replayability in the long run.
While there are certainly some bottlenecks, you can play at least 4 different characters (2 Alliance, 2 Horde) from level 1 to the level cap while repeating only very little content.
What Is New Content?
WoW currently offers eight starting areas (1-10/12ish) and probably seven paths to level 20 (both Mulgore and Durotar feed into The Barrens and Stonetalon, and I'm not sure there's enough content there to reach level 20 twice without repeating anything).
The bottlenecks Tobold is talking about start to kick in during the dreaded level 21-58 range. Some of the content is offered by neutral faction NPC's, like the Steamwheedle Cartel, the Thorium Brotherhood, the Argent Dawn, and the Cenarion Circle. In particular, around level 50 I suspect that the Tobold Challenge starts to run into real issues because so many of the traditional zones - Ungoro, the Plaguelands, and Silithus - are populated almost entirely with neutral faction NPC's.
Once you get through to Outland and Northrend, you can get a bit closer to the Tobold challenge; I'm pretty sure you could get through three characters relatively easily, since I'm advancing my Tauren through Outland currently doing almost exclusively Horde-factioned quests. Character number three could really focus on the neutral faction stuff, but I'm not sure that there'd be much of anything left for the fourth guy.
Then again, what exactly are we counting as "new" content? The Alliance guy wants you to kill Old Ironjaw for fur trim on a cloak, while the Horde guy wants you to kill the same wolf to contact the ancestral wolf spirits, but both quests are functionally identical - go hunting for the wolf in question in Terokkar and kill him.
Each faction does have its own signature quest lines (e.g. Thrall and the Mag'har, the Alliance reuniting Muradin and Brann Bronzebeard), but Blizzard has been going out of their way to have more and more content shared between the factions; either you're working for a neutral third party, or the two factions will have identical quests with different flavor text.
Why does this matter?
The big advantage to shared content is that more players will see it, allowing Blizzard to spend more time on it. A random quest in the corner of one zone that is only used by one faction really can't eat too much dev time, because so few players will use it. By contrast, if you're sending everyone from both factions through the same area, you can afford to spend more time fleshing things out. If you're only going to play one character ever, shared content means more, higher quality choices. If you're going to play a second or a third, you can repeat your favorites while still having some new stuff to shake things up with.
The problem arises if, as in Cataclysm, Blizzard is counting on players to re-roll repeatedly. In the short run, the plan of literally blowing up and revamping large chunks of the old world will certainly freshen things up for longtime veterans. In the long run, though, the question is whether we will see more content that, as with Outland and Northrend, is designed to be used by both factions. When Blizzard revamped Dustwallow Marsh, the answer to this question was indeed a lot of high quality but almost entirely shared content.
That's a trend that could ultimately hurt WoW's touted replayability in the long run.
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
Incentive Inflation At Work
On September 3rd, I wrote:
I own 14 Emblems of Triumph, and was debating whether to pursue six more daily dungeon runs to collect the [Brimstone Igniter] Triumph Wand (the last piece of gear I need for the "epic" achievement) or work on other projects. Various projects for my raptor-riding, flying, potion-mixing Fury Warrior won out.
On October 6th, Bornakk wrote:
I'll have those last few emblems in a few days' worth of dungeon runs when patch 3.3 happens. Guess I had my priorities in the right place.
"Gear that I worked hard to get six months ago, thinking that it would last for the remainder of the expansion, has been made obsolete by gear that will itself be obsolete in six months, after Icecrown's three-wing 5-man extravaganza arrives.
...
The next time I'm facing a reputation grind or low drop rate in WoW, the prospect that the rewards will be obsolete in the next patch will weigh far more heavily on my mind."
I own 14 Emblems of Triumph, and was debating whether to pursue six more daily dungeon runs to collect the [Brimstone Igniter] Triumph Wand (the last piece of gear I need for the "epic" achievement) or work on other projects. Various projects for my raptor-riding, flying, potion-mixing Fury Warrior won out.
On October 6th, Bornakk wrote:
"The current plan is to make Emblems of Triumph the "base" of emblems so everything that drops Emblems of Conquest would be changed to Triumph and then the new raid content would drop the new highest emblem along with things like the heroic daily and such.
I'll have those last few emblems in a few days' worth of dungeon runs when patch 3.3 happens. Guess I had my priorities in the right place.
The Sacred Cow of LOTRO's Random "Legendary" Item System
Turbine has a dev diary up describing the changes to the legendary item system in the Mirkwood Miniexpansion. Jaxon has a summary; he and Doc Holiday seem to be pleased.
Superficially, the changes sound pretty friendly to players. We have vague language promising better random legacy traits that we won't be able to evaluate until the system goes live. There will be ways to make non-random improvements to existing weapons, replacing worthless legacies with stat boosts and upgrading the "quality" of important legacies so that they don't cost too much to upgrade. They're also tweaking the exp curve to make lower quality legendary items level faster, while increasing the exp required to level the raid-drop 1st age weapons (think Epic or Fabled quality in WoW or EQ2 respectively). But what hasn't changed?
Legacies are still random
They concede that it's a problem for players not to know whether a weapon is worth leveling until after they level it a bit to see if it picks up a crucial missing legacy. (In fact, they're overhauling the whole legacy pool for Champions because our weapons live or die on whether they get the legacy that boosts DPS for your preferred stance.) Now the strongest legacies are most likely to be handed out when you initially level the weapon.
The catch is that they're not willing to give up the slot machine. There will still be "a small chance" of getting one of the more powerful "group A" legacies later in the weapon's life. Even if you don't get quite that lucky, there will always be the chance that the RNG outdoes itself with the ideal assortment of "group B" legacies. Don't you want to spend time grinding out more exp on that weapon that's almost as good as your current one, just in case?
The Existing Relics are probably still random
Turbine is adding a fourth relic slot and allowing crafters to make relics that go in it. That's great for crafters, since players only needed a single crafted weapon back before Moria, and now they'll need replacement crafted relics every time they switch disposable advance-able "legendary" items. Or at least, that would be the case, except for the minor fact that they have also decided that they're jealous of WoW's self-only crafter perks. Don't you want to grind out a profession for no real financial benefit so you can have the best bonuses?
What they don't say very much about is those other three slots, which will still be filled using the deconstruction pyramid-scheme slot machine. These relics are still untrade-able, so you will have to level and then deconstruct large numbers of items to get them. Don't you want to go level more legendary items so that you can have a random chance to get the all-new tier 9 relics?
(Currently, each tier is made by combining five of the previous tier. If they stick to that exponential progression, a single random tier 9 relic will result when you combine 1.95 million tier 1 relics.)
Most of your item experience will be wiped
Hidden away on the third page is the revelation that Mirkwood-quality (level 61+) weapons will not accept item exp runes from previous content. Runes are the consolation prize for constantly replacing your supposedly "legendary" named advance-able items; you don't just have a random chance of getting relics, you get to transfer some of the exp of your old weapon over to your new one (possibly helping you leapfrog a few levels to figure out if the new one is worth owning in the first place).
If you're using a 3rd age weapon, like the ones that I have access to currently, you're simply out of luck. Your Moria quality runes are good for leveling Moria quality weapons to break them down for relic parts and nothing else. If you happen to have a raid-quality 2nd or 1st age weapon and you maxxed it out at level 60, you can get a Mirkwood rune instead. In case you were expecting a lot of experience out of that deal, Turbine clarifies:
Don't you love leveling disposable legendary items so much that you're happy to be starting over from zero exp every expansion?
The Sacred Cow: Timesink, Timesink, Timesink, Timesink
I probably wouldn't be so hostile towards this feature if they hadn't misleadingly promoted it with reference to the ACTUAL legendary weapons of the Fellowship of the Ring, which they didn't discard and replace with random items from every orc they killed because these items were actually legendary. Indeed, they initially described the items as "mobile quest hubs", where players would get quests to do things that would improve their existing weapon.
Instead, the primary design feature of this system has been to get players to spend more time working on weapon after weapon without actually having to add new content to support that extra grinding. The changes try to paper over the community's complaints with vague promises that this expansion's weapons will be "better" - of course they will, or players would not abandon their current ones.
At the end of the day, Turbine's item advancement system doesn't really detract from the game - they've still implemented a high quality experience that I'm happy to play through at least once. At the same time, the sheer disposability of the not-so-legendary weapons removes all incentive to actually work on any of them, when the system is so clearly designed to wipe out as much of that work as Turbine thinks they can get away with, as often as Turbine thinks they can get away with it. Legendary items could have been unique and exciting; instead, Turbine has reduced them to just another timesink.
Superficially, the changes sound pretty friendly to players. We have vague language promising better random legacy traits that we won't be able to evaluate until the system goes live. There will be ways to make non-random improvements to existing weapons, replacing worthless legacies with stat boosts and upgrading the "quality" of important legacies so that they don't cost too much to upgrade. They're also tweaking the exp curve to make lower quality legendary items level faster, while increasing the exp required to level the raid-drop 1st age weapons (think Epic or Fabled quality in WoW or EQ2 respectively). But what hasn't changed?
Legacies are still random
They concede that it's a problem for players not to know whether a weapon is worth leveling until after they level it a bit to see if it picks up a crucial missing legacy. (In fact, they're overhauling the whole legacy pool for Champions because our weapons live or die on whether they get the legacy that boosts DPS for your preferred stance.) Now the strongest legacies are most likely to be handed out when you initially level the weapon.
The catch is that they're not willing to give up the slot machine. There will still be "a small chance" of getting one of the more powerful "group A" legacies later in the weapon's life. Even if you don't get quite that lucky, there will always be the chance that the RNG outdoes itself with the ideal assortment of "group B" legacies. Don't you want to spend time grinding out more exp on that weapon that's almost as good as your current one, just in case?
The Existing Relics are probably still random
Turbine is adding a fourth relic slot and allowing crafters to make relics that go in it. That's great for crafters, since players only needed a single crafted weapon back before Moria, and now they'll need replacement crafted relics every time they switch disposable advance-able "legendary" items. Or at least, that would be the case, except for the minor fact that they have also decided that they're jealous of WoW's self-only crafter perks. Don't you want to grind out a profession for no real financial benefit so you can have the best bonuses?
What they don't say very much about is those other three slots, which will still be filled using the deconstruction pyramid-scheme slot machine. These relics are still untrade-able, so you will have to level and then deconstruct large numbers of items to get them. Don't you want to go level more legendary items so that you can have a random chance to get the all-new tier 9 relics?
(Currently, each tier is made by combining five of the previous tier. If they stick to that exponential progression, a single random tier 9 relic will result when you combine 1.95 million tier 1 relics.)
Most of your item experience will be wiped
Hidden away on the third page is the revelation that Mirkwood-quality (level 61+) weapons will not accept item exp runes from previous content. Runes are the consolation prize for constantly replacing your supposedly "legendary" named advance-able items; you don't just have a random chance of getting relics, you get to transfer some of the exp of your old weapon over to your new one (possibly helping you leapfrog a few levels to figure out if the new one is worth owning in the first place).
If you're using a 3rd age weapon, like the ones that I have access to currently, you're simply out of luck. Your Moria quality runes are good for leveling Moria quality weapons to break them down for relic parts and nothing else. If you happen to have a raid-quality 2nd or 1st age weapon and you maxxed it out at level 60, you can get a Mirkwood rune instead. In case you were expecting a lot of experience out of that deal, Turbine clarifies:
Please note that the Mirkwood heritage rune received from these deconstructions will be a rune of lesser experience value than the Moria heritage rune received.
Don't you love leveling disposable legendary items so much that you're happy to be starting over from zero exp every expansion?
The Sacred Cow: Timesink, Timesink, Timesink, Timesink
I probably wouldn't be so hostile towards this feature if they hadn't misleadingly promoted it with reference to the ACTUAL legendary weapons of the Fellowship of the Ring, which they didn't discard and replace with random items from every orc they killed because these items were actually legendary. Indeed, they initially described the items as "mobile quest hubs", where players would get quests to do things that would improve their existing weapon.
Instead, the primary design feature of this system has been to get players to spend more time working on weapon after weapon without actually having to add new content to support that extra grinding. The changes try to paper over the community's complaints with vague promises that this expansion's weapons will be "better" - of course they will, or players would not abandon their current ones.
At the end of the day, Turbine's item advancement system doesn't really detract from the game - they've still implemented a high quality experience that I'm happy to play through at least once. At the same time, the sheer disposability of the not-so-legendary weapons removes all incentive to actually work on any of them, when the system is so clearly designed to wipe out as much of that work as Turbine thinks they can get away with, as often as Turbine thinks they can get away with it. Legendary items could have been unique and exciting; instead, Turbine has reduced them to just another timesink.
Monday, October 5, 2009
RMT vs Higher Fees?
It seems that studios are less and less inclined to settle for just a monthly fee.
Last week, LOTRO announced that they're spinning off their new shared bank feature into a $20 "adventure pack", which also contains a mount and two character slots. On the same day, the Star Wars TOR beta EULA disclosed that TOR will have microtransactions, though, in fairness, we don't know for sure that the game in question has a monthly fee. (I'd be shocked if it was outright free-to-play, but it could go with the Guild Wars/DDO/W101 content purchase model.)
Meanwhile, SOE announced that the EQ2 team had been tasked with making an exclusive dungeon as a loot card reward for their online TCG. (Yes, people will buy a $4 online booster pack for maybe a 10% chance of getting a key that lets you run this dungeon for a presumably cosmetic reward ONCE.) In typical SOE PR form, the card game promo team was allowed to declare how cool this new feature would be, while the EQ2 community team was barred from disclosing anything about the contents of the dungeon in question to reassure the community that the best dungeons and loot won't be moving to TCG rewards and Station Cash in the future.
My guess is that the new zone won't be any more out-of-line than existing TCG loot, but the appearance is worse; Blizzard might not have made a Spectral Tiger at all if not for their TCG, Turbine might not have assigned someone to code the shared bank at all if there wasn't additional money in it, and SOE says that they would not have hired the guy who makes the Station Cash furniture and outfits without the added revenue, but one presumes that EQ2's dungeon team would have been making dungeons whether or not there was a new TCG expansion to sell.
The angry forum posters are wrong, as always. Very few will cancel as a matter of principle. A larger number might cancel as a result of running out of stuff to do, when their subscriptions might have been saved had the team not devoted its limited dev time to content that so few players will see. Still, the card game probably brings in more revenue than both groups combined, so SOE doesn't exactly have a strong incentive to change their priorities anytime soon.
Is the Monthly Fee Effectively Capped at $15?
I'm not thrilled with the addition of RMT to subscription games - I feel that they create a conflict of interest where future game design cannot be changed in a way that would hurt item sales, even if changes need to be made. Dealing with that conflict is the price of admission if the game isn't charging a fee to begin with, but this is not stopping subscription games from adding transactions left and right. But what is the alternative?
Like it or not, all games are compared to the production values of World of Warcraft. None of these other games have the revenue of World of Warcraft. Perhaps it isn't fair, but that's life - in order to crack my crowded MMORPG play list, your game needs to outcompete the games already on the list for my limited time and money.
Tobold once suggested that WoW has effectively capped the monthly fee at $15 - there were some rumblings that Warhammer might have a higher fee, and the reaction was so universally negative that even EA decided that this was not a PR battle they could win. I don't think that WoW is the only reason, though "more expensive than WoW" would certainly put some added pressure on a new game to be even bigger and better than the genre's 800lb Gorilladin. However, if Blizzard is responsible, then perhaps they have done the genre a favor.
The $15 monthly fee already adds up to $180 per year. At any given time, you've got a financial incentive to quit the game; if you can finish enough to declare victory and go home, that's $15 you could be spending on something else. Increasing the fee only increases the pressure, and the risk that players have to take on in order to try something new. If studios can't compromise on quality and therefore need to find some way to charge more, perhaps we're better off with RMT.
Last week, LOTRO announced that they're spinning off their new shared bank feature into a $20 "adventure pack", which also contains a mount and two character slots. On the same day, the Star Wars TOR beta EULA disclosed that TOR will have microtransactions, though, in fairness, we don't know for sure that the game in question has a monthly fee. (I'd be shocked if it was outright free-to-play, but it could go with the Guild Wars/DDO/W101 content purchase model.)
Meanwhile, SOE announced that the EQ2 team had been tasked with making an exclusive dungeon as a loot card reward for their online TCG. (Yes, people will buy a $4 online booster pack for maybe a 10% chance of getting a key that lets you run this dungeon for a presumably cosmetic reward ONCE.) In typical SOE PR form, the card game promo team was allowed to declare how cool this new feature would be, while the EQ2 community team was barred from disclosing anything about the contents of the dungeon in question to reassure the community that the best dungeons and loot won't be moving to TCG rewards and Station Cash in the future.
My guess is that the new zone won't be any more out-of-line than existing TCG loot, but the appearance is worse; Blizzard might not have made a Spectral Tiger at all if not for their TCG, Turbine might not have assigned someone to code the shared bank at all if there wasn't additional money in it, and SOE says that they would not have hired the guy who makes the Station Cash furniture and outfits without the added revenue, but one presumes that EQ2's dungeon team would have been making dungeons whether or not there was a new TCG expansion to sell.
The angry forum posters are wrong, as always. Very few will cancel as a matter of principle. A larger number might cancel as a result of running out of stuff to do, when their subscriptions might have been saved had the team not devoted its limited dev time to content that so few players will see. Still, the card game probably brings in more revenue than both groups combined, so SOE doesn't exactly have a strong incentive to change their priorities anytime soon.
Is the Monthly Fee Effectively Capped at $15?
I'm not thrilled with the addition of RMT to subscription games - I feel that they create a conflict of interest where future game design cannot be changed in a way that would hurt item sales, even if changes need to be made. Dealing with that conflict is the price of admission if the game isn't charging a fee to begin with, but this is not stopping subscription games from adding transactions left and right. But what is the alternative?
Like it or not, all games are compared to the production values of World of Warcraft. None of these other games have the revenue of World of Warcraft. Perhaps it isn't fair, but that's life - in order to crack my crowded MMORPG play list, your game needs to outcompete the games already on the list for my limited time and money.
Tobold once suggested that WoW has effectively capped the monthly fee at $15 - there were some rumblings that Warhammer might have a higher fee, and the reaction was so universally negative that even EA decided that this was not a PR battle they could win. I don't think that WoW is the only reason, though "more expensive than WoW" would certainly put some added pressure on a new game to be even bigger and better than the genre's 800lb Gorilladin. However, if Blizzard is responsible, then perhaps they have done the genre a favor.
The $15 monthly fee already adds up to $180 per year. At any given time, you've got a financial incentive to quit the game; if you can finish enough to declare victory and go home, that's $15 you could be spending on something else. Increasing the fee only increases the pressure, and the risk that players have to take on in order to try something new. If studios can't compromise on quality and therefore need to find some way to charge more, perhaps we're better off with RMT.
Friday, October 2, 2009
Gear, Story, and Patch Progression in WoW 3.3
The finale of the Wrath era, patch 3.3, has hit WoW's test server. Though the patch is just in its early stages - only the art is really finished - we can start to get a glimpse of Blizzard's long-term plans.
Gear Progression
Blizzard is working to try and bridge the staggering entry barrier for raid-quality loot - the best in game stuff already has 100+ effective item levels (corrected for quality) over the best leveling quest rewards in the game. The new five-man dungeons will drop item level 219 epics on normal mode and ilvl 232 on heroic. The patch is also apparently planning a pre-Icecrown raid of the week quest to give people an incentive to run old content that incidentally may still contain upgrades for their guildies. Needless to say, I'm patting myself on the back for not having gone too far out of my way to try and milk every last ilvl 219 drop out of HTOC.
Over the summer, I predicted that we could see soloable daily quests in patch 3.3 that award the currently retired Emblems of Heroism. Though Blizzard did open up heirloom items to Champion's seals, we could still see my prediction come true.
Even if ilvl 200 epics, currently available for emblems and at the very end of rep grinds, do become widely available, that's still a staggering difference for Blizzard to balance as they approach Cataclysm. My first gut reaction to the Cataclysm rumor was that the smaller increase to the level cap might allow Blizzard to get away without offering a full gear reset. I just can't see level 81 quest reward greens making the jump to ilvl 300 (deducting two tiers for lower quality) in one fell swoop just to try and keep up. Then again, with 5-man loot hitting ilvl 232 this expansion, it can hardly start any lower for the next one.
Story and Difficulty Progression
Speaking of the new three wing 5-man extravaganza, Blizzard is making an interesting attempt to make the expansion's signature villain more accessible. TBC's lore was all Illidan all the time (until Blizzard needed another patch to kill time until Wrath was ready), but it turns out that Illidan was right when he told non-raiders that they were not prepared.
That said, will an encounter that allows players to visit Arthas and spar for some loot really satisfy that complaint? It's a bit of a step up, but the final battle will still be reserved for raiders, and I'm sure we will all get tired to hearing Jaina and Sylvanus' color commentary after the second time through.
Patch and Expansion Schedule
With only one of the four instances (three 5-mans and the raid) open for testing, this patch will probably be on the test realms for at least the six weeks between now and Wrath's first birthday. Even so, it looks like the rumors suggesting that Blizzard might actually release three content patches in 2009 are still plausible, a massive improvement from the lean days of 2007 and 2008. Turbine, with their planned December LOTRO mini-expansion, may be less than amused.
This will, however, put huge pressure on Blizzard to finish Cataclysm in a timely fashion. Unless they're going to add something major to the patch at a later date, there will be very little for solo players - the current notes just contain some streamlining for very low level alts. In the current marketplace, having Cataclysm arrive any later than the summer actually could cost Blizzard some serious money.
Gear Progression
Blizzard is working to try and bridge the staggering entry barrier for raid-quality loot - the best in game stuff already has 100+ effective item levels (corrected for quality) over the best leveling quest rewards in the game. The new five-man dungeons will drop item level 219 epics on normal mode and ilvl 232 on heroic. The patch is also apparently planning a pre-Icecrown raid of the week quest to give people an incentive to run old content that incidentally may still contain upgrades for their guildies. Needless to say, I'm patting myself on the back for not having gone too far out of my way to try and milk every last ilvl 219 drop out of HTOC.
Over the summer, I predicted that we could see soloable daily quests in patch 3.3 that award the currently retired Emblems of Heroism. Though Blizzard did open up heirloom items to Champion's seals, we could still see my prediction come true.
Even if ilvl 200 epics, currently available for emblems and at the very end of rep grinds, do become widely available, that's still a staggering difference for Blizzard to balance as they approach Cataclysm. My first gut reaction to the Cataclysm rumor was that the smaller increase to the level cap might allow Blizzard to get away without offering a full gear reset. I just can't see level 81 quest reward greens making the jump to ilvl 300 (deducting two tiers for lower quality) in one fell swoop just to try and keep up. Then again, with 5-man loot hitting ilvl 232 this expansion, it can hardly start any lower for the next one.
Story and Difficulty Progression
Speaking of the new three wing 5-man extravaganza, Blizzard is making an interesting attempt to make the expansion's signature villain more accessible. TBC's lore was all Illidan all the time (until Blizzard needed another patch to kill time until Wrath was ready), but it turns out that Illidan was right when he told non-raiders that they were not prepared.
That said, will an encounter that allows players to visit Arthas and spar for some loot really satisfy that complaint? It's a bit of a step up, but the final battle will still be reserved for raiders, and I'm sure we will all get tired to hearing Jaina and Sylvanus' color commentary after the second time through.
Patch and Expansion Schedule
With only one of the four instances (three 5-mans and the raid) open for testing, this patch will probably be on the test realms for at least the six weeks between now and Wrath's first birthday. Even so, it looks like the rumors suggesting that Blizzard might actually release three content patches in 2009 are still plausible, a massive improvement from the lean days of 2007 and 2008. Turbine, with their planned December LOTRO mini-expansion, may be less than amused.
This will, however, put huge pressure on Blizzard to finish Cataclysm in a timely fashion. Unless they're going to add something major to the patch at a later date, there will be very little for solo players - the current notes just contain some streamlining for very low level alts. In the current marketplace, having Cataclysm arrive any later than the summer actually could cost Blizzard some serious money.
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