A Hybrid Revenue Model For LOTRO?

Via Kill Ten Rats, Turbine has announced the full, confusing details of the roll-out for the Mirkwood mini-expansion. They're not quite taking this game free to play with an item/unlock store, like they have with DDO, but they appear to be forging towards a hybrid model.

Is it a paid expansion if no one pays?
The big headline is that the expansion is effectively free for many subscribers. If you are subscribed as of Oct 31, with your billing plan set to "multi-month", and you do not cancel before the expansion launch (December 1st), you get the expansion for FREE. The multi-month subscription is currently $30 for 3 months - this is described on the website as a limited time offer, but the terms and conditions make it sound like it is here to stay - so there's no reason not to switch to multi-month.

If you wanted the expansion and one month's subscription starting December 1, you could pay $20 for the expansion and $15 for the month when December rolls around. Or you could pay $30 now, get the expansion for free, and Turbine will effectively be paying you a $5 discount to accept two additional months of game time between now and then. It doesn't sound like they're going to take your free expansion back if you feel really strongly about paying $15 per month instead of $30 for three months and change it back on December 2nd.

One of the catches is that you must decide by October 31st. Still, what's the point of having a price tag on the expansion at all if basically the only people people who pay that price are newbies and people who got confused by the misleading advertising?

Spreading the DDO store?
The answer is the previously un-announced "adventure pack". For an additional $20, Turbine will sell you two additional character slots, access to a new shared bank feature, a goat mount, and a throw-in cloak that's similar to normal pre-order bonuses. However, this is not a pre-order bonus. Instead, it's an optional additional purchase, which is NOT required to obtain the expansion (unless you are a lifetime subscriber, in which case you can get the expansion and the AP for the price of just the expansion).

The character slots are a big deal if you need them (and relatively cheap compared to additional recurring fees in EQ2 or FFXI) and irrelevant if you do not. The shared bank sounds a bit more functional than EQ2's version, but EQ2's version does not come with an additional fee (and WoW accomplishes somewhat the same effect by allowing you to instantly mail stuff to your alts).

The mount is actually a bigger deal than it sounds, because it does not cost gold to purchase, and because it is willing to go in the Mines of Moria. Currently, you need to farm up a decent chunk of gold to afford your horse mount at level 35, and that mount will NOT ride in Moria - you must instead grind up rep to obtain one. I.e. this purchase allows you to bypass timesinks that non-purchasers must complete, which is relatively unusual for offers such as this in games that also charge a monthly fee.

None of these items would sound out of place to me if you dropped them in DDO's store. Of course, LOTRO doesn't have a store yet. So, instead of being able to pick and choose which of these perks, if any, are worth paying for, we have to take all or none in a bundle that costs as much as the actual content of the expansion (five levels, probably multiple zones, and a new scaling instanced skirmish system for starters).

The Best or the Worst of both worlds?
On the one hand, this rollout effectively saves me a fair chunk of cash - I'd already resolved that I was willing to pay for the expansion, and I will now get the portion of it that I'm interested in for free.

I also have the option of skipping the adventure pack, and I have no intention of purchasing it. (Indeed, there's no real benefit for non-lifetime subscribers who preorder the adventure pack.) I would NOT have chosen to pay $40 for this mini-expansion plus added optional featues (though I suspect that Turbine is hoping that players will see the two as a bundle, rather than evaluating the Adventure Pack on its own independent merits), and I suppose that I should be glad to be offered the choice NOT to purchase it.

On the other hand, unlike DDO, this game still has a monthly subscription fee. DDO has no fee but charges for new zones and other unlocks. If this new announcement sparks a trend - and I can't imagine that it will sell poorly enough NOT to set a precedent - LOTRO will charge a monthly fee AND be in the business of charging extra for unlocking new zones and features. The same is true of the traditional expansion, such as LOTRO's Moria expansion, but Mirkwood is a smaller creature than Moria or Wrath, while carrying the same price tag for players who opt for (or are confused into) the additional purchase.

In this context, the decision to all but give away the expansion to get players in the door makes a bit more sense. You can't sell transactions to people who aren't playing the game. Also, LOTRO has many lifetime subscribers, who effectively are not paying unless Turbine finds new and creative ways of adding additional, non-subscription fees. (Indeed, the $199 lifetime subscription is back, implying that Turbine will take the sure thing of the subscription money now and the prospect of selling additional add-ons down the line over the potentially greater revenue from a cancel-able monthly fee.)

Regardless, Turbine is forging into some new ground here. I suspect we will see this thing morph into a full-fledged DDO-like store (perhaps even using the same currency wallet) if it succeeds. That might be a good thing, if it props up a game that was otherwise not bringing in enough money. Or it could be an invitation for companies everywhere to charge more for features that are currently included in our not entirely trivial monthly fees. Time, and the numbers, will tell.

Alchemy and the Merits of Self-Only Perks

What did I do with the little windfall when my flying mount training was cheaper than expected? I decided to get to work on converting my Tauren into an alchemist. He just hit level 65, which allows him access to the Wrath tier of crafting professions and various self-only perks.

Perks of the Alchemist
The bad news is that I don't get to equip the [Mighty Alchemist's Stone] until level 75. In the mean time, though, I get to amuse myself with two bottomless consumables - the [Endless Healing Potion] and the [Flask of the North].

For perspective, I have about 7K HP at level 65, and the potion restores about 2K HP an unlimited number of times on a mere one minute cooldown (must get out of combat to start it ticking). I.e. I'm now regenerating 20+% of my health every minute, and might as well stop carrying food. The flask is better than Outland-quality elixirs even with my Mixology bonus, and it too is infinite and persists through death.

In principle, some of this benefit is purely monetary. With enough gold, I could buy transmutes and elixirs and health potions (seriously, I click that button every single time my HP goes down by enough that I won't be wasting most of the heal, so you'd be talking about buying a LOT of super healing potions). Then again, I would never spend that much gold, even if I had it, on leveling content where it isn't technically necessary. Instead, I'd just try to push through without, die more often, and generally have a less fun experience.

Meanwhile, this project didn't actually cost me that much - probably around 600-800G total, as I was able to turn around and dump a lot of the stuff I made (e.g. Northrend-quality elixirs) on the AH to recoup some of my expenses. In return, this character effectively won't have any more consumables costs until at least next expansion, and I'm strongly considering leveling at least one of my planned Cataclysm alts as an alchemist.

"Optional" self-only perks
EQ2 offers unique non-combat tradeskill content to get players into the trade game. LOTRO doesn't really offer much, but that also makes tradeskills eminently skippable if you just want to harvest and sell. By contrast, WoW's trade game is pretty boring - buy stuff off the AH, or spend an equivalent amount of time running around to harvest it, click button, watch crafting bar. Despite this, WoW crafting is probably far more heavily used than the systems in other games because you can get things like unlimited healing potions if you craft.

Perhaps there are some good sides to all of this. As Gevlon writes, having informed players participating in the economy is what establishes the market. I was willing to spend money to buy the Northrend herbs I needed to level so that I can benefit from this profession starting at level 65, instead of level 80. I got that money selling herbs that I actually can harvest to some combination of businessmen and other players who similarily value their time more highly than their virtual currency.

Then again, it's also no coincidence that we get gold sellers using corpse spam advertisements in major cities in a game that features mechanics like this one - do something that doesn't interest you (playing the market), as a pre-requisite for doing something that does interest you (having top quality bonuses for raiding/PVP/"coolness"). You have to wonder whether the price Blizzard has had to pay to get players doing this particular part of the game is worth the amount of extra subscriber time they manage to occupy by convincing players to play a crafting game they would otherwise ignore.


One of these days, I'll get to equip this beauty

Flying Mounts For All?

When I bought flying mount training for my Tauren last week, I was puzzled that the trainer only wanted 200G. I had previously been to the trainer, seen that it cost 600G (which was more than I had), and went off to earn the money by mining and herbing while working on Darkspear troll quest rep for another project.

Apparently, I've been the beneficiary of an undocumented change from patch 3.2.2; the cost has been slashed to 225G, and they also placed it on Ogrimmar rep, allowing me an additional faction discount.

The change was needed to meet the goal of the mount changes - flying mounts for everyone at level 60. In fairness, I might have been able to afford the original price had I not spent all of the character's money on epic ground mount training back before they nerfed that price to the ground, but 600G (plus another 45 for the mount) was a pretty steep mountain for a newbie to climb.

That said, I wonder whether this goal was a good idea. It's one thing to accelerate leveling for alts of experienced players, who can buy the heirloom book to allow their alts cold weather flying as they start Northrend (financing all of this through their levle 80 mains). It's something else to hand the ability to fly to new players who have not seen Outland before and will have flight taken away from them when they reach the latest expansion. (I can only imagine that Blizzard will reduce or eliminate the cost for Cold Weather flying when Cataclysm hits.)

The fact is that flight breaks a large number of quests, even in Outland (which was supposedly designed with flight in mind). That's why they didn't enable flight when players first hit Outland, and why they took it away at the start of Northrend. Post 77 Wrath was, for many players, their first experience having flight while leveling. Going back may not go over well.


One of numerous quest mobs you can fly right up to on your new flying mount.

Ode to a Giant Cow on a Giant Dinosaur

After all the mechanized hoopla, it seemed only fair to give Greenraven equal time.

The MMORPG Customer Is Always Wrong?

WoW's ubiquitous Lead Systems Designer has an interesting quote on MMORPG's and democracy. Blue wall of text inc:

I understand how it can seem like a double standard where you feel you have an enormous mountain to climb to make your case, while we aren't obligated to do the same thing. That's simply because we're the ones empowered to make the call. I don't state that as a power trip deal, but I think sometimes players want to turn our approachability into this being a democracy. It's not.

We're not interested in developing under a system where we have to get community buy-off for our decisions. We don't think that will ultimately lead to a strong design. I don't mean for that to sound harsh. I'm just trying to steer you away from logic that ends up where we have to justify every decision we make or you can somehow get us to make the decisions you want if you just find the right knobs to turn.

The crab has the nerve to actually say it, but he's certainly not the only developer thinking it. MMORPG's are not a democracy, and we wouldn't want them to be - we have seen what happens when you let players make the design choices. That said, I'm seeing a disturbing trend of studios deciding that they don't even feel like being the bearers of bad news.

Is Silence Better Than Bad News?
SOE implemented changes in the latest EQ2 patch this week that gutted the rewards for contested raid boss fights and implemented a lack-luster but easy to balance racial trait revamp. The PR strategy was simply to quarantine all of the negative feedback into one thread per topic (something like 75+ pages on the former and 38+ on the latter), not respond unless there was a verifiable and fixed bug, and basically ignore the issue until it goes away.

Sony is not alone. Under the crunch time wire, Cryptic quietly didn't mention plans to completely revamp combat difficulty in Champions Online until it went live on the retail servers (once you've started your head start, they are your retail servers) with a single line in the patch notes. Faced with major server queues at Aion's head start, NCSoft did technically issue a statement, but Syp summarizes it as suck it up and wait it out.

There are two problems with this approach. The first is that the customer may always be wrong, but that doesn't mean that they're always 100% wrong. Contested loot may be a balance problem, but there is no incentive to scramble to race to the spawn point to attempt bosses on no notice if the loot is no better than instanced content you can attempt at your leisure. Aion might absolutely require those pesky server queues for longterm population balance, but they are also officially charging for a service that players cannot use at the moment.

The second issue is consumer confidence. For better or worse, the current generation of MMORPG's are based around progression for persistant characters. It's a problem if you decide you're going to wipe your battleground currencies after not having done so for your first expansion (a move that Blizzard had to reverse). It's a problem when your Champion is suddenly unplayable because you didn't obey a set of unwritten rules (e.g. take a defensive power ASAP) that didn't exist when you created it; sure enough, Cryptic insisted that respec costs were fine for all of a day before implementing free respecs. SOE planned massive changes to DPS across the board earlier this year, and reversed themselves when it became increasingly clear the player outcry would be even more damaging than the status quo (with hybrid DPS ruling the day).

(Aside: One has to wonder whether SOE will simply reintroduce the tanking/DPS changes under the veil of secrecy of its expansion beta NDA, not revealing them until the last possible moment. At least this would remove some of the issues with making changes of the scope they were planning mid-expansion, but it could make for a very volatile situation in February.)

Accountability and consumer confidence
It's no coincidence that changes like these are the ones that get rolled back. It's not a democracy, but that does not mean that there is no accountability. In the subscription-based MMORPG, your consumer confidence is your meal ticket.

That's why I find the veil of secrecy so puzzling. Do developers really think that players won't notice major nerfs if they appear on the test servers without any announcement or warning? Is it better to have players discussing misinformation instead of issuing a full and detailed explanation of the changes at the risk of aggraving those who disagree? Developers may not need their customers' approval, but that does not mean they should ignore it.

When Mining Goes Wrong

My complaints about mining in WoW can be summed up with a brief visit to the Charred Vale in Stonetalon Mountains. I ran through this area as part of my project to mop up low level quests that are going away in Cataclysm, and encountered every type of metal from copper (mining skill: 1) to truesilver (mining skill: 230).

Of the three games I've played recently, WoW's other two harvesting professions (skinning and herbalism) are very very easy to level, but WoW's mining runs into big problems. The game could really use one more type of non-rare ore. Players can start mining Mithril in their late 30's, but they must collect a whopping 70 skill points off of that tier, with the last 20 earned after the mineral nodes have turned green (low chance of skill up). You can shortcut some of those points via smelting and mining rare ores, but you're going to outlevel the areas where mithril drops long before you finish with mithril. Thorium is another 55 point grind, and you literally cannot mine anything in Outland until you reach 300 mining skill.

Gathering professions are only useful if you can actually gather the stuff you encounter in the field. I'm guessing that this was part of Blizzard's reasoning in scattering lower-level minerals in higher level zones, to help players catch up. The problem is that this makes it very difficult to level expediently - either you're forced to collect low level rocks you don't need to clear the spawn points, or you're unable to harvest higher level minerals until you reach the next magic skill plateau. There's also the secondary issue that even the lower level ores are worth harvesting to sell, so it's much more common to go hunting and find that someone else has already picked the area clean.

By contrast, EQ2 offers new minerals, and crafted gear using the new materials, every 10 levels without exception. As a result, it has to be moderately easy to keep pace, and that's how the game plays out. LOTRO's system is closer to WoW's, but your prospecting skill is tied only to smelting ingots. This takes an insultingly long time sitting AFK while your character smelts (mastering the current top tier takes 1,800 crafting exp, which you have to earn 6-8 exp at a time, with each bar taking something like 5-7 seconds to smelt, vs 1.5 seconds per bar in WoW), but you only need to get a third of the way through each tier to be allowed to mine the next one - I've never had the experience of having trouble harvesting level appropriate resources quite like you get in WoW.

At the end of the day, crafting is simply less integral to WoW than to EQ2 or LOTRO. That's fine, except that Blizzard has opted to make everyone go through the exercise of leveling professions for self-only perks. Then again, the old world is a big part of the problem - Outland and Northrend are far better at being self-contained, which is yet another illustration of how deep into various systems the various flaws with old world Azeroth go. It will be interesting to see whether Cataclysm tackles this issue head on, or simply papers over the problem by expanding the range for guaranteed skill ups.

On the plus side, all of the Thorium, and all of the Mithril I had to harvest to get it to respawn as Thorium, was worth a lot of money. Greenraven is no longer too poor to buy flying mount training. I guess mining had a good perk after all (though I still think that the herbalism perks are much more interesting).

Did Aion Learn From Warhammer Population Woes?

A new heavily-hyped PVP-focused MMORPG has just launched, and they're having queues and faction population balance issues. Apparently this is going to be the new tradition for September, take note if you've got a similar game in development. What has Aion learned from the launch of Warhammer?

The "good" news, and I use that in quotes because there's nothing fun about it, is that they have decided to take the long view on server queues. Server capacities must be set lower during the launch window since all of the players are crowded into the same few zones (precisely two in Aion's case). If you expand too aggressively and don't have the population to sustain that, your PVP players won't have opponents and bad things will happen.

The bad news is that they seem to be convinced that they can do PVP with two factions (and an NPC faction that supposedly turns on whomever is currently winning) and balance the sides by physically shutting off character creation for the winning side. This is going to cause a very misleading and false sense of security.

Players will not permanently abandon their friends to play on another server just because of some temporary server queues. They will watch like a hawk for the opportunity to be reunited with their comrades, they will invite their friends to further swell the ranks by piling on to the same server, and they may even feel strongly enough to pay $50 in transfer fees to rescue their old character via paid faction and server transfers.

The only players who are going to change their minds are the dreaded WoW tourists - players with no social ties, who value being able to play their faction of choice over being on a particular server with other players. Sounds mighty accomodating of them, but can you really count on these players to stay with the game? (Aside: the current server stats say that there isn't a single server where the good side has the population advantage. That's a problem.)

As Saylah writes at West Karana, the current rules are splitting guilds down the middle. In the long term, this is very counter productive - keeping that guild together, playing with their friends, is what keeps people in the game. If one of the two sides is full of guilds who chose to play on that side and brought all their friends, while the other side is full of random players who switched because the character select screen asked them to, which side do YOU think will be on top when that first monthly fee comes due?