Intermittent FFXIV Players Better Off Starting Over On Expanded Free Trial

FFXIV apparently has so little need of intermittent revenue from low level, infrequent players, that it is willing to allow permanent free access to its first sixty levels including its entire launch game and first expansion.  Changing the trial so that someone who has the time to binge the game is able to play for a month straight could convince that player to stick around.  A telling side effect of the change is that I am apparently such a small fish that they don't care if I ever pay them again. 

In 2013, I played 2 months of FFXIV on both PC and PS3 (using the game's crossplay).  I tried a number of the game's jobs, ultimately leveling a character named Johari Jeutremie to 27 as an arcanist, and I always meant to go back someday. The game is about to launch a patch that overhauls the level 1-50 "main story quest" I never completed, and will allow new players as much game time as they would like without paying. There may never be a better time to revisit the game.

Unfortunately, Johari is not invited.  "Upgrading" a trial account to a paid account is a permanent, one-way process that forever cuts off access to the free trial, even if you are nowhere near the trial's level cap. I can afford the subscription fee, but I would inevitably play once and cancel 65 days later, having been billed twice more without having logged in again. I would be paying to get less access to the game than I would as a free player able to come back for a day every few months if I want, when I am unlikely to finish the story and first expansion's level cap in the foreseeable future.  Even if I did someday hit the trial's level cap, it could rise again in the future; I would be locked out all over again if I paid. 

The only sensible choice is for me to start over and never pay again. I don't love free-loading, but it isn't personal. A single player who becomes a year-round subscriber is worth more than a dozen tourists like myself, and my hypothetical $13 isn't worth risking making it easier for current subscribers not to pay year round.

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!  

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? 

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?  

Failure to Transfer-proof MMO Launches

There are at least four US/EU servers in FFXIV where people I know from blogs, twitter, or podcasts have characters.  I will need to pick one of those servers as a home.  That choice has huge implications on my future in the game. 

If I pick a newer server that is populated too heavily with tourists - players with established social ties are seldom willing or able to re-roll when new servers open post-launch - it could be deserted in a few months, leaving me high and dry in a search for groups.  If I pick one of the more crowded servers and the game does somehow continue to trend upwards, I could be facing the kinds of extended performance issues that I experienced in 2004-2005 having rolled on one of the 40 WoW servers whose names were announced prior to launch.  Perhaps most importantly, if I roll on a specific server to join specific people and those folks don't stick with the game, as I did in SWTOR last year, I'll be looking at a lonely experience.

I find it frustrating that we as customers who pay for online gaming services seem to have a misguided focus on the portions of the server population discussion that should be easiest to forgive.  We dwell on overcrowding on launch week, even though these problems are almost always fixed in a week or two.  We brand as a failure any product that ends up with too many servers and has the nerve to make the correct decision to consolidate them. 

Meanwhile, I'm sitting here with a server list and a choice that's harder than it should be.  There's no choice I can make today that is transfer-proof, and the provider really doesn't have an incentive to care since they stand to pocket the transfer fees if I get it wrong.  It just seems like the rare thing that we as customers who are paying for a service actually have a good basis to complain about, but we don't complain much and the problem persists. 

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? 

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. 

Rift Goes Pay-For-Others

Rift's newly announced "Free-to-Play" relaunch was so obvious that even I saw it coming.  One of their more interesting decisions harnesses an emerging trend in payment models - turning the traditional RMT incentive structure on its head with a system that encourages people who have money to pay for others to play the game. 

It's a subtle but important distinction that makes sense when you look at the incentives and motivations for why people pay real money for stuff in MMO's.  On paper, this approach could be much better for gamers than many of the other things that have been tried. 

Traditional RMT - Paying for Progress (to Win?)
Traditional "Real Money Transactions" (RMT) - people buying swords or accounts on Ebay, currency from illicit third party sites, or all of the above from official exchanges - is motivated by a desire not to play the game.  The buyer wants to obtain something - currency, a pre-leveled character, etc - that they could in principle earn in game.  For whatever reason - lack of time, unwillingness to group, lack of interest in timesinks that are a prerequisite for endgame, etc - they are unwilling or unable to earn their incentive the traditional way, but they have money they are willing to part with. 

Setting aside all of the logistics, legalities, ethics, and design issues that these systems inevitably raise, you are left with a fundamental problem - a game that people are willing to pay NOT to play.  Blizzard accidentally took this to the logical, absurd extreme in Diablo III, where it became so easy for players to buy gear with trivial amounts of gold on the auction house that nothing the player ever earned in game would be relevant. 

Unless you have designed your game in a way that requires one playstyle as a prerequisite for another - most commonly requiring people who want to raid with their friends to first grind out 90 levels solo and then run random PUG's to get the gear to be useful to the raid group - there is no scenario where the player who pays for progress isn't ultimately going to wash out that much faster for having done so. 

Paying for Others
Beyond the traditional RMT, we are seeing a growing trend - regardless of genre and type of payment model - towards games that somehow allow one player to pay another's way.  A few examples:

• EVE was the first game to my knowledge to implement a mechanism they dubbed PLEX, effectively an in-game time card that is bought with real money, can be consumed to extend your subscription time, and is also free to be bought, sold, bartered, stolen or destroyed like any other in-game item can be in EVE.  SOE has adopted the same system (minus the thievery and destruction) in EQ2, and I expect more will follow.
  
• SWTOR's free to play model didn't make a lot of sense to many people - myself included - in part because it did not seem to ever make sense for someone who is NOT subscribing to pay money for the game.  Weekly access to content like PVP added up to around $8/month, but you also had to pay significant one-time unlock fees for gear and other things you'd need before you could start on this discounted (but still hobbled) plan - and if you wanted to add in a second type of content unlock, such as raiding, you actually failed at math because you'd be paying more than the subscription but getting stuck with greater restrictions. 
  
  The difference in this model is that every single unlock in the cartel market can be resold for in-game credits on the auction house.  I was dead wrong when I assumed that this secondary market would be unsustainable because people would not pay real money for the paltry number of credits a non-subscriber can pay them.  Even the most expensive unlocks and items can be had for affordable prices because people are unwilling or unable to earn amounts of credits that I consider to be trivial - Bioware is even expanding this market by adding a consumable, resellable item that pulls credits out of non-subscribers' escrow accounts.  In a perverse way, it makes sense to be a non-subscriber who gets less for the money because it's someone else's money.  
  
  The real story with SWTOR is that the number three (optional) subscription MMO in the West is quietly convincing some demographic of players (probably casual Star Wars/Bioware fans who have money and aren't interested in learning to crew skill or farm dailies) to pay significantly more than the standard monthly fee in exchange for credits.
  
• Rift's new model will feature a variant of PLEX that awards not game time, but rather the game's new item shop currency.  It's not clear whether this currency can be used to purchase subscription time (which sounds unusually optional, though we need more details to be sure), but it can definitely be used to purchase all kinds of items.  Many free to play games offer some mechanism for gifting stuff from their cash shops - sometimes for resale to other players (and sometimes at the players' peril when it comes to scams) - but this is not a common mechanism and Rift is the highest profile F2P relaunch to do anything like this.

The difference between pay for others models and traditional RMT is subtle, but important.  One side of the demand curve is still driven by people who wish to trade real world money for in-game currency.  The other side of the demand curve is driven by people who want to play the game - presumably because they enjoy playing the game - but are unwilling or unable to pay for the game. Under a pay for others model, the person with the money can pay that person's way in exchange for their in game currency. 

Why making the non-payer valuable is a win for everyone
What happens to people who choose not to pay under the various payment models?

• Mandatory subscription fee: The player who is not willing to pay leaves, thereby ceasing to support the game and indirectly removing the incentive for the developer to address their concerns.  Meanwhile, the player with excess money has no legitimate way to spend it, as their $15 is all they can pay.
• Traditional free-to-play/buy-to-play: Assuming the system isn't so poorly monetized that no one pays and the game goes under, the player who is not willing to pay is still asked to pay and still leaves as a result.  The player who is willing to pay more than $15 can do so, and becomes disproportionately valuable to the developer as a result.  However, they can also lose in the long run, as the financial incentive for the developer is to find ways to "encourage" them to pay even more.
• Pay-for-others: Instead of leaving the game, the player who is not willing to pay becomes the incentive for the person with more than $15/month to spend their money.  Theoretically, this can keep all of the players within the community (good for their friends, paying and not), while retaining a financial incentive for the developer to support their whole community, not just the "whales".  

It will be interesting to see how this all plays out.  The one thing you cannot do is go back and restrict things that you gave away later if you're not happy with the revenue, and Rift is giving away so much stuff that they won't have much left to sell if this plan does not work.  They are also offering entry level gear for cash store (and thus indirectly in-game-currency) purchase, which could alleviate some of the entry barrier issues for new max level characters by letting them skip the much despised PUG grind and pay for what they need to join their friends in raid content. 

A final note - this change causes the ranks of mandatory subscription MMO's to dwindle further.  We will now have WoW (losing a million subscribers per quarter, with Activision predicting that the numbers will drop further by year end), EVE (which offers a very unique experience that can't be had anywhere else), the online Final Fantasies (assuming that 14 launches and survives) with their strong subscriber numbers from the Japanese market ... and then we're down to stragglers and titles on life support.  It would not surprise me to see some of these titles join EVE in offering some sort of mechanism for players to pay for others going forward, especially if Rift's new model works out. 

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? 

Mid-April Outlook

It's been a few months since I posted a round-up/outlook post, though I suppose some of what I've been doing can be inferred from what I've been posting about. 

• I finally got back to the level cap in WoW a few weeks back, and I'm not opposed in principle to continuing on into the endgame.  The problem is more practical - where in my schedule to find time for this stuff.  The current expansion sounds like it is doing some interesting things in terms of story tied to daily quests (i.e. hit a new tier of rep, see some new plot).  The problem - not new to this expansion - is that I can get story of similar quality from other games without the grind requirement.  I never finished Cataclysm's Molten Front storyline, and I'm told that LOTRO has a similar feature around rebuilding a city in Rohan that will probably fall off my plate for similar reasons. 
  
• DDO remains a back-burner project for me, but it's one that I actually pick up from time to time (albeit usually just for one evening if the mood strikes me).  My character has some interesting things coming in his next few levels, and it's possible that his entire build is going to be blown up by a massive overhaul to the game's enhancement system that is now in early development.  If I can get to level 20 before that happens, I will have the option of true reincarnating to start over as a build that works with the new rules.  I'm willing to call this a goal, though I don't know if it will happen. 
  
• A year and a half into its run, SWTOR seems to have settled in as my current MMO of choice.  I have long-term concerns about the game's business model, but in the short term I have only scratched the surface of things that interest me in the game. 
  
  My Trooper is now halfway through the (brief) expansion story, my Agent will probably follow close behind, and I could see spending at least some time at endgame on one or both of these characters.  (Aside: One small but significant difference between SWTOR and other MMO's is that all reputation scores are shared amongst your legacy and mirrored across factions - both characters add to my legacy reputation while playing through the new content.)  
  
  Given enough time, I could imagine someday completing all six of the remaining class stories.  My next two 50's should be my level 20 Sith Warrior and either my Jedi Consular or my Sith Inquisitor (both currently level 12) to complete all four class buffs for my legacy.  The fact that I can look at my character select screen and legitimately consider clicking the "play" button next to five separate characters in the same game is something that I can't imagine in any other game at the moment. 
  
• I don't know that anything new is likely to make its way onto my schedule in the near future.  If I had to pick a wild card, though, based on current info, I'm surprisingly intrigued by the relaunch of Final Fantasy XIV.  Perhaps this is more of a game that I WANT to like based on the IP than a game that is likely to be suitable for my gaming style.  Perhaps the magnitude of the improvements to the game won't live up to the hype.  I sat out the game's first launch and I probably won't be there for day one of its second launch, but I could imagine giving this game a shot sometime later this year if the word of mouth goes well, especially if they offer some form of free trial. 

What are you all looking forward to these days? 

The Free Side of the Force

In February, EA announced that SWTOR had sold 2+ million copies and retained 1.7 million subscribers.  Executives claimed that 500,000 subscribers was the break-even point, and that "At a million, we'd be making a profit but nothing worth writing home about".

In May, they announced that the number was down to 1.3 million.  This was followed by two rounds of layoffs - the first rumored to be 40% of the staff - and mergers of 90% of the game's servers.

On today's conference call, EA described the numbers as below 1 million but "well north of" the 500,000 subscriber break-even point.   It's not clear whether any writing home took place, but they did end the lengthy and unusually public discussion of the game's business model by announcing that it will go free to play sometime around November. 

The Path to the Free Side
Just from the public and not especially hard numbers, we now know that the game has failed to retain over half of its customers and has almost certainly set an all-time record for fastest MMO to lose a million customers (in fairness, partially due to how few games have sold a million copy).  If you make up numbers of 2.1 million total copies sold and 700K current subscribers - which are completely fake but plausible given what we've been told - you're looking at more like two thirds attrition within six months. 

In response, they will be converting the game to a payment model that the studio heads had previously said would not support the scope of their product. Let's be clear, the studio didn't go bankrupt and leave the state of Rhode Island on the hook for a nine-digit bill.  Setting aside the connotations of the word "failure", reasonable people can agree that this was not the outcome that EA had in mind when they ponied up a nine-digit sum of money to have this game made. 

As I wrote last week, the game may be a victim of its times.  Non-subscription payment models are lowering the cost of switching games and may be diminishing the appeal of the repetitive mechanics that previously sustained subscriptions.  It's certainly possible that large numbers of copies were sold to non-MMO players - fans of Star Wars and/or Bioware's single player efforts - who were predisposed against paying a monthly fee.  Even so, the numbers EA cited today are staggering.  If 40% of players who quit cited the subscription on the survey and over a million players have quit, you're talking about potentially hundreds of thousands of votes specifically against the subscription. 

(If memory serves, you're required to complete the survey in order to cancel your subscription, obviously the impact of the number would be greatly reduced if I'm wrong and this step is optional.)

Outlook
The details are sparse, but the forthcoming SWTOR free to play model appears to be the industry standard for F2P conversions not owned by Turbine - no fees for content or the level cap, with restrictions on quality of life for non-subscribers (races, currencies, etc) and possibly a complete lock-out from endgame group content.  If the game's problem was that players were finishing the game's single player story and then quitting, I fail to see how a payment model that does not charge until players have completed the single player story is going to work out for them. 

While I personally will most likely pay less for SWTOR under the new model, I'm not celebrating.  SWTOR is a quality product, albeit one that may have been especially ill-suited for the subscription model.  The quality and direction of the game's future development, with the reduced staff and revised business model, are likely to suffer. 

More generally, if you are a subscription MMO that has been around for at least a year and you are not named WoW, Eve, Rift, or possibly Final Fantasy (the jury remains out on XIV after it launched so poorly that Square had to decline to charge for an entire year), you're either trying to retrofit a new payment model or abandoned in maintenance mode.  I get that there is more to the current MMO scene than the catastrophes of Copernicus and Prime and the disappointments like SWTOR and DCUO.  Even so, as someone who has very much enjoyed and benefited from playing in an era of multiple high profile MMO's, I can't say that I'm liking the way things are going.

Three Predictions for 2012

Here are a few predictions on the state of MMO's in the coming year.  Ironically, though I hadn't planned it this way, the three topics I came up with address (albeit in a different order) Wilhelm's top three questions for 2012. 

Go Big, Go Small, Go Free, or Go Home
The subscription MMO isn't dead, but there are basically two very specific circumstances under which it can work:

1. Have a nine-figure budget like the reported $100 million in venture capital that founded Trion or the even larger figures that EA is rumored to have spent on SWTOR.  Ever notice how the three corporations able to foot this type of bill - Blizzard, Trion, and EA-Bioware - are the ones who are still touting the subscription model?
2. Serve an un-filled niche, such as sandbox PVP (see Eve, Darkfall, or perhaps the forthcoming Dominus) or old-school group MMO (see Vanguard, lots of room for a newcomer in this genre).  The big-budget one-size-fits-all MMO that includes solo, group, raid, and PVP has to make compromises  to fit all these activities under one roof.  This makes it possible for a more specialized game to offer something that the big guys cannot.  However, as CCP found out last year, this also means that your entire company lives or dies by its ability to continue to keep one segment of the market satisfied.

Note what's not on that list.  The best licensed IP's out there don't guarantee you $15 a month - see DCUO and LOTRO.  Neither does implementation of a specific feature in what's otherwise a one-size-fits-all MMO (e.g. RVR in Warhammer and PvPvE in Aion).  Even the huge budget is no guarantee of success - probably the most remarkable thing about Rift's progress is how much discipline the team has shown in implementing only what they can actually accomplish and accomplish well.

The bottom line is that if you have yet another fantasy MMO, you're not solidly in one of the two categories above, and your business plan depends on collecting a $15 monthly subscription - FFXIV and Tera come to mind, along with Copernicus if they're not thinking F2P - you are in for a rough time in today's crowded market.  Of course, you're also in for a tough time in the crowded free market, but at least the bar is lower to get potential customers to actually try your product.   

SWTOR will have high churn... and high revenue
Both sides of the discussion on SWTOR's longterm prospects tend to assume that the game will be a failure if there is a mass exodus by the 90 day mark.  Ironically, there has never been another MMO so well-positioned to handle a high rate of churn. 

Yes, the game has guilds and PVP and dungeons/raids, all the traditional MMO trappings that tend to do poorly with high churn.  As long as Bioware was spending whatever ungodly amount they spent on this game, there was no reason NOT to support these playstyles and collect the associated revenue.  However, the core thing that has everyone raving is the Bioware story.  With the past Bioware games, the customer pays once for the box, and maybe once more if the expansions/DLC are worth purchasing, no matter how long it takes the player to complete the game or how many times they replay it.  With the monthly fee, EA gets paid every month for every playthrough and replay, regardless of how little or how much content Bioware actually adds to the game in future patches.   

With such a focus on a highly replayable single player story, SWTOR doesn't need half a million year-round subscribers.  They can get the same effect with 1.5 million players who pay 4 months out of the year when new content is added - or when players choose to replay the old stuff.  I don't see how Bioware can lose here - which is probably why they got so much of EA's money to spend in the first place. 

Mists of Pandaria Will Ship This Summer, Or Heads Will Roll
Many intelligent people are predicting that Pandaria won't ship until Q4, and there is strong basis for making this call - Blizzard is not known for shipping its products on time.  This round, however, I think the stakes are higher. 

Blizzard spent 2011 losing subscribers by the millions - to Rift, or wherever else - and SWTOR will not help this situation.  No amount of spin about how the lost players are in the less lucrative Asian markets, or how players have returned to WoW after the launches of past competitors, can change the reality that Blizzard will continue to lose customers and money until something changes.  A scenario in which the content that was available in early December 2011 is still the only content available in early October 2012 is unacceptable. 

My guess is that we will see the paid closed beta phase of Pandaria (courtesy of the annual pass) kick off in May-June, with an aim for an early Q3 release.  Delaying this product further is not like delaying Starcraft II or Diablo III, which do not have monthly fees - every month means more subscribers lost from the current live WoW service.  I'm prepared to believe that Blizzard might let the expansion slip anyway, but I think that there will - and frankly should - be consequences if this occurs. 

What do you all think will happen in 2012?

F2P Assault on the Hard Drive

Yesterday, I posted a full run-down of five separate free to play games that are currently installed on my computer: LOTRO, DDO, EQ2X, Runes of Magic, and now DCUO.

In addition to these, I have clients for WoW (annual pass subscription), EQ2 Live (yes, this requires a separate full client install) and Rift (the latter two of which I do not want to uninstall because I want to be able to patch up quickly for free retrial weekends).

The net result of all these clients, all of which I could potentially use on short notice, is that my hard drive is 77% full and climbing rapidly.  Already gone from the hard drives of this and my previous machines are various games that I'm not actively playing, including Age of Conan (tried sometime last year pre-F2P, did not feel any particular desire to return), City of Heroes (tried back in 2007 or so), FFXI, Guild Wars, Torchlight, Warhammer, Free Realms, Vanguard, and Star Wars Galaxies (soon to be a moot point).  This does not include betas or test server clients (none of which I currently have.) 

In addition to all of the above, my post and the following comments identified half a dozen high quality F2P or formerly paid games that I have never played in any form, including: Champions Online, soon Star Trek Online, Fallen Earth, Pirates of the Burning Sea, Allods, and Wizard 101.  (Honorable mention to the soon to be closed Lego Universe.)  I'm sure there are plenty I've missed in that number, feel free to post shout-outs in the comments. 

A year or two back, I remember someone mentioning on a podcast that they had installed an MMO to an external hard drive and thinking that this was a weird call.  Now I'm vaguely considering whether I should add an external drive (perhaps SSD?) to my Christmas list, as hard drive capacity is about to become a limiting factor in my ability to try additional games.

Is anyone else's hard drive buckling under all the MMO clients, now that it is increasingly both possible and desirable to have so many at your disposal?  Any suggestions on creative or high quality external storage solutions? 

F2P DCUO Day One

DCUO has finally gone free to play, and the Green Armadillo - yes, finally an MMO where my pseudonym is actually appropriate - has hit the streets of Gotham to investigate.  A few early impressions after a few hours in game:

Controls
I was dreading the attempt to play this thing with a keyboard and mouse, because the PS3 beta made it feel tailor made for a controller.  On this front, I've been pleasantly surprised.

The control scheme is definitely different - your character (hopefully) turns in whatever direction you move the mouse (no keyboard turning), and if you're extra lucky the camera turns with you.  Your melee attack is the left click button and your ranged attack is the right click.  You generally will only hit stuff that is in front of you at the time you click, and combos are executed by various combinations of left and right click/hold.  WASD handles forward, backwards, and strafing.

You have one hotbar that you cannot click - you have to actually push the number keys to use your non-basic-attack powers, and I believe you're only allowed eight total active powers at a time.  The "e" key is bound to interacting with objects, the "f" key is used to toggle "fast" mode, and there are other keys for various menus, as is par for the MMO course.

I'll have to take the PS3 version for a spin over the weekend, but after trying this on the PC I'm wondering if the less popular PC version isn't the better choice after all, if for no other reason than to let players type.  One aside, though, I think you probably need a real mouse - I don't hate my fingers enough to try and play this thing on a laptop trackpad. 

Costumes and Customization
I last attempted to play COH sometime circa 2007, but that game then had way more options than DCUO does now.  There are only three body types - muscular brute, almost as muscular but not quite so brute, and kid/sprite (i.e. disproportionately large head), each of which comes in small/medium/large and both genders.  You do have relatively broad discretion to change the color of your skin textures, but it's nothing like the more powerful character generator in COH/Champions.

Likewise, your power options are limited.  Everyone gets one of three travel powers - speed, acrobatics, or flight - and one of 6-7 powersets.  (The seventh, from the Green Lantern DLC, is a paid unlock for non-subscribers.)  Each of the powersets comes with a dual spec option - DPS and something that is actually useful for groups (tank, heal, or crowd control) - as well as two "trees" with something like 10-12 powers on each one.  There are supposedly respecs, but the variety does not look that impressive.

The style panel contains all the loot textures I have ever equipped.

One thing that is very different in DCUO compared to other MMO is the way cosmetics are handled.  Every time your character equips an item, they receive the permanent option to use it as cosmetic armor.  All of your armor is automatically recolored to match the three colors in your palette, though it may be possible to change this somehow.  Either way, it's an interesting feature that lets you keep your preferred superheroic look as you get gear.

Gameplay
Overall, the game feels a lot like a console superhero beat-em-up.   There's a lot of button mashing, a combo meter that I've already run up to 100 hits, and plenty of mobs to beat down.

The combo counter in action

Interestingly, every quest in the game that I've seen so far is effectively a public quest - you don't get credit for everything that happens around you, but most times I do get credit for a mob kill if I did significant amounts of damage, and most times I get credit for helping the beleaguered cops of Gotham if I damage something that is trying to stop them.  

There's also a dungeon finder equivalent that automatically throws together groups.  The only group quest I've gotten so far is a Halloween event against the Scarecrow, and it appears to be way too hard for a group of newbie F2P players of appropriate level, but at least the thing works in principle.

On the plus side, the feel of the world and the lore is alive and well - it's always fun when a new iconic character makes their appearance. 

The Business
As a free player, I didn't feel that badly limited.  There are some unfortunate quirks - NPC's send me mail that I'm not allowed to receive because free players can't open attachments.  In principle, I will eventually care about my bagspace.  I get only one weekly trip to "the vault" - effectively a slot machine for more cosmetic appearance unlocks.  I am completely banned from receiving items from other players in any way until I upgrade to premium, which is okay because I wouldn't have any cash with which to trade due to the game's escrow account - non-subscribers must pay real money to access their currency.
I'm clearly supposed to want to spend $5/500 SC for the permanent upgrade to "premium" status, which increases my character slots from 2 to 6, adds more than 50% to my total bag+bank slot inventory, and opens up the broker.  I just don't see precisely why I do want this, since I'm not feeling that I lack anything. 

If you are looking to spend the 500 SC, there are cosmetics and consumables in the cash shop, but probably the most attractive options to meet this quota are character slots (500 SC per, though I'm not sure if I need seven slots with only seven powersets in the game) or inventory and bank slots (300-400 for additional slots, unclear whether this is account-wide, and the numbers do not add up to a convenient way to spend exactly 500 SC).  If you're prepared to spend a bit more, there's the Green Lantern DLC, which costs 1100 SC but actually includes a decent chunk of content along with the Green Lantern powerset.  Alternately, non-Green Lantern fans could wait for future DLC, which will probably run in the same price range, and possibly snag a double Station Cash weekend for a hefty discount in the process.

I'm not at all hostile to the cash shop as currently organized, I just don't see anything that I really want in it either.  If this does turn out to be a good game that I'd be willing to support, this is unfortunate. 

The Outlook
If this game had come out as a single player game with paid DLC and optional online multiplayer, it would have likely been a huge hit - as it is, the game is reportedly three times more popular on the PS3, and that market is willing to pay $60 for a box and $10 for the occasional DLC.

Instead, SOE went for the monthly fee model and came up short.  Now the game is in the unenviable position of having gone Free to Play ten months too late, after having effectively failed to make it as a paid game and dwindled to the smallest number of servers the payment platforms allow.  (PVE and PVP rulesets are two phases on the same server, with shared queues for instanced PVE and PVP content.  It sounds like world PVP is problematic in any case, because apparently people who want to be Batman greatly outweigh people who want to be Killer Croc.)  Like many games that have had to retrofit their payment models, I'd argue that this one does not make a ton of sense. 

On the plus side, there's definitely some interest in the game, and I suspect that it will get many more players on the PS3 side - PS3 players will download anything they can get for free off the PSN store.  This may even translate into some additional money for SOE, though clearly much less than they were hoping for.  That said, I can't help but wonder that this game won't be around in a year - the only games SOE ever cancels are licensed IP's, and this one probably is not cheap.  The fact that there's little doubt in my mind that I can finish the content in the game before the lights get turned off doesn't do much to reassure me about the game's outlook. 

P.S. Two additional potential losers in this deal - the Marvel Universe online MMO, which will now arrive in a marketplace where all three previous superhero MMO's have gone F2P inside of about a year, and anyone else who thinks putting a subscription MMO on the PS3 is something the PSN customers will tolerate.  (I half feel bad for FFXIV trying this, they've already been through a lot.)

Could GW2 Self-Heals Backfire?

The gang on the Multiverse did a rundown of upcoming MMORPG's this week.  They noted that there seems to be a general trend of backlash against class-based games in general and the "holy trinity" in particular these days, and they blame the rise of solo play.  I'd suggest that their cause and effect may be reversed.  In my view, the holy trinity mechanic complicates the process of looking for groups to point where developers are forced to offer more solo options as a concession to the difficulty of finding a group. 

As the gang reminded me, the forthcoming Guild Wars 2 will supposedly eschew the traditional dedicated healer class, instead giving all character the tools to watch their own health bars.  This might sound like a way to address the problem of the holy trinity, but I'm wondering that the devs may be giving players what they say they want instead of what they actually want.

Causes of "LF2M tank and heals"
In every game that I've played, the most common difficulty in assembling a group is finding players to fill the tank and healer slots of the "trinity".  People who are down on solo play will jump to blame it for this problem - DPS characters often solo faster, they would argue, and therefore the system encourages players not to play tanks and healers.  The truth is more nuanced than that. 

I only lasted a bit over a month in FFXI back in 2006, which was about as solo-unfriendly as games have ever been.  The tank and healer shortage was in full effect in that game, and I'd routinely see groups spend so long looking that the four bored DPS would try asking more DPS with tank or healer subjobs to try and fill the missing roles (which tends not to end well when the group also insists on trying to pull the toughest possible mobs for max exp). 

Meanwhile, over in WoW, the fact that it's easier to level solo is nigh meaningless, because dual spec allows players to switch from the best solo spec to the best tanking/healing spec at the literal touch of a button.  As Spinks points out, there are other issues involved in picking up WoW tanking at this stage in an expansion cycle (chiefly the learning curve), but I don't think you can argue that solo leveling alone accounts for the fact that tanks get groups nigh instantly, while DPS wait for 15-30 minutes. 

The dirty little secret is that DPS IS EASIER.  As a DPS, you need to know two things: what order to push your buttons in, and where to stand.  The order in which you push the buttons may vary slightly based on the situation (perhaps you're saving cooldowns for a burn phase, or AOE'ing adds), but that's usually not that unpredictable.  The where to stand part means being in range of the boss and not standing in the fire, and even the second part of that role is more than many DPS (myself sometimes included) can handle. 

As a tank or a healer, you still need to be aware of the two things DPS need to know (what buttons to push, and where to stand) but you also need a far greater awareness of what the other members of the party are doing.  I was once the last player capable of removing a curse from the main tank left standing in a 40 man raid, and that one minor responsibility - far less than a real healer would have to handle - was enough to make that fight the most stressful experience I have ever had in an MMO.  Being a tank or healer is harder, carries more responsibility, and many players simply do not want this level of complexity to their hobby. 

Distributing heals, responsibility
So back to GW2's little revision, in which everyone has to heal themselves.  The practical effect of this change is that, instead of one player shouldering the responsibility for everyone's health bars, everyone has to add their own self-healing on to their other responsibilities.  If I'm right, this means that GW2 DPS WILL BE HARDER than DPS in other games due to the additional task.  The really good DPS, who always top the meters and move out of the fire and do whatever misc utility their classes have, will really shine under this system.  Those of us who struggle to react quickly enough with someone else watching our health bars may not fare so well. 

The point of asking for the removal of the trinity is to make it easier to assemble groups.  It's simply not fun to have five people lined up outside a five player dungeon only to be told that they all have to sit on their rears because none of them is a healer.  However, the new problem may be that this system further emphasizes the difference between a good player and an average one.  The average player no longer does average DPS, they do 0 DPS because they failed to watch their health and they died.  The irony is that this may leave players - especially the good ones - unwilling to do PUG's at all.  If that's the case, a change that was intended to facilitate grouping may actually make it more difficult. 

Connecting New Players With The World

Motstandet has a post up praising the immersion offered by FFXI's harsh travel system.  More than anything else, this system was the reason why my stay in Vanadiel back in 2006 lasted for a mere 5-6 weeks.  At the time, soloing was not really an option beyond level 10 or so and you could not get a group if you weren't in the correct zone (which may or may not be the zone in which the group would eventually be leveling).  As a newbie, I lacked both the knowledge and the resources needed to pull off this travel successful.  The problem was not that travel was hard, or that it was time consuming, but that it literally prevented me from getting where I would need to be in order to play the game.   

That said, I look at EQ2's new travel map system, and I'm not sure that they haven't gone too far in the opposite direction.

The New EQ2 map

You could argue that EQ2 travel was in need of a user interface overhaul.  If you were in Qeynos and wanted to get to the Enchanted Lands, you needed to know to take the boat bell to Antonica, from Antonica to Thundering Steppes, from Thundering Steps to Nek Forest, and finally from Nek to your destination.  (At least, I think that was the order.)  The process took about 10 seconds of gaming time but it also triggered a total of four loading screens, and a newbie might legitimately not have known which way to go. 


(Another absurd example: I could never remember what subzone of Freeport the Research Assistant lived in, so I would instead ride the carpet to Sinking Sands, carpet to Butcherblock, run to hills and fly to Gorowyn to use the RA there.  The lore openly weeps that I'd travel all the way around the world because the Freeport city guards could not tell you where in their own city the Research Assistant lives.  Then again, I suppose they might be mean enough to do that on principle.) 

In the new interface, you click on any bell anywhere in the world and get the above map.  You can pick any zone - including some inland destinations that did not previously have bells - and you'll appear right there.  Wizard and Druid portals also use this new UI, but offer slightly different destination (including newly expanded options from the last two patches).  If your guild hall has all three travel options, you can teleport instantly to at least one point, and possibly as many as three, in every single zone in the game. 


Location and Context
I will concede that it is more likely that I will correctly identify continents on a map of Norrath now that I actually look at one on a regular basis.  Given that zones were already broken up with loading screens that might encompass vastly different distances, the amount of additional harm done by moving to a single map is minimal compared to the previous clunky UI. 

At the same time, this approach kind of removes zones from their geographic context.  Previously, if you wanted to ignore the breadcrumbs and just go exploring, you knew that Nek and TS were your hubs and you could branch out to there in search of something in the right level range.  In a more-connected world like Azeroth or Vanadiel, you would literally walk to the edge of the current zone and the next zone over would be aimed at a higher level.  In EQ2 today, if you want to go somewhere new, you'll have to start clicking at random, load up the Wiki, or go to the new "storyteller" window of the quest log (which will flat out tell you where to go). 

At the end of the day, I still think that there has to be a system in place so that a player who has somewhere to be - especially because they're looking to join a group - has a way to get there quickly.  I'm not opposed to working for that privilege through rep grinds, consumable daily quest rewards, or gold or whatever, and I definitely support making players reach each location at least once on foot before they can insta-port there.  (This was part of EQ2's druid rings, and they removed it for the new patch.)  However, there are enough other obstacles in the way of group content without also having travel block access.

EQ2's solution may be better than WoW's approach, which is to literally teleport you instantly to a dungeon on a continent that you've never even visited, if that's what the random group finder picks.  Still, I'd be happy to give back a little of this arguably excessive access to get a little bit of that sense of zone progression back. 

The Death Penalty Difficulty Fallacy

Discussion of the Rise of the Leet King exercise continues on the blogosphere. Responding to some suggestions about harsher death penalties from Tobold's original post, Gevlon says the following (bolded emphasis mine):

- Slower leveling: long =/= hard. Saying "cheese" is easy. Saying it 10K times is long, but not harder. Yet it would be great if one could finish his questlines without greying out all the quests and monsters.
- Experience loss death penalty: Definitely yes. Without death penalty all content, regardless difficulty can be brute-forced: you try and try and try until the RNG gives it to you. So without death penalty nothing is hard, just long (need more tries).

For someone who spends a lot of time talking about opportunity costs, I'm especially surprised to see Gevlon of all people fall for the "harsh death penalty = more difficult" fallacy.

ALL MMORPG death penalties are really just time
When you die in WoW, you suffer two penalties:

- Time lost running as a ghost back to your corpse to revive, recast any buffs, and deal with any respawned mobs.
- Money spent on repair bills and refreshing any consumables that ended early because of your demise.

The time is, obviously, time. The money, however, can also be measured in terms of the time it would take you to replace it.

Now let's look at the exp penalty that Gevlon says prevents players from repeatedly retrying content until they win via RNG default. Experience debt on death delays your next level, while the losing levels outright might obligate you to go back and regain the level immediately before you can continue what you were doing. Still, both penalties are ultimately reversed by spending more time playing to re-gain the lost exp.

How about item loss? Games with item loss/decay very rarely feature items that simply cannot be replaced. EVE veterans repeat the motto "don't fly it if you can't afford to replace it". In this context, loss of items is effectively loss of money, which we've already established is actually loss of time.

But what if the game goes even further, and actually inflicts irreversible harm to the character, whether it's permanent loss of an irreplaceable item or even the almost-never used extreme of permadeath? Even in this case, the amount of damage the developer can inflict on the player can be reduced to a quantity of time - the time it would take to replace their character re-starting from scratch.

Unless the developers are actually charging you real world money by the death - and playing a game with that business model would be a real leap of faith - there are no penalties that cannot be reduced to an amount of time that it takes to recover from the damage.

The effect of increasing time penalties
Though all penalties are ultimately an amount of time, there is no question that the amount in question differs drastically from game to game. In WoW, I find that the gold cost for repairs and consumables is all-but irrelevant in the context of my daily income. In EQ2, the experience debt for a death can be fully paid off with a handful of mob kills, or logging off for the night. By contrast, losing a level in FFXI can put the player in the difficult position of having to seek a group that's farming in a different level range.

Even so, all of this is merely increasing the time the player is penalized for their mistakes. And, as Gevlon himself says barely a line before falling for the death penalty fallacy, long is not necessarily hard. If anything, the game that players actually experience when harsh death penalties are implemented becomes easier, not more challenging. Players are not willing to risk failure when the penalty in their time is so steep, and thus they are far more inclined to demand group-mates who outgear the content or can otherwise demonstrate that they will provide a SAFE experience.

Ironically, we're seeing precisely the same behavior in WoW today, despite its supposed lack of death penalty. The fact is that a five-man group that wipes twice on every boss and needs to replace someone midway through via votekick or frustration can easily spend double or triple the time it takes an overgeared raid team to clear content that's five tiers below them. And, sure enough, players bail out on unpopular dungeons and immediately votekick their team-mates if gearscores and achievement checks raise concerns that someone will not be able to pull their own weight. Perhaps even WoW has more of a death penalty than people realize.