CoX and LotRO have good implementations: send whatever chat you want to whichever tabs you want. I can have a “guild, alliance, and whisper” tab to make sure I did not miss anything during a fight, then another for narrowing information during raids or dungeons.

Guild Wars has the interesting addition that it uses !@#$% as a first character to let you indicate which channel you’re speaking in. It also uses what looks like tabs (but are really chat type/channel indicators) for that purpose. They combine to a suitable way of maintaining the last channel you talked in and indicating it visually.

Guild Wars also ties its party search and chat systems. Adding yourself to LFG (or for trade) sends a message to the chat window. It facilitates trade spam, which is unfortunate, but it neatly solves the problem of how invisible LFG is in most games.

: Zubon

Chat Windows is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

City of Heroes used to have the Isolator badge restricted to players who for some reason farmed 100 enemies in the tutorial. No point, no benefit except this, and nothing indicates its existence. You just need to know in advance that it is there and put in the time for it during the most boring part of the game. That is like design decisions duct taped together. That was compounded in Issue 7 with a change seemingly designed solely to taunt the players: one of those enemies would spawn every 45 minutes in the highest level PvP zone. Issue 11 added a mission that let players farm it post-tutorial, and the City of Villains equivalent was always available later via a mission on the tutorial map.

LotRO has “The Undying,” a title track for not dying until level 5/10/14/17/20. If you want to pursue that link, you can see some related unhappiness. Recommendations for getting the title were usually to solo (no PUG risk) and NOT to take the easiest content; you were in a race against the inevitable lag/bug/crash that would kill you, so you needed to get experience at a sane rate rather than trying to farm the weakest enemies. MMO designs that discourage soloing and trying challenging content are not good. The Guild Wars equivalent was even worse (earn more than 1,000,000xp with no deaths, go!), and it was mutually exclusive with another title. That changed in a 2011 update that made Survivor for earning X xp since your last death rather than without ever dying. This helped many slightly unbalanced people avoid going entirely off the deep end.

Feel free to toss in your favorite from other MMOs.

: Zubon

Closed Doors is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

I’m wondering how many other /played stats are driven by overnight AFKs. In City of Heroes, it was common for badge hunters to leave the game running overnight to farm healing, damage, or time under crowd control effects. The /played will be how much time that character has been logged on, but it’s not quite what we mean by how much time you’ve spent on that character.

: Zubon

Misleading Metrics is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

There is one school of thought that thinks F2P means “if you spend enough time, you can experience the whole game for free – paying is just a shortcut”. There is another school of thought that says “you will never see the whole game, unless you pay astronomical amounts of money, and maybe not even then”. There’s a real conceptual rift between the two camps, and some games are finding themselves caught in the middle, or transitioning between the two.
— Brise Bonbons

I’d argue “astronomical,” although that depends on the model, and it’s really the models I want to discuss here.

We’re all familiar with pure subscription models, as well as subscription plus a small premium shop (WoW sparklepony, CoX booster packs). WoW, Warhammer, and others now have unlimited free trials along with their subscriptions. Most Western players have limited familiarity with the item shop model in its pure, evil form, although Allods players got a taste. I think it’s clear under these models that you will be ponying up some funds or you will not be getting much beyond the most basic experience; item shop gamers may have been fooled at the onset, but it should become quickly apparent once they’re into it.

The murkier middle comes from hybrid models and games that let you unlock content (“no cover charge”). Wizard101 has a very clear unlock model, in which you just do not get most zones unless you pay for them. League of Legends gives you access to everything, eventually, a little at a time, with some free permanent unlocks and why don’t you just give them $20 to get the handful of champions you really want? Turbine is the headliner for the hybrid subscription/pay to unlock model, with Dungeons and Dragons Online and The Lord of the Rings Online. You could theoretically unlock absolutely everything in LotRO without paying, although you would be creating and deleting characters to grind deeds until your very fingertips wore away.

And there really is tension between people who want to play for free, absolutely free, and those who are willing to pay and/or recognize that someone needs to fund these companies if you want servers to stay up. When I am getting a lot of value from a game, I don’t mind giving an extra $20 to Valve or Riot or whatnot. I look at my Settlers of Catan box and wonder if I should mail Klaus Teuber a check or something, based on the play value received. But I remember having no money, and I can see a bit of that perspective.

And then there are games that are just annoyingly in your face with their pleas for money. See, for example, the LotRO UI re-design that makes the shop the most visible UI item (poor design decision: the shop links are annoyingly present even if you cannot use them to spend more money, such as subscribers/lifetimers at the stables).

: Zubon

F2P Quote of the Day is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

Edit: let’s see what happens if we add in enemies that do the same, some of which may mirror heroes.

Engineer class turret/sentry:

• Borderlands, Crimson Lance Engineer
• Brink
• City of Heroes, Malta Operations Engineer
• Guild Wars 2
• Hellgate: London
• Mass Effect 2
• Quake Team Fortress
• Star Trek Online
• Team Fortress Classic
• Team Fortress 2
• Warhammer Online
• World of Warcraft (trade skill)

Engineer class without turret/sentry:

• Anarchy Online (or are those robots turrets? haven’t played)
• Battlefield FPS series
• Bloodline Champions
• Eden Eternal
• Hellgate: Global (mobile robots)
• Mass Effect
• Torchlight 2

Non-Engineer class that builds a turret/sentry (“close-enough” names starred):

• **Asheron’s Call 2, Lugian Tactician
• Borderlands, Roland the Soldier, although he is canonically a former Crimson Lance Engineer
• **Champions Online, Inventor
• City of Heroes, Blasters and Corruptors with Devices (was Auto-Turret, now Gun Drone)
• DC Universe Online, Gadgets
• **Dungeon Fighter Online, Mechanic
• **Global Agenda, Robotics
• **League of Legends, Heimerdinger the Revered Inventor

Obvious turret analogue, but not “built”:

• Dark Age of Camelot, Hibernian Animist
• Guild Wars, Ritualist
• Warhammer Online, Chaos Magus
• World of Warcraft, Shaman

“Deploys” turrets s/he did not build:

• Diablo 2, Assassin
• StarCraft, Raven
• TitanQuest, Rogue
• Torchlight, Vanquisher (Arbiter tree)

Rejected, pending argument: engineer units from RTS/turn-based strategy games like Civilization.
Heard of but unknown to Zubon: Alpha Protocol, Return to Castle Wolfenstein.

Engi Census is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

If you play everyday, you probably start around the same time, usually before/after work/school. A 24-hour timer gradually shifts your activities unless you are clockwork-perfect and can consistently complete X exactly 1,440 minutes later, and may the server gods help you if some blip renders the timer slightly off. More likely, you cannot begin whatever quest or instance has the timer until the old timer resets, so if it takes you an hour to complete it, you effectively have a 25-hour timer. There might be some merit to keeping people from building up a daily routine (use a 28- to 32-hour timer in that case), but these games tend to encourage that daily habit. The best mechanics are invisible, not pulling the players out of the game world to check whether the group is waiting on Bob’s reset timer because he hit traffic on the way home last night.

Some examples:

• City of Heroes alignment missions reset every 20 hours.
• League of Legends gives you the “first win of the day” bonus every 22 hours.
• Spiral Knights (from the makers of Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates and Bang! Howdy) refills your “energy” every 22 hours.

: Zubon

The 20-Hour Day is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

: Zubon

F2P Coming Soon: City of Heroes/Villains is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

But I would instead like to highlight one of the best quality of life improvements ever: AE buffing. CoX has four support sets with two castable shields (Cold Domination, Force Fields, Sonic Resonance, and Thermal Radiation) and then the pair of Kinetics buffs. You could spend a LOT of your time buffing and re-buffing, and I did in my day. Now you can hit two buttons and buff the team (plus any innocent bystanders). Note that this gives Kinetics an AE CC-breaker with Increase Density, moving that power from “marginal in many builds” to “omg!”

: Zubon

Issue 20.5 is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

The latest pack is Steampunk, and the trailer is great fun. At least, I am amused by steampunk antics. When goths discover brown!

: Zubon

Steampunk Superheroics is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

Continuing the alternate advancement system, four of the ten incarnate slots will be in the new update. I am particularly drawn to the notion of adding debuffs to all my damaging attacks, but the other three slots are occasional big AE attacks, big AE buffs/heals, and pets. Is it a backhanded line from marketing to say, “the long-awaited endgame arrives!”? Just seven years after launch…

In addition to the two trials, there will be two new lower-level task/strike forces. And, of course, quality of life additions. You can read about all of the new additions here.

: Zubon

Issue 20 is a post from: Kill Ten Rats