: Zubon

2012 Predictions 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

When DDO came out, I wondered why it was not using a module pricing strategy: base game cheap/free, sell the dungeons individually. You could even have a store for player-made, developer-checked dungeons for which players get a cut. Of course, selling the packs piecemeal encourage power creep by the question of whether this pack is worth the $5. Is the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus awesome enough to spend extra money on it? The same power creep/worth it question arises every time Team Fortress 2 puts a new weapon in the store, but at least there you face a near-certainty of getting the weapon as a drop (or crafting it) fairly soon.

: Zubon

DLC Is the New Expansion Pack is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

… we salute you!

For those about to rock… is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

I’ve got absolutely nothing against DDO. I think it’s a fine game. Not the best game there is, but does it have to be? It provides fun and that should be the basic mandate of any game. I like the visuals overall. It’s AD&D which, despite its DDO-specific splashes of flavor, is basically a known quantity and familiar waters if you’re into that kind of swimming. It treats its F2P players well and the Eberron setting is interesting.

However, after coming back to the game and playing it more or less steadily for the last couple of weeks something rather ironic stuck out at me: The RP scene is quite barren. The sadly ironic part of all this is that we’re essentially talking about D&D, kickstarter extraordinaire (however you wanna slice it) of Roleplay Gaming, paper or not. So it should have a more or less healthy RP community, but I haven’t observed it (and yes, I know where to look. Us RPers are like dogs sniffing each other’s butts when it comes to this).

So where’s the disconnect?

Lacking RP scenes in online games usually happen due to three major factors, one of them a rather overriding one.

First, it could be that there simply is no critical social mass of players. Whether this is due to a new game that finds itself largely off the radars, or because of an aging game that cannot retain a bleeding playerbase, the end result is the same; there just isn’t enough people around. And since RPers are (almost by default) a minority, well there you go. But I don’t think this is the case with DDO. The game might be aging, yes, but it’s hardly bleeding players away. The much-touted conversion to F2P has definitely netted the game a nice influx of players.

The second common reason is that the game’s setting doesn’t lend itself well for players to RP with, but we can toss this one out of the window when it comes to DDO. I found Eberron to be interesting to be in, and at no point I got turned off by environments, content or lore. There’s plenty there to exploit.

The third factor, however, is the big kahuna and the one which DDO I think fell prey to: The game doesn’t give any tools to its RPers for them to use and create anything of note.

Now, let’s not beat around the bush here. To date, NO MMO, has succeeded in this. Some came closer than others, naturally. Some did better jobs. But MMOs are largely static environments with static resources in which the words “user content” (which is essentially what RP is) are as much holy grail as they are a cuss word as far as most designers are concerned. I’m not ragging on DDO and DDO alone because it fails to adequately cater to its RPer population. It’s endemic to the genre as a whole. But I am ragging on DDO because it only provides an absolute minimum in this area.

It’s quite painful to see AD&D, the game system which has been the great catalytic agent of RP to the masses, the one which spawned countless worlds, settings and variants, one which is so ripe with possibilities to be reduced to this; not only a static playspace, but also a rather confined one as well. RPers essentially generate their own content, and as such they only need two things: room and tools.

What I mean by room: Not strictly geographic or game world room (although it’s always nice), but rather room to play in. Bringing our characters as close to life as we can requires that they feel and seem as alive as they can to us and to those we play with. To do this, a large selection of visual emotes are necessary. Many clothing options are necessary, with a good level of granularity as well. A good interaction with the environments our characters are placed in is necessary, because that usually finishes selling the illusion.

What I mean by tools: Mechanics and options that us players can use to improve and finish fleshing out our characters in a believable way. This is beyond mere cosmetics and naming/titling options, but it does include them. It includes a metric asston of fluff items. It includes the ability to use dyes and accessories on wearables. It includes mechanics to enable us to distinguish our guilds and associations from one another. It includes mechanics to allow us to create our own fluff items and quests.

DDO, sadly, lacks in providing room and tools for its RPers, so it’s not surprising the scene seems to languish. As a norm, due to how static our game worlds are, RPers tend to play around the game and its limitations, and the saddest thing about DDO is just how evident and how strong its RP limitations are. The DDO Store does a good job in providing cosmetics for a price (and we applaud that, seeing as how many of us here at KTR are fans of letting people pay for fluff), but even the Store has its limits. Seems to me DDO began with a very basic framework of what is the absolute minimum of things required for RPers to exist as players in that world but never progressed past it. The list of emotes is paltry, and visual emotes are even more rare. Wearables largely tend to come as a package deal in which you wear something or not, not many parts allowed. Character interaction with its environments is pretty dismal.

So you end up with what essentially is a large stat-based dungeon crawl game. By the way, nothing wrong with that at all. I enjoy those as much as the next guy. But it could have been so much more had it paid more attention to the “RP” instead of the “G” almost exclusively. It’s a very fine game which, unfortunately, tends to make it severely uphill to roleplay in. Two different things.

And since we also love food metaphors in here so much, DDO is like pizza without toppings. Nutritious enough. Serves it purpose. Myself, I like to indulge on cheese pizza too every now and then when we order. My kids like it. But it lacks the layers of flavor, texture and extra nutrition that toppings provide. It’s just the base, and none of the art. Leaves no room for RPers to top it as they see fit.

Memo to Turbine (and while we’re at it, to arena.net too, since they also created another huge cheese pizza a while back): Even my kids are now beginning to have their cheese pizza with olives. We can eat more than base. We want more than base. Give us toppings, give us a large enough base to put them on and let us use it.

DDO, or how to take the RP out of ‘RPG’ is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

To be honest, I found the entirety of the post a little vague.  He has some hyperbolic analogies such as comparing F2P games to coin-driven arcades or TV advertising, and it is unclear whether he is talking about true F2P games or something less when he talks about how some developers rope off a portion of the game for later purchase.  Then he briefly brushes past the wildfire topic of “ethics [in a cash shop],” which is a too-big-for-this-post concept that really muddied his best point.  He did have a fantastic point in his post “[a] game with a more diverse array of offerings is going to satisfy more people and earn more cash in the process.”

In other words, the most profitable games will have something in the cash shop for everyone.  They will have functional items for those time-starved gamers that find it more worthwhile to buy a $2 sword than spend an hour grinding mobs to get it.  They will have boost items for the power gamer that wants the absolute best efficiency of her time.  They will have aesthetic items for the gamer that likes to decorate his virtual home.  It’s a very simple concept for MMOs, considering that our genre is based in part on having some kind of gameplay for everyone (e.g., grinding, raiding, crafting, alting, etc.).

Dungeons and Dragons Online, one of my current active MMOs, has possibly the best cash shop I have experienced.  (As a warning, since I’ve avoided most Asian F2P games this might not be much of an indicator of “best.”)  Like a good cash shop should, it has a wide array of items to buy including content.  They are also very good, in my opinion, at balancing the worth of money vs. the worth of time/skill/effort in game.  Most temporary buffs and boosts are a $1 or less, and most permanent buffs are $4-10.  For example, a Medium Collectibles Bag can be bought in-game for the not-insignificant sum of 90,000 gold.  At the cash shop it can be bought for about $3-4.  A player that is feeling lucky and driven can buy a small loot bonus for about 20 cents each instead of trading in-game items for the boost.

Almost every functional item can be earned in game instead of spending cash, and it’s up to each player to decide at what cost will they have the most fun.  More options are never a bad thing.  What is a bad thing, and what I felt Edery was trying to get at with the term “ethics,” is when a cash shop purchase can destroy the fun of another.  Now, fun is a subjective term, and for purists any functional cash shop purchase will destroy their hard-earned fun.  What’s more important to the general MMO populace is to keep a sense of in-game accomplishment intact.  This is an incredibly touchy subject, which deserves its own set of articles, but I wanted to clarify the danger from “ethics” to something I felt was more appropriate.

Anyway, I may be a bit behind fellow blogger Beau Turkey in foreseeing the imminent future, but I believe that the good cash shops that have flourished in the Western market, such as Dungeons and Dragons Online and also Wizard101, will be dissected and copied.  Upcoming games that rely on some form of a cash shop would be stupid to limit their offerings to the conservative degree that Edery envisions Western developers safely designing.

–Ravious
they all become blueberries

$omething for Everyone is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

Apparently, “free-to-play” these days really means “no cover charge.”

I assume it has been said before, but this is my first time seeing this phrasing, and I like it. Can we all start using that to refer to Wizard101, Dungeons and Dragons Online, and other games with the not-quite-F2P pricing model? I’m not sure that “NCC” will catch on as an acronym, although there would be a special glory in applying it to Star Trek Online…

: Zubon

“No Cover Charge” is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

The key factor here, I think, and the one that led Turbine to this decision, is that DDO subscriptions have increased under its free-to-play model. And not just jumped a bit, but tripled. Not to mention that overall revenue is up tenfold, last we heard.

Pretend for a moment that you are a Turbine executive, circa 2008. Someone on the DDO team presents the free-to-play proposal. S/he includes a slide predicting that subscriptions would triple. You would have laughed him/her out of the room, wouldn’t you? I would have expected some decline in month-to-month subscribers with potentially increased revenues from new and old players engaging in microtransactions. This must be the most successful free trial program ever, to say nothing of the microtransaction revenue.

: Zubon

Holy Crap is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

I was a little spoiled with guild features with my first MMO A Tale in the Desert.  Not only could a player be part of multiple guilds, but guilds themselves actually had purpose above and beyond an exclusive chat channel.  For instance, one guild – let’s call it OilCo – was created to build a massive deep well, which would unearth petroleum.  In the first Telling it required hundreds of man hours, and each slot in OilCo was bought like a share by main guilds.  So not only did the main guild have a guild project in gathering the huge amount of resources necessary to buy a share, but OilCo itself had purpose in maintaining the deep well and sharing out the dividends.  Nothing I have played since has even come close to the purpose given to guilds in A Tale in the Desert (although from what I hear EVE Online and Darkfall seem the closest behind).

In World of Warcraft, and similar games, guild projects are implied.  The guild becomes stronger as its members become stronger.  As the guild progresses in leveling and raiding decisions are made to funnel resources in ways that make the guild stronger.  This is why  the main tank gets first dibs because if the main tank is stronger, raids are easier for the whole guild.  Yet, this guild purpose is not very collective.  It’s ultimately individualistic and selfish in nature.  Sure, Raider Bob could farm herbs for hours to make sure everybody gets a Potion of Noburn, but ultimately the reward for all the work is selfish to each raider.

In Warhammer Online, the guild projects are more explicit, but they are unfocused.  A guild has a level, which is based on the amount of XP activity by guild members.  A guild that RvRs all day will grow in level and power, while a guild of roleplayers will not.  The rewards are tangible, but the purpose can be lost because a guild member can do nearly anything to advance the guild level.

DDO’s guild system seems to be an iteration or two beyond Warhammer Online’s.  Details are still a little hazy, but the guild members will work towards gaining Renown for their guild in order to gain a guild level.  At level 25, the guild can get an airship, which can be slotted with a lot of features, such as access to the auction house.  At level 50 or so Renown noticeably decays.  It is unclear if specific tasks will create greater Renown, or if it follows a Warhammer Online do-anything-to-level model.

It is a well-known fact that MMOs that have people playing together are more successful.  The more purpose an MMO gives to players for their guild, the more likely a guild will work and stay together to achieve goals.  An aimless guild is one that will not last long.

–Ravious

Guild Projects is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

Not that I can blame you, your boss was standing between 2 explosive barrels.

Respectfully,

- Ethic

Dear Quickfoot Cat Burglar is a post from: Kill Ten Rats