Category Archives: Lord of the Rings Online

The F2P In-Game Economy

5 Replies

If you are spending $0 on a game, and the economy is working great for the company and the players who are paying money, but your favored currency is not retaining value well, that means the economy is working. “Working” applies both in the sense of in-game supply and demand (there is WAY more supply of the free currency than of the paid currency, and people with low time value are more prevalent than people with low money value) and the game’s business model. A business model that rewards “not paying” as much as or more than “paying” will not be a business model for long.

Just because you do not like something does not mean it is not working.

: Zubon

Quantum Leap

Leave a reply

I am still playing Dawn of the Dragons, despite the standard social media game mechanics. Something about the energy bars and the false sense of achievement is compelling.

Mission zone 10 is an expansion pack gear reset sort of experience. Players quickly acquire zone 9 gear due to the multiplayer mechanics, and then better from leveling up while wearing it. Along the way, nothing except zone 9 raids do much damage to you. Bosses deal trivial damage, and random encounters deal exactly 1 per attack. And then you hit zone 10. Continue reading →

Pareto Superior Testing

3 Replies

Our testers can veto releases at work, but we have an allied tradition that half a loaf is better than none. We may not get everything we want from an update, but if it makes some things better and no things worse, we go live. We can add the rest in a future update.

A gaming example comes from GW2 crafting. At launch, crafting could use items only from your character’s inventory. Soon after, you could craft from the vault but discovery was still inventory only. Now both check character inventory and the entire vault.

This is easier in my work than in gaming because our users are not competing with each other. If we can implement new functionality for one interface but need another month to accommodate the rest of our users, bonus for the users with the easy update. If your FPS added rocket launchers for PC players but needed another month to add it to the Mac client, forums would explode, especially if PC and Mac players were on the same servers. You can see this in games that are gradually rebalancing one class at a time rather than all at once. The relative values of classes are having large swings each month. LotRO had “the month of the [class],” TF2 had class-specific updates, and other games have similarly revamped single classes. See also City of Heroes gradually adding heroes’ passive archetype abilities over time, so there were months in which only half the classes had them.

Sometimes half a loaf is worse than none. Beyond the cases where it distorts your competitive balance, a function that only half-works can make some things worse and no things better. Adding something that only works for a known half of the users is inconsistent but reliable, which can be okay; adding something that works for everyone a seemingly random half of the time is inconsistent and unreliable, which is bad. The new functionality must work as expected, even if only under additional assumptions, and those assumptions must not cause other problems. Half a loaf is better than a whole loaf with gravel scattered through it.

: Zubon

Or Sometimes It Doesn’t

2 Replies

Yesterday we discussed the tendency of a new option to expand to all potential uses. Facebook was a digital whiteboard but now you use it to share family pictures and invite people to events. I want to discuss the failure to expand in two ways.

“The gimmick” is when it does not proliferate. They tried it once, it failed to spread, and it became quietly ignored outside its home. The blade itself is lost in the back of a drawer. In MMO-land, this is usually update- or expansion-specific, the neat new idea that never went anywhere. Will LotRO have mounted combat outside Rohan? You go through a zone and need to learn a new mechanic, but you will never need that mechanic again. Sometimes that is intentional, to give each zone its own gimmick.

“The forced feature” is when it proliferates but reluctantly and only by including it whether it makes sense or not. Developers may not have a use for it, but management said that it goes in everything. The Wiimote comes to mind: it may not make any sense for the game to involve wiggling the controller, but the Wii was sold around its innovative controller, and the games must justify it. Maybe every dungeon must have a physics puzzle or use the conversation mechanic or include a trap or have a secret door with a bonus treasure behind it. You learn to recognize when you have reached The Obligatory X Scene

These two go together really nicely. In the new expansion set, every single thing must incorporate the forced feature, and then it will not be seen again until someone uses the gimmick five years later in one boss fight as an intentional callback.

: Zubon

If you have better terms than “gimmick” and “forced feature,” comments are open.

Supply Creates Its Own Demand

8 Replies

The blade itself incites to deeds of violence.
— Homer, The Odyssey, although I cannot find a translation online that uses that exact phrasing.

It is not a slippery slope argument to say, “Developing the capacity to X makes X much more likely.” Beyond the tautology that you cannot do X if you cannot do X, we find that humans are more likely to pursue options that are readily available. Once you have the ability to do something, you start finding occasions for it. This is a driver of progress and source of anguish.

Continue reading →

Revolution, Evolution, Variation, Recombination

3 Replies

Before Arkship started, I needed food. I walked until I found a restaurant we did not have back home, which happened to be Fatburger. We do have hamburgers in Michigan, but not that chain, and friends had gushed about the place. It was indeed a quality sandwich and my first time having a hamburger with relish on it. I have had hamburgers and relish before, but not together, and the combination of ingredients was unexpectedly good.

Relatively few restaurants offer anything new. They can offer something new to you, Continue reading →

Revenue Models

10 Replies

Felix Salmon blogging at Reuters has some things to say about monetizing online magazines that has applications to gaming:

Which brings up a fundamental rule of online subscriptions: there is zero correlation between value and price. There are lots of incredibly expensive stock-tipping newsletters which have a negative value… And of course there’s an almost infinite amount of wonderfully valuable content available online for free…

Or look what happened when Newsweek and Sullivan parted ways: both of them started subscription products, at almost identical prices… That doesn’t mean the two products have almost-equal value; it just means that both…came to the conclusion that the $20-a-year range was more or less the point on the supply-and-demand curve where they would maximize their income…

But there’s another consideration, too: the more formidable the paywall, the more money you might generate in the short term, but the less likely it is that new readers are going to discover your content and want to subscribe to you in the future…

…on the internet, people prefer carrots to sticks. That’s one of the lessons of Kickstarter, too. To put it in Palmer’s terms: if you want to give money, you’re likely to give more, and to give more happily, than if you feel that you’re being forced to spend money.

I saw this last note most richly in Kingdom of Loathing, where players would buy the item/familiar of the month as a de facto subscription fee just to give Jick $10. I have donated to quite a few online games, some of which called it “donating,” but I find myself strongly averse to paying for flash games that added a grind you can pay to skip. Games with limited, optional, non-pushy cash shops probably see more purchases that the players think of as donations, and some shops’ opening saw pent-up demand to donate to the game (probably an influence on sparklepony’s revenue).

The third paragraph is most of interest to me. Aggressively monetizing can yield great short term revenue while harming your long term prospects. Without having revenue numbers, I suspect Turbine is seeing this: excellent initial numbers, followed by decline and aggressive monetization of dedicated players, and flirting with blatant absurdity. You can get a feedback loop if players start feeling like the game is being milked before it shuts down.

: Zubon

Hat tip: Marginal Revolution

Yearly Contemplations and Prognostications

2012 was a good gaming year for me. There were some nice surprises. I am looking forward to what 2013 has to bring. Here’s what I thunk and think as we cross the yearly threshold.

Play to Finish MMO Paradigm

With all credit to this term going to SynCaine, this simple concept has been in my rock tumbler since it opened my eyes. It is also very pertinent because arguably my favorite MMO relies on the concept. A “play-to-finish” MMO is one where players get to some end of their choosing, such as a storyline, max level, or something clearly designed as an end point. Then the bulk of the experience has been played. Players that do stick around do so in a fashion similar to single-player gamers doing game achievement unlocks. This is an oversimplification, but this is where I want most MMOs to head. Continue reading →

[LotRO] Help Me with This One

Is this LotRO’s community being typically atypical, F2P players displaying entitlement, or something else I’m missing?

LotRO recently added (character level) experience for crafting, which is the sort of thing we like around here. As with any change, forum-goers announced they are going to quit. It is “More then ridicules. It’s underhanded,” “a deal bracker,” and it will not “do anything aside from discouraging people from doing crafting.” Oh, you laugh now, but “I hope you feel the same when the game is shut down from everybody leaving and Turbine not making a profit.” (One poster took the interesting tactic of replying until he had 10% of the posts in the thread then declaring, “Good for you u like the idea but sorry to say your out numberd.”) (sic on all those)

Some players do not like outleveling content or leveling too quickly. Except there is more content next zone over, and you can run an alt through that level range rather than doing everything from that level range on every character. Except if you are not paying anything and want to avoid running out of free, level-relevant content. Except your opinion does not matter if you are not paying anything, so pushing the free players through the free content faster is a good business decision. Out of alt slots, out of quests? Oh sorry, that is not a problem for subscribers, $$ button’s over there.

Logging on a level 30-something alt, she needed to farm 2.5 stacks of blackberry (master tier) seeds to get one level, and that is with rested xp. Given the leveling curve, this must be a significant amount at the F2P levels but virtually nothing near the level cap. Festival quests now give scaling xp, I’m told, which will also help F2P players level to paid content more quickly.

Turbine also added an xp disabler to the cash store (although not as a consumable as originally designed). Sure, you can stay in F2P levels all you like, but you’re paying for it. I have sympathy for the argument “this should be free for VIP players,” because there are several things in the cash shop that you would expect as part of your paid account rather than monetization monetization, but I’m also sympathetic to “if you think this game is worth playing for months, how about paying us for it?”

: Zubon

My sympathy for that argument does not extend as far as $70 expansion packs.

[LOTRO] The Horse’s Path

Mounted combat is the centerfold for the Riders of Rohan expansion in Lord of the Rings Online (“LOTRO”). It changed things, subjectively for better or worse. Some people think that LOTRO became bad for them. I feel that as I am nearing level 80 I have a pretty good handle on mounted combat. I can see through the curtain, so to speak, and I haven’t decided whether I like what I see. The horse’s path doesn’t seem to go very far. Continue reading →