: 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

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

: Zubon

Engineers Have Turrets Syndrome is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

: Zubon

Bears, Bears, Bears is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

Near the end of the Gloamwood crusade, I was starting to get bored. I was thoroughly enjoying all the camaraderie, but the game was being distilled down to merely following the herd and firing off as many spam skills as I could before whatever was targeted inevitably popped. The system was stretching to the outer limits of its “balancing.” Yet, there were far too many players for it to respond in a useful way. This is when the system needs for players to scatter.

The simplest solution is also the most un-fun. Simply stop the activity. When players get bored, they will disperse back to the capital city, or quests, or crafting, or slightly active zones. There will be an exponential bleed off rate, and the trick for the developer should be finding that sweet spot between downtime duration and zerg weakening.

Having other activities helps. For example, in Rift there are always quests. Most of them are fairly standard and/or boring, but it passes the time between events. With enough downtime, a player will begin to think of the wealth and experience she could be amassing being active. These other activities lower the pain threshold to bleed because there are other carrots to chase after.

Yet, other carrots are hard to design. In Warhammer Online’s early age, a zerg in an RvR lake became an unstoppable force as it rampaged across the tier. As long as the opponents continued to poke and prod in defiance, the zerg would stay on the move as one. The other carrots were bland in comparison to the ongoing RvR event even in the RvR lakes. So what if the piddly opposition took a few small RvR objectives when we were about to fell a keep. There was simply no reason for a task force to peel off. The rewards gained by zerg action far outweighed nearly every other activity.

Another way is to be heavy-handed with event completion. Tell the zerg they have won in a super-significant manner. The more pronounced the reward, the more people are likely to call the zerg quits because “they done good.” With the final mega-event in Gloamwood the other night, getting a purple token was a great time for me to call it a night. It was unlikely I would get a better reward that night, and it caused me recollect on the fact that I had fun.

The hardest solution is to split or kill the zerg. Sure, it is the easiest solution to implement. Just create an unbeatable opponent that one-shots every player or endless mobs until everybody hits the inevitable out of energy. Yet, it’s hardest to handle elegantly. Designers want their game to be fun, and “rocks fall, everybody dies” is not fun. It’s also pretty hard to get individual groups to peel off. Many players are incommunicado and will simply follow the herd. In the Gloamwood mega-event, the final stage is eruption of mobs surrounding the central city, Gloamwood Pines. Theoretically, this was designed to split the zerg, yet I saw it was much easier just to trample each node in turn. If one node fell, it actually became easier for us to defend as we only had to keep up one defense point.

In review, I think Warhammer Online did a fairly poor job. The motivation to keep the zerg rolling overcame everything except non-action. That’s the way I remember nearly every zerg dying, there was simply nothing to do. Rift is doing a fairly good job at using win-points and other activities as ways to disperse at least parts of a zerg. I am interested to see how things progress further as the events become more complicated and more opposed by the enemy faction. Finally, Guild Wars 2 is going to be an interesting data point. On one hand, everything in the open world is an event. Can a zerg just faceroll a zone, or are the zones designs clever enough to continually eat away at the zerg from behind? The biggest unknown in Guild Wars 2 is how map warping will affect event zergs. Will it increase the growth rate of a zerg to a ridiculous degree as news spreads, or will it cause players a very low-pain means to jump out of the zerg for a break. I’m not even sure ArenaNet can know that answer until some sort of large beta.

–Ravious

The Essential Scatter is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

City of Heroes does this. The Lord of the Rings Online™ does this (except for passive skills). Warhammer Online does this. Dungeon and Dragons, the basis for all these CRPG mechanics, has been doing this for decades (fireball does 1d6 damage per caster level, capped at 10d6), although not so much in 4th Edition.

Really, we promise to pretend not to notice that our spells do 5% more damage while we are fighting goblins with 5% more hit points. MMO players are used to looking past that. Just stop pretending that Fire Bolt III was a good design decision, and especially do not start calling them Lesser Fire Bolt, Fire Bolt, Improved Fire Bolt, Greater Fire Bolt, Lesser Fire Blast, Fire Blast, …, Supreme Exalted Fire Conflagration… And double-especially do not do that while having all those fire bolts on an alphabetized skill screen with no indication of level order.

: Zubon

Buying Skill Ranks is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

If anyone still cared about Warhammer Online, this would be a scandal.
– Ardwulf

I know Ravious already covered this. I don’t expect to see a better MMO line this month, so I will give the award now.

: Zubon

Quote of the Month is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

You spend years making this base content. It takes a lot of work to recreate that leveling path several times, even if you recycle content across the paths (a roc is a red vulture, sure, why not). Unless you are Cryptic, this is something like a four-year development cycle. Now that the game is live, you are expected to patch in new content every one to three months while working on bugs and balance. At least you have some half-developed content that was meant for live, maybe even an advertised feature that was not completed on time; City of Heroes/Villains gets a special prize for patching in the last 10 levels after release twice. Oh, and you likely have an expansion every year or two, and that needs to be big enough to justify selling a new box.

Making new content for each faction is time-consuming, creates balance issues, and has limited value given the number of players at the level cap in multiple factions. Or you can make the new content once and send everyone through it. You will need faction-specific details, but the more overlap you have, the less content you need to develop. Add neutral factions that deal with everyone. Add common enemies. This conveniently encourages PvP and/or cross-faction teams, depending on how you set it up.

So you have one Outland and one Northrend. Albion, Midgard, and Hibernia fought over the one big dungeon, and now their descendants in WAR do the same. Superheroes and supervillains both fight the Hamidon, the Honoree, and Romulus (CoX is odd for having the Statesman Task Force and Lord Recluse Strike Force, very different parallel content). Holiday and event content is often mirrored, with the same content slightly redecorated for the factions’ cities or low-level areas.

I don’t know that I would prefer it any other way. It sometimes feels like corner-cutting, but I do not want to need level-capped characters across multiple factions to see all the new toys, and making two sets of them means more time or more cost. I would rather have two sets of content that I can experience on my main. Although it strikes me that Blizzard has the billions of dollars and the staffing and is still producing shared content at a Blizzard pace.

: Zubon

New Content Is Shared Content is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

Ardwulf thinks that if anybody really cared about Warhammer Online, this would be a scandal. It is a small one on Warhammer Online forums, where cries of MMO death are slightly amplified because of this. But, I think Spinks has the right of it. The “suck” was already there with the end-grind hell levels. Having the option to pay past this suck, while not the best option, is far better than if hell levels were designed so subscribers would want to fork more money in to get back to the fun.

It seems to me that the Western MMO audiences are more readily embracing so-called microtransactions, but they are not yet accepting of games designed to push players into purchases. If MMO-X was released, kept the status quo for years, and then gave a cash shop item to ease the pain, it would not the greatest thing, but it is acceptable. If MMO-X releases exactly the same, but with the cash shop item on launch, players would cry foul. (I saw a lot of this in regards to the Guild Wars 2 transmutation stone uproar.) It’s a thin red line where players’ wallets stand.

Chris at Game By Night is ejected forcibly from a blog-cation to comment, and he thinks that this is more evidence of Warhammer Online going to a subscription-less or hybrid model. Honestly, I am at the point where I am really unsure as to whether it would help. Clearly the evidence shows that Turbine’s toilet paper is now a wad of Franklins, but both Dungeons and Dragons Online and Lord of the Rings Online seemed like stable games at the switch. Warhammer Online seems eternally plagued by RvR issues, and every major patch seems to try something new on the PvP front.

Honestly though, the $10 level is a gimmick. Players still can’t buy their way to 40 because the War Tract limitations are pretty severe. It’s not a meaningful cash shop item. It’s not permanent like an appearance item. It’s not substantial like buying a mount or weapon. It’s just at best a way to get money out of players wanting the equivalent of a $10 party popper. The other cash shop items that just dropped have much more weight on the future course of Warhammer Online, in my opinion.

–Ravious
what’s that? hawaiian noises?

The $10 Level is a post from: Kill Ten Rats