Item wear is a minor death penalty and gold sink, but it can lead to your losing progress in a night of play. However many hundred times you are supposed to fail a raid, you are losing each time you do unless the raid comes with enough trash to pay for your repair bills (and that is just wrapping in the farming you could do outside the raid). You have heard of people hitting their heads against a wall so hard that all their armor broke and they could not afford to fix it. Then there are the expected consumables of potions, food, scrolls, etc. that get burned for each attempt. Those are dispiriting evenings, when you leave with less than you started with, and that experience cannot be wholly beneficial for player retention (which is funny when the game that avoids it does not have subscribers).

EVE Online is a game where you can lose everything you own but keep making progress because skill training is time-based. You are supposed to lose ships over time. Don’t get attached. Even if you are down some ISK, your skill points keep increasing.

There is something to be said for a lack of consequences. It’s a game.

: Zubon

Forward Progress is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

: Zubon

2012 Predictions is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

All you need to know is that the game is under tight NDA wraps with less than two months until launch.

Melmoth on Mists of Pandaria:

Werewolves in top hats, gnomes performing the dance moves from Bloodhound Gang’s Bad Touch, … ridiculous sexual dimorphism in PC races, non-combat pets, Haris Pilton, giant cow-men riding on chocobos, … shoulder pads you could hide a small village under, remote-controlled fighting robots, … escorting mechanical chickens, ludicrous retcons, kobold candles, Forsaken Death Knights, teleporters, steam car vs rocket car racetrack, … dressing up in a murloc suit, orbital death satellites, pink elekks…

And you’re worried about pandas?

Anjin on arguing about Mists of Pandaria:

When people argue that World of Warcraft is a silly game, they are talking about the world. When people argue that it is a serious game, they are talking about the systems.

On second thought, let’s not go to Azeroth. It is a silly place.

: Zubon

Quotes of the Week is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

Anyway, while The Lazy Geek’s thoughts were more negative, I couldn’t help but silently applaud Blizzard. They have this sinking ship. It’s sinking slowly and still dredging up tons of gold and oil, yet I have a feeling the captain already sees the end coming. Except, it’s not going to be the end in a sense. Sure, it will be the end of the massive floating ocean liner that engulfs oceans, but the ocean liner could be retro-fitted into something else. Maybe with hats.

I think that Blizzard should start using WoW like how Valve has been using Team Fortress 2 (TF2). Basically as a lab. Conduct experiments that would normally be frowned upon. Stick that golden goose with tons of hypodermic needles that would have scared stockholders spitless in days of yore. Go crazy. Make a $1000 mount. Sell a new class as DLC. Make the next expansion a digital product only. Give new emotes as dungeon awards. Make a hat-based economy. The sky is the limit!

See, I think we are going to hit a node in the pattern soon for the MMO genre, and in my opinion the outcome is going to be that investors are going to be even less adventurous. Yet, if Blizzard is showing that they are doing some crazy things it is possible that the detrimental nodal effects could be mitigated. Ironically it could be that formulaic Blizzard doing out-of-the-box thinking and experiments could save us from any potential MMO dark ages.

–Ravious

WoW Fortress 2 is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

At least a real treadmill gives you the real progress of a lowered % chance to die of heart disease.

: Zubon

Hat tip. I credit LotRO for having an extremely minimal gear grind, in that there are perhaps two or three tiers of endgame gear between expansions, and the tiers are not that far apart. You only need the raid gear if you are doing the one or two raids anyway.

Gearing Up is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

I have seen less in LoL: Dominion, but I may have just had a good few days. I have also gone days almost every game a 4-on-5 for at least half of it. In Dominion, idiots and quitters are more prominently felt, because capping and defending 4-on-5 just does not work even if the 5 are pretty lousy. One game today featured a player tripling up on the bottom (you usually send 1 or 2), then running past the minions, suiciding into a tower and quitting; the game is decided 30 seconds into it, and now we just wait for the timer to officially forfeit.

It’s a general problem in F2P games: players with no investment have no loss if they’re just there to watch the world burn. Real grognards from games where you paid by the hour (with small communities and active admins) can likely regale us with how you behaved or else. I’m debating how impressed I am that folks will play a game for ~200 hours and then continue to grief/quit/whatever in low-Elo ranked games. I suppose you’ll get xp while being an idiot for those 200 hours, because you keep leveling up win or lose.

I have no idea how the community moderation tools are helping this. I dutifully click the report button after games where folks leave, smack talk, and such, but it’s not like we get a report back.

: Zubon

Grinding to the Real Game 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

The only thing that is dead is the MMORPG gold rush, and that is something to be thankful for. It only created a huge number of very bad games in the hope of getting rich quick. Surprise, surprise, video game players aren’t total idiots, and bad games don’t really do well. Especially not if you have a business model where you expect your customers to keep paying for a long time, instead of selling them a game they can’t test first and running with the money before the customer finds out the game is bad.
– Tobold

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

Five or six years ago I went to a sake-tasting event in San Francisco called “The Joy of Sake”. About 140 sakes. In a few hours I became such a sake connoisseur that the sake I could afford — and used to buy regularly — I now despised. The only sake I now liked was so expensive ($80/bottle) that I never bought another bottle of sake.
— Seth Roberts

What was revelatory for me at one point was that there were people who thought of themselves not as gamers, not as MMO gamers, but as WoW players. They are not interested in the genre, in seeing competing implementations, in the next MMO coming out… They just play WoW. Hardcore or casual, this is their game, done, the way some people are baseball or football fans (a perspective that had not occurred to me until I typed it, which suddenly makes “one game” make a lot more sense, although most seem to be “sports fans” who need a group of sports to make it through the other seasons).

Today I find myself wondering if my recent blasé with the MMO world is a result of becoming familiar with too many different ways of doing things in MMOs. No matter what game I am playing, at least half the features will have been done better somewhere else, and the failings of individual games and the entire genre stand silhouetted. Maybe if I did not know better, getting another boss further in the latest raid tier would be fulling absorbing entertainment. But that seems like a critical failure of fun theory.

I am not saying that WoW is a bad game. I’m more saying that if you have never played/studied EVE, you do not know how a game economy (and economic tools) could work; if you have never played A Tale in the Desert, your crafting ideas are probably disgustingly limited; if you are not familiar with WoW, you are probably willfully putting up with the far shoddier implementation that is so common in MMOs. And what has seen cannot be unseen.

: Zubon

[Hello Seth Roberts readers! Pork belly is in the fridge, flaxseed oil (capsules, not fresh) is in the pantry, and we have some lovely videos of faces on the DVD rack.]

Are Single-Game Players Happier? is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

Once a MMO embarks upon the “new expansion, gear reset, more love for raiders” road, the danger is that the game becomes so linear and focused on the end game that players new to the game may feel they can never catch up — and that even if they have the desire, the largely unpopulated lands between them and the bulk of the playerbase could be very discouraging.
— Tipa

Sentence of the Weekend is a post from: Kill Ten Rats