Author: Ravious

Photon Phasing

Marc Nottke at Massively writes his last column on “phasing” for MMOgology, a column that had a very good run.  Phasing is a mechanic in a persistent MMO world where prior to some event horizon players are all in phase alpha of a zone.  After the world-changing event, players belong to the phase beta club.  A town that players once loved is burnt to the ground, there may be new mobs, new quest-givers, etc. in the beta phase.

The problem with the big MMOs current use of phasing (namely World of Warcraft and Lord of the Rings Online to a much lesser extent) is that the community is partitioned.  The door goes one way, folks.  When you raised the ire of the enemy and your city was burned, well you can’t go back in time to see the city unburned.  That would be silly.  Now it’s time to eke the new world order out of the ashes.

Guild Wars phased the world between the starting area and the rest of the game with the first offering, Prophecies.  Players refused to leave.  They stayed in phase alpha, and to some degree – as much as is possible in Guild Wars – built a community there.  This is an extreme, but it does highlight the dangers of phasing.  People are not happy when people in the beta phase club cannot come back and group up with the slower alpha phase club.  Developers therefore have to be careful to limit the scope of the alpha phase in width and depth.  Areas unaffected by the event should not be partitioned, and players should not have to spend inordinate amounts of time trying to pass through to beta phase.  More thoughts after the break.

Continue reading Photon Phasing

Moria Hard Mode Review

I have been starting the end game for Lord of the Rings Online Mines of Moria expansion.  There are six dungeons in Moria.  I have not been in every dungeon, but each dungeon seems to be a full dungeon having hours of content.  The ones I have experienced so far each have had an excellent story vignette, and they are beautifully crafted.

However, I don’t know if I will ever get to play the full experience of each dungeon.. or just one.  Each dungeon has a hard mode.  The best way to describe it is hard mode requires a trick, which usually requires two things.  The first thing is players must usually ignore a lot of the dungeon’s content in order to accomplish hardmode.  The second thing is players must employ some sort tactic that is not usually required.

When hard mode is beat players get a one-in-six chance to get the absolute best armor in the game -  radiance armor.  This armor is required to fight the (current) ultimate boss of Moria: the Watcher in the Water.  The loot gained from doing the dungeon as normal pales by comparison, as does any crafted items.  So, Turbine created an atmosphere where players only want to do hard mode.  Yesterday, I saw a group on a global chat trying to form for well over an hour to go through to play one of the dungeons normally.

I like the challenges that hard mode presents, when they are not bugged to hell (which many are).  I do not like that Turbine funneled players to this extreme degree.  I hope that upcoming Book 7 update looks at hard mode with a hard eye. 

–Ravious
hip about time

Guild Wars 2 – Ripples from Friday

After the shareholder’s report released Friday, there were many interesting things that happened through the Guild Wars community and news sites.

The first thing I found really interesting was the disregard for Aion.  The report gave us a fairly tight window for a U.S. release of the MMO.  Massively left Aion out of the subject line but mentioned Guild Wars 2 in the subject line and used the Guild Wars 2 logo in the post.  Ten Ton Hammer also overlooked Aion’s release window and focused on the Guild Wars 2 “delay.”  I think this should be pretty telling about NCSoft’s 2009 offering.  Aion marketing has their work cut out for the western world.

The second thing of interest was the an open letter from Mike O’Brien, Guild Wars 2 overlord, in direct response to the community reaction caused by the released report.  He stated that Guild Wars 2 would be released “when it’s done.”

I think it was a good letter, and is smoothing over the reality that Guild Wars 2 is not really on the horizon yet.  It is on Valve-time.  I am really happy that ArenaNet is in a position to seemingly afford such a luxury.  Guild Wars Factions, Nightfall, and especially Eye of the North were on very tight development schedules, and the feeling of a rushed schedule came through sometimes (even though some were outright delayed).  What would the series have been like if ArenaNet was on Valve-time from the start? I digress…

However, this was not what we were led to expect with Guild Wars 2.  Somewhere ArenaNet shifted gears into a long development time, and they forgot to make sure their community was on board.  All we knew was that the originally stated plan was out the window.  I think what Chris Chung said in the conference call and Mike O’Brien’s letter are definitely smoothing out that gear shift.

–Ravious
not everything is a trap

A Philosophy of Fail

Colin Brennan, over at Massively, pulls no punches in describing the World of Warcraft’s current state of the early game.  I also do not understand Blizzard’s decisions with the features Colin sets forward.  I do know that Blizzard makes some incredibly polished content, and I do know that running through ~70 levels before getting to the “actual” game is not very fun.  New players want to know they have a fun game from the start until they catch up to their friends.  Not a fun, brief start then agonizing, lonely grind even if it is quicker than it used to be.

The failure, I feel, is that Blizzard is not trying to cultivate an enjoyable journey through the whole game for new users, newly returning users, and alternate characters to enjoy.  They are pushing players past some really good (old) content at ever increasing speeds.  Without the raid treadmill, or similar content gating, every long wait that ends with Blizzard making more content grays out a lot of the prior content.  And, in the end I just see a pile of band-aids.

–Ravious
just a flesh wound

Guild Wars 2: 2010-2011

NCSoft released their quarterly earnings report for the last quarter of 2008 today.  The company’s sales and profits seem to be on the upswing, but the bad news is that according to the product lineup, we will not be getting Guild Wars 2 until 2010-2011.  This makes sense for the company as a whole if they want to push Aion in the U.S. at the end of this year, even if ArenaNet is calling their own shots.

Things could of course change, especially with the leadership and corporate shakeup going on at NCSoft West, but Guild Wars 2 is very unlikely for 2009 with the little information we have.  For some good Guild Wars news, it is pretty likely that they will have sold 6,000,000 units by the end of next quarter further solidifying the success of a great business model.

–Ravious

EDIT: After listening to the conference call it seems that the internal expectations of what Guild Wars 2 would be really took off during development.  They did intend to make a ‘sequel’ at the start, but it has evolved in to ‘a whole new game.’

Watch Ads For Your Subscription

A quick idea to throw to the masses.  My wife and I watch all our shows on the internet.  We get to watch our favorite shows for about 1-3 minutes of ad watching for an hour long show.  Could this be brought to MMOs?

Obviously MMOs have tried in game advertising.  Planetside had in-game advertising while players waited for transportation between battles.  Matrix Online had them strewn throughout the MegaCity as well.  I believe Anarchy Online was the first big MMO to implement in game advertising.  I think the problem was two-fold: (1) it impinged on player’s feel of immersion.  Seeing Fanta ads in Planetside breaks the feeling that the developers were trying to create through lore, props, etc.  (2) the advertisers could not be sure how well their ads were doing.  I know I barely look at the developer created wall-hangings and stained glass windows depicting actual lore.  In a world where my mind automatically parses out ads on countless web pages, why would anything be different in an active game?

But, what if just prior to a play session a gamer could watch a few ads?  The player logs in, the system checks to see how much ad-time is “owed” based on past play time, and then it starts streaming a few ads to the player.  A player who is “hardcore” with “no time for this $%#&” could pay the monthly subscription fee and get no ads.

This allows advertising without breaking the game immersion, gives players more options to pay for the game, and gives advertisers a way to gain access to an audience they may not normally get.  If I can generate enough money for a big TV studio to keep LOST afloat through minimal ad-watching, shouldn’t there be a way I can pay for a $15 subscription by doing the same?

–Ravious
tuned to a dead station

Migrant Developers

There is a lot of buzz in forums and the blogosphere about the recent layoffs from Mythic (and later THQ).  The extremes can be found at Broken Toys (sympathetic view from the inside) and Tobold’s MMORPG Blog (harsh view from the outside).  What I want to comment on comes from the statement from Mark Jacobs (top boss of Mythic) concerning the layoffs at Mythic after the launch of Warhammer Online.

With respect to customer service, quality assurance and play testing, prior to the launch of WAR, we hired additional people to deal with the rush of demand associated with an MMO launch and to insure the best possible experience for our players.

This seems to be commonplace with the development of MMO’s these days.  Age of Conan had to have layoffs from their pre-launch bloat as well.  Is the MMO development culture now one filled with migrant developers?

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Exploits or Creativity in Moria?

I just reached level 60 in Lord of the Rings Online, and this happens to be my first max-level character in a Diku-style MMO.  I was really excited to gearshift to the Mines of Moria endgame, which currently consists of a few dungeons, a few epic quests, and the Watcher in the Water.  My first two endgame experiences really threw me for a loop.  Were we playing as intended?

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The Player’s Advocate

A lot of people could be the player’s advocate to the developers in MMOs.  Forumites say a lot of things, but the focus is about as good as a room full of overtired, over-caffeinated toddlers.  Bloggers write with better focus, but we are full of ourselves.  Playtime and sales statistics have extreme focus, but they don’t tell the developers anything human.  The best player advocates, I believe, are the often overlooked, often assaulted community managers.

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