Author: Zubon

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Промоакции для игроков не только в шутерах — воспользуйся промокодом Vavada от наших партнеров и получи бонусы, которые подарят азарт и атмосферу, сравнимую с игровыми победами.

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Flash Not-Really-MMOs

Over the past week, I have responded to quite a few requests, ads, etc. for F2P browser-based “MMOs,” CCGs, etc. They have been, to a one, poor. The winner, though, is Call of Gods, a game that applies the Evony/Civony/Travian economic model to what looks like a mostly PvE game. Combat plays out automatically with no player intervention. The developers recognized that this was really boring, so they added a button to skip it … which demands the RMT currency. Yes, it is a game that invites you to play and then offers to let you pay for the privilege of not doing so.

: Zubon

Grinding to the Real Game

In theory, I like League of Legends. In practice, you need ~200 hours of play to get to ranked games, then enough ranked wins to get out of Elo Hell, before you stop seeing so many people griefing, feeding, quitting, etc. As the wiki link suggests, any good player will get through random grief and rise about Elo Hell … over the course of another ~200 hours of play

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

League of Legends: Dominion

Also known as League of Legends: Arathi Basin. It is live, a map with 5 capture points instead of three lanes. The overview has information about the new mode. I haven’t tried it myself, but the games should be shorter (~20 minutes).

Of course, quite a few League of Legends games are decided at the 20-minute point, because that is when a team can forfeit, but that’s another story.

Update, having tried it: Wow, that is a MUCH faster game. Team battles start within 90 seconds. I have been ahead 200 (of 500) and lost and behind 200 and won. The map is much smaller, the minions are fewer, and everything just feels very INTENSE NOW GO GO POWER! versus the stately pace of the League of Legends early game with its laning and harassing.

: Zubon

My Dog Ate It

Commenters have raised the issue of lagging out due to a pet’s having eaten the router. They went on to start the real question: how much will this affect performance, and how can we mitigate it?

Is your dog small or thin enough that a wireless signal can still get through? Will it matter if you have a long-haired cat? Are the essential pieces small enough that they could be sufficiently whole after the plastic case has been devoured? And how much battery life does that thing have?

: Zubon

related

Classics as Social Media Games

Oregon Trail is now on Facebook. It is kind of lousy. Take the old game and extend it so it cannot reasonably be completed in one day, to say nothing of one play session. Add in the social media mechanic of a limited number of turns/amount of energy, in this case several separate bars for that. Add in the social media mechanics of items requiring RMT or soliciting the help of several friends. Add in minimal spamminess. Serve tepid.

Civilization is now on Facebook. It is rather lousy. Take the names from the usual game and throw out pretty much everything. Keep the tech tree in a weird form. Keep the resource types. Replace most of the mechanics with a few mini-games. Remove the world map. What guilds are in most games, nations are here.

This is actually a good idea that makes sense. CivWorld makes superior use of social media gameplay mechanics, if only there were more of a game underneath. Isolated city-states can be competitive early on, but large and/or organized nations own the late-game; this makes sense, and you cannot “rush” it by wiping out other nations, so the game inexorably pushes towards social integration or failure. Instead of “come back in x hours to harvest,” the game accumulates harvests that you can cash in to make everything produce. There is a hard cap on how much real money you are allowed to spend per unit time. I cannot see much/any reason to spam your friends to do the equivalent of tending your crops. They are being a good corporate partner here, not trying to make up for the horrible game by adding addictive elements.

But the games are still horrible. Maybe there is some depth of whatever, were I to spend a few weeks playing HARDCORE, but they play like the original games fed through a food processor then dribbled over a featureless path that takes two weeks to walk.

: Zubon

Krepost

The krepost in Civilization V is one of the most simple, elegant, nearly hidden pieces of design you are likely to find. Every Civ V civilization gets a special ability and two altered units or buildings. The Roman legions can build roads, the Siamese wat combines culture and science, and the Americans are good at bombing things. The Russian unique building is the krepost, which replaces the barracks. It is a normal barracks plus a 25% reduction in the culture cost to acquire new tiles. Like the barracks, it is unlocked with Bronze Working, an Ancient Era technology.

That one bonus on one building creates a dynamic that simulates Russia beautifully. It encourages you to build a barracks in every city, even for a quasi-pacifist player like me who has no need to build troops in every city. That leads naturally to a more militaristic playstyle. The bonus also facilitates the creation of a large empire with extensive borders. Those borders will put you into conflict with neighbors who object to your taking up half a continent, but those neighbors might be hesitant to mess with an enemy who is prepared to mobilize troops in every part of the empire. And this mechanic starts in the earliest stages of the game, which gives it time to define your strategy and to let those cultural borders expand.

Add one unrelated bonus to one item and watch the entire play dynamic change.

: Zubon

On Asking for Money

I’m happy to help a friend in need so long as I think it will make a difference. You have some friends whom you would gladly lend money or your car. You have other friends who constantly need to be “lent” money, and you know it is going down a bottomless pit. They have back-to-back Facebook posts about how much they love their new iPhones and how they can’t afford to buy books this semester.

I feel the same about game developers. I want to keep afloat the companies that make products I enjoy, but I am immediately disinclined to contribute to someone who always has his hand out. I presume that the latter brings in more revenue than it drives away, but I am one of the driven away. I don’t mind a cash shop ad at log-in plus a link somewhere on the UI. I do mind if the most visible (worse: and flashing) UI element is a shop ad, along with a constant stream of pop-ups and item descriptions that ask you to spend money.

There is an old one-liner about how banks will only lend you money if you don’t need it. Close, but where a good banker makes his/her money is being able to distinguish between an investment that will pay off and a black hole of endless “need.” In life, try not to resemble the latter.

: Zubon

F2P Quote of the Day

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

Isengard Pricing

The pre-order option for LotRO’s next expansion just became more attractive when Turbine released the Turbine points costs, which are about twice as much and were presumably calculated as “every single point a lifetime subscriber would have accumulated since F2P.” Oh, and the pre-order xp item is being added to the store, so that’s $10/character bonus in the pre-order, if you wanted to price it that way. I would expect more upcoming content to be classified as “expansion” and therefore an additional cost to VIPs and lifetimers.

We also now have the timing of content release: raid at launch, the instance cluster in December. That is, the answer to Mirkwood’s ridiculously lacking endgame is to launch without most of the endgame and patch it in 3 months later. That kind of worked for City of Heroes/Villains, because they launched the entire game that way, giving you 40 levels to enjoy until the first patch, rather than 10 levels in a game with rested xp.

This is basically the make-or-break point for any current players. Either you pay the $30 for an Isengard pre-order or you quit, because the Turbine Point cost is not worth it. I would have paid 3,000 TP for the expansion, but not 6,000; the pricing at 6,000 perversely makes me want to wait for it to be 1,500, so someone comment or something if it goes 75% off someday.

Following up on last year’s post, the F2P model has apparently gone off the rails for Turbine. Has revenue fallen that much, or are they plowing it into their next game rather than their current games? LotRO is now a game with an excellent mid-game and an endgame that has gotten worse every time they raise the level cap. But hey, if people will pay for it, “less content for more money” is a great business model.

: Zubon

Hat tip: Spinks