Author: Zubon

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Of Three-Monthers

About a decade into the MMO genre, we have started seriously discussing MMO tourism and have settled on the idiom of a “three-monther,” which implies how long you will stick with that game. Of course, as in most online game blogging, Jessica Mulligan wrote about it years ago in Biting the Hand: the four-month point was where games either died or took off. I am wondering about Sturgeon’s Revelation: a game you can happily play for years is an outlier, and most games you play for a few months then move on.

My college gamer friends almost perfectly followed that pattern. Single-player games you typically played through once and put away, and multiplayer games lasted almost exactly three months. An expansion pack could buy you another three months, so there were two three-month stretches for the original StarCraft. Asheron’s Call? Three months. Several Age of Empires games? Three months each. I think one of the Monster Rancher games was stretched to three months as people experimented with builds, strategies, and CDs that yielded special monsters. Our group skewed RTS, but I think that speaks to the consistency of the time frame.

The longest lasting game was Settlers of Catan. That never gets old, even with multiple games per night: extreme outlier. We played some pen and paper games. How often did we shake up campaigns or change game masters? Every three months or so.

The structure of American academic life lends itself towards that, and the large number of student gamers contributes to trends. Semesters last about four months, so you have a couple weeks to settle in, your group plays, and then you have a large break for exams and vacation. It is a natural stopping point; your momentum is spent, so switching to something new is easier. If you are not a student, you might be a parent to students, and their schedules affect yours. If neither, there is probably still some seasonal variability to your life, peaks of business or of outdoor activity. Our planet is conducive to three-monthers.

: Zubon

Rebalancing

Continuing with the random flash games, Kingdoms CCG recently did rebalancing. “The goal was to remove the tiers and the associated power gap between Heroes to create a much more versatile and interesting meta game and battle experience.” This means that the free heroes got better and the heroes you might have bought with the RMT currency were nerfed. On some changes, you might argue about whether it was a “nerf,” but it was definitely a significant change, like turning an AE buff into a stronger single-target buff. Oh, and “The Hero Trade In program will no longer be available after this update.”

League of Legends does this sort of thing, but so far only with a few of its dozens of champions, and there will be a few with similar functions, and it is rare to completely change the role of a champion. Also, you probably bought most of your champions with the in-game currency rather than the RMT currency. Also also, they did not explicitly establish tiers of champions, make the higher tiers more expensive, and then eliminate the tiers.

While I have played some Kingdoms CCG, I don’t really have skin in the game. I had a tier 3 hero, but I used the RMT currency you receive free in-game. The rebalancing included resetting all achievements, and earning them now awards some of that RMT currency, and they removed grind, and they added free rotating heroes like the LoL champions, so this is an almost unalloyed good for me in the game, except for needing to grind achievements to unlock things I already had access to and changing my favorite hero’s abilities into something I like less.

But that is a heck of a thing to do to players who are your revenue source. How do you expect people to trust you enough to spend money after you do something like that? It’s like a tiny little NGE.

: Zubon

I Get Press Releases

I have before me an e-mail announcing open beta starting for a game this week. Clicking to their website, a winged woman in most of a bikini is hovering immediately to the left of the game’s name. Immediately to the left of their tagline is another woman who could not afford an entire halter top; she is blowing kisses at the screen, with an animated heart floating from her lips. Someone has reliably informed them that English is written left-to-right, so placing the boobs just to the left of your text makes it a sort of capitalization.

Still classier than the game advertising “one click to a Roman orgy!”

: Zubon

Against Covetousness

I have been playing Dawn of the Dragons, because having just one energy mechanic game at a time is less than gaming. The actual gameplay of any of these tends to be low, but in combination they can be entertaining.

Dawn of the Dragons has lots and lots of items, because grind and cash shop. The crafting tab is where much of the rubber meets the road: a fight has a chance to drop a trophy, and combine trophies to get an item, then combine items and trophies to get better items. They have these for different maps, for raids, for events, for raid events, and so on for three years of development. There are five tabs for crafting, and the longest list has a progress bar dozens of screens high. That is a lot of scrolling to see everything.

This is to be expected after years of development. Following MMOs as I do, I am used to entering at the beginning. Sure, your game may have 1000 achievements, items, or raids, but you started earning them during the pre-order head start. You naturally earned most of the new ones while trying each update, so you have a subset of Things To Do that probably covers 10% of the list, and you know which part of it is relevant to your character. And then you have the new player who must do/get all the things! He joins your guild and asks every five minutes how to get X. It is essential that he gets X as soon as possible, and it is tragically unfair if X was event-related and is available only seasonally or (horror of horrors) not at all anymore.

This is my first time walking into that situation in a long time. It is pleasantly inuring. I occasionally see those new folks (but mostly people with levels in the four-digit range), and I occasionally ask something (but I can type it into Google as fast as I can type it into chat), but mostly I am just enjoying coasting. I got some newbie tips, I am accumulating some things that do who knows what, and I am working in no particular direction except up. If I keep playing, I will someday join those players in the higher digits, and I could start caring and planning. But really? That overwhelming list is somewhat comforting. I would need a lot of time to refill the energy bar to reach a lot of that content. I would need to play for months or more to see events repeat. It helps to get past the false sense of achievement.

: Zubon

Of Horrible Launches

Did you know that Anarchy Online is still … online, 12 years later? Most current MMO players started after its launch, so they missed that debacle. It is polite of current developers to give us a nostalgic look back, acting like it is 2001 and wondering if enough players have dial-up modems to play their always-online games.

: Zubon

Revolution, Evolution, Variation, Recombination

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 Revolution, Evolution, Variation, Recombination

Quote of the Day: This Is Why We Cannot Have Nice Things

Some people will say that it isn’t reasonable to expect an online game to run on release day. I don’t agree with that. Just because incompetence is widespread, that doesn’t mean that customers have to put up with it. The game companies have no problem of charging me either in advance or the moment I buy the game, so unless they are willing to postpone taking my money, I don’t see why I should have to postpone my expectation to be able to play the game.
— Tobold

Tobold writes about incompetence. The first commenter hits the nail on the head for malice: it is not profitable to build enough infrastructure for Day One, so let the players suffer until it settles down, you already have their money anyway. My perspective on Origin has not been improved by this new data point, whatever the explanation.

: Zubon

QA Veto

QA has an unconditional veto in our workplace. If it does not work, it does not ship. But we work in public safety, so delaying a new feature a week is less of a problem than potentially messing up your criminal record.

I read the Tales from the Trenches archive over the course of a weekend, and one recurring theme there is the non- or misuse or QA. There is not much benefit to doing QA if you are not going to act upon the resulting information. (Bonus points to the companies that fired testers when they found serious problems.) When we incredulously ask, “Did anyone test this?!” the answer is often: “yes, and we reported the problems, and they shipped anyway.” And then they sob.

Reading through Tales from the Trenches, you can decide who has the worse job: testers whose work is ignored or testers who are denied work but must sit in featureless boxes if they want their paychecks (presumably “and no goofing off on company time”).

: Zubon

Failure is Overdetermined

Success has many fathers, while failure is an orphan.
— exactly the opposite of what we’re talking about here

We are reviewing contract bids at work, and we are having trouble convincing the official buyer that you can lose a quarter of the available points for each of a dozen or more problems. He thinks it is absurd that X could be worth 25% of the whole scoring total. I am at the opposite extreme: if you cut half a leg off a chair, it has only lost 1/8 of the leg content, but I’d say the entire chair just failed even if the seat and back are really good. A system can have many single points of failure, and doing badly at any of them means the entire thing fails. If your MMO does not have a network connection, it is worthless, even if the content is really good.

So I am not entirely in disagreement when you say that Game X failed because it did not have your particular hobbyhorse. It had PvP/no PvP/wrong PvP; it was/was not F2P; it’s combat or guilds or crafting or achievements were this, that or the other — all fine. It is entirely possible for a game to fail on many points, each of which could be worth unsubscribing, or perhaps any one of several combinations of them. We, the online ramblers, tend to ascribe it to the world’s agreeing with our personal preferences, so every other game that comes out should cater to my whims or you’ll be the next Dawn, but we are not even necessarily disagreeing when we say that Game X failed because of ten different reasons. Yes, any or all of them, shame on Game X.

Should we also stop calling games failed when they are still online, running, and profitable? NC Soft has certainly had (enforceable) opinions on what characterizes sufficient return on investment.

: Zubon

Revenue Models

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