Category: General

General

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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

Tome of Knowledge item to adapt

One thing I really like in the Tome of Knowledge is tracking which set pieces you have found. If you are going to have a dozen sets of armor for each class, in assorted tiers, track them. Three reasons, the last of which is where I am going with all this:

  1. Checklist. As a developer, this gives your player a menu of “what do you want to do next?” As a player, this reminds you of what you have in the vault. This is less necessary in the sort of game that has clear tiers where you work on one tier at a time.
  2. Achievement. If you need to pitch that old armor to make room for the new, it would be nice to have some sort of trophy, like an achievement tick saying that you had it. Do this for each piece, not just for the full set.
  3. Cosmetics. Combine it with an appearance system so that you can display any old set (possible restrict this to full sets, rather than single pieces). Completing a full set effectively gives you a new costume. Maybe I want to show off, or maybe I really liked the look we had three or four tiers ago.

: Zubon

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

Meta-PR

I have been hating on PR lately, but what sort of PR do you use to snow people who believe their own PR? The Arnell Group figured it out. I could leave the commentary to Bruce Webster, but I, like Language Log before me, feel the need to highlight. They have covered the text (“Emotive forces shape the gestalt of the brand identity.”) well, so let me outline the visual explanations.

  • Page 3 explains how the new Pepsi logo was developed by sending DNA into the future and then backtracking a bit.
  • Page 5 relates the logo to 5000-year-old Hindu traditions and the Mona Lisa.
  • There are nine pages of loops that have a tenuous relationship to anything in the world, but claim proprietary geometry to Pepsi, so don’t you go using circles and ovals.
  • Page 21 claims a relationship to the Earth’s core, its magnetic field, and … no, that’s completely incoherent.
  • Two pages of molested happy faces follow. Show me on the Pepsi can where the bad man touched you.
  • Page 26 shows how a sufficient quantity of Pepsi (3) will create a relativistic gravitational pull, sucking the shopper through the wall of the aisle and into a spherical Pepsi aisle. This may relate to page 24, which shows how 2D figures can transform into 3D figures. Mario simply failed to move correctly.
  • It concludes with the creation of the universe, in which units of distance are equal to units of velocity. There is an exponentially expanding 8 light year Pepsi universe.

: Zubon

We Are Loved

I was not aware that Kill Ten Rats appeared in a couple of developer podcasts recently. Granted, Kingdom of Loathing developer podcasts, but I like the game, and it is probably more popular than any MMO you have made. For most of you, at any rate; if you have a link to the right under “MMORPGs,” okay, most of those out-sell Kingdom of Loathing. Not all.

Anyway, 120 Minutes with Jick and Mr. Skullhead on January 29 and February 5 continued discussion from the The Price is Right post and Ultimatum follow-up. Which means this has now spilled into three KTR posts and two KOL podcasts. For your convenience, xSmootx made this video mocking everyone involved. Huggles! He then connects it to professional wrestling.

For reference, the “scathing criticism” was why I get burned out on KoL periodically. We exchanged a couple of e-mails. I may not have mentioned then that I binge heavily when I play KoL, like MMO player heavily, two hardcore characters while speed ascending on another. I am not entirely healthy, but I have a dancing badger pet, so life is good.

: Zubon

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?

Continue reading Migrant Developers

Audience Effects

Misaimed Fandom is when the audience takes irony as endorsement or likes a character the author meant to be problematic. The classic example is Milton: Satan is the bad guy of Paradise Lost. If you enjoyed Achievement Unlocked with no sense of irony, you were engaging in misaimed fandom.

The tropers note the characters of Rei and Kaworu Neon Genesis: Evangelion. They are pale, creepy, and emotionally stunted, and therefore not intended to be sympathetic, sexualized (Rules 34 and 36 aside), or fan favorites. The creators missed two things: (1) they are the nicest people in the series; (2) many otaku are pale, creepy, and emotionally stunted.

What examples would you cite as misaimed fandom in gaming? PETA’s Thanksgiving Cooking Mama parody was meant to make you sick, but children enjoyed its gooey, over-the-top violence. Other games have meant to sicken you with violence but instead provided hours of gore-soaked enjoyment for the masses. Hard moral choices lead to “hey, watch what I can do to this old lady” moments. Was You Have to Burn the Rope really meant as a Portal parody?

: Zubon