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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

[Rift] We All Fall Down

Jaradcel writes up another in-depth guest post on Rift news. Enjoy! –Ravious

This week marks a massive riot in the world of Rift. The proverbial straw came in the form of news of another new change to PvP, one that was implemented not two days after its announcement. With only a few hours of test realm testing before it was pushed live, many feel like the choice was rushed, sloppy, and a band-aid. Is it true?  Continue reading [Rift] We All Fall Down

[GW2] Asura Week and Arrows

I’ve just received word that next week (9/12-9/16) is Asura Week for Guild Wars 2. The week is chock full of blog articles fans would expect from the Guild Wars 2 race weeks. Monday and Tuesday, Matt Barrett will be discussing asura character and then environment design with a special “Hey Bookah” asura advice column on Tuesday. Wednesday, Angel McCoy is going to discuss writing about the asura and the article is sure to be peppered with asura audio. Thursday, Helen Prior is going to show off the asura animation style while Jeff Grubb helps to update the official site’s asura entry, and Ree Soesbee is going to top it all off with a lore post on Friday.

I find this interesting in terms of development and possible the beta because there is really only one more big arrow, the eighth profession, after Asura Week. I say big arrow because, in my opinion, it’s the last bit of news that all Guild Wars 2 fans are interested in. Things like guild specifics, PvP specifics, and the like won’t hit everybody’s bullseye, so to speak. Those anti-gremlin asura are sure to get the mental juices flowing!

–Ravious

 

Born too Slow (or Bound too Long)

A post over at Hardcore Casual resonated with me. In it Syncaine writes in the title “This is what happens when the MMO genre sucks and I have ‘nothing to play’. The rest are his thoughts on otherwise passing the time. Except for Guild Wars 2 news, I know I’ve been a little quieter. My style is more about writing what I play, see, and experience. When I played Rift, I wrote about Rift. I have not wrote a Rift post in awhile, ergo…

I have been playing PC games though. I fell in love with the bargain priced Magic the Gathering’s Duels of the Planeswalkers 2012. I have the usual smattering of first-person shooters headed by Team Fortress 2. I am still not sure why I bought Serious Sam (again), but it brought back memories. Then Trackmania² Canyon. I’ve been playing that enough to warrant a brand new blog. It’s community is so online based that it feels similar to an MMO community, and there are developer updates, mods, and tournaments that keep things rather fresh.

Continue reading Born too Slow (or Bound too Long)

Scaling Content

I played through most of the Borderlands DLC this weekend. Most of it scales to level. This is both really great and really awful.

It is really great to have everything as endgame content. There is always tension in development between working on the leveling game and the endgame, and scaling content lets you create one dungeon that is available at many level ranges. Success! Are you really going to buy DLC that adds level 20 action for a game where your character is level 50? This isn’t an MMO where you are likely to have a stable of alts.

It is really awful in that it highlights the problems inherent in the game. If you stopped playing Borderlands because it felt like you just kept fighting the same guys over and over again, making them level along with you so that everything is an at-level encounter really drives home that you have yet another edition of the same guys, this time with a new number by the name. You don’t even get the MMO scheme of making this goblin blue with a flaming sword; you are still fighting exactly the same bandits and psychos, sometimes with a different name but exactly the same model and abilities. When you get new enemies, the zone structure will make you repeat many fights unless you complete the whole thing in one setting, and the fight is exactly the same because the enemies leveled along with you (or it might have gotten harder if you did not find better equipment, so you are fighting the same fight only you are relatively weaker). It’s great that you can have a Playthrough 2 where everything is even-con to make it a potentially meaningful challenge, but it really drives home that you put levels in a FPS where they add so little that you built mechanics to get around having levels in your FPS.

: Zubon

At this point, I’m open to the argument that “do the same thing 10 times a day for as long as you’re willing to subscribe” is the point of the current MMO genre rather than a defect in it.

[GW2] Big Government Guilds

That buzz word in the title should get some attention. Regardless of your stance, good reader, on federalism and what any U.S. founders believed, the premise of “big government” is control. It’s this issue of control, or perceived lack of control, with the hinted Guild Wars 2 guild system that has the community in a tizzy.

The Guild Wars 2 guild system lets players join multiple guilds through their account and characters. My asura warrior, Guvvernator, might be in some main guild, an asura-only role-playing guild, a 6-man real-life friends guild, and a casual PvP guild. The full details of the guild system are missing, but I suspect that since I can rack up influence for my guilds, I would likely have to choose one guild as my “main,” which would receive the benefits of my activities. The others would be exclusive chat rooms with whatever other guild features ArenaNet is planning, hopefully like a guild bank. Continue reading [GW2] Big Government Guilds

Overthinking

We have several commenters on the last post citing the problem as “overthinking”: optimization is sort of prisoners’ dilemma, in which optimization (defection) takes the fun out of the game, but if you don’t optimize (cooperate), you’ll be excluded from some significant portion of the game/community. By this logic, everyone would be happier playing with each other and not worrying about optimization, but once someone brings a gun to the knife fight, you have to too. There is a tension here.

On the one hand, I am very much on the record as being against games that use big numbers on monsters instead of an interesting challenge. You only need optimized characters if the encounter is tuned to need optimized characters, and this optimization usually involves lots of grinding and hey this kind of thing is why I am on MMO hiatus. One part of the tension is whether the game itself actually calls for optimization, or at least accessing some significant portion of the content does, at which point non-optimizers are self-excluding by that decision. They are not playing the same game as everyone else, and if they complain about not being invited to groups that would wipe because they are there, well, it’s a DPS check boss, bring the DPS or stay home.

On the other hand, I am very much with the view of playing with friends for fun. That’s kind of why we’re here, or should be, because “achievement” in the MMO sense is mostly a false sense of achievement. At that point, though, what game you’re playing is mostly irrelevant as long as it does not get in the way of fun, which most MMOs do with level differences and several other things, so you would be much happier playing something else with your friends. If the fun is playing with your friends, and you are bringing the friends, the game itself is not carrying much of the weight here. It’s just an excuse to be in a chat room together.

On the gripping hand, there is non-optimization and then there is just being lousy. You don’t need hardcore theorycraft to see that some people are just really bad at really easy games, going beyond “I don’t care about optimization” to “I don’t care.” The tank who won’t use a shield, the guy who is using gear from 20 levels ago, the folks who like to see big numbers and why are you whining about group mechanics: there are degrees of sub-optimal, and once you’re on that slope, internet arguments will typically deliver you into the hands of people who show up to raid without any potions. As a reasonable human, you can probably strike a balance, but get 5 or more random humans on the internet, and how likely are you to strike a reasonable mean between “you must have this gearscore to come” and “complaining about the naked tank is just rude.” (I’ve played with people who never trained the best abilities for their classes because it went against their “character concepts,” which is fine if you warn people at the start that you are intentionally sub-optimal.) You and your friends may have a reasonable mean within your group, but then we are back to your bringing your own friends and so why would it matter what anyone else thinks if you are not going to be grouping with them?

: Zubon

Ethic, I can still get annoyed remembering the */Radiation Controller who joined us on the Sewer Trial and mocked the notion that she should have taken any of the Radiation toggles. I was checking builds and ready to boot people for a month after that.

Choices

Tobold asks about choices in games. Come on back after reading it, because I substantially agree and just want to extend on the last paragraph, because the optimal solution cited is rather difficult. Of course, I think we should be more demanding of our games, so that’s not a problem for me in particular, except for the disappointment.

Set aside the two easy cases first: one choice is clearly better than the other (once you know the consequences or do enough math), or neither choice has any meaningful consequences. If you want to argue that there is still a meaningful “choice” to be had there, you can argue the point back at Tobold’s.

The goal is “different but equal.” Choice A gives you 10 armor and choice B gives you +30 to attack rats. Tobold cites Sid Meier, while my favorite quote on the subject comes from a fellow posting under the name Tempest Stormwind: “Taste the indecision? That’s balance, right there.” That is the goal, to have a non-trivial choice where you could go either way. Let’s add some complications to that. Continue reading Choices

Tech and Talent Trees

One sort of “RPG elements” that never felt like a grind was the StarCraft 2 armory. This gave a real sense of progress in that you upgraded a building and it stayed upgraded. Contrarily, you still needed to go through upgrading your vehicles every mission at the armory building. I get that the campaign armory and research were effectively talent trees, but it felt like there really was some continuity and meaningful advancement as a part of the campaign, rather than just starting over with a Command Center and a few SCVs every time. Because sometimes you get tired of learning Bronze Working every game of Civ.

I thought Age of Empires Online was doing that, but it turns out that you are unlocking the ability to train Wheelbarrows every time you play rather than simply learning Wheelbarrows. There are some permanent upgrades down at the bottom of the tech tree.

: Zubon