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Interview with ArenaNet’s Chris Lye

I had the chance to ask ArenaNet’s Global Brand Director, Chris Lye, a few questions about marketing in MMOs.  Chris talked about dreams, demons, and marketing the Guild Wars series, and he was kind enough to drop a nice big Guild Wars 2 bite.  Check out the full interview after the break!

At gamer events, how do you describe your job to people?

Basically “Marketing Guy” gets the point across. Alas, people seem to have a very narrow (and dim) view of marketing – usually they think it’s just the ads. However, to do marketing right, especially for an MMO, it’s about building customer relationships – so I’m also responsible for ArenaNet’s website and the community team. Continue reading Interview with ArenaNet’s Chris Lye

Pony Revenue

More people bought it without the queue, and more will, but we know that at least 140,000 people bought the sparkly pony. At $25 each, that is $3.5 million. There are costs to making it, dealing with billing, etc., but we’ll ignore those along with the people not in the 140,000. For the moment, I just want to help you get an idea of how much money they already got for the sparkly pony, since most of us have trouble visualizing numbers like $3,500,000.

Take all the money you have, including all your savings, your retirement fund, and any equity in your house. Now add in everything you are going to earn at work for the next ten years. It’s probably more than that.

: Zubon

Walk to Mordor ARG

Thanks to Merric and Goldenstar at the weekly podcast, A Casual Stroll to Mordor, I learned about this prety cool “reality overlay” for people getting in shape for the summer can use to make walking and running a little more fun.  Eowyn Challenge has a mile by mile breakdown of Frodo’s journey in Lord of the Rings.  People can then match up their daily walking or running distance and chart it with the location of Frodo.  My Lord of the Rings Online kinship is doing this as a group journey where people are buying pedometers to track their journeys to Rivendell.  Not often does the fantasy or MMO fringe intersect with physical fitness, but I think this is a great way to get motivated.  Good luck to all participating!

–Ravious

Multi-Purpose

American Red Cross Donate blood. If you can, you ought. Fewer people die, and the survivors share your blood type, so you will have more people around who are potential donors for you. It’s win-win. You also get a cookie.

As part of their social media, the American Red Cross site has avatars for download. Most of them are variations on “I gave” and “please give,” but note the avatar to the left. I don’t know about your favorite FPS, but in Team Fortress 2, everyone I kill gets an image of the kill along with my name and avatar. Now with every headshot I can show off my civic spirit, encourage others to donate blood, and taunt my enemies. I am also thinking of changing my spray to one of the “give blood” avatars, to decorate the enemy base.

: Zubon

Reverse Collector’s Edition

Like any good subject, Blizzard’s latest online purchase for World of Warcraft, the Celestial Steed (i.e., the Sparklepony) created a lot of back and forth commentary around the blogosphere.  Thankfully, some clarity poked through the clouds.  Guild Wars also released another buyable costume set for the War in Kryta chapter of Guild Wars Beyond.  Parallel discussions of item-worth, self-worth, happiness, and greed occurred on all affected forums.

Yet, when a collector’s edition for an untried, over-hyped (read: untrue) MMO drops for $30 more than the commoner’s edition, there is barely a peep.  It seems that collector’s editions can contain nearly any in-game bonus, and unless it provides game breaking balance issues, the bonuses are merely seen as value added to the collector’s edition.

Continue reading Reverse Collector’s Edition

Breaking Your Game’s Economy

in one easy step!

Following Tobold’s link to NanoStar Siege, one of the other games from that company is NanoTowns. There are a variety of these on Facebook, usually Farmville clones with a different graphics theme, although this one is interesting in that it does not have the standard formula of “click 20 times then wait 12 hours to harvest.” It instead is the sort of thing where you do a lot of clicking every five minutes, and you use the resources you gather to complete “quests” like “Could you get me some fries?” If you have a large enough city, you can presumably keep clicking indefinitely once it starts taking more than five minutes to go through your city.

nacho1 And then I bought a taco stand. I suspect there is decimal place error, because it costs less to make it NOW than to wait five minutes. Maybe they meant it to be 550. And it sells for 29% more than it costs to make it. If only the game had a multi-create or multi-sell, this would be an infinite money loop. As it is, it is a tediously long positive sum money loop that requires many many many clicks. There does not seem to be a limit to how many times you can click; you can see that I went as far as 70 wondering if it would stop.

nacho2 Oh, this isn’t good. You can start it up and then hurry the completion. Hurrying the completion gives you money back. The game is not really sure how to feel about that; it gives you the money then fails to hurry completion. You can then exit that window and re-hurry. Smaller profit, fewer clicks, two nigh-infinite money loops in one!

And if anything brings home the gameplay of the standard Facebook game, it is “tediously click here for as long as you like to watch your numbers increase.” Kind of like ProgressQuest without the “fire and forget” feature.

: Zubon

Guild Wars Beyond

Gamespot has a good interview with the Guild Wars Live Team’s Linsey Murdock.  While the updates have been rolling in for awhile now, the interview helps to re-focus what is actually going on.  And, what is actually going on?  A new campaign has started titled ‘Guild Wars Beyond.’  This campaign will start to wrap up, and also advance, much of the lore of the original Guild Wars to set the stage for Guild Wars 2 with ongoing updates throughout the year.  It starts, obviously, by looking at the human side of things because in Guild Wars 2 the human nation is Kryta and the human hero is Logan Thackeray.  This first chapter gives some good answers as to how we get there about 250 years later.

It is important to note that anybody that wants to wait, for whatever silly reason, should be able to experience all these additions as well when they chose to join in.  In other words, these additions are not merely temporary stemming from some passing event.

Continue reading Guild Wars Beyond

Upgrading Function, Keeping Fluff

You may have heard something about a shiny pony. One thing I like is that you can keep the same mount your entire career. How many games let you improve the function while keeping the appearance? Fluff and stats should be entirely separable aspects, hence the glory of the now-common appearance tabs. If you really like how your first horse looks, it would be nice to be able to keep it and just have it run faster. You can even force the player to pay for the privilege, but don’t force fluff changes for function upgrades.

Okay, this is more than I was expecting in the sense of “pay for the privilege”…

: Zubon

Misery’s Peak

Last night was Day 2 (or Week 2?) of Massively’s Nights of Eberron. Last week was fun but perhaps a bit disorganized.

During the week off, I took my Cleric out back and had him shot, to be replaced with a Ranger. I spent some time getting him back up to level 2 so he would be ready to go. Even still, I had a lot of things to learn. For example, how to use a quiver. It’s not obvious. It kind of works like a bag. You equip it and then you open it and put your arrows in it. However, not all quivers are alike. The two varieties I could find for sale at a vendor are called “narrow” and “wide”. They both can hold 1,200 arrows (that’s a big quiver!). The “wide” quiver can hold 6 types of arrows, with a maximum of 200 each type. The narrow can hold 3 types of arrows, with a maximum of 400 each. Since I only had 2 types of arrows I opted for the “narrow” quiver so I could hold 400 of the arrows I’m using right now.

Continue reading Misery’s Peak

DDO and Super Rewards, Part 3

Ravious has hit his quota of DDO posts so I’ve been forced to do the final update on the “Saga of Super Rewards”.

Marketroid posted a “final” update on the story here. The important part may be this:

Based on your feedback, we’re stepping away from the ‘Offer’ category for now. We’ll keep exploring alternate ways for players who want points to get them. We’ll also continue to innovate in pricing and accessibility because that’s who we are. As of today, the Offer Wall is coming down. We’ll collect all the feedback we’ve received over the last few days and will use it to guide future decisions.

Follow the link above to read the rest. In my opinion this should have never gotten off the ground floor but at they did a pretty decent job of responding to the player base (and finally responding to the security complaints). And hey, at least they didn’t charge folks 21 times for the last month. Bazinga!

– Ethic