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[GW2] Guild Score

ArenaNet has called guilds in to question. Not all guilds. The very active, very big guilds are having no issues plowing right ahead to unlocking all the mission types at the pace of a few months (or less!). It’s the small guilds that are having problems. It’s the small guilds that feel threatened. It’s the small guilds that are now forced to reflect on whether their community actually reflects ArenaNet’s mechanical definition of a guild.

So what is a guild? Well I would say Guild Wars 2 has two definitions. The first is the objective definition, where players can open the “G”uild menu and click “Create Guild”. Voila, a new guild is born. Yet this is the lowest common denominator of a guild. The subjective definition is whether the guild contains activity to generate Influence, the guild resource, to reasonably progress along ArenaNet’s guild progression track. Continue reading [GW2] Guild Score

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

Loopy

  1. I haven’t felt like playing that MMO in a while. I think I’ll boot it up and play a bit.
  2. Oh, updates, right.
  3. How long?!
  4. I’ll do other things now, let it update overnight. (sleep)
  5. (wake) Eh, not in the mood right now.
  6. (wait an indeterminate amount of time)
  7. (go to 1)

: Zubon

[GW2] Dodge

When you double-tap to dodge in Guild Wars 2, you are invulnerable while dodging. You evade attacks. The daily dodger achievement makes very clear a systematic oddity: the game only counts it as a dodge if the attack hits you and is evaded by the invulnerability mechanic. If you actually dodge the attack so that it does not hit you, that does not count.

Does much trigger off dodges beyond the achievement? It seems odd to have a dodge mechanic that rewards you for failing to actually dodge.

: Zubon

[WS] Arkship 2013 Demo Telegraph’d Combat

Continuing my thoughts on my play experience at WildStar’s 2013 Arkship, I also want to discuss the thing that is most core to most MMO’s: combat. The most prevalent MMO combat style is the stand-and-deliver style found in World of Warcraft et al.  The other extreme is something along the lines of Vindictus, with button-mashing, arcade-style combat. WildStar is neither of those, but it takes elements from both. Like its content design it appears to place itself comfortably in a middle.

From a high level view, the easiest thing to discuss in WildStar’s combat system are combat telegraphs. In WildStar’s system enemies have normal, attrition-ish attacks, and they have the big attacks that should be avoided. When an enemy winds up a big attack the ground becomes shaded where the attack would affect players. Honestly I was skeptical at how much the “don’t stand in the poop”-mechanic could really make combat interesting. Continue reading [WS] Arkship 2013 Demo Telegraph’d Combat

[GW2] Slow-Release Storm

The February patch for Guild Wars 2 dropped yesterday. March is going to be the month where all of the content of that patch slowly unfolds. I think it’s hard to fathom for some players that each patch ArenaNet is trying to extend the game’s life in the long term. The expectations seem to be set for a content dump. Instead ArenaNet seems to largely focus on foundational issues and long-life new features. There is of course immediate content to be had, but even there ArenaNet is working on a slow-release.

Dailies

The most apparent change was how daily achievements work. Players that logged on saw all new achievements, do a group event, complete a story step, sacrifice things to the Mystic Forge, or make a couple steals in Keg Brawl. I spent a good amount of time last night in Wayfarer Foothills, and I was amazed at some of the questions. “What is the next story step?” “What is a group event?” Continue reading [GW2] Slow-Release Storm

[WS] Arkship 2013 Demo Content Design

We were allowed to write about our play experience amidst the NDA of WildStar’s 2013 Arkship. The demo was kept to the Deradune zone, which is the open-world starting area for the draken and another race, an Exile I believe. I feel that there is so much more to learn about the quest and combat design in WildStar, but I also feel, given my play experience with many, many MMOs that I have a pretty good feeling where WildStar is heading. This post will be about my thoughts on WildStar’s quest and content design, with another following on the combat design later this week.

WildStar is going to have quests. It will be a “quest-oriented” MMO similar to World of Warcraft or Lord of the Rings Online, but it plays more like Guild Wars 2, the “questless” MMO. Last year’s Guild Wars 2 focused on iterating on the social aspect of open world PvE and Star Wars The Old Republic and The Secret World focused on the story aspects. WildStar is iterating on the basics of quests. Like the name of the game implies, Carbine wants quests to be free in form. Continue reading [WS] Arkship 2013 Demo Content Design