Tobold's MMORPG Blog

Thought for the day: Persistence part 2

2009-11-21T11:12:00.002+01:00

Even a MMORPG ends one day, either by us quitting or by the servers shutting down. If we don't play to enjoy the moment, but play to achieve a certain level and quality of gear, what exactly remains from all of our efforts the day the servers shut down?

Phishing alert: Jade Tiger e-mails

2009-11-20T22:09:00.002+01:00

Please be warned that today somebody swamped the internet with an extremely well made phishing mail, which looks very much like a genuine mail from Blizzard, and promises you a Jade Tiger in-game pet if you just fill out a survey. Of course to do so you'll have to type your Battle.net login and password on the fake website us.blizzard-survey.com. And the next time you log in after that, instead of finding a Jade Tiger, you'll find your characters naked and all your gold and possessions gone.

Braving the dark corners of the internet I gave a fake userid and password to the phishing website, which led me to the survey (note that if the website wasn't fake, I wouldn't have been able to "log on" with the fake userid). I was surprised how extremely professional this phishing side was, it looked exactly like a Blizzard site, even the survey looked real, and after thanking you for participation you get forwarded to the real World of Warcraft site. Scary stuff, this.

Now excuse me while I run a virus check on my computer.

Dragon Age: Origins - Review

2009-11-20T06:30:00.001+01:00

FTC disclaimer: I do have a material relationship with EA Bioware insofar as they did send me a free review copy of Dragon Age: Origins. Nevertheless the copy of the game that I actually played was a “Digital Deluxe” version bought via a Steam pre-order, thus including all existing additional downloadable content. I'd claim my opinion isn't influenced by a second free copy, but I'm disclosing this information so you can decide that for yourself.

This review of Dragon Age: Origins will include several comparisons of DAO to MMORPGs in general, and specifically World of Warcraft. That might seem a strange comparison to some of you, as obviously these are different genres of games. But there are common problems and solutions in single-player and massively multiplayer role-playing games; and by comparing them I hope to show up some inherent limitations of the two genres.

Dragon Age: Origins is the spiritual successor to Baldur’s Gate. Although DAO isn’t based on a D&D license like Baldur’s Gate, the game system used is quite similar to D&D, with some clever additions adapted from MMORPGs, e.g. warriors having a taunt command. So like Baldur’s Gate you start out the game alone, but quickly pick up various colorful companions. It’s not quite “go for the eyes, Boo, go for the eyes”, but your companions do have a mind of their own, leading to sometimes funny interactions between them and you, or each other.

A RPG consists of two building blocks: Combat, and a story which happens between combats. In Dragon Age: Origins combat happens in real time, but by hitting space you can at any time pause the game and give commands to your characters. You can control one character directly in real time, and give a series of tactical instructions to the other characters. Note that even on “normal” difficulty, the second lowest of 4 difficulty settings, doing combat only in real time will get you killed in any harder fights, and every boss fight. Thus pausing and working in pseudo turn-based mode is pretty much required.

In comparison to World of Warcraft, combat in Dragon Age: Origins is generally harder, and far more tactical. Some basic principles are the same: You put a heavily armored tank in front, taunting the enemy to attack him; heal said tank with a healer or potions; and use the remaining party members to deal damage. There is aggro management, crowd control, and the necessity to watch both health and mana of your characters. Only that in WoW you only play one character (unless you multi-box), and you can’t pause to give commands. As in DAO you can save before the combat and then replay any failed attempts, and as you can pause in combat to have time to think and give commands, combat can be harder and still be doable. As you control all characters, there is also the possibility of friendly fire, which as a concept in a MMORPG would cause all sorts of problems.

The story that happens between combats in Dragon Age: Origins is mostly told in the form of dialogues, plus a few cutscenes. In the dialogues you have several options, which do have some influence on how the story unfolds. But much of that choice is an illusion, as the main storyline will progress with only minor variations regardless of which options you chose. DAO has a rather dark story, and the choices you have aren’t of a simple good or evil nature. For example a recurring choice is dealing with children possessed by demons, where you are given the options of letting the evil demon loose, or killing him by killing the child, neither choice being very pleasant. In other cases the dialogue has much simpler choices to make, which basically boil down to “do the quest” or “refuse the quest”, with doing the quest being the obviously better choice, to get more xp and rewards. The world of DAO features orcs, ogres, dragons, and many other mainstays of fantasy RPGs, only that for some reason the orcs are called hurlocks or genlocks, the ogres look like horned demons, and the dragons are referred to as archdemons. That is the sort of “creativity” I could have done without.

In comparison with WoW, the main difference is that as a single-player game DAO has a beginning, middle, and an end. That is the classic structure of storytelling in general, and thus the story of DAO follows a classic narrative structure, with you starting out as an unknown, and ending up saving the world. World of Warcraft doesn’t have an end, nor a story per se, but has “lore” instead, which is told in non-coherent bits and pieces through quest texts and books you find on your journeys. One consequence of that is that the world of WoW is relatively static and only changes with patches, or through tricks like phasing. In Dragon Age: Origins the world is changed by your actions, so that a village isn’t the same before and after you saved it from an evil undead invasion.

While you do interact with NPCs, and especially with your companions, this interaction of course is much simplified in DAO compared to the interaction with real other players in WoW. While you might do an action that displeases one of your companions in DAO, you often have the option to reload a previous save game, do the same action again with a different group composition, and thus keep everyone happy. Your companions in DAO are also suspiciously fond of gifts, so if you committed a heinous act in the presence of a good character, you can just bribe him with a trinket to completely compensate for the loss of esteem. I haven’t played the game through yet, but it is reported that if you do enough positive actions and gifts to a companion, you can even have cybersex with them. Not sure if that applies only to members of the opposite sex, not to mention the dog. Given the sex and copious amounts of blood splatter, I wonder why the game is only rated M. Your characters in dialogues and cutscenes after a combat are often covered in lots of blood, and there doesn’t appear to be an option to switch that off.

Character development in Dragon Age: Origins works by gaining xp and leveling up. While I would recommend to always have a healer, a tank, and two dps in your group, you will with time get enough different companions to choose from so that your main can be any class and specialization. However taking a mage character with a healing spell as your starting character will make your first game go a lot smoother. Characters have a kind of a talent tree, but as the tree is very wide and only 4 talents deep, you can quite well mix various specializations, and for example have a mage who heals, deals area damage, and does crowd control to boot. The rogue and warrior talent trees are somewhat less varied, but still interesting.

Depending on what version of Dragon Age: Origins you buy, different methods of “digital rights management” (DRM) will apply, that is either Steam DRM, or a simple disc check. EA did not put a more invasive DRM like SecuROM in Dragon Age: Origins. However every version of the game comes with at least some codes for downloadable content and these codes can only be used for one account to be created on the Bioware website. Thus if you buy a second-hand copy of DAO (or pirate one), you will miss out on at least part of the game, or you will have to buy the missing downloadable content. So in a way the DRM of Dragon Age: Origins is rather similar to the DRM of World of Warcraft, where you need a valid account too to enjoy the totality of the game. Of course Dragon Age: Origins has no monthly subscription fee, but Bioware will sell you additional content for the game in the future, with the first DLC called Return to Ostagar just having been announced to cost around $5.

In summary, in my very personal opinion, I do enjoy Dragon Age: Origins for its very tactical combat. Other people like the epic story of DAO, but I found the story to be rather stereotypical, linear, and cliché-ridden. I did however appreciate the “origins” part of DAO, which results in the first hour or two of your game being different depending on which origin you chose for your character. I’m not a huge fan of DAO’s dialogues, which are often long, and ultimately have only a small effect on the main story. But I must admit the story is well told, and not limited to simple good vs. evil choices. And you could always click through dialogue fast and get right back into the next fun tactical combat. So overall I do recommend Dragon Age: Origins.

Thought for the day: Persistence

2009-11-19T08:36:00.002+01:00

It is claimed that a MMORPG is fundamentally different from a single-player RPG in that the MMO game has a persistent world: When you log off, the world continues to exist and things happen while you are away. In a single-player game the world freezes when you save it, and starts exactly there when you load that game. But is that really true? When you log back into a MMORPG, has the world really changed in your absence? Or isn't the change limited to other players having gained a level while you were gone, and the content of the auction house having changed?

In the current common model of eternal respawns, where it doesn't matter if somebody else killed the monsters you need for your quests while you were gone, because they came right back 5 minutes later, can we really talk of a persistent world? Or is a stupid Facebook game like Farmville, where somebody fertilized your crops while you were away, ultimately more persistent than a classic MMORPG?

Mirkwood vs. Cataclysm

2009-11-18T08:21:00.002+01:00

Technically I am subscribed to both Lord of the Rings Online and World of Warcraft, only that the LotRO subscription is the "lifetime" deal. So I should be playing both games, and I should be equally interested in both both upcoming expansions, LotRO's Siege of Mirkwood coming out in two weeks, and WoW's Cataclysm coming out next year. But in reality I'm highly excited about Cataclysm, while Mirkwood leaves me cold.

Now you could think that this is because I'm actively playing WoW, but haven't played LotRO at all this year. But there is more to it than that. Imagine my situation was reversed, that I had high-level LotRO characters, but only low-level characters in WoW. In that case the Cataclysm expansion for WoW would still be quite interesting for me: I could start a new Worgen or Goblin, or I could use my existing low-level characters to explore all the massive changes to Azeroth. But for my low-level LotRO characters, the Mirkwood expansion offers nearly nothing, certainly not enough to encourage me to come back to LotRO.

In short, Cataclysm is an expansion which is quite interesting for ex-WoW players, regardless of when they stopped and how far they got into the game. Mirkwood is an expansion which is only interesting to players who already have a LotRO character at the level cap.

I do think that Blizzard is onto something here. We talk a lot about the number of WoW subscribers, are there 11 million, or should you just count the 5 million players who pay a monthly fee, and so on. We talk very little about the number of ex-WoW subscribers. If you look at PC games sales charts over the last 5 years, you'll find that World of Warcraft continues to outsell quite a lot of other PC games. But as the subscriber numbers have stopped growing, that influx of new players must be balanced by an outflow of burned out and bored players. I am pretty certain that by now there are more people with an expired WoW account than people with an active one. And a solid number of those ex-WoW players never made it to level 80, so they wouldn't be all that interested in an expansion which only offered post-80 content.

If you want to be extremely cynical (and hey, I know you want to, this is the internet after all) you could interpret it like this: The active World of Warcraft players are going to buy the expansion anyway, so it is better to design an expansion for ex-players, and even completely new players, than to just concentrate on your existing customers.

And I think that would work on other games than just World of Warcraft. Siege of Mirkwood? No, thanks! If I came back to LotRO for Mirkwood, with my highest level character being under level 30, I'd be stuck all alone, without a guild, without friends, without even a pickup group to be found, with only the announced change of making previous group content somewhat soloable so I could do the epic quest line to comfort me. But if LotRO had a Cataclysm-like expansion which added lots of low-level content, and thus breathed life into the low-level zones, I'd be back.

Do not buy gold guides!

2009-11-17T16:11:00.002+01:00

Earlier this year a fellow blogger named Markco asked me to have a look at his WoW economics blog, and whether I would allow him to do a guest post on this blog. I had a look at his blog, which looked interesting enough, and allowed his guest post, which created a lot of traffic on his blog. Once he was well established and got lots of visitors, Markco transformed his blog: It was now not only offering WoW economics advice, but was also selling Markco's gold guide. Markco then repeatedly pestered me to promote his gold guide, promising I would make a lot of money. I refused. I do consider gold guides to be the very worst deal you can make on the internet, as you are basically paying for information which you can easily get for free at many places. Buying a gold guide is actually more stupid than buying gold. I am not promoting gold guides, and I considered Markco's bait-and-switch blog to be a clever, but shady and underhand way to quickly attract lots of visitors.

Now you would never again have heard of Markco on this blog, if it wasn't for Gevlon. Markco approached Gevlon with several shady offers designed to promote Markco's gold guide. And Gevlon, while probably not considered the most upstanding citizen of the MMO blogosphere, is intelligent enough to see through scams like that. Actually being anti-social makes scam detection easier, as they are based on social engineering, which is something which simply doesn't work on Gevlon. Gevlon posted his experience with Markco here, and called me as a witness, after Markco mentioned my refusal to cooperate in a mail to Gevlon. I am happy to comply. Selling gold guides is bad enough by itself, but using various underhand ways to promote them, and promising affiliates unrealistic sums they'll never receive is downright repugnant.

Do not buy gold guides! There are dozens of WoW economics blogs which are considerably more up to date, and give better information for free than you are likely to find in any gold guide you had to pay $20 for.

How big is the US market for MMORPGs?

2009-11-17T15:51:00.002+01:00

Bigeyez alerted me to a Gamasutra article quoting a NPD study saying: "14 percent of U.S. consumers have a subscription to an online game like World of Warcraft." The US has about 308 million citizens, so if this study counted each of them as a possible "consumer", there would be over 42 million people with "a subscription to an online game like World of Warcraft". I have a hard time believing that.

I really wonder what exactly their definition of consumer is, and what their definiton of a subscription is. The report talks about consumer spending on these subscriptions, so did they count only active subscriptions with a monthly fee? Or did they count anyone with a free account to any Free2Play or "social space" online game too?

If there are between 2 and 3 million World of Warcraft subscribers in the US, then what exactly are the other 40 million subscribed to?

Spice of variety

2009-11-16T10:52:00.003+01:00

Let me tell you how a typical play session of mine goes: Usually I first log on those of my World of Warcraft characters with a daily cooldown, like the alchemist transforming a rare gem into an epic gem once a day. Send the epic gem to my jewel crafter, who not only cuts the gem and sends it on to the bank alt, but also does his daily jewelcrafting quest, to get the tokens to buy new recipes. Then comes the general bank alt, followed by the glyph bank alt. The glyph bank alt can take up to one hour, as even with addons, getting 1,000 mails with either sold or expired glyph auctions from the mailbox and reposting those that expired will take a while. Then comes the inscription alt, who will now buy herbs, mill them to pigments, make inks, and then make those glyphs which sold out.

As several of these characters are guilded, and I'm watching guild chat, it is possible that I join a guild group doing some heroic dungeon or other activity. If not, I'll play one of my leveling alts, for example my paladin. But I'm usually just playing him an hour or two, and never past his rest xp. On other days I play other games instead of leveling a character, for example Dragon Age at the moment. Again I'm just playing an hour or two, finishing one chapter or section and then stop.

As you can see, I'm playing a *lot* of different characters and sometimes even different games in the same play session. The direct result of that is that I'm leveling quite slowly. I started that paladin when Cataclysm was announced, and today I'm only level 41. Measured in "level per week" that is rather slow, although I'm probably not faring that badly in "level per hour /played", given that I'm always on double xp from resting. My level capped characters are also developing either slowly or not at all. My "raiding" priest is only used as jewelcrafter or for helping out a guild group as healer, but as I don't raid for the moment he's not likely to get much in gear upgrades. In Dragon Age I'm also advancing quite slowly, I only reached Denerim this weekend, being less than 20% through the game (not counting having tried several starting "Origins").

Now I know that some people play games, especially MMORPG, to *arrive* somewhere. Some people even say that leveling a character in World of Warcraft is just a tedious obstacle towards the true goal of having a level capped character for the "true" game of raiding. If somebody who thinks like that looks at the way I play, he'd probably tell me that I'm playing it wrong. By dispersing myself among different characters and even games I'm not progressing very fast or very far with any character. But, as so often, the "you're playing it wrong" comments are based on a faulty assumption of us all having the same goal. But I'm not standing here scratching my head and wondering why my pally levels so slowly, and what I'm doing wrong. Rather I'd say that I'm playing it perfectly right, only my goals are diametrically opposed to the goals of the achievers.

Basically I'm working 8 to 5 every day, and when I come home I play games to relax. My goal is maximum entertainment, preferably with not too much stress and effort. My periods of low raiding activity for example coincide with my periods of higher job stress. As I put a strong priority on real life over virtual life, I'm rather reducing my game progress when I need my energy for my job, or my family, instead of the other way round. Playing a lot of different things in one play session for me has a higher entertainment value, as doing the same thing for several hours tends to bore me. Thus splitting my time up between different characters is perfectly rational and wanted. I actually enjoy the leveling game, in many cases more than the end game. And playing different areas of the game, leveling different characters, trying different tradeskills, and exploring different activities from playing the auction house to running low-level dungeons brings the spice of variety to my gaming sessions.

Now I'm certainly not telling the people with different goals that it is them who are playing it wrong. Yes, I sometimes wonder why people try to "win" a game which by definition is unwinnable, spending a lot of effort on getting gear which the next expansion will make obsolete. But I just assume that this is what is most fun to *them*. For me a MMORPG is not just *one* game, with a defined set of rules and a victory condition; for me a MMORPG is *many* games, and even has some aspects which are more correctly described as "toy" than as "game". So just as there is no way to play LEGO wrong, you can't really play World of Warcraft wrong either. As long as your activities are in line with your personal goals, you are playing it right.

Paladin charger

2009-11-15T10:18:00.003+01:00

My paladin reached level 40 today. As I had read that epic mounts are available at level 40 since patch 3.2, I looked around for the quest that would give my paladin his epic charger. Turns out Blizzard has been lazy: You can *buy* epic riding skill at level 40 as paladin. But if you want to do the quest, you need to do the old quest line, which is level 60. I love epic quest lines, but I'm not riding slowly for 20 more levels, just because there is no level-appropriate quest line for this.

Thus, being human, I followed the instructions in the letter the riding skill trainer Randal Hunter helpfully sent me, and traveled to the Eastvale Logging Camp in Elwynn Forest. There I bought the Journeyman Riding skill for 42 gold 50 silver. Then I went to the paladin trainer, and bought the Charger spell for 1 gold 80 silver. Alternatively I could have bought an epic horse for 8 gold 50 silver, but that doesn't make much sense for a human paladin: The charger and the epic horse have very similar models, with the charger looking better and costing less. For paladins of other races there is a choice to be made between a racial mount and the charger.

Man, I remember an epic mount being 1,000 gold, now it only costs 50. Times have changed.

Thought for the day: Entitlement

2009-11-14T11:23:00.002+01:00

Game by Night Chris asks whether players are wrong to feel entitlement to easy gameplay, fast leveling without grind, and other luxury features we didn't have when we played Everquest a decade ago. But is that really the only entitlement players feel, and is it only the noobs as Chris says that feel it? What about the sense of entitlement of those who play the most, and who think they are entitled to special treatment by the game company, to exclusive content, to the fanciest outfits?

WoW in space

2009-11-13T17:43:00.002+01:00

Massively has an interesting video preview of Allods Online, a game that looks remarkably similar to World of Warcraft, but with more SciFi elements and space ships. What is remarkable about that game is that it looks pretty good, and will be Free2Play, which would make it basically the second good, free WoW clone after Runes of Magic. In a market where some companies still try to let you pay $15 per month for a *bad* WoW clone, getting a *good* WoW clone for free is a sweet deal, even if you then end up paying $10 for a mount or such things.

I just hope that raises the bar on monthly subscription MMORPGs. Surely game companies must see that if decent quality, even combined with a lack of originality, is available for free, they'll have to offer far more than that if they hope to get $15 per month out of a large number of players for a considerable time.

New MMORPG will come out in February 2010

2009-11-13T09:08:00.002+01:00

The headline is deliberately obscure, because I'd like to make a point about expectations. What do you think if you hear that there will be a new MMORPG coming out in February of next year? Normally the reaction to such news is rather positive, and the hype starts spinning into overdrive. But in this case the new MMORPG is Star Trek Online, and there are lots of bloggers who responded to the announcement quite negatively, believing it won't be ready for launch. Cryptic Studios currently appears to have not a good name in the community, and thus people project their negative expectations on their next game.

Star Trek Online is a game I am certain to check out. I'm not really a "Trekkie", and only like the original Star Trek series with Captain Kirk (yeah, showing my age here). But I'm hoping that Star Trek Online will offer a somewhat different gameplay than the current MMORPGs. There are far too many fantasy MMORPGs, too few of other genres, and even games like Champions Online which supposedly aren't fantasy play pretty much exactly like the fantasy MMORPGs.

Will Star Trek Online be any good? I can't tell before I played it. I'm keeping an open mind. As far as I know it wasn't the same team that made Champions Online and Star Trek Online, so the quality of the two games doesn't necessarily correlate. And as I have zero information about how far advanced the development of Star Trek Online really is, I'm not joining the chorus claiming STO is rushed out of the door quite yet. I am pretty certain that there will be some open beta period where I can test the game for free and be able to decide for myself whether the game is good or not.

My material relationship with EA Bioware

2009-11-12T17:14:00.002+01:00

Okay, I'm nearly 3 weeks early, as the Federal Trade Commission guidelines on disclosure of material relationships between bloggers and companies only kick in December 1st. Nevertheless I wanted to let you, and the FTC, know that my review copy of Dragon Age: Origins just arrived by mail. This is a first: While I got free access to some online games in the past, this is the first free physical copy of a game I received. Which is nice, notwithstanding the fact that getting a review copy a week *after* release is a bit late, and I already bought Dragon Age via Steam while I was still unsure whether I'd get a review copy.

I'm already past the Zitron number of 9 hours played. I will probably publish a review of Dragon Age: Origins next week, after having played it a bit more. As this will be way too late for a classical standard review, I was thinking of doing a comparative review between Dragon Age and World of Warcraft. Not because these two games are similar, but because they are so different. By comparing them I hope to explore the question of where the inherent limitations of MMORPGs and single-player RPGs are.

Modern publicity warfare

2009-11-12T15:00:00.003+01:00

According to user reviews in various places, like Metacritic, IGN, or Amazon, Modern Warfare 2 is one of the worst games in history, with a user review score hovering very close to the absolute bottom. At the same time press reviews regularly score the game above 90%, as one of the best games of the year. What's happening?

What is happening is that the press in most cases reviews the game just on the merits of its gameplay, and apparently MW2 is a fun game to play. The players meanwhile are very upset about issues not directly connected to gameplay: The campaign is too short (and downloadable additions will probably cost extra), the game is priced more expensively than comparable games, and the multiplayer mode is too restrictive. Thus large groups of unhappy players are trying to send a message by voting down the user review scores of MW2 on various sites. Something similar happened in the past to games like Spore, which were downvoted for their DRM, but with MW2 the practice of lodging a "political" protest against a game by giving it a bad user review appears to be expanding.

I've never been a fan of any review scores, but the more different issues you try to express with a review score, the less useful it becomes. I am not saying that the protests aren't valid: $60 for less than 10 hours of gameplay is expensive by any measure (and 30 times more per hour than I pay for MMORPGs). But by mixing measures of gameplay quality, price, DRM, and customer service into one single number, you end up with a number that isn't expressing anything at all. Different players have different degrees of sensitivity to things like price, game length, or DRM, so a score expressing everything is even theoretically impossible.

What will protest review score lead to? Amazon already got into trouble during one of the previous protests when they sneakily tried to remove the protest reviews from one game. If protest reviews become more widespread, people trying to find out about a game will learn to ignore user review scores. And sooner or later the sites now offering the possibility for users to review things will stop doing so. Sites like Amazon will decide that the protesters are hurting sales. Sites like Metacritic and IGN will decide that offering infrastructure for user reviews that are then ignored by the regular users, because they are held hostage by some protesters, isn't worth it.

And the effect of these protests on Modern Warfare 2? Apparently none, MW2 is said to have broken all first-day sales records, netting $310 million on the first day alone, with sales for the first week projected as being 10 million copies. Not bad for a game that score 1 out of 10 on average in user reviews.

What can we expect from RPG storytelling?

2009-11-12T08:39:00.002+01:00

Bigeyez sent me a funny chart he found at Hellforge, which shows how much the stories of Bioware RPGs are similar to each other. Somebody posted that chart on the Mass Effect 2 forums, and got an angry response from a Bioware writer, defending the classic story structure.

Actually that discussion is far from new. In Joseph Campbell's book on comparative mythology, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, from 1949, already discussed the idea of the monomyth, the idea that numerous myths from disparate times and regions share fundamental structures and stages. Bioware games conform to that monomyth structure, as do fiction works from Lord of the Rings to Star Wars.

What I think is that requirements of RPG gameplay limit the freedom of writers. The monomyth structure works well in role-playing games. The structure of the hero's journey perfectly fits the RPG structure of character development. It is easy to transform fiction with the structure of the monomyth into a RPG. Which is why there are lots of games based on Lord of the Rings and Star Wars, but no games based on, lets say, Jane Austen novels. A story like Pride and Prejudice simply doesn't have the structure and the setting which would make a good RPG.

MMORPG storytelling suffers from the game having no end. That clashes with the basic narrative structure of stories, which normally have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Seen as a whole, MMORPGs have a short beginning, an infinite middle, and no end. Thus storytelling in MMORPGs usually works by not telling one story, but thousands. Each story is short, has a beginning (quest giver dialogue), middle (you go and kill ten foozles), and end (you return and get a reward). The inherent repetitiveness of that approach isn't very engaging. And often gameplay is more efficient if instead of doing these stories sequentially, you do them in parallel, accepting all quests at a quest hub at once, then doing all the tasks, and then returning to the quest hub getting all the rewards, which further dilutes the impact of the story. You easily do a dozen or more quests in a single play session, so none of the stories is memorable, and would be better described as "errands" than "quests".

The *real* story of a MMORPG, the one the player is interested in, is a personal one. It is the story of how his character developed, how he interacted with other players, how he overcame major challenges. Very few games offer the tools to chronicle this sort of life story: You get tools like the armory showing where your character is now, but not a history of how he got there, except for the dates in small print in the achievement list. Everquest 2 had some web-based tools, but for World of Warcraft you'd need to use a third party application like Path of a Hero to chronicle your virtual life story. And of course even automatic chronicles would only tell the predictable story how you leveled up, and would need room for manual additions to tell the stories of your encounters with other players.

Single-player RPGs have an end, thus they can have an overarching story of the player vanquishing a greater evil at the end of the story. Nevertheless that larger story is often subdivided into chapters, main quests, and sub-quests, so often you end up doing exactly the same as you do in a MMORPG: Talk with an NPC to get a quest, go and kill some mobs for the quest, return and get a reward. The dialogue with the NPC might have several options, but sooner or later you realize that most of the time these options boil down to "accept quest", "don't accept quest", and "get more information". That isn't really much different to WoW's quest dialogue window, where you can accept, cancel, or scroll down to read more. You don't even really have the option to play the unhelpful guy, because if the NPC asks you to save his farm for him, and you say "no", you simply miss out on the quest and the attached reward. Which is why in MMORPGs with a "good" and an "evil" side the evil guys end up being exactly as helpful and nice to NPCs as the good guys.

In summary, I would say that storytelling in RPGs can be improved, but mainly in terms of delivery and pacing. There is little hope that these games ever will be able to tell a wider range of stories, which are significantly different from the monomyth structure of the hero's journey. Pride and Prejudice Online isn't going to happen.

Kudos to Blizzard for honesty

2009-11-11T06:30:00.001+01:00

Via MMO-Champion I saw this Blizzard "blue post" on pugging in 3.3:

Just a couple of observations from our point of view:

1) Players who don't pug dramatically underestimate the number of people who do.
2) Players often assume every realm has the same dynamics that their realm has.

Pugging is something an awful lot of players do and our (frankly inadequate) tool didn't facilitate that experience very well. The new tool is pretty fast and simple. If you enjoy pugging (or don't enjoy it but do it anyway) the new tool should let you spend less time organizing and more time killing (or wiping).

If pugging isn't your thing, that's cool. We're not trying to push you into it... unless you really like pugs (by which I mean the pooch). The tool will also benefit premades.

Emphasis is mine. It is refreshing to see that Blizzard is well aware that their LFG tools, in spite of several iterations, are still "frankly inadequate". And I do believe that the patch 3.3 approach of making pickup groups more common by A) making them easier to find, and B) rewarding people for pugging is the right one.

It is said that Blizzard's "A team" moved away from World of Warcraft to create the next-gen MMO, and left the "B team" behind to take care of WoW. Usually people use these designations to indicate that the people now working on WoW are less qualified than the people who built WoW originally. But to me it appears that at least in the field of social competencies the "B team" is way ahead of the "A team". It would be ironic if patch 3.3 made WoW blossom into a far more cooperative game, and the next-gen Blizzard MMO would turn out to be another massively soloplayer online RPG.

Thought for the day: EA layoffs

2009-11-10T10:15:00.001+01:00

EA is usually the first company mentioned when people complain about game developers making unimaginative bad sequels instead of innovative good games. EA, due to sheer size, is also the company whose games are getting pirated the most. Now EA is laying off 1500 people, and there is an outrage among gamers. What did people think would happen to a company making bad games and being constantly robbed, in the middle of an economic crisis? If you wanted to save an EA programmer's job, all you had to do was buy some EA games legitimately.

World of Microtransactions, and how we got there

2009-11-10T06:30:00.002+01:00

If you consider what the most likely business model for future MMORPGs is, you might be surprised to realize that the most likely scenario is that you will pay for that future MMORPG three times: Once for buying the game, a second time in the form of a monthly subscription fee, and a third time in the form of microtransactions, buying virtual items for cash. At this point most people either just shrug, or start ranting with foam on their mouths. But what I want to do is to explore how we got into this situation, and why microtransactions in subscription MMORPGs are a logical consequence of our own behavior.

We start this journey with classical board games, games like Chess, Monopoly, or Risk. The outcome of these games is determined either by just skill, or by a mix of skill and luck. These are games of equal opportunity: The participating players all have exactly the same opportunities in the game. A player very much determined to win can try to increase his skill by playing the game a lot, or even studying tactics in books. But unless he cheats, he can not do extra turns while his buddy is getting a coke from the fridge, or buy extra play money for real dollars.

MMORPGs are different, they have never been games of equal opportunity. While some people might want to argue that MMORPGs are open the same number of hours per week to everybody, it is obvious that due to real life not every player can spend the same number of hours in the game. And as MMORPGs are games of continuous progress, the player who spends more hours in the game progresses further than the player who spends less. In addition to the direct effects of more playing hours, there is also an indirect effect: If you can play the consecutive blocks of hours, usually at prime time, required to participate in raiding, you will get extra epic rewards unattainable to people whose schedule doesn't allow raiding. Of course skill also plays a role in your raiding success, but a player with time to raid and lack of skill has a better chance to still leech some raid epics than a player with lots of skill and no time to raid. And raiding is not the only way to get rewards in the end game: There are alternative ways to get epics, and there are alternative rewards, like achievements, and many of these depend nearly exclusively on the number of hours played.

The influence of time spent on rewards and thus social status in MMORPGs has led to a curious reversal of how people regard time spent: In other forms of entertainment the time spent in the entertainment activity is a gain, in a MMORPG time spent is often considered a loss, a cost. If you paid $15 for a movie ticket, you'd be seriously annoyed if the movie lasted only 5 minutes, because you counted on having paid for something like 90 minutes of entertainment. In MMORPGs, if it would take 90 minutes of killing monsters to do a quest and get a reward instead of just 5 minutes, you'd complain about "the grind". Any time spent in a MMORPG in an activity that doesn't give a reward is considered pointless, and any addition of a reward even as silly as an "achievement" to a previously pointless activity will make players pursue it.

Thus people spend time playing Chess either to pass time in a fun way, or to get better at playing Chess. But they spend time in a MMORPG to get rewards in the fastest way possible. If time spent in game is a "cost", it not only makes sense to minimize time and maximize rewards, but it also suddenly makes sense to outsource the activity. Nobody pays somebody else to play Monopoly for him, because it just doesn't make sense. But people do pay others for powerleveling in MMORPGs, and they also pay others to farm gold for them. People tend to blame the gold farmers, but those only respond to a market demand. And it was always just a question of time when the game companies would respond to the same demand. The game companies can create unlimited amounts of virtual goods out of thin air, so they are at a natural advantage over gold farmers, who have to work (or steal) to get virtual goods. Plus game companies make the rules, and thus can sell items that can't be traded between players, another big advantage.

At first microtransactions were just used as an alternative business model for smaller games. Instead of paying an advance sum for the game, plus signing up for a monthly subscription, the game company offers you the game to download for free, and you can play for free as well. But then you'll encounter some obstacles to progress, and are offered a way out by buying virtual stuff from the item shop. If you consider time spent without virtual rewards in a game to be a loss, then it makes sense to buy a scroll that doubles your rate of advancement. It makes even more sense to buy the reward you could get by playing directly, even if that reward is just a mount or a pet. Then somebody noticed that the two business models of monthly subscriptions and microtransactions aren't mutually exclusive. Now games like Champions Online, and since recently even World of Warcraft, have both. This leads to the bizarre situation that at the same time you pay the game company money to be allowed to play their game, *plus* you pay them money so you don't have to play all that much, but get the reward without the "grind" of playing. It's like first paying to enter a movie theatre, and then paying a second time to see the movie in fast forward instead of at normal speed, so you get to the end faster.

There is no equivalent for this in board games, you can't pay to advance faster in Monopoly or Risk or Chess. Not only would the fun of playing very obviously be destroyed if people could pay to win, but also by paying to win players would cut short the entertainment time, and the opportunity to get better at the game, which was the purpose of playing these games in the first place. We need to ask ourselves why this is different in MMORPGs. If a game isn't fun, why don't we just stop playing, instead of paying a second or third time to make it through faster?

Many people have pointed out the negative consequence for game design: If the game company earns more money because you pay them to bypass tedious content, they are more likely to put in tedious content into the game to make you pay. What you end up with in the end are stupid Facebook games, which aren't fun at all to play, but offer you rewards for mindless clicks, and then let you pay money to avoid the mindless clicks. Is this how we want the future of MMORPGs to look? Now everybody blames the greedy game companies for this, but as RMT in games without microtransaction shows, the demand was there before the game companies responded to it. The fundamental flaw isn't company greed, but the attitude of the players who value the virtual rewards more than being entertained for some time, or getting better at playing. And the truly casual players, who just play for fun without running after various rewards and achievements, are actually less likely to buy virtual goods than those who believe that these virtual rewards mean something. If you never stepped onto the treadmill of virtual progress, you aren't paying to advance faster. The day we don't believe any more that the player with the shinier gear and more glamorous fluff is superior, both RMT and microtransactions will just wither and die. It is the relentless pursuit of rewards, the idolatry of purple pixels that got us here, not just company greed. As long as we value virtual rewards more than gameplay, game companies will happily sell us those rewards.

Frost Lotus

2009-11-09T09:16:00.000+01:00

The number of people trying to make money with inscription has increased a lot since MMO-Champion posted a guide on how to get rich quick with glyphs. Basic economics tells us that this should cause the price of glyphs to go down, and the price of herbs to go up. While the former is certainly the case, the herb price has remained remarkably stable. Why is that?

It turns out that the Northrend herbs most often used for making pigments and inks for inscription are actually a byproduct of herb gathering. The main source of income for somebody farming herbs is frost lotus, which is needed for all level 80 flasks. With raiding now being accessible to far more people, the demand for raid flasks has gone up, and so has the price for frost lotus. While pretty much everything else in Wrath of the Lich King has suffered from deflation, the price of frost lotus went up from around 25 gold to around 75 gold. As there are very, very few pure frost lotus nodes, the only way to get more frost lotus is to gather lots of various high-level herbs, because each gathering has a small chance to net you some frost lotus as well. That is somewhat annoying, because getting frost lotus that way is so random, and on some days you get a lot, while going empty on other days. But the consequence is lots of Northrend herbs being gathered and being sold for around 1 gold per herb. Basically those herbs are just a side-product, who cares for the price of the 1-gold herbs when he is trying to get the 75-gold herbs?

Right now this is more or less balanced, as the excess herbs are being used for inscription. When the glyph market cools down, there is a risk that the continued search for frost lotus will make the prices for other Northrend herbs crash. Already now some mid-level herbs sell for more than most Northrend herbs. Will be interesting to watch how this develops further. It's the law of unintended consequences that tells you that linking different production chains together isn't really a good idea, because it is unlikely that demand for both productions will always remain balanced.

Thought for the day: Story

2009-11-08T08:49:00.002+01:00

While Dragon Age offers choices in dialogue which will lead to minor variations in the story, ultimately all these variations lead back to one main story line, which never changes. If I were to play through the game a second time, the same major plot elements would happen, and there would be nothing I could do about lets say getting betrayed a second time. While better storytelling especially in MMORPGs would be nice, it all ends up with us being trapped inescapably in stories we already know. Is story the death of replayability?

Some random WoW pet store thoughts

2009-11-06T08:33:00.000+01:00

I'm not buying either of the two pets on offer. I expect them to be fun for about 5 minutes, and most of that fun you can experience by watching somebody else's pet, and save your money.
The $5 to charity deal (limited time offer, and only valid for one of the two pets) is a scam. If you disagree, I have an offer for you: Send me $10, and I promise to send $5 of it to charity.
Blizzard used to be one of the few game companies with a basic understanding of exchange rates. Playing WoW in Europe is more expensive than in the US, but not by a stupid factor of 1.5 from an $1 = €1 calculation used by other companies, like Steam. But this isn't true for the pet shop, a pet costs €10 in Europe, £9 in the UK. That makes the UK pet more expensive than the cheapest monthly subscription rate! Europeans pay $15 for the exactly same pet that Americans pay $10 for.
Dragon Age: Origins has microtransactions too. I understand the part where you buy additional playable content. But instead of buying items that make the game easier, you could just change the game's difficulty level. And why would you pay for vanity items in a single-player game?
I don't care if you think that $10 or $15 isn't "micro" any more. I'm still using the term "microtransaction" for buying virtual items from the game company for real money. I'm using RMT for buying virtual currency *from other players and companies*, just to have two different terms for two very different things.
Do microtransactions make baby murlocs cry?

Dragon Age: Murphy's Law

2009-11-06T06:30:00.004+01:00

In an extremely predictable sequence of events dictated by Murphy's Law, I first bought Dragon Age: Origins via Steam, and promptly got an e-mail from EA's marketing people saying that they decided to send me a review copy after all, and that it's in the mail. In hindsight of course I should have waited, but at least by buying the game a few hours before it came out I got some pre-purchase bonus in-game items.

Well, I started playing, and did both a dwarf commoner warrior, and an elf mage, playing them until their stories converge. First impression is that the mage is overpowered, having ranged magic dps, crowd control, and healing. As it is a lot easier to pick up various melee types for your party, playing a mage as your main guarantees you always have a healer around, plus excellent dps, which is a great tactical advantage. I'm enjoying Dragon Age: Origins very much up to now, due to combat being a lot more tactical than most MMORPGs. Even at normal difficulty setting you can't just storm into every fight on automatic settings and expect to come out alive.

I'll play this a good deal more, before I write a review of the game.

Blizzard introduces microtransactions

2009-11-05T06:43:00.002+01:00

A lot of people have previously argued that while Blizzard will take extra money from you for services like server moves or race changes, they aren't selling you any virtual items for real money. That isn't true any more. Via MMO-Champion and WoW.com comes the news that Blizzard now officially launched a microtransaction shop for their game, the Pet Store. For $10 you will be able to buy an in-game pet for World of Warcraft.

Right now there are only 2 of them available, a pandaren monk and a miniature Kel’Thuzad. Others will undoubtedly follow. Then maybe other fluff items (armor dyes would sell well, Blizzard!). And later this could be expanded to classics of microtransaction shops like double XP scrolls, mounts, and various other things.

I think I just won an argument with one of my readers who swore that no AAA MMORPG like World of Warcraft would ever add microtransactions. Wake up and smell the coffee, people! Microtransactions are now officially arrived on the list of possible features for every MMORPG. Once World of Warcraft does it, many other games that don't have microtransactions will copy them.

Dragon Age: Absence

2009-11-04T16:54:00.003+01:00

So Dragon Age: Origins is all over the internet today, having been released in the USA yesterday. Europe only gets the game this Friday, which is one reason why I'm not yet playing it. The other reason is more complicated:

Since some time somebody working for a public relations agency emloyed by EA to promote Dragon Age: Origins sends me regular e-mails with news about the game, and links to where I can download publicity materials. And they offered me a review copy of Dragon Age: Origins weeks ago, asking me to preferably write a review before the release date. That review copy never arrived. Yesterday, the day of the release, I got a mail instead, saying "I should hear back from EA later this week about whether I'm able to secure a review copy for your site. I'll keep you posted."

This has the somewhat perverse effect of me being reluctant to buy Dragon Age: Origins and to review it. If EA ends up sending me a free copy, it would be stupid to pay for the game as well. But as they apparently aren't really sure about whether they want to send me that free copy, I'm a bit stuck. If I didn't have this half-promise of a free game, I'd certainly buy Dragon Age: Origins. But the way EA handles their public relations ends up with me hesitating to buy the game, and in consequence not writing a review. That can't be what EA had planned when they wrote me.

[P.S. I'm just seeing that Rohan from Blessing of Kings has exactly the same problem]

Thought for the day: Ignorance

2009-11-04T06:52:00.002+01:00

How come that every time an outage of Blizzard's servers in mainland China is reported, some people reply with comments about the effect that has on Chinese gold farmers? Isn't it blindingly obvious that if you wanted to shut out gold farmers of whatever nationality, you'd need to close down the US/Euro servers, not the Chinese ones? How do people imagine that gold is transferred from Chinese servers to US/Euro buyers?