Tobold's MMORPG Blog

Aion review - beta version

2009-07-06T06:30:00.005+02:00

As "how much time do you need to play an MMO to review it?" is a controversial subject, I'll start this by stating exactly how long I played and what I did: I played Aion during the 3rd closed beta event weekend, for over 20 hours, leveling a priest and a warrior to ascension (level 10) and a bit beyond, and playing the other two classes less than that. So I know nothing about the end game beyond of what I read. Let's call this Aion review a beta. A beta game gets a beta review. :)

Aion is a very pretty game, if you are into the Eastern style of MMO / RPG graphics. The animations are especially well done. It is also a very solid one, I didn't have a single crash, and only a few very minor bugs, like hair sticking through clothes, or translation errors. Aion is a very accessible game, easy to learn, easy to play, if you played any other MMORPG you need nearly no time to learn how to play this. All these great qualities mean that if Aion had come out in 2004, it would have given World of Warcraft a run for its money, much more so than Everquest 2 did at the time. But as it is now 5 years later, Aion will have to stand comparison with several other games.

If you would draw a map of the archipelago of MMORPGs (a bit like Tim Howgego's map of WoW online communities), the island of Aion would be extremely close to the island of World of Warcraft, and a bit in the direction of Warhammer Online. Term's like "WoW clone" or "copy" have such negative connotations, so I'll use the term WoW-a-like. It is impossible to deny a certain WoW-a-likeness in Aion, more so than for example WAR or LotRO.

You start the game by creating a character of one of only two races, Elyos or Asmodians. Aion's lore is one of civil war between those two races, so they don't look very different. There is a huge number of sliders for character creation (including one for boob size for females), so you can modify your look over an extremely wide range. For example your height can be anything from 4' to 8', regardless of race. As the end game has a strong PvP component, expect many people to choose the less easily clickable and visible minimum size.

Your character can be one of 4 different classes, warrior, priest, scout, or mage. On ascension at level 9 or 10 you will have to specialize into one of two sub-classes. For example tank or dps for the warrior, healer or buffer for the priest, etc. As the sub-classes still share a lot of spells and abilities, this is more like choosing a talent-tree in WoW than like having completely different classes. Aion doesn't have talent trees, but you can specialize your character further by choosing what manastones to put into your gear. Manastones are a nice feature, stat buffs you typically find as a loot drop, and which can be placed into slots in your gear. The ones giving critical hit seem to be the most sought after, makes me wonder whether the stones are already well balanced.

Once in the game, you meet an NPC with a glowing symbol over his head, click on him, and he'll ask you to kill some level 1 monsters. Just like WoW you'll spend most of your time doing such quests, usually involving going from A to B, and killing mobs, mostly pretty standard stuff. The monsters you kill are quite original though, not the standard wolves, boars, and orcs. Okay, so a "porgus" looks very much like a boar, but in general the monsters are quite well done. There is also a kind of "destiny" quest series, including some quests that have very nice cutscenes. Only drawback is that this destiny is the same for every player, regardless of race or class, I would have hoped for an AoC Tortage-like intervowen web of different destinies. Quests are relatively easy, and the quest text has hyperlinks to names and places which you click on for explanations, and even get locations shown on the map. Quest rewards are mostly cash, avoiding the problem WoW has with you getting too many gear rewards you don't need. Mobs also don't drop gear all that often, at least not in the lower levels, but NPC vendors have a handy "sell all junk" button to clear your inventory of grey items. Some quest chains earn you titles, and selecting a title also gives you some stat bonuses, nice!

Combat is mostly like WoW's, with a touch of WAR mixed in. So you target a mob, auto-attack, but do most of your damage with special attacks launched from your hotkey bar. There are combat ability chains, like in WAR, where you can launch the level 2 ability only after having done the level 1 ability related to it. But somebody decided that finding two buttons was too challenging for players, so after clicking on the level 1 ability button, the button automatically changes into the corresponding level 2 ability. It's a 1-button-chain system, a bit too simple in my opinion. At ascension you get the ability to fly, but only for a minute at a time, plus added time from flight potions, and only in certain areas. Flying combat is possible, but tricky due to the time restriction, and you can't just fly and hit non-flying mobs from above, they evade. Curiously swimming is not implemented, you just walk under water.

Crafting is better than in WoW or WAR (not much of a hurdle). Gathering works like in WoW, clicking on nodes, but you don't need to buy tools or train, and you even get a few xp from gathering. After ascension you have access to 6 crafting professions, from alchemy to weaponsmithing. You can learn all 6 to 399, but only one of them to the absolute cap of 450. Unfortunately the act of crafting itself is not interactive, so getting that high will involve a lot of downtime waiting for progress bars. Critical successes during crafting lead to better items. To avoid having to make items nobody wants, there are work requests from the crafting trainer. Except for the first one, these *do* cost you some money, in vendor bought materials, but skilling up that way is still much cheaper than crafting items nobody wants to buy. You can sell items on the auction house or open a personal shop while afk. Both work reasonably well, I'm just not sure the sorting of items in the AH is working as intended, and for items posted as stack you don't get the price per item calculated.

The only major disappointment of my Aion weekend was the severe lack of replayability. There being only two races means there are only two newbie zones from level 1 to 10. And the two newbie zones are very similar to each other, starting you in the wilderness, getting you to a first village with all the trainers, then a lake area, a forest, another wilderness area, a big camp full of enemies, and a cave. Several quests in the two zones are downright identical, for example the final quest in the cave where you need to activate three colored colums before destroying an abyss gate. As I mentioned, even the big cutscenes for the destiny quest line are the same for the two races, and for every class. So while Aion can compete with World of Warcraft in terms of quality and polish, in terms of amount of content WoW is far ahead, even if you compare 2004 WoW with 2009 Aion.

I haven't decided yet whether I want to buy Aion or not. While the leveling game is fun enough, it isn't much different of the leveling game of half a dozen other fantasy MMORPGs. And I'm a bit wary of the Aion endgame, which is labeled as PvPvE: It seems to be similar to WAR keep battles, with a PvE faction thrown in. There even appear to be world raid bosses in the PvPvE zone, apparently working a bit like Wintergrasp: Win the PvP battle to be able to battle the raid boss. I can't say how good this is going to be, but knowing myself, I probably won't like the PvP part of the endgame.

I would expect Aion to do quite well, there aren't all that many games out there with that level of polish and accessibility. But the mythical "WoW Killer" Aion is not. While Aion has some unique features, the same level of quality as WoW, and even surpassing WoW in some areas, World of Warcraft still comes out ahead with being much bigger, offering better replayability through more classes, races, and zones, and having the more popular PvE raid endgame. It is difficult to image millions of players quitting WoW to play Aion, when Aion isn't that different in the leveling game, and its endgame is PvP-heavy. It is hard to predict how much being WoW-a-like is going to help or hurt Aion in the long run.

Open Sunday Thread

2009-07-05T06:30:00.002+02:00

Tell me your thoughts and opinions about the games you are currently playing, and the game you are looking for! Or your ideas about games and features you would like to see. It's the open Sunday thread, the discussion post without a fixed subject.

Why RMT discussion must fail

2009-07-04T08:26:00.003+02:00

$1 is not worth the same thing to every person.

That might seem counterintutitive, but the value of $1 isn't absolute, by itself it is just a worthless piece of green paper. The value of that 1 dollar is determined by what you are going to buy with it. And that is pretty much depending on how many other dollars you have. Common Sense Gamer is furious about a permanent horse in Runes of Magic costing $10. Then he gets even more furious when nobody agrees. But the point is that there is no absolute answer to the question of whether $10 for a virtual horse is too expensive or not.

If you would otherwise use those $10 to buy food for your starving children, of course spending those $10 on a virtual horse instead is downright crazy. But if you have paid all your bills, done all your shopping, put aside enough money for your retirement, and you still have $10 left, whether you spend those on a virtual horse or on a cinema ticket or on a 13 shot venti soy hazelnut vanilla cinnamon white mocha with extra white mocha and caramel at Starbucks doesn't really matter.

What microtransactions do is put a fixed price on something which is at best a convenience, a luxury. There is no "true" value to anything on offer here, so discussing whether the price is fair or not just doesn't make sense. It is as pointless as discussing the price of a Luis Vutton handbag.

Fallout 3 on Steam

2009-07-04T06:44:00.002+02:00

I have an unopened box with the game Fallout 3 sitting on my shelf since it came out. For all I hear that is an excellent game, but I have too many other games to play, and not enough time, so I can't say from personal experience. Nevertheless I thought you might want to know that you can get Fallout 3 for half price on Steam this weekend. Nothing better to celebrate the 4th of July than battling in a postapocalyptic wasteland.

The illusion of impact

2009-07-03T06:30:00.000+02:00

The discussion in the last open Sunday thread was about making MMOs more dynamic, less static, with the players having an impact on changes in the world. In the current situation, players feel more like stuck in Groundhog Day, with them evolving every day, but the world around them always remaining the same. Why is that so?

The main reason why having a real impact on a virtual world is hard to implement is that it would affect other players. Imagine Hogger or Onyxia or Kel'Thuzad being permanently dead after the first players killed them, or mobs generally not respawning; after a few days the virtual world would be void of monsters. Game over. Imagine *players* not respawning after being killed in PvP. Game over. Imagine an RvR game in which one realm wins, there is no reset, and due to having control of everything the winning side keeps getting stronger and at some point can't be overthrown any more. Game over. Everything resets in order that the next player can still play the same game.

What we are left with the possibility to create an illusion of impact. In its most simple form that is created by the player moving through content and not coming back. You got the quest to kill Hogger, you go there and do the deed, you see Hogger lying on the ground and loot him, you go back and get your quest reward. As there is no real reason for you to go back to the little peninsula Hogger roams, you have the illusion of having killed Hogger, when in reality of course he respawned 5 minutes later.

The more advanced method of creating the illusion of impact is by using copies of parts of the game. If you killed Onyxia or Kel'Thuzad today, they will still be dead tomorrow. Unless it's Wednesday, and the raid dungeon reset and they are all back. This was much expanded in Wrath of the Lich King, so if you do the quest series in Conquest Hold in Grizzly Hills that leads to a different chieftain becoming the boss there, or if you do the Wrathgate event in Dragonblight, you will see these places permanently changed every time you go there. What you can't do is go there with a friend and show him "look what I have done", because your friend will see those places as they were before the quest, until he does the quest himself. In some cases that can also lead to two players being unable to cooperate on a quest, because they are in different phases, and see different things.

Another illusion of impact is a location that exists in two (usually) states, and alternates between those states based on player actions. In PvP that is places like Halaa in Nagrand, or keep battles in WAR. You conquer the keep, and it is yours! Then nothing happens. You get bored and log off. Then the other side comes and conquers the keep and it is theirs! And so on, ad infinitum, ad nauseam. That could theoretically be done for PvE too, for example questing for the villagers to chase away the wild animals from the forest, so the lumberjacks can log wood there; and other players later questing for the druids to chase away the lumberjacks from the forest to restore natural balance. I just can't think of any game that does this right now.

Thus the best possible case of a dynamic world is one where everything exists in several states, which are in some sort of dynamic equilibrium that can be influenced by the players. Fight a lot of orcs, and the village prospers. No players doing those quests for a while and the orcs burn down the village, opening up new quests to reconquer the place. Moving frontlines in PvP, with some balancing factors that prevent one side permanently dominating. We could have player run cities, that evolve with the actions of the players, but following certain rules. We could even have unique events planned by the devs in which the world is permanently changed, but following a script balanced by the developers. What we can do is to make the illusion of impact very good, very convincing. The question is whether players will be happy with that illusion.

Aion beta EU authentication server down

2009-07-02T22:11:00.002+02:00

So my Aion beta experience got off to a bad start, the authentication server for Aion Europe broke down, not that this is unheard of when a beta launches. The authentication server being down also means I can't log into the Aion beta forums. So how do I know what's going on? Aion has their CMs on Twitter. I'm usually not a big Twitter fan, and deleted my account there, but telling people over Twitter about tech problems when players can't get that information from the game or the forums is just brilliant.

Are we still having fun?

2009-07-02T11:29:00.003+02:00

Wolfshead runs a blog on which the post range from brilliant but grumpy to just grumpy. His latest brilliant but grumpy post is about tackling player inertia, in which he takes the 2008 WoW zombie invasion event as example to demonstrate how much MMO players hate change and anything unpredictable.

Over time we willingly trade the feeling of wonder and excitement for the security of the daily grind and the routine. We become like the cast of Cheers. We show up in our favorite MMOs each night, occupy our virtual bar stools and embrace the insanity of tedium and repetitiveness.

This leads him to the conclusion that if Raph Koster's Theory of Fun is correct, and we are having fun by learning things, we can't possibly have fun after having settled down into a routine of daily repetitive tasks. So the big question is:

Are we still having fun?

Right now the answer appears to be no. I'm not playing any major MMO at the moment, spending my time with single-player games and small niche MMOs instead. I've seen various reader comments on my blog from people either still playing but grumbling about it, or not playing any MMO and loudly proclaiming hate for them all (Which makes a MMORPG blog a strange place to hang out). The most positive excitement I hear nowadays is about games that haven't even been released yet. It is easier to find somebody saying nice things about Aion or SWTOR than somebody saying nice things about World of Warcraft or Warhammer Online or any other existing MMORPG.

And not only are we not having fun in the existing games, we also strongly resist any proposal to change them. Just watch the players recent reactions to the various changes that patch 3.2 brings to World of Warcraft: Every single one of them has been blasted as bad by the players.

But if we look beyond the world of blogs, comments, and forums, an explanation dawns: The games themselves are still full of millions of players, apparently still having enough fun in the game to not quit it. If unhappiness about MMORPGs were widespread, shouldn't the user numbers be dropping? So the alternative theory to "MMOs are not fun any more" is that the people who are having fun are so busy playing that they don't find the time to hang out in blogs or forums; while the people who stopped having fun also stopped playing, giving them more time to complain about the existing games, or to express hope for the future games. People writing on forums, blogs, or comments are not representative of the average MMORPG gamer. And increasingly the writing sub-part of the MMORPG community is far more negative than the non-writing part.

Best economic system

2009-07-02T08:08:00.002+02:00

I've been asked what MMO I thought had the best economic system. The sad answer is "none of them". Economic systems are often not at the heart of MMORPGs, and only added at a late stage of the development as an afterthought. Warhammer Online, for example, did not have an auction house for most of the beta, and when one was added just before release, it didn't work very well. Crafting in WoW is a joke, you can get from level 1 to the level cap in an hour once you bought the resources. And in nearly all games you are forced to craft a huge number of useless items to skill up. If we want to have a good economic system, we'll have to design one from scratch, taking highlights from various games:

Resource gathering: By far the most fun resource gathering I ever played in a MMORPG was in Star Wars Galaxies. In that game the location of resources change once per week, and resources have stats. So you go out exploring with a fun scanning system to find resources, manually extract one resource to find out its quality, and if that quality is to your liking, plant a harvester. Great system, with lots of advantages: Putting in more effort to find better quality resources pays off, but somebody not playing a lot can still have his harvesters running while he is offline, unlike most other games where you don't get anything if you're not online.

Trading: In the real world trade happens because certain goods are plentiful in one place, and rare in another. Thus transporting the good from A to B enables you to sell it at a profit. Very few MMORPGs have a system like that, and most of those who have are space flight games. In a game like WoW the auction house of lets say Undercity is linked with that of Thunder Bluff, thus the price of goods is the same regardless of location. And if that wasn't the case, transporting items by teleport would quickly remove all opportunity for trading. If we want to add trading to an economic MMORPG, we would need a system where teleporting and other fast transport is limited to characters and their equipment, while the transport of goods was much slower. Ideally transporting goods from A to B would have some adventure involved, so there would be an interest in a career as trader, transporting goods all over the world.

Crafting: The best crafting system I know is smithing a blade in A Tale in the Desert. There you start with a block of metal, and need to hammer it into the shape of the blade you want, using different types of hammers. The closer your block of metal resembles the target shape, the better the quality of your produced blade. Thus you can hammer out a cheap blade quickly, or spend an hour on a perfect product. And the whole process really feels like smithing, you're not just clicking a button, or playing Bejewelled to craft something.

Craft skilling: I'm still looking for a good system here. I do not like systems where you need to craft useless things to skill up to be allowed to craft useful things. Star Wars Galaxies at least had a sort of practice crafting, which used less resources, did not produce anything, but still gained you skill points. Systems where you can salvage a crafted item and get most of the resources back can also work to avoid markets being flooded with items only crafted for skilling.

Auction house: I much prefer blind auction houses like the one in Final Fantasy XI to the more common simple WoW AH system. In a blind AH you don't see for how much the seller has put up his goods, but you do see how many items are available, and for how much the last X items sold. Then you make a bid, and if there is a seller whose offer price is lower than your bid, you'll buy his item. In a WoW system you only see the price of the items that *didn't* sell, so the average computed by an addon like Auctioneer is systematically too high. Blind auction houses also prevent people from seeing at what price the competition offered their items, and then simply underbidding them by 5 copper. In addition to being blind, a better auction house system would also offer buy orders, not just sell orders.

Personal shops: I'm not totally against personal shops. I do however strongly dislike systems where there are ONLY personal shops, and no centralized system to find who is selling what, example Ragnarok Online. In such a system, whenever you want to buy anything, you need to visit every personal shop one by one to see whether what you want is on offer. Comparing prices takes forever, a really horrible system. Personal shops however can be a good addition to an auction house system, or you could design a system with only personal shops, but a centralized register to find who is selling what where at what price. Another suboptimal feature of many personal shop systems (mostly in Asian games) is the necessity to stay online to keep your shop open. That is a design based on the fact that in Asia you often pay per hour hour for these games. Thus keeping your shop up costs you real money, and earns the game company revenue, which is why they design it that way. In a monthly fee or Free2Play business model, the need to stay online to sell something is just annoying and serves no purpose. Nothing more annoying than to come back after having set up an afk shop and finding that you sold nothing, because for some reason you got disconnected shortly after going afk. A much better personal shop system is the one in Star Wars Galaxies, where there is player housing which can effectively be turned into a shop, the selling is done via vendor robots and works offline, you can even put up a display of the wares you want to sell, and over time you can get a reputation as a master crafter and good shop source for some type of item.

Inflation: One major problem of economic gameplay is the convention that a level 1 character killing a monster will earn currency or items worth only a few coppers. A high-level character killing a monster of his level, in spite of that being no more difficult than the level 1 character killing that level 1 monster, will get far more valuable loot. In World of Warcraft the reward for one daily quest at level 80 is sufficient for all the monetary needs of a character from level 1 to 20. That level based inflation is extremely destructive to economic systems. Nothing but the economic activity at the level cap really matters.

Rest of game: I mentioned before that economic systems are often added as an afterthought. While some people have a lot of fun doing economic activities like resource gathering, crafting, or trading, most games are designed in a way that these activities are not necessary. You can perfectly well get from level 1 to the level cap in World of Warcraft without ever visiting the auction house, gathering a single resource, or crafting a single item. Items never break permanently, they can always be repaired. The only items leaving the economy are those that are soulbound, being either bind on pickup, or bind on equip items that have been equipped, and where the owner got hold of a better item. So the old item gets vendored or disenchanted. Crafted items compete with all other sources of items, loot drops, quest rewards, PvP rewards, token items, etc. In a game where crafting and the player economy was to play a bigger role, crafting would have to become the major source of items. For example the raid boss would not drop epic loot, but only a resource that was needed to craft an epic item. All current non-crafting sources of items would give out resources or gold instead, and you'd have to take these resources to a crafter to get items made, or sell the resources and buy the items on the market. This is how Luminary works, which is why I'm playing that game now. Other game systems that encourage crafting are systems in which items break, and have to be replaced, or where repairing gets more and more expensive until buying a new item is simply cheaper.

So as you can see, elements of good economic gameplay are already existing in various games, but there isn't really one game where all the elements are good. One game has fun trading, but boring resource gathering. In another game crafting is fun, but there is no need for the items you crafted, and nobody buys them. No game is really a good economic simulation MMORPG with fun in all of the various aspects.

Aion third beta event

2009-07-01T10:13:00.002+02:00

The most reliable way for a MMO blogger to get into betas remains a Fileplanet subscription. Having that, I finally managed to get a beta key for Aion, valid for the third beta "event" (period in which the beta is open), starting this Thursday. So I'll have a look at the game, which will help me to decide whether I want to pre-order it or not. I'll tell you what I think next week.

What I could do up to now is use the Aion beta key on my NCSoft account, and download and install the NCSoft Launcher and the Aion beta client. Starting the Aion beta client only gets me to the login screen, where obviously any login attempt fails right now. What worries me a bit is that I have no cursor on the login screen, so the quit button is unuseable, and I have to shoot down the program with the task manager to end it. Anyone else having mouse cursor problem with Aion and Vista 64?

A more amusing error is contained in the NCSoft Launcher. If you click the "Store" button, there is advertising for various NCSoft games, including one asking you to buy Tabula Rasa. :) NCSoft might want to clean up their launcher a bit. :)

Preventing asymmetric trade

2009-07-01T08:23:00.002+02:00

For years I have been accusing all major MMORPG companies of hypocrisy: The all lament the practice of gold selling, but are not using the means at their disposal to actually stop it. Especially Blizzard is famous for using gold farmer bannings as a publicity stunt, doing nothing for months, and then banning them all at once with a big press release [a technique I copied for banning trolls from my blog :)]. But if gold selling becomes actually illegal, governments might come down like a ton of bricks on game companies, and tell them that putting a paragraph in the EULA and banning a few gold farmers twice a year is not sufficient. So lets explore the other options game companies have to stop gold selling.

The principal problem with stopping gold selling is that half of the transaction happens outside of the game, beyond the control of anyone. Not even a government could know whether player A gave player B $50 in cash in a dark alley, in return for player B giving player A 5,000 gold for an epic mount in World of Warcraft. (Sorry if the exchange rate is horribly off, I have no idea of the current price of WoW gold, and no desire to visit a gold selling site to find out). The only thing which is visible, and easily controlled is the transfer of gold in game. The reason why game companies do nothing about gold selling is that they want to allow player B giving player A 5,000 gold for free, for example if the two players are friends or relatives. They just don't want to allow player A giving $50 to player B. Thus the illegal half of the transaction is the one that is invisible. That policy can't possibly work.

Thus if the game companies were pushed to actually get serious about stopping gold selling, what they would have to do is to prevent asymmetric trades. That includes not only player B opening a trade window to player A and giving him 5,000 gold, but also player B sending the gold by mail, or player B "buying" one piece of copper ore from player A for 5,000 gold. It also includes removing any other means of transfer of wealth, like shared guild bank accounts.

As I said in the post about the Chinese government banning virtual currency trades, it is certainly feasible to simply remove all these features from a game like World of Warcraft. WoW would be a very different game without mailbox, auction house, trade windows, and guild banks, but it would still be completely playable.

But there are less drastic options than to remove all forms of trade. It would be sufficient to remove only the asymmetric trades between strangers. You could be allowed to exchange goods between alts, and even between different accounts from family members, as long as they are linked to the same credit card or other means of identification. Note that Blizzard is already allowing character transfers between accounts based on such a rule. All your linked accounts could for example have a shared bank, thus enabling you to give e.g. heirloom items to your alts, or exchange trade goods.

Between strangers it would still be possible to allow symmetric trades. Instead of players being able to put up an item for any price they want on an auction house, players could sell that item to an NPC merchant. But unlike with a current WoW vendor the item wouldn't simply disappear, but would be stocked by the NPC merchant, for resale to other players at a slightly higher price. The more of any item the NPC merchant has in stock, the less he will pay for it, but the cheaper he will also sell it. So it would still be possible for some players to farm items and sell them, and other players to buy those goods and craft something from them, reselling the product. But as all the transfers are indirect via an NPC merchant, asymmetric trades are prevented.

Designing a MMORPG with a player-run economy, but no asymmetric trades, and no gold selling, is completely feasible. But I'm afraid that unless there is government intervention, it will not happen. Despite all what they say publicly, game companies obviously aren't all that interested in stopping RMT. Developers are absolute gods over their virtual worlds, and have far more power over their creations than any government has over their citizens. Claims that they hate RMT and are just unable to stop it are simply bogus.

China stops trade in virtual currency

2009-07-01T06:30:00.000+02:00

This Monday the Ministry of Commerce of the People's Republic of China announced a prohibition of use of virtual money for trading in real goods. Note the order of the words! Of course this also prohibits the use of real money for trading in virtual currency, because real money is a real good. But the order of the words tells you that this isn't done because China is worried that their gold farmers might ruin World of Warcraft. The intention is a very different one, which they clearly state:

China has unveiled the first official rule on the use of virtual currency in the trade of real goods and services to limit its possible impact on the real financial system.

The intention is to prevent activities like money laundering via a transfer and back into virtual currency. But whatever the intentions are, it remains to be seen how this will actually be formulated into law, and what activities it affects. Will Chinese gold farmers playing on US servers of WoW become extinct, or at least driven underground?

One tricky part is the sales of virtual goods that aren't currency for real money. In the wording of the press release that appears not to be affected. But of course one could launder money not only buy buying virtual gold with it, but also by buying and reselling virtual epics or trade goods. But if you prohibit that, then the microtransaction business model also becomes illegal in China, and it is far more widespread there than in the US or Europe.

Even more interesting is the potential effect of this on future game design. It is possible that the Chinese government will hold game companies responsible to completely stop RMT. That is easier than you might think. You just need to completely eliminate the player economy and all forms of trade. For example in World of Warcraft you would need to eliminate the auction house, mailboxes, and direct trades. Then you'd better remove the current limit of 2 tradeskills, because everybody will need to be able to do everything, when there is no trade possible. You would also have to remove the shared guild banks, but could add shared banks limited to the characters on the same account, so people could still pass trade goods and heirloom items between alts. Of course that would be a rather significant change to World of Warcraft, but it would still be very playable like that. And as the goal here is to prevent harm to the greater financial system, I doubt that the Chinese government is too worried about the effect of that on game balance. We might even see games without player economy here in Europe and the US, if the game company wants to sell the same game everywhere.

Weight Watchers: Slim your Tauren down to a Gnome

2009-06-30T09:05:00.002+02:00

In a completely predictable move, after allowing you to change your name, server, sex, and look, Blizzard is now working on a system that lets you change your race in World of Warcraft, including changing a Horde character into an Alliance one and vice versa. Yes, you somewhat overweight Tauren can now do a diet and slim down in bulk and size until he is a Gnome. Details are still being worked out.

Some commenters accuse Blizzard of this being just another RMT option, as you'll have to pay to change. But I don't think the income of that is really going to have a big impact on the billion dollar annual revenue of World of Warcraft. I'd say the main motivation is to keep people playing after they got bored with one side, but don't want to abandon their old character.

And in WoW, unlike other RPGs, that is easier than it looks. Race has very, very little influence on your character, much less so than in other games. In many other systems a large race like the Tauren would be stronger, while a small race like a Gnome would be more agile or intelligent. In Everquest it was completely possible to gimp yourself by making a sub-optimal race / class combination. Not so in WoW. The Tauren warrior transformed into a Gnome warrior will not suddenly become less strong and more agile. The stats will only change minimally, or not at all.

What made this predictable was that it is just another step in the process of diluting character identity. That is a bad thing, because it weakens social cohesion, which isn't strong in WoW in the first place. Next up: The ability to change you character class.

Anno 1404 and sandbox MMOs

2009-06-30T08:30:00.004+02:00

My copy of Anno 1404 (Dawn of Discovery) arrived yesterday, and I've also been reading up on that game. The game appears to cause some confusion among some players and reviewers. At first glance there doesn't appear to be a tutorial. The campaign is somewhat short, only about 20 hours, and the difficulty settings for the campaign are limited, ranging from trivial to far too easy. What's going on? The answer is simple: The 20-hour campaign *IS* the tutorial. The actual game of Anno 1404 is the endless sandbox game, where a single game can take over 100 hours. And you can customize the sandbox part with a huge number of parameters, ranging from the completely peaceful to the highly military, and from the very easy to the ultra challenging.

Of course I couldn't help but notice that this is exactly how I would design a sandbox MMO: Have an extensive tutorial explaining really every aspect of the game, before releasing the players into a completely freeform game.

Complex sandbox games, like EVE, often suffer from the tutorial not explaining anything beyond the most basic functions. The EVE tutorial has much improved over the years, but many new players still feel extremely lost at the end of it. And of course there is the Tortage risk as seen in Age of Conan: Players like the guided gameplay of the tutorial more than the freeform gameplay afterwards. But I do think that is an issue of properly managing expectations: Tortage was heavy on story-telling, and light on obvious "tutorialness", so it was easy to confuse it with being the actual game. In Anno 1404 the campaign is more easily recognized as a tutorial, although maybe it should have been named differently. All the main quests are about using new game functions or building new buildings, and you frequently get advice in case things go wrong.

Ultimately the main problem of a sandbox game is how to make it complex enough for players to be occupied forever, but still be able to integrate new players without them feeling lost or unable to catch up. Linear advancement, quest-based games can get away with much simpler gameplay, as long as you provide thousands of "kill 10 foozles" quests that superficially look different from each other. A sandbox game in which there is nothing to do but kill foozles isn't likely to be a big success. An extended tutorial could lead players into the required complexity, by helping them to build something up which they then need to sustain in the freeform sandbox main part of the game.

Blood Bowl - First Impressions

2009-06-29T08:31:00.000+02:00

About 20 years ago I visited a little shop in London and bought one of the games they produced themselves. The shop was the Games Workshop, and the game was the first edition of Blood Bowl. Blood Bowl is a strategy game in which two teams from the Warhammer universe play a game not unlike American Football, after having discovered an ancient religious text with the Lore of Nuffle (that is an NFL rulebook). At the time the rules were rather complicated, and not all that well balanced. But Blood Bowl is a game that kept on going, and the ruleset is now is the Living Rulebook 5 (LRB5), which contains a lot of input from the player base.

Last week Cyanide Studios released the PC version of Blood Bowl, currently only available as download either directly from that site, or from a few download platforms. It has both a turn-based mode adhering strictly to the LBR5 rules, and an optional real-time mode, which can be paused to give orders. I played it over the weekend, and it is quite fun. And the computer is playing Blood Bowl quite well, for somebody like me who hasn't played for a long time, or a new player, even on easy difficulty the game is still quite challenging. Besides all these strong points in gameplay, Blood Bowl also is pretty. There are several different stadiums, with fans, cheerleaders, and everything. All with a comic style tongue-in-cheek humor.

The only weakness of Blood Bowl is that this isn't really a casual game. There is a campaign mode, in which you start out with a limited amount of gold, buying players, creating a team, and then earning gold and levels by playing in competitions. But leveling up is extremely slow, you're lucky if you have one single player level up from 1 to 2 after one or two games, and thus your team is mostly defined by its race and the types of players that race gives you. If you start for example with the orcs (recommended for beginners), you'll quickly find that every game against a particular other race, lets say skaven or dwarves, plays very similar to the last game against that race. Of course the strong random elements make every game different, but the basic strategies stay the same. So you'll be playing a lot of similar games, giving you plenty of opportunity to refine you strategy, but advancing rather slowly. Of course the positive side of that is that a Blood Bowl campaign offers entertainment for many, many hours. And with a strong community from the board game, there is plenty of sources if you want to read up on strategy.

So if you are interested in a rather different Warhammer fantasy strategy game, check Blood Bowl out.

Achieving happiness in MMORPGs

2009-06-29T06:30:00.001+02:00

Happiness, chemically speaking, is the release of certain chemicals in the brain. One of them is dopamine, which is related to rewards. If you get an reward, dopamine is released, and that in turn increases the happiness you feel when you get the next reward. So one way to be constantly happy is to be on a constant dopamine high, fueled by frequently receiving rewards. Which is exactly how MMORPGs work.

Basic MMORPG gameplay consists of setting yourself a goal, and then achieving it, which leads you to the next goal, the next achievement, and so on. As achieving a goal is coupled with a reward, that makes you happy, especially if there isn't too much time between the achievements. Ideally, of course, the gameplay between the rewards should be fun by itself, or at least not frustrating. But very often players are more attracted by the constant stream of rewards than by the gameplay leading to it.

With developers eager to give the players what they want, getting from one reward to the next has constantly become quicker. While in earlier games you still needed to set your own goals, now in most games the goals come pre-packaged as quests, easy to do, and with a reward at the end. And often you don't even have to explore or think any more, as Larisa noticed even World of Warcraft will soon patch in an official "Questhelper", showing you where to go to do your quests. And of course because other players could cause delay and possible failure, soloing went from an emerging gameplay to being the norm.

Thus the standard gameplay of a modern MMORPG consists of you accepting a solo quest, performing a trivial task, and then being rewarded for it. After which the next quest starts, and the cycle repeats over and over. The "ding" of gaining another level adds another dopamine rush. Being constantly rewarded is what makes playing MMORPGs so addictive, although the drugs involved are produced by our body itself, and not some controlled substances. Still, taking that drug away can have consequences.

Dopamine's function in the brain is related to learning, and acquiring new behavior. We learn through carrots and sticks, and dopamine is the brain's carrot. Thus getting constantly rewarded in a MMORPG also changes our behavior, especially our expectations towards rewards. There is a certain danger involved in that. Not only that sooner or later the effect of receiving the same type of reward over and over dulls, and we get bored with MMORPGs; but also in that life is not a MMORPG, and is usually handing out rewards a lot less frequently, so there is a mismatch between our expectations and reality. MMORPGs teach us the wrong things about life, that success is easy to achieve, and anything you do gets rewarded.

But because it makes us happy, the MMORPG game design with ever increasing rewards in shorter and shorter intervals is going to remain with us for some time more. Until one day we collectively get bored of the virtual rewards, and they stop making us happy any more. Then maybe one day MMORPG design goes back to include other things that can make us happy: Social contacts, interesting gameplay, having to think to overcome challenges. I still have hope that one day we'll wake up and realize how dull a gameplay of constantly getting rewards for nothing much is.

Open Sunday Thread

2009-06-28T06:30:00.002+02:00

Hard week, so I'm glad it's Sunday and I get to take one day off from blogging. As always, I'm leaving this thread for you to discuss whatever subject you want.

Misrepresentation

2009-06-27T07:03:00.004+02:00

There was a news story recently where a student inserted a fake quote in a Wikipedia entry of Maurice Jarre right after his dead, and watched newspapers all over the world copy that fault. In the MMO blogosphere the biggest story on journalistic accuracy this year was the Ed Zitron review of Darkfall, which contained several factual errors, and gave the game a 2/10 rating after the reviewer only played the game for a few hours.

This week I made two factual errors on my blog. I quoted a story by Spinks, where she said Aion did not have auction houses, which happened to not be true. And I said Mortal Online was eBaying 999 limited editions, because it looked like that on the eBay page, and I hadn't read the Mortal Online newsletter saying only the first copy was auctioned off. Both of these mistakes have been fixed by A) admitting the mistake, and B) correcting it in the post.

Which, as you will find, is exactly what newspapers do with mistakes, only they don't have the luxury of being able to edit the already printed copy. So why is syncaine making a blog entry (which ironically contains several untruths) calling me an asshole for my misrepresentation? Why did some commenters try to derail those threads, attacking me for "misrepresentation", up to the point where I had to delete several comments to get the discussion back on track? Why did Ed Zitron get death threats and a "war declaration" on YouTube?

"Misrepresentation" and "journalistic standards" are the latest weapons of discreditation in the arsenal of those trying to oppress the opinions of others. In fact my blog is probably full of mistakes, starting from spelling errors to factual mistakes, because I never double-check my stories. But you will note that it is only ever the hardcore fans of certain games who complain about misrepresentation. My real crime is not that I wrote things without double-checking, my crime is that I have a negative opinion of Aion, Darkfall, and Mortal Online. Aion actually not so much, I'm just not enthusiastic about it. But I definitely think that both Darkfall and Mortal Online are worthless pieces of garbage designed for jerks who like to gank other players. That is a strong opinion, and a completely biased and subjective one. But it is that opinion syncaine calls me an asshole for, not my "journalistic standards". As I said, his post saying that also contains several untruths, but he is just making his defense of a bad game look pure like snowflakes by dragging journalistic standards and charitable donations into it.

My journalistic standards have not changed in 6 years of blogging, and they won't change anytime soon. I do not double-check news. If the source I am using is wrong or incomplete, I am likely to report the story wrong or incomplete. Yes, I could have done better if only I had found that developers post buried on page 7 of a long thread in a sub-forum of that game I don't play, but frankly, I can't be bothered looking for that. Because "truth" is not a goal of any blog, opinion is. If I make a mistake, and it is pointed out to me, I will correct that mistake, and always have done so. If, which is far more likely, my offense is having a different opinion from you, you're out of luck, and I won't "correct" that. I would have had no problems whatsoever with Ed Zitron's review if it had been a blog post, because it totally confirms to general blog journalistic standards.

And as other writers can maybe express themselves better than me, I'd like to close this post with a quote provided to me by a reader in a comment from the site disclaimer of blogger and SciFi writer John Scalzi:

Everything on the site is my opinion (except comments written by others, which are their opinions). I have strong opinions. At times, you may not agree with these opinions, or how I choose to express them. This is not my problem.

I make no claims as toward being even-handed, fair, or nice. I write what I want here. Your being offended is not a reason for me to stop writing as I choose.

I run this site as I please. You do not get a vote. If you try to suggest that you do, I may be rude to you.

A hypothetical vote for change

2009-06-27T06:30:00.002+02:00

Imagine you took 10 random MMORPG players, and asked them to participate in a series of votes. In the first vote the players would be asked whether MMORPGs are already perfect, having the best possible design, or whether they could be improved by some changes. The most likely outcome of that vote is all 10 players voting for change, because everybody has some idea how to improve MMOs.

So now you ask everyone separately to put to paper their specific proposition on how to improve MMORPGs. And then you run a second series of votes, where every player gets to vote yes or no on all of the 10 proposals. And, surprise, surprise, you'd find that every single proposal would be voted down, most commonly 9:1 or 8:2 against.

While that vote is hypothetical, the result can be predicted from existing and easily observed reactions: Just take any blog, including mine, or any forum thread, where the original poster proposes some change, and you'll always find the naysayers outnumbering those who agree. The only posts and threads where people can agree, are those who are either just complaining without offering a solution, or those who are just offering a nice-sounding catch phrase as improvement. That not only is depressing for those bloggers and forum posters who took some effort to propose something, but it also has a range of other negative consequences: Game designers reads those blogs and forums, and decide to stick with what is already there, because obviously MMORPG players are against change. And forums quickly descend into being dominated by negativity, because any constructive criticism is booed down.

For new games this also feeds the hype to disappointment cycle. People asked me what I thought about the chances of SWTOR to succeed, and my opinions on the planned improvements that game promises. But that is a typical case where right now we only have a few catch phrases, like "storytelling as the 4th pillar", to which most people can still agree. And when the game arrives, and we'll see the details, people will start turning against it. SWTOR might be a very successful game, but probably has better chances with a new generation of players who never played an MMO before than with the jaded veterans of WoW or earlier games. Just do the same hypothetical vote test again: 10 out of 10 players will vote for "improved storytelling", but every specific proposal, e.g. using cutscenes including your character to tell the story of every quest, will be voted down for various reasons, like "too long", by the majority. MMORPG players are extremely conservative and impossible to please.

How much money can you get out of a hardcore player?

2009-06-26T19:17:00.004+02:00

You remember this weeks news of Aventurine asking US players to pay a second time for Darkfall? Amateurs, just amateurs, I'm telling you. The competition is far, far ahead of them. Mortal Online is auctioning the first of 999 copies of their limited edition on EBay, and the current bid is at $2,550. But no worry, the offer includes a lifetime subscription, so after just 15 years you'll have recovered your investment.

Okay, so they promise to donate the proceeds to Doctors without Borders. But nevertheless it is astounding how much money you can get out of a hardcore player. If they wanted, they could sell all 999 copies around this level, and they'd already have over $2 million before the beta even starts on July 6!

Recycling as endgame

2009-06-26T08:36:00.002+02:00

If you take half a dozen MMORPGs at random and look at their gameplay, you'll probably find that most of them share an almost identical gameplay from level 1 to whatever the level cap is. Sure, there are variations, but basically the majority of MMORPGs have you doing quests and killing monsters for experience points, levels, gear, and improved stats, one way or another. But once you reach the level cap, the differences begin to become larger. Some games have not much of an endgame at all, other have mainly a raiding endgame, some have a PvP endgame, and there are a few games where the endgame is more political, with player-run cities for example. Not only is there a huge variation in different types of endgames, but generally all of them have important problems, and are usually the source of the bulk of player's complaints about games.

To some extent an endgame is always a crutch. In any other game you'd stop playing after reaching the end, get a game over screen, rolling credits, and maybe a computer singing to you. In a MMORPG the game company doesn't want you to stop playing, because you still give them money as long as you play, so they offer you an endgame instead of a game over screen. But is that the only way?

Take for example World of Warcraft. The raiding endgame in World of Warcraft has two major problems: It is a very different game from the leveling game, with very different requirements, thus difficult to balance between those who only play WoW for that higher challenge, and those who don't like the jump in difficulty at the end. And every expansion makes the previous endgame obsolete, including making all the rewards worthless. World of Warcraft adds 10 more levels in every expansion, so the game gets longer and longer. The leveling game suffers from that, because there are often not enough players at a given level and location to do anything actually "multiplayer". And Blizzard is forced to devalue the leveling game as well, speeding it up with every expansions, so the total time from level 1 to the level cap doesn't go up.

Now what if we removed the endgame from a leveling game like World of Warcraft, and replaced it by an incentive to start over? For example the first time you play WoW there could be only a handful of basic classes: Warrior, Priest, Mage, Rogue. Once you reach the level cap, the hybrid classes unlock, but you have to restart playing from level 1. Once you reach the level cap a second time, either with another basic class or a hybrid, hero classes like the Death Knight open up, and so on. The classes that can be unlocked wouldn't be more powerful as the basic classes, but they would be more complex to play, thus adding more challenge to keep people entertained.

As a consequence of a gameplay like that, expansions would not be vertical, adding more levels, but horizontal, adding new classes to unlock, new zones to play through from level 1 to 60. The world would grow with every expansion, but the new content would add to the old content, not make it obsolete. There would be less of a rush to reach the endgame, because there is none, and more players available to play together at every level. Of course such a game design would be controversial, MMO players are an extremely conservative bunch. But if you think of the long term, it is easy to see how a game with horizontal expansions and continuous recycling is more stable than lets say WoW with a level cap of 150.

Anno 1404

2009-06-26T06:30:00.002+02:00

So after playing the demo, I decided to buy Anno 1404 (US name is Dawn of Discovery). Steam was selling it, but the price of 50 Euro appeared rather high to me. I looked around just a tiny bit, and found the game on Amazon.co.uk for £23, which is 27 Euro at today's exchange rate. Even with shipping that was far cheaper than Steam. But of course I'll have to wait a couple of days before the game arrives by mail now.

But I'll gladly wait, not just for getting the game at half price. Anno 1404 is also the type of game which my wife might enjoy playing. And if I buy it on Steam, not only can it not be played simultaneously on two computers, but when my wife would play Anno 1404 I could not play *any* other game I bought from Steam on another computer. At least the last time I tried to play two different Steam games on two computers, logging into Steam on the second computer kicked me out of Steam on the first. That seems a bit too restrictive to me. I certainly don't mind copy protection and following license agreements. But no license agreement says that I shouldn't be able to play two different games on two computers simultaneously.

Well, Amazon thinks I'll have the game by Monday. I'll just wait. And wonder whether digital distribution would really take off if the games online weren't so expensive and came with so many restrictions.

Darkfall boycott ended

2009-06-25T09:13:00.002+02:00

It turns out I can't keep up my attempt to completely boycott mentioning Darkfall. My readers keep bringing up the game in comments, and the stories around the game are just too outrageously funny to be completely ignored. So my Darkfall boycott is officially over, but I'll step in if the game's fans are misbehaving.

In their latest move Aventurine does something of which I can completely understand the business logic, but which is bound to royally tick off the hardcore players which are the core audience of Darkfall: If you want to play on the new Darkfall US servers on release, you will have to buy the game again, even if you already paid for the European version. You *do* have an option to not pay, reuse your Euro client, and transfer your character to the US servers, but only at some point at least 3 months after release.

I find it highly entertaining to watch how extremely anti-hardcore Aventurine's business practices are. First they punished early adopters by forcing them to camp the website to buy the Euro version of the game, now they'll make them jump through hoops again for the priviledge of being early on the US servers. There is a sublime logic behind it, and a refreshing honesty: Being the first on a server has obvious advantages in a competitive persistent online game. So why not make people pay for that advantage?

Darkfall is like a very exclusive club with restricted access. That is contrary to the policy of every other MMO, all of which try to get the maximum number of subscribers. But by separating those who really, really want to play from what syncaine would call the tourists, Aventurine avoids the fate of AoC and WAR, dropping off a cliff after high initial box sales. That saves them money on server hardware etc., and thus has some justification as a strategy. So kudos to Aventurine for doing their own thing in managing their subscriber numbers.

The downside is that some US Darkfall fans will be less than happy about this. There will be yet another Hitler movie with Darkfall subtitles on YouTube, and the whole gammut of outrage and overreaction on various forums. Might be quite amusing to watch. Anyone got popcorn?

Misunderstandings and a warning

2009-06-25T07:18:00.003+02:00

Advance warning: I'm going to get extremely impolite in this post and use swear words.

I made a mistake with my last Aion post. I wasn't allowed in the beta, so my only source of information is what other sources write about the game. One of those sources wrote something wrong, and I quoted that source. I appreciate the input of those who pointed out the mistake. I fixed the mistake. End of story.

But this is just a blog. It's free for you to read, and I don't even make money with advertising. Getting all sanctimoneous about my standards of journalistic integrity is just plain silly. I'm writing a bunch of assorted opinions about games here, not the Washington Post.

But comments have been getting worse recently, mostly from people who either irrationally hate or love a particular game. One idiot posted three comments in a row full of insults, calling my writing bullshit, for the simple reason that I said I liked WoW's version of keep battles. One guy falsely accused me of being on an anti-Aion crusade, quoting my post about uninspired WoW clones as evidence. Only that post didn't even mention Aion, and was in fact about a completely different game.

All this is the equivalent of me coming to your house and starting to tell you what a loser you are, criticizing your decor, and pissing in the corner of your living room. Which would probably make you very angry. So you'll understand that right now I'm very angry, and I'm telling those whose comments contain personal attacks on me and my blog:

Fuck you, and the horse you rode in on!

If I came to your house to insult you, you'd probably chuck me out. And I'd like to remind you of my Terms of Service where it clearly states that this is exactly what I'm going to do. I'll run an extremely tight ship in the coming weeks, deleting every post with personal insults. Feel free to disagree with my opinions, and point out my mistakes, but don't call my blog bullshit, or you will be banned. This blog is dedicated to the polite and intelligent discussion of games, and if you can't live up to those minimum standards, you're invited to leave.

Mythic merges with Bioware - Mark Jacob leaving

2009-06-25T06:30:00.003+02:00

So the big news is that EA merges their two RPG / MMO subsidiaries Mythic and Bioware. That probably makes business sense, because there are obvious synergies in having all MMOs under the same roof. But of course if you merge two companies, you have one General Manager too much. So Mark Jacobs left EA.

I've read one nasty bunch of comments from people that were previously fired by Mark, and other comments wishing him well for the future. But most comments expressed surprise at him leaving Mythic. Well, I'm not surprised at all.

To me it appears obvious that when EA bought Mythic three years ago, Mark had to give them certain promises about the expected performance of Warhammer Online. We don't know what exactly he promised, but he did publicly announce his criteria for failure: Less than 500,000 subscribers and servers having to merge. Earlier this year EA announced that WAR had 300,000 subscribers, and there were server mergers. Now I'm not saying that Mark is personally responsible for the failure (as defined by his own criteria). But he was the boss. The buck stops here.

I don't know if Mark was pushed or fell on his sword voluntarily. But I do give him credit for this being a lot cleaner than when Vanguard failed and merged with SOE, and all employees were fired on the parking lot. Of course Warhammer Online didn't fail that hard, and is probably even making money. But not as much money as EA required and expected. Being held responsible was part of Mark's job description. Must be hard on him now, but if even Brad McQuaid can stage a comeback, I'm certain that Mark Jacobs will find another good job in the industry.

Aion knocked out

2009-06-24T15:46:00.004+02:00

In a strange coincidence, shortly after me posting about knockout criteria, Spinks is posting Aion impressions and mentions one feature I hate with a passion: "There’s no auction house, instead players can populate their own private vendor and set it out for other players to look at. This means that in any populated area, you’ll have to push your way past hordes of players in vendor mode. And if you want to buy, you’ll need to browse all the vendors individually."
[EDIT: Turns out Spinks was mistaken, there is an auction house as well. I'll edit this post, but don't remove it, because the point that I dislike games with only personal shops remains valid.]

I already abandoned several other games with that feature, only because I reached the point in the game where buying and selling stuff became important, and found that I just can't stand visiting a hundred small personal shops to find the one item I need. ~~This feature single-handedly removes Aion from my "games I must play" list.~~ Because in the worst case I'll be forced to search hundreds of small vendors; and in the best case the only reason why I don't have to search the vendors is that there isn't much of a player-run economy. I'm all for player-run shops, but only if you can search them from a centralized data base, or they work in addition to a centralized auction house.

Having to go into vendor mode to sell things not only makes it hard for the buyer to find things. It also means that you can't sell while adventuring. And presumably you need to stay online, afk, while in vendor mode, at least that is the case in most of these Asian games I've seen with that feature. That usually ends up with me setting a vendor up, going to bed, and coming back next morning only to find I got disconnected for some reason during the night and didn't sell anything. For a player shop to work well, and not use unnecessary bandwith, it has to work offline or when the player is doing something else, for example by operating out of player housing. Now there is one thing that Star Wars Galaxies did well, or even Ultimate Online! I won't suffer a worse system a decade later.