The Truth about Subscription Models

Well here’s a shocker, I haven’t posted anything for over a month. Anyways, in a random turn around I might actually have a couple of blogs up in short order here. The first is, of course, this one and discussing some of the major gaff’s concerning the now painfully outdated subscription models are for MMOs or as sometimes referred to as pay to play or P2P in shorthand. So, instead of wasting time, let’s look at just a few of the gems I often see from completely clueless people trying to defend the outdated and outmoded subscription model system.

Subscriptions offer solid income for the game

This is a half and half. In other words, it’s partly true but only true if the game is supporting a magic number of subscriptions. Just because a few people are paying the subscription fee doesn't mean the game is getting a solid enough income. If there are very few (relative to the actual number they need to sustain and create meaningful content), there is no solid income.

Subscriptions guarantee new content

This one is absolutely false. A subscription does not guarantee new content. See the first gaff. If there is not enough subscriptions, then there won’t be new content. Too many people see WoW and assume that’s how it always is, and once again fail to recognize these games need money to continue.

Subscriptions make sure the undesirable types can’t play

100% wrong again. Most of the time when someone means undesirable, they mean gold spammers and sellers. As TESO and WildStar proved at their launch, gold sellers find a way.

So what does a subscription actually guarantee? The answer is; nothing. That’s right, putting money into a subscription doesn't actually guarantee you anything. It’s an oft misguided notion, in fact, that people believe that a subscription means guaranteed content, the game servers will always be on, and that it’s a wall to keep out the bad schlock. But, that isn't the case. A subscription only keeps the people you want from playing the game, as the model is very outdated, and most people are not willing to put that kind of investment into something that can disappear. Several companies have even told us the magic number that was needed to be maintained to keep meaningful updates, but of course, players don’t listen to that. Instead, the vote with your wallet mantra is always uttered in a misunderstood sea of they don’t listen falsities in some vane belief that they only listen to the money.

Here's the problem with that above thinking. Voting with one's wallet is all fine and dandy with products like cereal or some such, as big corporations like that will listen to the dollars, but MMOs actually do listen to their player base. However, they have many things to consider first, because believe it or not, you are only one voice in a sea of many with all differing angles and goals to what they believe should be done. Even if two people like the same thing, both of them will, more than likely, have radically different ideas on how that should be approached. All voting with your wallet does for your hopeful MMO is guarantee that it's going to lose the ability to generate meaningful content, listen to you, and in many cases now as this happens more and more, close its doors down.

The reason new MMOs never get a chance is that very reason. People believe they are owed new content, and not understanding how economics work. Hell, throw a rock and I am sure that you will hit someone that thinks that just because they pay $15 a month they have more than paid the salary of several developers.  And this kind of thinking also goes hand in hand with people who think content can magically be whisked into existence to. But that’s another story all together.

So what's the take away from this? Subscriptions don't guarantee jack. Each MMO has a magic number of subscriptions they have to hit and maintain just to not only produce meaningful content, but have a steady development cycle. Examples; 2009 we were told that Champions Online needed 100,000 subscribers to be considered successful. Star Wars The Old Republic was stated it needed to maintain over 500,000 subscribers to continue to be considered a success.

As you can see where this is going, it takes a lot more than a few people paying $15 a month before you will see that new, meaningful content. And if you want an MMO to succeed, you can't always just hope it can weather a storm, sometimes you have to put your money where your mouth is or watch it fade into obscurity. While there are some obviously bad games that you should not put money towards, and in no way am I saying put money down towards a game you do not like any way you stick it but for a game that you are hopeful for and you see potential, using the tired mantra "Vote with Your Wallet" is not going to make developers instantly turn around and fix what you consider to be the problem. They will instead downsize their development team, or consolidate servers, and at the end of it all as this mantra keeps going because they can't produce content from lack of resources, eventually close their doors. That is the take away in the end.

Two things that have been lost to MMOs in the past few years

It’s been a while since I posted anything here. There isn’t much I can say other than I have just been trying to keep my mind busy with all that has been happening lately, kind of a roller coaster ride I guess, but suffice it to say I guess I need to just get out there and talk a bit. Anyways, onto the point of this blog; one of the things that just came to mind recently was that the concept of my mind of the MMO identity. Now, this is not some singular thing but an encompassing idea that I personally feel has been slowly getting lost in the MMO.

Now it’s no secret that even to the casual observer that MMOs have been getting easier and less involved with the social aspect of the game in place of just focusing more on the singular experience. A noble goal, in its own right, but one that has blinded what the entire genre was about. Instead of creating worlds that are interesting to be in, a singular experience of objectives have been created that instead focus too much on a singular story that ultimate makes the player feel more like a bit piece in the end than someone that could potentially forge their own destiny. I’ve covered that before but there are other, smaller things I’ve been taking stock of that I feel has actually been hurting the whole experience.

So, what follows after this point is not an end all be all, but I feel that these two items demonstrate things that actually have removed the feeling of an immersive world in favor of just simplifying things and kind of excusing the need to put effort towards other objectives for this.

The Flow of Time

The flow of time is one of those things that I’ve been noticing has been getting sacrificed on the edifice of telling a story (not necessarily a good story, but a story). Some of the most recent MMOs released and those currently under development have even taken this one step further by completely removing any day and night sequencing in the game. The time is always locked to one particular time of day and it’s something that players won’t notice at first, but as they continue to play, they begin to notice that the sun never sets, or it is always dusk, or even just night time.

The whole goal of this, from a developer and storyteller’s perspective, is to create atmosphere, but in doing this it does something very jarring that is subtle but your brain notices immediately; there is no sense of scope or passage of time. Now while this effect can be done beautifully without ever removing the whole concept of day and night from the game, it irrevocably demonstrates that the flow of time is being lost, and any concept of the story “advancing” seems lost when you do quests in their game that are basically from 3+ years ago next to events that are supposedly be happening as part of a future.

This creates what I generally call a world frozen in time effect. The absence of any true time progression is sacrificed in favor of allowing newcomers to partake in these quests and thus either new “future” quests are placed beside older quests, creating some very jarring time experiences, or new areas have to be introduced that are far out of time compared to the old areas, thus creating yet another dichotomy as one passes from the old into the new it almost feels like stepping through a bubble as one area is locked in a perpetual state and the new area is suppose to be three years ahead of that last event.

It just fascinates me that this basic concept of a world that actually advances in real time has been lost so readily to the whims of the story, and the attempt to appease people that weren’t there, that they try so hard to appease everyone, but the end result is just mediocre at best.

I never understood why players and even developers are afraid to let the time line advance anymore, and to remove old quests from the game to represent this passage of time. It’s not like anything from those old areas would even quantify as needful things, as the items themselves have lost any meaning or value when the game reaches that point in theme park games. But then again that is the problem in itself, the desire to make a theme park instead of an actual, interesting world that players want to keep coming back to instead of just a bunch of strung along stories that may or may not be good.

Part of the reason MMOs don’t have much staying power anymore these days is because of that lack of desire to create a living world and make the story apart of that world instead of just trying to create set pieces around a story. A story has to progress to be good, and always having the old set piece sin place can be more problematic than helpful in the long run.

Player Tools are often Missing

Outside of the misanthropes who think socializing is something that they never need, MMOs are very much social experiences. Personally I think if you hate playing with others then complaining about being required to team in an MMO is not exactly the fault of the game, but with yourself. But, the squeaky wheel always gets the grease and more and more the entire concept of the social tools for players have been getting removed slowly. Just areas to idle and converse or areas to do things that would evoke a sense of belonging to the world, these things that some of the oldest MMOs had are not even given though to anymore these days for the modern MMO genre.

Doors are closed to houses, never to be opened, while things like auction houses and smithy’s are becoming less and less social outlets and more and more private ones away from the contact of fellow players. Hell, some games have even given tools to remove other players completely from ones screen, thus removing any sense of the whole multi-player aspect of the game.

Then there is perhaps the biggest victim of all; the crafter. Crafters were one of the biggest outlets for social experiences in an MMO. Long ago, a crafter never had to be someone that focused on being an adventurer; in fact a crafter never had to pick up a sword once. But, as games have gone, the idea of the crafter became something of a taboo as companies kept thinking up ways to get players to play in their carefully constructed dungeons. The result, what crafters made was less important than what a player found in the heart of a dungeon.

Adding insult to injury, going out and trying to gather up resource nodes became a level locked past time, instead of allowing for the idea that players actually enjoyed just doing that. Resource nodes were considerably shrunk down in number, and their placement often dictating that the player had to join his fellow adventurers and level and gear up through the dungeons. Indeed, the crafter found that to create gear of equal level to what they needed, they often had to be much higher level to create the gear, thus destroying the whole concept in one fell swoop. Thus, the life of a crafter ended. This signaled the beginning of the end for the social experience of MMOs, as gearing and dungeon runs became more important and socializing and getting to know your fellow players became less important.

In today’s MMO, the idea that socializing past a weekly event is considered taboo. Many players are still trying to rally against even those as the requirements for these runs continue to decline. The number of participants for raids has drastically been declining. And big encounters are no longer events that one might see, but now turn style encounters that you do every week or few days now. The removal of such social aspects has created what amounts to drones doing what they are programmed to do in the end, and while some find those activities fun, it is no longer an MMO experience, and more or less a multiplayer game experience session.

This of course just creates what is laughingly known as mega servers (something Zenimax is trying to claim they are pioneering, but many MMOs have been using for 8+ years now). It’s an interesting quandary, the whole aspect lately has been to remove as much social interaction for MMOs, then why are developers going out of their way to force as many players together then? The short answer is, they want to get players to socialize, but of course they don’t understand how they can do that in the current dynamic of the MMO world they’ve created. They are afraid to give players the tools and a sandbox, as it might go against their ideals, so they put the cages and leashes on, but tell us to enjoy.

The thing is it can’t really be enjoyed when you know what you are doing has no potential outcome to affect anything. Personalizing a story in a world where thousands of players are playing in the same space at the same time just doesn’t have an impact. The whole idea of trying to recreate a single player experience in an MMO just doesn’t work like developers like to believe. There is a reason that MMOs have never reproduced the success that WoW has, and even WoW is showing signs of losing steam.

WoW started making a lot of design choices specific for their own game, and as a result it worked for them. But they’ve continually been amputating all the bits and pieces that MMOs use to have that players enjoyed that has resulted in a loss of self in the long run. MMOs blur together now, because playing one is like playing the others. Differences might range in UI and names, and maybe some control schemes, but fundamentally they are the same games now with a different coat of paint. You spend all your time, rarely even paying attention to whatever story might be there, just to get the objectives and move on. Some devs are trying to get clever and lengthen the quests with micro objectives in their objectives but it still the same deal.

In the most basic sense, MMOs should be massive sandbox worlds that players have the tools to create their own adventures. It’s sad to me that players need intentional guidance and handholding to be inspired to go explore that cave, or check out what might be at the top of the mountain. If the game play was there from the beginning, a part of the world as a whole; players wouldn’t need to see NPC # 374 to be told to kill those wolves, the player would do it themselves as they would want to get the skins for their leatherworking to create armor for themselves or their friends.

You wouldn’t need quests every step of the way to make a player feel like they are progressing and you wouldn’t need the game. To tell a story you would just have events happen that players can be a part of, they get to see them unfold and participate with quests specific for them, but not something the player has to work up to through some misguided notion that the player might be lost of what’s going on because they didn’t do the zone beforehand. It’s honestly time to get back to making the MMO what it used to be about and not try to just take single player games and slap MMO on them, because in the end, developers can’t create content fast enough to keep the player interest that long.

Confusing Gear to Play as Learn to Play

One thing you will often hear in the world of MMOs in general and gaming at large is the term, learn to play. Now this can often be abbreviated many ways and many of you have probably seen the various ways it can be spelled, abbreviated and other ways such as L2P, lrn2ply, learn2play and quite possibly many more out there that I don’t know or have tuned out not to even bother remembering them. In a previous blog, I stated in the context of the phrase, learn to play, it is generally used as an insult by some people to denote how much better they are than some people. But in the reality that the actual phrase falls in, learning to play like those players denote, generally doesn’t mean what they think that phrase means.

Let me clarify a bit; in past games, your actual skill and ability determined a lot of your playing power in various games long ago. However, in this day and age your skills and abilities have relatively been replaced by automated systems, assistance programs or even the lowest of the low, what is known as pay2win type deals that actually give a significant boost to your character’s actual growth or abilities. In these type of systems there is really no learning curve so the term Learn to Play doesn’t even remotely apply. This is what is not as well-known as a term called Gear to Play.

Now gearing to play takes many forms in games these days, the most common of which is obviously in the title of the description; getting gear for your character to increase their relative power or give them more damage in their attacks or more useful abilities. This is an obvious point of that statement but there is an additional layer to this, one that is becoming more prevalent in games in general but has been a staple of MMOs for a long time, which is the leveling up system which provides increases to the characters relative power in itself, but when these two types of systems are combined the general concept of learning to play as many would present it is completely thrown out the window.

Now in gear based progression systems, gear is very powerful. In many cases they make up a huge chunk of the character development. The level based progression generally uses levels as a sort of small benchmark for this, with increasing power on a relative curve system, with the curve generally spiking higher the higher level a character goes. But even in games where levels just only unlock things like new combos or new guns, levels are still important because access to those new types of gear are important to the overall growth of the character, and in many cases some of the powers, combinations or gear items are so powerful that progression through the game otherwise would be monumentally difficult at best, to near impossible at worst.

While “learning to play” does have a small part in these types of systems, over all in the longevity of the game, they play a very small part and at the end of the day what determines your overall ability will be your level and your gear/abilities you are given to that character. This presents the issue that skill is less important to the overall play experience and more emphasis on your time investment to find items.

Now is this solely the fault of developers with these types of systems in play? Not really, again this stems back to the whiney, self-entitled lot that we gamers actually are. Gamers are highly competitive, no matter what they claim, and many out there can’t handle the fact that someone could actually be better than they are by default, so they’ve demanded that developers put in overt handicaps into the system at large to give a leg up for players that either refuse to or just can’t improve themselves to get better. Is it a bad system? No, not in the least, but sometimes things just go too far.

Now, of course, when you take a step back and look at everything as a whole, you realize the entire system blew up in the faces of the whining mass of gamers, because instead of it being a learning system where you utilize placement, timing and such to their fullest, now it’s a time based system of investment and those that have more time will be ahead of those that don’t. The end result, the playing field is now even wider a part as the skilled players now has the handicaps on top of their own skills to give them an even greater boost. The result, gamers inadvertently, through our own petulant demands (and we were rude about it on many occasions, which makes me wonder how devs could stand it) have created the gaming world at large where it isn’t a matter of just learning the system anymore it’s also a matter of putting in the time to get the gear to play.

In short, gamers and developers need to take a large step back. Learning curves have been replaced by easy hand outs and gearing systems that try to replace the need of skill with either easy lock on targeting, insane power boosting systems, or just giving out insane weapons that completely replace any need for relative skill anymore. In short, learn to play practically doesn’t even exist anymore especially in most MMOs. It’s gear to play or go home. Skill hasn’t really been a part of such systems for a long time as gear progression systems continuously replace the need of learning skills and abilities to actually improve yourself.

Weighing in slightly on consoles, and why modern MMOs "fail"

Well before I get into the parts of this article I am going to go on a tangent about, I guess I should probably weigh in on the whole console war debate and winning E3 thing. Honestly, the whole console war thing is now getting ridiculous, and the fact people are throwing in their lot with X or Y brand in something that, if it doesn’t change how it operates soon, will be a relic of years gone by is astounding to me on many levels.

The fact that this year’s E3 was “won” because one console sucked the least is even more astounding on so many levels, and the fact that things like console exclusives and such to try and bait people to their specific name brand is another nail in the coffin leading towards the next video game crash. In short, I think it’s time consumers started taking a step back and stopped letting consoles and in other cases publishers, try to rule developers lives with what they are creating. It’s gotten to the point that a game that sells a million copies isn’t good enough anymore is a pretty pathetic state of affairs as far as the video game industry goes, and just shows how far it has fallen.

But now that that is out of the way, let me talk about the other issue that’s been creeping into my mind lately; why have modern MMOs been “major” flops since World of Warcraft launched? Why is WoW the only game that the average consumer thinks can succeed and ever beat itself? Actually the answers fairly simple and by how simple it is probably also demonstrates why Blizzard doesn’t get it either. Now, some may recall an article written by some big wig over at 2K games or something like that (the parent company maybe?) and him trying to tell the world at large that North Americans do not like MMOs. This statement is baffling on many levels because they are popular, to a point.

So what is the point that an MMO is popular in North America? Quite simply, a North American player will only tolerate playing the same game so many times. For the last nine years now, developers have been pushing out the exact same game since World of Warcraft launched, even some other companies attempting to try and reformat older games to be just like WoW, and gamers take notice of this. It doesn’t matter how much you change the paint job, the overall gameplay experience doesn’t change, a players interest is not going to last months. It might last a few weeks at most the more like WoW the game actually is.

Innovation is a word I rarely like to use, because generally when innovation is involved companies don’t know when to pull the reigns in an analyze if their innovative idea is fun or not. You can pretty much run down the list of every MMO game you’ve played since World of Warcraft launched, and you would find precious little difference between each of them. And this is the very reason these new games with big budgets and multi-million dollar devs team behind them fail. They don’t fail because the games were bad or had poor launches, those are just excuses of the players, they fail because they’ve done absolutely nothing different from World of Warcraft.

To be blunt, North Americans don’t like being told how to play the game, if I were to make an observation. It’s most common questions asked, can I explore, can I build the character I want, etc etc, and the answer in every one of these games is a resounding no. Developers try to say you can, but if you have a class lock system picking trees isn’t changing much to the formula. Changing how the bland kill X enemy quests to be local area isn’t changing up the formula either. And offering nothing else as an alternative style of gameplay, such as crafting, isn’t going to get much enthusiasm in the end. Hell, when you shove your PvP into secluded and segregated areas, you have also pretty much made two games, and promising people these things is both a lie and a slap in the face.

MMOs are meant to be emergent worlds where the actions of the players dictate how things can go. The modern MMO is a rather pathetic mess, a single player game forcing a player along a specific route, and North American players are very capable of seeing this crap that they’ve been there and done that already. They want something new. The markets outside of North America, are they just more tolerant or are they just accepting of any mediocre thing that’s put in front of them? Who knows? But I think it is safe to say if you want to get in on North America, you can’t make yet another clone of WoW. People will just stick with WoW in that case.

The Qualities of a Sandbox MMO

Hello out there, I know it has been a while since I’ve written anything and for all the readers I might have, I do apologize. Had mostly family things come up, namely dealing with the fact my father getting sick and passing away, which I think many could understand would have an impact on anything I could write about. It’s been tough the past few weeks, and I miss him terribly, but I should at least look at things to try and keep my mind busy.

Anyways, not trying to bring anyone down and certainly don’t want to make this some sort of depressing rag about my life, so I decided to work on a topic I touch on a lot but I guess I never really describe at heart; what defines a sandbox game. This is something I feel that has been lost in the past few years, as the lines, for whatever reason, have become murky and ill defined, mostly because of preconceived notions created thanks mostly in part to World of Warcraft pretty much becoming the definitive MMO in the mindset of everyone out there. For an insight into where I am aiming at in this blog, I suggest watching MrBtongue’s YouTube episode (Un-Ruining the MMO) on this very subject. It’s definitely entertaining but hits all the right notes on exactly what I am discussing.

Needless to say, what defines a sandbox game, something MMOs were before, as MrBtongue would say, WoW ruined everything, is actually fairly easy to define. The problem is that people believe, falsely, that these elements exist in the modern MMO, but they don’t. The parlor trick of the modern MMO is cleverly, or not so cleverly, designed to forcefully direct players on a set path. Some developers go that extra mile by providing a secondary path towards to disguise the convergence, but the end result is the same. You are destined to go from point A to point B along this road and deviation from this path is not only frowned upon, it is highly discouraged, and in some instances, illegal to the point attempting to change your course could even result in penalties against your account.

Now, let me try and define what makes a sandbox game;

Number One: Freedom. This doesn’t just relate to freedom to create the character you want, though in reality, people have actually been tricked into believing that the carefully structured character classes in the modern MMO is freedom to build the character they want. This is both a lie and false advertising on many levels. But more on that later. Freedom implies that once I log in, get my bearings and figure out what in the hell is going on in this game world, I can sod off and do whatever I want. The modern MMO frowns upon this heavily doing everything it can from allowing us this freedom, such as, but not limited to, level gating content, restricting access to areas, and dead-ending experience gain from critters and other objectives so much that we are almost forcefully compelled to do the quests that the developers have created for us.

While people will make up excuses that this isn’t true, and pointing out outlying instances of people doing such and such to reach max level in a game (namely WoW) this is again, an outlying instance and proves the point excrutiatingly well. It was possible, but the player in question not only was inefficient about level gaining, but the time it took them to reach max level was many times longer than anyone just doing the set path. In past MMOs, a player was not required to do the quests, they were fun little activities as an aside and even gave a micro goal into the normal set of grinding, but players were free to choose whether they wanted that goal to kill wolves, or if they just wanted to kill wolves on their own without some NPC telling them to do it.

However, now the attempt to kill wolves without a quest is so highly frowned upon that the experience to advance your character required is dramatically lower. Developers do everything in their power to make sure that players follow the set path, even putting artificial barriers that the player doesn’t perceive consciously, but their subconscious can see. This gating even extends to exploring, though people may not realize it as the terrain is carefully constructed to guide players on the set path. In fact, it’s well known that if players find ways off the path, though developers will jokingly claim they love it when players do that, many actually do not and such methods tend to get fixed or altered so it’s not possible to do anymore. In short, if developers loved when players find things like these, they would not be so quick to alter them so players could not do them anymore.

Of course, this freedom also extends to how you want to play to. The current MMO thinking is everyone wants to be some heroic knight, or flame wielding wizard type to get anywhere. The truth of the matter is, no, they don’t. Now, I won’t disagree that the heroic knight is probably the first thing many people think of when they start playing this game, but as time goes on, people start gravitating towards what they really like to do. You can’t achieve this is a structured class system, of course. For instance, in my case, I want to craft. I want to make things and be useful that way to the game as a whole. But I can’t do that because most of the modern MMOs not only make crafting fundamentally useless because a crafters gear can’t keep up with loot off of critters, but because I can’t level my crafting unless I become an adventurer anyways, defeating the whole purpose of a crafting system to begin with.

For other people the freedom to explore is what they are after. But like I stated previously, MMOs are being “cleverly” designed (I am using the term loosely) to funnel people in a specific direction. Exploration itself is actually frowned upon by developers if you go outside of their defined parameters. While people, again, will claim this isn’t true you don’t have to look far to see that this isn’t the case. Areas are specifically level gated, you need prerequisite gear and items to compete, and any attempt to jump over that cliff is often met with an invisible barrier that doesn’t allow such things and glitching the terrain to do so can actually get you in trouble.

Even the quests now are being designed that way. While people believe The Old Republic gives you RP freedom, it robs you of that. No matter your choice or desire, the outcome is always the same at the end. There is no real deviation from that course other than a few differences in dialog. This is the furthest from freedom, and this cinematic experience actually kills the whole world within a world aspect of the game. RP itself has been hopelessly destroyed because the very identity of the characters we wanted to create was completely removed and taken out of our hands. You have to follow the set path, by design, and any deviation from that not only penalizes your character, it may even restrict you from unlocking your characters full potential. And nowhere else can you see swift changes to a game because players attempted to deviate from that norm.

Take in stark contrast Skyrim. Now I know for some people that loved their Morrowind, this game is an abomination, for some reason, but let’s be factual; Skyrim is a sandbox game, only one step short of being an MMO. While at the beginning of the game we are given an objective that says go do this, we can basically say sod off and do anything else we feel like from that point onward. In stark contrast, TESO will not allow for this, as it is very purposely being linearly designed. A leveling treadmill is in place and players are expected to follow a set path. Yea, I’ve seen the leaked beta footage, and while graphics and such may get cleaned up, the core gameplay won’t change much from this, and since the emphasis, much like TOR, was on that personal story, you can bet your last dollar TESO is going to be yet another Theme Park in a long list of Theme Parks.

Number Two: Bigger is not Better: Another thing that makes the sandbox different from the theme park MMO is the inherent balance that is already within the system and the fact that people can equalize themselves to match the others within the system. Skill is actually the name of the game, not the gear worn. While gear is useful, and helpful in cases, it is not the end all be all of the gaming experience. This is not true in a theme park game, especially one following the WoW formula, whereas levels get higher, the gear has to progressively get better. The idea is that bigger numbers and bigger stats are always better. The skill of the player, while it can be a factor, is often only a small portion of that result. A very skilled player will more often than not, be beaten by a below average player who is better geared and equipped than they are.

This is also the case based on the class system these games often force down specific paths to. Like it or not, while some people will claim otherwise, there is always going to be a class that is easy mode in these systems for a specific thing. They tend to pump out tons of damage, and strangely enough have tons of defensive measures to boot to make sure they continue to deliver that damage. Nothing about this requires any actual skill to deliver, contrary to what many WoW rogues or TOR snipers might claim, because it is the easiest thing to do and a subpar player can do it without worry or consequence. If it actually required a lot of skill to do, players would not gravitate towards it so much, especially in the PvP environment. This is not to say that a person skilled in the class wouldn’t be deadly, they would be, but the application of skill required is less than that of another class.

In a sandbox game, gear is not a major factor and in fact player skill is the deciding factor in a long run. A player who just mashes buttons will find them increasingly outclassed by people who actually know when the best time to use their moves is and planning accordingly, instead of just blowing their entire wad in the first few seconds of combat. Timing is key, and gear is only a distant second fiddle to this. The same stun locking, button smashing rogue trying that in a game based on skill and tactics would find they are severely outclassed by players that actually understand timing and the fundamental rules of the game, and would turn the tide quickly on the rogue.

But in the end, in this type of system, dungeon loot is de-emphasized and crafted loot becomes the big prize. Though there will be things that dungeons would be required for, they would not be the end all be all of the game, left in the hands of those daring enough to traverse them for the materials for crafters, or explorers who think the risk is worth the reward. In basic, a player economy, and thus a community, is born because of this, and player loyalty is actually rewarded instead of punished.

Number Three: An Open World: This is similar to number one, but basically in a sandbox game, the world is open. It’s explorable, there is no corner you can’t go to to see what is In that nook or cranny, no invisible barrier blocking your progress, no level gating, the only thing determining your fate is your skill and your own wits to survive. Your death is determined either by your own hubris or stupidity. But this open world is not limited to just exploration, nope it also includes PvP.

The modern MMO has done a lot to try and push PvP out of the public eye of players, forcing the PvPers into carefully controlled arenas for their matches or shoving them into specific lake areas. Of course, the reason for this is because player killers (aka PKs) never really had a punishment that fit their crime before in games. But then again, many of the early attempts made the mistake of giving them too much freedom without any reprisals to be had. The worst that would happen is a PK couldn’t get into a town, but that was easily countered by alts or friends.

While it’s been instilled into the head of modern gamers that PvP is somehow evil, the truth of the matter is that it’s not. The same PvP jerks that talk smack are still talking smack in PvE. The difference now is that you’ve given them the power to do so and no one can reprise against them. What’s even funnier, most of the people that claim they hate smack talking in PvP are the people that do the smack talking, and generally acting like an ass most of the time. In short, hypocrites.

All in all, the world of an MMO needs to be open. It needs to be open to exploration, it needs to be open to conflict, because that is what drives RP and story (sorry bar people, it’s true) and it needs to be open to the fact players don’t want to follow your set path.

These are my basic points of a sandbox MMO. Now I know this is only a small list, there is a lot more I know, but this article is already getting long and I feel it’s time to stop padding and start letting people read. I don’t know when I will put up a new blog, as I said I am currently still dealing with my father passing away, but hopefully it won’t be two months again before I do. Until then, take care and I hope people start inspiring developers to make sandbox games.

Please leave a comment below.

Why I despise multi-guilds

I touched on this in my rant about GW2, but I think this deserves more explanation and talk about my view why I think that multi-guild is a terrible thing and will only increase guild drama. I don’t think people have to go far in GW2 to see this has already begun to happen, but let’s get it out of the way and discuss it at length. I will try to keep each point to its own paragraph, but they will undoubtedly bleed into each other as I have a tendency to ramble. So, without further stalling let me get into the reasons why multi-guilds are terrible.

First and foremost, for the multi-guild system to work you need to represent a guild, but you can only represent one guild at a time. Right out of the gate you are already going to garner hurt feelings from people as a lot of the functions of one guild are locked out until you represent it, including the chat features, and any contribution you give only goes towards the guild that you are representing. This is just stupid in and of itself. Why even have multi-guild in the first place if all of the guild features are going to be locked out to you unless you represent them? Not to mention this also causes hurt feelings because people on both sides of the fence feel you should be pulling your weight for them. And you are left in the issue of who do you represent more.

Next on my list of why multi-guild is a bad idea is pretty simple one; it destroys community. If you can casually hop in and out of a guild, ignoring that people are going to get offended by this, then it doesn’t foster the idea that growing a community in a game is even something to strive for. Guilds are a large part of the backbone of a gaming community. But casually tossing the one last bastion of gaming community into the recycle bin like that completely negates all that. It just creates more undue tension and drama as people are stressing over who they should spend more time with.

And now my biggest gripe about multi-guild systems is this; it makes it way easier for spies to get into guilds of opposing factions to relay info to enemies. If people don’t think this is a big deal for PvP then you obviously have never played an MMO in PvP or any PvP based game before. This is one of the issues that GW2 has, outside of bots and cheaters, the number of people that relay information to opposing groups. And if you think that PvPers would not find that edge by getting alternate accounts, then you really have not played MMOs before. Just go over to the WoW forums and see how much of a stink has been raised by multi-boxers (players who play more than one account at once) because the /follow command was removed from PvP.

You want to know how to solve multi-guild issue. I’ve brought this up before in other forums, but it’s a fairly simple concept that, believe it or not, older MMOs from the early days actually used. It was called guild alliances. What makes this different from multi-guilding you might ask, well many things. First, an alliance is a separate chat channel and you can participate in an alliance chat, even if you are in another guild. Furthermore it bolsters community and healthy competition between the guilds in an alliance. Finally, it removes a lot of undue pressure on individual players from their guild that their guild might be offended they aren’t representing them enough. It leaves the control within the group of power, and it doesn’t cause break ups or harsh feelings. It solves all the issues and creates no extra drama that multi-guilds would undoubtedly create. Even if your guild is not hardcore PvP, a guild in the alliance most likely would be so wouldn’t be hard pressed to find it.

That’s my feelings on the whole multi-guild thing. It’s stupid, it’s creating undue pressure on individual players as well as the guilds in question, it removes any resemblance of community that MMOs even have left and it’s a breeding ground for battleground spies. I don’t know why developers have been opting for this when they have to see the negatives vastly outweigh the one positive multi-guilds have, and foregoing a system that has existed almost since the beginning of the modern MMO era, and that is Alliances.

Anyways, feel differently about it, leave a comment below.

My reviewing/ranting about Guild Wars 2

This is kind of a subject I wanted to avoid, but I realized the more I tried to ignore it the more it ate at me. This is going to be a review/rant at GW2 and tearing down the walls that the fanbois and apologists built up in defense of that game. Now, I want to preface this, there is no misconception, there is no I just haven’t played it long enough as many of the fanbois will undoubtedly say. I have, I’ve spent several weeks playing the game, a few of them devoted to just finding a class that wouldn’t bore me to tears, because make no mistake, this game makes the cardinal sin by being mind numbingly boring in the worst ways for an MMO.

I am going to get this point out of the way. Right out of the gate you are pretty much required to grind things and while people kept clamoring and claiming everything you would do in GW2 would be epic (including ArenaNet, so no backpedalling their boys, like you did when you tried to claim GW1 wasn’t an MMO after years of claiming it was), you are still met with grinding that would make even the most hardened EQ1 fan cringe. Each class is repetitively boring and while might start out fun, all of them fall into the same trap as losing steam by the time you reach around level 15. And losing steam in the worst way to.

Part of the reason for this issue with the character classes is they are completely aimless. You have no idea what they were designed to do, how they should function or in what way would be best. You meander around looking for something to fill in but you can’t, and instead try to get by being a jack of all trades. And it isn’t a problem of just not understanding the class design, it’s clear that ArenaNet had no real design in mind just what they felt would be cool, because while some classes have a lot of great tools, others have questionable tools that leave you wondering what were they thinking, and it’s almost like they didn’t even bother balance testing a lot of this.

Quests are superfluous, as you are doing menial tasks from farming for lazy NPCs to picking daisies for incompetent star crossed lovers. There is nothing epic about these fights so already that’s one lie out of the gate about everything you do is epic. Later on the quests devolve into killing X rats, and while people will say no it doesn’t, I’ve done at least 8 different zones and ended up doing the same kill X mobs in all the heart points every time. This is the absolute worst facet people hate about MMO quests, and all they did was move the quest giver from someone you talked to, to a local area for nothing new. Hell, the epic battles are actually so far and few between and give so little rewards I actually had to beg people just to tackle a giant in the Charr zone. And when you get a big battle event it’s not even that epic as you are watching several dozen people doing damage and nothing really else with zerg mentality going full steam.

In addition to this, you don’t feel rewarded. The thing about WoW, Champions and such, every level you felt a little bit rewarded for reaching that level, even if it wasn’t a big reward. In GW2 the gulf between getting something new and interesting is so far and between that just getting there feels like you are walking barefoot over rusty nails. And that’s only up to level 30. Once you pass level 30, you’ve already hit the peak for what you potentially wanted. Even the trait gaining doesn’t even feel like milestones because you get so little for your investment.

The world itself is so god awfully big that it is actually a detraction from the enjoyment of this game. They basically said at the office let’s do WoW but EXTREME and obviously people nodded their head in agreement because the terrain is unrealistically big, the buildings are unrealistically big, even the architecture is unrealistically big. And while there are some very beautiful areas, they are far and between. I hate designs like this, you don’t make your world actually big in design to make it feel big. This is incompetent game design and drives me up a wall.

This also brings up the waypoints in the game. This is the only game, I’ve ever played, that waypoints are actually mandatory, not a convenience to your enjoyment of the game. Waypoints should be conveniences to your game, not design requirements. But they don’t allow mount travel, but everyone has a way to increase their movement speed, in some cases significantly, and of course there are the gobs and gobs of waypoints.

Next, the story. Oh god this story. I thought SWTOR was a badly written game, whoever wrote GW2’s story should feel ashamed. They set back the whole story in industry a good decade with this mess. It’s like they hired Stephanie Meyers, or the lead writer was taking notes from her or something. And let’s not get on the voice acting, because it was obvious the voice actors were only there to get a check, because the way the lines are read are so cringe inducingly bad, I can’t believe people take this atrocious mess seriously and think it is good. This is as bad as the prequels with as many plot holes as the TNG movies.

Then oh boy the bugs, bad controls and crappy camera. This is the first game I’ve ever played that has actually made me rage because of how poor the controls are. And there are also numerous bugs that constantly get to me, in addition to the poor camera and just poor responsiveness of the controls of this game. One bug that always annoys me, despite the game has a solid lock on and I will be locked onto a target, facing it all the good stuff involved and my character will still turn to face at something behind me and start shooting at it once I start pushing my fire button. This is not an uncommon occurrence either, I tend to get into large fights because of this bug alone with crap I had no interest in fighting.

And barring the buggy camera not getting to you, the jumping puzzles are so insultingly easy that I wonder why they even bothered with them. The hard ones are actually based around speed running while platforms disappear underneath you not on actual precision jumping because very little of the precision jumping is actually anything that can’t be easily corrected in the game by a simple jumping back up.

So that brings me to the PvP maps. After 30 levels of the teeth gritting bad story and the mind numbing heart quests of kill X mobs, I decided to just PvP my way to 80. Except that 3 of the 4 PvP maps are the exact same map, right down to the last detail, and that the only map with anything different is the 4^th map. But, and unfortunately for me, my realm was hopelessly outnumbered, because the server pop is actually only high (according to the server list) while the other two realms are in the very high status. On average, the other two realms generally bring odds that favor them 3 to 1 against us, average, per realm (it’s often higher odds against us). Nevermid that fact we never get that outnumbered bonus because… who the fuck cares obviously, because while 50 baddies might be attacking a keep with only 15 of us inside of it defending.

In short, as far as the PvP is concerned, it’s obvious ArenaNet didn’t think too hard on it. Gear and level play important roles there, no matter how much people try to say you get auto leveled to 80, that doesn’t help matters when people are using top PvP gear and maxed traits against you. They make a big difference. And that isn’t even bringing to the table the fact that this is zerg PvP at its worst. I’ve been told people feel the maps are too small, but that isn’t even the problem, it’s the maps are the exact same except 1 of them, and the other problem isn’t their size, its if one faction dominates they can set up way points inside keeps they control. The problem also isn’t the size of the maps because they are entirely too large, but the fact that any point that gets taken over can be near instantly retaken over in almost an eyeblink.

There isn’t even time to set up defenses if the PvP is especially aggressive, and considering, again, my server has the other two servers deciding to beat down on us cause we are a small server we tend to have very little chance to actually set up defense until everything we fought for is lost. And what’s sad at points is our server proves that we can actually keep them at bay, but when they fight together against us that means we are outnumbered 6 to 1 and due to fast turn arounds it’s impossible for us to maintain territory.This doesn't even include the fact that the game is riddled with bots,a nd in PvP bots and cheaters are especially prevalent which apologists or fanbois will try to downplay.

This also brings up the issue I have with guilds. Since anyone can be in any number of guilds, it makes spies quite a large possibility. I know on my server there is a guild leader that likes to think he’s a great leader (funnily enough whenever he leads our alliance we lose everything) and tries to claim that he doesn’t have guildies on other servers despite we’ve seen them. He’s a laughing stock and claims he doesn’t run a spy ring. However, most everyone knows differently. I personally hate this multi-guilding non-sense as all it does is breed contempt between people when someone isn’t devoting time and just makes it easy for spies to get in.

In the end, just to put it bluntly, GW2 isn’t a very good game. It’s very dull and repetitive, it blows its wad on anything shiny very early on and snoozes the rest of the time for the rest of the game. The PvP is poorly implemented and balanced with obvious copy pastaing going on for the maps that are also poorly designed, with several important structures within siege weapon distance from a safety zone for specific areas. People believe the trinity is dead in the game but it is obviously still there, as doing content like dungeons if someone isn’t healing and someone isn’t drawing agro, you tend to die, a lot. And even more comical people believe the game play is vastly different from other MMOs, yet I still just watch cooldowns on powers thus my attention is still focused more on my hot bar than actual game screen. So in the end, this is yet another game that made a lot of promises, and failed to deliver on. Sorry for GW2 fans if that isn’t praise, but I am going to be honest about this stuff.

Resource Managing in MMOs

So in a weird twist I want to discuss resource builders, as they currently stand in MMOs. Personally, I find resource builders to be outmoded. Why? Because it tends to interrupt the normal flow of the game as it stands as all you end up doing is pushing one button repeatedly until you build up enough of an X until you can actually use Y. This is made even more frustratingly complicated when it is combined with a cool down. In short, they are disguised mana bars, and it doesn’t change how they function. This is one of the things I really do not like about TSW’s combat, for instance. I sit and spam one button 5 times to build up resources so I can get the best possible effect out of my consumers. It doesn’t evoke strategy as mind numbing approach to whack-a-mole.

Needless to say, the function of the mana bar has changed over the course of the life span of MMOs. Originally, the mana bar was just reserved for the mage types and thus they had increase resource management while physical weapon people were left maybe with cool downs. So this ends up giving mages double duty.

As time went on the mana bar was spread to other classes. In games like Dark Age of Camelot everyone had an energy bar, which was just a different name for mana, and basically everyone had to play resource management next to cool downs. It was a basic solution to an otherwise nagging problem of one class being heavily restricted while the others were not. WoW of course tried to change up that formula by giving each of the resource bars its own name, such as rage, or focus, or mana or what have you. But even that wasn’t enough as later on they would add a second resource bar to every class increasing the need to micro manage, and this is still on top of the fact that powers had cool down numbers.

Now, the latest version of resource building is some bizarre twist on what WoW does, basically where everyone has to build up their attacks to be able to use their best stuff. CO does this with its energy bar and TSW does this in spades with their resource bar for every single weapon set up you could have. The level of micro management is getting tedious, to say the least.

Why I don’t like this is because it is tedious micro-management and adds too much busy work. They can cut the entire middle part of building the resource entirely and just rely on cool downs and base it on an acceptable level of DPS that they would like it to reach in a reasonable avenue. Hell, CO has near practically abandoned the need of resource building as almost every power set over there now has some way to return energy without using an energy builder.

So, this is how I would view the future of resource builders in MMOs. They are gone. Yep, that’s right, resources builders are gone. The only reason I would have some sort of resource is for flavor but not something that dictates the flow of the actual enjoyment of using the abilities. All of the abilities that would need it would have a cool down to give an acceptable level of DPS. If there was a resource it would influence something like giving you better defense or a bit more damage on certain attacks, something to make it less tedious overall than sitting there spamming the exact same key over several times until you can unleash your attack to consume said resource and begin the process all over again. The only, and only place I would put a resource builder is a type of charge up attack that allows you to use an ultimate power, but only reserved for the best of the best abilities, not your entire attack chain.

Basically put, this is yet another step that I think the next generation of MMOs will need to take. The resource builder doesn’t really have a place anymore in this day and age of gaming. It is one of those outmoded systems that needs to go the way of the dodo, as games these days keep pushing more and more to be more action oriented and less turn based in the MMO genre.

The End of the World, oh and Story in Games

Sometimes, you can’t help but laugh. For the past few years all we’ve heard is about December 21^st being the end of the world that we need to make our peace now, and so forth. Hell, even the History channel spent every year for the past five years, at least, running apocalyptic doom crap constantly to the point that I am sure most people had the shows memorized. This is what happens when you let a bunch of nutters take an ancient calendar and try to reinterpret it for the modern era. I could only imagine the panic if it was the Julian calendar found that way instead, every year someone would be going the world ends on this date because the Julian calendar said so.

Anyways, enough of me ribbing people who bought into that, let’s talk about something else. I’ve lightly touched on this before but I think I want to actually drive a nail through the forehead for people on this one. This is my thoughts on story for gaming.

Now, before I get into the meaty grind of it all, let me state, I love a good story. Who doesn’t? Well, never mind that, we already know there is some nutter out in the wings about ready to raise his hand and say he hates story. But what really burns me up lately about developers using story is the fact they make the rest of their game suffer for it. It’s almost as if the developers are afraid people might want to play the game and try other things to for a little bit besides stick to the main story. This is starting to get more prevalent in MMOs, but has been happening for a long time in single player titles these days. It is especially, and hilariously insulting to hear it from RPG designers.

Take Final Fantasy 13. I’ve been sitting back watching videos of walkthroughs of course; the first thing that strikes me of the game play is how pathetic it is. A linear corridor and a combat system so simplified it’s only one shot above that flash game that is one button to win type thing. Now I raised an eyebrow at this because normally, Final Fantasy has been about exploring and wandering around, even the fact that I hate 7 and 8 they had these basic elements at least. But to see how far my one time favorite series fell just makes me cringe. That doesn’t even get into how stupid easy the combat system is, basically playing the game with one button now.

To me, story should enhance the game, not completely drive every aspect of it, especially in an RPG. It’s great to tell a story, but don’t sit there and completely ramrod your players into one thing and be afraid to let them explore this beautiful world you’ve created. Players notice the small details as much if not more so than the big overt ones.

And this problem is starting to get more pervasive in the MMO world to. We haven’t hit the point where everywhere is an exact corridor but it’s getting dangerously close. New zones are being locked off until you meet either level or story prerequisites, and you can’t go outside the slowly tightening rails unless the story wants you to. Hell the dungeons are already corridors, in most modern MMOs with you being guided exactly to each boss. At the current rate of design, we are one generation away from a high profile MMO being a corridor game, like Final Fantasy XIII, removing all semblance of control, choice or the ability to explore.

Hell, most of the achievements now have been getting built with the idea in mind of not impossible to get, but the intent people don’t move from a single spot for hours or days at a time killing the exact same critter over and over again. And ludicrous kill numbers at that. It was an achievement to kill 100 of a similar critter, but these days those numbers have been inflated to the thousands range. It is not uncommon for a game to have a kill achievement around the 5,000 mark anymore, which is bizarre in itself since the enemies in most of these games don’t come flooding out of a gate like that.

Again I like a good story for my game, and I highly encourage developers to create a good story, or several stories, but don't make the story the only focus of what you are doing. MMOs, especially, are about vast, open worlds for players to explore, to see, and be apart of. The living, breathing experience for them. It shouldn't be some exercise in how well trained you are to follow a corridor and mash one button. And the complexity of the fights is something that should be paid attention to as well. So, please, keep this is mind when you are developing your next game.

{Edit}
Small Edit. I still want to thank Kaiserin for the wonderful new art piece. I wasn't expecting it, but she created it for me for Christmas, so thanks again to Kaiserin.

She mostly works on pony stuff that she sells here, but you might be able to ask for a commission. Who knows. I know she is also the 2D artist on the fan made MLP:FiM MMO game to. So check her out.

Tagging, Binding, and Seasonal Events

Happy Holidays to everyone, and for this blog, tonight, I am going to discuss three small things. None of them relates to one another but I think all are interesting topics to discuss and since they, on their own, would more or less produce a very short blog each I decided to mash them up together with no real rhyme or reason to doing so other than saying, here you go. I am just bizarre like that.

The first thing I wish to discuss that I, and I am sure a lot of MMO gamers also feel, is the archaic tagging system. Now, if you are not familiar with tagging, tagging is a term used to describe someone who attacks a monster first. In some uses you may hear terms such as tapping (like this was Magic: The Gathering or something) aggroing first etc., etc., etc.; this list goes on. But basically what they describe is a system where whoever attacks the critter first basically gets all the credit and glory and everyone else can just go sit in a corner.

Now, I am sure I am not alone in my feelings on this system, but to put it bluntly for the masses, this system needs to be killed off completely. It was novel in WoW when they first introduced it, but guess what, it was still a square peg in a round hole issue. Instead of solving the problem it was meant to go after (namely whiney people complaining about “ninja’s” as if anything in the game belonged to them) it instead exacerbated the problem by just giving a new level of power to ninja’s and griefers.

Let me try to be brief about the history of why Blizzard invented this system. Now, contrary to popular belief, MMOs existed before WoW, and in fact were mildly popular until WoW just exploded on the scene. However, the biggest complaint was always people ninja looting their loot from corpses, since older MMOs tended to use first come first serve rules. UO tried a system of splitting loot based on kill credit, and I think that would work better. This tagging system basically turned every games these days into griefer paradises and just kills community as people become stingy, hateful and mistrusting one another. Tagging needs to go and they need to find a better system.

Next on my list would be the infamous, infamous binding system. This is yet another square peg in a round hole decision brought to us by Blizzard in WoW. Originally it was called soul binding to give WoW a more immersive feel, but that was kicked in the head by the first expansion as like the entire company itself, WoW has basically been sterilized to the point the games immersive value is negligible.

Binding, for those who don’t know, is when you either equip and item and it becomes locked to your character and you can no longer trade the item, or what is becoming way more common, if you just loot an item it becomes locked to your character. In other words this is a type of system where if you believe in community, trading and such, you either have to be extra careful out of the gate with items or, more realistically, you might as well forget the community aspect all together. Binding is the quintessential square peg in the round hole solution to a problem that didn’t really need an answer, because the problem wasn’t anything but a matter of ego to the people it actually bothered.

Let me try to explain. Binding is actually a several part solution to a problem, again, that didn’t need to be answered. Binding, in a nutshell, attempts to fix the problem of loot sellers (which didn’t they became gold sellers later instead), dungeon hunters who thought it was stupid that people could spend their money to get loot that they think should only be reserved for the best of the best and thus promoted elitist egotism, and try to appease a certain crowd of PvPers who thought if they could keep these items out of PvP they would have easier victims to hunt. Of course, binding was also to appease a very minor group who thought that losing items on death was stupid, but since WoW came about there was no item loss on death so that made that aspect of binding entirely pointless.

Binding is a system that needs to go it is one of the walls erected, that wasn’t needed, that hurts community in the long run. The ability for people to go out adventuring, finding loot and later being able to trade or sell it helps, but when you can’t you end up killing a huge part of the community and you don’t solve a problem as much as just shift its position. You can easily level lock items if you don’t want people using things, it’s not like most of these games don’t use level locking anyways, so why the complicated, unnecessary and bullshit system of binding on top of it? In short, stop doing it developers.

And now finally, let me completely derail myself and talk about something way different from the above two items; Seasonal Events. People love seasonal events in MMOs, to a point. Here’s the problem with some of them in the modern MMO however; they aren’t matching the season they are supposed to be for. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love seasonal stuff and honestly, with MMO business models shifting I think seasonal events should be a nice, free thank you to the various MMO gaming community that they appreciate those players. Sure it’s a net loss, in general, but the gain of respect from your players will be more so.

However, I don’t think just throwing out random kill quests and stuff like that and calling it your seasonal content, especially when it matches very little to the actual season, is considered a seasonal event. Furthermore, a lot of MMOs, especially WoW and company, have a habit of just creating a seasonal event once, and then leaving it on a switch to flip every year changing nothing or very little about it from last year. This is not good design, this is piss poor performance. I know, again, these things take time to develop and test, but you should be showing your player base you appreciate them. Creating an event once and flipping a switch once a year is not showing appreciation, it is thumbing your nose at your player base. And worrying about people who might have missed it last year, so what? If they were around they should have known, if they weren’t, oh well, they can hear the stories from other players. That’s what makes a living, breathing MMO world, change that is change and permanent.

Anyways, that’s enough from me, I hope everyone has a safe and happy holiday season here, and maybe I will start writing blogs more readily.

Payment types of the MMO world

One thing that is becoming an ever increasing controversy these days seems to be subscription models and the free to play format of MMOs, and I can see where this argument might be coming from as well. In the past, subscription models were essentially the life blood of the MMO genre, and in this day and age, rate hikes are not something that can be planned for anymore. In today’s gaming market, with MMOs being very similar to one another, it’s hard to actually justify a subscription, hence the ever increasing push towards the free to play model. Of course, you have odd balls, but I do think that there is an easier middle.

Now first, let me get to addressing the obvious not free to play model that SWTOR chose. Let’s face it, anyone saying that’s a free to play model honestly doesn’t understand the concept. When basic, core features, like action bars, the ability to turn off helmets and basic UI features are locked behind a payment plan, this is the shadiest of shady practices. Let’s not even get into the fact that major parts of content are actually locked out to anyone willing to try the game, or have a limited use time per week to actually participate in, such as the dungeons and space content. This isn’t so much a free to play model as a very limited permanent trial feature.

Now, I won’t go into details on this but other people have talked about free to play models that have been smarter than me. Personally, I can see the merit of free to play, but it requires some ambition. Ambition that a lot of these MMOs actually lack and thus once the game is done and in free to play mode it sort of like they just kind of give up. A few are exceptions to this rule, of course, but others are not.

But, I think there is a third option. What is now being dubbed the buy to play method or B2P. This is something that Guild Wars 2 started on and TSW just recently adopted. What is it you might ask? Well quite simply buy to play is basically you buy the box and you can access the game without subscription. It’s kind of a middle ground between free to play and pay to play. Like a normal box game that you pay for, the updates are a part of DLC content that you can choose to buy later on. The only difference here is this is on a massive scale instead. I think many MMO gamers would actually be in the mind for this type of model than just subscription or the price gouging of free to play.

Now, despite what some reviewers might say, buy to play is not free, not in the slightest. You have to pony up cash at the start, and of course that’s a lot to ask for starting out of the gate. This marks the fact that developers of MMOs actually have to start getting bold again. Currently MMO developers are content with taking one design matrix and going from there with very few tweaks in between; just copying each other with no real ambitions to do things differently from everyone else. Some call it just being like WoW, but realistically, WoW’s a copy of the games that came before it such as Everquest and Dark Age of Camelot.

Now that’s not to say that being familiar is a bad thing, it isn’t, but when everything you do from one game to the next is the exact same game with only a different coat of paint you really haven’t done much thinking outside of the proverbial box. This is off putting to gamers, and after that initial wow factor wears off that they are in some new world, the familiarity comes crashing back down like a lead brick to the face and it makes people not want to stick around all that much.

But back on point. Despite what several reviewers might think, Guild Wars 2 is not free to play. You have to pony up cash and this type of model is actually quite sound. Now the key difference between an MMO and a single player box title is that future content is almost always in constant development where a single player title future content usually gets halted after a few DLCs and much more is never done for it. In the case of an MMO using the buy to play method this opens up the avenue of DLC in a way that developers can actually not only develop knick knack content for use by its players (like clothing, costumes and various skin styles for players to buy) but also they can develop larger future content for people to pay for a decent fee.

Of course, that’s the catch-22. The DLC has to be worth it to keep convincing your player base that they want to pay for it. Not all your content should be pay for, special events and such (like holidays) should be special and should be reserved as thank you’s to your fans of the game. That’s something I will probably touch on in another blog about how I feel on holiday events but that’s a discussion for later. But the key point of this is that the DLC has to be decently packed with new content updates and possibly new powers, gear and so forth to keep your player base interested, but not stuff that makes the rest of the players feel alienated or isolated from the game.

I think TSW has it right, and I know from experience I prefer that game over GW2, but there is always room for improvement. Ad revenue can help the game, but having methods in game for players to earn said currency can help to. But in the end when you introduce new DLC content, do not make it feel like you are alienating your players. Players shouldn’t feel like they have to buy a DLC to feel a part of the game. So this also means that the main original game, back to that point, has to be worth the cost of a box price. If you develop your main game then your future content strongly, you will keep getting repeat people willing to buy the content if you prove you are capable of delivering.

Players are stingier than ever now and they want to know their dollars are actually worth it. Of course you have your unreasonable types but it’s just as unreasonable to expect people to pay $25 for a pony. Subscriptions are pretty much dead. It’s time to adapt and change or shrivel up and die in this day and age of the MMO market. And those resisting change are going to get caught up in that wave.

Challenge versus Instant Gratification

I know it’s been quite some time since I last updated this blog, and most in part because I had nothing really to talk about. Well that isn’t the exact truth, it was more of the fact that I was more or less in a slump as far as what I felt like talking about and nothing really cheered me up in that regard. I can’t say I was depressed, but I wasn’t exactly inspired either. Probably has to do with the fact there is very little interesting going on, other than a lot of MMOs just constantly recreating the same mistakes over and over again.

I do want to discuss something that has cropped up in my mind just recently and that’s the concept of earning something and instant gratification. Now there is a very fine line between the two, that much is certain. How can you decide if you've crossed it? It’s a hard thing to measure in the end, but I think I can safely say that in the modern MMO era that instant gratification is the side that they are heavily leaning on. Hell, even the single player games cater to that play style with games having a difficulty setting with the only difference between 1 setting and the next is how hard the monsters might be in the game. In short, they offer everything up the first play through and have nothing to offer for a repeat performance. This, to be blunt, is just terrible game design.

Why do I say that? Because the player is supposed to learn and grow with the experience as much as the game is giving a return investment for putting skills and knowledge to the test. However, when the experience is flat, the game is flat. In fact a lot of games have been foregoing difficulty for the sake of “story” which is a piss poor excuse, honestly.

Let’s take Mass Effect for example. I’ve made my feelings clear on how terrible I feel that game story and play wise was, but let’s look at this more objectively. The first Mass Effect game had a bit of structure and trimmings, nice things here and there to play around with and discover on your own. It needed some trimming, but otherwise it had a great foundation, but was poorly realized for the sake of the story which allowed the player to be able to walk through the game in around the normal time of a single play session. Mass Effect 2, they did more than trim, they started pruning. Entire systems were gutted out for the sake of “streamlining” but in addition for the sake of the “story” causing the difficulty curve to actually go down further from the previous game. Once Mass Effect 3 rolled around, everything about the original game was gone except for the wallpaper. Everything had been gutted for the sake of that story, and the difficulty curve took yet another step down. The entire crafting system was gone and everything was so “streamlined” that any semblance of choice and character building for uniqueness was pretty much gone.

The same can be seen in MMOs as well. Now I can understand that developers and companies want that bottom dollar, but making things easier only causes the exact opposite effect you were going for. People are less inclined to return if they are assured that they can pretty much cheat their way to the top. Grant it you have a few who love that style of game play, but reality is that many do not. If you start handing out your best stuff within the first few hours someone picks up the game, no one is going to want to have a repeat performance if little else actually is left for them to do.

MMOs are about staying power and you have to strike a fine balance on difficulty to earn something (that dreaded grind westerners seem to be afraid of for some reason) and being given stuff on a platter. There have been many people who have talked about this very thing, including celebrity net people like Yahtzee, but I think it bears repeating that making things too easy is suicide in the long run. I think it’s obvious to many players that WoW has crossed that line, for instance, where your investment isn’t worth as much because your return has been devalued by how easy it is to attain.

Crafting is another area in MMOs that make suffer from this and they were honestly the first victims in the MMO genre. In today’s MMO crafting world, you go out, earn a few points in a specific field then buy a recipe from an NPC for a set amount of in game currency. No mystery, no discovery, everyone who follows that path gets the same thing. TSW tried something different using a Minecraft inspired crafting set up, but FunCom failed to understand what made Minecraft work was there was always something new to discover and be added and the recipes actually mattered in the end, and the overall mod community helps grow that games recipe list even further.

It took a Minecraft mod called Thaumcraft 3 for me to realize what MMO crafting needed, and if I were to ever point at one simple method I would say Thaumcraft has done it. The fact that many of the recipes are actually hidden and require player investment and discovery, it feels rewarding to do the research and you want to keep going. It’s very addictive. MMOs don’t do this, they again put everything on a silver platter for people to get with little effort.

Anyways, over all MMOs and games in general, need to stop making games super easy. The challenge isn’t worth the value anymore when developers want $60+ for a game that can be completed in less than a single playing session. MMOs themselves have this problem when the MMO game is supposed to be about staying power, but they give too much away too soon and people get bored very fast. I think this is something developers need to stop doing now.

Thoughts on the MMO market; Why I loved UO

Things are interesting when it concerns the landscape of the MMO world. In the current MMO age, everything is set to a level of hand holding and made so ridiculously easy that any sense of gratification one might feel for having accomplished anything is nearly lost almost as instantly as it is accomplished because things were just too easy. On the other hand, the concept of a living, breathing world that players could interact in and be a part of has been neatly swept under the rug and replaced with essentially single player games trying to pass themselves off as MMOs. The world we live in, as far as the gaming world is even concerned, is not an MMO world. It’s just businesses trying to cash in on the actual MMO genre without understanding what truly got people so interested in it in the first place.

I’ve been sitting back and just thinking, mostly. And so far I realize that I miss the young nature of the MMO industry. I don’t mean WoW; that pretty much heralded in the current generation of single player games disguising themselves as MMOs. No, I mean the games that came before, like UO, Dark Age of Camelot and so forth, where the world was more determined by the player than the players waiting on the actual world to get updated in expansion packs.

For me, the best world was always UO. This was a world that was determined by the players, and events and such were only small hallmarks. I wasn’t required to be a fighter of any kind. I could just spend my days being a crafter, making things for other players, and I know the things I made would actually be desired. Crafting in today’s MMOs is such an afterthought, I am left wondering why they even bother having crafting anymore, because it’s little more than lip service in the end instead of actually being something that players can aspire to or want to desire in the long run of the game.

I guess it might be nostalgia talking at times, but it really is something I do desire; a return to what an MMO was truly supposed to be about. Something more than just creating a specific character class and going out and bashing monsters continuously over the head until they relented, that has just never really struck a chord with me. And even as much as I love protecting the team, that role itself has been becoming less and less needed as developers continually push their MMOs to be more single player than ever before.

No, my best time ever that I can honestly say I’ve ever had was sitting, as a blacksmith, at the Britain forge in UO just talking with other players, repairing their goods and even making armor. You didn’t feel useless because the stuff a crafter made was actually on par with the stuff that could be found. Very little was actually needed to actually improve upon that, though they could have done so without destroying the actual integrity of the game. I don’t even think I could possibly describe how much I would love to go back to UO right now and engage in that world again. But, unfortunately, that world is gone.

If I were to show people UO now, they would probably just imagine it as another Diablo dungeon romper, as the crafting professions themselves are pretty much dead. Though socializing and such still exists, and from I’ve seen, a strong commitment of the RP community, in the long run what UO is now and what UO was just are two different entities and what I would desire just won’t ever come back. Not without basically a complete and drastic reboot of the entire franchise, and doing that to a 15 year old game would pretty much just require a new game at this point.

So what is it about this game that I always end up pining for in my mind? What keeps making me pine for it in ways that no modern MMO has been able to fill the void in? I don’t think the answer is simple. Parts of it can be describes as nostalgia, parts of it may be described as mechanics, and maybe even parts of it can be described as the community itself. But I think what really attracts me, and I think a lot of people actually remember, is that you truly could decide your own fate and how you actually wanted to spend your time in the game.

Ultima Online wasn’t just another game, and while the learning curve for getting into it was steep (nowhere near as steep as other games mind you, but it definitely was not newb friendly) once you got into it, the possibilities of what you could do became wide as all can be. There was a lot to do in UO, from owning your own house to being a tailor to exploring dungeons. And none of these activities, believe it or not, required the player to take up one offensive weapon or spell in defense. If you were skilled enough or planned yourself well, you could play the game without worry of ever having to cross swords with another player or monster in your gaming life.

Of course, if you were to look back on history, the one thing that would probably be noted as infamous about UO was the fact that player killers were rampant in the game. The original premise for UO was that it was a social experiment. Believe it or not, the grand-daddy of the modern MMO movement wasn’t expected to last 6 months when it launched. But when it did, it pretty much exploded onto the world. And what was remarkable about this simple looking game was actually how complex it turned out to be. I know people think that the 250,000 player subs at UO’s peak means it was a failure of an MMO, but most people are also too young to remember or even know that until WoW came along, the largest MMO on the market only peaked 500,000 once and quickly declined.

This is why I am disappointed on the announcement of Elder Scrolls Online. When I heard the rumors, I actually thought, Maybe they might make a sandbox game like classic UO, and of course I set myself up for disappointment. But I was using my knowledge I had from the fact of how the previous Elder Scrolls games had been created. But, instead, they flat out stated it’s going to be yet another theme park MMO, a single player game disguised as a multi-player game with classes locked in and such. So, players will not have choices and such. Now, one of the things they cite is the difficulty of balance in a freeform system, and I don’t disagree that can be hard, but that is just dumb to ignore the one core facet of your entire legacy, not to mention why can’t I be a bloody werewolf? Again something that was core since Morrowind.

I just don’t understand developers who want to jump into the MMO market, with their famous products, but not stick to the core fundamentals of the product that made it great. Elder Scrolls would have been perfect to usher the MMO back into the living, breathing world set up that MMOs use to espouse to. Giving players the ability to be whatever they wanted, play how they wanted, without forcing them into a set class. Let them be the blacksmith and forge weapons. But instead, we are given yet another theme park loot hunt game that will probably have yet another tacked on crafting system that means jack shit in the end, except for maybe the one that is all important (probably the potion maker) if they even bother with crafting at all.

In short, I believe Bethesda is making a big mistake. They are shunning the fans of their game to appease the lowest common denominator. They are looking at WoW and going, let’s be like them because they think copying them but changing the wallpaper is just going to be enough. It really isn’t. This was the perfect opportunity to take MMOs back to their roots at what they were all about, to allow people to actually be a part of a living, breathing world, and allow them to play it how they wanted to without always being forced to play some form of damage dealing character and always having to hunt and kill monsters, or other players.

So, what would I have done differently? Well, I would have incorporated a skill system. No levels. I would have looked at classic UO as the basis for the design. I would have then decided how I would have wanted it to pan out, how crafting should work, and built the world around the idea that crafters are important to the game. I would have let the player decide how they want to play, if they want to mine, or be a blacksmith and hang out and repair gear for the adventurer players, let them. Allow them to enjoy the game as they see fit.

How I would have handled crafting would have been done thusly; the skill of a crafter determines the quality of the items, with a highly skilled crafter making the nearly best items. I would have incorporated a type of enchantment system that would allow for prefixes and suffixes that give special boosts to items as well. Items found in the world could potentially be slightly better than what a crafter could make, but it would be very rare. A gatherer would be just as important as someone who goes out and slays the rampaging dragons that swoop down on the world. This would help to create an in game economy and such that would actually help promote trade and commerce and yes, items would have durability maybe even requiring replacement in the end.

Speaking of items, I would finally get rid of the stupid bind system. It was novel, but now it’s just a ridiculous control system that has done nothing but hurt community and promotes elitism in the worst ways. Elitism is not a bad thing, but the type of elitism that spawns around it is. Item loss from death is a bad thing to deal with, but I think some items lost from death should occur, but other things like weapons and armor can probably stay.

Death would be something that would need to be handled carefully, but I don’t think the game should be easy, and I do think that a death penalty of some kind is a necessary evil in an MMO. Otherwise you just end up with the death zerg. A loss a consumables on death, and possibly gold should be a good start with ways to get them back. Primary items like weapons and armor I would consider as well, since in order for an economy to thrive there needs to always be a constant demand for things. I know people would hate that, but economies don’t really thrive when there is no reason to repair, replace, or sell items.

I also probably would have pissed off a lot of people that enjoy their ranged classes by bringing ammo back and of course, with mages, having reagents again of some kind, just like in UO, for their spells. I know that’s probably not very Elder Scrolls, but it would have helped balance things out in the long run where the warrior types would have to constantly run in melee while the ranged can just plink away at range.

Another thing I would have brought back is limited pack space not based on arbitrary slots assigned by a bag type, but by actual carrying capacity. The weight in your pack and how much can be carried would, in the end, determine exactly how much you can carry. This limit could be determined by strength, of course, but wouldn’t restrict players based on a slot system but more on just how much they can actually physically carry.

And then there is the one thing that often gets brought up in every MMO but either not implemented or very poorly done in the modern MMO because there really isn’t a point to it, and that is housing. Housing was perhaps one of those features of UO that basically added icing to the cake of the fact that UO was a living, breathing world that people were a part of. You could own a slice of the land and decorate a house. You could have vendors to sell your goods for you while you were in town, and there were actual player towns that sprung up like this. Space was limited, but players could buy or sell houses as well, and later, were able to build the plot as they saw fit. If you want a theme to build an inn, you were capable of doing that. This is something I would do, but probably use a plot system similar to horizons, but not as convoluted or restricting as that. That way the players can build how they want.

And of course, the final part of the puzzle would be PvP. PvP is important in a living, breathing world of MMOs. But there would have to be some differences from the willy nilly gank style of old UO to today. Safe areas, maybe kings territories, and of course probably special rules for PvP. After all, today’s PvPers who’ve grown up in the safe world of WoW (yes, I am calling WoW PvPers carebears) would probably froth at the idea that their uber leet sword of pwn just got ganked from their corpse, but then again, I say the one thing about UO’s PvP is that it acted as its own kind of stat loss as a player went to regear. It was probably the biggest factor in helping control the battlefield and keeping people from zerg rushing. It was probably one of the biggest make people think things, the fact that dying could result in them losing all their stuff. But again, it’s something that most MMO gamers just wouldn’t accept.

In the end, I don’t expect much out of ESO, especially since they made it clear they are just going to copy the tried and true WoW formula. I can hope they will wake up in the end and realize that giving a finger to their fans is a bad idea, but who knows. I would hope they might actually experiment and try to make the MMO a true sandbox world instead of yet another bloody theme park that we have entirely too much of on the market. I think that’s what a lot of the angry posts are truly about in the long run. Who knows, I am still waiting and seeing, I guess.

If I could wave a magic wand, I would probably make a classic UO reboot with modern 3d graphics but keeping its classic gameplay albeit streamlined and the isometric viewpoint. Hell, if I could magically get it, I would use Blizzard’s graphics engine because that’s just about perfect for UO, make the entire world of Britannia, maybe double the size of the world and just go from there. But that’s a pipe dream, and currently while most developers think that more theme park games are magic dollar signs, my dream of seeing another game like UO just keeps becoming smaller and smaller.

But I keep holding onto hope. Maybe soon a developer will wake up.