Category: Editorials

Uninstall Your Free To Play Games, Namco Says They're Low Quality


Today I uninstalled my entire catalog of free to play games. RuneScape, Lineage II, DC Universe, City of Heroes, Everquest II, Alganon, Dungeons and Dragons Online, Lord of the Rings Online, Pitchblack, Star Trek Online, Hello Kitty Online (it was for screenshots for articles), Missing Ink, Gods & Heroes, Fallen Earth, and Age of Conan, and Team Fortress 2. Sure I was enjoying these games, but it wasn’t until Namco pointed out that they “can’t be high quality,” that I realized how fake and empty my enjoyment was. I mean, sure I was having fun playing through my dwarf fighter for absolutely free, but was I having the kind of fun I could be having by buying another PacMan re-release? I think not.

But Olivier Comte is right, the free to play industry is harming big budget titles. Just look at Modern Warfare 3, which sold 6.5 million copies in the first 24 hours. Or Skyrim, which sold 3.5 million copies on its opening weekend. Or hell, Portal 2 sold millions just in retail, not counting Steam sales. The point is that those games would have sold even more if there weren’t disgusting, greedy developers letting people play their low quality games for free. If there weren’t independent developers peddling their wares for sub-premium prices, maybe developers of real video games could have their voices heard without buying huge ads on gaming websites.

“The business model for smaller, easier titles is making an expectation to consumers that is whittling away at AAA development.”

Exactly.  Just look at the substandard titles that are set to launch as free to play. Planetside 2? Bound to be a failure. Ghost Recon Online? What was Ubisoft thinking? Jagex’s Stellar Dawn and Transformers MMOs? Hurting the industry. Hell, i’d venture that DUST 514 will result in the cancellation of Modern Warfare 4, because who can keep up with low quality, but free games?

Sure some people might say that these are the rantings of a developer publisher seeing the market shifting and, rather than accommodate for the changes by shifting their development system, decides to throw a tantrum in the Walmart parking lot and blame their perceived future losses on the customers.

But that’s just my opinion, I could be wrong.

Rift: $100 Million In Revenue


For every decent article I write on this website, I’m inundated with people asking me to talk about “the great fall of Rift,” and how the game is apparently sliding down a population exodus to match or beat that of Warhammer Online all those years back. Still, when I have to make announcements like Rift placing more servers on Trial status and making sure everyone knows it is not the same as a merger, and assuring people that Rift’s consistent promotions to bring the client price down cheaper than a McDonald’s value meal is actually an aggressive marketing strategy by Trion rather than the desperate grab for players that some make it out to be, my job becomes rather difficult.

So my greatest asset is figures. Hard figures released by the developer, not half baked xfire statistics or polls on a thread where 80% of the people voting “I cancelled and hate this game” have never even purchased the game. According to Reuters, Trion has pulled in over $100 million in Rift during 2011, according to Trion CEO Lars Butler. And with impending releases in Asia, this figure only stands to increase over 2012. Trion has also received an injection of $85 million (this is not figured into the revenue) by investors.

$100 million in revenue feels more realistic when you account that at least $50 million of that came through initial box sales when Trion reported one million sales, before the major price reductions began. Figuring out the actual number of boxes sold (digital and retail combined) would be next to impossible with all the promotions Trion has done over the past six or seven months.

(Source: Games Industry)

Playstation Network Down (For Most) For Most of Today


If you plan on doing anything that requires logging into Playstation Network, you have approximately ten minutes (until 11am eastern) to do so, otherwise you will be locked out for thirteen hours until tonight. Sony is conducting routine maintenance on the PSN servers, meaning during this time players will be unable to sign into the service in order to access the Playstation store, account management, and Playstation Home.

This also means being unable to sign into Playstation Network to access your games online. To the best of my understanding, however, if you are signed in before the deadline, you will still be able to play multiplayer games, so make sure you do so in the next seven minutes (I’m going to waste half of that time writing this article). This includes, of course, Free Realms, DC Universe, and Massive Action Game.

Any trophy you receive during the off time will sync when the servers come back up, as normal.

Turbine Breaking Out The Forgotten Realms


Less than a week ago I discussed findings on the Dungeons and Dragons Online forums by sleuths far more skilled than myself, that Turbine has been buying up domains relating to Forgotten Realms and “____ of the Underdark,” as well as related to the fictional deity Lolth. Well that speculation has come to fruition, in a far shorter time than I had expected (generally domains are registered when the work is still in the “we can trash this if we ultimately don’t like it” stage, to prevent information leaking and squatters taking the domain). Turbine has announced the upcoming expansion to Dungeons and Dragons Online: Menace of the Underdark.

Menace of the Underdark takes place in the Forgotten Realms village of Eveningstar, and the area surrounding King’s Forest. Players will battle the forces of Lolth and the Underdark Drow. To aid them in their fight, the level cap is being raised to 25, and players will have access to the new Druid class.

Happy birthday, Dungeons and Dragons Online. A new class, Forgotten Realms, and an upcoming free adventure pack? Color my account reactivated. Menace of the Underdark is expected to hit sometime this summer.

(Source: DDO website)

Lineage II Compensation Detailed


Lineage II has not been having the best week or so. Between the number of technical difficulties that have cropped up, NCSoft has had enough trouble keeping the servers from buckling and passing out, let alone keeping them running smoothly enough to keep their players happy. Between crashing, lag, and game breaking issues, the community is understandably unhappy.

Luckily, NCSoft has a fix: Free stuff.

As many of you know, technical issues have created gameplay problems in the past week, leading to a less than optimal game experience for affected players. We deeply understand how difficult it can be to play in these conditions and we sincerely apologize for this inconvenience. You, the player community, are very important to us and we want to show you that we care and are working to right any wrongs that have happened.

NCSoft’s compensation package includes a 50% experience rune that lasts five hours, as well as five luxury cocktails, which boost your character’s abilities for 30 minutes each. In addition, NCSoft is running an even from January 25th to February 1st, in which players will enjoy no experience loss on death (unless in Chaotic mode), the reduction of the augmentation removal fee to 1 Adena, and the removal of teleport fees from most gatekeepers.

They are still working to fix some lag issues, warning that emergency maintenance will be taking place over the next few days.

(Source: Lineage II)

Slideshow of the ___: A Disturbance In The Force


I’m confused about The Old Republic. On one hand, I’ve seen players complaining of over instancing on Ilum, but if Bioware was truly instance-heavy, the least they could do is balance out the population on the open world PvP planets. Granted, if Bioware had introduced the third Vulcan faction as I had suggested back in 2011, we wouldn’t be having this problem right now.

Sorry, I wanted to preempt any Dark Age of Camelot people who were ready to talk about the 3-faction master race.

NCSoft Outsourcing European Hosting?


You know, I hadn’t really noticed until tonight how small NCSoft’s library has become in the west. With the shuttering of Lineage, Auto Assault, Tabula Rasa, Exteel, and Dungeon Runners, us westerners are left with Aion, City of Heroes, Guild Wars, and Lineage 2. Four titles? Granted, we have Blade & Soul (hopefully) coming out at the end of this year, and Wildstar and Lineage Eternal coming at some point in the future.

I can’t help but notice, however, that NCSoft’s personal appearance in Europe has taken a lesser role recently. Lineage II’s European service was recently handed over to Innova for the free to play transition, and when Aion goes free to play early this year, Gameforge is taking over service of that title. So far this is only on NCSoft’s titles in Europe that have transitioned to free to play, with the exception of City of Heroes in which case the two services (US/EU) were merged into one under NCSoft. This leaves Guild Wars.

If I’m lucky, NCSoft will answer my emails about future title publishing.

"No Intention At This Time"


People who read this website know that I am a free market capitalist, so my response to changes in the business model is simply that consumers should, and will, vote with their wallets and their mouths. If a developer does something you don’t like, don’t give them your money, and let them know exactly why in a civilized manner. Marketers are people just like you and me, we need a decent amount of feedback in order to know what players are dissatisfied over.

I think we understand by now that the phrase “at this time” is a back door to allowing a company to do a complete one hundred eighty degree turn on their policy at some point in the future. The safe route for navigating the “at this time” phrase is to remind yourself not to translate the phrase into “we don’t want to do this,” but as its more accurate “we would like to do this, but we feel that the market/demographic may not be receptive to it at this point, or we feel a reminder that we are not doing said action at this exact moment in time will satisfy some of our uneasy customers who we plan on convincing over the next few months.” After all, how many times have you heard “we have no intention at this time of (adding free to play/shutting down/merging servers/cash shop/etc)” only to have that same event occur within a year or two?

“At this time” is still an interesting phrase. After all, for all of us who see it as a verbal form of twirling one’s mustache nefariously while slyly directing the movie’s hero toward the entirely not poisoned glass of wine, there are plenty more who buy into the false promise that it usually accompanies, and it appears to still be a viable marketing tactic. Turbine recently released non-cosmetic gear on their cash shop for Lord of the Rings Online, breaking their previous commitment but justifying it over the virtue that the armor is relatively low-tier. Oh and,

“Furthermore, we have no intention at this time of selling any raid gear in the store.”

At least not until metrics come back on the recently added gear to let us know if enough people are willing to throw money into the system. Again, as a capitalist I am personally unopposed to the idea of Turbine selling gear for stats. I think Turbine has proven itself responsive enough that if the community backlash is strong enough, they will indeed take the offending items down. For others, however, the message isn’t heard until the servers are a ghost town, and usually by then it’s too late.

But then again, I’m a capitalist, and if an MMO bankrupts due to poor design decisions, it is entirely on the heads of the developer.

“No Intention At This Time”


People who read this website know that I am a free market capitalist, so my response to changes in the business model is simply that consumers should, and will, vote with their wallets and their mouths. If a developer does something you don’t like, don’t give them your money, and let them know exactly why in a civilized manner. Marketers are people just like you and me, we need a decent amount of feedback in order to know what players are dissatisfied over.

I think we understand by now that the phrase “at this time” is a back door to allowing a company to do a complete one hundred eighty degree turn on their policy at some point in the future. The safe route for navigating the “at this time” phrase is to remind yourself not to translate the phrase into “we don’t want to do this,” but as its more accurate “we would like to do this, but we feel that the market/demographic may not be receptive to it at this point, or we feel a reminder that we are not doing said action at this exact moment in time will satisfy some of our uneasy customers who we plan on convincing over the next few months.” After all, how many times have you heard “we have no intention at this time of (adding free to play/shutting down/merging servers/cash shop/etc)” only to have that same event occur within a year or two?

“At this time” is still an interesting phrase. After all, for all of us who see it as a verbal form of twirling one’s mustache nefariously while slyly directing the movie’s hero toward the entirely not poisoned glass of wine, there are plenty more who buy into the false promise that it usually accompanies, and it appears to still be a viable marketing tactic. Turbine recently released non-cosmetic gear on their cash shop for Lord of the Rings Online, breaking their previous commitment but justifying it over the virtue that the armor is relatively low-tier. Oh and,

“Furthermore, we have no intention at this time of selling any raid gear in the store.”

At least not until metrics come back on the recently added gear to let us know if enough people are willing to throw money into the system. Again, as a capitalist I am personally unopposed to the idea of Turbine selling gear for stats. I think Turbine has proven itself responsive enough that if the community backlash is strong enough, they will indeed take the offending items down. For others, however, the message isn’t heard until the servers are a ghost town, and usually by then it’s too late.

But then again, I’m a capitalist, and if an MMO bankrupts due to poor design decisions, it is entirely on the heads of the developer.

Pathfinder Online Invokes Everquest/RuneScape Death Mechanics


Pathfinder Online almost sounds like a cheap title one might use to parody an MMO with poor AI. That being said, the folks over at Goblin Works have piqued my interest with the announcement that death in Pathfinder will function similar to the old Everquest corpse walk, and yes I just used the words “upcoming MMO” and “old Everquest corpse walk” in the same sentence in 2012.

In a blog on the Goblin Works website, the team describes the mechanic in more detail. When a player dies, they can be resurrected by a nearby friend. If no one comes to their rescue, they will respawn at their bound location with everything they had equipped still on them. Anything in your inventory, however, is now in the possession of a soulless husk lying dormant on the ground of some creature-ridden cave. Should another player come across your fresh carcass before you do, they will be able to loot a random selection of your items with the rest being destroyed in the process.

According to the website, this is to ensure that players don’t just have friends loot them and give their stuff back, as part of your inventory is destroyed for good. It also means that players in groups can defend that person’s stash while they run back, even if no one in the group is capable of resurrection.

Pathfinder Online is an upcoming sandbox/themepark hybrid MMO with open world PvP based on the pen and paper RPG. Expect more articles coming up on Pathfinder, including how Goblin Works shoved my own foot in my mouth over a bounty system.

(Source: Goblin Works Website)