Editorials – Page 86

Top 5: Lessons We Should Learn From Infinite Crisis

This week Turbine Entertainment announced that Infinite Crisis is shutting down, news that shouldn’t have really been a big surprise given the game’s extended development period, stretched out beta, lack of promotion, and how Turbine was throwing $50 cash packs in with Nvidia graphics cards.

Infinite Crisis isn’t the only game I’m going to talk about here, so just imagine the title was “Lessons We Should Learn From The MOBA Industry”

1. Developers Face A Steep Uphill Climb

If earning a seat at the MMO table is about as hard as getting a reservation at Rao’s in New York City, then the MOBA industry is right up there with a gig at Carnegie Hall. There are a few dozen MOBAs on the market right now, only a small handful of which will dominate the rest while the industry graveyard continues to branch out and buy up more land for the recently deceased. We talk a lot here about how World of Warcraft clones fail because, for the most part, players aren’t willing to forego the time and money spent leveling their characters to go do the same thing over again.

The MOBA genre, with its hyper-competitive nature, has a lot of shortcomings that can kill it early. You’re going up against companies with established communities, years of work balancing each individual hero, and thriving eSports scene. In order to break into the industry, it seems that companies either need to bring something different to the table (ala Smite), be backed by a company with a massive community (ala Dota 2) or to have gotten into the industry at an early age (League of Legends/Heroes of Newerth).

2. Big IPs Still Mean Squat In Gaming

Isn’t it fitting that, out of all of the MOBAs, the ones that crashed and shut down happen to be based on very popular properties? Warhammer is a franchise that spans tabletop games, pen and paper role playing, video games, novels, and more, and yet none of that mattered when the MMO toppled and the MOBA couldn’t sustain itself through beta. The same goes for Transformers Universe, a popular IP with the backing of an established developer with a massive customer base.

Even Guardians of Middle Earth, with all the power of the Lord of the Rings, couldn’t avoid being critically panned (22% approval on Steam) with presently deserted servers on PC. The game came and went on PS3 so quietly that even Warner Bros. didn’t notice to update its website to stop directing people to buy the PS3 version on Amazon, or even acknowledge the game’s existence on PC. According to Steam Charts, Guardians of Middle Earth has a 30 day peak of 19 players on Steam.

3. The Perpetual Beta Is Tired And Pointless

The idea that a game should receive more lenient coverage when in beta became a thing of the past when developers started fully charging for products that were still in beta, and it would be irresponsible to not acknowledge this when MMOs/MOBAs are shutting down without ever launching, and many don’t even offer some form of refund to the customers that went out on a limb and spent their hard earned money to fund an unfinished project.

And while the unfinished state of the game is a great excuse to deflect criticism when reviewers tell you not to spend money, Turbine apparently has no problem using beta time played to justify denying a refund to their founders, which is the exact sentiment given by Turbine’s Community Manager.

That’s mostly it. Because Founders got to play for 2+ years, you guys were well outside our refund window. We really do thank you for supporting the game, as it was your support that kept us going. Make no mistake about that. But, they guys who just bought their elite pack or starter pack from Steam, they didn’t get to play for as long as you guys.

4. The MOBA Genre Is In The Middle Of A Soft Crash

Right now the genre is in a position where developers are looking at the success of the likes of League and Dota and saying to themselves “I can do that too.” What we’ve wound up with is three major players (League, Dota, and SMITE in that order) and a whole lot of stragglers. This isn’t the case of the MMO industry where we have one game to rule them all and a ton of other companies making much smaller, but still livable incomes. The MOBAs that are down on the bottom of the list are struggling to remain relevant, in a genre that is heavily favoring those few at the top.

Compare the 30 day peak of Infinite Crisis to Dota2 on Steam: 1,557 to 967,674. Or Super Monday Night Combat (152), or Demigod (27), or Guardians of Middle Earth (13).

5. Fully Funded Betas Are Still A Bad Place For Your Money

Paid betas have taken on one of the worst attitudes and practices by developers, as repeated by Turbine’s community manager. Developers like Turbine have no problem selling a beta as though it is a finished product, ending character wipes, opening up a fully functional cash shop, and pulling hundreds of dollars out of players, yet when push comes to shove and people start giving the game negative reviews because of bugs or unfinished features, they turn around and claim that it’s unfair because the game is not released and not a finished product.

And when games like Infinite Crisis shut down after a prolonged beta and short launch? Well then it’s considered a full experience, and when pushed on a refund? Deny the entire concept of a finished game.

I know some of you feel as though you only had a small amount of time to play a “finished” game, but Infinite Crisis is a game that was built to consistently change. Even after launch we were still going to produce new champions, add new features, and continue iterating the game as we went forward. As we posted during our launch announcement, launch was never going to be a stopping point in the eyes of our development cycle. We’re an online game, and we’ve changed a lot (and changed for the better) over the last two years.

Turbine’s CM knows as well as you or I do what the players mean by “finished,” that being when the game sheds its beta tags, but you have to hand it to Turbine. Infinite Crisis was finished enough to open up the cash shop, not finished enough to review as a final product, and when it shut down right after launch? Well what exactly does “finished” mean, really? Hold two sides of the same coin, and then deny that the coin exists.

We understand when indie developers can’t finish a game because it’s a couple of guys working out of a motel/office funding the game partially out of pocket and partially through donations/pledges. A company like Turbine, on the IP of DC Comics and the backing of a corporate hulk like Warner Bros. shouldn’t be dropping development of a game because it wasn’t making enough money during beta.

It’s PR spin, and people aren’t going to fall for it. Infinite Crisis shutting down right after launch is bad enough as it is, bridges will be burned and customers will be lost, it’s an unfortunate part of business. But burning founders can damage a brand, in the case Turbine’s future ability to put a game out in beta and ask people to join in early to fund you, as people will look back to when Infinite Crisis shut down and see that while those who jumped in late were refunded, the people who were there from the beginning were told “oh well, too bad.”

I feel that this is a bad sign for Turbine overall.

Diaries From Gielinor: Tuska Event Fatigue

As I work on this piece, my character is toiling away semi-afk balancing on Tuska’s spine for agility experience and Tuska fragments that can be turned in for points. At 8:44 am, more than halfway through the day in server-time, the overall contribution isn’t at 50%. It isn’t even close.

RuneScape’s third world event is only three days in and already players are getting discouraged and seemingly dropping out. Tuska has won the first two days, leading players to speculate whether or not the event has been rigged to give Tuska an early lead and raise the tension, or whether Jagex overestimated the abilities of the community and made the event too hard by accident.

One major issue brought up is that since the Tuska daily event can be easily capped in one run, players don’t have any incentive to return other than for the good of the fight. As I’ve said numerous times before, Jagex has long nurtured RuneScape into a game centered around efficiency, and as a result (whether they like it or not) if it isn’t on the higher end of the reward/time spectrum, players will simply ignore it. This is the culture that Jagex created, and one that will guide development.

In the long run, rewards will beat lore every time. If it isn’t rewarding, players won’t do it. If something else exists that is more rewarding, they’ll spend their time doing that. If the event is being purposely designed for players to lose, they’ll get discouraged and stop participating completely, because they have no real participation in the event.

I’d like to see a response from Jagex about how this event is going to play out, because we haven’t even reached the end of day 3 and people are already worn out.

[Column] Shovelware Makers On Steam Should Be Afraid

Today marked the day that Valve took a leap forward for the cause of customer service and announced that players would be allowed to return their games, no questions asked, within two weeks or two hours of game time, whichever comes first. There are certain caveats to the deal on what can be returned and what can’t, but as far as the crucial details go, two weeks or two hours is all you really need to know.

Before I start to get critical, I’d like to point out that I have been calling for a refund system on Steam for years, as their “all sales final” policy has been more and more problematic when coupled with their laissez faire policy on curation allowing broken games to make their way into the store space. Valve already does what it can to deny these games front page coverage, but this policy will be the silver bullet to possibly knock specific developers off of Steam forever. You know the ones I mean.

I also don’t see this as a big problem for independent developers putting out cheap games at low prices. As has been echoed by other voices on the web, I feel that anyone who would buy a short indie game to play it for an hour or so and then refund it wouldn’t have gone through the trouble of buying it in the first place, and would likely pirate it. The only measurable notice that the dev will see are the sales going up, and then slightly coming down.

One are where I do see this having a harmful effect on a legitimate developer is in the realm of review bombing, an issue that is already prevalent on free to play and low cost items, but will now be easier if groups of people can buy easily buy a game, bring the overall rating down, and then all request a refund and walk out without a loss of their own. Review bombing is a problem as it is.

For PC gamers, this system is great. The small demo or benchmark download is, with some exception, just about extinct, and with the variety of PC builds available, there is no way of knowing for sure if a game will run on your system without forking over the sixty bucks and praying. Additionally, it also knocks out a good source of income for developers releasing poor quality games and cashing in before word of mouth spreads.

Which brings me full circle to the point of this article, Valve has put a bullet in the head of fly by night developers peddling their wares on Steam. Not only do they struggle to find an audience, thanks to a lack of presence on the main page, but now their source of income (ill informed customers) has been cut off at the neck.

I’ll end this by recommending that you don’t assume that every developer that has concerns about the system is hiding bad intentions, just as well that any customer who applauds the system is just looking for some easy free games. Valve’s lack of specificity and reminder that each refund is handled case by case means that we’ll need to wait until the system is actually used to see where it is ripe for abuse, and where Valve draws the line.

Overall, this system is a major leap forward for Valve as a company and Steam as a platform.

[Community] Let’s Call A Merger A Merger

Originally I intended this week’s Community column to be speculation about how Trion Worlds would handle ArcheAge’s upcoming server merge, given that the plans are still in the conceptual stage and any real action that will be taken is still months down the line. To fuel speculation, I looked at how server mergers were handled in Korea and Russia under XLGames and Mail.ru respectively, and hoped to get a comment from each party.

While Mail.ru and XLGames didn’t respond to my request, I was told by Trion Worlds that an FAQ was in the works. It isn’t out as of this publishing (approximately 2pm EST on Monday, June 1st), so I’m going ahead with my original plan.

It’s safe to say that the term “server merger” has such a negative connotation attached to it because, in the eyes of the ever-rational internet mob, developers might as well post an announcement that they’ve failed at business. Couple that with a media in love with negative headlines, and you’ve got a recipe for PR disaster. Because of this, Trion Worlds isn’t the first to treat the phrase like they’ve been accused of having lice, and have joined the growing list of developers shuffling players away from low population servers (before closing them usually) without actually using the term “merger.” Even Blizzard opted to develop its engine to support cross-realm play rather than merge its list of low population servers.

There tends to be an even more negative response to this tactic, since if there’s one thing people hate more than being lied to, it’s when companies talk to them like they are lawyers in a courtroom dodging a guilty plea by questioning the definition of the term “murder.” To go back to the previous analogy, they are the kid in school trying to explain that while their head has been buzzed and their hair smells of medical shampoo, there is no way you can prove that they were responsible for the lice sighting that the school warned about over the morning announcements.

This isn’t the first time Trion Worlds merged without ever using the term. In Rift, Trion would convert low population servers to “trial servers” in order to force players off of them without actually calling it a merger. Designating a server as “trial” would result in character creation being disabled (for subscribers) and would limit players to the two main cities, forcing players to transfer off once they had finished the content available in the free trial.

We won’t know what Trion plans on doing with ArcheAge until they release more information, but we did grab this soundbite from their latest Twitch stream:

“It’s basically taking lower population servers and then creating an entirely new server and allowing players to migrate from that server to the new evolved servers.”

If their approach to merging servers in ArcheAge is anything close to what they did in Rift, it is likely that players will be not so gently coerced into transferring over to these “evolved servers,” through various limitations on these legacy servers. This way, once the population has sufficiently dwindled, the servers can be logically shut down due to lack of activity, with any characters remaining forced to transfer off.

So the notion that the servers were never merged is technically correct, and as I have said before technically correct is my favorite kind of correct.

Weekend Wrapper: Chicks With Abs Edition

It’s Sunday and you know what that means: You’re all playing Deadly Profits. It may surprise you to hear that there’s been a lot of arguing going on between Derek Smart and the people reviewing Alganon on Steam. The game currently has a review score of 31% positive with 114 reviews and an all time peak of 78 players on Steam, according to Steam Charts.

While users have been getting banned from the Alganon Steam forums, Quest Online can’t do much about them posting negative reviews.

MMO News:

Greed Monger is gone, and so is the hundred grand they raised in crowd funding.
Wildstar is going free to play, to the surprise of everyone.
Shadowrun Chronicles isn’t going anywhere, despite developer bankruptcy.
Trion Worlds trademarks Reactor (via Massively)

Around The Web:

Gearbox Software not involved in Aliens: Colonial Marines class action lawsuit. (Via Polygon)
Microsoft isn’t buying Silent Hill from Konami. (Via Gamespot)
Sony investigated by BBC over their no refund policy on fraudulent purchases made on compromised accounts. (via Eurogamer)
Twitch bans broadcast of AO games. (Via Eurogamer)
Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes free on PS+ in June. (Via Playstation Blog)

Notable Release:

Kung Fury: Street Rage – PC $1.99
Splatoon – WiiU $59.99
Magicka 2 – PC $14.99

[Updated] Indie Dev Uses Multiple Names To Dodge Bad Rating Association

[Update 5/31: Digital Homicide has updated their games to have a consistent naming, making it possible to easily view all of their games.]

Temper Tantrum currently costs 99 cents on Steam. It has a 44% positive rating at the time of this publishing with many of the negative reviews pointing toward bugs, and the fact that the game is entirely comprised of stock UNITY assets purchased from the store. If you look up the developer, you’ll see that the game is made by a studio called DigitalHomicideStudios LLC (two words) and that they only have one game on Steam if you search by developer.

We’ve covered Digital Homicide here at MMO Fallout before, back in November when the developer had a meltdown over a critical let’s play video of their game The Slaughtering Grounds, which currently carries a 25% positive rating on Steam. This game, similarly, was heavily panned for its poor quality and reliance on stock assets purchased from the UNITY store. The Slaughtering Grounds is credited as being developed by Imminent Uprising and published by Digital Homicide Studios LLC (four words). The companies are the same, but if you follow the link on the Steam page you would never know the link between the two games, because of the alternate spelling.

And finally we come to Deadly Profits, a game released May 29th under the developer name Digital Homicide Studios, changing the studio name once again to prevent users from stumbling upon the game’s other, less well received titles. Deadly Profits is currently the highest rated title in the library, 61% at the time that this is published, however the top fifteen most helpful reviews are all negative.

Should developers be able to hide their past on Steam, or should Valve be enforcing a policy to tie developers to a consistent name? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

[Community] Are Boxers Harshing Your Ragefire Buzz?

(Community is a weekly column discussing ongoing events in various MMOs. Agree or disagree, we’d like to hear what you think in the comments below.)

Everquest’s Ragefire progression server has been up for less than a week, actually it’s been up for about four days, but if you’ve been trying to make headway in the game it might feel more like a week. Unfortunately, parts of the community are at each other’s throats over the issue of people not being able to play, and who is responsible for clogging Ragefire and camping its mobs. Daybreak has been working to alleviate problems without trampling on either side’s shoes, and the fighting is getting worse.

The culprit of choice for Ragefire are the boxers, players who run two or more copies of Everquest simultaneously, either controlling accounts separately or using programs like isboxer to direct multiple characters at once. A distinction between boxing and botting is important, since botting is unattended and boxing is one player actually operating multiple accounts. Boxing has become very common over the years in Everquest, as computers have expanded and become capable of running multiple instances of the game very easily. For Ragefire, where getting a spot on the server has been rather difficult, members of the community are understandably angry over long queues that are at least partially the fault of single players taking upwards of six or more slots.

With Ragefire requiring a subscription, it’s also easy to see why Daybreak doesn’t want to tread on the shoes of someone paying $15 per month, per account.

On Daybreak’s end, the company has implemented an afk timer that apparently goes up and down based on how much demand there is to get into the server. I haven’t been able to test this out myself, but reports from other players indicate that the timer can swing as high as over an hour to as low as under ten minutes. In addition, Daybreak cobbled together a server queue that allows players to get their place in during peak hours and alt-tab out of the client or go into chat without worrying about the system automatically logging them out.

How do you feel about boxers in Everquest?

Beta Perspective: Triad Wars

Disclosure: I haven’t played Sleeping Dogs, to which Triad Wars is set in the same universe, so this series is new to me. MMO Fallout should be taking part in a beta key giveaway at some point in the near future.

(Correction: Triad Wars is set in the same world as Sleeping Dogs, it is not a sequel)

Let’s get something out of the way right off the bat: Triad Wars is an asynchronous single player game where the only interaction you have with other players is via AI recreations of them. At some point, the devs intend on adding in cooperative play, but that’s it. If you came in expecting Grand Theft Auto Online in the Sleeping Dogs universe, you’ll be sorely disappointed.

I try to reserve the “Beta Perspective” column for games that fit the traditional sense of a beta, that being a game that is definitively a work in progress rather than a mostly completed product that is in the bug testing phase. The game isn’t being wiped, but that doesn’t change the fact that many of the systems are still very much incomplete.

The main goal of Triad Wars is to build up your criminal empire while simultaneously knocking down those of your rivals (Ie: every other criminal), in modern day China. You’ll do this by operating a turf and raiding the homes of others to steal their stuff and embarrass them in front of their mothers.

Thus we get to the current meat of the game: Raiding. Raids are something of an endurance run, tasking you with taking down each of the player’s resource pools (counterfeiting, cock fighting, etc) guarded by various NPC mobs before ultimately taking on the big guy himself. All you really need to complete a raid is to take out one building, but you get more rewards if you bring down the whole shebang.

You are limited by time and health, and the game recommends that if you don’t think you can do it, it’s best to cut your losses and run. You can always hightail it and make off with what you’ve got, lest you die/run out of time and lose everything. Your timer can be extended by performing a number of intel operations prior to assaulting the base, these involving breaking up deals, stealing merchandise, and beating up thugs.

Ultimately you end up with a lot more time than you’d probably ever need, an additional four minutes presently (giving ten total). It’s amazing how much an extra few minutes can dramatically reduce the tension and thus the mistakes a player makes while trying to beat the clock, and the whole process of collecting intel gives the game a bit more to do.

There’s also a bit of strategy in the whole symmetry between melee and ranged weaponry. The game is balanced in the sense that you can’t just walk in with a pistol (which you get very early on) and wipe everything out. Aiming is a pain and your avatar has all the accuracy of a drunkard, so in most cases you’re really better off saving your bullets for the guys who also have guns.

As you level up, you gain points that can be put into improving your character and your gang, improving health, mitigating damage, boosting power, etc. The other big part of the game comes in the form of favors, cards that you unlock through gameplay and buy through the cash shop that offer different bonuses. Some cards offer temporary guns, others permanent, some give you boosts to production and others protection on certain areas of your turf. You can buy packs of random cards through the cash shop, however the game supplies them in pretty good quantities via daily cards and acquiring through missions.

The two most glaring problems with Triad Wars are, I’m told, completely unfinished and the dev team is aware of their shortcomings: Controls and AI. The quality of controls in Triad Wars seems to go up and down as you play, where sometimes you’ll be pulling off amazing fighting stunts (melee combat is very similar to the Arkham series) and parkour moves, and other times you’ll be gunned down because your character simply refused to respond to key presses. I’m keeping count how many times I’ve been killed because no matter how many times I’ve pressed the button, my guy won’t draw his pistol. Right now it’s five. Five times.

Maneuvering while in sprint mode is also a massive pain, with my character making sudden and random movements while seeming sprinting everywhere except where I wanted him to go most of the time. I had a particularly frustrating time with the simple process of getting him in front of a shop counter to buy a health drink, because he kept automatically jumping over the counter.

The AI also makes it really easy to go through raids where your enemy doesn’t have a gun but you do. The AI’s method of dealing with an armed intruder is to take cover, wait until he gets close enough, and then bum-rush and tackle. A nice idea, but you can usually get close enough to fire off a headshot before they take their chance. It’s fun when you’re on the offensive, but then you realize that these guys are defending your base too.

I’ll end this with a suggestion that really popped out at me while playing:

You need to change the description on the cash shop. A fair amount of items sold for gold (cs currency) are rotated out and therefore only available for a limited time. The game isn’t clear that this is what the timers on the shop pages are for, and given the habit of cash shops to sell temporary cosmetics, I assumed that the devs were selling clothing and vehicles that lasted only a day or two, and immediately wrote the shop off since they cost in the realm of $10. It wasn’t until I actually bought something with the gold the game gives you that I realized my mistake. This needs to be communicated better, otherwise you might be putting players off.

Otherwise I’m having a lot of fun in Triad Wars. It’s definitely in need of a lot of work, and there isn’t an incredibly diverse range of content in the game, but you should check it out if you get the opportunity, and you will get the opportunity because MMO Fallout will be running a beta key giveaway at some point in the future.

[Column] NCSoft, Misconceptions And Frequently Asked

The kind of activity I’m seeing among the Wildstar community is pretty similar to those of other MMOs when they were either in the process of being shut down, or at heavily speculated risk of being shut down. So none of what I’m about to discuss is of any surprise to me, and I don’t want people thinking that I’m just singling out the Wildstar community for behaving in such a manner. Thank you.

First of all, you can read my analysis of NCSoft’s first quarter report at MMORPG.com. I’m no trained expert in finance, but I’ve been doing these quarterly reports for five years, and in the months that I’m not regurgitating income and revenues, I’m doing research and chatting with real investment bankers. So I have at least a good grasp on what I’m talking about and the charts the present are all mine, so you know I’ve actually read them.

The unfortunate side effect of this being a somewhat complicated topic is that articles like this usually end up with a lot of gotcha questions from fans and “haters” alike, statements you know are wrong but can’t really refute with the proper level of confidence.

I decided to compile a few of the most common things I see concerning quarterly reports, particularly for this one.

The graph shows box sales, not total revenue.

Incorrect. The figure reported by NCSoft is total revenue per game, from box sales to subscriptions and cash shop purchases. No, this isn’t directly stated on the quarterly report sheet, but it is discussed in more detail over the conference call. Also, just consider this from a logical point of view. There are games on this list that don’t exist in a boxed form anymore, in any region. Sales for titles like Aion and Lineage II would be zilch if the figure only counted box sales.

But my guild is growing, the game must be growing too!

A nice sentiment, but anecdotal and ultimately meaningless, not to mention demonstrably false given we know for a fact that Wildstar’s sales are dropping. Also consider how small the game’s population would need to be in order for one guild’s numbers to be indicative of the overall population.

Who cares what the revenue is as long as the game is profitable?

You should, at least fans of the game should. While some developers might be happy with just profitable, it doesn’t take an expert to know that NCSoft is not that kind of developer. If NCSoft was happy with a game being somewhat profitable, we’d still be playing City of Heroes.

Your sources are unaudited and therefore inaccurate.

Half true. The figures provided are not audited, meaning they are in their form as NCSoft has submitted them. While it is possible that a mistake was made and the numbers are wrong, you would need some hard evidence to prove why the numbers should be doubted.

[Less Massive] Shuttered Game Still Being Sold On Steam

Steam Early Access has seen a lot of criticism, from the fact that most games don’t see completion, to the sale of titles that are at best misleading and at worst engaging in outright fraud. It has also become the source of indie devs putting games up for sale only to engage with the community for a few months before disappearing with whatever money they had managed to gain in that time frame. Customers, on the other hand, generally have no recourse if their purchase turns out to be for nothing.

Such is the case again with Into The War, developed and abandoned by the now absent Small Town Studios. According to Steam reviews, the servers for Into the War haven’t been operational going back to early April, possibly even further. The developer’s website is offline, and their social media has gone silent.

In addition, the game’s forum currently contain a sticky telling players to not just avoid buying the game, but to report it to Steam (typos left intact).

On the store page you will see a Flag icon at the right side of the page. Use it to report the game and describe it as abandoned by the developers.(use the “Broken” option) and it’s nothing more than a scam now, with the devs running away, deleting their site and social media presence, while the game remains unplayable.

Despite the servers being offline and the developer unreachable, the game is still up for sale as of this publishing for $4.99. Those who bought the game may have a glimmer of hope, as Valve has issued refunds for other early access games abandoned by their developers and left in a broken state.

For critics of Early Access, this is just another example in an ongoing demand for more curation on the Steam platform.

(Source: Steam)

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