MMO Fallout

Lessons From 2013 #5: Free To Ignore

Today’s lesson from 2013 is all about free to play or as I’ve taken to calling it, free to ignore. The very same developers who designed free to play to advertise to the gamer bouncing around from title to title are now finding that their customers are in and out in the blink of an eye. In a way, free to play was a great method of knocking the low hanging fruit from the development tree. Gamers now have the ability to download a game, realize that it isn’t worth their time, and leave it behind without a single cent lost. When a game goes free to play, developers are quick to trumpet how their population increased by five hundred billion percent, only for the PR department to go strangely silent when, after about a month, most of those new players have already moved on.

Free to play was once the bastion for lower-tier games and indies, and then the big industry folks moved in and did what they do best, knock everyone out of business including themselves. Heroes in the Sky, Age of Empires, the Mummy Online, Fusionfall, Battleforge, RaiderZ (in most territories), Kartuga, Prius Online, Dungeon Fighter Online, Dragonball Online, Sevencore, Wrath of Heroes, Hellgate: Global (in Japan), The Old Republic (Asia Pacific), Family Guy Online, and Glitch, and that’s just a small list of games from the past twelve months. Then look at the games merging servers: Rift, Neverwinter, Age of Wushu, Age of Conan, Vanguard, The Old Republic, and that again is a small list of AAA titles from the past year. The system has been turned on its head so much that now free to play games are partially converting to subscription models! Dogs and cats are living in harmony, put all of your money in gold and bury it in the backyard, the world is coming to an end!

When adding this topic to my list of lessons, I asked myself “I’ve harped on this subject more times than I can count. Why bring it up yet again?” The best answer I can come up with is because out of all of the items on this list, this is almost guaranteed to not just be a problem next year, it will be bigger. Like lemmings, completely oblivious to the growing pile of dead bodies around them, developers of all sizes and budgets continue to throw their hat into the ring with the outdated and inaccurate belief that free to play is a treasure-trove of easy money with no effort because games like Team Fortress 2 and League of Legends are extremely popular. These are the same developers who blew up the subscription market by trying to beat World of Warcraft and subsequently shut down because, regardless of profit margin, they couldn’t make their target of a billion subscribers.

Imagine how much better off this industry would be if developers would only set a goal of carving their own section of the market, rather than those who took an everything or nothing approach.

Lessons From 2013 #4: Threats From Devs

Despite some of the criticisms I make here at MMO Fallout, I have a decent relationship with most developers that I talk about. I don’t water down my editorials and for the most part they are fully aware that anything negative is said with the best of intentions. That out of the way, MMO Fallout has received several threats of defamation and slander lawsuits, all of which disappeared when pressed to explain precisely what was said that was false or published with the intention of damaging said company/individual. Over at MMORPG.com, however, 2013 saw the delisting of two games due to the actions of their developers. Back in March, WWII Online was removed completely after Cornered Rat Software threatened to sue over comments made by users in the forums. Just a month later, Jason Appleton threatened the website over comments made about Greed Monger, resulting in the game also being removed.

Forums for MMORPG.com and big video games are often toxic pools of hatred, but a place where someone is allowed to vent their frustration, even if it is poorly worded, incorrect, or agenda-driven, is always preferable to one where the developer has a strangle hold and silences any criticism. The unfortunate side of the MMO genre is that as the market continues to push itself far past the saturation point, with games shutting down left and right, the very developers who can’t afford to push their customers away are doing just so, and they are the same people who will be sitting alone, wondering where everyone has gone and why no one returns their calls anymore.

This lesson of 2013 is that websites are not responsible for the statements that their forum users make, although if you want to shoot your potential for publicity in the head, you should target the largest MMO websites first to convince everyone else to stop covering your game.

MMOrning Shots: Heroes & Villains

Today’s MMOrning Shot comes to us from Heroes and Villains, a spiritual sequel to City of Heroes in development by the folks at Plan Z Virtual Studio. This is a rather early build of Plan Z’s character creation tool, although as you can see from the image above, work is coming along great on my personal superhero, Contemporary Lounge-chairman. Players will be able to create their character as a hero, villain, or freelancer, and customize their costume, abilities, powers, secret identity, and more.

To check out Heroes & Villains, check out the official website.

Line of Defense Coming 2014

It’s been a while since we heard anything related to Line of Defense. In a post on the game’s official blog, 3000ad inc announced that players should be “rolling in awesomeness by Q2/14.”

Having switched from a custom internal engine to a custom middleware engine (Havok Vision Engine), we did have some setbacks during the transition. Especially in light of the fact that, well, the game uses over twenty-five (!) different middleware engines; all of which do various things. And all the content – include the world – had to be ported over.

Line of Defense is a massive open world first person shooter in development by 3000ad.

(Source: Line of Defense)

Path of Exile Enjoys Successful First Month

The folks at Grinding Gear Games are enjoying a successful first month. One month after launch, Path of Exile has enjoyed a rather sumptuous four million registered users with a quarter of a million logging in every day. Development and release was funded primarily due to founders packs, ranging from fifty to nine hundred dollars in price. Last Wednesday, Path of Exile launched version 1.0.2, bringing with it a host of new features.

Version 1.0.2 includes several new Unique items, vendor recipes, achievements, and microtransactions, as well as final touches on the rapid-fire PvP Tournaments, various bug fixes, and some balancing changes to the game’s damage over time mechanics.

(Source: Path of Exile press release)

Lessons From 2013 #3: Reading Too Far

Can we agree to stop reading into every little comment made by developers as cryptic hints or confirmations? One such case that many of you may remember from this year is back in March when John Smedley said “we like permadeath for EQN” when responding to a question on Twitter. When Dave Georgeson confirmed that Smedley was simply giving his opinion on permadeath and that the feature was not coming to Everquest Next, players accused Smedley of lying or deliberately misleading players.

The lesson? It doesn’t matter what you say or how clearly you say it, gamers will find a way to deliberately misinterpret it and complain.

Jagex Reveals Premiere Club 2014

Last year, Jagex rolled out the Premiere Club. Players were able to buy limited packages of 3, 6, and 12 months of membership for a reduced price and receive added bonuses for doing so. In a post on the official website, Jagex has laid down the plans for 2013 Premiere Club. The packages are only available until “early 2014,” and the deal last year expired on February 4th. At the highest, gold tier full year package, players receive bonus loyalty points, exclusive pets, extra daily spins, access to VIP exclusive worlds, exclusive Q&A’s, chat and forum badges, and cosmetic promotional items that generally can only be obtained through special game cards.

This year’s deal is more expensive than last year, by a margin of about $12. It will be possible to redeem bonds for premiere membership, so dedicated players can get it all for free. You apparently need six, twelve, and twenty four bonds for each package respectively.

(Source: Jagex)

MMOrning Shots: Treasure Trove

What would Trove be without a laundry list of logos and 8-bit sprites being recreated in the game world?

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Lessons From 2013 #2: Triumph of Old School

You can only hope that other developers are paying attention to Jagex. This year marked the announcement and launch of RuneScape’s Old School server, a separate service that originally launched as a snapshot of the MMO way back from August 2007, but has since evolved into its own game entirely. Updates are based entirely off of polls, with each addition being voted on separately and requiring 75% approval in order to be implemented. Rather than vote on ideas from the standard RuneScape ruleset, Old School has gone in a completely different direction with the implementation of features such as pvp worlds, where players are able to fight it out all over the world instead of being relegated to the wilderness.

We can only hope that more developers will see the value of classic servers.

Lessons From 2013 #1: Not Mass Bans

There is an old phrase that says “I can’t define obscenity, but I know it when I see it,” a paraphrase of a quote originally stated by Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart. The gaming media, as with any other media, loves to use sensationalist headlines, and nothing makes bank in this industry quite like a rolling ban for some exploit. The question is how do you define a “mass ban?” Hundreds? Thousands? I can’t define a mass ban, but I know one when I see it.

Some of you may remember an exploit that popped up in last year’s winter event for Guild Wars 2 resulting in what some referred to as a mass ban. The announcement drew a lot of flak, partially from people not fully understanding just how many were banned at the end of the day. Turns out, according to Arenanet, that the total ban figure came out to less than two hundred. Bans were reserved only for the worst offenders who used the exploit hundreds if not thousands of times and knew exactly what they were doing. I still believe that calling it a mass ban was a poor choice of words, misleading, and probably paints ArenaNet in a poor light.

If you want to see a real mass ban, watch Jagex run a sweep of bots.

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