Hardcore Players CAN Destroy a MMO – If The Devs Let Them

A couple of days ago Spinks asked the question can hardcore players destroy a MMO – I guess I’ve kind of given away my own view on the subject with the title of the post.

The two things about hardcore players are that they’re rare, and they’re vocal. It’s easy to overestimate what percentage of the player base are hardcore because these are the guys invested enough in the game to write blogs, run fan sites and beat their chests on the forums. They’re also the guys doing newsworthy stuff – nobody wants to hear about the guild that finally got around to running Gnomeregan two years after WoW launched, and the most riveting EVE stories aren’t about a guy who logged on, mined ore in a 1.0 sec system for a couple of hours and then went to bed. But the vast majority of players don’t raid and don’t go into null sec space, and may never even meet a “hardcore” player. They’re having fun doing their own stuff, which is (or should be) separate from the concerns of the godlike min-maxed guys who are fully kitted out with the latest, hard-to-obtain, top-of-the-line gear or starships. Having said that, there are four ways I can see that the hardcore can impinge on the experience of the lesser mortals:

The main one Spinks talks about is dominance - that the hardcore guys get such a lock on the game that there’s no room for anyone not at their level. It can be territorial dominance in a PvP game, or they could take over the auction house and drive any and all competitors bankrupt. That requires that there are enough hardcore players to be able to lock the game down – remember, there aren’t actually that many of these guys. If the game worlds is big enough, then the hardcore guys have to leave some land for others or they’ll end up too thinly stretched to defend anything (quote of the day: He who defends everything, defends nothing) Likewise, in a complex enough economy there are too many profitable niches for the hardcore to be able to control all of them. The hardcore will lock down the most profitable ones (and then compete with each other to make those less profitable) but there will be opportunities for some profit left for a more casual player willing to make a little effort to find them.

Secondly, they can mess up the game by strip mining content - that can mean camping a top farming spot 24×7 and not letting others get a look in. It can also mean by turning dungeon runs into speed runs where everyone is expected to be fully optimised, geared up and know the dungeon backwards, and guys who are actually there to get upgrades from drops or see the dungeon for the first time are not welcome. A decently designed game would not encourage this behaviour, because there should be other content for the hardcore with challenges and rewards that are more at their level. Unfortunately, not all MMOs are decently designed…

Then there’s the risk of elitism poisoning the community - where newer or more casual players are told to meet hardcore standards or GTFO. Probably worth making the point here that “hardcore” and “elitist” are not automatically the same thing. Some of the most dedicated players I’ve met have been nice guys, and some of the most elitist jerks I’ve met have been wannabes who would never be up to the standards of, well, Elitist Jerks. To some extent this is out of the hands of the devs, although effective forum moderation helps keep it in check and ‘normal’ content shouldn’t be built in such a way that elitist attitudes are actually justified.

Finally, the worst risk is that of dev pandering to the hardcore – where the lion’s share of development effort goes on content that is intended exclusively for a tiny minority of players, or where systems put their rewards out of reach of most players (new shoulderpads? Only 500 hours of rep grind with the new Too Tuff 4 U faction!). Basically, this is like the previous point except that it’s the developers rather than the payers who are saying, or implying, that the casuals should be more hardcore or GTFO. And the risk of doing that is that the NEXT thing they’ll be saying is “Dude, where’s our player base?”

Charr Stealth

The alt I’m currently playing most in Guild Wars 2 is Tullius Tremayne, a charr thief. Yup, my “stealth class” character is a seven foot tall, five hundred pound tiger-beastman-thingy in a trenchcoat. His primary weapon of choice is a brace of pistols that he uses to lay down continuous rapid fire, and my usual elite skill is the Charrzooka which temporarily gives me the use of a rocket launcher.

One of my guildies on a recent dungeon run pointed out that the charrzooka isn’t the most thief-like weapon possible. I told him “Tullius has charr stealth. Once they’ve been deafened by the explosions, the survivors will never hear him coming.”

The Foundations of Camelot

So, in my last post I mentioned that Mark Jacobs and City State Entertainment are working on the “not DAoC honest so please keep EA’s lawyers at bay” Camelot Unchained. Since then, Mr Jacobs has been busily posting his ‘foundational principles’ which are probably what a business school graduate would call a ‘vision’ or ‘mission statement’ except they’ve got a lower level of buzzwordy bullshit than most of the MBA-generated mission statements I’ve had the misfortune to encounter. Which doesn’t mean I buy into them one hundred percent, but at least they don’t talk about strategically leveraging the synergy of exploiting neglected player dynamics in new and innovative ways…

Anyway, as the descriptions of these principles, are long, detailed, enthusiastic and occasionally almost incoherent, I am offering a Tremayne’s-eye view and summary of each of them here. If you like it, you can thank me later. If you don’t like how I’ve summarised them, take it up in the comments section (which I get to moderate ) If you don’t like the principles themselves, go have a pop at Mark Jacobs on his own blog if he ever gets around to updating it. I’m reliably informed that Mr Jacobs is big enough and ugly enough to stand up for himself

Foundational Principle #1 – Be willing to take risks, even if fortune doesn’t always favor the bold. In summary – they’re going for a niche and not including features just because it will increase player numbers if it doesn’t fit. The aim is to make a game that is the best fit for the style of game they’re making, and if that means it lacks appeal to players who like other sorts of game then so be it. The Tremayne view – I like niche games as long as they recognise that they’re niche games, budget accordingly, and actually find a big enough niche to pay for that budget while still being a small enough niche to be well-defined.

Foundational Principle #2 – RvR isn’t the end game, it’s the only game! In summary – there’s no PvE apart from a few very limited areas such as newbie training zones. It’s RvR or GTFO… apart from crafting and housing, both of which will be RvR-related in some manner. Tremayne view – it’s a niche game and it’s going to stick to its niche. Seems fair enough to me, and I’ve met enough players who are happy to live in RvR zones (or the GW2 WvW equivalent) that it looks like it could be a viable niche.

Foundational Principle #3 – You should always hold the hands of your little children while crossing busy intersections but… In summary – old school game that will dispense with a lot of modern conveniences that arguably have over-simplified games in an attempt to please the ADHD kiddies. Also known as the “damn kids get off my lawn!” school of game design, examples of things that will NOT be featuring in a Camelot near you are ‘follow the big glowy arrow’ quest helpers, overly informative in-game maps (go learn the terrain the hard way!), auction houses and free and easy respecs. Tremayne view – I’m all for designing a game to be challenging. I’m less keen on throwing babies out with the bath water, so while I like the principle in principle, care needs to be taken that some of the good ideas of the last ten years of gaming don’t get junked just because they were thought of after DAoC went live. I’m particularly ambivalent about not having an auction house per se. Yes, restricting the sale of crafted items to player shops adds immersion and might help build community, but it also makes it harder for a realm warrior to quickly tool up and hit the battlefield. Although I suppose it does create a niche for an enterprising middleman to set up a one-stop-shop weapons and armour supermarket for the slayer on the go…

Foundational Principle #4 – Choice Matters! In summary – lots of options for customisation, and consequences rather than flat-out prohibition as a way of restricting players. So unlike many other games your mage CAN wear a suit of plate armour, but it’s heavy (and you don’t have the strength to cope with it that a warrior who works out every day has) and encasing yourself in metal and then flinging lightning bolts around might not be the smartest idea ever. Tremayne view – this is another one I like in theory, but it’s devilishly difficult to get right without making some choices much more effective than others, in which case they stop being real choices and just become a “gotcha!” trap for unwary players. That goes double when allied with “limited respecs” as it can leave a player feeling stuck with a crappy build and wanting to quit. There’s a good reason that games have been moving towards making all player character creation choices cosmetic, and it’s because balance is hard. Kudos to City State Entertainment if they can make real choices that are balanced enough to feel like choices – and no matter how good a job they do, players will still zero in on a few builds that their theorycrafting ‘proves’ are slightly more efficient and that anyone who doesn’t choose them is a gimp.

Foundational Principle #5 – I Still Hate Gold Sellers In summary – ’nuff said, really. Tremayne view – me too. However, any game is going to have people who want to “buy win” and others will turn up willing to take their money, and who really don’t care if they shit all over the game to make that money. That being said, a niche game is less likely to be worth a gold-seller’s time, especially if the easiest ways of making gold such as farming PvE mobs aren’t available. Expect to see some attempts by the RMTers to monetise this game though, such as creating ‘easy kill’ bots that can be farmed for RvR kills and hired out to their customers, or straight power-levelling services.

Return To Camelot

So, Mark Jacobs has announced that after putting out a decent enough iPad tower defence-ish game, March on Oz, his next project is going to be a return to MMOs with Camelot Unchained

Mark tells us that this game is not exactly a spiritual successor to Dark Age of Camelot.

Apart, of course, from being a three way RvR-centred game with Arthurians vs celts vs vikings. No DAoC heritage there at all.

But seriously, apart from the snark there’s another way it resembles DAoC that has me more interested. The original DAoC was made on what was a tight budget even for its time – under $5 million, I believe. The aim for this game is to produce it on a budget of $10 million. That’s a twentieth of what SWTOR is said to have cost, and a fifth of the figures I’ve seen bruited about for Rift, which is generally regarded as the modern MMO paragon of tight project management. The man actually has what looks like a plausible plan to achieve this – by making the game almost purely RvR (with a side of crafting as the main source of gear) and having very little PvE content, he’s de-scoped a lot of the work needed for a more traditional MMO. That’s a shed-load of zones that don’t need to be built, an ass-ton of monsters that don’t need models and animation doing, and a hell of a lot of quests and dungeons that don’t need to be hand-crafted and then tested, tweaked and balanced for every possible party composition. It’s the most realistic plan I’ve seen for making a decent MMO for a smaller budget, and meets the fundamental project management principle of getting the budget down by keeping a firm rein on the scope.

If the future of MMOs isn’t going to be monster blockbusters with millions of players (and the history of everything except WoW suggests that it isn’t) then it has to be niche games built on a budget that the niche can afford. If it works, Camelot Unchained will be a perfect example of that. If it doesn’t, then maybe MMOs don’t have any great future at all because I honestly can’t see a plan C.

Massively has an interview with Mark Jacobs that makes for an interesting read. I’ll be watching this one.

Dear Son, You’re Gonna Get Ganked, Love, Dad

To file under “treating MMO addiction”, “controlling parents” or “those wacky Chinese” comes this report of a father paying players to gank his son’s character in one or more unspecified online games.

I’m not sure how effective an intervention that is – for players who love PvP, having some extra action sent your way seems more like a reward than a punishment, and even if Feng Junior was losing the fights then it might only encourage him to play for even longer to recoup any losses incurred (if the games in question have item loss or costs from being ganked). As a way of motivating someone to get off their backside and go looking for a job, though, it’s certainly a novel approach.

What really caught my eye in the BBC report was a quote from “World of Warcraft expert Olivia Grace”. This intrigued me – I hadn’t realised there was such a career available. It turns out to mean blogger on WoW Insider which probably isn’t worth me giving up the day job for.

The Facepalm Files: Presented Without Comment

No, really, there’s no comment I could possibly add.

The Subscription Is Not The Problem. Your Game Is The Problem.

This isn’t just aimed at The Secret World, which we’ve just been told is moving to a Buy To Pay model. And it’s not especially aimed at SWTOR, which is now settling into one of the most ham-fisted conversions to a Free To Play model in the history of F2P conversions. It’s aimed at all MMOs – past, present and future. Because a lot of bloggers and more than a few developers seem to have got so caught up in debating the relative merits of subs, F2P, B2P and every other model under the sun that they’re missing the important point – it doesn’t matter exactly how you get players to pay for playing your game, what matters is that you get players to play it and then you get those players to pay for it.

From a business perspective, having no players is the same thing as having a lot of players who aren’t paying anything. A game that is F2P depends on having players who are engaged enough with the game to want to spend some money on it. The thing is though, if you’re engaged enough with a game to spend money in the cash shop then you’re probably engaged enough that you would subscribe to the game if that was the only way to play. F2P acts as a free trial on steroids that brings in more players – but the ones who aren’t willing to spend money may as well never have been attracted in the first place. They’re using up bandwidth and bitching on the forums about how the stuff they aren’t paying for is “pay to win” and giving nothing back to the developers. A game that depends on those guys is like all the dot com companies ten years ago who went round gathering up starry-eyed investors and when asked what their business model was, always said “advertising”. Well, that worked for Google… but just about every other dot com bust survivor was selling something a bit more concrete. Likewise, any game that depends solely on attracting players is doomed unless they convert into PAYING players. If the game’s good enough then people will pay – and they’ll pay whatever your pricing model is unless the cost is exorbitant. Very few people can’t afford a $15 per month game subscription for their main form of entertainment. They won’t pay that for a mediocre game that they only dip into for an hour here or there – but they won’t drop anything in the cash shop for a mediocre game either.

That, I think, is where both TSW and SWTOR have gone wrong. TSW just didn’t stack up against the competition for a lot of players, and it still doesn’t. SWTOR ignored its strengths (story) and instead tried to compete with WoW on WoW’s strengths (raiding, battlegrounds, repeatable instances) and found that if players are going to pay $15 for raids and grinding dailies then they’ll pay that for the more polished set of raids and dailies thank you very much. It’s not that people couldn’t afford the sub for TSW but they’ll pay a box price up front and then buy some more content down the line, and it’s not that people thought that SWTOR was worse than WoW but they’ll now put up with second-rate raids in order to save a few dollars. In both cases, players found other things they’d rather do with their gaming time. My leisure time is too precious to spend it doing stuff I don’t enjoy just because it’s cheaper than doing stuff I do enjoy, and I don’t think I’m alone in that.

NotNaNoWriMo

Once again, November is National Novel Writing Month, where the challenge is to start a novel from scratch and attempt churn out 50,000 words by the end of the month.

I’m not doing that.

I did try last year, and while I didn’t make the official target I did break the 40,000 word mark and completed twelve chapters of a fantasy novel by dint of using a week’s annual leave and cancelling my social life for a month. In the ensuing eleven months, I’ve completed exactly one more chapter.

This year I’ve got too much going on at work to even try repeating last year’s feat, so I’ve set myself an alternative target. The aim is to produce 15,000 words, that’s 500 per day, and plough on towards finishing a first draft of By Light And Shadow (the aforementioned fantasy novel). Hopefully, I can find a way of working that lets me produce a steady amount of writing without having to give up my job, my family or all of my gaming time. If I can keep up that level of steady output I can produce first drafts in well under a year, as opposed to my current rate of taking all of eternity. And if I can finish a draft, I can think about polishing and maybe even trying to sell some stories.

Wish me luck. I’m going to need it.

Did SWTOR Launch Too Early?

I don’t mean in terms of needing a few more weeks or months of polishing and bug-fixing time, although that never hurts… I’m thinking more about what would have happened if the sequence of MMO launches had been changed and The Old Republic went live in DEcember 2012 instead of December 2011 (apart from producers getting fired for the massive cost over-run a 12 month delay would have incurred, of course).

SWTOR’s biggest selling point apart from the Star Wars IP is the character class story. However, this was something new and strange for some players, and it was clear that there were plenty who saw the story as something to click through and get on with levelling to the endgame… only to find the endgame somewhat disappointing. In the last year, though, we’ve had both The Secret World and Guild Wars 2 doing similar story elements, but not as well. SWTOR coming after them would have been seen as perfecting and polishing the story, rather than pioneering it, and might have earned more appreciation from the comparison.

I also think that SWTOR would have benefited from some other lessons from those two games, particularly with more action-oriented combat, which would fit the lightsaber-wielding classes especially well. However, the “WoW with lightsabers” basic design would have been too well embedded by that stage to rip everything out and re-do. SWTOR 2, however, would do well to consider being closer to “Guild Wars 2 with lightsabers” assuming we don’t get something even closer to the proper Star Wars ‘feel’ to copy from in the interim. On that subject, it’ll be interesting to see what the House of Mouse do as the new masters of LucasArts…

SkyWorld

Not a new MMO (although I’d be very interested in looking at one with a name like that), but the third ‘proper’ publicly-released album by Two Steps From Hell which was released a few days ago.

Regular readers of this blog (both of them) might recall that I enthused about Two Steps From Hell a little while ago and after listening to the new album, I’d be very inclined to add the title track to that Asura racial playlist. Plenty of other tracks there to add to other playlists too – while they aren’t all instant candidates for one of my gaming playlists, having listened to all twenty two tracks I don’t think there’s a bad one in the bunch.