Star Wars: The Old Republic Archives - Page 13 of 16

Whim Republic

August 14, 2013 by Belghast

Good morning folks. In many ways last night was a far worse night than the previous… but for whatever reason I am feeling awake and rested this morning. I wish to god I understood sleep patterns, and why getting significantly less sleep ends up with me feeling better in the morning. Previously I had been used to 5 to 6 hours of sleep, but here lately consequence has ended up with me getting to bed a little bit earlier. More often than not… getting extra sleep just ends up making me feel horrible as a result.

Harvesting Moonshade

I spent a little bit of time when I first got home helping out a guild member orient herself to Ashora. However after assuring that she got all of the porticulum points… I logged back in Belgaroth and continued down my rabbit hole of leveling as a pure harvester. At the point at which I left off yesterday I had just finished up Freemarch and was entering into Stonefield. Stonefield actually went extremely quickly as I found that all of the rock golems gave extremely fast skill-ups. Additionally there were large fields of the mountain goat like creatures that I could gather up and AOE down.

Once I moved into Moonshade everything slowed down quite a bit again. Firstly I was finally catching up to where the character was at foraging wise… so this meant now having to manage leveling a third skill. I managed to push up rather quickly in harvesting on the various ram like creatures near the Defiant portal. The only problem is they petered out about 200 and the transition point to train the next tier is 225. I found the same essential problem killing boglings and skinning them out in front of the Dwarven Relcaimer camp. At roughly 200 everything slowed down.

Unfortunately the zone did not have any lower level golems or earth elementals… so I had to run around the zone randomly pushing up my mining from picking up Cobalt Lodes. I noticed that the Golems up near Hammerknell all required 170 mining, so that was ultimately my goal. After about 30 minutes of farming Cobalt I managed to push up to that point. The Golems all give skill-ups but they are fairly annoying since after killing each one it spawns three little phantoms. Additionally if you do not harvest the golem immediately it fades often times before you have killed the three phantoms. So it is this delicate juggling act of trying to mine the golem as the phantoms are spawning and before they have really begun attacking you.

This is the point at which I left off for the night. I figure tonight before we pull together the guild night festivities I will try and finish up pushing my trades to 225 so I can learn the next tier and move into the endgame zones. Hopefully I can find a ready source of mobs to mine, forage and butcher as that makes it go so much quicker than having to run around and try and find nodes to harvest. I would rather kill hundreds of mobs at one camp, than try and find 50 nodes spread out throughout a zone.

Whim Republic

Early in the evening one of my friends on mumble had been playing Star Wars the Old Republic and talking about it. After we got finished with our walk I decided to patch it up and pop in for a few to poke my head around. When I was last playing I had been alternating between leveling a Dark Side Sith Sorcerer and a Light Side Sith Juggernaut. I have to say I almost immediately regret my decision to log in when I was confronted with the warning screen letting me know that I was no longer a subscriber and should as a result feel horrible. They gave me a nice chart showing me all the ways I should feel horrible in the various basic features of the game that I would be losing by logging in.

I guess to some extent I had forgotten exactly how miserable an experience it is to try and play SWTOR as a free to play title. There I sat with my no-crew skills, my one hotbar, my inability to use various sundry features like displaying titles, my bank, the auction house. I had a stack of credits that had apparently built up from the last time I subscribed so I decided to start trying to make my character playable by unlocking various things. Essentially each one of these items can be unlocked permanently at an account level, but it would literally cost you multiple hundreds of dollars to get your account back to a state at which it would not feel absolutely horrible to play.

All the while I am going through this… I am marveling in the back of my head just how horrible an experience this is as compared to Rift. When I was trying to do my now dead in the water “How To Rift” series, I created a brand new account for the purpose of seeing what exactly the limitations were. Surprisingly enough logging in and playing on a free to play character pretty much felt exactly like logging in and playing on my main. There are a few limitations, but they are essentially unlocked through the loyalty system the moment you spend any money. You are gimped on the number of bag spaces, but as compared to SWTOR this seems like a truly minor thing.

Lack of Loyalty

I guess what feels so exploitative about SWTOR is the fact that I spent a good deal of money with that game. I bought the collectors edition package at launch, and subscribed for I think a total of 9 months. That is far longer than most players did, I feel as though I should get some of these features grandfathered in. I fully expect to be limited on total character slots, or the ability to play the newest content… but it feels like complete shit to log into my characters and have zero recognition for money spent when they were struggling along trying to make the subscription model work. What they are missing essentially is a loyalty system along the lines of what Rift has put in place.

When I logged into Rift after the free to play conversion… I was literally showered with loyalty rewards and the in game credits currency. I want to say I had roughly 100k credits and was at roughly 3/4 of the way through the purple tier of loyalty. I felt like they cared about me as a longtime subscriber, and they were more than happy to welcome me back and shower me with gifts. Granted I am STILL a subscriber, there has only been about a three month period since the release of the game that I did not subscribe. The experience all feels so much nicer however that they give me rewards I want to build towards, and make me want to spend money on the game because I want to support them.

On the other hand in SWTOR I feel like I am a cow being milked for whatever money they can get out of me. Everything about their system just feels cheap and insidious. Instead of adding new features to the game and pay-walling those… they seemed to have chosen arbitrary basic features to hide away from the unwashed masses of non-subscribers. So essentially without paying that monthly fee you get an extremely broken feeling gameplay experience. I know I have commented multiple times about how horrible their free to play model is, but I guess I forget just how bad it really is… until I experience it again each time.

The above video was compiled by Rift Scene and compares and contrasts the features of SWTOR, TERA and Rift. If you are not really familiar with the differences between the Rift and SWTOR free to play model it is well worth watching. I hope I will remember just how bad it is, the next time I get the urge to patch up the game and log in. There really is nothing there for me there unless I choose to subscribe, and I have no desire to do that since I know the next time I lapse I will be treated the same. The main difference for me is that I feel like EA Bioware really does not deserve any of my money. Trion on the other hand, gives both the outwards appearance that they care about me as a player, and as a result I feel like giving them all the support in the world.

Wrapping Up

Well time to get on the road. Todays post ended up far more ranty than I had intended it to. I am just still shocked at how bad the SWTOR free to play model is when it actually comes to playing it. On paper it looked horrible, but as a non-subscriber attempting to play the game it feels even worse. I hope you have a good day and you find absolutely nothing to rant about. I have a massive list of things I need to get done, so here is hoping I have the “oomph” to do them.

5 Biggest MMO Disappointments

July 13, 2013 by Belghast

This is one of those days I have zero clue what to write about… but as not to break the chain of constant posts I am going to push through and post something anyways. In part this post about nothing has been brought to you today by the letters N, D and A. So instead of a normal post about what I did last night, or what I want to do today… I am going to make a post about my top five biggest MMO disappointments. This is kind of the bookend to my post about my five favorite MMOs, so hopefully I can do this without coming off overly negative about each.

The Disclaimer

Some of my picks for this list will be rather controversial… but they are my picks nonetheless. This list is not about what I consider to be the worst MMOs, or even bad MMOs at all. In fact most of the ones included on this list are games I have played over and over again… and will likely play again in the future. On the converse… these are the games I have been the most disappointed by over the years. This could be due to lack of content, lack of depth, lack of features… or just simply lack of follow through. This is by no means a death sentence for an MMO… it wouldn’t be on the list at all if I didn’t care. For example… I do not care at all for TERA or Aion… but I was not necessarily disappointed in either because I was not expecting to like them in the first place.

5 – World of Warcraft

If you remember… I included World of Warcraft as number five on my five favorite MMOs list… and I think placing it in the number five spot on this list adequately represents the love/hate relationship I have with this game. Without a doubt I have had some of the best times playing WoW, but I have also had some of my biggest disappointments in the path they have chosen to grow it. It feels like an old high school friend… that you were extremely close to… but after years of being apart you grew in two completely different directions. While you want really badly to be happy for it… you can see the potential that was there… and how it has been squandered.

World of Warcraft was a game that I expected not to like in the first place. I remember my very first thought when I heard about it… was where the hell would they get their story. Until Warcraft 3… every Blizzard game had essentially only had enough storyline to keep the game from completely falling on its face. After experiencing the deep and rich world of Norrath… I did not think that Blizzard could pull off anything that engaging. I was wrong… they wove together a world that was deep, rich, and filled with lore. Additionally they incorporated the best features of every game that had come before it… and remixed it in a way that truly represented the absolute best of breed for the time.

However over the years… they have butchered the lore… and instead of continuing to incorporated the best features on the market… have instead created half assed versions of them. I have to keep coming back to the Transmogrification system… because it personifies this concept of the modern Blizzard approach. They took something awesome… alternate appearance systems… and instead turned it into an extremely cludgy money sink. The same thing happened over and over as they tried to incorporate features of popular mods… but the official version was never anywhere near as solid as the original mod that inspired it.

Then on the other side of the coin… the content was just lacking. When new content was introduced… it was too little to late. Like a quick appetizer that never quite turned into a meal. Shortly after the release of Cataclysm… I started a brand new Worgen Druid… and managed to level it without much effort in under 5 days played time. Additionally the raid content just felt more and more uninspired… remixes of previous encounters. So I will admit… at times I am one of those guys… that views the golden area of vanilla through rose colored lenses.

For certain players the new mix of content and the pacing works. I have a ton of friends who are still knee deep in the thrall of this game… and more power to them. I just reached a point where I could not view anything but the disappointment. As a result I am not playing, and trying my best not to complain on a regular basis about the game. But… additionally I do not feel this post would be honest if I did not include WoW in the mix. I feel like it still has so much potential, and maybe if they changed to a content driven DLC style free to play model… they would have the endorsement to build content other than the raid ladder and dailies.

4 – Guild Wars 2

This is another title I did not really expect to like when I first heard about it. I was never a huge fan of Guild Wars 1 despite everyone telling me just how amazing a game it was. I liked some of the concepts presented, like the Magic the Gathering style ability system and the ability to multi-class… but everything else about that game I really despised. If I do not like your games user interface or control scheme… no matter how awesome a game it is underneath I just cannot bring myself to play it… no matter how many times I try. So all of this said I really had written off the concept of Guild Wars 2.

This all changed however when the folks at Arena.NET posted their Design Manifesto. It basically said everything I thought I wanted to hear, and laid out a great vision for a new game. So I was amped when I was able to get access to the testing program. However I was immediately disappointed in the experience I had there, and lack of what honestly felt like a game. I was disillusioned enough that I actually resigned from testing and wished them luck. One of my friends remained in the test a little bit longer than I did… and eventually bailed himself. I hoped they would find some direction and turn the project around.

When it came time for open beta testing… I gave the game another shot. The lowered expectations of expecting to dislike the game… caused me to view it through slightly different eyes. I enjoyed the game enough that I picked it up when it came out. The problem is… there just was not enough meat on the bones to hold my attention for long. There are definitely some aspects of the game that I enjoyed, but the whole experience felt very disposable… more so than any game I had experienced.

Additionally it did not feel like I was progressing my character at all. By the time I reached level five, I had unlocked all 5 abilities for my primary weapon choices and the signets and other related abilities… just did not feel like they had enough weight to them to make them something worth striving towards. The game set out to abolish the holy trinity of tank, healer and dps… but the problem is that it didn’t really replace it with anything in the process. Group content felt like a chaotic mess, and I was extremely disappointed when I did my first dungeon and realized the zerging a boss down from a spawn point was totally a viable tactic.

In the Manifesto they proposed that – Shouldn’t Great MMOs be Great RPGs too? The only problem is the key means for moving the story along in a role playing game is the questing construct… but they sought to abolish that as well. Once again… it is fine that they wanted to change the game… but they didn’t really replace it with anything meaningful in the process. As a result I felt extremely disconnected to the world around me. Things were going on around me… on scripted timers… but I didn’t really care about whether or not we won or lost. I didn’t care about the people and place… and the lack of questing did this.

In the Manifesto they stated that it was time to make MMORPGS more social. The only problem with that is that they introduced so much passive grouping, and took away any need for player roles… that the end result is one of the least social games I have played. When roaming around the world… you may be fighting along side other players, but you do not have to interact with them in any meaningful way. Each player is a self sufficient independent state… and as a result has no real need for anyone other than themselves. The game just feels like it is lacking reasons for players to actually be grouping together.

Let me reiterate, there is a lot to like about the game. It runs amazingly well on low end hardware, and presents a very fluid gaming experience. It has one of the prettiest worlds I have ever explored, and has a lot of things that incentivize exploration. While it is presenting a ton of new content in the form of now bi-monthly updates… the problem is most of it is limited time only. Instead of growing their world… they are creating disposable episodes that only serve to make the game play experience all the more disposable itself.

3 – Star Wars: The Old Republic

I’ve loved Star Wars since before I could even fully verbalize it. My parents tell stories about me seeing the movie when I was one… and then coming home and jabbering endlessly about “Darfa Bater”. So if there was any game that has enough storied lore to hold my attention… it should have been SWTOR. I was a huge fan of Knights of the Old Republic, and as a result I was completely committed to the genre they genre they chose to set the films in. Additionally I love the Bioware style of storytelling, and am a pretty huge Dragon Age and Mass Effect junky.

All of these things should have made SWTOR be the next 8 year game for me. The problem is… the experience while amazing… is overall disposable once you have made your way through the content. So much care and feeding were placed on making sure the quests were just right… and the voice acting was flawless… that it greatly cut into the total amount of content available. The three chapters that were available at launch… felt like an awesome introduction to the game… but the main course never really arrived.

I hear the Makeb release is extremely nice… and the continuation of the storyline extremely successful. The only problem is… that content came a year too late to stave off the players leaving. I feel like had they had more content in the pipeline and ready to release a month after launch, they would have been able to keep the majority of all the players that started playing. We just burned through the content way faster than they had expected. Additionally the fact that there was only one path per faction… and that essentially all the quests were the same minus the handful of class specific ones… alting became extremely tedious.

Additionally when they chose to go free to play… they adopted one of the most blatantly abusive models I have seen. Essentially with free to play, you can choose to take the carrot or the stick… and things like gear locks, pay walling what should be base features, and rolling out a never ending stream of unique lockbox gear just feel too much like being beat with the stick for me. It has however been extremely lucrative for Bioware… and enabled the game to keep its doors open. If it means they continue to release new content… then in the long run it could be good for the game as a whole.

I am still disappointed however at what could have been. Had they been able to launch a continuation of the main storyline each month or so… it would have kept me glued to the game. The original storyline was amazing… and there is no taking that away from the game. The Jedi Knight storyline is probably one of the most epic story arcs I have experienced in any game. It was just over way too soon, leaving me nothing really left that I wanted to do. The problem is… that content was extremely expensive to produce. There was never a way that they ever could have kept up with the demand.

2 – Champions Online

One of my all time favorite pen and paper games is Heroes Unlimited by Palladium games. I had early experiences with D&D and AD&D… but this was the game that really hooked me on the possibilities of role playing games. What made the system so cool is that it had rules to create literally any type of super hero or super villain you could imagine. Of course I created my share of Wolverine or Batman clones… but the game system was this fertile group that through a series of roles I could create some unique characters as well. What made the game so engaging was that the sky was literally the limit in the types of things you could create.

I was a huge fan of City of Heroes, because it gave me some of this same rich character building… but did so in an easy to digest MMO form. That game however had a lot of short comings… and when Champions Online was announced it looked to be addressing all of these base issues and creating this wild open ended super hero creation system. You could mix and match power sets… creating your own custom mix for your character… and this was placed on top of a character generator that was even more robust than City of Heroes. Everything sounded like the perfect super hero game… and I was hooked on it early.

The problem is… the power sets were grossly imbalanced. This is the first game I had ever played where certain power sets were literally unplayable. You could reach a point where you just simply could not progress any further due to the choices you had made. On the other side of the coin… certain power sets were so grossly overpowered that they completely removed any challenge from the content at all. You could steam roll over the top of anything, while your friend that chose one of the broken ones… could not even fight the lowest rank mobs.

The major disappointment is that they did a very poor job of mitigating the different power sets. They would buff one…. but then another power set would become the broken one… making it a constant cycle of your favorite power set potentially becoming the unplayable one. The game had all the potential in the world… and just became grossly mismanaged. Instead of understanding that this constant state of power flux and un-playability was what was driving their players away… they instead decided to streamline the content.

I really do not remember the timing, but I believe this happened around the time of the free to play conversion. Previously there had been a pretty interesting storyline that had multiple paths your characters could take. The end result ended up with everything being a big jumbled mess. The thing that ended up as the nail in the coffin however… is that coming back as a free to play character… I could not play any of my existing characters. Each and every one included some costume bits that were not open to free players. This should be a lesson to anyone… grandfather existing characters… because holding players characters hostage behind a pay wall is never a good call.

1 – Warhammer Online

I had to put this one at number one… because really this game turning out the way it did is one of my biggest gaming regrets. I love Warhammer… have since I was in middle school and painting my very first citadel miniatures. I love the world and the lore… and the sheer brutality of the chaos gods. They took a failing IP and placed it in the hands of MMO veterans… Mythic games… who had brought the world Dark Age of Camelot. It seemed like a no-fail proposal. I thought they knew exactly what players wanted… and could borrow from the success they had with DAoC and all the nuts and bolts that make a game work.

Unfortunately Warhammer Online is really the tale of two games. The one to twenty experience was amazing. The PVE content rich, the new public questing construct extremely fun, and the early battlegrounds extremely inventive and enoyable to play. I still think that the early experience in Warhammer Online ranks among some of my favorite leveling experiences. The problem is that when you hit about 20-25 the bottom fell out… the PVE content ceased to be interesting… and became increasingly more sparse. The game changed from this fun questing experience to this “go grind pvp to level” experience.

I feel like the game as a whole was a clash between these two seperate games… one of which I enjoyed immensely… the PVE experience… and one I really could care less about.. the PVP experience. Had they given me a pure PVE warhammer game… I would probably still be playing it. The game as a whole did so many innovative things, and there were so many mysteries around the world to unlock for your book of deeds. Additionally it shipped with an Addon system that was on par with World of Warcraft, and presented some extremely interesting class and race choices.

If only they had focused on giving equal time to both the PVE and PVP experience. The only problem is… I feel like the makers of this game have come to completely different conclusions about why it failed. Mark Jacobs has gone on to create Camelot Unchained… which serves to be a purely PVP game completely casting aside any PVE aspects. I feel like his take away was that it failed because it just was not PVP enough. In truth not a single friend that was playing left because of lack of PVP. We had a guild of around 40 players… and all of us left when the post 20 forced pvp experience began. Harecore PVP players are a niche within a niche, and I just don’t feel that you can really build any game solely around them as your target audience.

This is probably the game I feel would beneift the most from a free to play conversion. Awhile back I signed up for a new free trial account just to give the game a spin and see if it really is as good as I remembered. Overall the starter experience is still extremely fun, even though they have dumbed down the richness quite a bit by funneling everyone into the empire lands. I feel like a free to play version, might pump a bit more life into the title and allow it to survive. The problem is… this has become the textbook example for MMO failure… and I doubt EA would spend a dime on it going forward. As a result I will always be left with the thoughts of what might have been had the direction been a bit more sound.

Wrapping Up

This post ended up going a lot longer than expected. I’ve been typing for around an hour and a half now, but finally have reached a point where I have said what I needed to say about each of them. Hopefully none of them came off as too terribly ranty. I hope you all have great weekends, I will mostly be trying to relax a bit before Monday. I am already stressing out quite a bit, because I know going back I will be having to fill in for my boss as he is going out of town.

Other MMO Wants

July 3, 2013 by Belghast

This morning is going to be pure hell on wheels for me. Not only is this my last day before our vacation… but also about 10:30 last night I got a nasty surprise when I checked work email. Apparently there is a big impromptu meeting going on today, at which I have to represent the department and speak intelligibly about everything we do. How do you cram a million things into a quick talk that doesn’t bore all the non-technical people. Also as a result I had to scramble around the house to find a pair of slacks that actually fits me. Dropping 8-10 pants sizes in a few months tends to deplete the stock of clothing you don’t wear often.

Basically this morning I need to bang out this post as soon as possible so I can get into work and prepare for the event. As a result I got up and around this morning at 5 am rather than my normal 5:30… here is hoping the time can be spent wisely. I would normally just skip posting on a morning like this… but I am afraid that if I skip a day my routine will unravel and usher in yet another one of my 4-6 month lapses in posting.

Other MMO Wants

On Monday I made my Ten MMO Must Haves post and it kind blew up… as in it seemed to get far more traction than most of my posts do. The only bad thing about it all… is as soon as I posted I thought of a few more items that I should have put on the list. Listing Beards in the final slot was maybe not the most well thought out thing I have ever done… but in reality it is a metaphor. Every player I know has one feature that they look for in the character creator. My friend for example is always hunting for actual blonde hair… instead of the orange mess that most MMOs have. That is one of the most important things to her, and just like me and beards… if it is not there she does not feel as close to the character. Here goes a quick stab at the rest of a list.

1 – Mentoring

This one is huge, and I have no clue why I left it off the list. I did the list as a whole on the fly Monday morning as I thought of things that I really want in every MMO. Essentially those who are not familiar with the term, it is the practice of allowing higher level players to drop down to the same level as lower level characters. The first game I ever experienced in was City of Heroes… and I felt it was absolutely revolutionary. Eventually Everquest 2 added it in, and now Rift and Guild Wars 2 also have similar systems that have improved upon the base concept. Essentially I want a way to be able to play with my friends… no matter how high above them I am. I have a mantra that “anything that keeps you from playing with your friends is bad”.

2 – Single Server / Cross Server Architecture

Back to the mantra of “anything that keeps you from playing with your friends is bad”.. the traditional server structure is way too restricting. If you have a small group of friends that all organize at exactly the same time… and pick one server ahead of time.. it is no big deal. However if you have many different pools of friends, that you feel constantly torn between.. servers are pure hell. This is the case with me… at any given point I have groups of friends playing a dozen or more games and on each roughly a half dozen different servers. I have to unfairly pick and choose between who I play with. Stop making me choose. Let players communicate and group freely with any player who is playing your game.

3 – Single Account ID

This one has been massively controversial, but I have warmed to it over time. If you scroll back far enough, there are even posts of me rallying against RealID, but again I got used to it. The thing I want is the ability to create a single account id, like the later BattleTag system that is not connected to your real world identity. Then let me choose which players to give that ID out to… and in doing so they magically get to see every character I have regardless of where I am playing. Additionally it would be amazing if the system also allowed for friending single character names… for those individuals you need to have communication with… but don’t want to give them everything. It is such a pain in the but to send your friends a long list of a dozen alts for them to add to their friends list each time someone new joins the game.

4 – Multiple Paths of Advancement / Endgame

The answer to the endgame should not always be Raid or PVP. There should be something else… something a player who does not have the time to raid, or does not have the penchant for pvp can do to constantly better their character in game. This could be something like the Alternate Advancement and Planar Advancement systems in Everquest 2 and Rift… or could be a series of epic quests that allow your character to obtain very slowly raid like gear like TSW has implemented. There needs to be a way for players to feel like they are constantly evolving their characters. It is when characters start to feel stagnant that players lose interest with a game and leave. Help me not get bored with your game, by giving me lots of things to do when I hit maximum level. Daily Quests are fine… but they are not a solution to anything.

5 – Alternate Leveling Paths

This is something that has mutated over the years, and I really wish there was a way to undo it. When Everquest launched it had a distinct leveling path for each race in the game. While some of them quickly merged together once you hit the second or third zone… they still started out as unique experiences. When World of Warcraft launched, you had roughly three leveling tracks per race… and this still ended up giving you a fresh way to level your alts. Now in games like Rift and SWTOR… there is a single track for every member of a faction… and as a result by the time you level your alts… you have nothing really to look forward to. Give us multiple ways to get to the end of your game… do not penalize players for wanting to jump around and try new content paths. I realize multiple paths of content takes more development time… but it also improves the quality of your game for players in the long run and makes alting far more sticky.

6 – No Faction Wall

This is a concept that needs die in a huge inferno. This is without a doubt probably the worst seemingly permanent lineage of World of Warcraft. The concept of setting up a red and a blue faction that are diametrically opposed and can in no way communicate is just a shitty way to create a game. Again back to the mantra of… “anything that keeps you from playing with your friends is bad”. If your friend has to sacrifice what he wants to play… for the greater good.. he will always regret at least somewhat the path not taken. Additionally it is very easy for two friends who joined the game at different times to end up on opposite sides of the battle field.

Everquest and Everquest 2 had the best faction systems in the game… in that no only could you communicate with any player freely, but if you so chose to… and with copious amounts of work.. you could raise your faction and be able to function as a member of those societies. Additionally in Everquest 2 they gave the option of betraying your faction through a serious of quests and permanently changing your allegiance. Faction Walls are just a non-creative solution to the problem of setting up PVP. Rift probably did the best decision it ever did when it released the “Faction as Fiction” patch, making it so that both Defiant and Guardian could group, communicate, and guild freely. Additionally they set up 3 new factions that were not connected to either of the original… which recruit players to fight battles for them. This gave you three way pvp without having to make life restricting to your players.

Wrapping Up

This one is going to be extra short today. I’ve spent thirty minutes digging into six more items on the cutting room floor that MMOs should have. I need to finish getting ready and get into work so I can prep for the event. I hope you all have a great day, and maybe this will jiggle loose some other ideas you have about what a “best of breed” MMO needs to have. Tomorrow I am off, so my intent is to try and finish up the second part of the “How To Rift” series.

Bel VS F2P

June 20, 2013 by Belghast

I am breaking the mold yet again tonight and knocking out a topic that I have been kicking around in my head all day. Quite honestly the topic is not my own, it was suggested to me by Syl of MMO Gypsy. There is a really interesting discussion on this weeks Cat Context podcast between Syl and Liore about their feelings regarding free to play games. I started the discussion up on twitter as well, because I tend to align more to Syl’s thought in that free to play is generally a good thing.

The Non-Believer

The funny thing is… I did not always have this opinion. In fact there was a time I was pretty vehemently anti-free-to-play model. I even believe at one point I wrote a blog post about the fact that I did not believe the industry pundits that all games would be switching over to free-to-play in order to survive. I really disliked the thought of a pure free to play game.. and in part this was due to some bad experiences with early games in the genre.

My first real taste of the free to play genre was with the blatant wow clone Runes of Magic. During one of my bored with WoW phases, I ventured out… downloaded it and tried to get into it. The problem is, the game at its core was this fairly horrific grindfest, that could only be sped up by spending “diamonds” on the in game store. It had some other fairly egregious money sinks in that most of the mounts that were available were “rental” only, giving you it for a fixed number of hours at a time. Some of the only permanent mounts came from… you guessed it the cash shop.

Later on I had gotten into the closed beta for a pretty nifty game called Allods. It was essentially a very unique looking russian/steampunky wow like game. I played the heck out of it in beta and really enjoyed it, and was looking forward to launch. Then towards the end of the test period they introduced their take on the cash shop. I don’t remember a ton of details other than the fact that so many things were pay-walled behind real money transactions. One of the mini-games i refuse to play in an MMO… is inventory maintenance… and the only real way to increase your bag space was through dumping cash into the in game store.

Both of these games served to give me an extremely negative impression of what this whole free to play genre was. Combine with the fact that the servers I was playing on seemed to be entirely populated with kids… aka people unable to buy their own subscriptions to games… I thought subscription gaming was the only way to maintain a thriving community. As new free to play conversions entered the market, I would give them a spin, especially if it was a game I had played before. Every time I would walk away disgusted by the horrible community I found there.

What Changed?

When Everquest 2 first launched its forray into free to play, I really paid no attention to it. Essentially it held nothing for me. Gameplay was essentially corralled off to its own dedicated server, so you could not play with your friends currently subscribed to the game. Additionally the various tiers of access felt extremely punitive, locking away functionality behind numerous paid gates. However after a period of time they decided to open up the free to play options on all servers. This is the point at which I started to notice changes in the game.

Firstly the station cash shop is pretty amazing, stocking all manner of things from nice cosmetic armors, mounts, amazing houses, and various buff potions. With my 500 station cash a month stipend from subscribing, I was able to pick up all sorts of things that improved my enjoyment of the game. Additionally I noticed the server populations start increasing, and these players were not necessarily the “unwashed masses” I had seen in my earlier ventures into free to play games. Some of these folks were really solid community folks, that just lacked the ability to commit to a month subscription.

The game was still extremely limiting for free to play players, but at least you got to play on the established servers with existing players. The guild I was a member of saw a massive influx in recruits and at one point we had 20-30 players on some nights during the peak of this influx. Additionally it felt like we were seeing a faster speed at getting cool features out to the players like the dungeon creator, eqemote, and new content areas like sirens grotto and skyshrine. It felt like there was a new kind of free to play player that I had not seen before, one that just wanted to play the game without commitment and had no qualms about spending money at their own pace.

Eventually recently they have completely dropped all race and class restrictions from free to play players, and we have seen another big jump in people in the game. There are still some functionality locked away, but the game is at its most playable state for a subscription free player. The game feels more healthy in every sense of the word since the free to play conversation happened. The cities are bustling, the zones have players available for grouping, and the brokers are completely loaded with goods.

Changing My Opinion

After watching the transformation the free to play model has had on the Everquest 2 community, and seeing the numbers released at just how much better Star Wars the Old Republic has been doing since it made its jump. I started to turn my opinion around on the payment model as a whole. While there are still some pretty egregious practices going on, I think for the most part these games are doing better under the new pricing schemes. I will always prefer the option to subscribe, but having free access to my characters gives me the ability to boot up a game I have not visited in months on a whim and spend a few days without feeling the need to fire up my account officially.

I feel like as the conversions happen, each game gets a little better at the model. So far Rift seems to be the best conversion I have seen, in that they chose the route to give subscribers bonus “premium” perks… like increase in coin, token and mount speed. Additionally they have taken the cash shop model to heard and provided hundreds of cosmetic armor available from day one. Sure there are lots of questions about whether or not they took things too far… but really I don’t believe any game has come even vaguely close to “play to win”. No cash shop has offered something so amazing that better cannot be attained in game through grinding out whatever passes as end game content.

Ultimately at the end of the day the real question is, do you want your favorite virtual landscapes to stay alive and well… or are you willing to see them suffer just to make sure they stay away from a free to play model. I don’t think it is about success or failure anymore… but more about survival. These games cost a significant amount of money to keep up and running and keep staffed. These are old figures, but it was reported that between 2004 and 2008 Blizzard spent 200 million dollars on upkeep of the World of Warcraft servers. Dividing that out it ends up at over 4 million dollars per month in upkeep and maintenance fees.

Granted most of the games that have gone free to play don’t have the number of servers or staff that Blizzard has, however I am sure it is still a fairly staggering amount. If they can get 5 players that are willing to pay 5 to 10 dollars on cash shop items per month, instead of 1 player that pays their 15 dollar subscription fee, they end up well ahead and have more money to invest in the game. The games that have gone to free to play seem to be doing well with the model, and that income gets invested in making new content. When Vanguard made the switch to free to play, the influx of new money allowed them to invest the first month in half a decade in development. As a result the players got the benefit in the first ever holiday event, and major server patch.

The Last Starfighter

Right now realistically there are two subscription model games left: The World of Warcraft and Eve Online. Eve is kind a bubble in itself without any real competition in that space, however World of Warcraft has been losing subscribers on a regular basis of late. After the successes of the Star Wars the Old Republic conversion, and if Rift ends up being as successful as it is looking just by the server activity and players returning with a vengence… I feel that before the end of the year we will at least hear about plans for a free to play conversion for WoW. We know that Titan is a long ways off, and their development cycle has always been prodigiously slow. They lack the hook of new and fresh content to keep players engaged.

I feel like the big announcement at Blizzcon will be a conversion to some form of a free to play model, or at least a tiered payment model. There is a huge part of me that mourns the subscription era, but I think it has been shown that the hybrid model ends up wildly successful. The folks that want those premium features are still willing to pony up for a month subscription, whereas the folks that are not wiling to have the monthly commitment are still going to buy the occasional doodad or account unlock.

For me the real takeaway is that whatever keeps these companies healthy, and keeps developers and support staff in their seats instead of hunting for jobs is going to be better for the players in the long run. Right now it is seeming like the free to play model is doing that. Rift for example has had to roll out a couple of new servers just to handle the influx of players. Personally I have had at least 8 friends start playing the game again, with more waiting in the wings to see just how successful the first volley is. When we are talking about MMOs that are not blizzard… we really are not talking about a lot of profiteering going on there. Ultimately they are fighting for survival, and if the free to play model gives it to them… I feel we are more likely to be able to keep playing the games we want to play.

Wrapping Up

This post ended up far more rambly than I intended it to. I can’t say I am really passionate for or against the free to play model, but at this point I feel like i understand why it is occurring so frequently. I love playing MMO games, it is the one thing I always fall back on. I am in theory embracing free to play, because it seems like the most likely way for these companies to continue getting the money they need… to keep supporting the worlds I care about. Ultimately none of these companies make these games out of the goodness of their hearts. They need our money to make sure they can survive and grow, and at the end of the day… how ever that happens I feel is pretty much fair game so long as it isn’t done in an exploitative manner.