How Should You Deal With The Launch Rush?
The launch month is usually a tumultuous time for new MMOs. In the post-World of Warcraft landscape, there is one undeniable pattern in the first month of new MMOs: probably about 50-75% who play your game for the first month will not be staying past those first thirty days. Whether it is because they are going back to WoW or to whatever other game is not important. The simple fact remains that more people will leave in the first month than stay.
There are a lot of reasons for this. Some may blame the "WoW tourists" and others may blame game breaking bugs while some others may blame hype and the game not living up to the expectations set by it. However, none of that is really important to this topic.
Let us just pretend for a minute that the universal rule for new MMOs is that after the free thirty days, you will lose one-half to three-fourths of your user base. Let us pretend that there are no ways about this rule and no matter how complete and polished your game is, it will always happen. How do you plan for that? There are three methods that come to my mind that recent games have used.
Warhammer Online decided to launch with about fifty servers. With the amount of boxes they sold, the servers were decently populated for the first week or two. Once the people started leaving, servers were shut down en masse. There were multiple server merges and now the game is down to about five servers. All seem fairly decently populated, but it is about one tenth of what they started with. They saw a lot of bad press for the mass server closures, but would have also seen bad press had they only started with five servers.
Aion went the opposite route. The game opened with ten servers. Some servers saw queues of between four and eight hours. After about two weeks, NCSoft opened up a handful of new servers as well. The queues settled down after a couple weeks when the people started leaving, but for the first week or two there was quite a bit of negative press on how NCSoft should have better prepared for the launch. Now, however, all the twelve or so servers they have are sitting at a relative stable population.
Darkfall used a different method when they started their game up. Being that they are not releasing a triple A title, they used unique means of distributing their game. Purchase of the game was only done through their online store and for the first few months, they only allowed a certain amount of copies to be sold a day and only for a small time-frame each day. They received a bit of negative press for this because it seemed like they were not letting people who wanted to play to even buy the game. Also, since it was more of a niche title, the exodus numbers might have been different. In the end, they limited the amount of people able to buy the game per day so that they could better handle the server population from day one.
Are any of these methods superior to each other? Are there any better methods to handle the launch rush and exodus?
To me, it seems like NCSoft did it best with Aion, but even still I wonder how many people were turned away from the game because they heard about the terrible queues.
If you were to go play a new MMO on launch day, what method would you prefer?
The Best of Both Worlds
I am playing two MMORPGs right now. World of Warcraft and Darkfall. It would seem like those games are polar opposites of each other and that they would not go together. Well the do not go together and that is why I like it. I could be playing World of Warcraft and LotRO or World of Warcraft and Aion or World of Warcraft and Warhammer or Darkfall and Fallen Earth but in all of those cases, the games are the similar style (themepark and themepark or sandbox and sandbox).
Now, I have a great themepark game and a great sandbox game. If I want to go socialize, leasurely group with others, kill some random things, see purples fly, or even just sit in town and idle, I can play World of Warcraft. If I want to travel a harsh land fearing for my life and expecting death around every corner, I can play Darkfall. I think it is a logical fallacy to believe someone could only ever want to experience one of these feelings. Variety is the spice of life.
I generally save my larger play sessions for Darkfall now so that I can get more accomplished in that game, but I still will often alternate between the two. The other day, I ran an instance in WoW, then went to Darkfall for a few hours, then went back to WoW to run another two instances to take a break, and finally returned to Darkfall to do more gaming.
Having both of these games satisfies almost all of my MMO urges and lets me better game to my mood. I do not want to fear for my life every time I log onto a game, but sometimes I do. I do not always want to have rewards raining from the sky with zero risk, but sometimes I do. I think that playing both games helps me develop a greater appreciation for the differences in the two.
Both games tried to do something different. World of Warcraft took the Everquest model and opened it up to the masses while Darkfall went back to the MMO sandbox roots like Ultima Online.
All of this just hammers in the point that we do not need more of the same. We need more new ideas. Do you want a good themepark game? Play WoW or LotRO. Do you want a good sandbox? Play Darkfall or Fallen Earth. Now give me something different (here is to hoping Planetside 2 is good).
Aion Vision – Once Bitten, Twice Shy
I have not played Aion since my free month lapsed and to be quite honest, I have not even really thought about playing it either. There is only one end game instance and fort sieges become quite boring after the fiftieth time. The grind is a killer. Out of the people that remained in my guild after the free month, I would venture to guess that 75-90% botted their way from about 35-50. Even then, it took a month of botting to accomplish. What I am hearing from them now is that the level grind cannot even compare to the real grind of the game: the item grind. Most of them are saying that the end-game item grind costs hundreds of millions of kinah and dedication that surpasses the original High Warlord grind in World of Warcraft. No thank you.
But then NCSoft has to try to trick me and I must say that I am falling for their tricks. The released an "Aion Vision" trailer (embedded below) earlier this week and it is quite delicious. Keen and Graev found a translated list of the features within the trailer:
* Swimming added
* New underwater zones, cities, dungeons (and even more zones)
* More Quests (+ Questing revamp)
* New Classes (According to Korean forums and translations)
* New Skills for existing classes
* Revamped Combat (More action oriented)
* Improved graphics and animations (DX10)
* Dynamic weather effects
* Customizable player housing
* Animals you can tame and use as riding mounts (some mounts can carry 2 players)
* Mounted combat
* New weapons (whip & crossbow)
* Revamped Sieges
This is not the Aion I played. This is a whole new game. I wonder how this would be implemented because this appears like a whole new game. Will this get me to resubscribe? Probably. Aion went a long way to try make a Korean MMO successful in the west, but it has a long way left to go before it is accepted by the mainstream. In addition to those changes, it needs to become the standard for MMOs that if you are using a themepark model, you need to be able to quest your way to the level cap. In the post-WoW landscape, I think nothing less will be accepted.
Feeling Compelled
I have not felt compelled to play Aion lately. I actually have not logged into it for over a week. Last week was when the free month ended and I had planned on having the subscription auto update but in the last month I got a new debit card so the subscription auto cancelled. I have not felt compelled to go update my payment info.
Aion is a game I want so desperately to love but at this point it cannot hold my interest when I look forward and only see a mountain of grind. To be quite honest, I do not know if any MMO can really hold my interest right now. My will to grind has quickly been slipping. As of right now, the only active subscription I have is World of Warcraft but I doubt I will ever fully cancel that subscription as I often venture back there for a day or two a month.
Call me a simpleton, but I am growing tired of having to work for my gratification in gaming. When I look at my gaming choices I think "I could go grind along a breadcrumb trail for some gratification or I could go play a non-MMO and get my gratification instantly."
Torchlight completely consumed me for the last week and Dragon Age: Origins is unlocking on Steam today (it actually should be unlocked by the time this is posted). Left 4 Dead 2 is coming out in a couple weeks, Mass Effect 2 is coming out in January, and Bioshock 2 is coming out in February. Singleplayer and multiplayer non-mmo games are making it hard for me to even think of MMOs.
I do not think I am falling out with MMOs completely. For me though, I prefer a deep storyline in the games I play. I do not think storytelling and MMO gameplay have to be mutually exclusive. I know Syncaine prefers the sandbox where the players tell the story. Personally, I think sandbox games are just better for those who have time to get into the politics of the game.
I love the story woven into games like Wizard 101 and Guild Wars. I also, though many will disagree, think World of Warcraft has a very compelling story. Perhaps what I really want is massively multiplayer online single player games. I just want the depth of story in a single player game in the environment of an MMO.
Bioware may be able to deliver on this with The Old Republic (I hope anyway). My main drawback on that is that I was never a huge Star Wars fan. It is not that I do not like Star Wars, I was just never "into it" like other people seemed to be. Well, here is to hoping.
Dealing with Aion’s Bots and Gold Spammers
Today a new patch was deployed to the Aion servers and I cannot say I really agree with the major change in it:
1.5.0.11 Client Update
* All chat channels now have a level 10 restriction, both to join and participate
* Whispering now has a level 10 restriction,
* Players can receive whispers but cannot respond below level 10
* Players cannot send in game mail until level 10
* Players under 10 can still receive in game mail
* Players cannot search for ’who’ in game until level 10
* Players are now limited at the amount of in game mail you can send per hour
* If players exceed this limit, they will not be able to send mail. There is currently no message saying players have exceeded your limit
There was already a level five restriction set in place on channels and whispers, but now it was extended to level ten. I do not quite see how this is going to do anything to curb the gold spam. Now instead of waiting one hour to gold spam, they will have to wait three hours.
Currently, I do not think the gold spam is actually that terrible. It is not nonexistent, but it is nowhere near the "scrolling chat log" we had last week. The real problem currently is the botting situation. I am only level 31 and I have seen numerous bots all over the place. And with talking to some guildies, apparently there are sections in high level zones where you cannot get a single kill on a mob in because the place is so over-farmed by bots.
It makes me wonder: is it really that hard to deal with botters and spammers?
There are only about 12 US servers for the game. If you hired even just six people to monitor these servers every day, you could eliminate all these problems. Just have a GM sitting in chats and as soon as someone gold spams, immediately IP ban them. Have a GM teleport to any reported botters and observe them and immediately IP ban them. If I was a GM, I could easily get rid of 100+ bots an hour.
Instead, we see the same bots there day after day. If there was one person hired to monitor each server or even one person for every two servers, you could destroy the botting population in no time. Why has this not been done? Is it really that hard to deal with botters?
MMOs I Have Played – Pass It On
Taken from Trembling Hand, I thought this would be an interesting retrospective on my gaming.
How many MMOs have you played? How long did you spend in each one? Which did you enjoy the most?
They're the questions I asked myself the other day, and it resulted in the interesting list below (remind me: why do I still play MMOs, when I haven't enjoyed any of the recent crop?). I figured I'd also throw it open to the MMO blogging community and ask what MMOs have you played?
MMO -- months played -- star rating out of five*
- A Tale In The Desert -- 1 -- ***
- Aion -- 3 -- *****
- Cabal Online -- .25 -- *
- Chronicles of Spellborn -- .5 -- *
- City of Heroes -- 6 -- ***
- Dungeons and Dragons Online -- 1 -- **
- Earth and Beyond -- 5 -- ***
- Free Realms -- .5 -- *
- Guild Wars -- 6 -- ****
- Kingdom of Loathing -- 4 -- ****
- Lord of the Rings Online -- 6 -- ****
- Maple Story -- 3 -- ****
- Megami Tensai Online: IMAGINE -- .5 -- **
- Planetside -- 2 -- ***
- Pirates of the Burning Sea -- .5 -- **
- RF Online -- .5 -- *
- Rose Online -- 1 -- **
- Runes of Magic -- 1 -- **
- Tabula Rasa -- .5 -- *
- Warhammer Online -- .5 -- **
- Wizard101 -- 3 -- *****
- World of Warcraft -- 60 -- *****
*Star rating is an entirely subjective measure of how much you liked it at the time, not how much you'd enjoy playing it today.
Taking It Slow
I have really been taking it slow with video games lately and I have really been enjoying it. I am not playing video games less, but instead I am just taking my time to smell the roses. It is refreshing to not be moving at a breakneck speed in a game.
A lot of people were complaining that Brutal Legend was only about 6 hours long, and it is if you speed through the story on the easiest difficulty and never do any of the side missions or exploring. If you take the game at a bit of a slower pace and just explore you can easily put over 15 hours into it. I am about 70% done with the game and I have put in over 12 hours myself. What is the satisfaction people get in speeding to the end?
It is the same way in Aion. People try to race to the level cap and then complain when they burn out. I can understand it a little more in Aion since the faster you level, the more you have an advantage against those that are not leveling so fast, but maybe I am just losing my competitive edge. I just do not care how I stack against the other players. I am there to enjoy the game for myself at a slower speed and that is just what I am doing.
As for now, Rynala and I are currently level 31 in Aion. We probably will not hit level 50 for at least another two months. We have been working on crafting a lot. My cooking is at 399 and my armorsmithing is at 399. Her weaponsmithing is at 399 and her handicrafting is at 199. On another note, spam is virtually non-existent now in the game. Spam messages come few and far between. It seems like NCSoft is cleaning up the place quickly.
Whistling While You Work (or Craft)
Crafting! Crafting! Crafting! That is how I spent my weekend. Rynala was out of town visiting her sister so I spent my time crafting in Aion. In the end, I still got over half of a level of experience from it.
Now raising your crafting is not hard. It just takes time and money. A LOT of time and a LOT of money. Now when I say that it takes a lot of money, that is relatively speaking. You can take any or all of your crafting skills to 399 without specialization. With specialization you can go to 450, but you can only specialize in two of the six professions. Getting your skill to 399 will let you craft items all the way to level 50. The items craft-able from 400-450 are your high end-game level items. It is incredibly expensive to gain a specialization so it is not something to be expected until your late 30s or early 40s.
This weekend, I took my Armorsmithing skill from 150 to 299 and my cooking skill from 20 to 230. This cost over a million kinah. I am estimating it will cost roughly another three million kinah to take each of those skills to 399.
In the grand scheme of things, four million kinah is not a lot of money. It is a lot of money for a level 28 character like myself, but 1000 gold is a lot of money for a level 30 character in WoW. The difference between raising your crafting in Aion and raising your crafting WoW is that you can raise your crafting in Aion without having to rely on the market or gathering skills.
In WoW, you have to either get a gathering profession to gather the materials or buy them off the auction house to get your skill-ups. In Aion, you can either craft items using gathered materials or you can do work orders. If at level 80 in WoW, you wanted to learn a new profession from 1 to 450 it would be obscenely expensive for even a level 80 character. It would cost thousands of gold. Millions of Kinah may sound like a lot, but it is really not in Aion.
Work orders are seemingly the most efficient way to level up your crafting. I have been over work orders before, but starting from your first skill point you can pick up the work orders, craft what they ask for and get rewarded. They provide the main materials for the crafted item, then you just need to buy the smaller reagents from the material goods vendor nearby. The amount of reagents and reagent prices get higher as you progress deeper into the skill, but still it is much more efficient than trying to craft hundreds and thousands of items. Each work order you turn in rewards you with a small amount of reagents or one of the unique recipes for the skill. Most of the times, the recipe rewards are high quality recipes that you cannot buy from the vendor, allowing you to craft really nice items. You also often start collecting multiple of the recipes from doing so many work orders most of the recipes can fetch a fine price on the auction house.
The only downside to crafting is that it takes time. Lots of time. I spent an obscene amount of time on crafting this weekend and I am nowhere near maxxed on those two professions. I was a bit behind on the podcasts I listened to and I was able to catch fully up. I listened to three episodes of the Bugle, four Gamers with Jobs Conference Calls, three episodes of Shut Up, We're Talking, as well as watch a handful of Netflix movies.
Raising crafting is a great thing for if you have two monitors, a TV for a book in the room. I know a lot of people cannot take the tedium, but for some reason I am very addicted to it. My favorite part is the experience gains. They are not as much as going out and farming monsters, but it is still a decent flow.
Early October Update
I have been quite busy as of lately and as such, my blog has unfortunately been collecting a little dust. Class and work have been busy, I have been playing some Aion, and as of last week I totaled my car and am in the process of buying a new one.
Rynala and I are currently level 26 in Aion. We have been playing quite a bit. I have really been enjoying the game, but at this point I think she is even more in love with the game than I am. We are leveling at what I consider a decent pace. It is nowhere near as fast as WoW but it is not mind numbingly slow (though I know some others would disagree). A lot of the people in the guild are in their 30s now, but I do not feel far behind as there are multitudes of people at every level. Nothing beats being around at the start of a new game. Sure, there may be server crashes within the start of a new game and occasionally some bugs, but the feeling of being on that frontier is awesome.
Crafting in this game is completely addicting and yet can be so utterly infuriating. I do not know why I love it so much when the crafting system is not really unique in any way. I am currently up to 205 armorsmithing and that is the only crafting skill I really have been working on. Even now, I am constantly broke from crafting so there is no way I could be working on maximizing two professions at this time.
One of the nice things about crafting (with armorsmithing at least) is 99% of the gear is actually useful and worth making. There are occasional random recipes that take materials from specific mobs, but the majority of the standard recipes are great for actual use. Every five levels, you can make two new sets of plate and chain. One set is the white set that can crit and make a green (high quality) set. The other set is a green quality set (with stats slightly higher than the crit-green set), that can crit and make a blue set (VERY high quality). It is unlikely you will be able to afford constantly making yourself a crit-blue set every five levels, but there is no reason you should not be able to make yourself a full crit-green set. The materials for the crit-blue set are really out of the question. But, there is an upside to this. Once you reach the level cap and have excess money, you should be able to afford making full blue sets for your alts every five levels. This will help to improve their leveling by a decent bit.
Rynala and I had our first foray into the Abyss this weekend. We only looks around and did a couple simple quests. Not much to do in there at level 25 as you cannot really contribute much to keep sieges. Either way, I remain excited to get higher in level. I hope to hit around level 30 by the end of this weekend. I am in no major rush to get to level cap, but I am anxious and excited for it.
Server Restrictions and the Sense of Community
With just over one week since Aion's launch, Rynala and I hit level 23 last night. The server queues have not been a problem. We are usually able to get into the game before the queues hit. Disconnects are very infrequent. The server has went down a couple times this week but it was the first week so I guess that is to be expected. (How sad is it we just take these things as expected for MMOs?)
I have been seeing Aion getting a lot of flak from bloggers about the server queues but as I said before, I would much rather have queues for the first month than empty servers/server closures for the rest of the life cycle. Everyone knows the population will dip-be it a little or a lot-after the first month.
Tobold seems to think that we need to do away with the traditional server model of selecting a server and then putting characters on that one server. I would have to say I disagree to a point. I know games like Wizard101 and FreeRealms do not have your characters hardlocked to a server but I think the hardlocking gives a sense of community.
With your characters being locked to a server, you grow to know the other people on that server. You know who to trust, who to hunt, who to sell to and who to buy from. You know who the good guilds and who the trash guilds are. You can make a name for yourself on the server. Even with thousands of people on a server, you will still commonly run into the same people. If you break that down, now if you want to hunt a guild for PvP you will have no luck because this guild could be hiding on one of many different servers. Perhaps you want to go capture a fortress in a certain area... well if one side is defending too well one server, you could just switch to a different one and beat those people into submission. It would be a fundimental breakdown of any community building aspects of the game.
It reminds me of when cross server battlegrounds were implemented into World of Warcraft. I remember getting in the queue for a battleground and often facing some of the same people. Yes, it could get repetitive, but it also made you care more about it. Now, when you go into a cross server battleground, you are lucking to see one other random person from your server. That sense of "PvP community" is gone.
I like having a strong server community. Breaking down server boundaries diminishes that community. For a casual player not involved in server politics, I could see it not being that big of deal but for everyone else, it is somewhat nice to build up that e-reputation.