How Should You Deal With The Launch Rush?
Posted by Mordiceius at 1:46 pm
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?
Holiday Update 09
Posted by Mordiceius at 4:00 am
Somehow I got in the Darkfall Spotlight on the forums. I do not personally read the forums, but it is not because I am lazy. It is simply because I am afraid (that, and I cannot access them at work).
Being that it is the holidays, I hope you do not expect too many posts from me over the coming weeks. I am going to be working all this week but I will have all of next week off work (though Rynala and I may be driving up to see her folks around New Years). I will be gone for the first week and a half of January to fly north and care my mother while she has surgery.
I have been devoting a majority of my time to Darkfall and World of Warcraft. Since Darkfall is not a system resource hog, I am able to play both simultaneously. This works even better for me since I can set up my character in Darkfall to mine or log and go run an instance or work on auctions in WoW. In WoW, I have had to find unique ways of making money as enchanting and engineering are not huge money makers right now. I am thinking of taking my level 70 warlock out of retirement and making them an alchemist.
As for Darkfall, I have been spending majority of my time in small scale PvP. The Goons have largely moved from Aerngardh to Darkmoore since Aerngardh was not so newbie friendly and apparently the spawns are broken all over the frigid north lands. The journey was absolutely terrifying.
When we moved from Janhalek to Aerngardh, there were about ten of us on a raft making the trip, this time there were only four. A third of the way through the trip, there was a cry of pure horror on vent. Closing fast on us was the kraken. One of the people on the raft tried to push me off as a sacrifice but was instead knocked off the raft himself by the kraken. We could not rescue him so we made haste out of there. Fifteen minutes later we saw the kraken once more on the horizon pursing us. One of the other members of the ship sacrificed his life to save the raft. The raft owner and myself made it to landfall safely, never forgetting the sacrifices our two brave comrades made.
I found the move to Darkmoore very amusing because it is about a ten minute mounted journey north of Mir Bellith, the elf area I started at. I had gone from Mir Bellith down to Janhalek and north to Aerngarde only to end up ten minutes north of the start of my journey. Since I was so close to my origin, I returned to Mir Bellith to work on getting some skill ups (and to look for some PvP).
My favorite targets so far have been people in the NEW clan. NEW is the clan for people new to Darkfall, but has lately received some scorn. When they were originally created, Goon Squad declared war on them as a joke, and made a couple enemies from other clans in doing so. Since then, I have seen many clans declaring war on NEW. In clan chat, people were explaining that there were some players exploiting the clan and using it as a safe haven to avoid PvP so a lot of guilds were getting sick of it.
I have had a lot of good PvP in Mir Bellith. Since I am still quite new to the game it is nice finding people that mostly match my skill. I have lost quite a few times though. Luckily, beside my mount, I have not lost anything of any importance. As for the mount, that situation did not make me happy. I was running away from a guy that was killing my mount with arrows and so I ran into the city to safe corner to try to desummon my mount and then bank it before I died. While dismissing it, some blue player came, jumped on it and rode it off. Since they were blue, I could not attack them due to the guard tower and an alignment hit. There should be penalties to mount thieves. It would nice to see them take an alignment hit or go rogue for a while. If that guy had gone rogue, the guard towers could have taken him out. Other than that, it has been a lot of fun in Mir Bellith.
All of this good MMO gaming has made it hard for me to go play any other games. I have yet to finish Borderlands and I still have a load of games from the Steam sale I need to play including Last Remnant, Overlord 2, WH40K: Dawn of War 1 and 2. Plus, the good games are going to keep coming with Mass Effect 2, Bioshock 2, and Final Fantasy 13 coming out in the next few months. What is a gamer to do!
The Best of Both Worlds
Posted by Mordiceius at 1:02 pm
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).
Settling in Darkfall
Posted by Mordiceius at 2:14 pm
I traveled with the Goons this weekend as we relocated from their previous base of operations in Janhalek to a new location in the frigid northlands. I was still in the elf starting lands when the announcement went up in vent that the move would be taking place later that day. Both the old and new locations were equal distance from me. I could head south to Janhalek and then travel north to the new town. I had heard that traveling north took me through a bit more perilous territory so I ventured south.
The journey was uneventful but took the greater part of two hours on foot. While I saw a lot of wildlife, I saw very few enemy camps while sticking to the coast. Making the swim from the mainland to the island of Janhalek took over a half hour in itself. I could have asked for someone to bring a raft for me but I wanted to try to do it all on my own.
I arrived in Janhalek about fifteen minutes before launch time and had some time to meet and greet with the Goons before about ten of us got on a raft. The raft ride was pretty fun as we all laughed and joked while fishing and watching for the kraken. There was word that a trio of ships was assaulting the city we were heading to and as a raft we were pretty much sitting ducks. We made a wide angle entrance into the city and luckily arrived after the assault was over. Just hearing word of it made me excited.
When we tried to bind to the city, their stone was out of bind slots since their keep was destroyed from the attacking ships so myself and a handful of other people rode north to a hamlet to bind. It was terrifying as we left the city because about a hundred people on mounts were rushing straight at us. Luckily, they were just allies returning to the city.
I took another hour to get acquainted with the area and learn a little more of the game. I found a nice troll spawn about ten minutes away so I worked on my skills a little there.
Yesterday afternoon when I logged in, the owners of the city were about to make an attack on a neighboring city. A group of Goons had offered to join the charge and I decided to go with. My skills are still at abysmal levels but I wanted to see an attack for myself. I rode down from the hamlet to the city just in time for the army to take off. It was about ten Goons and a hundred other people heading out in this charge. We were told on vent that the enemies were some of the most skilled players in the game.
The destination was nearby and it only took about twenty minutes to get there. Unfortunately, our attack was very unorganized. It was more of a "everyone charge this point, okay now everyone head to this point, okay now everyone go to this next point" instead of "group one take this point, group two take this other point, etc". After about ten minutes of fighting, a full retreat was called. I fired of a ton of arrows and did hit someone with one arrow for 13 points of damage. I may not have contributed much, but I contributed!
When we returned back to the city, I went back to that troll camp to work on my archery some more. As I have only been in the game for about a week, I find myself being overly cautious. Especially in this location which is not just new for me, but the entire guild, I am wary to leave the troll spot for farming because I do not know what will annihilate me yet.
The hardest thing for me currently is just deciding on what skills I want to work on. It is weird playing this game after so many theme-park games because in Darkfall, there is just so much I can do that I do not know what I want to start first. I keep getting gamer ADD and working on one skill for five minutes before getting distracted and working on something else. I know eventually my completionism tendencies are going to kick in and I am going to start focusing hard on one or two skills at a time until I max them out.
I am having a lot of fun in Darkfall and I am excited to become more familiar with the area and the mechanics and more comfortable with taking risks.
My Darkfall Beginning or Syncaine is a Bad Person
Posted by Mordiceius at 5:21 pm
I had my first experiences in Darkfall this weekend. Between me being a sucker for deals and Syncaine's propaganda, I could not help but finally pick it up. Aventurine was running a deal this weekend where you could buy the game and six months of play for only $87. My consumerist self could not refuse that.
Usually, I disagree with almost everything Syncaine says. The man is a psychopath (no offense intended). So it almost pains me to say that I am really enjoying the game in a deep primal sense. The game is really not as bad as I was expecting it to be. It is really not that bad at all, to be honest.
The first thing I noticed is that the graphics are not as bad as people say they are. With shadows on, the game looks pretty decent. It isn't going to win any graphical achievement awards but good graphics do not a good game make. I used to joke that the game looked like Morrowind, but the game actually looks quite a bit better than Morrowind.
But on the subject of the Elder Scrolls, that is what the gameplay most reminds me of and that is a very good thing. I love the Elder Scrolls games. They have always had a soft spot on my heart. So when I jumped into this game and it felt like an advanced MMO Elder Scrolls, I almost immediately fell in love with it.
The game has quite the learning curve though. I died twice to goblins before I ever killed my first one. World of Warcraft, this is not. Though there is a newbie questline to help you get a better feel for the game. I am told that this was a recent addition, and in my mind, a very helpful one.
I only played yesterday, so I only was able to get a few hours in but my experience was quite positive. I joined up with Goon Squad and had my first experience in ganking. It did make me rage a little bit, but that was only because I had not found the bank yet and was still carrying all my spoils of war. Luckily, every experience is a learning experience and thus I know better now how I should handle myself. I am really excited for when I get to play some more.
Darkfalling
Posted by Mordiceius at 2:32 pm
God help me, but all the posts from Syncaine and the video of the Kraken destroying a ship are really making me interested in Darkfall. I am still not sure if I will play it as I do not know if I really hate myself that much, but it is starting to look quite tempting.