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).
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.
Back in the Saddle
So my month long classes are over and I am back to the normal work schedule. Hopefully I can get back to blogging regularly. After not blogging for over a month, it is going to take some getting used to again.
My last month has been filled mostly with work but I did get the chance to game a little bit. Almost all of that was done with Rynala and split between Aion, Guild Wars, and Wizard 101, with Wizard 101 taking over most of our gaming time of the past two weeks.
In Guild Wars, we finished up Nightfall last month and started in on Eye of the North. I cannot say I much care for Eye of the North compared to Nightfall. Nightfall seemed to be the highpoint in the storyline. But then again, I guess it is sort of hard to top the story of killing a god. It does not help that Eye of the North has a bunch of reputations to grind (UGH!) and is not as long as the other campaigns. We only have the last mission and the final boss left and we are not even that motivated to finish. I think it just disappointed me that the last major storyline in Guild Wars was not that exciting. At least it was still better than the terrible story that was Factions.
Aion has been an absolute blast. We initially went and leveled Elyos and Asmodian characters to level 10 on the NA open beta and then went and played on the Chinese servers since the US beta servers are only up every other weekend. We leveled another set of Elyos characters to 10 and then switched to Asmodian and played them to level 15 or so. At this point we stopped because we did not want to burn out on the game before the NA launch in late September. We probably will not touch it before then.
Aion does have me quite excited. A lot of people just shrug it off as a "WoW-like" but I think that is one of the beauties of the game. It feels a bit like WoW while still having new and foreign elements. Something old and something new. Makes it a lot easier to transition. Either way, I think it is a solid game and I hope it does well after launch. I do not want to speak too soon, but I almost think that it might beat WAR is subscription numbers. One of the big disadvantages WAR had (other than imbalances and broken endgame) was it launched two weeks before Wrath of the Lich King. I do not care how good your game is, it is hard to compete with the 800 pound gorilla. Aion will be launching two months after WoW's patch 3.2. By this time anyone who came back for 3.2 will be getting bored with the content and it will still be at least another three to four months until patch 3.3. It will be a perfect time to draw people away from WoW.
Wizard 101 surprised me. I had played earlier this year and got a character to level 8 before quitting. The lack of community tools, guilds, uncensored chat, or friends in the game pushed me to leave. Reflecting over my MMO time over the last few years showed me that as of recently I have become more and more of a social gamer and so it makes it hard for me to get into games like Wizard 101 if playing solo. To combat this, I talked Rynala into trying the game out with me. She might not like every MMO I try, but she is usually always open to at least trying them. Just like Guild Wars, I figured Wizard 101 would be a lot more fun playing it as a team the whole way through.
I created Seth Lifeweaver, the life wizard and she created Victoria Duskrider, the death wizard. For the first couple hours, she was skeptical and thought she might play it for a week or two but it had little to no long term potential. As we progressed further into the story of the game and deeper into the gameplay, she really started enjoying it. As of last night we both hit level 15 and are about ready to head into Krokotopia, the second world in game. Personally, I was surprised when I found out how fleshed out the story and world actually are. I may be a very social gamer, but I also need at least someone decent stories in my game. This is a reason Wizard 101 works for me and Free Realms does not. Wizard 101 is a realized world with an ongoing story. Free Realms is just a collection of minigames thrown into a hub world.
Anyway, it is great to be back to blogging. I just have so much catching up to do in my blog reading for the last month. >.<
Storytelling and Hero Building in MMOs
Many people have talked on this subject before and I may just be beating a dead horse, but I have been thinking a lot lately about how stories are told in MMOs.
There are many different ways to split up the types of storytelling that happens in MMOS. The main ways are: who is the one telling the story (developer or player), the impact the story has on the world, and if it is a single event or part of a larger picture.
Games like Darkfall and EVE do not have a developer story. The story of the world(s) and the players of the game is shaped by the actions of the players. These games are often dominated by large guilds and many of the stories that come from the game are about political shifts, guild drama, and other player created events. An example of this is the recent destruction of BoB by betrayal.
The other stories that come out of games like this are just small isolated events such as you and your friend riding heroically into battle against a group many times your size and taken them down in a white knuckle match. While fun to reminisce about, "Hey remember that time...", very rarely do these small events have any lasting impact on the game world.
On the other hand, games like WoW, WAR, Guild Wars, LotRO, CoX, and others mainly have a focus on developer-told storylines. World of Warcraft has overall stories that go on through the quests of each zone, but there has never really been an overall storyline to the game. Lord of the Rings Online has the epic storyline quests that you follow. You know that history books will not tell of your actions but you do some heroics of your own.
The most guided storytelling in MMOs I think is Guild Wars. Each "expansion" is its own campaign with a distinct storyline. Each mission has cutscenes that your characters take part in and interact with other main storyline characters. While the developers wrote the story out and are railroading you, it does feel like you are part of the story.
Thinking of storytelling makes me think back to my days playing MUDs. The memories of significant events that happened in MUDs far surpasses any of my fond memories of MMOs. But on the flip side, these games would have a maximum of 15 to 100 people playing at any given time. Everyone knew everyone. The imms (immortals, or GMs as they are called nowadays) were often players too and would handcraft neat coded events.
I remember playing Achaea, Dream of Divine Lands and all the imms in that game played the role of the gods of the world. When one of the imms, Gaea, quit the game team, the forest in the world shriveled up in mourning of the death of a god. In CoreMUD, you were a miner on a colony on a distant planet and events like alien attacks and mine cave-ins happened often. Everyone would be a participant and everyone was affected.
I guess it just becomes harder to integrate meaningful storylines into games when you have thousands and tens of thousands players at any given time. Personally, I just love having the storyline cutscenes in Guild Wars and wish more games would do this.
What kind of storytelling would you prefer?
Week of WAR – Final Thoughts
So this weekend wrapped up the week of my Warhammer Online free trial. Have I decided to purchase the game? Probably. But it was not because I was wowed by the first 12 levels, it is more because I am a whore for MMOs.
Also, I might be able to talk some friends in WoW to start playing with me. A lot of them are bored with the content now after getting all the server firsts for raid bosses and mastering 3-drake Sartharion. We might try to schedule a weekly or bi-weekly Warhammer night.
My final opinions of what I experienced over the last week is mixed. I can see where this game has potential. I can see how it would be fun with a group. For people with a 7 day trial, I think it will end up as a missed opportunity for most because a lot of people spend those 7 days soloing and unguilded. If you do not have a group of friends or guild to play with regularly, I can see the game wearing out its welcome sooner rather than later.
Next, I feel the game almost has TOO MUCH content. Three public quests per chapter is too many. In the lower levels, you are in a chapter for a few hours at most and majority of that time is spent in scenarios or the RvR lake. Three scenarios per tier strikes a good balance, I think, but three public quests per chapter is too many. I think one public quest per chapter would be good enough. With one PQ per chapter, you could make each public quest exciting instead of some rather boring ones.
For instance, one of the normal public quests for what I think was either chapter 5 or 6 (whatever is the first chapter in tier 2), has you fight 40 boars, 12 champion minotaur men, and one giant boss minotaur man. It was really boring. I liked the first chaos public quest you encounter. You are sacrificing soldiers to a demonic sacrifice, but a bright wizard screws things up so that a blood god demon gets summoned that you have to fight. That is exciting. Fighting a couple waves of boars and minotaur men is not.
Soloing is a bother as a zealot. I am sure it is fine and fast enough if you are a dps class, but as a zealot, I am struggling to kill things before they respawn on top of me. In the first quest hub in tier 2, you get a quest to enter a crypt to fight some cultists or something (yes, I skip the quest text in this game). I was level 12 and these enemies (cultists, bats, skeletons and ghouls) are all level 10-12. They are not hard to kill, but as a zealot it just takes time. The mobs were almost respawning on top of me because things went so slow. I do not know if every class has this much trouble or if it just my slow DPS as a zealot.
I do not know about other classes, but you do not really get a feel for how the zealot plays until you get your level 8 abilities. (I do remember someone somewhere saying that you do not usually get a feel for the character style until level 8). Why? Why should I have to wait until level 8 to decide if the playstyle works for me. In WoW, with all classes but the hunter and druid, you get a good feel for the character style within the first 4 levels (druids because you do not get all your shapeshifting forms right away, and hunter because you do not get a pet until level 10, which I never liked). Within the first two hours, I should have a good handle on how my class plays, not after the first five to eight.
With all of this talk, it probably seems like I hate zealots and the game. It is actually neither. I love zealots, with the caveat, in a group. But then again, I think everything is better in a group. That should just be motto for this game. "Scenarios are okay, but in a group they are awesome." "Public quests do not work solo, but in a group they are amazing." "Open world RvR sucks by yourself, but in a group it can be the best gaming experience you will have."
I may not pick up the game within the coming days as I have some XBox 360 games I want to finish up (my second playthrough of Fable 2 and my first playthrough of Mirror's Edge), but I can see myself picking up the game in the very near future.
I just need to find myself a good group to play with.
A Quick Explanation On My WAR Opinion
I plan on having my final "Week of WAR" write up tomorrow to summarize my weekend activities and my final thoughts on the game.
First, I want to give somewhat of a disclaimer that I will probably elaborate more on tomorrow. After chatting with some people about my posts this week, some thought I was being extremely critical and unfair to the game. A few said things like "You're playing the game wrong", "Tier 1 is not that fun, the good stuff is in the upper tiers", and "Yeah, this game probably is not fun if you're not with a group of people or in a guild".
No offense, but most of those sound like excuses for shoddy gameplay.
When I approached WAR this week, I pushed from my mind most the stuff I had read over the past few months about the game and the hype since pre-beta. I tried to come to the game as a brand new player without too many preconceived notions of what it was supposed to be. My opinions over the past week have been based on what I would think coming to the game as a solo player for a seven day trial.
Anyway, I will elaborate more tomorrow with my final thoughts and if I plan to pick up the game.
A Gentleman’s Duel, WoW Tourists, and The Pixar Factor
So the gentleman's duel between two of my favorite bloggers continues today so I what better time to give my happy medium opinion.
On one side, Syncaine blames the rise and fall of WAR numbers on WoW tourists who constantly say that they are looking for something that is now WoW, go after every new shiny, and then leave because it is not WoW. He also argues that when we think back to WoW's launch, we see it with rose colored classes and it had a terrible launch in its own right. Moreover, he believes the main reason WoW is so successful today is because of the perfect storm of game launches and mishaps that made it possible for Blizzard to sweep up everyone on the market
Wilhelm argues that maybe the rise and fall of WAR numbers is because the game is bad or not fun or people just did not get what they wanted out of it.
So why was WoW a huge booming success from day one and why did WAR see the loss of so many in the first three months?
I think it is a mixture of both Syncaine's and Wilhelm's with a dash of some things alluded to in the blog comments on one of Syncaine's posts.
First, I believe WAR was released too early. I do not think they should have launched until all the classes were implemented into the game. The four cities that were removed do not bother me. The removal of the classes (even though they are getting patched back in) does. This could be one of three reasons in my mind. Either someone at Mythic realized they were running out of money and felt they needed to push it out the door, someone at EA wanted their fiscal report to look better so forced Mythic to push it out the door, or because they were worried if WotLK launched before them, they would lose out on those players for too long and have a weaker launch. Whatever the reason, the game was released when it was and I think that was a mistake.
Second is something that a comment by Nat outlines well:
WOW (Blizzard as a whole actually) has a special something that most games don't. It's the same thing the separates Pixar from other studios that make animated movies. It's the same something special Disney had 50 years ago.
In a way, I could imagine WoW as Pixar and WAR as Dreamworks. The top Pixar films include Wall-E, The Incredibles, Monsters Inc, Finding Nemo, Toy Story, A Bug's Life and more. The top Dreamworks films include Shrek, Madagascar, Kung Fu Panda, Over The Hedge, Bee Movie, Shark Tale. While Dreamworks may have some hits with Shrek and others, the Pixar films are seen as much more memorable and have more of a consistent quality to them.
In that way, I believe Blizzard has a bit more "street cred" to them for years before WoW they had three strong IPs going. Starcraft, Warcraft and Diablo battlechests still sell ridiculous amounts of game boxes to this day. Mythic's only major accomplishment was Dark Age of Camelot.
Third, WAR sort of looks like... well not very good for 2008/2009. I am able to play both WoW and WAR at max settings and side by side I believe that the graphics of WoW at maxxed are superior to WAR at maxxed settings. Rynala came into the office while I was playing the other day and remarked on how it surprised her that such a new game looked worse than one four years old. Lord of the Rings Online came out in April 2007 and the world in that game looks tremendously better than WoW. I do not see why WAR took a step back on graphics instead of a step forward.
Fourth, focus. I think that the focus of WAR changed a bit multiple times in development leading to this lack of focus seen early game. WoW came out as a jack of all trades, doing everything okay, nothing spectacular (except questing for the most part), so that it could appeal to anyone. Compare the grind and penalties in WoW to those in Everquest and Ultima Online. Blizzard looked at WoW as a hobby game instead of a niche game. I remember watching the beta videos Paul Barnett and Jeff Hickman put out about how to play the game and the tiers. They talked about how you could just open world PvP if you wanted, do scenarios if you wanted or do the PvE with the awesome revolutionary public quests. Well the questing (not counting public quests) in WAR is boring. And since it is human nature to take the path of least resistance, we are left with everyone running scenarios and few people in ORvR and even less doing questing and public quests. WAR needs to decide what it wants to be and focus everything into that. Want open world RvR to be more popular? Make the experience and renown gains three to five as much as you'd gain from scenarios. I guarantee you would see more people in the world fighting.
Fifth, I believe some of blame does land on Blizzard and World of Warcraft. They took a genre that is about niche gaming and opened up to the masses. I am betting that Syncaine sees this as a bad thing. I, however, do not. Compare MMORPGs to other genres. Call of Duty 4 sold seven million copies. Seven. Million. Copies. Madden 2009 has already sold over 2.5 million copies. These other genres have millions upon million of people playing. Call of Duty 4 sold more copies than Blizzard has of WoW in the US. I believe in a way, MMOs are still a niche genre, but nowhere to the scale that they were 5+ years ago.
So wow, this post became about three times longer than I wanted it to be. Forgive my rambling and stream of thought typing.
In the end, I believe WAR can and will succeed. It just needs to find its focus and be what it was meant to be.
Week of WAR – Day 3
Of all weeks to have to work extra hours, the had to be the week. I got home late last night so I did not get to play as much Warhammer as I would have liked. The good news is that I'm out of Tier 1 now. Maybe I can take part in a keep siege tonight.
Tier 1 just needs to be removed. Simply that. It lacks purpose and focus. The other thing that would help is if they had a low level keep and improved influence gains. When I spend a total of three hours in the RvR lake and am only half way to the first influence reward, things are too slow.
I have come to hate the Vegas roll system. Coming in first place for contributions but not getting anything for your efforts is terrible design. We were doing the chapter 4 public quest in Chaos lands where you burn wagons, fight soldiers and then a Knight of the Burning Sun. I came in first in contributions twice. The first time I rolled and 88 and even with the +500 was bottom of the loot charts and the second time I rolled about a 220 and only got one of the bad loot bags that does not have anything good in it.
The other solution for the Vegas loot system is change the way points work. Right now, first place contribution gets +500, then +450 then +400 and so on from there. Instead, set a pool of like 2500 "contribution points." Have the amount you get be in direct relation to the percentage of contribution they have you marked at. If you're at 50%, you get +1250, If you only did 10% contribution, you only get +250. Then have the Vegas 1000 sided dice roll after that. I often feel like I'm contributing a lot more compared to the next person on the list yet we're still only 50 points apart in this system. I would like more transparency to see the actual contribution percentages.
I explored the rest of the tier 1 map that I could explore. I found a huge public quest to the far south of the Chaos/Empire tier 1 zones that was marked as "Hard" since it was basically a PQ in a huge town. Obviously no one was there so I will never get to experience that one.
The night ended with me hitting rank 11 and renown rank 9, moving on to tier 2 (which I think looks a lot better than tier 1) and abandoning all my old tier 1 quests.
What I wonder is how many quests are carbon copies of each other. Since Chaos and Order are mirrored, how much variety are there in the quests for each side or do all the tier 1 Chaos quests have an exact mirror Order quest with just the names changed?
Also, I hope you do not expect me to write about the new WoW patch 3.1 news. There are a million other blogs already talking about it and you do not need me to repeat it.
Week of WAR – Day 2
After taking the day off gaming for my birthday on Tuesday, I was able to get a full night of WAR in last night (well, a full night minus and hour for Lost).
Tier 1 RvR is boring. Simply that. The XP is slow and the fights are boring. I can understand why people do the scenario grind. We had a warband and a half of Chaos against a warband a half of Order and the XP and renown came at about 1/4 the speed of scenarios, if not slower.
Not to mention, the fights themselves are boring. We stand on a hill and slaughter them, pushing them all the way back to their warcamp and then slowly they muster and push us back to a field while they are standing on a hill. I did this for about an hour back and forth until I could not take anymore so I grinded scenarios and public quests for the rest of the night.
Why even have Tier 1 and 2 RvR lakes if they are not enjoyable?
I am enjoying my Zealot more since I got my level 8 heal, but still fighting in PvE is just slow for this class. Holy priests in WoW kill stuff faster than I do.
I ended the night at rank 10, renown rank 8. I probably would have hit level 12 or so if I had just did scenarios all night. Even when losing, I get more XP than open world RvR (and that is even in the times when we are wiping the floor with them).
Public quests are alright. They are neat but I do not think they are the savior of PvE they were heralded as pre-launch. They are a nice distraction, but do not really make up for the lack of exciting quests. I have always been a man to read all the quest text in games but in this, I cannot seem to muster the excitement to read quests. It breaks my heart to think of all these zones and the lore behind them that 99% people are just basically ignoring.
While the quest indicators on the world and minimaps (the red circles around where you need to go) are a neat idea, I almost worry they are hand holding a bit much. I have always been against the mods like QuestHelper and Carbonite and enjoyed finding the location myself as quests are already simple enough nowadays. But this could all just be the explorer in me. With the unimaginative quests, the grinding is more evident and the PvE of the game feels one step away from an Asian MMO.
I think the entire playerbase would have been happier if the entire world was just one giant RvR lake or if the entire world was about 10% of the size it currently is. All the players seem to want is "Deathmatch: The MMORPG."
At the lower tiers, this game feels like it is in the middle of an identity crisis. It does not really have a solid aim or focus. I have heard this improves in tier 3 and tier 4 with more of an RvR focus but if the endgame of taking keeps and cities is what this game is all about, why even have level 1-39?
Just strip the game down to all the content in tier 3 and 4, remove tiers 1 and 2, have no levels and the only line of progression be the renown ranks that do the same things they do right now.
Also, Wilhelm of The Ancient Gaming Noob put up a good post regarding the accusations by a certain someone. I have some thoughts of my own which are somewhat of a medium between the two but I will save that for another post.