I have a few meaningful posts in my head that I desperately want to get out - unfortunately work/life are not helping me out. All I have time for today is a quick link dump.
- Should players be able to make permanent choices that cripple their character? Syncaine thinks so. I tend to agree so long as the game makes it clear in advance that there are consequences to a player's choices.
- Michael got a little hot under the collar when he started to consider the release date antics that game publishers inflict on consumers.
- If you're a Warcraft player in search of a new game then check out Flyv's recent thoughts on WAR.
- Spinks took a long look at the idea of empowering MMO players with truly meaningful choices to make during game play. Fascinating stuff.
- I've read a number of blog articles complaining about the so-called death of grouping in modern MMOs.... but there are some solid reasons why any game must support solo play (while continuing to encourage grouping).
- Syp is polling his readers to determine their preferred MMO payment model. The subscription model is winning by a landslide right now, which is a shame.... it's the least fair of all the models, and discourages experimenting with multiple games simultaneously. DDO/Wizard101 do it right: they offer a subscription and F2P+microtransactions.
- Keeping with the theme of bloggers asking questions: Keen wants to know what your ideal MMO setting would be. I'm leaning towards a time travel/alternate reality game... I think that could be amazing if done correctly.
- Beau Turkey has put together 2-word descriptions for a huge variety of games. He missed EVE Online, so I'll fill it in for him: "Super slow".
- Practical life lessons from MMO gamers: the secret to marital bliss; child rearing techniques.
- MrAnderson has some thoughts about Aion that are worth a look for players considering picking up a copy of the game when it is released.
Phew. That's it for now.
10 comments:
Honestly, I don't wanna praise WoW or anything (usually the opposite actually...) but I can't really agree on Flyvs idea of WAR being an alternative to WoW or simply worth a shot. If you play WoW, stick with it - even if you can't wait until 3.2 hots. If you're looking for an alternative wait for Aion or try EVE or LotRo.
WAR has so far been the biggest disappointment of my RPG career - Flyv names some of reasons but so far hasn't progressed to the endgame content (which WAR laks in).
As for Syncaines idea of permanent decisions for you character I can only agree - I loved the old Diablo times. Back then you had to simply reroll your character if you skilled/stat'd it wrong and get your stuff over. On the other hand I am aware that these times won't come back as we've recently discussed here: Casuals are taking over and games try to bring it back simply fail like Darkfall.
Lastly the Aion impressions - well I'll refrain from calling him names but he seems mightily prejudiced: I've not yet played a beta weekend (will do upcoming weekend, however) but I follow the forums quite frequent and I don't think he has progressed enough to judge PvP & flying in the game since you usually seem to stick to the starting areas until level 15-25 and your flying abilities develop more and more during the game.
@Rob:
"If you're looking for an alternative wait for Aion or try EVE or LotRo."
Aion is still in beta, and EVE is so drastically different (and mindnumbingly slow) as to not be an option for most WoW players. I can't speak to LotR.
I found WAR decent enough, but not worth the box price + monthly sub. I would have subscribed for at least a month had there been no box price, however... because it's different enough to be interesting - especially if you make an informed choice about the server you play on.
"Casuals are taking over and games try to bring it back simply fail like Darkfall."
Yes and no. I think the big games will be more casual friendly, however I don't see any reason that a more hardcore offering cannot survive and cater to an audience who enjoys that sort of thing. Darkfall had so many more problems than just being hardcore.... starting with a toxic community.
Re: Aion -
The problem here is that the betas so far have not allowed you to progress very far.... so there's no way he could break out of what was allowed to fully experience the game. I came away from my Aion beta weekend feeling that it was a very pretty WoW-like game that was a little too "on rails" for my liking at this point.
About Aion Beta - that's pretty much what I said... He shouldn't judge it after some beta weekends.
'I would have subscribed for at least a month [...]'
Well, you're right.. after all those patches and changes WAR probably offers fun for 1-2 months but speaking for myself I'm looking for games that offer fun for a long time and not just to for some weeks/months.
I think this applies for most online RPG players and especially those who have played WoW for years. It's always a pain to lose friends & community because they (don't wanna) move on to other games. Personally I hate playing games 'alone' thats why I always try to find RPGs that remain fun for a long time and then drag my friends with me....
PS: I liked my 14 days of EVE just as much as you - I quit because you couldn't even go AFK for some time without often suffering bad losses, that's just not my style since I often tab to browser or ICQ and forget the game is running in the background.
your 2 word summary of EVE online is imprecise. "Space Excel" is the one preferred by some players.
super-slow isn't the best way to describe it, it's designed to crush new players into the tedium/thrill of treadmill missions and waiting 3 to 6 real-time months to train some skills. i still laugh when i remember the eve online dificulty curve graph with it's cliff face of ramping difficulty that has all the stick figure corpses surrounding it.
http://www.mmocrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/learningcurve.jpg
comedy gold.
I'm also not a fan of aion being a pay for play MMO since there's going to necessarily be a breaking in period that the beta can't really avoid, and that's entirely due to people.
i.e. how people will find their niche in the game, wether it be griefing or farming goods, or PVPVNPC or simple PvP, etc. or those rare few who want the experience, etc.
all that will be decided in the period from when they officially go retail, to about 3 weeks later when 60-80% of people discontinue their 14/30 free days and have to pay real money.
i don't think ncsoft will appreciate being told there's going to be a lot of interested people on the beta's and only 1/20th to 1/50th as many prepared to pay $15/month. should be interesting to see what people say closer to september/october 2009.
the only other thing to ruin aion, apart from WoW releasing another epic content patch , is if SW:ToR beta's open up in september, aion will likely be extinguished.
Toli do you have any idea what you're talking about?
SW:ToR will be P2P just like any other decent MMORPG and the idea that players are not willing to pay 15 bucks per month play is utter bull****. (proven not only by WoW...?)
SW:ToR sure looks nice but I have doubts that it will be such a big shot. Bioware can probably be happy if the game can compare to Aions success on the Asian market at all....
As for WoW's upcoming 3.2 - It sure is anything but epic - epic laugh maybe. If I were Blizzard I'd worry that people might actually flee for Aion etc. seeing such a lousy patch hit the servers. You don't seem to have read much about 3.2. so I'll just leave you with your illusions until Blizzard crushes them.
I for one am increasingly unwilling to pay $15/month for an MMO. As I alluded to in this article, it prevents me from playing multiple games at the same time by shackling me with an unfair one-size-fits-all entry fee.
If SW:ToR goes subscription, then the chances of me even trying it are vastly diminished.... and I'm a child of the Star Wars era.
I'm not alone in this thinking; more and more people are starting to appreciate that F2P done right (like DDO, Wizard101, and RoM) is a GOOD innovation, not a scary evil one.
well, to be fair, the same crowd left in the wind by the failure of warhammer, are also the same crowd that have left warcraft, but eventually gravitate back to wow because it actually offers some of the experience they want, until they get frustrated again and quit.
WOW might have 11 million purchasers, but likely only ~2 million active (who probably login once a week) subscribers in the US.
that's a HUGE number of people who would
1. would jump ship if there was something on the horizon that looked like it was worth paying for.
2. have already been exposed to the MMO genre and are willing to pay money to play a new one. (somewhat realistically, beta MMO users are more often just freeloaders)
3. Willing victims/customers are hard to find, it requires a fair bit of hype to attract people's attention typically. even a cleavage-endowed screenshot or 300 no longer does the job.
3. MMO'ees have experience in dealing with very broken games and will actually pay money to play them, i.e. everquest, DAOC, AOC, WAR, UO, SWG, TR, TSO, SL, etc. the list goes on.
admittedly, WoW 3.2 isn't anything special, the PTR recaps and video i've seen of the new instances, it looks fair, BG's instances, raids, gear, and super-levelling bonuses i.e. cheap mounts as 20/40/60/68 make sense.
but, it's still flawed, the season 7/tier 9 gear, well, the DK set looks like it came recycled from tron, and T9, looks and feels generic, most especially with the emblem changes, it won't keep people engaged who have stopped playing, or attract a lot of people back who have left.
as for 3.3 ? it's 'probably' 4-6 months away, due for late november.
if any other MMO was attempting or planning to use that time, they would be crunching to avoid the same period as a WoW content patch. aion is being released late september. it wouldn't surprise me if blizzard tried something, it would only surprise me if they didn't.
As for the dig about aion being crushed, i'm obliquely referring to the mega-hype surrounding warhammer online's open beta, which was being drowned out by blizzard's lich king beta sending out all the spare beta invites in the 2 weeks before warhammer's beta.
there were a few stories about it.
now, it's true i don't really put aion in the same category as star wars fans, but in the category of disillusioned wow fans, who would latch onto a rotting corpse in the street if it offered a social MMO experience, aion is in that category.
as seen in the sony MMO lineup, they regularly make that corpse do some crazy, crazy things in the name of an MMO.
there's even people still playing EVE online, for god's sake. can you imagine how emotionally scarred you have to be to migrate from WOW to EVE and enjoy EVE more ? it beggars belief.
@toli:
"WOW might have 11 million purchasers, but likely only ~2 million active (who probably login once a week) subscribers in the US. "
You are misunderstanding WoW's "11 million subscribers" statistic. World of Warcraft has 11 million CURRENT subscribers world wide. This is the amount of people signed up for their subscription model. China makes up ~5m of this, and they actually pay by the hour instead of a flat monthly rate. But that is still 11 million ACTIVE AND OPEN accounts.
The total number of WoW boxes sold is far more than 11 million.... the game and all expansions are consistently on the top of the PC sales charts.
"3. MMO'ees have experience in dealing with very broken games and will actually pay money to play them,"
That's a sad truth. I hadn't ever thought about it quite like that.
"if any other MMO was attempting or planning to use that time, they would be crunching to avoid the same period as a WoW content patch. aion is being released late september. it wouldn't surprise me if blizzard tried something, it would only surprise me if they didn't."
Blizzard are the kings of PR.... they do an amazing job of drowning out competitor's news by making their own announcements/releases at the same time. Expect major Blizzard announcements when Aion goes live, when Champions goes live, and when SW:ToR opens its beta.
(i suppose i can't leave this bone unchewed... sigh)
@andrew
You are misunderstanding WoW's "11 million subscribers" statistic. World of Warcraft has 11 million CURRENT subscribers world wide. This is the amount of people signed up for their subscription model. China makes up ~5m of this, and they actually pay by the hour instead of a flat monthly rate.
i don't think it is a truly valid number to use. for one, 11 million is far too large to be accurate or believable or useful.
secondly, you can get stuck in the immensity, and it becomes too much effort to untangle where 11 million people fit into a game, where you can only see 20-30,000 players at a time on one server, out of the 200 or so in the US, and the 150 or so european servers with the same server numbers.
it would be interesting to see where 11 million active subscribers call home in the wowverse, and how many have active characters and which don't.
as for 11 million active subscribers, sure. i'm considered an active subscriber, and i stopped playing in early may.
i was also an active subscriber when i stopped playing in 2007/2008, i guess that helps too.
But that is still 11 million ACTIVE AND OPEN accounts.
there's been intimations that 11 million might be purchasers, subscribers, etc. or people who haven't completely quit, or thought they needed to.
it's also not a number you can really check with a 3rd party either. it's not exactly fiction, but it's close.
but perhaps you can check via the armory.
as far as the 2 million active players i pulled out of nowhere, there's already a warcraftrealms.com census mod that takes in stats from most of the US/EU servers by active logged-in players,
and there's some fragile endeavours to try armory data mining, which would be more precise about how 'truly' active characters and accounts were.
but, it's not convenient or totally accurate. the extra 4 million active subscribers might not be logged in when all those thousands of individuals take an active census of online players every hour for the last few months.
The total number of WoW boxes sold is far more than 11 million.... the game and all expansions are consistently on the top of the PC sales charts.
It's likely not continously astronomical, The PC gaming market is completely drowned by both online & direct downloads and console users.
i don't follow sales stats that closely, but it would be surprising to me if more people owned a copy of wow than were owners of the twilight book series or an oprah book of the month buy. and those products are in the 20-30 million ballpark.
i would have to say WoW is probably more on par with the sales of the slanket/singing fish plaque/3 wolves t-shirt in the retail market, but it does get a lot better, and then it peters off.
plus, in retail, wow is 1/2 the price of a conventional retail game. that really shows out when people window shop for games, especially parents, uncles, grandparents, friends, multiboxers, etc.
@Toli:
Sorry for the delay - work has been kicking my ass.
"i don't think it is a truly valid number to use. for one, 11 million is far too large to be accurate or believable or useful. "
Whether or not you believe that number has no bearing on its validity. WoW has 11 million subscribers according to every single reliable source. No one (yourself aside) disputes that figure.
"as for 11 million active subscribers, sure. i'm considered an active subscriber, and i stopped playing in early may. "
You are not counted in that number. "Active" means "paying right now".
"there's been intimations that 11 million might be purchasers, subscribers, etc. or people who haven't completely quit, or thought they needed to."
No, there haven't. It's people currently paying $15/month for the game (or equivalent payment scheme depending on the country the player is located in). If they're paying $15/month and not playing they're wasting their cash, but still considered an active subscription. Active in this sense means "current", not "playing right this second".
"it's also not a number you can really check with a 3rd party either. it's not exactly fiction, but it's close."
You can check versus their financial balance sheets, which are public given the nature of the company. Remember though, only North America and Europe has the monthly subscriptions; most of Asia is actually hourly - they buy X hours of gameplay at a time.
"as far as the 2 million active players i pulled out of nowhere, there's already a warcraftrealms.com census mod that takes in stats from most of the US/EU servers by active logged-in players"
Which is "concurrent" players, not "Active" in the sense that the 11 million refers to. Remember: we're dealing with open & paying accounts.
"The PC gaming market is completely drowned by both online & direct downloads and console users. "
I agree that DDL has certainly made the value of these charts less than they used to be. But Warcraft still outsells anything else on a month by month basis - at least in the stores. So at the very least that suggests that there is a continuous influx of new players into the game to replace those (like you and I) who left.
"i don't follow sales stats that closely, but it would be surprising to me if more people owned a copy of wow than were owners of the twilight book series or an oprah book of the month buy. and those products are in the 20-30 million ballpark."
Apples & oranges. MMOs are no where close to as mainstream as novels and movies, sadly.
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