Camelot Unchained: A good first impression

Posted on February 8, 2013 by SynCaine

Snowmageddon will not stop my blogging!

Camelot Unchained is making noise of late thanks to Mark Jacobs sharing some details. I’m not going to link to all of the info, but it’s out there and you should go check it out. Also, don’t forget that MJ’s old blog was called The MMO Genre is a Niche Market. That’s important only for the lulz, but those are very important.

I think the best info about CU is that the team is aiming for a niche. MJ tossed out 30k subs as a target, which is great, and not just because I’ve been saying for years that you can be totally viable with that kind of population. The earlier worries of low-pop servers are silly too. Current themeparks cap out at around 10k per server, so if CU does have 30k subs, that’s either three good pop servers, or one without any population problems (beyond of course having too many in one area, but more on that later).

Along with setting reasonable expectations, MJ has also said that the game will have stuff in it that most won’t like, but the niche will love. We’ll see how far they stick to that once the forum babies start crying, but again, it’s the right thing to say for now. Niche games work not because they are a half-decent version of something great, but because they are great versions of something that appeals to only a few.

I’m a bit curious why so much time has been spent talking about crafting in an RvR game, but hopefully its actually worthwhile. My fear is the crafting itself will be ‘cute’, and fail to really matter because in an MMO, crafting is not about HOW you make something, it’s about WHY.

My biggest concern however is progression. MMOs without it don’t work long-term, and an RvR game aiming at a niche can’t afford to be something that only last for a month or so. The ask for a ‘pure skill’ PvP MMO just doesn’t make sense. We have LoL for that, and LoL does it better than anyone out.

A solid PvP MMO has progression while also allowing for player skill to matter. It’s a tough formula to balance, but minimizing the progression aspect just shortens your retention.

So with all that said, CU is on my radar. I don’t think it’s something we will see for a while, and who knows how it will turn out, but at least the initial info is better than pitching us a personal story or full voice acting. Baby steps.

 

Posted in Camelot Unchained, MMO design | 8 Comments

Camelot Unchained has a release date!

Posted on February 5, 2013 by SynCaine

More on this tomorrow or the next day, but just a quick comment: we are making hype videos with a date for launching games on kickstarter now? Bit… odd, right? And do they expect to get all 10m from kickstarter?

Spoiler alert: I’m actually semi-interested in this and forgive Jacobs for WAR. Still find his old blog title hilarious too.

Posted in Dark Age of Camelot, Warhammer Online | 12 Comments

The difficulty of depth

Posted on February 1, 2013 by SynCaine

Jester’s excellent Fractal post is well worth reading, and it’s just one example of the deep, multilayered posts frequently made about EVE. If you read enough blogs with enough variety, I’m sure you have picked up on this as well. Posts about virtual worlds such as EVE tend to juggle a multitude of factors when considering a point, while a post about something like the WoW LFR changes is limited to just that single feature.

That’s not an accident. Blog posts work off what an MMO provides. Something as simple and compartmentalized as WoW is going to warrant simpler, more focused posts. Do you like the change? Yes/No and why. Something as intertwined as EVE offers the chance to write something like Fractal (which itself is fairly focused in the EVE-scale of things), and the discussion can often spiral into any number of sub-topics.

It’s also why something like the CSM makes sense in EVE, while it would be a total waste of time in WoW.

Comments such as this always make me laugh:

EVE [has a] large population of non PvP players supporting the economic survival of the PvP part

It’s not quite as silly as the 80% highsec chant, but its close.

There are no non-PvP players in EVE. It’s a PvP MMO. Just because someone is focused on mission running or manufacturing does not mean they are not playing a PvP MMO. EVE is not WoW where you can select which ride to go on, insulate yourself from everything else, and enjoy. Mission runners need (or will be reminded) to consider suicide gankers looking for targets flying something too expensive. Manufacturers have the best economy in an MMO to play in because of the sinks, balances, and risks that PvP provides. Traders have a job, in part, because moving something in EVE is a calculated risk thanks to the PvP factor.

In a virtual world, everything matters to everyone, whether you know it or not. In WoW, arena players don’t exist to raids, alt-players don’t exist to raiders, and econ people don’t exist at all because lulz WoW puppy economy.

It’s also why, as CCP states often, once EVE has its hooks in you, that’s it. Most vets never ‘quit’. They might go on a break, or their playtime will ebb and flow, but few ‘finish’ EVE and completely leave. There is just too much game for anyone to fully consume; in part because all of it is player-driven, but also because everything is tied together and changes in one area affect others.

And that’s hard to create, let alone balance. It requires a lot of buy-in from the power players that make such worlds spin, all while giving their cogs reasons to stick around as well. It also means not getting tricked into ‘get rich quick’ gimmicks like ‘fluff is content’ (Incarna), or believing that this massive other group of players would totally sign up if you just made life a little easier overall (Trammel, NGE) or add something to the formula without considering the total impact (ToA).

The reason MMO history has more examples of failures and mistakes than success stories is because getting it right is more difficult than perhaps anything else in gaming. Doubly so because Blizzard had the stars align for them with WoW and skewed the perception of success and how to attain it.

The correction process is a slow one. We’ll get there eventually though.

 

Posted in crafting, EVE Online, MMO design, PvP, World of Warcraft | 25 Comments

Octo-moms will finally have the gear they deserve

Posted on February 1, 2013 by SynCaine

The current state of WoW raiding everyone:

If you wipe in lfr 90% of the time its down to 1 of 2 things. Firstly too many people are afk, I wiped 4x on tsulong last week until we finally had 4 out of 6 healers actually healing, Or someone pulls the boss too soon, someone starts it with people outside or people dead.

That’s right, the biggest obstacle to overcome in WoW today is hoping that more than half your raid is awake at the keyboard. The bar, can it go any lower?

Breaking news, it has! Wipe buffs everyone! Finally a true reward for failure!

If you don’t think half your raid is going to intentionally wipe to further make things faceroll easy for far longer than it would actually take you to finish the boss normally you must be very new to the genre, or just humanity itself. Welcome!

My guess is the next addition is to pre-gear everyone in gear two or three tiers higher as you zone in. That way everyone can enjoy the special effects and boss attacks, but not actually worry about them thanks to everyone being massively overpowered. Maybe put in a slider to access fourth or fifth tier gear in case 90% of the raid is AFK?

Assuming that players in the majority are not masochists and would rather like to eventually succeed than to repeatedly fail appears like a safe bet to me.

Also welfare epics and all such measures have pushed WoW to all-time subscription record highs. Plus look around folks, all those MMOs that also followed WoW’s lead to become hyper-accessible are just KILLING it in terms of sub…. err cash shop sales.

Safe bets all around!

Posted in Rant, World of Warcraft | 31 Comments

UO Forever: More lessons

Posted on January 28, 2013 by SynCaine

UO Forever has been a great time so far, both from just a pure gameplay perspective and as a refresher of sorts on how the MMO genre got started and the design decisions that worked.

I’ve covered combat already, as well as talking about the slower pace and why that’s important. Keen has a post about his enjoyment of crafting, which I think touches on some of these points as well.

Quick comment on the crafting aspect; as I said on vent, mining in UO ‘works’ because you are advancing towards something that matters to you, in a way you want to. You mine to get ore, to get ingots, to skill up smithing, to smith better items, to place those items on a vendor, and ultimately to make that vendor known and have people come to you to shop. This ultimately makes you good money, but also gives you a bit of fame, carves out your spot in the world, and opens other doors (shoppers become friends or guild members, the gold is used to fund bigger projects, the vendor traffic attracts other shopkeepers to your area of the world, etc).

In other MMOs, a ‘crafter’ is just a monster slayer that happens to dump gold into a side profession (usually at a huge loss), and the ‘fix’ that many have added is to get monster slaying experience from the art of crafting. “Level to the cap from crafting” should not be seen as a step forward, it should be seen as a slap in the face to crafters. Of course, when the result of crafting is being an anonymous listing on some global AH, who really cares?

Moving on, the skill gain rates on UOF are interesting. Combat skills go up very quickly. You can max out the basics in about 10 hours, and all but a few skills (magic resistance being the main one) shortly after that. Crafting skills on the other hand are very slow.

The fast skill gains, IMO, just shorten one area of the game and get you into another faster. Had they been slow, players would have spent more time fighting weaker creatures, all while farming less gold/items while they skill up. Eventually many would have reached the cap, and what is happening now would have happened then, but instead that early phase was basically non-existent. If UOF had a sub fee, that would be bad design from a business standpoint. Since it does not, it might just lead people to burn out quicker.

That said, just because you are able to get some skills to the cap does not mean you are ‘done’. Far from it. My current goal is to buy a house to place in our guild city. Originally this was going to be a basic house for about 65k, but the farming has gone well and along with a buddy, we have decided to go big and aim buy a two story for 150k. We are currently about 50k short of that goal.

And once we buy and place the house, it opens up some additional options for us. We will now have a base to PK out of. We will have a place to run a vendor from if we choose. And of course, we can’t leave it unfurnished, now can we?

By the time all of that’s done, who knows what other goals or options will pop up. Perhaps we will be in a guild war, or working to establish control of a particular dungeon. UO being a sandbox, the path is not pre-arranged and laid out for you to follow.

Finally, playing UOF reconfirms my belief that the reason UO retained subs for so long was because it’s a great game, not because it was the only MMO out (as if people didn’t have other gaming options back then…). It also confirms how massive of a mistake EA made when the trammeled it, and later butchered the IP with silly stuff like elves, ninjas, and whatever else is in the current paid version of the game. To think that UO could have been handled like EVE has been handled, expanded and enhanced while remaining true to its original design. Somehow I don’t think the genre would be quite as focuses on ‘personal stories’, instancing, or voice acting.

 

Posted in Combat Systems, crafting, Housing, MMO design, Ultima Online | 5 Comments

WAR’s legacy

Posted on January 23, 2013 by SynCaine

Nice interview by Massively with Mark Jacobs. He makes some good points.

WAR’s hype was inexpensive and very effective. The point of hype is to get people interested enough to buy; for WAR, that worked. My only question would be whether the hype would have worked as well with a more measured tone. If ‘bears bears bears’ was not in the game yet, or was not how the game really worked, would a more toned-down video have been just as effective for hype purposes? Or did the hype only work because it was as crazy and outlandish as ‘bears bears bears’?

The whole third-faction, RvR vs PvE focus; obviously I retrospect this was a bad decision. As I point out frequently here, aiming at 300k and getting it is better than aiming for 1m and getting 50k. WAR/SW:TOR and many others aimed at a ‘broad audience’. They appeal to no one enough to retain them. A game like DF:UW only appeals to a tiny subset of the MMO population, but is able to retain that group because for those players, it’s the best game out due to its focus. Why this continues to be a pitfall for others I’m not sure. I get greedy is a powerful thing, but with almost 10 years of examples, it’s pretty crazy that people are still willing to throw money into the fire like that.

Finally, if you look at what WAR brought to the genre, and compare it to SW:TOR or the ‘genre fixing’ GW2, WAR win’s in a landslide in terms of contribution. Public quests, evolving cities, how they did instanced PvP, the Tome of Knowledge, map functionality, etc. Yes, at the end of the day the game did not work enough to succeed, but many of its parts were brilliant and the blueprint going forward. Other than convincing everyone NOT to do voice acting, what did SW:TOR bring? Is there one feature of GW2 that is new and worth copying into another MMO?

Posted in MMO design, Warhammer Online | 24 Comments

Commenting on Blogger

Posted on January 23, 2013 by SynCaine

Is it just me or is commenting on Blogger-hosted blogs massively frustrating? Between the login errors, the captcha that is impossible to read half the time, to it eating what you wrote, it takes me ten times as long to comment on those blogs than on others, to the point that I generally don’t bother.

Is it as bad for Blogger-people when they come to WordPress sites, or is it a one-way street of suck?

/end rant.

 

Posted in Rant, Site update | 18 Comments

UO Forever: Death by dragonfire

Posted on January 22, 2013 by SynCaine

While Aventurine continues to uphold the DF:UW NDA, and :stuff:, I’ve decided to entertain myself with a bit of UO:F, joining up with Keen and his crew. So far it’s been very enjoyable overall, and also leads to one amusing story.

Just north of Britain there is the ever-popular dungeon Despise. It’s a good spot to farm some gold and the odd magic item, and it’s where I’ve spent the majority of my time in-game so far. The ettins and trolls found on floors 2 and 3 are very doable solo and drop a nice amount of gold, while killing deep earth elementals in a duo lands you a very nice 600-700 gold.

It was in this duo setup that a rather… amusing thing happened. Deep inside the third level there is a glowing portal. I had seen it before, but did not enter. With my friend along, I figured now would be a good time. My character is not ‘done’, but he has a few skills to 100, with other in the 60s or 80s, and I was wearing full plate while wielding a magic hally.

As soon as I entered the portal I knew I was in trouble. For starters, you are in agro range of not only a dragon, but a special ‘boss mob’ dragon as well. In addition, this portal was a one-way trip. Needless to say, I lasted for all of a few seconds before the welcome embrace of black-screen death took me, and I was standing inside a new dungeon as a ghost.

Just to provide further proof of my silly actions, as I made my way out of the dungeon in ghost form, I passed multiple dragons and other major creatures; all which would have surely seen to my end had the original two mobs not been so quick.

And because this is UO, all of my items were left on my corpse; a corpse that would not be recovered. Furthermore, instead of an instant portal to some graveyard, I was left to find my way out in ghost form. And when I finally did get a rez from a wandering healer, I was quickly dispatched a few minutes later by some random mob. Back in ghost form, I finally made my way to a town, got rezzed again, and spent about 30 minutes and 3000 gold to get myself back into fighting form.

All of this happened while my friend was laughing at my misfortune on vent. He was smart enough to wait for my initial reaction rather than jump right into the portal, and lived. And during my stumble back to town in ghost form, we talked about how quickly such an experience would be ‘fixed’ in modern MMOs. How someone would be quick to point out how ‘unfun’ such a trap is, and how during their ‘casual’ playtime, they can’t afford to not make progress. How such a ‘harsh’ experience has no place among the masses.

And it’s probably true. Far too many players are absolutely risk-averse, can’t deal with setbacks, and will only sign up if they are promised rainbows and lollipops just for showing up. It’s also here where having a strong dev team with solid vision comes into play, because while I do believe most players don’t believe they want this kind of experience, I am fully convinced such experiences are what make an MMO great, and make you stick with a game. They are memorable, make you work harder, and give you something to come back to and hopefully get your revenge. And if they do/did cause you to rage-quit, you would have anyway over something else. Knowing who is NOT your target audience is just as important as knowing who is when it comes to designing an MMO.

Posted in MMO design, Ultima Online | 16 Comments

MMO housing IS gameplay

Posted on January 17, 2013 by SynCaine

And yes, I’ve heard the Ultima Online house analogy. But until I can plant a flower box outside my POS, I don’t buy it. EVE ain’t Minecraft.

Going to pick on Jester a bit in this post. I say pick on because while Jester is extremely knowledgeable about EVE (and writes the best blog about it), his overall MMO experience is somewhat limited, and I’m 99% sure he did not play UO and experience its housing.

So with that said, flowers did not make UO housing. Not even a little bit. And ‘flowers’ would not be what would make EVE’s POS revamp. ‘Flower’ housing systems, like what LotRO has, suck. They are pointless, vapid wastes of instances space. That type of housing has zero gameplay. But that’s not what UO had.

The reason housing in UO was amazing gameplay was because it centralized you in a huge world. Without a house, you lived out of an NPC city, and those cities were not ‘yours’. As soon as you had a house, that was YOUR spot. Everything around you was important, because it was connected to YOUR spot in the world. That alone is perhaps the biggest retention ‘hook’ in the genre.

But housing in UO went further than just claiming land. It also opened up options such as running a vendor, or a crafting station near a mine, or just being a guild house for everyone to store items in and work out of. Each of those avenues further branched out. Once you start running a vendor, you care a lot more about the economy, and what items are worth. Or you go into crafting to ensure supply. Or you make connections to a crafting guild to work out a deal.

Point being, a house is the central point of the giant spiderweb we call sandbox content, and it’s a damn crime so many MMOs do it so poorly or don’t even do it at all.

Returning back to EVE, running a POS is painful. Really, really painful. No one likes it, very few tolerate it. Yet even in the sludge that is the current system, you have some interesting gameplay. Jester himself covers one example here.

Now imagine if CCP removed the sludge of the horrible UI you have to use to place POS guns, or the mishmash that is placing refineries and hangers. Designing a house/POS should be fun, like it is in UO. It should allow talented individuals to do something like the deathstar, but to the degree EVE lets you do things (think EVE market manipulation vs WoW kiddie pool economy).

And if newish players are given the chance to jump in and setup a small home, how many new players does that bring in? What kind of splash would a video showing the creation of a great looking and function POS make in the media? Hell, new players often struggle to define a ‘why’ in EVE; and building/growing your POS could be just the ticket. Reach a certain size, and the game should naturally encourage you to branch out, socialize, and work with others to continue on, much like UO subconsciously did way back in 1997. Again, the problem has been solved. The solution has simply been forgotten and drowned out in WoW-clone me-too trash design.

Posted in EVE Online, Housing, Lord of the Rings Online, MMO design, Ultima Online | 15 Comments

Three hours

Posted on January 17, 2013 by SynCaine

In the comments of yesterday’s post, frequent commentator Saucelah suggested that playing an MMO for three straight hours (the comment said five, but let’s work with three, because I think that was my original ask in some post. If not I’m saying three now) is extreme hardcore or niche. I disagree. I’d say that if you CAN’T setup a three hour block to play an MMO, you are in the minority.

Millions of people recently saw “The Hobbit”. Total uninterrupted time needed for that? Over 3 hours. Well over if you have a longish drive to the theater. Even an average movie that runs just under two hours in length is going to take you around three hours total. The cost? Oh, about $15 per person. A number that sounds oddly familiar. Guess movies are for the hardcore only huh?

The NFL is by far the most popular sport in America. Millions and millions watch a game or more each week. Average length of an NFL game? Over three hours. Per week. Watch your team’s game every week, and you just spent 12 hours or more a month. Oh and the NFL also has DLC. Yup, Sunday ticket, which gives you access to EVERY game and special features like Redzone. Cost? About $200-$300 bucks a year. Let’s not even get started on actually going to a game in person, both for time and cost. The NFL, super-niche, yo.

Raise your hand if you have been to a concert that was shorter than three hours total time (driving etc) and cost you less than $15?

I could go on.

So yes, if you personally can’t organize your life to allow for a three hour block of time to enjoy something, you are niche. A sad niche too. L2live noob, you only get one life in this game.

If you CHOOSE not to spend that much time on something that is basically a hobby (MMOs), don’t expect hobby-quality results. Plenty of people show up to Superbowl parties clueless about the NFL, and we can continue to politely smile while tuning you out to focus on the game, while you enjoy the pretty sights and sounds (commercials).

Posted in Random, Rant | 21 Comments