DFTM

Daedric princes, birthsigns, guilds, and many more elements that players strongly associate with the franchise are all integral parts of the game. Some things, like player housing, aren’t making the transition to an MMO because of the constraints inherent to an online game, but Zenimax Online is including everything that makes sense. (Game Informer, What Elder Scrolls Online Offers Skyrim Fans, MMO Players)

Quick, call the developers of Lord of the Rings Online, Everquest 2, the original Everquest, Final Fantasy XI, Runes of Magic, (the late) Star Wars Galaxies, Vanguard, Wurm, Ultima Online, Wakfu, whoever came up with guild ships in Dungeons & Dragons Online and the guy behind astral ships in Allods Online, the dev team in charge of fleshing out the concept of guild ships in SWTOR, or any other MMO studio that includes player owned housing or variants thereof and tell them that because of the constraints inherent to an online game their housing systems make no sense.

Through the end of the quarter, approximately 2.4 million units have sold through. In our last call we indicated that we had 1.7 million active subscribers, and as of the end of April we now have 1.3 million, with a substantial portion of the decrease due to casual and trial players cycling out of the subscriber base, driving up the overall percentage of paying subscribers. (EA Q4 FY12 prepared comments, emphasis mine – source 1, 2)

This statement from EA during their Q4 earnings call goes a long way to show that 1) the numbers do include the players getting a free month (seems like they did end up using that as a way to pad numbers) and 2) the endgame model used by Bioware (“please, please, play alts”, operations, PvP) is broken as the casuals are cycling out. You don’t want to lose those casuals and the way to keep them happy and playing doesn’t seem to be offering them the same as the hardcore but at an “accessible” level.

Want to learn from the failures of others? SWTOR is hardly dead in the water, but it offers an opportunity for other game developers to learn valuable lessons for free. Are you listening, Zenimax?

While my last post about cancelling my Tera-account failed to convince Reddit, one comment there stood out to me and made me think. Then I got depressed.

1 guy don’t want to play the game because he is surprised you do MMO things in an MMO which he is already doing in Rift.

I’ve seen similar comments before, especially on official forums when people complain about the lack of endgame – I saw it quite often on the official SWTOR forums for example, when people started to hit 50 and finished their main class quest chain. In other words, reaching endgame and finding either a lack of content or simply a gear grind is what you’re supposed to do in a MMO.

The end?

I find this terribly cynical. We’re not supposed to expect more from the games we play and pay for? It’s also proved to be quite the design problem for companies – players will run through that content much faster than the developers can produce it. We’ve seen that over and over again. With no secondary game systems in place, you risk having a lot of paying customers leave either because of burnout or because they simply aren’t interested in doing that in yet another game.

Gear progression can be a lot of fun and I love theory crafting and learning my class. I did in World of Warcraft, I currently do in Rift. I don’t believe in the inherent evils of min-maxing. What I firmly believe is that the “MMO things in an MMO” don’t end there. What kind of endgame would we have if Bioware hadn’t spent all that money on voice overs and instead put $50 million on making varied endgame content on top of the operations/PvP? Hell, $10 million?

I know, investors want to play it safe. That’s the sad reality. Because of this, indies will stay indies and the large MMO companies will go for what they believe is the safest route – what they know large parts of the communities will see as the “MMO things”. Yet, there seems to be this total disregard about alternative systems that can complement the raiding and gear grinding. Rift had its artifacts, its events and rifts on top of the normal endgame – adding Emerald Isle, a new outdoor zone aimed at level-capped characters, on top of that. Players still burn out of course, but having played a lot at level cap now I still have things to do outside of the raids. Instead companies release a game, then scramble desperately to retain players by adding more and more gear-related content and raids instead of thinking outside the box for a bit. Just a tiny, little bit.

New profession in SWTOR - cart building! Anyone?

I’m talking about complementing, not replacing. I promise, I haven’t gone full Wolfshead and started to hate modern MMOs. I really haven’t. Yet I can’t help feeling that the safe route no longer is to just throw more raids at the players. The trick is to keep us occupied outside the hamster wheel of gear grinds – especially when you have insane amounts of money to spend, like Bioware did. Making MMOs is terribly expensive, though it looks to me like a large part of the various budgets are wasted on things that don’t really give the game in question better longevity; like high quality voice-overs on everything.

More research is desperately needed. The MMO genre seems to be chugging along according to a couple of basic truisms that haven’t been questioned in a long time; truisms that keep putting companies into trouble. Pay a sociologist, a media researcher, a psychologist, anyone. Have them do action research, let them play your competitors’ games for months while you start to flesh out your own. Be agile, work in constant research cycles. Hire good community representatives (i.e. don’t do an Earthrise) that talk to the players and feed that research. Don’t learn from the success of others, learn from their failures. The return on investment could potentially be huge.

(As an aside, I do have to consider why I – together with many others – left Rift relatively close to launch, despite it being as solid as it was from the start. Thinking back, it came down to a lack of enthusiasm. It was good, it was fun, but leveling up wasn’t different enough I guess. I think SWTOR gave me a new perspective on it and allowed me to enjoy it a lot more. Right now it feels like I haven’t had this much to do at level cap in a classic theme park MMO since The Burning Crusade. Sandboxy games like Star Wars Galaxies and Everquest 2 don’t count into this discussion, they are a post of their own. Or, in the case of the former, a novel. The overall subject of this post also ties into the larger “you rushed to cap, you got yourself to blame for being bored”-discussion.)

As customers, we should expect more, we shouldn’t pick up a new MMO with the full knowledge that we will probably be bored or that there will be a lack of content once we reach level cap. I think many of us have started to ask for more than that, no matter what a random poster on Reddit thinks. In Tera, I am not surprised that “you do MMO things in an MMO”. Not at all, I went in expecting a theme park with fun combat. But I am sad that Tera, like SWTOR, is starting to look like a one trick pony. Outside of combat, there’s nothing. Outside SWTOR’s storylines, there’s nothing. Except those MMO things we always do in MMOs, of course.

Initial disclaimer: My warrior in Tera is level 25, thus my impressions of the game is only based on what I’ve experienced and read about so far.

A few minutes ago I logged into my En Masse-account to cancel my Tera-subscription. While my account is still active, since the 30 days of free game time are far from up, and I might change my mind down the road, I’m already convinced that the game – in its current state – doesn’t have the staying power to keep me interested in the long run.

Boss fight!

I agree with Levelcapped-Chris that the game is fun, and focusing on the fun is the right thing to do. At the same time, it also comes down to why you play MMOs in the first place. While I am having a lot of fun swinging my swords around, I know that as I crawl up the levels I will think more and more about progression – and if all there is is a gear grind, then count me out. As I pointed out in my last post, I am already doing that in Rift. That’s quite enough.

Comparing Rift and Tera (just like comparing Rift and SWTOR, for example) is inherently unfair. Rift has been out for a bit more than a year and Trion have been pumping out updates ever since launch (with 1.8 fresh on the servers and 1.9 already on the horizon). Tera is about a week old. The thing with the latter is that we have some insight into what the (near) future will bring by looking at the Korean version. There’s simply nothing there that interests me. There’s a guild housing NPC in Velika, but he doesn’t do anything – not in the US version, not in the Korean version.

Which brings me to the issue of guilds. I’m playing together with a bunch of MMO-bloggers and Twitterers (that’s a word, right?). We are a pretty small guild, and I don’t see it growing very much. Tera’s guild systems are aimed at large guilds, who have the members to make guild vs guild warfare fun and the grind for upkeep/reward tokens easier. The political system, which we will discuss on the next episode of the Three MMOsketeers, is mostly aimed at larger organizations. That’s an individual choice, and I only have myself to blame for that.

Stop taunting me!

Tera does have a lot of things going for it. The combat is a lot of fun. The group content (I’ve only experienced the first dungeon, Bastion of Lok, so far) looks extremely promising. Hunting for world bosses (I hate the term/acronym BAM) seems like a very viable way of keeping yourself entertained – I’ve tried to solo a couple and there’s a lot of adrenaline involved. The world and character design, if you can get past the obvious lack of actual clothing, are beautiful. Poporis rock. I agree with Arkenor – if you want a new shiny theme park MMO to keep you occupied for the time being, I don’t see how you can go wrong with Tera.

But with no real end-game beyond bashing monsters (of various sizes) for loot, and guild systems out of my reach, and no real replayability, I don’t think Tera is for me right now. If the combat would turn dull, there would be nothing left. So for now, I’ve cancelled. Come billing-time I might change my mind, and I’ll certainly be playing until the account runs out.

As noted during the tenth episode of the Three MMOsketeers (anniversary!), while everyone and their extended families were playing the pre-purchase open beta weekend of Guild Wars 2 me and Arkenor were playing Tera Online. I’ve played GW2 a couple of times before and didn’t feel like downloading the whole client again just for a few hours of fun; also, I’m saving myself for launch and the Asura.

I didn’t plan on playing Tera this early on, but the smell of a fresh new MMO coupled with posts by Chris and Pete (and the news that Ark had picked it up) made me cave. So far, I’m not regretting it. The game is stable, except for a maintenance period that lasted longer than expected there have been no major crashes as far as I know, and it runs great on my rig that’s slowly getting old and unpredictable. Since I decided to pick up the US version, I have yet to experience any queues since I’m more or less always off prime time – that might also be because the PvP servers seem like the most popular and I’m carebearing it out on the only available roleplaying server.

The pros

The main sticking point of Tera is obviously the combat, especially if you are a melee class (as far as I’ve gathered from friends playing casters). I love my warrior; dual-weilding two swords while wading into packs of enemies gives a very satisfying feeling. While killing ordinary mobs might not always call for much movement, I try to be moving at all times to prepare myself for the time when it will be absolutely necessary to stay alive.

Not using any form of tab-targetting is great, there’s a certain freedom to it. The warrior only uses directional slashes, and I have to constantly make sure I am actually aiming at the mob. No standing around in one spot, DPS-racing against the enemy. Every fight I enter has similarities to a PvP-fight in other MMOs, dancing around the target to gain the upper hand and find a position where I can deal as much damage as possible while receiving as little as possible myself. The actual challenge level is quite low, so I’m looking forward to bringing her up against larger monsters (such as the BAMs) or actually giving tanking a try. I’ve never been interested in tanking in MMOs, but the kind of evasion tanking a warrior uses sounds like it could be a lot of fun.

There’s a couple of other systems that I like in Tera – like that your bank is automatically shared between all your characters and that every character can level all crafting professions at the same time. The world design is beautiful in its epic, completely over the top way. One could argue that most characters – including some of the male ones, luckily – don’t wear much clothes or armor. The first mission I set for myself was finding a pair of decent pants. When I did, my upper body was suddenly very exposed. I can absolutely understand people who are turned away from Tera because of this design choice. It can be way too much at times, but it does fit into the rest of the world design.

In short, I’m enjoying Tera a lot. That said though…

The cons

While I could see myself playing a game like Tera for a long time – when jumping from Tera to Rift for some Hammerknell-raiding yesterday I already missed its combat and controls – I got a bad feeling that the stuff I enjoy now is really all there is. Looking at end-game, it looks to be the same as in so many other MMOs. Dungeon grinds, raiding, PvP, dailies. While those things might be great individually (except most dailies, god I hate dailies), the package as a whole looks shallow. I am tired of MMOs that work that way and that was one of the reasons why I was turned off SWTOR.

Also, I’m kind of doing that song and dance in Rift already (even if Rift’s end-game offers quite a lot of choice for me so far, since I haven’t done every quest or seen every nook and cranny of Telara yet). I don’t want to hit that wall and realise that the only thing I can dedicate myself to is better gear. Incidentally, most of the concept art shown during loading screens isn’t of combat – it’s mostly about crafting, about family, about society, about community. There might be something in the game that I’ve completely missed though, which I’m obviously hoping for.

What I haven’t missed is that the one big thing that might make me quit Tera in disgust right this minute is my own character. Not her class, as mentioned above the warrior plays wonderfully. But the actual character. I was stupid enough to choose to play a female High Elf warrior. C’mon, they look great. “Bad-ass”, even. The animations when she swings the swords looks amazing, even to the point of forgetting the fact that her armor looks like it would offer even less protection than a chainmail bikini (at least she’s wearing pants!). She’s in total control, tearing demons and sabertoothed tigers to pieces, dodging their blows and finishing them off with a well-placed whirlwind attack.

Look, pants! Oh...

No, the main problem is the sounds she makes outside of combat. The ashamed giggle when she fails to harvest something. “Yes, I know I just cut up a whole pack of ravaging bears with my two swords, but I am so ashamed that I failed to pick up this flower! Giggle giggle!” That makes me want to stop harvesting, which would gimp her completely since you get vital buffs for gathering materials. The “yay!” she makes when she does harvest something can luckily easily be cancelled by moving as fast as possible, but she also makes it as soon as she crafts something. That makes me want to stop crafting. The absolutely atrocious sounds she makes when doing the /dance emote. Not vital to gameplay at all, it’s just a detail that drives me insane. She sounds like a really bored, badly paid stripper that has given up on life. At least she doesn’t magically spawn a stripper pole.

I’m playing a warrior for crying out loud, not a washed up porn star that still acts like she’s in her lower teens (nothing bad about porn stars, having never met one I am sure they are lovely people – that’s just a rhetorical stereotype, people). One day that “yay!” and stretched up arm she makes will make me quit the game, go straight to the En Masse website to cancel my sub and then uninstall the game.

Because there is another problem with Tera, which it shares with many other modern MMOs – it’s linear and has only one starting area. I’m currently questing in the Valley of Titans which is a level 20 zone, so it might open up more later. But right now I know that if I reroll a new character (trust me, I will try out all the emotes before committing to it long term), I will have to go through the exact same quests again in the exact same areas. While I wouldn’t expect every new MMO to go Vanguard-crazy, in which you more or less never had to go through the same starting area twice, it would be nice to at least have some form of choice. There’s no replayability for me here, and simply switching class doesn’t cut it. Especially since I want to play a warrior.

The end result

I am still on the fence about Tera, which I guess I should be after only 20 levels. I see a great combat system, but the whole game hints about being quite shallow beyond that. There are some UI-problems and guild related problems that they will have to solve (including no access roles for the guild bank, which means that even a guild filling its bank with low-level stuff – like we are doing – is forced to restrict access to the guild master and officers), but those I can live with and simply hope that En Masse and Bluehole fix. There’s the aspect of over-sexualisation, especially for the child-like Elin (even after the “censoring” of their clothes). There’s the issue of community, since what I’ve seen outside of our small guild has been horrible.

All of that can change over time. Someone, somewhere, might even change the High Elf emotes (bloody unlikely, but a man can dream). So maybe I should quit now and return in the future? Tera is a game I can see myself going back to over and over again simply for the thrill of combat – or to see first-hand some troll guild vote themselves into power using the game’s political system, which is bound to happen sooner or later. Bluehole and En Masse are clearly on to something here, they have a great combat-system to build upon. All things considered though, I think they have a lot of problems to deal with before the game will truly shine.

Update: Thanks to the Tera Online subreddit, I found this link to Twitter where a user asks about race changes and gets the reply that En Masse will “have more details on premium services this week.” If race changes become an option and the cost isn’t insane, it might be a way out. I guess it’s not a good sign that I’d rather pay money to change my race than go through those 20 levels again, but yeah… Let’s stay positive!

Over the last weekend, I decided to embrace my inner adult (eh…) and play a game which at least visually looks like it’s aimed at kids. Wakfu is, in a sense, the sequel to Ankama’s incredibly popular (at least in France) Dofus and uses the same visual design – in fact, the two games share a lot of game features as well; including the isometric view, character classes and turn-based combat. It’s more of a sandbox game than Dofus though, with an ecosystem the players control and a political system where the players vote for a governor of their nation every two weeks. It looks naive and sweet, but it’s actually pretty hardcore – especially if you define “hardcore” as being grindy.

One of the more interesting facets of Wakfu is the economy. First of all, you can’t sell anything to NPC vendors; you can only sell stuff to other players (either using the market boards or your own personal shop). The money, called kama, is minted by the players using mined materials. Depending on what materials you use, the more money you get – since I’ve just started, I have to mine 10 iron ore that I can turn into a single kama. That process takes a while. Iron is easy to find, the nation I’ve chosen isn’t very populated so there’s not much competition for the iron, but I still have to run around and look for it since the spawns are spread out across the zone. I then bring the materials to a bank where the minting machines are located.

It should be pointed out that I have no education in economy, what I know about it is based on common knowledge and books like The Undercover Economist. But it’s hard not to consider the kind of research that could be done on this kind of microcosmos. When I pass another player’s shop, I check the prices – even if an item is being sold for one kama, that kama isn’t only a kama; it’s a whole process. That might change the more kamas you have, at some point you are probably “rich” enough to not having to bother with minting your own money. If the market works, then kama flows between players. And since there are no money sinks through an arbitrary NPC market (at least that I know of, remember that I’m a newbie), any kama minted stays in the economy (with the exception of money hoarded by some players).

CCP used to be open about the economy in EVE Online through the economic reports they released every quarter (“we have an actual economist on staff” was a mantra they kept repeating). I’d love to see something similar from Wakfu, and other sandboxes in general. Most games have some form of NPC market though, and money is usually created out of thin air – even EVE, with its complicated market, creates money this way. There’s no doubt that there’s been an inflation over the years as more and more ISK enter the system (again it’s important to point out that a lot of this ISK is hoarded by richer players, which in turn keeps inflation down).

But what happens to a market where only the players can create the money? What impact does the process of having to mine materials to turn into money have on the economy? Is there inflation? At what point does the shift from minting your own money to only using the market happen? Does it happen at all? Since a kama can’t be broken down into smaller parts, what is its actual value for the players?

Sadly, Wakfu doesn’t have that many players right now – it’s hardly barren, but it could do with some more people. I’d love to see a more active culture, but perhaps I’m spoiled by EVE Online. I decided to sign up for three months, I found a nice guild through Reddit, and will give it a proper go. But if there’s an economist out there who would like to take a look at a game completely in the control of the players, I’d recommend Wakfu.

In future posts about it, I’ll probably go back to my own interests – media, culture and sociology. After all, Ankama have created a trans-media product; both Dofus and Wakfu are examples of convergence culture.

Ragnar pushing on for that we shall soon realize that we are not alone, that we are only part of a störra army and we do not – in comparison to some other online role-playing actions – is selected hero. While the intro to the story may not be the best at expressing them, we feel, after all, exactly the same things all of you, so you feel absolutely as one of the crowd when several of us running around in Brooklyn and are clues that will lead us on …

Ah, Google Translate. How I love you. Anyway, I went to Oslo to play The Secret World and the resulting preview article is now up on FZ.se. If you’re not Swedish, and can deal with the kind of garbled English seen above, there’s always the Google Translated version. Be warned, since Google seems to translate the name “Ragnar” as “Raymond” from time to time. I have no idea why.

Then again, everybody loves Ragnar. Badoom-dish.

Last summer, with the release of EVE Online’s Incarna expansion, CCP faced one of the worst backlashes from their community the company had ever had to deal with. It was hardly the first time the company had been in a collision course with their players, but this time it rocked the game – and CCP itself – to the core. When it was over, 20% of the work force was forced out (if this was due to the protests or due to other underlying economic factors shall remain unspoken) and the entire plan for the future of the game was rewritten.

What happened during, and after, the Incarna protests is a great example of something that certain MMO companies seem to forget. The social graph that social media companies love to talk about it very much alive in MMOs as well as on websites such as Facebook and Twitter. Many players spend years in these games and no player exists in a vacuum – while soloing has been given more room in modern online games, most players still form relationships with the people around them; through guilds or random meetings with strangers. Some of these relationships last as long as a player is active, some even escape the bounds of the virtual world. Many of us can tell stories about how we met new friends playing World of Warcraft, just like I tell you stories about how I met new friends through Twitter.

One of the companies that seems to need a reminder about this is SOE. The decision to partner up with German ProSiebenSat.1 (you are excused if you think that name sounds more like a virus than an actual company) and sell off the European servers for eight of their games and at least two future titles is typical of a company that simply does not care or factor in the bonds that their community can create. While the bottom line always is important, and needs to be taken into account, the complete disregard for human interaction that they’ve shown during this whole affair is scary to say the least. At some point, SOE forgot that their players are not isolated islands that simply pony up money to play their games.

While it might be harsh, I do hope that the protests that have erupted on the Everquest 2 forums will keep up. In EVE Online, players could riot inside the game using game mechanics and that way drawing CCP themselves into the meta game. That’s not really possible in theme park MMOs like the ones SOE run, so the forums will have to do – it’s worked before, after all.

I cancelled my Station Access subscription when the news about the P7S1 deal broke. Even if I can still play my illusionist on Crushbone (since my characters there will still be available), and Vanguard is left alone for now, I don’t want to pay money to a company that shows this total disregard for how MMO communities form and how they stay alive. Like most dedicated MMO players I’ve seen a lot of bullshit over the years. Breaking apart communities that have had years to form is one of the most idiotic things I’ve ever been a part of.

I am proud of the people who stand up and protest, the people who are cancelling their subscriptions after years of play. While there’s a clear risk that there is no way out of the deal with P7S1 for SOE, and that the whole thing is a part of something much bigger, cancelling your account and telling the higher echelons of management what you think might have a positive impact on other MMO companies with the finger on the trigger of something equally stupid.

I’ve said before that going back to school, leaving my safe full-time job as assistant editor, was one of the best decisions I’ve made in my life. I have a lot of friends to thank for that, people that supported me and gave me advice.

Having started on my second term (out of six) of media- and communication studies, we’ve started to study academic research methodology for real. I’ve done that before, both in Sociology and Cultural Studies, and I can’t help myself from thinking about what kind of research I could do myself. Compared to Sociology, the major focus here is on qualitative research and action research. To call it “tempting” would be an understatement.

Combine that with reading Jon Ronson’s The Psychopath Test and you got a recipe for disaster.

Action research (AR) and the kind of modern Gonzo journalism (GJ) Ronson does in his books (both The Men Who Stare at Goats and Them! Adventures with Extremists are brilliant examples of modern Gonzo) go very well together. Usually, AR incorporates some form of normative goal; an aim to enter a certain field of research actively and cause change. And while GJ (as genre) might not have a stated goal, it sets up a certain narrative that the researcher can use to present the results of his/her AR.

Qualitative research, in itself, is often highly subjective. GJ, by definition, is subjective – the journalist is the focus of the story and the narrative revolves around him/her. I wouldn’t call Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas academic research, but in Hunter S. Thompson’s own words it was a “A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream”. And when Thompson summarizes the death of the hippie movement and the end of Timothy Leary’s dream – “you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back” – that savage journey seems to have taken him to a place where his experiences become knowledge. He certainly knew a lot more about the hippie “scene” and the kind of madness that prevailed in San Francisco at the time than I will ever do, and his self-biographical masterpiece can (from a certain perspective) be seen as a form of action research.

So where does that leave me, the subject of this blog? First of all, it should be stated that I don’t plan to pump myself full of a “whole galaxy of [...] uppers, downers, screamers, laughters” like Thompson. Secondly, the old tip for budding authors that you should “write about what you know” echoes in my head. So what do I know? With almost ten years in games journalism, I guess I know games. And the game genre that is perfect for both AR and GJ is the MMO genre.

The difference between GJ and AR is that the latter needs an academic and scientific backdrop. While I’ve seen action (and artistic) research that I’m highly sceptical of, some of it at my own university, I don’t want to risk losing sight of the main goal – actual tangible knowledge of the subject matter. Gonzo is a tool, a narrative and framework, but it can’t be allowed to take over completely. There needs to be a method, a question that needs an answer, theories that can both be applied and created.

I am not sure where to start, outside of the mindmap I drew up the other day. But even just thinking about it, planning for it, feels good. Ranting about it here, on my blog, feels good as well – it feels more real that way.

Going through stacks of old papers and notebooks crammed into and around my desk, I found these pages scribbled with notes from when I was playing Star Wars Galaxies. Most of them were related to crafting, which took a lot of effort to learn and get good at. One of them is a list of where I had placed various harvesters and what kind of quality of materials they were pulling up – I’d then cross out a location when I moved them a few days later when that spawn ended. There’s also a list of various collectibles that I tried to get my hands on.

I just thought I’d share them. Oh, SWG. I miss you so. Every time I start up a MMO I am remembered about all the cool things you tried, and became really good at. I’ve said it before – the sunsetting of SWG was a major loss for the genre in general. Remember that you can use your directional keys to scroll through the photos.

(Yes, I also tend to scribble silly pictures whenever I take notes.)