It’s ok to hate bad PvP, but have you played good PvP?

What if Warhammer PvP is something PvE players do end up liking? I mean, if EQ PvP is your only example of PvP, I don’t blame you for hating PvP. Same goes for WoW PvP. Two PvE games that tried to add PvP as an extra, and in turn made a lot of people really hate PvP.

What if a lot of those ‘PvE only’ players see what decent PvP is like in WAR, and actually enjoy it? Word spreads to their PvE only buddies, and down the snowball rolls.

The major problem with the perception of PvP in MMO’s is that the biggest games had really, really awful PvP, and in turn PvP-focused MMOs were themselves bad games. EQ1 and WoW are the two big PvE games, and both had horrid PvP systems tacked on to PvE games. Shadowbane and Fury were both ‘PvP focused’, yet both were crippled by numerous issues not at all related to PvP. A bad MMO is a bad MMO, regardless if its a PvP or PvE game. Same goes for a good MMO. Even PvP diehards have likely played WoW simply because it’s a good MMO.

What is possibly unique about Warhammer Online is that, from all accounts so far, it’s a good MMO and it’s PvP focused. That’s never happened in MMO land on a mass market scale. The good news is WAR is looking very solid, the bad news is it has the ‘PvP’ stigma to overcome. The difference between 500k subscribers and 5 million might come down to convincing those PvE-only ‘carebears’ that PvP done correctly is a great way to game.

One year of blogging done, and what a year it has been!

It’s been a year already?

I initially started blogging for what I believe is the most common reason: to have a place to keep all my thoughts and ideas about gaming in one place. What originally started as just ‘something to do’ has slowly grown into a very enjoyable hobby and craft. Over the course of the last year, I’ve been rather heavily involved in the MMO blogosphere, be it commenting, linking, or podcasting. Through it all, I’ve had a great time and gained a huge amount of insight into not only MMO games, but my own approach to them as well. Not to mention all the great bloggers and podcasters I’ve gone back and forth with, something that would likely not have happened without the blog.

I figured the best (easiest?) way to break down my first year as a blogger was just to go over the great statistics that WordPress provides, and comment on anything I found interesting or surprising.

First up, the very top-level stuff.

Blog Stats

Total views: 104,123

Busiest day: 11,852 - Thursday, September 6, 2007

Posts: 253

Comments: 1,658

As I recently posted here, the blog hit 100k views not too long ago, a nice round number. I never gave traffic much thought when I started, but I must say I’m very happy hitting 100k in my first year.

The busiest day, way back in September, is the result of getting linked by the BBC tech page, a quote from a somewhat random post I made about WoW and the future expansion. That was an exciting day, especially since it came so early in this blog’s life. Sadly the retention rate from all that traffic was rather low, although it certainly helped. As the stats below will show, no other day/post has really come close to that huge, single hit boost from the BBC, although if the current traffic trend continues, it will happen eventually.

The total posts number, 253, is overall rather decent considering I generally don’t post on Saturday or Sunday. If my math is correct (odds are low), that means out of the remaining 261 days, I posted on average almost every single day. Clearly days with multiple posts help offset days I posted nothing, but even so, a near post-a-day average not counting the weekend is fine by me. Now to keep it up in year two!

The 1658 comments stat is what I think I’m most proud of, as to me it means people actually cared enough about what was posted here to say something about it. Comments are what really drive a blogger to continue and to stay active, and they are a great source of motivation, so thank you to everyone who has taken the time to write something. (yes, even you random troll)

Top Posts for all days ending 2008-06-25

The love and hate game, WoW style. - 16,875

Screen shot comparison. - 2,636

Looking in the mirror; the sickness that was WoW raiding - 1,918

EQ2, trial of the never-ending download. - 1,632

Throwing down the gauntlet, the great MMO challenge - 1,414

Ebolt anyone? - 1,230

Funcom to AoC players, GTFO! - 1,176

Can my toaster run AoC? - Concerned Walmart Shopper -1,143

Stuck in easy mode. - 1,059

Ghost town, population you. - 704

As mentioned above, the first post is the one linked by the BBC, and as you can see, it’s far and away the top post. The next post is somewhat interesting, in that the concept was rather simple, and it was also one of the few posts with pictures. Also of interest is that the post was about EQ2, a game that I overall spent a limited amount of time with. This trend continues in a few more examples, showing that the EQ2 community is very active, and that EQ2 itself drives a lot of MMO traffic. Top post three is one of my favorites, as it was a very personal retrospective look of my time in WoW, and in particular the endgame raiding grind. In addition to the post itself, a lot of really great comments have been left by others sharing their own experiences and methods of escaping that trap. I won’t go into detail about the rest, other than to say a few more recent posts have snuck into the top ten, and that my original post, ‘Ebolt anyone?’, is holding on strong despite originally getting very little traffic due to the blog being new. UO reminiscing still gets peoples attention, a clear sign that you never really forget your first MMO, as UO was for so many.

Referrers for all days ending 2008-06-25

news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/default - 11,015

news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/default - 3,159

wowinsider.com - 2,922

virginworlds.com/home.php - 1,831

google.com/reader/view - 1,288

tobolds.blogspot.com - 1,055

eq2-daily.com - 838

keenandgraev.com - 650

killtenrats.com - 499

crazykinux.com - 398

Again the BBC dominates the top spot, and even spot number two, despite that link being on the back page. WoWInsider, being the huge a site that it is, is not a very surprising number three, followed by the ever awesome VirginWorlds news feed. Tobold, the blog overlord himself, is not surprisingly the first blog on the list, along with Keen and Graev, KTR and the link-happy man himself, Crazy Kinux. Thank you to everyone who has linked me, it drives traffic, which leads to comments, which leads to happy blogging!

Search Terms for all days ending 2008-06-25

Syncaine - 334

vanguard trial - 312

hardcore casual - 267

eq2 - 259

wow progress - 219

hardcore - 195

warhammer podcast - 132

eq2 trial - 119

sotnw - 92

switch mmo - 77

shadowbane reset - 70

This list is a little surprising. Spots one and three are all about me, and you know, I’m kind of a big deal on Google (clearly kidding). The big surprise is spot number two, people looking for a Vanguard trial. How does that game NOT have a trial? Seriously, I’ve been looking to try Vanguard for a long time now, if just to see what all the fuss is about, and yet without a trial it’s never going to happen. It’s silly that SOE has not gotten around to this yet. Another random surprise is the amount of searches that lead people here about Sword of the New World (sotnw). I only briefly posted about the game, and generally concluded that while pretty, the game was an afk-grind with little point. Maybe that’s what people are looking for though, who knows…

Finally here are two charts (remember, people like pictures) showing overall traffic flow. On the monthly chart, you can clearly see the spike from the BBC link, followed by a return to the more normal, steady growth. Hopefully the trend continues, and one day that BBC spike won’t look quite as dominant.

The weekly chart shows that while monthly traffic might be fairly steady, week to week traffic is very sporadic. This is due no doubt to a combination of who linked me, what exactly I posted that week, and how active I was commenting on other blogs and generating hits from that. The one thing I have learned after a year of blogging is you can never really predict what will drive traffic. A well-crafted post (imo of course) may get little attention, while a quick post about something random will start a firestorm. The important thing to remember is to post about what YOU want to talk about, and not worry about posting the next ‘major hit’ blog post. If you write honestly and with passion, people will pick up on it and drop by.

To sum it all up, it’s been a crazy first year for me in regards to this blog. It’s been a huge learning experience, and hopefully I continue to improve and provide interesting reading for everyone. I’m very much looking forward to year two, especially since the ‘next big think’ in Warhammer will hit, and no doubt spur some good debate in our corner of the Internet. I can’t wait!

Thanks again to all the reader!

Focused crafting, not just a bullet point on a box!

Psychochild breaks down the general ideas behind crafting in his recent post, a topic that was addressed here on this blog not too long ago.

While I don’t want to rehash the great discussion we had from my previous post, I do want to touch on a point that I might have missed, and that Psychochild mentions; who are we designing crafting for?

He points out that many socializers enjoy crafting, as it allows them to chat and be social while still getting something done. While you create 100 bronze daggers, you might as well chat it up with your guild mates, right? In this case, the actual crafting is just a side event to being social, and since it’s a side event, how engaging or useful the actual crafting is might not be that important. More important is that the crafting does not interfere with chatting, so active input systems like EQ2 tend to be less favorable to something like LoTRO, where you can queue up those 100 daggers, click a button, and chat until all 100 are finished. Sure you are just going to vendor all 100 daggers, but again, that’s not really the point, the point is that crafting is an excuse to stand around and just chat without feeling like you are doing nothing. No matter the play style preference, we all like to feel like we are advancing our characters, be it levels or crafting skill.

So at least for socializers (incoming generalization, relax), crafting being actually useful is great, but not make-or-break important. Systems where 99% of all crafted items are worthless vendor trash are not seen as broken, but rather as ‘just the way it is’. If you are aiming crafting at socializers, you focus more on creating a simple, unobtrusive system rather than something that will significantly impact gameplay or power balance. This might explain most crafting systems in MMOs. If you are not primarily a socializer, you might miss the point of crafting.

But what if we wanted to target crafting at other play styles like achiever, explorer, or killer? Would there even be an interest in such a system? EVE, for instance, has a vastly different crafting system, one that appeals more to the min/max crowd than to the typical socializer. If dumping data into excel and analyzing it is your idea of fun, you will love the crafting/market game in EVE. And lots of people do love it, to the point that that is all they do in EVE. Whole Corporations (guilds) exist to focus on mining/production/selling. And that aspect of EVE has a profound impact on all other aspects of the game. Regardless of what you do, the crafting system in EVE has impacted your game. In contrast, you could go from 1-70 and see almost all the content in WoW without ever coming into direct contact with crafting. You can ignore the nodes, ignore the crafting section of the AH, and never need to use a single crafted item.

At some point during this rambling I got a bit off track, sorry… My point is that it’s important to identify who you are targeting with your crafting system, and design reasonable expectations around it. If we are targeting the socializer, what the system does not do, impede chatting, is more important than what it does do, create useful items. On the other hand, if we are aiming at the min/maxer, you better make sure your system is not only useful, but centrally important to everything else, and deep enough to appeal to the number crunchers without excluding everyone else. Above all, what should be avoided is a crafting system simply thrown into an MMO for the sake of a bullet point on the back of the box, or because someone in design just assumes all MMO’s need a crafting system, regardless of how it actually fits into your game.

Maybe if crafting was targeted more to a specific audience it would receive less hate for being worthless or misguided. Just like raiding or PvP targets an audience, why can’t crafting?

Stop raising the level cap, it’s not working!

For years now MMO gamers expect a level increase when their MMO of choice releases an expansion pack. Bumping up the level cap a few levels is as natural as adding new items or monsters, but is it really needed? Is WoW a better game because the cap is 70 and not 60? Did all those level increases in EQ1 really push the gameplay? Will LoTRO be that much more fun once Turbine lets us level to 60 instead of 50?

First let’s break down exactly what more levels means, because too often player will lump a bunch of changes and assume they are all the direct result of a level increase. First, it means gaining experience again, something that is a very natural process in an MMO until you cap. People like to see the XP bar fill up and finally ding. It’s solid confirmation that you are making progress. Next you get new or improved skills as you gain levels, which again people really like. It’s fun to go to a trainer and see what new tools you can use. And finally, leveling again means a gear reset, as the older top tier stuff is quickly replaced with higher level quest and common drop items, putting everyone back on a more level playing field, at least until the next wave of grinding/raiding/pvp takes place.

All of the above sounds like fun stuff, and I would venture to guess is what most people think of when they hear ‘level increase’. Yet all of the above can be accomplished without a level increase, albeit in more non-traditional ways.

Want players gaining ‘experience’ from quests and mobs again? Allow specialized progression paths, something similar to EQ2’s AA point. Instead of just blatantly making everyone more powerful, allow players to specialize more, with more choices on how to kit their max level character. Healers could focus on either single target healing or AoE healing, same with DPS, and tanks could pick between increased magic or physical mitigation. However you structure it, the system would allow character growth that would feel similar to gaining experience and leveling, without actually changing the level cap. Quests and even monster kills could all contribute to an ‘alternate XP’ pool, and players could spend those points on growth paths of their choosing. Imagine questing and gaining more talent points in WoW, without the actual need to gain a level to get a point.

As for new skills, why not create some challenging quests and encounters with the rewards being class specific skills. Instead of just handing new abilities out when someone dings, give players a clear path in the form of a quest chain, perhaps something similar to the epic feel and pacing of LoTRO’s book quests, and allow them to pick what skills to pursue and in what order. All players like choices and feeling in control of their characters, and this would be the perfect way to facilitate this.

The gear reset is a cheap copout. It’s an admission that the games itemization is broken, and the quick fix is to return everyone to point A and let them grind all over again. Players for the most part hate gear resets, as any item that was hard fought or required great effort is now worthless. Gear resets also completely screw with an economy, as top level items and crafting materials sink in value. The fact that you can once again gain quick upgrades to your gear, like you normally do when leveling, is not reason enough to turn your game upside down. Plus that quick gear gain is very temporary, as players will quickly hit the new level cap and once again fall into the slow grind for gear that happens in most MMOs.

In addition to issues with gear, raising the level cap also has many other negative impacts on a game. Old ‘end game’ content is quickly forgotten and never used again, meaning all that development time and effort is completely wasted. Zones that once served as tougher ‘end game’ zones, like Silithus in WoW, are skipped by most players as they race towards the new level cap. Often these zones contained the more complex chain quests, requiring former level capped players to put in substantial effort to gain a reward. Once you raise the cap, you remove the motivation to put in that effort for those rewards, as there value has been greatly diminished thanks to the gear reset.

Along with unused zones, you also make all high level crafting obsolete as well. Why chase after rare materials to make an epic former level cap weapon, when in a few levels it won’t be useful? All of those rare materials drop in value, and the need to acquire a rare pattern is lost. Most expansions ‘expand’ crafting by adding new patterns, but in reality for every pattern added, an older pattern is rendered obsolete. In the end crafters generally have just as many, if not less, options to craft useful items. Not that much of an ‘expansion’, is it?

And finally, the most common problem with raising the level cap is that you stretch your player population across more zones without increasing the size of that population, while also raising the amount of time required for new players to join their maxed out friends. You either allow this problem to persist, or you add in another quick fix and change early leveling speed, like WoW did. As with most quick fixes, you end up breaking up the pacing of older content in an effort to rush everyone to your end game. The same end game your expansion and level cap increase seek to fix…

You can’t have everything, sorry.

Keen has a post up about his recent experience in DAoC. The gist of it is that after the ‘newness’ of being back in DAoC wore off, the fact that the PvE in DAoC is not as on-rails as more recent MMOs was a deal breaker for him, and he could not get himself to play through the PvE portion just to get to the PvP part that he wanted.

Along with the post there are some great comments left by several people debating both sides of the issue. After posting one comment myself, I had another going until I realized it was getting lengthy, and when that happens, its blog post time.

I think two huge issues play into Keen’s feeling about his recent trip to DAoC. First off, he has a pre-set image of what he REMEMBERS DAoC being, and more importantly, he remembers DAoC as a max level character focused on RvR. DAoC was NEVER an amazing PvE game, because it was never designed to be. It’s a PvP game, and as with any GOOD PvP-focused game, you have to make sacrifices on the PvE end to get good PvP. I really don’t think that point is debatable either, games either get PvE or PvP right, or they try to do both and everything ends up meh. UO had good PvP, eh PvE. EQ1 had good PvE, trash PvP. AC Darktide was good PvP, no one cared about the PvE. WoW HAD good PvE, trash PvP, and is now stuck in ‘meh’ mode for both as it tries to become an e-sport. EVE has good PvP, eh PvE. The list goes on and on.

So issue one is that Keen has to accept the PvE aspect of DAoC in order to get to the PvP. This is not to say the PvE in DAoC is worthless, its not, but it’s not what sells the game. You can’t expect WoW 1-60 in DAoC, and then still expect the RvR game to be there as well. It’s similar to someone logging into EVE and expecting ‘!’ above the NPCs heads, while still hoping to get into fleet warfare later; it just does not work that way. The key is to know and accept that day 1. You don’t level a character in EQ2 to max so you can get to the sweet PvP at the end, right? So why expect that from DAoC?

The second issue, and I think this is the big one, is that too many people assume that what worked back in early 2000 won’t work today, because somehow WoW was this giant revolution in MMO design and made any idea before it obsolete. People make statements that things like open world PvP, death penalties, open-ended PvE are all dead, generally based on the fact that WoW does not have them, and since 10 million people play WoW, that must be the one and only way to design an MMO. The truth is almost any idea done well works. Open PvP works, just not in WoW. It works great in EVE, and removing it from EVE would basically be one step away from shutting off Tranquility. Same with death penalties, they don’t work in WoW, but done right they do. The death penalty of item loss was a major factor in AC Darktide working as well as it did, and without it the PvP would have suffered greatly. Or take a game like LoTRO, even being as close to a WoW clone as it is, it does open-ended PvE well in the form of deeds, giving you a reason, however small, to just go and grind away on mobs. The key is, if you hate grinding mobs, LoTRO does not force you to do it, as the deeds are somewhat minor. But the option is still there, and for many, it works really well.

As the next wave of big name titles is set for release, it’s very important to remember that those games are not WoW. If you want an on-rails ! chase, WoW has perfected it, so stick with perfection and enjoy it. But if you want something else, either because the ! chase is not your thing, or because you have been doing it for however long and want something else, you have to accept the give and take of design. The next game you play after WoW won’t do its thing PLUS everything WoW did, that’s just not possible. If it’s designed well, it will do its thing well, and hopefully that will be reason enough to play. But going into a game and comparing it constantly to WoW’s highlights, you will be forever disappointed, no matter how well the game hits its goals.

It’s everyones favorite topic.

RMT talk time!

Tobold has a post up today about the subject, quoting a well written article from Zen of Design by Damion. I’ve made a few comments on Tobold’s blog, but felt the need to get into more detail here.

First off, we are talking about RMT in a game NOT designed for RMT. I could care less what happens on the few EQ2 servers that support RMT, or what happens in the browser-based land of cartoon micro transactions. I care about MMOs that are monthly subscription games with a competitive environment.

Next it’s important to keep things in context. We are trying to keep things fair in an online game world. One step to achieve that fairness is to limit outside factors and keep everything that happens in that world subject only to factors in the world itself. In other words, not have some players start at max level, while others start at level 1. Or not to reward all player characters that start with the letter C, while penalizing all characters starting with D.

Since we are talking about monthly sub games here, the way a developer makes money is by having a player subscribe for as long as possible, which means providing content that takes as long as possible to complete. If it was possible to achieve everything in a sub based MMO in the first month, very likely a large portion of that player base would leave after their first month, having seen and experienced everything. Hence we have long grinds and ‘carrot on a stick’ mentality objectives, with the more extreme rewards being on increasingly longer grinds.

The key balance issue is how to reward those with lots of time, while still keeping those with less time competitive enough to keep pace. This is the reason upgrades at the highest level are so small compared to early game upgrades. Going from a green item to a blue is a noticeable change, while the difference between T5 and T6 is far smaller.

We still reward those with more time, but good design will limit that advantage enough to keep those with good skills but limited time competitive, while still giving the power gamer reason to stay. Compare the old honor system with the one Blizzard has now. In the past, only the very elite made the highest ranks due to the pure amount of dedication it took to reach such levels. No amount of skill could compete with the overwhelming importance of time. The new system still rewards those with more time, but also allows those with less to keep pace. Skill factors in as well; those with higher skill will require less total time to achieve a reward, and the very upper level rewards (2000+ arena rank) are reserved for the top skill teams.

So how does RMT factor into all this? RMT replaces the ‘time’ baseline, instead factoring in real world money, an outside factor. Now the balance of power is no longer a formula of skill + time, but skill + money/time, where any amount of time can be replaced by money. And since unlike time, money is not strictly a limited factor, you could easily overwhelm the skill factor with large amounts of money. How many times have you seen a fully decked out character playing terrible, and just assumed the character is Ebayed? As bad as the PuG scene in WoW is now, imagine if half your group was ebay characters, people just messing around with their new toy? Now what if instead of just wasting your time in WoW, that ebay player costs you a fleet battle in EVE, costing your Corp billions of ISK or territory control?

The challenge of balancing a competitive MMO are difficult enough without the added frustration of RMT, as more often than not RMT is simply used as a crutch due to a player’s lack of skill and or time, and in a truly balanced game the RMT would offset the skill factor more than time. No matter how you design a game, certain players will attempt to cheat the system to get ahead, and I view RMT as just one tool in a cheaters arsenal, little different than steroid use in sports or sneaking notes in to a test. You are bringing in an outside factor to overcome your own lack of performance compared to others.

It’s like the good old days. Thanks SOE!

Now this is an interesting story.

First off I have to say that Massively has really been impressing me lately. First they listened to the community and moved a ton of their Second Life stories to their own section, and generally reduced the SL clutter that was dominating the front page. While the land of flying penises surely has it’s place, it should not be every other story on an otherwise quality MMO site. And now, they post this story, which will no doubt upset a few high-ups over at SOE, possibly costing them future exclusives. Job well done guys, and keep it up. We have enough trash ‘news’ sites like IGN already giving us ‘exclusive’ fluff piece previews.

On to the story itself; for anyone who has been following MMOs since the UO/EQ1 days, news that SOE abuses their players should not come as a surprise to people. A quick Google search will bring up countless examples of shady dealings, yet for a bit it seemed that SOE was trying to turn its image around and actually respect the players that made them who they are today. I guess not…

While any corporation as big as Sony will have its skeletons, it’s borderline amazing that SOE has had as many scandals as they have had, especially in a market as dependent on its player community as the MMO space. Since the release of WoW, and the massive disappointment that was EQ2 at launch (and perhaps even now), SOE no longer holds the top spot in the MMO world, and as such can not afford to ignore the smaller, more vocal minority while catering to the massive ‘don’t care casual’ community like Blizzard does.

Now is the Massively piece the be-all-end-all of the story? Of course not, it’s only one side. But odds are good that’s the only side we will ever hear, as it is unlikely that SOE will even acknowledge the story, hoping instead that it will just fade away like so many previous PR disasters. Luckily for MMO fans, and unfortunately for SOE, Google makes that ‘fade away’ process rather difficult.

update: Very likely just a coincidence, but I do find it funny that of all days, today is the day that SOE announces a ‘Treasure Chest’ of information based on the official forums. From the announcment:

With so much information being posted in the EQII Official Forums at all times, it can be very hard to keep up with it and very easy to miss some real gems and opportunities to share. Have no fear though; the Treasure Chest is here to highlight interesting, unusual, and humorous posts, as well as opportunities to help your fellow player with a question or two!

Wonder if any of the ‘treasure’ will be how to get your duped character from test to live…

To the time machine, we need to correct a grave mistake!

A good topic making the rounds in our blog community asks the question ‘what MMO would you unmake?’ The point being what game do you feel the MMO space would be better off without? Too many blogs to link here have already commented on the subject, yet I don’t believe anyone has mentioned the following game: (comment and correct me if I missed something)

Shadowbane.

Why would I unmake Shadowbane? Because at its core, Shadowbane is everything I dream about in an MMO, and in my opinion has the base structure to be an amazing game. It’s a PvP focused, dark fantasy, player controlled game that revolves around guilds laying siege to towns built by other guilds. Many other games have incorporated some aspects of those ideas, like DAoC with player controlled keeps and some siege weapon use, EVE Online with player built Outposts and Corp vs Corp focused PvP, the upcoming Warhammer Online and Age of Conan games featuring PvP, etc; yet no game before or since has focused on the guild vs guild, player build and controlled city vs city gameplay of Shadowbane.

So again, why would I unmake it? At launch, Shadowbane was a technical mess, released long before it was ready. It also never had the commercial backing of a major release. As a result, it was a commercial failure, and now resides in ‘free to play’ land with all the other failed MMOs. Developers looked at that failure and assumed a PvP-focused MMO was not commercially viable, and along with the success of the PvE friendly WoW, MMOs went away from PvP and into pure PvE (WoW, EQ2, DDO, AC2, LoTRO, the list goes on). Only recently are we seeing the return of PvP focused MMOs with WAR and AoC, along with the continued success of EVE Online.

In a world were Shadowbane never came out, perhaps it would not take as long for the PvP community to get some love. And perhaps we would actually see a quality PvP based fantasy game without the trappings of PvE elements like gear dependency, quest grinds, leveling treadmills, etc. It would also be tough to sell the idea of a dark fantasy, city vs city PvP game now to a major publisher, considering we supposedly already have that game and we see how that worked out.

Remove Shadowbane, use those core ideas, give a good studio enough money and time to actually finish the game, and I’ll be one happy MMO gamer.

The value of the blogging community.

Darren made a nice plea over at his site for bloggers to get into the WAR beta, or at the very least Keen. I support that (both the bloggers part and the Keen part), and can’t really come up with a great reason to keep bloggers out.

One reason that does come up whenever the whole ‘are bloggers press’ issue comes up is that the company does not want negative publicity about a game still in beta. Just like certain companies refuse to send PCGamer or other magazines pre-release copies of their games for review, some people think MMO developers apply the same reasoning to bloggers. The reason I have trouble accepting this is that MMO blogs reach a relatively small audience, and a very hardcore one at that. Regardless of your play style or game time per week, anyone who goes out and finds an MMO blog has long since crossed the threshold of casual and into hardcore status. True casual players are not even aware of official forums, let alone fan sites or blogs.

But let’s assume a developer wants to grab even the small hardcore population that does read blogs and listens to podcasts, is keeping the bloggers themselves out going to help? For one thing, bloggers tend to be a close knit community that respect each others opinion (for the most part), and take what is said into consideration. Unlike when I read a PCGamer preview and take everything said with a grain of salt, if I read something positive on a blog that I respect I take it as truth. When I read that Tabula Rasa ‘turned a corner’ and was actually fun, it put the game on my list. Based almost exclusively on Tipa’s writing, I went out and bought two copies of EQ2 to give it a try. Sure it did not work out, but it was two copies and three months of subs I would have never bought had it not been for her blog. On the other hand, while I was in the PotBS beta, my decision to see what the game was like in release was put on hold based on Keen’s PvP write ups, showing me that game was not yet ready for prime time. Of course, if in two months Keen makes a post saying all is well and PvP in Pirates is a blast, that could sway my opinion right back.

My point is that while bloggers do influence buying decisions among our small community, they do so with honesty. No one here gets paid to write glowing reviews or previews. If you have a solid product, bloggers will write that. If your game has issues, we will write that as well. Ultimately it comes down to the buyer; it just so happens bloggers and our readers tend to be better informed than the average gamer, able to see past the bullet point fluff and analyze the details. If everything checks out, you get our money. If you have some skeletons that you tried to hide, you likely won’t see many of us subscribe until you straighten those issues out.

Goons, EVE, and Freedom!

This Wired article is making the rounds on various blogs, and as it focuses on griefing, which is somewhat related to PvP, I figured I would throw in my two cents. Go read the article first, if nothing else it’s an interesting piece.

The biggest ‘news’ out of the whole thing seems to be the intent of the Goons in EVE Online to not only destroy your ship, but to make you quit the game itself. Many people are viewing this as exactly the reason no sane developer would let such PvP exist; who wants to lose accounts and money, right? The somewhat ironic thing is that EVE Online, a 4 year old game that had a horrible launch, no marketing budget, and is limited in its appeal due to being Sci-Fi and terribly difficult to get into at the start, is still growing at a very healthy rate. Go look at what MMOs launched around the same time as EVE, and see how many of them are still growing or even maintaining their numbers.

So how is it that a game which allows players to abuse others and to beat them to the point where they quit is still growing? Has WoW not taught us that unless we give everyone access to everything in a no risk solo manner, we are doomed to fail miserably? Sure the slaughter of ‘sheep’ worked in 98 with Ultima Online, but we have grown since then, all the ‘sheep’ have options now, and they won’t stand to be butchered. As soon as the first sign of unwanted danger arises, they cancel their account and jump ship, leaving that game to slowly rot and die, right?

Yes, some do get frustrated and quit. It would be foolish to think otherwise and clearly this type of game is not for everyone. But how many players have downloaded the trial for EVE because they have heard or read about the incredible stuff players are doing in EVE? How many read the story about the bank heist, or heard about a titan being destroyed in an epic battle, and said ‘that’s awesome, let me give that game a shot’. Can you say the same thing about the first time Onyxia was killed, or the first time someone completed an epic armor set in WoW? How many players signed up for the WoW trial because of some guild’s raid progression or high ranking Arena team? And all those stories are products of EVE’s design, a design which gives such great freedom to its players. Take away that freedom, and you quickly take away every great moment in that games very rich history, a history which has no doubt created more paying accounts than it has destroyed. In gaming, just like in life, freedom is a double edged sword. Some will find ways to abuse it, while others will embrace it and creating unexpected and positive results. The real question is, are you a communist (WoW player) or a free thinking man/woman (EVE)? (bets on who will fail to see that as a joke anyone?)

And before everyone points out that WoW has 10 billion users, let’s just remember that WoW is a phenomenon that is as much a product of timing as it is of game design. A far more accurate comparison would be something like EQ2 or LoTRO numbers, which are still higher, but not in a hundreds of thousands vs millions way. Oh and before this turns into another PvP vs PvE debate, keep in mind I’m not saying all PvE games should be burned and destroyed, but rather that the market supports both styles in a financially viable way. Had WoW not gotten lucky, perhaps both styles would be viewed as equally viable models, but that’s an entirely different post…