Gamestop delivers.

I mentioned yesterday that I was still waiting for my SE pre-order codes from Gamestop, but they have indeed arrived today. Is it beta time yet…?

WAR beta and EAStore codes!

Just when I was begining to worry a bit about getting my beta codes from the EAStore, ping goes the iPhone and there they are. Score! All three of the codes from pre-ordering the CE are included. Now I’m left waiting on Gamespot for Aria’s codes from the pre-order of the regular edition.

BRING ON THE WAR!

When playing the market in EVE really pays.

I took a quick two day vacation to Maine, just to get away and clear my head a bit after the recent job fiasco. Crap weather aside, it was a very nice trip, especially since it was only an hour away.

I log into EVE to check my market pilot, and what do I find? A extra 20 million ISK in his wallet. Again not an earthshattering amount, but not a bad haul for two days of not logging in. Just like skill training, sometimes the best gameplay happens when you are offline in EVE.

The current goal is to increase volume and sales to the point where they actually matter, which for me will be around 50 million ISk per day. Hopefully once my orders limit is a bit higher, that will be possible. So far however, I’m having a blast just seeing stuff move, seeing what prices work, and how it all flows. Great stuff indeed.

Reverse WoW-thinking.

Working on Book 3 in LoTRO last night reminded me why MMOs are as great as they are. When you get a group of people together, and everything goes well, the experience is far greater than anything a single player game could offer. The big problem of course is when you get people together, and things don’t go well, it’s often far worse than any single player experience. At best you waste a lot of time, at worst you get reminded what High School was like.

A bad grouping experience can make a player jaded, and turn them into a solo player, even in an online world. WoW provided the perfect game for those sick of pick up groups, as you could now solo all the way until the level cap. While a nice feature, the side effect is that now 4 million or so MMO players in the USA and EU view PuGs as something to avoid. WoW has taught them not to group until the level cap, where it then forces you into non-committal groups (BG) or forced grouping (raiding).

One of the things I’m most excited about with Warhammer is the ‘open group’ system, along with Public Quests. It certainly looks like Mythic is trying to get people to play together again in an online world, to work together with strangers and not fear them like the plague. WoW had a culture of bad groups, so even those that might not usual bail on a group did so because that was the culture. Hopefully WAR will foster the opposite, and the mindset of the majority will be to cooperate. Undoing the WoW-mentality will be a tough hurdle, but hopefully Mythic has the tools and design to do just that.

Quick LoTRO update.

Yes I still play LoTRO, just don’t have too much to say about it. It’s a very solid MMO that is well worth playing. It does not break a whole lot of new ground, or do any one thing particularly well (aside from perhaps using the LoTR license effectively), but its just solid.

Aria and I are currently level 32 and climbing, and looking forward to 35+, the spot we quit last time. I’m hoping I will be able to see most of LoTRO before WAR is out and grabs what I expect to be most of my MMO time. We will see…

EVE Market update, 100 million ISK.

Market Update time.

After a week or so of really focusing on the market, I’ve learned quite a bit, and made plenty of mistakes (which is kind of like the EVE mantra really). The good news is that I now believe my base of operations will do just fine for my little market mogul. Traffic seems high, it’s a minor mission hub, and it even has decent asteroid fields to attract miners.

Now my mistakes. If you produce 500 cargo expanders, don’t list all 500 in one order, even if you put them up for a good price. People buy them 1-4 at a time, and while you might get a few buyers a day, it will take next to forever to move all 500. What I should have done is split the 500 into groups of 50, and list each group at a different station, maximizing on those impulse buys that are too common in EVE. Why fly to the next station just to save 1000 ISK, right?

I also made some mistakes with my buy orders. Being the top buyer is often not enough, you also have to offer an aggressive price to encourage others to just take the offered price rather than list the item themselves. As long as you can make a decent profit, it’s worth getting more aggressive.

It total, I believe I’ve made somewhere around 100 million ISK in profit so far. A low amount compared to other traders, but decent enough for someone still learning and making mistakes. My current buy/sell limit is 53 right now, which is somewhat restrictive. In a week or so it should be much higher, and at that point I can really start to expand and think big.

Prolonged vacation

So I lost my job yesterday. For me, that means it’s time to scramble and find a new job, for you (the reader) that means possibly more/less posting. I’m not sure which just yet, but we will see. While being unemployed means I have a lot of time, nothing motivates to write like sitting in a cube with nothing to do.

Oh, and if anyone is hiring in the Boston MA area, let me know.

Warhammer Online being overlooked.

Moving away from game theory and the other more common topics generally covered, I wanted to bring up something that has irked me for a while now.

Why is it that in every earnings report and preview, Warhammer is never mentioned as a potential hit for publisher EA? Is it as simple as EA not getting a big cut from the game, so it’s impact will be small regardless, or is it just the opinion of ‘market people’ that WAR won’t set the world on fire in terms of sales?

If it’s the second theory, I really find that really odd. Every report from beta has been very positive, and everything points to a solid, smooth launch for WAR, baring server overload issues and queues like we saw with WoW, but you only get that problem if more people bought your game than you estimated, so it’s kind of a nice problem to have

Now we know an MMO has to remain popular for however long to actually be profitable, as the initial sales are used to recoup development costs, but again WAR is poised to stay popular due to RvR being its endgame, rather than the more burnout prone PvE/Raiding endgame. There is also no big MMO release after WAR for quite some time, WoW expansion aside, as anything really big is at least 1yr+ away, so you have to figure if WAR is a success, it won’t face serious competition for a nice window of time, again helping profit numbers.

Are they just missing what more focused MMO fans have predicted for quite some time, or is there more to this than we are able to see?

End-game content is not the ONLY content.

Tobold, MMOCrunch and Random Battle are three blogs which have recently talked about solo vs group play in an MMO, and everyone brings some good points to the table. One major issue during the leveling process is that far too often, grouping actually slows progress down, and hence players solo instead.

The quick fix to this would be to make grouping more rewarding than soloing, while not going as far as EQ1 with forced groups. Players avoid groups in WoW because they know they can accomplish more solo, and hit the level cap faster.

What stuck me however is not the group vs solo aspect, but the whole ‘rush to cap’ notion. Why do we just assume everyone want to hit the level cap as fast as possible?

The easy answer is, ‘Blizzard said so’. It’s no secret the ‘good’ stuff in WoW is at the level cap, at least according to Blizzard, which is in sharp contrast to what most people really like about WoW; the questing and fast paced progression.

Before WoW (yes, people played MMO’s before WoW), rushing head first to the level cap was not how most people played. No one rushed to 7x GM in UO. You blatantly could not rush to cap in EQ due to how long that whole process use to be. In Asheron’s Call, after a certain point, level gains were insignificant due to diminishing returns. DAoC had plenty of PvP pre-cap. The list goes on.

Yet today, in WoW/LoTRO/AoC (and I’m sure others), you have the ‘leveling game’ and the ‘end game’, and the two are usually night and day. Will that be the case with Warhammer Online as well? The reason I ask is because for months now, we have been reading about all these great Public Quests and PvP areas, which are zone/level specific. What if I really love doing a certain Public Quest, or enjoy how PvP works at a certain level? Will I still need to rush and hit cap, just so I can join the ‘official’ endgame of city sieges?

Unlike questing, PvP is almost endless content, and since WAR is built around PvP, who is to say people won’t slow down and enjoy each tier of PvP, instead of always looking at their XP bar and grinding out another level. Perhaps the whole ‘group vs solo’ issue will be a non-factor, as players instead focus on their current tier and battling the enemy, enjoying what is currently in front of them, instead of rushing towards the end-game carrot. One can hope, right?

Can Blizzard dig itself out of this hole…

We have a shortage of tanks, how are we going to fix that?

Trick everyone into playing a new tank class.

But people hate tank classes…

Yea but this one will be more fun, have more utility, and will have a fancy ‘hero’ title.

Hmm that sounds unbalanced…

No it’s cool, we will gimp him on the high end, so he can’t dps/tank/heal as well as focused classes, but he will be super fun in that part of the game we no longer view as important, leveling.

Blizzard’s fix to the warrior shortage, make a class that’s more fun to play than the current tank, while not being quite on par in terms of tanking, and make him more solo-friendly. That fixes EVERYTHING…