An alternate WoW

What if there was a World of Warcraft where the amount of content was the same as today, but the max level was somewhere around 20-25? E.g. when a Horde player hit Barrens and completed the quests there, he/she would be at max level.

From there on every mob, every dungeon would have enemies typically level 20-something, with big bosses perhaps into the 30s.

Weapons and armor would have various stats, but with smaller differences than this reality’s WoW. The stats could also be moved around with some work and you could obtain stat modifiers separately.

Only a subset of skills would be available when the max level were reached, but you could earn more and better skills through quests or indirectly through rewards that allowed you to buy more skills (i.e. rewards + money would be needed).

In this alternate WoW the end game would just be about raiding – in fact, almost the whole game would be the “end game”.

Would you play an alternate WoW like that? Would you stick with it? What do you think the guild structure and the community would be like?

This is just a thought experiment combining WoW’s content with some of the game mechanics of another game by some ex-Warcraft developers. Would a game like that have been developed with a different Blizzard?

Time vs item subscriptions

NCSoft is in the process of changing their subscription model for Lineage and Lineage II, accoding to some comments on their latest earnings report call for Q2 2008 – this info is probably somewhere else also, but I first heard it on the call.

Instead of just offering a subscription with unlimited time, they will have three different options which you can choose from for that subscription fee:

• Play with unlimited time, as before
• Play at most 300 hours per month and get some in-game items
• Play at most 100 hours per month and get more in-game items

So instead of spending a lot of time grinding for phat loot, one can spend less time in the game and possibly get phat loot anyway.

I do wonder a bit how much time some players spend on that game if the middle option is 300 hours. That is about 70 hours per week, almost twice as much many regular full-time jobs. Even the low option is one that would be more than enough time for me, most of the time.

Would a similar model be beneficial for other item-focused games, like World of Warcraft? Or any older and a bit grindy games, e.g. if items included were xp boosters or something similar?

Age of Conan prices – rip-off or rebate?

I recently read a blog entry by Tobold on the European price for Age of Conan and I am must say that I was a bit surprised by Tobold’s comment and by some of the commenters.

The European monthly fee for Age of Conan was 12.99 Euro if one paid one month at a time. This was basically called a rip-off because with the current exchange rate between Euro and US dollars, this is substantially less than the US monthly fee of $14.99.

This is just silly. The fees are basically the same as all major subscription-based MMOGs , be it in Europe or in North America. It is not a market where the companies compete with price, but at the same time it is a bit price sensitive – at least no company is willing to try to get a much higher fee than the rest, too much risk.

Since the fees actually pay for operations and continued development of the game, what becomes interesting is where do the companies have those costs?

In the case of Funcom – originally a Norwegian company, but at least on paper it is registered in Netherlands and has a headquarter in Switzerland. There are probably some tax reasons for this. They are listed on the Olso stock exchange. They also have offices in Norway, USA and China.

There is little doubt that the majority of the development work is done in Norway though. The main expense there is salaries; that is typical for a software-focused IT company. The salaries do nto change with exchange rates. So how many Norwegian crowns (the currency – NOK) would they get for a monthly fee today (May 9th 2008)? How would they have received a year ago (May 9th 2007)?

Today a North American subscriber gives them

$14.99 = 14.99 * 5.1307 NOK ~ 76.91 NOK

Today a European subscriber gives them

€12.99 = 12.99 *7.8815 NOk = 102.38 NOK

Looking back a year ago, the corresponding numbers are

$14.99 = 14.99 * 5.9893 NOK ~ 89.78 NOK

€12.99 = 12.99 * 8.1317 NOK ~ 105.63 NOK

(Source: FXhistory@oanda.com)

Note: I did not include any taxes here . That will affect what a customer will pay in the end, but that is not money that is going to the game companies, that is picked up the the governments. So it is not relevant in terms of whether a game company would rip someone off or not, since they do not get that money.

In both cases Funcom are “loosing” compared to if the game would have been released a year ago. If the exchange rates change they might of course “gain” some later, or “loose” again.

Roughly, the fees from 3 Europeans pay for the same amount of work that 4 North Americans do. If the value of the US dollar drops more, then more North Americans are needed to pay for the same amount of work, since they keep the prices the same. The same is the case for those paying in EUro as well.

Now, everything is of course not handled in NOK most likely. US servers and operations are likely handled in the US and with US costs. European servers and oprerations are likely handled here in Europe, perhaps in Norway or Switzerland.

The costs there would very likely be in the local currencies and differences in exchange rate would not matter that much.

Now, if there were any “rip-offs” that would more be from the companies with have the bulk of their development in the US, e.g. Blizzard, SOE, Turbine, NCSoft (for Western games).

Or aren’t all Westerns getting ripped off, since prices in China is likely even lower for any games that are available there? Let’s encourage all these companies to relocate and put all of their development work and all of their servers and operations in China instead. That would surely cut the costs and they can lower the fees for us all and not rip us off.

Is polish fun? Is innovation fun? The curse of meaningful play

Polish. Innovation. Two quite overused words when it comes to MMORPG discussions and which seem to become some general blunt weaponry to smack around with either to defend or attack some game in the genre.

Polish entered the stage with World of Warcraft and while at that point seemed to describe games whose properties were few annoying bugs and a number of game mechanics which did not completely suck and worked fairly well together. Which was a bit rare at that point, at least at the release of an MMORPG.

Now it seems to generally be used for the initial use, but with some added mesarement on how good the user of the word thinks a game is. E.g. World of Warcraft is more polished than insert-any-game-here.

How do you measure polish? What are the units? Is this polish measurement all that matters? If game a has 10 polish and game B has 12 polish, will players pick game B then? How much more polish matters?

If the game from a technical perspective works generally well and game mechanics are mostly positive experiences, then the game is “polished” enough to me. There is no “more polished” and even if there were, it does not really matter. Lack of “polish” can get int he way of the fun of the game, but more “polish” does not make the game more fun or better.

And innovation – people must have listened too much to Bill Gates and his crew who used the innovate word for way too many things in my opinion. And it is used as it is the only way to salvation for the MMORPG games. And when people are talking about innovation they are asking for things they think is more fun than what they are currently used to, once they see it and like it. Which is a quite different thing.

It seems every time a new game is released in the past few years a discussion with “Innovation” (or lack thereof), “clone” and similar words pop up. Age of Conan gets a bit of that now, Tabula Rasa and Pirates of the Burning Sea had that a few months ago and Warhammer Online and Chronicles of Spellborn will surely have that as well.

People are talking about “WoW clones” or “WoW killers”, perhaps saying that it is too much of the first and too little of the latter. Which is a bit #2 from the cow’s husband. What some people here, in particular many WoW players, are looking for is a “better WoW than WoW” referring to them as “WoW killers”, projecting some lack of complete satifaction with their game of choice, but without wanting to give up that unless it feels meaningful to do so. And it becomes meaningful if “everyone else” would jump on this killer game and it it would feel like a better WoW than WoW.

This is not just for WoW of course, but due to its market size there are more people in that situation and it may also accentuate the feeling of playing the “winner”, which also makes it more meaningful than other games for some.

While I think these are quite understandable and human reactions I think it may hurt the game market – they do not only have to be fun and functionally working properly (for the most part), but also have to fight a legacy with gaming hours spent in a meaningful way.

Good stories hurt the longevity of an MMORPG?

For many people, inlcuding myself, a good background story and story content is an important aspect of an MMORPG. So why the headline?

Let me qualify “good story” a bit; that is that a game company developed story is a prominent feature of the game and with some thought to hold various elements in the world toghether by the story. You have to put in an effort to compltely avoid the story, if you wanted.
Tabula Rasa is a recent example, Earth & Beyond was another game with some serious story telling ambitions. LOTRO is another one in the fantasy genre.

The story experience if often considered weaker in MMORPGs though compared to single player games. In single player games, the player is the big hero or center of attention – this is not the case in MMORPGs.
The story telling is however not much different from single player games. At any given moment a single player can experience the story by himself/herself. He/she may need help at certain stages to overcome certain difficulties but in essence much of the story telling is just directed to a single player – no element of the story changes regardless of the number of players involved, only the amount and diifculty of some enemies in the path of the story.

Thus I think the story telling currently works better to support solo play experience, sometimes spiced up with some added support by other players. It does not support a core multiplayer experience, at least not well.

And for longevity of a player experience in an MMORPG, the multiplayer part needs to work. This can of course be accomplished by other means, but the story as it is now does not do that much to contibute to it. Rather it makes the solo experience better/good/more bearable. With a too strong story element in comparision to other features of the game, the game is going to hurt. To some extent like in single player games, players are going to feel some kind of completion when a story is followed through. And that may make the game feel “empty” and people may end up quitting.

Compare the games above to games like World of Warcraft, City of Heroes/Villains and Everquest 2, to take a few. The latter 3 all have a strong background story element, but the story element is a bit more hidden and a less prominent part of the player experience. I think this provides for a better foundation for longevity of the game as it is now.

And then there is EVE Online of course. Not much story at all provided by CCP, but very much so by the players themselves and very much a multiplayer story telling. And for those who get into EVE it seems to last quite well.

So how can the story telling be improved? Does it have to be player created content only, like in EVE? Or can game companies create story telling on a multiplayer scale and will that keep players playing longer due to the story?

Our niche of the universe

Following the look at the NCSoft earnings and the Tabula Rasa results, I had a look at the analyst reports from earlier in 2007.

One of the analysts had forecasted that about 560K copies would be sold of the game in 2007 (roughly 29 million US dollars in sales) and another 63 million in 2008, assuming that the sequel was launched in late 2008. Another analyst had noted that NCSoft had said that Tabula Rasa should be considered a niche game and would likely not enjoy the sam popularity as World of Warcraft.

Maybe these analysts had different expectations, but selling 560K copies in the initial months is far from a niche game to me, in particular when talking about the Western market space.
The forecasted numbers were based on a 10% penetration of the MMOG player market space, which was estimated to 3.5 million players. That sounds pretty much like the amount of people playing World of Warcraft at the time in North America and Europe.

I do not think that just because people play World of Warcraft they are suddenly MMOG players that actually would consider playing other MMOGs. World of Warcraft shows there is a potential, but if we suddendly gained millions of more players, why have not other existing games picked up a decent amount as well? How many started to play World of Warcraft despite it being a subscription-based game and would prehaps never consider another one?

Another factor included was the sales numbers for City of Heroes at launch in 2004 and the total estimated US market then and the current estimated US market and the penetration of that game in the category of “niche” games. From that point of view the numbers make sense, assuming the estimated market size is valid. Again, does World of Warcraft throw these numbers off?

Sales of the Tabula Rasa pre-order pack had been quite good though according to reports, so it is understandable though that a positive forecast was maintained.

And with some of NCSofts other games – Lineage, Lineage 2 and Guild Wars all selling in multi-millions, it makes it easy to be led to believe anything less than a million to be “niche” from their point of view.

The analyst reports indicated a sequel (expansion?) in late 2008 and also that Tabula Rasa was one of the existing IPs to be considered for a console launch in 2009. Will that still happen? Would more people play Tabula Rasa on the PS3? Perhaps more MMOGs on console will impact more what would be considered niche rather than then influence of World of Warcraft?

Country of Warcraft

World of warcraft is of course a large game worldwide, but how large is it in your country?

Today in a technology newspaper I subscribe to (Ny Teknik – translates to New Technology in English) I saw a small article saying that World of Warcraft was bigger than Uppsala. Uppsala is the 4th largest city in Sweden. Knowing that Blizzard just recently announced that 10 million subscribers, which is larger than the population of Sweden, I continued to read to see what they meant.

The article basically talked about the two best selling games in Sweden 2007 was World of Warcraft and The Burning Crusade. There were no numbers for how many people in Sweden was playing the game, but a representative for Vivendi had said that the number of players in Sweden exceed the population of the city of Uppsala (population 128000) by a wide margin.

That may not sound that much. However, the population of Sweden is 9 million. Compare that to the population of United States, which according to CIA World Factbook has a population of 300 million. This is 33 1/3 times as many people.

Let’s assume the number of WoW players in Sweden are 130000. With a comparable density of players the number of players in the US would have been 33 1/3 * 130000, which us roughly 4.3 million. Add the Canadian population in the mix to get North American population size (334 million in total) and do the same type of calculation and the comparable player count would have been over 4.8 million.

The official Blizzard numbers say 2.5 million players in North America. So taking the population size into account, World of Warcraft is almost twice as popular in Sweden than in North America.

And then we have China, which weighs in with a population of 1322 million. Doing the same type of calculation a comparable player number would have been over 19 million players. So World of Warcraft is far less popular in China than in Sweden.

Compare the North American numbers and adjusting for Chinese population and one ends up with almost 10 million players in China if it would have had the same popularity in China. Which is quite far from actual numbers. Again, the game is less popular in China in comparision.

So what is the point here? Just that numbers for big regions may not say the whole truth and without trying put them in some comparable context they might no be so meaningful.

To be fair, I do not know if the Videndi representative referenced in the article used the same metric for number of active WoW players as the Blizzard press release. Number of sold units are far higher than these numbers through, so at least there was no Second Life type player count in this case.

Blizzard reached 10

Blizzard made a press release where they announced more than 10 million players for World of Warcraft. Almost half of those are in North America and Europe (2.5 million and 2 million).

While I have not played this game for along time now and have no intention to start again, it is still impressive to see that they what a phenomenon the game has become. It seems also that the numbers fo Europe and North America has grown a bit also if memory serves me right.

Another top 10 MMOG comment

As a lot of other bloggers have added their take on top 10 MMOGs inspired from the thread at F13.net, I decided I’d put in some comments in the same spirit here. I don’t read those forums normally, so I did not jump in and register. I found the different motivations people wrote more interesting than the actual order and who put in their votes – I am sure there are a couple of celebrities in the game world there judging by interest sparked for this particular list, but I did not notice.

The motivations are interesting since it shows in my opinion it is a bit difficult to get some coherent criteria that everyone would agree with, making such list pretty much useless (as it also says in the original post) for anyone outside to get a good view of what game is better than another.

Worth noting is that the only game in the top 10 that is actually reasonably new is Lord of the Ring Online and 7 of 10 are fantasy MMOGs.

My own top 10, which is pretty much all MMOGs I have played for at least 2 months:

1. City of Villains/Heroes
   This is the game I played played actively the longest (almost 19 months and counting), mostly on villain side. It is not the most feature rich game, but what has been implemented usually works well. Best character creator I have seen so far, separation of looks and character abilities, good variety in powerset selection, great mechanics to enable people to team with each other and good fun fast-paced combat in groups.
   It gets a bit grindy at times (big hurdle around level 30) and there is a lot of similar content. Good content updates that comes at regular intervals without extra cost. I have loads of characters in this game and enjoy most of them. Played witha good group of people here which definitely contributed to the enjoyment of this game.
2. World of Warcraft
   Second longest game I have played, spent around 11 months, got 1 character to top level, which was 60 at the time and a bunch of alts in 30-50 range. Fun to explore, solid content. Main reason for staying that long was the guild I was in and when that fell apart my interest in the game pretty much vanished. Among the least amount of annoyment factors in a game that I have played, which is one reason it is high up in list. Decent mixture of skills in the different classes.
3. Final Fantasy XI
   Spent around 8 months in this game. Loved the concept of jobs and subjobs, did not like that some combinations there where pretty much forced in practice. Hated the camping. Loved the cutscenes, some of the story line and the general feeling of a dangerous world. Fighting my first dragon there was a rush like I barely had in any other game. I loved the beastmaster job. Did not really like the forced grouping in certain areas at certain levels, which which was abonus for the beastmaster – that did not really apply in that case. Had good fun with the BCNM fights (Burning Circle Notorious Monster) I was in. The linkshell I was in was good at the beginning, but after the general maturity and common ground with the other members faded, the interest in the game also faded.
4. Everquest 2
   Lots of features, some nice storylines and mixed graphics – some great some so-and-so. Loved Brigand and Coercer and had some decent fun with some other classes also, highest got to mid 40s (brigand). Have played the game in 4-5 periods, total time perhaps 8-9 months. Too much master spell farming and grouping for XP for my liking.
5. Star Wars Galaxies
   Mainly for the game as it was during the first 5-6 months, to a bit after player cities was introduced. This was a time where many higher level creatures could be considered dangerous. Loved the skill-based structure, hated the grinding necessary for some of these skill trees. Hated the one character per server restriction. Loved the versality in classes, crafting mechanics although did not like htat you pretty much had to be a master crafter to make any money on your work (and the grind to get there). Ended up as a ranger/creature handler eventually and I loved the pet handling, collecting pets and raising them and go hunting for material that I sold later. Player cities was an intersting concept, but I thought it actually destroyed a bit of the game and later changes destroyed it more. Never was interested in getting into Jedi.
6. Anarchy Online
   My first MMOG. Spent perhaps 10-11 months in total there over multiple periods. Have all the expansions, but has not really touched much beyond the original game content. Had plenty of alts, only a few got above level 50. Due to real life circumstances (i.e. work), my first 10 months in the game was mainly a couple of hours each weekend, the only time I was home in Sweden. Great mood setting in some areas and good fun back then. Cannot really back into the game nowadays though.
7. Tabula Rasa
   The game has not been out after release for 2 months yet, but I also played some in beta. Great combat and immersive environment, good storyline. Crafting is a bit crappy at the moment and some of the mission bugs gets annoying. Playing it with a good bunch of people, which adds to the fun. If I make this list again in a couple of months I suspect this game will be ranked higher. I just need to put some of the games I played for a longer time ahead of it, the postion is rather low due to the short time it has been around. A couple of months from now it may be in top 3.
8. Earth & Beyond
   My second MMOG and the first game in space, played for maybe 9-10 months. I loved the concept of a changing world and the grand story arc and the first 30-40 levels had some nice missions and story lines in addition to the story arc. Combat with space creatures was fun. Crafting was ok, trading part (a chat channel) was horrendous. A lot of the time towards level 150 was one of the worst grinds I have had in an MMOG, which lowers its position.
9. EVE Online
   Wanted to really like this game and have a complement to Earth&Beyond initially. Played in two periods, totalling maybe 2-3 months. Never got into a company I liked and after a while space felt a bit empty. I like a number of the game mechanics and it is a bit stimulating, but not so much fun after a while. Probably would have worked out better with a good company.
10. Lord Of the Ring Online
    Pretty game environment, some of the start quests and the main story arc was good. After a while it felt really uninspiring and grindy, quests, combat and pretty much everything except the environment itself. Highest character got to mid/high 20s, loremaster. left after about 2 months, even though I had bought a pre-order with 6 months subscription.

Some of the positions here is pretty much impossible for me even to agree with myself and if I am asked again in a short while some of the positions may change. And if I was asked about a list of games I would like to play now and order them, it would be a quite different list. It is a rather futile attempt at comparing my enjoyment and frustration at different periods in time when it comes to MMOGs.

The sense of humor

How important is humor in the MMOGs you play and what kind of humor should that be? Often we divide MMOGs into areas such as fantasy, SciFi and other themes, or perhaps if the experience is somewhat directed or more of a pure sandbox style.

But would not also how serious the game and its theme take itself or allows people to see the funny side of some thing be an important factor as well? After all, it is entertainment, so humor should be a relevant factor.
For me humor is an important factor, perhaps not for choosing to start play a game, but a contributing factor to why I might stay with a game. It can be what NPCs say, humorous things in the environment or situations occuring. And of course funny things caused by players.

Humor is a difficult thing; it should be delivered in the right context, with good timing and in reasonable amounts. It still will work differently for different people. And talking about it like this in a bit of analytical way for sure does not bring out the funny side…

I am not sure how much consideration is going into MMOGs when it comes to delivering humor in the games. World of Warcraft has some quite nice situational elements with the school class in Stormwind and the Dwarf shooting range in the dwarf/gnome newbie zone. And some of the characteristics of the races there might be funny initially, such as the troll Jamaican accent. That game is a good example I think where there is a decent amount of humor delivered well – it does try to take its story and environment too seriously and be that realistic, so it probably works well with most of the audience, I think.

In Everquest 2 humor was a main contributing factor for me when choosing to play on the good or the evil side (and that ratongas were evil only). The rude and sometimes sarcastic comments made by the NPCs in Freeport was a great benefit over the quite annoying and a bit cutesy comments of many of the Qeynos NPCs. Of course, humor is easier if you can be a bit evil and that shows in the Quenos/Freeport case. Comments were also adapted to the race you played, if you for example played the cat-like race some NPCs would comment on how wonderful I looked and if they could have my pelt..

The ratonga chef in the Temple Street zone in Freeport is also my favourite NPC in that game, with his constant hunt on the street for food sources to kill on the street, as well as being chased himself by street cats (he is a rat after all…)

Everquest 2 was also the first game I heard a mob ask for a heal (Cleric, heal me!) which was good fun the first time I heard that and smiled a number of times after that when it has popped up. Other games have also included that now, the latest I heard that in in Tabula Rasa, when a Thrax soldier called for a Caretaker to heal him. Short one-liners like that work great when delivered with voice, as has been the case in both Everquest 2 and Tabula Rasa.

City of Heroes/Villains have plenty of humorous one-liners and does not take itself and its environment too seriously, which I think works pretty good with a comic book inspired setting. There is also some good cut scenes, such as the one in Mercy Island, with the target of the mission, Dr Gerst, an evil genius wannabe being shown that he is just that, a wannabe…

Some of the one-liners in City of Heroes/Villains as well as in Everquest 2 is being delivered a bit too often, while others are seldom enough to work just great when they occur. If you see/hear a joke for the 100th time, it probably is not that funny anymore.

Another source of humor and fun is of course the emotes and how they are used by players. For me, City of Heroes/Villains is at the top there. I remember Anarchy Online having a decent amount of emotes here that were pretty good, useful. To be honest, I cannot remember what World of Warcraft had here besindes the dances (its been about 2 years since I played the game) and as I recall Everquest 2 emotes were a bit so-and-so. Tabula Rasa does not have many and do need to work a bit on that side.

So how is it for you, is humor important in the game? And what type of humor works for you? Any games that has too much humor, are lacking humor?