Three Predictions for 2012

Here are a few predictions on the state of MMO's in the coming year.  Ironically, though I hadn't planned it this way, the three topics I came up with address (albeit in a different order) Wilhelm's top three questions for 2012. 

Go Big, Go Small, Go Free, or Go Home
The subscription MMO isn't dead, but there are basically two very specific circumstances under which it can work:

1. Have a nine-figure budget like the reported $100 million in venture capital that founded Trion or the even larger figures that EA is rumored to have spent on SWTOR.  Ever notice how the three corporations able to foot this type of bill - Blizzard, Trion, and EA-Bioware - are the ones who are still touting the subscription model?
2. Serve an un-filled niche, such as sandbox PVP (see Eve, Darkfall, or perhaps the forthcoming Dominus) or old-school group MMO (see Vanguard, lots of room for a newcomer in this genre).  The big-budget one-size-fits-all MMO that includes solo, group, raid, and PVP has to make compromises  to fit all these activities under one roof.  This makes it possible for a more specialized game to offer something that the big guys cannot.  However, as CCP found out last year, this also means that your entire company lives or dies by its ability to continue to keep one segment of the market satisfied.

Note what's not on that list.  The best licensed IP's out there don't guarantee you $15 a month - see DCUO and LOTRO.  Neither does implementation of a specific feature in what's otherwise a one-size-fits-all MMO (e.g. RVR in Warhammer and PvPvE in Aion).  Even the huge budget is no guarantee of success - probably the most remarkable thing about Rift's progress is how much discipline the team has shown in implementing only what they can actually accomplish and accomplish well.

The bottom line is that if you have yet another fantasy MMO, you're not solidly in one of the two categories above, and your business plan depends on collecting a $15 monthly subscription - FFXIV and Tera come to mind, along with Copernicus if they're not thinking F2P - you are in for a rough time in today's crowded market.  Of course, you're also in for a tough time in the crowded free market, but at least the bar is lower to get potential customers to actually try your product.   

SWTOR will have high churn... and high revenue
Both sides of the discussion on SWTOR's longterm prospects tend to assume that the game will be a failure if there is a mass exodus by the 90 day mark.  Ironically, there has never been another MMO so well-positioned to handle a high rate of churn. 

Yes, the game has guilds and PVP and dungeons/raids, all the traditional MMO trappings that tend to do poorly with high churn.  As long as Bioware was spending whatever ungodly amount they spent on this game, there was no reason NOT to support these playstyles and collect the associated revenue.  However, the core thing that has everyone raving is the Bioware story.  With the past Bioware games, the customer pays once for the box, and maybe once more if the expansions/DLC are worth purchasing, no matter how long it takes the player to complete the game or how many times they replay it.  With the monthly fee, EA gets paid every month for every playthrough and replay, regardless of how little or how much content Bioware actually adds to the game in future patches.   

With such a focus on a highly replayable single player story, SWTOR doesn't need half a million year-round subscribers.  They can get the same effect with 1.5 million players who pay 4 months out of the year when new content is added - or when players choose to replay the old stuff.  I don't see how Bioware can lose here - which is probably why they got so much of EA's money to spend in the first place. 

Mists of Pandaria Will Ship This Summer, Or Heads Will Roll
Many intelligent people are predicting that Pandaria won't ship until Q4, and there is strong basis for making this call - Blizzard is not known for shipping its products on time.  This round, however, I think the stakes are higher. 

Blizzard spent 2011 losing subscribers by the millions - to Rift, or wherever else - and SWTOR will not help this situation.  No amount of spin about how the lost players are in the less lucrative Asian markets, or how players have returned to WoW after the launches of past competitors, can change the reality that Blizzard will continue to lose customers and money until something changes.  A scenario in which the content that was available in early December 2011 is still the only content available in early October 2012 is unacceptable. 

My guess is that we will see the paid closed beta phase of Pandaria (courtesy of the annual pass) kick off in May-June, with an aim for an early Q3 release.  Delaying this product further is not like delaying Starcraft II or Diablo III, which do not have monthly fees - every month means more subscribers lost from the current live WoW service.  I'm prepared to believe that Blizzard might let the expansion slip anyway, but I think that there will - and frankly should - be consequences if this occurs. 

What do you all think will happen in 2012?

Vacation News Roundup

I'm still on blog vacation for another week and a half, but I've noticed a few tidbits that I felt like commenting on anyway.  Comments remain moderated, though I expect to be able to approve them over the next few days.

• Disliking the fourth pillar
  Spinks' rundown of the SWTOR classes mentioned a detail that I hadn't considered.  Apparently, George Lucas is continuing to maintain that Jedi cannot get married without turning to the dark side.  This makes me less interested in the game - not because I really had my heart set on cyborz with my NPC's, but because the notorious forbidden love story from the second Star Wars prequel was not the one part of the Star Wars Universe that I've been dying to re-live in an MMO setting.  
  
  Specifics of this particular case aside, I see a potential issue with the "fourth pillar" approach here.  If you are going to put the story front and center, it becomes a bigger issue if players dislike the story you are trying to tell.  Moreover, I would imagine that Jedi who romance their NPC's are going to be the majority of players - the former because of the lore and the latter because that's what you do in Bioware games. If the gameplay impact of being a Republic-faction Jedi with Dark Side status turns out to be disadvantageous to game mechanics, Bioware will have some unhappy customers. 
  
  


• WoW 4.3 update
  This week, we're hearing details of WoW's patch 4.3.  The mega-patch will include the now industry-standard cosmetic gear option that Blizzard has been resisting for about five years now.  There's a new storage system that will save Blizzard disk space by having a vendor who will create a new copy of item number whatever upon request, rather than storing all the details of your existing item (e.g. enchant, crafted by, what bank slot it is located in).  There will be new five-mans, which was basically expected.
  
  The one thing that I find surprising is that the patch will feature the Deathwing raid, and therefore will presumably serve as the Cataclysm finale.  I had expected this to be bumped to next year to shorten the window between Deathwing and the expansion now believed to be Pandaria.  While it's not uncommon for the last raid of a WoW expansion to sit for 9-12 months, Cataclysm is already somewhat widely viewed as a failure and nothing from this list sounds especially game-changing.  Unless Blizzard can finally deliver a WoW expansion in 18 months instead of 23-24, 2012 may not be kind to the WoW subscription count. 
   


• Reinventing Warhammer
  Werit has the details of the free to play Warhammer spinoff. My view on this project echoes Tobold's.  Back in 2008, I genuinely enjoyed Warhammer's instanced "RVR" scenarios but generally found that the PVE game these battles were attached to did not compare favorably to the many other options out there.  On paper, ditching the PVE game allows Mythic to focus on balance, while opening up the door to more exotic races/classes/heroes/etc that might have been harder to fit into a holy trinity PVE game. 
  
  However, as Tobold suggests, this revamp almost certainly guarantees that I will never pay for the existing version of the game again.

Overall, it's been an interesting week.  We'll see if next week follows suit. 

Difficulty Versus Subscriber Retention

When it comes to MMO design decisions, the customer is not always right.  The challenge for the developer is that the "correct" decision sometimes makes it literally impossible for large portions of the market to play your game, no matter how well you do everything else. 

From Raid or Die to EZ-Zerg
The thing about WoW's ongoing dispute over 5-man dungeon difficulty is that we've been here before.  The year was 2007, and Blizzard had finally released the game's first expansion.  After years of complaints that the endgame was "raid or die", Blizzard's response was to offer smaller raids.  The cap was reduced from 40 players to 25, and TBC also offered both the 10-man Karazhan raid and the raid-like experience of heroic 5-man dungeons. 

Though these changes made some of the logistics simpler (and some, like trying to run two 10-man Karazhan lockouts in a 25-man guild, more difficult), the lower numbers left each player accountable for a greater portion of their group's performance.  Those of us who were below average in our old 40-man guilds no longer met the difficulty bar for this new, "more accessible" content.  In my old guild, about a third broke away to form a new raiding guild, a third disbanded and scattered to other guilds, and a third of us quit the game.

No one outside Irvine knows exactly what happened to WoW's retention numbers in the wake of TBC.  What we can see is how Blizzard reacted to those numbers with future development.  As I commented way back in 2008, my guess is that Blizzard did not like the trend they saw. 

Blizzard did not add another top tier raid to the game for 10 months after patch 2.1.  In the interim, they added gear inflation in the 10-man ZA and, as Sunwell arrived, with the first iteration of high end raid loot for heroic dungeon tokens.  Then Wrath arrived with zergable heroics (yes, even in the month the expansion launched) and raids so easy that even a PUG could complete them.  Then Blizzard made the already easy content even easier by rolling out the dungeon finder and bribing Icecrown raiders to run random dungeons once a day. 

It certainly appears from Blizzard's actions that they saw easier content as a way to draw more players into the endgame.

Ripping off the cast before healing the wound?
Making the game so easy was almost certainly the wrong call, and bringing the difficulty back up is most likely the right one (especially since the dungeons will only get easier as players overgear them).  The problem is, as Eric at Elder Game suggests, that it's hard to hurt your retention numbers by making the game easier.  By contrast, making the game harder because that's how things "should" be fails to address the core problem that got us to the Wrath era in the first place. 

Many players are not looking for the current level of difficulty in their PUG content.  Personally, I like the current dungeon difficulty, but the longer queue times (three times what we had in Wrath) are drastically limiting my ability to actually run dungeons.  With a 15-20 minute queue and a 20 minute dungeon zerg, I could run a Wrath heroic whenever I wanted - I was actually spending the majority of my WoW time in groups.  With a queue time of 45 minutes to an hour, and then about as long (or longer if things go poorly) to actually complete the instance, five-man content is a much larger commitment, which I can fit in maybe once a week. 

Things aren't as bad as they were back in 2007; with the dungeon finder, at least I can actually get an instance group when I do have several hours to burn, where this was nigh impossible for a lone DPS in much of the TBC era.  Even so, nothing in Blizzard's history since 2007 suggests that they're in the business of keeping players away from content though high difficulty.  Perhaps gear inflation will solve this problem for them whenever they get around to releasing patch 4.1.  Otherwise, it's going to be very interesting to see what gets changed. 

(As long as we're digging in my 2008 archives, I suppose we can expect some patch 4.1 news around the February 24th Rift Headstart, since that's how Blizzard treated Warhammer.) 

Are Dungeon Finder Leveling Dungeons WoW's Public Quests?

I've been saying some less than positive things about WoW's automated dungeon finder of late, so it seems only fair to give equal time to one area where I've been getting a lot of benefit from the system - groups for leveling dungeons.

The logistics of LFG
Historically, I've always simply skipped over leveling dungeons. The nebulous (generally lengthy) amount of time it would take to find a group before you even start the actual dungeon run was too much unpredictability for my schedule. On top of that, dungeons often represent the culmination of the storylines in a given zone, meaning that you will be out of stuff to do in the neighborhood by the time you have all the relevant quests. Though WoW did have dungeon summoning stones, at least two party members needed to travel to the stones (often as many as four of your party members may presume that someone else will summon them), and the greatest concentration of players looking for groups for a given area are often located in that zone's local chat.

The dungeon finder blows all of these concerns out of the water. As a DPS, you're going to be looking for something like 15-30 minutes, and you can do whatever you want with that time, as you will be teleported to the dungeon automatically when a group is assembled. As a result, my Warrior has been doing every dungeon in Northrend as soon as the relevant quests become available, earning significant gear upgrades in the process. I've even queued up for random dungeons when I feel like I could use a change of pace from solo questing - my warrior has already banked a handful of emblems and stone keeper shards from these efforts.

A different take on the public quest
When Warhammer Online was getting ready to launch, I was actually very excited about the concept of public quests. The idea, as Mythic described it, was for players to get to enjoy high quality group content without having to deal with group logistics. Unfortunately, because these quests were non-instanced events located in the outside world, population worked against them. You might show up at a PQ and discover that there weren't enough players there to complete it, or you might find that too many had shown up, making the content trivial. Worst of all, you had to travel to the quest areas on foot, and could arrive to find that the party was over.

The way that the random dungeon finder has worked out in WoW is very similar to the end goal of the Public Quest - but with much of the random chance and logistic inconvenience taken out. Your group will have the right number of people and correct balance of classes for the content (though they may or may not be overgeared). You do not need to worry about travel, or even knowing where it is that you should be going (though this can be a problem when players die and don't know how to get back to the instance).

There may be no removing the social downsides of working with strangers in group content. I also maintain that the system should do a better job of maintaining difficulty by using appropriately geared players when possible - one random Old Kingdom group, a level 74 dungeon, ended up with a level 80 tank for some reason. When it comes to the actual goal of making group content accessible to players as they level, though, this system is a huge success.