The Turbine Rebate, and Downsides of the Model

I've been back in LOTRO this week, as I try to get to the game's current level cap and complete the current expansion content before the cap rises again in September.  I'm currently level 72 (out of a cap of 75) and have completely skipped several sub-zones due to outleveling the quests.  While I'm doing this, I'm also re-examining the Turbine Rebate I saw while working on Enedwaith back in April.  As long as I'm at it, having taken a less than favorable view of the SOE model last week, I feel it's only fair to subject Turbine's approach to the same scrutiny.

The Rebate

Turbine Points up for Grabs - 5 TP each for exploring 10 subzones and a 10 TP bonus for finishing all of them

I maintain that the Turbine "Premium Free to Play" model is a model where you pay for content.  While it is theoretically possible to grind for Turbine Points at a "salary" of pennies per hour, I can't recommend this approach to anyone who values their time at any non-zero amount given the cost of stuff that you'd be trying to purchase with said points.
 
What the Turbine Points do reliably get you is a bit of a "rebate" on your purchase price.  In Enedwaith, I snagged 75 Turbine Points (around 15% of what I paid in Turbine Points for the zone).  The Isengard expansion was more costly, but there are probably around 200 TP in easily-obtained deeds (quests, exploration, reputation). 

I've never run an alt high enough to matter, but theoretically such a character would be earning the same rebate for content that I don't need to pay for a second time.  The catch is that there are some things that I do consider reasonably useful (especially the second millstone and the decrease on map cooldown) that you pay for per character, but at a minimum I suppose said character could be run on a Turbine-Point neutral basis.

The Downside of Selling Services
The virtue of doing business with someone who sells content is that they make money when they make content, which is generally a win/win for players.  However, Turbine also sells "services" - I'll expand on this shortly - and people who are in the business of selling services make money when they create or maintain demand for the purchase of services.

Marginally related - the "terms and conditions apply" asterick under "access to ALL quests"?  Quests from three and soon to be four paid expansions are an additional fee.  Minor terms and conditions, really.

Case in point, today Syp yet again points out the issues with LOTRO's virtue system.  These have been fundamentally the same since the game's launch in 2007, and the Sypster's solution is but one of several functional approaches to the problem.  No solution to this will ever be implemented, because Turbine is presently in the business of selling consumable deed accelerators and permanent virtue unlocks.  No matter how necessary, no producer is ever going to approve having their people spend time to remove a source of revenue for the company.

In fact, quite the opposite, Turbine has worked harder to monetize more of the longstanding design shortcomings in the game.

My current supply of rep tokens - a few are unbound but most are bound to character

• Inventory?  During 2012, Turbine will be rolling out two major features - a recently-released "premium barter wallet" and the first expansion to player base inventory in the game's history - for a total cost of 2000 Turbine Points (roughly $20 - and NOT included for people who still subscribe).  Bear in mind that these things are only necessary because the game generates excessive numbers of tokens, crafting items, etc - of all my MMO's, the two Turbine games are the only ones where inventory is a consistent struggle.
• Travel?  For several hundred Turbine Points here and there you can unlock the previously mentioned teleportation options, and this week's patch opens the system up for players to purchase as many as eleven destinations for instant teleportation.  This solution is definitely excessive compared to the problem, but it also allows Turbine to collect roughly $40 in points PER CHARACTER from interested buyers.  
• Finally, we have the Legendary Item system.  The Sypster said he was "0% sure why Turbine felt it necessary to complicate an already complicated system" with yet another way of enhancing items that are designed to be disposable, rather than "legendary".  And yet, Turbine added yet another mechanic in Starlight Crystals, which immediately went to the cash shop.

Bundling
Finally, there's the issue of bundling.  From the earliest days of the Turbine system, many of the best-selling unlocks were one-time purchases.  Unfortunately, this may have created a situation in which many customers are not worth a lot of recurring revenue once they have their basic stuff unlocked.  In response, we've seen a steady trend of increasing prices on unlocks, moving stuff that would typically be included in patches into the cash store (see the two inventory features), and now a trend towards ever-more expensive expansion bundles.  You can theoretically pay for your expansions a la carte with Turbine Points, but these options are priced to make them as unattractive as possible when compared to the price of points.

The Isengard expansion offered all of the new stuff for $30.  After this was a success, DDO followed suit with the just-released Underdark expansion, in which the cheapest bundle that contains everything other than the cosmetics cost $50.  (As an aside, DDO also made an odd decision to offer "epic levels" that do relatively little to everyone so they can claim that the level cap is still free, while splitting off a huge portion of the increase in character power from levels 20-25 into a separate "Epic Destiny" system that is included in the bundles, but costs prohibitively extra a la carte.  I don't get why they didn't just say that the cap increase required the expansion, as a level 25 without Epic Destinies won't be getting far.)

A year later, LOTRO's Rohan expansion was announced with a base price tag of $40.  These bundles were received poorly for coming in at a higher price than the previous year's editions, while offering less than the comparably upgraded packages.  Turbine eventually added more Turbine Points and a promise to throw in the forthcoming instance cluster (which they most likely hoped to sell for an extra fee, since Turbine's marketing department has basically never failed to mention something that is included), but the place they would not budge on was the price tag.  If they're only going to get paid once per year by some (many?) players, they're going to do everything the can to increase the minimum size of that one sale.

To add additional flavor to the world, Turbine just added "dummies" which will display model outfits available for sale in the store.  Nothing says "town occupied against its will by Saruman" like department store display models - wonder when we'll start seeing these for expansion bundle perks.

Outlook
I ultimately decided to put some money into my account during this weekend's point sale, so that I will have the balance on hand to pick up the barter token wallet the next time it goes on sale.  It irks me to pay for something that is free in most other games, especially when Turbine willfully exacerbates the problem with multiple new tokens in each zone, but it's no longer worth my time to work around the two dozen stacks of bound tokens wasting over a third of the space in my vault.  As to the bundles, well, I guess I'll do what I always do, which is wait for a sale and pay substantially less so that I'm not out-of-pocket for the fluff they crammed in to justify the higher price tag.   

At the end of the day, the problem I run into with LOTRO is the same one I had prior to the game's revamp - I will gladly pay for as much content as Turbine can produce, but they just can't make new content all that quickly.  With the new model, I'm able to get much more flexibility in terms of when I can play the content (i.e. anytime after I purchase it, rather than shackled to a monthly subscription) but I'm occasionally forced to pay for stuff I don't want as Turbine tries to keep the books roughly balanced.  That said, if your biggest complaint about an MMO is the pricing, you're usually in a salvageable situation, because eventually the price will come down in some fashion - if the game's not worth playing, that problem is unlikely to get better. 

Free to Pay SOE's Way

SOE often rolls out bonus exp on major holidays, and July 4th was no exception in EQ2.  I took Lyriana for a spin through the middle part of the Withered Lands, the game's latest high level solo content.  I've used up about 2/3 of the content from this new zone - ONLY playing when double exp is active - but I'm only a quarter of the way to the new level cap.   

Endgame EQ2 (not) for the Non-subscriber
That said, I'm not complaining about the quantity of solo content.  The idea that leveling content needs to get you to the level cap matters when the player is trying to get to the cap as a prerequisite for doing something (notably group content).  If your solo endgame is daily quests, there's no particular reason (until the next expansion arrives and gear resets wipe out all the rewards for the old dailies) why you can't have the player continue to gain exp and levels while doing the daily quests.  Meanwhile, this lengthens the exp curve in a way that hopefully left some more room for groups to advance at rates that do not trivialize the cap increase. 

Rather, my issue is with SOE's AA slider, which can only be adjusted by subscribers.  If I did not happen to have a subscription to the game thanks to some poorly thought-out promotions (I paid about $20 for the expansion and 6 months game time due to Station Cash sales), I would be even further from the cap, with half of my exp going towards AA that barely offer anything to my character. 

A non-subscriber in my shoes would also be struggling for the money to pay my mercenary (an "optional" feature from the "optional" expansion, though the new content seems suspiciously designed to make a mercenary highly beneficial) since nonsubscribers are barred from looting a single copper until they are just about broke -under 18 plat.  For reference, hiring the merc costs 5 plat, and he takes a quarter of a plat every 30 minutes, and every time he needs to be resummoned due to death or dismissal. 

Alternatives to the subscription, or just an extended trial?
Longtime readers will know that I'm not afraid to spend money on my MMO hobby - so far in 2012 alone I've spent money on five separate MMO's (not counting stuff unlocked using cash store currencies that I paid for last year).  In fact, I am willing to pay MORE total dollars in exchange for greater flexibility in when and how I can play.  Instead of flexibility, however, SOE requires the same old rigid billing cycle that they pretend to be working to change. 

Indeed, with Vanguard's upcoming free-to-play change they're not even offering a premium non-subscription tier and the game's producer describes their philosophy as "offering more flexible options for every type of player".   How are they offering more flexibility?  By determining that it is "in the best interest of our players to eliminate the Silver membership and instead provide primarily a Gold membership offering".  If I wanted the flexibility of paying a monthly fee to subscribe to Vanguard, I could have done so without SOE spending however much money on revamping the game.

Ironically, SOE lost this round because it took their accounting people six months to address a Station Cash pricing loophole that was immediately obvious to players the moment it was announced.  With that issue fixed, SOE has unified its catalog under a model in which they give away most of their content but refuse to offer a viable non-subscription alternative for continuing to pay for their service.  Perhaps this makes me a "content locust", but I'm not likely to pay people who don't offer what I want to purchase, no matter how much stuff they try to give away as an incentive. 

P.S. In other news that is going on around the same time, see Wilhelm's commentary on the announcement that Brad McQuaid has been brought back to the Vanguard team.

Limited Secret World Thoughts

Overall, I spent way more time downloading the clients and giving away keys for the Secret World Beta than actually playing.  I have very little interest in spending time on characters that will be wiped when I have so many characters I can keep competing for my limited time.  That said, now that the opportunity is past I suppose I should write what I can.


Limited time, first impressions
I really haven't bothered to watch any of the marketing info for this game, so I picked Dragon, cause A) green and B) ninjas (I think).  The second conversation my character had in game consisted of a strong implication that a female NPC was performing off-camera oral sex on my female character in order to grant access to a flashback combat tutorial.  I'm not so much offended as highly underwhelmed - rather than a feel for the Dragon culture, I'm left feeling that the writers are going to be simultaneously cliche and edgy because they can.

Havin gotten that over with, it was off to a dojo to test drive all of the combat styles in the game - magic, melee, or firearms.  Each weapon has a damage and a utility (tank, heals, support) role, and a new character won't have enough skill points to know what all of those skills will look like, but at least it was a good opportunity to get a feel for my choices.  More games need to offer this type of option, though ironically TSW has the least need to do so since you can switch weapons without re-rolling.

The first real zone was a zombie apocalypse scenario.  Quest text is delivered in fully voiced cutscenes, but, unlike SWTOR, these are not interactive and your character never speaks.  Not having options makes the discussions feel less interactive, even though very few conversations in SWTOR actually matter - the choices are an opportunity for your character to have a personality in a genre that often fails to flesh out its occupants.  However, it was definitely as advertised, MMO mechanics in a modern setting.

I didn't get very far into the skill tree, and I unfortunately failed to take a second type of weapon when an early quest offered me an upgrade.  The skill system claims to allow two weapons per skill "deck" and it would have been interesting to see how that works out in practice.  I did find it a bit odd that I had to take abilities in the one weapon I used (some sort of fists, forget if they were actually called that) in a linear order, but it looked like there would be more opportunity to branch out later in the game.

One final tidbit was the game's browser integration.  At one point where a normal game would have fired up a tutorial, TSW launched its browser and streamed a video off Youtube.  This does not break immersion because it is a modern setting, and it allows them to reuse work they already did for their marketing campaign to spin up players on the game.  I did not reach the much-discussed story puzzles that are solved via google, so my only comment there is that I eagerly await the day the Goons launch a campaign to get incorrect answers to the puzzles onto the top of the Google search results as a way to grief the playerbase.

Outlook
I respect folks who think the game is innovative and want to support it on principle.   The one place where they're not innovating, though, is the monthly fee, and that's pretty much a dealbreaker for me right now.  What I've seen of the game is potentially interesting, but I don't feel like dropping anything I'm working on right now to make room in my crowded money and time budgets.  Best of luck to those of you who are soldiering onwards to launch, and perhaps I'll join you someday.

The Uncharted 3 Spinning Ring of Doom and the Upside to Digital Downloads

We've seen a lot of commentary about the quirks associated with Blizzard's decision to take Diablo III online only.  Downtime prevents players from accessing the single player game.  Digital download purchase of the game are now being subjected to restrictions intended to prevent fraud involving stolen credit card numbers - though apparently the limitations were more severe than Blizzard intended and will be relaxed.  And, of course, there's the ever-convenient side-effect that an online-only game cannot be resold.  All of these things are true, but let's not over-romanticize the offline physical media era.

A cautionary tale
I purchased a physical copy of Uncharted 3 for my 2.5 year old PS3-slim and was shocked and disappointed to find that it would not load.  All the other disc-based games in my library play fine, so I assumed I was looking at a defective disc.  I was technically beyond the exchange policy at the retailer at this point, but my wife fears no customer service agent and she was able to convince them to swap out the disc for a new copy.

I brought the new copy home and was shocked to find the same symptoms.  The PS3 clock icon spins ineffectually long past when the game should have loaded, but the game never kicks in.  A trip to Google revealed that the PS3 forums call this phenomena the "spinning ring of doom"- convinced that it is an issue with either the coding or the manufacture of the physical game discs.  They may or may not be correct, but it appears that I am not amongst them.

I called PS3 technical support - not seriously expecting a solution to the problem - and at least came away with the real culprit.  My system will load all the other game discs I have handy.  It will load all the downloaded games on the device's hard drive.  Then the rep told me to load up a Blu-Ray movie and sure enough, the same problem emerged. My 2.5 year old system apparently has a broken disc drive. 

(Aside: The rep then attempted to give me the strong-arm hard sell for Sony's repair service, which cost over $100 - I don't remember if that included shipping or precisely how long I was going to be without my system as a result.  I pointed out that I can get a new system on sale for around $250 with a game and a controller that collectively MSRP for around $100, and the guy tried to put the scare tactics on me that my game and movie downloads would not work on a new console.  I pointed out that the PSN service specifically markets game downloads as tied to your account, and - caught - he said that they should but that he's heard that sometimes they don't.) 

Vestigial Points of Failure
Don't get me wrong, I'm not thrilled with how this experience played out, and the results do not leave me eager to spend more money on the PS3 platform.  I'm now out of pocket for a game that I can't return because it's been opened and can't play because my system won't load it.

However, the part that failed is not some fancy computing hardware or exotic cooling solution or even the machine's hard drive.  The point of failure is the optical drive - a vestigial appendage whose sole contribution to the endeavor of letting me play games is to load physical media from a physical store which is taking a substantial cut of the sale price for the privilege.

Can I hypothetically trade in my working disc for something else that may or may not run on my hobbled system?  Perhaps.  Somehow that's not a lot of comfort right now.

Explaining SWTOR Server Merges

My post from yesterday on SWTOR's "character transfer" program has gotten a fair amount of attention, including blockquotes at Tobold's and the MMO Melting Pot, who asks whether the game has shrunk by 90%.  To be clear, I don't think the population numbers are that low - at least not yet. 

We already knew that the game was down over a quarter of its population.  Due to the game's pre-launch guild deployment program, those losses were very likely to cluster on the newly added servers in the launch rush, as launch guilds stayed put on the pre-launch servers they were placed on.  As a result, losing 25% of players could leave more than 25% of servers with undesirably low populations.  If players were disproportionately leaving servers that never filled up to begin with, and new players (like myself) were disproportionately choosing the most popular servers that remained, it is easy to see how a lot of servers wound up in trouble. 

There are also some reasons beyond avoiding the M-word for PR reasons why transfers were used over mergers.  With transfers, it's up to the player choosing to transfer to make sure that any characters they already have on the destination server do not push them over the cap.  With a voluntary transfer in place of an involuntary merge, responsibility for loss of a name can also be pushed on the player who "asked".  In principle, some of the servers that were flagged as origin servers could still be saved down the line, though I think it is more likely that the stragglers will end up merged on a server that has room for them once they're down to manageable numbers. 

That said, the sheer numbers of servers in play, combined with the previous population trend and the abrupt talk of free to play do not bode well.  We already knew that the game was going to an unlimited free trial model through level 15 - currently seen in WoW and Rift - and that in principle means they are laying the groundwork for non-subscription access to the servers. 

Alternate Payment Model
One final thought - when I heard the news from E3, I immediately assumed paid mini-expansion based on some past rumors regarding a survey that EA circulated on this topic.  It sounds like they denied this rumor in press interviews, and perhaps for good reason.  This idea has been tried before and never goes over well in a subscription game, especially within its first year of release.  However, perhaps there is a way to make mini-expansions more like DLC - as an alternative to the subscription rather than an add-on. 

DLC has far greater acceptance amongst players in general and Bioware fans in particular.  What if, by "free to play", we mean that regular paid mini-expansions come with enough game time - at a discount that offsets the cost of the content for subscribers - to allow most players to beat the content?  If for some reason you aren't done and don't wish to subscribe in the interim, you'd be free to revisit the stuff when the next DLC arrives with more included game time.  It would still be a subscription game and you would still need to offer value for that option, but there may be some middle ground/hybrid model that hasn't been done before and that might work with the kind of content Bioware is producing.  Time will tell, I suppose. 

Surveying SWTOR Servers

SWTOR players have been asking for server transfers basically since the game's first month, and they have finally arrived.  The analysis that we're seeing on the forums is fascinating.

As expected, these appear to be thinly-veiled server mergers, with as many as sixteen sparsely populated "origin" servers invited to transfer to a single "destination" server.  The thing that has surprised me is how aggressive Bioware-Mythic is being.  By my count of US servers as of this evening, there are 10 servers that Bioware intends to save (destinations), 23 servers with unknown fates (neither origin nor destination as of yet), and a whopping 90 servers that Bioware appears to be writing off (origins). 

On the one hand, I tip my hat to Bioware for ripping the bandaid off.  On a day when I should have been celebrating - level 46, Legacy level 5, and 100 presence for purchasing the human racial legacy unlock - I was instead doing damage control.  I lost about 15K credits in auction deposits (I knew I had to cancel auctions but did not realize that your deposit is only refunded if you wait until the sale expires) and had to rename my character - I may or may not end up regretting not changing his name more dramatically if I end up sending stuff to the guy who has my old name on my destination server.  I've heard many stories of players losing multiple character names.  The only thing worse than doing this once would be doing it repeatedly as servers close one by one over time. 

That said, we're looking at closure of anywhere from 75-90% of US servers depending on how the undecideds break.  Perhaps Bioware has been able to optimize or improve hardware to accommodate more players per server, especially with the launch rush redistributed (albeit primarily to a handful of endgame-relevant locations).  Perhaps part of their decision to open so many servers at launch was motivated by a belief that populations would continue to expand, rather than contract, and they are now firmly in consolidation mode.  Even so, Bioware-Mythic now appears to hold the dubious distinction of the top two slots on the list of "most servers closed by a MMO", so something clearly did not go right.


P.S. A tip for those of you who are re-locating: I would suggest creating or leaving a low level alt on the server/legacy you are departing.  This may be moot if the origin servers close soon and the remaining characters are sent to the same destination as the current transfers.  However, in the event that the last stragglers on your old server get sent somewhere else, they can potentially take a copy of your legacy (as it was when you departed) with them - if you have no characters left, presumably nothing will transfer.  A minute in the character generator on a server you're leaving for good is probably worthwhile if it gets you more options to play on in the future. 

Odds and Ends

A handful of tidbits from the last week and a half or so, none of which got written up because none was that exciting.

• I now own a level 3 character in EQ1.  Yes, the original.  SOE is running another promo in which all players will be rewarded with Station Cash if enough people spam enough of their friends to increase the follower count.  ULLSXLQXU2  On the downside, someone in accounting finally realized that people were using promotional and deeply discounted Station Cash to buy subscription time and removed this option, but at least I can apply this towards the next EQ2 expansion.
  
• A riddle for your consideration:  I have something that I was given in order to share it with a friend.  I can't say what it is, I can't say why I have it, and people who don't need it can't say that they don't need it.  Can you solve The Secret? 
  
• Last week was Darkmoon Faire week in Azeroth, so I signed on to snag the monthly tickets from the monthly profession quests.  This felt like a really small number of tickets, but I double checked and confirmed that no, the numbers have been that low since the thing got off the test server.  If there is a nerf conspiracy coming, it hasn't arrived yet.  EU2TMXWJX5 

Meanwhile, my SWTOR server apparently just went eligible for "transferring everyone off but not calling it a merge" status, time to go take care of that.  I'll hold my commentary until we get the final numbers, but the sheer number of servers with one-way transfers off is far greater than I was anticipating.

Legacy Chapter 2

My SWTOR trooper cleared out the finale of Chapter 2, hit level 40 (along with Legacy Level 3) early in the Chapter 3 content, and unlocked a bunch of goodies. All characters on my legacy now get:

• +2% Bonus to healing received
• +1% Bonus to surge (affects critical multiplier)
• +20 Presence (improves all Companion stats)
• Heroic Moment, normally a 20 minute cooldown that lasts 1 minute, now lasts 24 seconds longer and has a cooldown that is two minutes shorter.  (This will be a more significant buff when I complete Chapter 3 on one or more classes for bonus abilities.)  
• Trooper Class Buff: +5% endurance (grants HP) to any class that does not already have the trooper/bounty hunter buff from another source (e.g. party member, drive-by buff from a player, being a trooper/BH)
• Trooper emote

None of these things are game-breaking, though I can imagine the presence numbers adding up for a player who has enough companions unlocked.  Still, it's kind of fun that I already get to take advantage of some Legacy bonuses even though this is my first character.

Min-Maxing Affection
Part of the reason why I was able to top out two of my five companions immediately upon starting Chapter 3 (required to unlock all conversations) was through efforts to min-max companion affection using some web resources (note: links contain companions' names, if you still think that's a spoiler). 

Dulfy's guide contains two crucial pieces of information - each companion's favorite gifts and how much total affection each companion needs to cap out.  My strategy was to throw tier 1 gifts that each companion views as a "favorite" at them as soon as possible until each companion hits 6000 affection.    (Psynister has some tips on how to deal with the handful of characters who do not have any "favorite" gifts.)  I wasn't quite able to afford this much of a headstart on all of my companions because this was my first character, but this is a huge bonus for the ones that I was able to pursue - said companions only needed 2000-3500 to the maximum required affection, rather than 8000-9500 that companions starting from scratch require.

Beyond 6000 affection, gifts begin to become costly - the tier 2 vendor gifts cost three times as much and are only good for 19 affection once you're above 6000, while higher end gifts are more difficult to obtain (or costly on the exchange).  Assuming that you don't have indefinite numbers of credits to throw at this problem, the solution is questing with a site such as TORhead open so that you can always determine which dialog choices will award the most affection.  This approach does mean spoilers, but it can make a huge difference - picking the correct dialog with the correct companion out can be worth over a hundred points, where the incorrect companion gets absolutely nothing for the same amount of work.

I suppose such is the paradox of removing choices that irreversibly affect gameplay - when all that are left are "moral" choices that your companions will always forgive by spending credits on gifts, these reversible choices are what is left to min-max.

P.S. In principle, Human is the optimal race for a first character in SWTOR because it is the only race that has any non-cosmetic benefit - another 100 points to presence (which is almost exclusively a solo stat).  However, I opted to go with more interesting races instead, as the human racial unlock is the cheapest to purchase.  I'm already over halfway to the requisite 500K credits and at Legacy level 3 out of a required 5. 

P.P.S. EA's press conference at E3 announced what sounds like a mini-expansion to SWTOR.  Perhaps it's early yet, but I have not seen the word "free", which makes me think that they plan to be the latest MMO to suffer extreme backlash for attempting to charge for content within the first year of service.  Dulfy reports that there was a survey that may have been attempting to determine pricing/features for this update.  One intriguing item was the idea of including game time in the price of the mini-expansion.  Depending on pricing, this could be a good thing (effectively free for subscribers, while console players who are more tolerant of non-subscription DLC get some time to use the content Bioware is potentially selling) or a bad thing (forced to buy game time along with the thing as a way to inflate the price). 

The Shortening MMO Retention Curve

Psychochild writes:

"Raph Koster has pointed out that big MMOs follow fairly predictable growth curves. The fact there's been a drop so far so fast means that curve has gotten shorter, or the curve has changed dramatically. Neither is a positive sign for traditional MMOs."

I wonder if Koster's famous graph from 2007 was the last point in history in which the model worked. 

I stayed with WoW raiding through 2006 despite generally low satisfaction because where else was I going to go?  LOTRO wasn't out yet, nor had EQ2 completed the Rise of Kunark era revamp that made it accessible to solo players.  If solo play was a substantial part of your gaming, it was WoW or bust through mid-2007. 

I've never seen hard numbers for what happened over the summer of 2007, but Blizzard made a dramatic shift towards "accessibility" starting in the fall of that year.  I don't think it's a coincidence that this change in emphasis coincided with Blizzard's first real competition for the solo demographic and their revenue. 

By contrast, a dissatisfied customer today almost certainly has one or more alternatives (unless, of course, they're focused on open world PVP, sandbox games or other things that don't fit in the "theme park" model) - as Psychochild points out, this includes increasingly high-production-value single player games.  Moreover, recent history suggests that it is very rarely a good investment of your time and money to stick with a game that launches in an unsatisfactory state.  Games that ship unfinished are very likely to do poorly enough to force layoffs that ensure that they never get finished. 

It's easy for us talking heads who spend time writing about games on blogs instead of playing games to admonish our peers for failing to "support" innovation.  In reality, we're customers, not investors, and it is very unlikely that our one purchase, or even several hundred purchases, are going to make or break a game's success in a way that shapes future development.  As a blogger I might prefer to see any and all games succeed, but as a consumer I can't in good conscience recommend throwing money at something you aren't enjoying just because it has some trait you would like to encourage.   That may indeed be a non-positive sign for the market, but I don't see it changing anytime soon.

Victory over the Doff System

Over the weekend, my Star Trek Online main hit rank four in the final remaining duty officer commendation.  As such, he has completed all of the assignment chains and all of the ranks currently implemented in game. I can continue to gain commendation exp up to 150,000/100,000 in each category - this will supposedly grant a headstart against any future ranks that are added.  I am also free to continue to improve my crew via recruitment, and to earn various currencies.  Overall, though, there is very little within the system itself that is of use to my main.

(My Klingon alt is also making steady progress - she has rank 4 Marauding for all the teleports, and is slowly completing chains despite roster limits - I have not paid to increase her roster size, and do not intend to.) 

DOFF missions award dilithium ore, which is required for certain types of crafting and purchases and can be exchanged for Cryptic cash store points through a player exchange.  As of now, my earnings have added up to around 1400 CP (plus 800 CP that I actually purchased).  A portion of that balance went to unlocking the energy credit limit for my account (400 CP) and to increasing my main's duty roster to 200 (580 CP), leaving me with around 1200 CP in spending currency - $15 worth.  This is more than half of the cost of the high level premium ships in the cash shop, though my income rate is dropping due to a steadily increasing exchange rate and diminished time in game. 

That said, the scorecard I'm actually tracking right now is my energy credits.  Now that I no longer need more officers for my crew, I'm selling stuff on the exchange for hundreds of thousands of energy credits daily.  I don't really need energy credits for their own sake - I don't actually play any of the conventional game and therefore have little need for gear - but it would amuse me to pick up one of those unethical lottery box ships that people are wasting over $100 in real money on in exchange for in-game currency. 

Of course, if I did this, I would be indirectly financing Cryptic/Perfect World's gambling activities.  The person who paid money for keys to open lottery boxes only to put the ship on the exchange did so because the roughly 80 million energy credits were worth the real money to them.  The players who buy my surplus duty officers are in turn providing me with the credits to convince that other player to buy lottery box keys.  On one level, this is a good thing because it is a way for my presence in the game to contribute income even when I personally am not paying - good for the game economy.  However, it also means that it's effectively impossible for anyone to boycott the lottery system unless they give up the entire in-game economy. 

Not sure how I feel about this, and I guess I have a good while to find out - I am less than halfway to the energy credit balance I would need, and I don't even want the Ferengi ship that's currently on offer.  It's definitely an interesting quirk to the system though - no wonder so many players feel so powerless to stop them. 

Lowering The Price of EQ2

In EQ2, SOE has the dubious distinction of developing the only major MMO that I otherwise enjoy playing but routinely do not play due to their business model antics.  That said, a questionable business model attached to a product that is worth playing is one sale away from being a done deal.

This weekend is a 50% rebate sale on EQ2's Station Cash store, which includes expansion packs and non-recurring paid subscriptions.  This is not an especially great time to buy Station Cash - a double SC sale, which happens more frequently, lets you pay half as much for the SC you want, while a rebate sale requires you to pay the regular price and gives you SC back afterwards.  It is, however, a spectacular time to SPEND Station Cash.

A few weeks ago, I decided to spend $20 for 6000 SC at the last triple SC sale - enough to cover the 4000 SC expansion and a one month non-recurring subscription for 1500 SC so I wouldn't need to start paying for gear unlocks again until I hit the new level cap.  For some reason, though, I held back on spending the SC after paying for it.  My patience paid off.

That $20, tripled and then instant-rebated, bought me the $40 expansion, three months of subscription status (3897 SC) and still over 2000 SC left from the most recent purchase (4352 total counting a previous balance).  The tough call now is whether to extend my subscription out from August through November (leaving me with around 2000 SC left after the rebate) or hold onto the balance in anticipation of being charged 4000 SC for another expansion in December.

Anyway, PSA: If you already have SC and are looking to buy stuff in EQ2's store, this is a good weekend to do so.

Marginal Return on Content

Anjin asks whether the layoffs at Bioware are a sign of trouble or business as usual.  I'd suggest the answer is a bit of both - losing staff is business as usual for a game that lost about a quarter of its customers in the previous quarter.  This move comes at about the game's five month mark, which is a bit late for the traditional ship-then-sack treatment.  At a minimum, the game's subscription performance can't have helped their case to keep more people on board.  That said, the game is still the number two subscription MMO at the moment, which would seem to make it a bit early to be abandoning ship.

The more concerning possibility, then, is that EA does not like what they're seeing in terms of return on investment for new content.  We know from the beta that Bioware has great tools in place to map out how content is used.  These tools may now be telling them that daily quests aren't helping them retain players who are out of story content.  Meanwhile, my experience has been that the solo content on a planet runs for a couple of hours, which can't be a great return on the development investment needed to create that much content. 

Overall, it is going to be very interesting to see whether the game ever focuses on advancing the solo story content beyond its current set of endings, or whether they continue to focus on quality of life features and concede that players will simply leave as they finish the story.  

The Pros and Cons of Scheduled Content

Last week's episode of STOked discussed a controversy in the Star Trek Online surrounding scheduled content.  The game has recently added some much desired additional group content, but this content has only been available at specific times through the game's event calendar.

I understand where the complaints are coming from.  It is fully understandable for players to want to play the game on their own schedule, with their own groups.  Especially in a situation where almost all of the group content that the team is developing is going into the "time-gated" calendar, players who aren't playing on the official calendar's hours are out of luck. 

The community seems quick to point the finger at Perfect World and the game's new free-to-play model.  This may be true, but it is at best an indirect effect.  Nothing in these minievents that I am aware of requires purchases in the cash shop.  Rather, the time schedule may be a legitimate attempt to help players enjoy the game - where perhaps eventually someday they might spend money. 

If you let players pick and choose their own groups, the folks with guilds will do the content they want to do, and everyone else will be stuck waiting because there is no one piece of content that everyone can agree to run.  Where most MMO's focus the random group pool by offering rewards for agreeing to run random content in the interest of forming groups faster, the scheduled content approach focuses the pool by saying that the one event is what's available at this time. 

In some ways, the approach is a stick (no access to content if it's not the right time) rather than a carrot (reward for agreeing to run a random dungeon).  However, when you look at the effects of the random system, every piece of content in games that use it now has to be designed to be easily beaten by a PUG of potentially dubious composition.  Setting aside a specific subset of content and saying that this is the stuff that any five warm bodies can clear for rewards may have less overall effect on the state of the game. 

In that case, though, the solution is as simple as it is elusive - make more content so that this one mechanic is not getting all of the limited new stuff that is being added to the game. 

Return of the 400,000?

There is much chatter about how SWTOR has - as Azuriel cleverly put it - lost an Eve Online's worth of customers in the last quarter.  This is roughly the first half of what I predicted at the beginning of the year - high churn.  The second half of that prediction - recurring revenue as those players return to replay the game - remains to be seen. 

Bioware is looking like it now owns the fastest MMO ever to acquire a million former players (in fact, Bioware-Mythic would own the top two slots if only Warhammer had actually made it to a million in the first place).  Many of the studio's games are well known for replayability, and this appears to be no exception - two factions, and four class stories (albeit with generic content padding out the leveling curve that is shared within the faction).  If you are coming back to experience the story, having more story left to experience is a good thing. 

That said, the short term looming crisis is to stop the bleeding.  The game is still most likely the number two Western subscription MMO, but knowing that the subscriber base is dwindling that rapidly puts a lot of what we've seen in the last months - the aggressive free game time campaign, complaints of poorly populated servers and the corresponding priority to implementing character transfers and guild features - into context.  Some of the solo-replay market won't care if they come back to a largely dead server in a game that's being viewed as a sinking ship by the "core" MMO community, but Bioware definitely does not want this to continue.

Storybricks: Emergent Gameplay on Kickstarter

The Storybricks project has taken to Kickstarter, in a move that's as fascinating from the business model perspective as the tool itself.

A Twist on Kickstarter
The traditional Kickstarter model is to ask for funds because you need the funds to complete the proposed project.  For example, Ferrel needed about $4000 to publish the Raider's Companion because he wasn't able to risk fronting the cash needed for editing, art, and other costs.  Goal reached, book published.  As Tobold writes, relying on this model for funding to develop an MMO is problematic - even Storybricks' $250K ask is very low in an industry that spends more than 100 times that on a triple-A title.

Reading Psychochild's post about the campaign suggests that they're going in a slightly different direction - what I'd suggest we could call emergent gameplay in the world of Kickstarter.  They would like $250K in funding - as would any independent project - but what they're really after is $250K in revenue. The theory - I'd suggest this is the same model that led to the two recent multi-million dollar game campaigns on kickstarter - is that revenue demonstrates to investors (either third party or within the studio itself if it has the means) that they will potentially profit from putting up money now, at a comparatively early stage in the project.

The project
The Storybricks project itself is a similarly quirky approach to MMO development.  The hope is to develop an artificial intelligence system for modeling NPC reactions to other characters first and then hoping to eventually build a game - and a system for player-generated content around that.   I have little idea how that will play out in practice, but it would hopefully result in something that looks different from the rest of the MMO pack. 

The campaign runs through the beginning of June and has currently amassed over $9000 in pledges from more than 200 donors - a lot by most standards but only a small step towards $250K.  Like most Kickstarter projects, backing this effort is a kind of purchasing decision - you will not be charged if they fail to reach the goal they say they need to fund the project, and you should in principle receive the promised goods if the project is funded.  Of course, the value of some of the longer term subscriptions will likely be diminished if the team does not eventually secure additional funds, but I'm guessing that most backers know what they're getting into - a longshot that, if successful, would be genuinely innovative in a genre that hasn't shown much interested in that activity precisely because of the large amounts of money involved. 

Whatever the outcome, this is a campaign to watch - both because of the actual project and because of its implications for future attempts at Kickstarter-funding MMO's. 

Subscriptions - MMO's and Cable TV

A bit of travel and an impromptu spring cleaning weekend have added up to keep me out of town and away from my new gaming rig over the last week.  My old laptop will kind of play SWTOR, but I've definitely been spending less time in game than I otherwise might have as a result.  I knew this was a possibility when I picked up the game and started my 30 day subscription (which did qualify me for the "loyalty" minipet), but I find the contrast striking.

• In LOTRO, I own access to the current expansion and all the high level content to consume at my leisure.
• After a triple station cash sale in EQ2, I now have the balance needed to pick up the "optional" expansion (required for the current AA cap increase) and pay for either gear unlocks or even a brief subscription while exploring the new content in the new patch (which most likely would have been part of the expansion, had it been ready in time for the launch window).
• In STO - which has been offering 50% bonus duty officer cxp this weekend - again, I can play at my leisure.
• In SWTOR, I had to pay for this stretch when I knew I wouldn't be in game much, because it sat on days 10-20 of my 30 day subscription.

Bioware's people swear up and down that their model - effectively the 2004 model with few changes - is the only way to finance development on the scale of their game.  But is it really the subscription that's propping the game up, or rather the sales of more than two million boxes at $40-60 each in a market where most non-subscription customers never pay a dime?  Judging from their aggressive promotional efforts, Bioware's problem with SWTOR appears to be less about getting people to try the game and more about getting them to stay.

I recognize that there are still arguments in favor of the subscription.  Even so, I can't help but notice the parallels between my recent SWTOR experience and the reasons why we got rid of our cable TV subscription.  Much like the MMO subscription, we found that we were paying a flat rate for a large bundle of stuff that we don't care about packed in with the handful of shows we do watch.  Like the MMO subscription, we were forced to pay for many days when we did not want or use the service in order to have access when we did want to do so.  Much like the SWTOR story experience, there is some content that we lose out on because its owners have not seen fit to provide it through any other channel.

Like the MMO subscription or hate it, it's starting to feel like it's on the wrong side of history.

Star Trek Online At 3 Months

Since my Klingon alt hit level 50 in STO through the duty officer system, I have been spending much less effort on flying my intrepid crew of officers around the galaxy.  By design, this is not a system anyone will ever be "done" with, but I'm getting pretty darned close. 


Progress
I have finished all of the assignment chains (including all of the officers for critical colonal chain completion) and am sitting at rank 3 or 4 in most commendations (except exploration, which recently saw several mission rewards doubled because it is harder than any of the others and not especially rewarding).  I've got 33 very rare duty officers and counting.  I'm already at the stage where I only very rarely have to send a green quality officer out on an assignment, and I am steadily converting these officers into blue quality.  Even my alt is now hitting rank 3 and collecting blue officers. 

Technically, I suppose I haven't won until I max out all the commendations (which actually go to 150K/100K, presumably as a headstart against a future rank 5) and get to run with basically an all-purple crew, but I'm rapidly getting to close enough. 

Teaming Up
On paper, there's no reason why you ever need to interact with another player to beat the duty officer system.  You can buy and sell items that are used in missions, or even officers, on the exchange, but you can also get most of what you need solo given enough time.  However, it has been fascinating to see how the system is slowly accumulating a community following - and how the developers are supporting it.

All of the sector blocks in the game get new missions every four hours.  The best missions - depending on your current goals and crew, might be anywhere on the map, and I used to spend 45-60 minutes flying around to see what I could pick up.  Apparently, I could have been leaning on a pair of custom channels - DOFFJOBS and DOFFCALLS - along with the crowdsourced tracking sheet.  At all hours of day or night, players are manually distributing this information - albeit imperfectly since you can only see missions that you quality for (due to prerequisites and cooldowns). 

The new system of NPC's on your ship who offer missions has even added a social aspect.  Now it is possible for a player who has an especially rare/desirable mission on one of their bridge NPC's to invite other players to their ship.  The very last chain I completed was the 10-part Jem'Hadar mission, in which I was stuck on the very rare 9th part for a number of weeks.  The day after I joined DOFFJOBS, someone broadcast that they had this assignment available on their ship and I was able to finally clear it out.

The Business
With my one month of subscription time safely lapsed, I can confirm that I do retain all of the bridge officer and bank/inventory slots I unlocked while leveling as a subscriber.  I did NOT, however, retain the currency cap unlock - my balance remained where it was (above the 10-million energy credit cap for non-subscribers) but I was not allowed to earn any more credits.  Due to the lack of any indication that this was occurring, I lost probably the better part of 2 million credits before discovering that I needed to purchase this unlock.

That aside, there is very little else that I see myself buying with Cryptic points.  I'm happy with my current duty roster limits, and I have no interest in participating in the "lock box" gambling that seems to be getting the lion's share of the developers' attention - this system is now even getting exclusive duty officers and assignments, but it doesn't really bother me that there are officers out there that I will never obtain. 

I'm certainly not complaining about the value I got out of the money I've spent on this game - $11.40 for an old retail box along with the points I used to unlock the currency cap and the +100 duty roster for my main.  It will be interesting, though, to see where the game goes from here.  During the three months I've been playing, the price of cryptic points has gone from just above 200 dilithium to around 300 dilithium - suggesting that the number of players earning in-game currency but not interested in paying real money into the system is growing rapidly in the post-free-to-play era.  If the only places where Cryptic is actually seeing return on their time investment is $50 ship packs and gambling boxes, this game could become a place players don't want to do business with in a hurry. 

Bypassing The Betas

There is a lot of beta going around these days, and I couldn't be less excited.  To name a few:

• I've had access to the Pandaria beta for several weeks now.  Downloaded the client, copied over characters, have yet to log in.
  
• The Diablo III open beta is this weekend.  In fairness, I suppose I would be more interested in this if I hadn't already made my purchasing decision on this game when I picked up the annual pass.  I've known for a while now exactly when my "invite" is arriving - the launch date of May 15th. 
  
• Tera has a complicated rollout schedule.  The game is in open beta this weekend, with a pre-order promo allowing players to retain one character per server into the headstart (which will open it up to the full eight character slots per server) and launch.  I don't see it written down anywhere whether open beta players who subsequently pre-order get to keep their character, but I assume this is likely.  So, at least this pre-head-start thing will potentially not be wiped.  Even so, I'm not in any hurry.  My decision to wait on SWTOR paid off with a more polished game, a lower price tag, and a clear choice of which server to pick after the dust settled on the launch.
  
• Further out on the horizon are more betas for games like Secret World and Guild Wars 2 (both of which are already distributing keys through various means), and more titles upcoming.

Don't get me wrong, I tip my cap to anyone who is still excited enough about some forthcoming MMO to spend their time dealing with bugs and crashes on a server that is going to be blanked before launch.  Personally, though, these things are making less and less sense for me as I juggle a large number of games that are already live, and as free trials become a required feature for even subscription games. 

SOE: Anyone mind if we shoot that other guy over there who isn't you?

When EQ2 went free to play, certain gameplay-effecting items were removed from the old EQ2X cash shop.  The promise was that these would only be returned after considering the desires of the community through in-game polling, and SOE further promised to disclose the results publicly.

The poll has finally arrived, and features questions on how players feel about self-res items and cash store potions.  Each item is broken out into two questions - if the player is okay if the items can only be used solo and if the player is okay if the item can also be used in raids. 

Most reasonable people can probably agree that these items are less problematic if you keep them out of content that is actually balanced to be challenging - where their use would feel more mandatory.  However, setting up the poll in this way is designed to get a specific result - i.e. substantially higher acceptance of the items as long as they're kept out of groups, where a straight up "are you in favor of this item" would have drawn more "no" answers due to the group concern. 

More to the point, this poll gives everyone an equal voice on a topic that has dramatically unequal consequences.  In this particular case, there are probably substantial numbers of non-raiders who can agree that having these items is problematic.  However, imagine for a minute that the results do go in the other direction.  Imagine that about 10% of the playerbase raids and that 90.01% of the votes in the poll are for allowing the use of the items in raids as well.  Would anyone outside SOE's marketing department be comfortable using those results to claim overwhelming popular support for the potions? 

At the end of the day, the deck remains stacked against SOE because this is a non-random poll sample - players who want a specific result have an incentive to sign on to vote (and get their friends to do the same).  SOE also claims that this is a "poll" and not a "vote".  Even so, presenting data that lumps in the opinions of players who are not affected by the decision with those who are is misleading, and a tactic that only makes sense if the marketing goal is to obtain a more favorable result. 

PAX East 2012: Things to do, people to meet

As a first time convention-goer, I had very little idea of what to expect of the PAX East extravaganza in Boston.

In some ways, it was not what I expected.  There were no major game announcements that I'm aware of, and even the stuff on display on the show floor tended to be minor updates to information we already had.  The demos and panels that were present were trapped behind massive lines that required substantial commitment.  Meanwhile, though some MMO's had senior developers manning their booths, it wasn't really an opportunity to ask all the hard-hitting questions that professional journalists dare not mention - though satisfying the fans is a plus, these folks were there to promote their products.  Even the swag was relatively limited (though my decision to steer clear of lines may have influenced that, and the swag I did get was very good stuff indeed).

As the song says, you can't always get what you want.  Even so, the things I found were in many ways better than the the things I might have expected.

The Road to PAX
The lowpoint of my PAX experience came very early.  Given unlimited time and money, I would definitely have preferred to fly in a day early and take the show at a measured, easy pace.  Instead, I work up at 4 AM to fly to Boston and arrive at the show floor around 11 AM - already a non-trivial day.

I arrived to find that they had run out of the day's allotment of swag bags.  Concerned that the MMO loot might find a similar fate, I set off on a rapid fire run around the perimeter, snagging codes from The Secret World, SWTOR, LOTRO, DDO, and Tera (none of which, as it happens, were in any danger of running out).  The one advantage to showing up on the second day was that I already knew what to expect on the show floor - nothing major and new.

At this point it was lunch time, so I grabbed an overpriced and mediocre convention center sandwich and wondered whether I had made a big mistake in spending the time and money to come to a place that, on a first pass, didn't have much to see.

Hope in unexpected places
With lowered expectations, I began my post-lunch circuit of the show at the Turbine booth.  I had a brief conversation with some DDO folks - not really my primary objective since the expansion is really aimed well above my characters' heads - before getting in line for the LOTRO hoodie promo.  Anyone willing to wish LOTRO a happy 5th birthday on camera was given a free hooded sweatshirt.

I asked the guy in the WB Games shirt watching the line and greeting people whether he posted in the forums.  He said he did, under the name Berephon.  Yes, the lore lead for the game, maker of the famous timeline of events that the public can't have, was smiling and waving at dozens of people who had no idea who he was.

I promptly extracted a few chuckles out of the man by asking a question that I've been dying to hit him with for years - how much time it take a normal person in Middle Earth to do all the travel that occurs in the epic book questlines.  After a good laugh, he conceded that the travel time was something that they just had to let go of in terms of the game design and the lore.  I noted that Elrond was right when he tells the player, at the start of Volume 3, that they are the only one capable of gathering all the rangers in time. 

It was a small moment, but the start of finding the hidden little moments that made this show worthwhile.

Dancing on chairs, and choices about lines
After stopping to listen to a panel at the SWTOR booth, I headed across the floor to see the sights and make it to Ferrel's book signing.  I've been listening to the man on podcasts for years, and have even been on his show twice, but I'm not sure that I will ever be able to look at it the same way now that I know that the guy isn't kidding when he suggests things like dancing on chairs to entertain the masses.  Kidding aside, it was great to finally put a face to the voice of Epic Slant. 

From here, it was time to start making choices about what exactly I was prepared to wait in line to see.  I was definitely starting to get tired, I already knew I had more possible activities in the evening than energy and time to do them, and I didn't want to overdo the afternoon on the show floor.  I was definitely surprised by how much demand there was to attend even the smallest-seeming booths and panels at the show.  I've always heard that everything at PAX has a line, and apparently this was true.

The one line I finally decided to wait in was the one to get in the Assassin's Creed III threater.  All told, this took about 40 minutes, for a chance to watch a developer-narrated preview of the gameplay in a room decorated to resemble colonial barracks.  The playthrough of a single sequence in the game probably took a mere five minutes or so of gameplay, but the commentary actually did manage to point out some interesting tidbits I might not have realized I was watching - efforts to make the climbable trees look more realistic, numbers of soldiers forming firing lines and shooting in formation, etc.   I enjoyed the video, and collected an inflatable hatchet for my time, though I'll concede that I did not line up for any more videos or demos.

Partying with Turbine
Everything I'd heard said that Turbine throws a great party at PAX, so I'd made RSVP'ing a top priority and picked this shindig over the numerous others (including a blogger tweet-up, parties hosted by The Secret World, Curse, and Bioware, and a Jonathan Coulton concert).   In a world where I had more time, I might have left the show early to nap and save some energy to hit more than one social event, but I guess I had just come to terms with the fact that attending an event as big as PAX means that you will necessarily miss some things that would have been worth going to.  In any case, it appears that I chose well.

Lining up to enter the party, I noticed a familiar logo on the shirt of the guy who had walked in at the same time I did, and realized that his voice sounded familiar.  Completely by accident, I had run into Chris from MMO Reporter.  In addition to his role as the head of a Canadian MMO Podcast syndicate, Chris was covering the show for PC Gamer.  It was interesting to hear about what he had seen (which we can all do via the podcast and upcoming videos), and he had definitely lined up way more formal interview time than I got by wandering the floor, but I was a bit surprised to hear largely the same impression I'd gotten of the show - some interesting tidbits but relatively little major news.  Perhaps PAX has gotten so big these days that it's only worth paying the cost of exhibiting for the biggest titles that are gearing up their marketing pushes for launches later this year.

Chris was not the only famous podcaster in attendance.  Jerry Snook - founder of DDOcast and now a member of DDO's community team - was in the house, along with longtime DDOCast PAX East correspondent Steiner-Davion and frequent guest-host Rowanheal.   Meanwhile, Turbine spared no expense, booking the back room of Jillian's across the street from Fenway park, providing free drink tickets and high quality swag.  (The highlight - an actual real-world cloak.)  For extra amusement value, they had the TV screens that would ordinarily be showing sports in most bars in Boston playing the promos for the LOTRO and DDO expansions instead - quite an unexpected sight.

On top of all that, I ended up getting to chat with Executive Producers Fernando (DDO) and Kate (LOTRO) Paiz for the better part of ten minutes about their experiences running their games through their now famous free to play conversations.  As Fernando tells it, one of the first questions the marketing people asked was how quickly they could retrofit DDO to free to play.  His response was very quickly if you didn't care about the quality of the product, and fortunately a more measured response won out.

Many couples might have been nervous about working together on such a high profile, high pressure project, but Fernando claims that things very quickly got too busy for them to get in each others' way.  Kate covered many of the business model systems, while Fernando worked more closely on the design and engineering side, and both had plenty of work to do.  I asked whether Turbine's shared engine made it easier to repeat the process with LOTRO, and Fernando definitely agreed that having two major projects running the current engine made it easier to justify large investments in this technology.  (In general, he said that LOTRO gets upgrades first, though DDO got to be the first in line during the conversion.)

Following up on this discussion, I asked Kate about the shift to the larger scale expansions in both games.  She confirmed that having the highly successful expansion launch in LOTRO definitely helped make the case for undertaking the larger project in DDO.  I'm still not 100% satisfied with this move, as I feel it undermines the a la carte choice of the model, but at least I can respect that they are trying more ambitious things with the larger revenue that has come under the new business model.

Winding Down
I finally headed out of the Turbine party a bit after 10 PM - perhaps a bit early by nightlife standards, but it had been a very long day and I had many sore muscles to show for it.  (Ironically, Bioware may have been exceedingly clever in providing comfortable seating in a portion of the SWTOR "booth" that served as a lounge and venue for several daily panels/Q&A's.  On paper it looked like a lot of underutilised space, but I wouldn't be surprised if tired convention-goers spent more time in view of the promotional videos and panels because it was a good place to rest.)

Sunday had much smaller crowds - after both Friday and Saturday sold out, there were plenty of badges to be had at the door, and I convinced my wife to tag along and demo some tabletop (yes, non-video) games.  The con organizers apparently had set aside an allocation of swag bags for Sunday, so I was able to get the loot that I missed out on Saturday morning.  The table top section of the convention was a real pleasant surprise - you can read reviews and buy games anywhere, but it's not every day that you can get people to teach you dozens of them just to see which ones you find interesting.

Cell phone reception at the con was sluggish, leading to delayed text message times that had Riannon and myself criss-crossing the show floor in an effort to introduce ourselves before heading out.  Riannon and Pete are another duo of folks I've been hanging out with online for years, and it was great to meet them as well.  That said, we were all pretty tired by this point in the con, and we all headed out our separate ways back home around lunchtime.

Overall
Far and away the best advice I got on attending the con was not to have my heart set on catching everything that was going on, as this seemed downright impossible.  I know I missed any number of things due to conflicts and aversion to lines, and that was just something to come to grips with. 

I saved some money through my less than optimal travel arrangements and staying with a friend in town, and I spent surprisingly little at the event itself - the Turbine swag in particular included several free items that I would have considered paying for.  That said, the cost of the weekend trip still comes pretty close to the total of what I spent on MMO's last year.  If not for the fact that both PAX locations happen to be in cities that my wife and I have reason to visit anyway, this trip would be very hard to justify.

That said, overall I had a good time at the con - in some ways despite the con itself.  The moments that are going to stick with me are not the games or the booths, but the people.  Perhaps in the same way that some of the things we do in MMO's can become fun in the right company, some of the less desirable quirks of the convention - long lines and limited information beyond what you could have read online for a fraction of the time and money - are worth overlooking.