Ending Panda Envy

EQ2's latest expansion features the Hua Mein, a race of intelligent Pandas.  As nearly as I can tell, there is no previous basis in the lore of Norrath for these guys.  Perhaps they were worried about NPC's leaving to look for work in other games.

When WoW's Burning Crusade expansion was announced at the inaugural Blizzcon in 2005, a suspiciously large number of magazines that had been invited on tours of Blizzard HQ reported that the expansion would add the Pandaren to the Alliance.  The Horde Blood Elves were both confirmed and playable at the convention, but the Alliance race was a mystery and there was no information anywhere in the public record to support this claim.  The rumor is that Blizzard was planning to add Pandaren, and even showed the journalists concept art, but subsequently reversed the decision because of concerns that China would disapprove.  Blizzard confirmed the China issues back at Blizzcon 2008.

Having actually visited a random village of walking Kung Fu Pandas, hidden deep in the mountains of Odus, I'm now wondering that China may have done Azeroth a favor.  The space goats that we got instead may have been a bit random, and required a re-writing of a major chunk of Warcraft lore, but they actually fit into the storyline of the expansion in a way that I don't think the Pandaren would have.    

Don't get me wrong, walking talking animals are reasonably well established in Norrath, which has giant frogs, rats, and cats amongst its playable races.  That said, the secluded dojo of somewhat pacifist martial arts pandas, complete with tea ceremonies and bamboo architecture, is a bit goofy for player characters, even for EQ2.  (There's apparently a cosmetic illusion that lets you turn into a Panda, so that bit of abuse is probably in Lyriana's future at some point down the line.) 

Microtransaction Lock-In in W101, DDO, and soon LOTRO

Tipa took her second Wizard 101 account free to play (or "pay as you go" as they call it over there), and has run head-on into an issue I'm seeing the opposite side of in DDO.  Quoth Tipa:

"The problem with buying zones à la carte is that after, you’re locked in. If you change your mind and decide to subscribe once again, you’ve wasted all that money spent unlocking zones one at a time. The only possible way to protect your investment is to keep buying zones at $2.18 each."

This happens when a game offers a rental subscription option alongside the option to purchase permanent unlocks (whether of content or features).  As the player pays to unlock more pieces of the subscription, re-subscribing in the future becomes less attractive because there's less left for the player to rent that they don't already own. 

The Sub Vs Zone Balance in W101 and DDO
Unfortunately for Tipa's wallet, KingsIsle has priced W101's zone unlocks in a way that makes the subscription a much better deal for players who consume a lot of content.  On paper, a $2 zone unlock sounds fine compared to a $10/month rental subscription, but the crucial question is how long that zone will last.  Apparently the answer is not that long if you chew through content the way Tipa does - she ended up dropping $50 in two days.

Over in DDO, Turbine is having the opposite problem because their adventure packs are actually priced at a relatively low level compared to the VIP subscription.  Turbine has increased the monthly VIP Turbine Point stipend to 1000 TP for the summer in an attempt to sign up more players.  At the non-sale exchange rate, that's $10 worth of Turbine Points as a throw-in for the $15 all-access subscription, but I'm still not interested.  I already own access to 9 of the game's 23 adventure packs, along with the Monk class, the Warforged race, and several things that even VIP's have to pay extra for.   If I did go VIP, I don't think I'd even encounter any content that I do not already own during that first month. 

Why Turbine wants subscribers
Why, you might ask, should it bug Turbine if I keep buying things straight up instead of renting them via the subscription?  The problem is two-fold. 

First, DDO's currently high stated revenue is unsustainable because so many of the game's top-selling items are one-time purchases.  At the rate Turbine has been releasing new adveture packs, they're looking at $2-4/month in income from players who do not purchase anything more than the adventure packs, and even that is conditional upon Turbine convincing the player that they WANT this month's pack. 

To fix, this, Turbine would like players to get more into the habit of spending money on consumables, fluff, and other things that players might pay for each and every month.  This is why the subscription gives players a starter balance each month.  The store does not even allow players to see the prices of purchasing the content they are currently renting through a subscription.  Instead, they want to encourage players to think about other uses for their increasing stockpile of points that do not involves saving them to fund a future "upgrade" from the VIP subscription to a Premium Free To Play account with permanent access to all the crucial content.  Unfortunately, the problem remains - as long as I know that my points CAN be used to purchase new content in the future, it's going to be very difficult to convince me to spend them on fluff. 

(In fact, the purchase restrictions make me inclined NOT to subscribe temporarily, as subscribers cannot take advantage of sale prices on content that might no longer be offered when their subscriptions expire.) 

Lock-In or Lock-Out For LOTRO?
The real interesting question, though, is how this issue will play out when LOTRO becomes free to play.  I started writing this post under the assumption that LOTRO would naturally follow the same path that DDO does - with a cheap free-to-play option that leaves the subscription relatively unattractive.  After examining the retrictions on free players more closely, I'm no longer so sure. 

If you are a former subscriber, you will sign on to find that two of your five bags, most of your trait slots, some of your character slots (which you may or may not be using) and all of the content from 15-50 (other than some skirmishes and all epic book quests) locked. You will be stuck with a 5G gold cap, and will need to pay to unlock the new cosmetic outfit wardrobe storage system.  Once you pay to unlock these things, that investment might seem to create a lock-out incentive that renders the subscription obsolete.  However, does any of this stuff really matter enough to make players run out and fix it? 

I already own a horse and a house, and I cook my own food.  I don't need to buy gear from the auction house, so my only expenses are repairs, rent on the house, food ingredients, and occasionally Athelas potions.  I can cover those expenses with the free slots left in three bags, and the rest of the vendor trash can rot.  If unlocking the trait slots is expensive, perhaps I should take Turbine's acknowledgement that trait grinding is boring enough to be worth paying to lessen the pain as an invitation to skip the grind altogether, instead challenging myself with slightly tougher gameplay via a slightly weaker character. 

The fact is that content is the only thing that I'd think about paying money for under the free to play system.  However, here's where the differeing playstyles in LOTRO versus DDO change the situation.  DDO is designed around repeatedly running the same dungeons.  Between loot and the adjustable difficulty settings, there's plenty of reason why players would actually want to retain access to the content after they complete it once. 

By contrast, most LOTRO quests cannot be repeated, and there would be relatively little reason to do so if it were permitted.  In this model, the value of continuing to have access to the content is diminished.  Depending on how the prices work out, it might make sense to pay to rent content when I'm actively using it (either because there is new material available, or because I want to take an alt through the 15-50 range).  In that model, I'd basically be using the free access for permanent "welcome back" status for the purposes of talking to the guildies and whatnot, rather than actively attempting to obsolete the subscription.

(Also, LOTRO has several features - monster play and rested exp currently - that are not available to non-subscribers.  That could always change if there's a market for them, but it could also be an intentional effort to preserve the appeal of the subscription.)  

Anything is possible until the prices are finalized, but it certainly looks like Turbine has learned something from their first forray into Free to Play. Time will tell which version of the model they ultimately prefer. 

EQ2 Quests Need More Grind

Lyriana hit level 86 in the Sundered Frontier the other day. Since Blizzard will be stopping WoW's level cap at 85 for Cataclysm, there is a very real possibility that my little Fae Dirge will be my highest level character for the next two years or more.

Random numeric fact aside, I'm a bit disappointed to find that EQ2's latest expansion suffers from the same flaw as the game's new starting area.  Much as it shocks me to type this, EQ2's solo quests need more grind.

Mapping out a quest

On this map is one chunk of the Sundered Frontier zone.  In the bottom left, an arrow (Lyriana's current position) shows where the questgivers are located.  On the top right, the X indicates the cave that the monsters have decided to camp around (but not, for some reason, inside).

You can't tell the scale from the map, but it takes Lyriana (who hovers around at +100% runspeed at all times due to her class buffs) about a minute to cover the distance, ignoring all the mobs because she can simply outrun them.  I don't think that anyone makes it to level 80 without some means of moving faster than base speed unless they've done so deliberately.  However, if you were unable to escape the mobs, you'd be in for relatively short fights - these enemies are rated weaker than normal, to ensure that future undergeared characters don't struggle to start the new expansion (as happened to solo players attempting to enter the Rise of Kunark expansion content). 

Now that you have the context, allow me to summarize the questline (wiki link here):

1. Run to cave, loot one object without fighting, run back to questgiver.
2. Use the looted object right next to the questgiver, obtain another quest complete 10 second later for no good reason.
3. Run to cave, kill six intentionally weak mobs, run back to questgiver.
4. Run back to cave again, climb a ladder, kill one mob (of actual normal difficulty), run back
5. Run back to cave, use item, run away and return to questgiver. 
   Alternately, stand still as about eight of the intentionally weak mobs descend on your position and attack, just because you're bored enough to see if you'll live if you fight them all at once.  For bonus points, take AFK time partway through combat, while the surviving mobs are still attacking you, to click on an item for a different quest that needs to be restarted every 7 kills. 
   In a bit of variety, upon returning to the questgiver after this quest, he will instead send you back to the city (2 minutes AFK-flight away) to talk to his boss for the quest complete.
6. The boss wants to investigate in person, and gives you a quest complete for traveling back to the quest hub and speaking to him there. 
7. Travel back to the cave, loot five objects (no mobs to fight), run to the the boss' office in the city (about 2 minutes from the cave for Lyriana, running directly towards the city and jumping off the cliff because she can glide safely down into the city on her wings) to talk to his flunkie, then fly the AFK flight back to the quest hub.  
8. Back to the cave again, click on the pool of water that you've waded through half a dozen times already to loot a sample, back to the questgiver.  I wish I was kidding.
9. Run back to cave, climb up the ladder from step 4, loot some items (still no mobs here), return to questgiver.  

The quest continues, and actually includes some combat, but the good news is that you're done with non-combat trips back to the cave.  The bad news is that you just spent 30 minutes on seven trips back and forth across an uneventful stretch of terrain in order to kill a total of seven mobs, most of which were intentionally trivial. 

If I believed that this garbage was the best that the current EQ2 team can produce - which I might if not for the fact that recent efforts like the Lavastorm revamp from last year have been massively better - I would be joining Ferrel on the "EQ2 solo quests are boring, trivial chores" lecture circuit.

What happened?
The sad reality is that this is not the quest team's fault.  No one decides that there should be a "quest" in which the player takes 10 seconds to walk across the room and click on an item.  This debacle is just a more extreme case of what happened in New Halas.  The developers ran out of tasks to assign the player before they had awarded a sufficient amount of exp to allow the player to leave the zone, so they had to create an entire series of increasingly trivial followups to justify awarding more and more quest bonus exp without requiring the creation of any more content.

In a game that actually had enough landmass to go around, this entire nine-part ordeal would have been a single "kill 10 rat-equivalents" and maybe a followup to kill the boss.  There's a reason why the cliche is to kill ten rats - assuming appropriate difficulty (adjust number of required kills up or down as appropriate), that's a number that justifies the travel time without feeling overly grindy.  How did a game called Everquest of all things wind up with too little grind?

The answer is in the relative weight of mob kills versus quest exp.  Quest turn-ins are worth drastically more experience than mob kills.  I'm guessing that they may be trying to avoid the situation that exists in WoW, where mob kills are worth more than quest bonuses to begin with, group dungeon mobs are worth more experience yet, and suddenly you're raking in 1% of a level PER KILL in 5-man dungeons with the appropriate exp bonuses.  Unfortunately, this means that you cannot compensate for removing half a dozen frivolous quest completion bonuses by simply doubling or even tripling the mob kill count.

Even so, something needs to be done about the state of these questlines.  Though each minor step does allow the writers to present players with another paragraph of quest text, that small amount of added story does not make up for the sheer pointlessness of the way quest series like this one play out.  

How Not To Reassure LOTRO Players On Free To Play

Turbine is at E3 talking to people about the coming shift to Free To Play in LOTRO.  Right now, players are asking how this shift will affect them. 

As a LOTRO player, here are my personal top complaints about the game as it stands today, in order of the magnitude of their negative impact on the experience.

1. Content is added too slowly.
2. Travel requires an excessive amount of unattended AFK time watching your character ride an invincible auto-horse/goat somewhere, especially given how unnecessarily frequently quests require players to travel across multiple zones to deliver a message to an NPC and return with their response.
3. Endgame/alternate advancement mechanics, such as player traits and legendary items, lean excessively on extremely lengthy but completely uninteresting and trivial grinds, such as "go kill 1000 wargs for +1 agility".

Let's see how these issues will stack up in the new model.

Content
The first bit of bad news was on the table up front - no new content until "fall 2010", potentially meaning an entire year with no significant content added beyond the paid Mirkwood mini-expansion.  Going back over a two year period from the launch of Moria, the game has received the portion of Lothlorien that was not ready for the Moria launch and a paid mini-expansion.

In the second tidbit, Turbine apparently gave Massively an exclusive map of the new zone that will be added when the free to play update goes live.  It looks very similar in size and scope to Mirkwood, complete with seven sub-areas that will provide the opportunity to offer players a variety of landscape for questing.  The other inexplicable bit that was already announced was that this area will be redundant with Mirkwood for the level 62-65 range.  My LOTRO character is already level 65, and hit that level well before completing the content in Mirkwood.  Why would I pay - whether a subscription or a one-time access fee - for additional content that will pose no challenge to me because I have already outleveled it?

Third, Turbine is apparently saying that players will see Isengard in 2011.  New content, sounds promising, right?  Thing is, this entire endeavor is a marketing presentation.  Players have been waiting for a Riders of Rohan expansion that covers the first half of The Two Towers for two years since the release of Moria.  You don't say that you're going to get players to Isengard if you mean that you're going to release Rohan, Helm's Deep, Fanghorn, and finally the fall of the White Hand.  It sounds more like players will get close enough to Isengard to see that there are orcs and then bravely run away because the defeat of Saruman is in another paid expansion and/or store unlock in some future year.

Convenience
As to the other two points - travel and grindy alternate advancement mechanics - we're told that it'll be the cash shop to the rescue.  Of the three announced preview items, one is a temporary buff and the other two are consumable items that temporarily alleviate the mechanics in question in exchange for real cash.  For example, there will be consumable teleport - excuse me, off camera swift travel - maps available for all those times when a questgiver wants you to deliver a package to a location so remote that Frodo will have destroyed The Ring by the time you can return.

In the DDO Store (offsite wiki link because, like all item shops, the official website is loathe to disclose actual prices), a 50-charge consumable Rod of Greater Teleport costs 495 TP, or about $5.  Of course, DDO is a heavily instanced  game and nothing I've seen about the game's travel system through the low levels implies that travel ever gets as lengthy as what we get in LOTRO - the LOTRO teleport will save players far more time and may be priced accordingly.

This is, of course, the one thing that I really dislike about item shops - when the developer identifies an aspect of the game that is not fun, their incentive is to create a consumable cash shop item instead of actually fixing the problem.  The irony is that I don't mind the DDO store precisely because it does NOT pull this kind of stunt.... yet?

Rob-Goblin Raiding Comes to DDO Guilds
The other thing that LOTRO players are looking to for a preview of the future is the way that DDO is handling its thriving Free to Play shift.  Meanwhile, DDO is poised to be the first game that I am aware of to ask members of a guild to chip in additional cash to the developers in exchange for guild perks.  The fanciest airships and the earliest access to guild perks will require Turbine Points.  It wouldn't exactly be fair to expect the guild master to pay for everything out of pocket, so the game instead creates a sort of escrow account that players can donate to.  It appears that the system will also allow any guild member to pay the Turbine Point costs of renewing the rental contracts on the various amenities on the airship.

I really wonder whether Turbine has fully explored the issues that this system could create.  Don't get me wrong, there are design issues too, but the social - and potentially legal - implications are astonishing.

Gevlon the Greedy Goblin coined the term "Goblin Raiding" when he basically rented out a high end raiding guild.  He had earned the maximum amount of gold that a WoW character can hold, and he was able to basically ensure that an entire guild would never have to think about money again in exchange for giving a raid slot to a reasonably skilled player who otherwise would not have made the cut for the game's toughest content.

Do Turbine's terms of service permit a Goblin-minded individual to buy a raid slot by contributing Turbine Points to the guild's airship fund?  It would seem hard for Turbine to prevent this, since players could take the negotiations to private websites.  If Turbine does endorse the purchase of goods and services in this way (using Turbine Points purchased from them), is it permissible to advertise in public chat that you're selling raid slots/loot to people who will join your guild and contribute Turbine Points?  Will Turbine Customer Service (which, incidentally, is not available to free players) get involved in disputes over such transactions when one of the parties decides to become a "Rob-Goblin" and refuses to honor their end of the bargain after receiving the loot/Turbine Points?  If not, will we see guilds phishing in the newbie zones for gullible newbies who might be tricked into donating their new player bonus Turbine Points to the airship fund, only to be /gkicked immediately thereafter?

Maybe Turbine has an answer lined up for this, but I certainly haven't heard about it.  Having this situation blow up in their faces would not be a way to reassure LOTRO players.

Same Store, Different Outcomes
The irony is that I like LOTRO as a product, and I don't have serious problems with the DDO store.  Indeed, DDO's free to play shift was enough to convince me to spend money on a game that I have not previously tried.  Meanwhile, LOTRO's shift to the same model may ironically convince me to stop paying for a game that I have previously paid for.  When the main thing that Turbine wants to highlight about the store is the fact that I can pay to remove timesinks that I don't think should be in the game in the first place, that does not inspire me to want to give them money.

The secondary issue is one of expectations.  From what I'm reading and hearing on LOTRO blogs and podcasts, expectations are high that new content will be plentiful and that prices will be reasonable and low.  The reality may be the opposite on both counts.  E3 is a press event, and Turbine (or at least their new owners) are there to raise expectations among outside observers.  At some point, though, someone may need to consider managing expectations among the actual customers.

Sure, going free to play will attract some new customers.  However, where DDO lets players have fun and then charges for additional content, LOTRO will let players in but then charge to remove non-fun elements like tedious travel, grindy time-sinks, locked down access to features and character abilities/traits, and slowed exp gain (no rested exp for free players).  If you succeed in making the game non-fun for non-payers, you simultaneous remove their motivation to pay for more of the same.