As Ardwulf notes, SOE's winback campaign is underway now that the services are back up. Change your Station Account password and then check your subscription statuses - you likely have 45 day pending subscriptions for all SOE games that you have ever paid for. This deal must be claimed by August, but extending it to former customers seems like a smart move - it costs them nothing if the player does not take them up on it, and the amount of time involved is long enough that they could potentially win back some former players during that time. (Besides, they coughed up former player data alongside current player info.)
EQ2 players are also getting a variety of goodies, including 30 days worth of rent deposited to their houses, 35 days worth of spell upgrade research time, and about two weeks of double exp. (EQ2X non-subscribers get 30 days of Gold time, so load up your broker slots early and often.)
On the PS3 side of the house, they're offering up two free downloads from a list of five games (US list here). Again, the cost isn't that impressive - we have two greatest hits games with recent full-priced sequels and several PSN-only games that Sony is probably hoping will convince people to consider buying more in the future. Longtime players have probably played the ones they wanted, but relatively recent PS3 owners who spend most of their gaming time doing other things (like MMO's) are likely to find something nice in the care package.
(Infamous was on my want list anyway, and I'm sure I'll get at least some mileage out of whatever I pick from the others - probably Wipeout, I liked F-Zero back in the day, and this looks vaguely like F-Zero with missiles.)
On top of this stuff, they're reportedly working on identity theft protection for everyone affected, which is the most obvious direct remedy to the actual harm that people potentially suffered. I can think of any number of times when some third party has disclosed my personal info in ways I would have preferred they not do and I've walked away from the deal with a lot less to show for it.
Will it be enough to convince players to put this all behind them? Not counting folks who were looking for an excuse to cut their ties with the company anyway, I think they've done what they can. Even if their reputations are mostly back, the cost is substantial, and time will tell what the impact of that is. Still, I think it could have been worse - hopefully we won't have to find out.
Gearing Up For Raids In Single Group Dungeons
I've been writing recently about what I see as a conflict between solo leveling and getting new characters to max level so they can join in group content. Solo players actually want to do the content, while group players find it a dull but time-consuming chore en route to endgame, and I'm starting to feel that both groups are getting the short end of the stick. Reading Ferrel's post about Rift's Expert Dungeon plaque changes in patch 1.2, I'm seeing some strong parallels.
From Ferrel's perspective as a guild leader trying to get his team geared up and ready to raid, decreased dungeon token income is a disaster, as it means that the guild has to spend more time farming content that has long since ceased to be interesting. He assumes that everyone who is farming expert dungeons is doing so for the same reason - to get the gear to be released from this purgatory as quickly as possible.
The reality is that there is a growing segment of the market for whom single group dungeon content is the end of the line. There's a big difference between clicking the automated group finder button at a time of your choosing to farm a 90 minute dungeon and committing days in advance to show up to a scheduled 3-4 hour raid. The old model of high difficulty, high reward dungeons does not serve Trion's long-term interest in retaining this demographic - infrequent players probably won't be able to find groups that can beat the content, and, if they do, they will run out of stuff to farm pretty quickly.
Developers are in a tough spot here. The majority of the content needs to be aimed at the majority of the customers - which means solo and maybe easy group content - because those customers have plenty of options to take their money elsewhere. However, taking the very top end of customers and letting them skip the 95% of content that is below their expertise is a good recipe for having those players run out of things to do exceptionally quickly. The result is what we have now - players forced to do things that they do not enjoy as a pre-requisite for things they would like to do, because that's the way the developers are getting paid.
Somehow, this does not seem like the best longterm plan.
From Ferrel's perspective as a guild leader trying to get his team geared up and ready to raid, decreased dungeon token income is a disaster, as it means that the guild has to spend more time farming content that has long since ceased to be interesting. He assumes that everyone who is farming expert dungeons is doing so for the same reason - to get the gear to be released from this purgatory as quickly as possible.
The reality is that there is a growing segment of the market for whom single group dungeon content is the end of the line. There's a big difference between clicking the automated group finder button at a time of your choosing to farm a 90 minute dungeon and committing days in advance to show up to a scheduled 3-4 hour raid. The old model of high difficulty, high reward dungeons does not serve Trion's long-term interest in retaining this demographic - infrequent players probably won't be able to find groups that can beat the content, and, if they do, they will run out of stuff to farm pretty quickly.
Developers are in a tough spot here. The majority of the content needs to be aimed at the majority of the customers - which means solo and maybe easy group content - because those customers have plenty of options to take their money elsewhere. However, taking the very top end of customers and letting them skip the 95% of content that is below their expertise is a good recipe for having those players run out of things to do exceptionally quickly. The result is what we have now - players forced to do things that they do not enjoy as a pre-requisite for things they would like to do, because that's the way the developers are getting paid.
Somehow, this does not seem like the best longterm plan.
Challenge As Intended
My last post stated that leveling content in WoW was too easy to be fun. A commenter called nonsense on this idea, arguing that part of being a soloist includes seeking out challenges. I agree, but I argue that this point actually proves mine.
(I would attribute this comment, but it is missing from the post, and I don't know whether the author removed it intentionally for some reason, or whether it was eaten by the Blogger outage this week.)
The new leveling game
The revised leveling content in WoW is highly linear. The intent is for players to do the quests of each zone (50-100 typically) one after another, using the gear awarded from previously completed quests. The problem is that, even without twinking or heirlooms or anything else, the exp curve makes it nigh impossible to complete a zone without over-leveling it, trivializing its content. You can try abandoning quests as you outlevel them, but this means missing out on the new storylines that, for me at least, are the reason why I was interested in leveling new alts in the first place.
I am not saying that there is no challenge to be found soloing in WoW. I am saying that playing the solo leveling content in the way it was designed and intended no longer produces a satisfactory level of challenge, which is a problem in an expansion that created so much of this content.
When intentionally sub-optimal becomes uninteresting
Late in the Wrath era, I spent about a thousand gold on BOE's and gems to assemble a melee set for my mage, because daily quests were so trivial at a 5000 Gearscore that I figured an autoattacking mage who did not use any damage spells could beat them. I was correct, and my choices did succeed in increasing the challenge of the quests, which took about 10 times longer as a result. I would argue, though, that the content no longer functions as intended when the only way to make it interesting is to have a caster who doesn't cast spells.
It is indeed always possible to make life more challenging for your character by making sub-optimal choices in game. You could argue that the entire existence of soloing in MMO's was originally based in part on skilled players choosing to see whether they could push their limits and defeat content intended for full parties. (Soloing old instances in WoW remains some of the most fun that I've had in MMO's.)
However, while we've always had naked warriors and melee hunters and characters who did not complete a single quest or kill a single mob, once upon a time you did not need to do these sorts of things to enjoy the leveling experience. At some point, you're no longer making interesting choices to challenge yourself. Instead, you're making bad choices to try and remedy a design issue in the game's difficulty. If you are the kind of player who enjoys making intelligent choices and being rewarded with greater success, this removes a huge part of the fun from the game experience.
(I would attribute this comment, but it is missing from the post, and I don't know whether the author removed it intentionally for some reason, or whether it was eaten by the Blogger outage this week.)
The new leveling game
The revised leveling content in WoW is highly linear. The intent is for players to do the quests of each zone (50-100 typically) one after another, using the gear awarded from previously completed quests. The problem is that, even without twinking or heirlooms or anything else, the exp curve makes it nigh impossible to complete a zone without over-leveling it, trivializing its content. You can try abandoning quests as you outlevel them, but this means missing out on the new storylines that, for me at least, are the reason why I was interested in leveling new alts in the first place.
I am not saying that there is no challenge to be found soloing in WoW. I am saying that playing the solo leveling content in the way it was designed and intended no longer produces a satisfactory level of challenge, which is a problem in an expansion that created so much of this content.
When intentionally sub-optimal becomes uninteresting
Late in the Wrath era, I spent about a thousand gold on BOE's and gems to assemble a melee set for my mage, because daily quests were so trivial at a 5000 Gearscore that I figured an autoattacking mage who did not use any damage spells could beat them. I was correct, and my choices did succeed in increasing the challenge of the quests, which took about 10 times longer as a result. I would argue, though, that the content no longer functions as intended when the only way to make it interesting is to have a caster who doesn't cast spells.
It is indeed always possible to make life more challenging for your character by making sub-optimal choices in game. You could argue that the entire existence of soloing in MMO's was originally based in part on skilled players choosing to see whether they could push their limits and defeat content intended for full parties. (Soloing old instances in WoW remains some of the most fun that I've had in MMO's.)
However, while we've always had naked warriors and melee hunters and characters who did not complete a single quest or kill a single mob, once upon a time you did not need to do these sorts of things to enjoy the leveling experience. At some point, you're no longer making interesting choices to challenge yourself. Instead, you're making bad choices to try and remedy a design issue in the game's difficulty. If you are the kind of player who enjoys making intelligent choices and being rewarded with greater success, this removes a huge part of the fun from the game experience.
Self-Reinforcing Cataclysm Subscriber Speculation
Over in the comments at Spinks' place, a blog-less poster named Simon Jones suggests that we're all treating news of WoW's subscriber blip as vindication that our personal complaints about the game are felt universally, and are responsible for the decline. Fair enough.
My personal pre-conceived concerns about Cataclysm are:
The interesting question is not what everyone with a blog thinks, but what other MMO developers think when they see Blizzard throwing cataclysmic amounts of money at revamping the neglected mid-game only to have endgame players run out of content and quit at a faster rate. My guess is that the odds of anyone else trying anything as ambitious as Cataclysm in the near future just went down.
My personal pre-conceived concerns about Cataclysm are:
- That the solo leveling content that Blizzard spent so much effort on is too easy to be fun for people who actually like solo leveling because group players need to be able to get it over with quickly to reach the cap.
- That the opportunity cost of spending all that time on low level content was less content available at max level. (This causes several additional problems - for example, dungeon difficulty gets harder to manage with fewer dungeons and therefore less room for difficulty tiers.)
The interesting question is not what everyone with a blog thinks, but what other MMO developers think when they see Blizzard throwing cataclysmic amounts of money at revamping the neglected mid-game only to have endgame players run out of content and quit at a faster rate. My guess is that the odds of anyone else trying anything as ambitious as Cataclysm in the near future just went down.
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