While I was out, Ferrel posted a survey on loot perspectives. I find the discussion as interesting for the perspective he attacks the problem from as a guild leader as for the actual age-old debate. One of the questions posed is:
"Do you trust other players to award loot fairly or do you need to see some sort of tracking metric?"
As a player, my instinctive response to this question is that you're running with the wrong people, or at least the wrong loot system, if you think that transparency is the only way (or even an effective way) to protect yourself from being screwed over by your leadership. In the ideal case, the value that I see for a tracking metric is primarily as a tool to help make decisions more quickly and in a way that results in an effective distribution of the loot.
Based on Ferrel's longstanding interest in the leadership of guilds, I think he's coming at this from more of the administrative perspective. In the real world, perhaps having more transparency might help mitigate the inevitable questions that get asked when the distribution of scarce loot happens not to work out in the favor of individual players.
Interestingly, the survey responses are almost universally in favor of trust over accountability. This is not a scientific random sample - in particular, a fair number of the respondents are in Ferrel's guild, which appears to be relatively free of loot drama - but I wonder if this is one of those odd cases where people on a whole distrust Congress but are fine with their particular Congressman (party affiliation permitting).
Players, even when they're happy with their leadership, invest tremendous amounts of time, effort, and emotion in implementing loot systems that may or may not be any more fair/effective than using the in-game need/greed button. I wonder whether it's really the resulting distribution that matters, or merely the feeling that players have done something to address the inequities inherent in assigning the scarce and random loot that plays such a large role in MMO incentives.
End of the PAX Turbinica?
MMO News during the first half of my vacation was interesting enough to lure me out of hiding for a round-up post. Spinks has a good summary of the news out of PAX week, which seemed like a slower convention by comparison. What caught my eye was a pair of seemingly unrelated posts that suggest the honeymoon may be over for Turbine's touted and popular hybrid free to play business model.
Underwhelming DDO and LOTRO updates
Over in Middle Earth, players are concerned with what they're getting for their money in LOTRO's new expansion. Syp's column at Massively calls Isengard "the Unfinished Expansion" and writes that it "feels a little weak" in comparison to the game's previous paid updates. Turbine's CM's had to rush to head off a controversy by confirming that there would be no additional charge for the level 75 instances that would not be ready by the players who pay full price at the expansion's launch.
Meanwhile, seemingly the biggest news for DDO out of PAX was that the new Artificer class will initially be limited to players who pay in the cash store. The class will eventually be available as a favor unlock (think reputation or faction reward), but there will not be enough quests in the game to obtain the required favor until the next patch, which will presumably come 2-3 months after the class rolls out. Non-subscribers should be relatively accustomed to this aspect of the DDO business model, but this marks the first time that subscribers will be forced to spend Turbine Points for access to a major character-building feature.
Double-edged popularity?
One one level, I'm not sure how many stones should be thrown in this situation. Both games are still delivering far more content to players than they were before their changeovers, and the premium options in both games allow players far greater flexibility to get by for less than $10-15 per month. I would still prefer to pay a developer when they actually deliver something worth paying for, rather than paying a monthly fee whether or not they've done anything to earn it other than not kicking me off of the servers.
That said, I think these two stories illustrate a shared flaw in the premium model used by both games, and one of my earliest observations of the DDO model - for a player who doesn't spend money on cosmetics and consumables, Turbine's monthly revenue will only drop each and every month as that player permanently unlocks the features they want and lives without the features they don't want. This bargain is precisely the feature that makes the Turbine premium model so popular with players, but it leaves Turbine getting less and less money for the same amount of work as the playerbase matures.
In this context, it makes sense that Turbine would be interested in some combination of higher prices and less content. Unfortunately for Turbine, players may not cooperate, and the flexibility of the models give players unprecedented leeway not to pay for stuff that isn't worth the price tag.
Underwhelming DDO and LOTRO updates
Over in Middle Earth, players are concerned with what they're getting for their money in LOTRO's new expansion. Syp's column at Massively calls Isengard "the Unfinished Expansion" and writes that it "feels a little weak" in comparison to the game's previous paid updates. Turbine's CM's had to rush to head off a controversy by confirming that there would be no additional charge for the level 75 instances that would not be ready by the players who pay full price at the expansion's launch.
Meanwhile, seemingly the biggest news for DDO out of PAX was that the new Artificer class will initially be limited to players who pay in the cash store. The class will eventually be available as a favor unlock (think reputation or faction reward), but there will not be enough quests in the game to obtain the required favor until the next patch, which will presumably come 2-3 months after the class rolls out. Non-subscribers should be relatively accustomed to this aspect of the DDO business model, but this marks the first time that subscribers will be forced to spend Turbine Points for access to a major character-building feature.
Double-edged popularity?
One one level, I'm not sure how many stones should be thrown in this situation. Both games are still delivering far more content to players than they were before their changeovers, and the premium options in both games allow players far greater flexibility to get by for less than $10-15 per month. I would still prefer to pay a developer when they actually deliver something worth paying for, rather than paying a monthly fee whether or not they've done anything to earn it other than not kicking me off of the servers.
That said, I think these two stories illustrate a shared flaw in the premium model used by both games, and one of my earliest observations of the DDO model - for a player who doesn't spend money on cosmetics and consumables, Turbine's monthly revenue will only drop each and every month as that player permanently unlocks the features they want and lives without the features they don't want. This bargain is precisely the feature that makes the Turbine premium model so popular with players, but it leaves Turbine getting less and less money for the same amount of work as the playerbase matures.
In this context, it makes sense that Turbine would be interested in some combination of higher prices and less content. Unfortunately for Turbine, players may not cooperate, and the flexibility of the models give players unprecedented leeway not to pay for stuff that isn't worth the price tag.
Vacation News Roundup
I'm still on blog vacation for another week and a half, but I've noticed a few tidbits that I felt like commenting on anyway. Comments remain moderated, though I expect to be able to approve them over the next few days.
- Disliking the fourth pillar
Spinks' rundown of the SWTOR classes mentioned a detail that I hadn't considered. Apparently, George Lucas is continuing to maintain that Jedi cannot get married without turning to the dark side. This makes me less interested in the game - not because I really had my heart set on cyborz with my NPC's, but because the notorious forbidden love story from the second Star Wars prequel was not the one part of the Star Wars Universe that I've been dying to re-live in an MMO setting.
Specifics of this particular case aside, I see a potential issue with the "fourth pillar" approach here. If you are going to put the story front and center, it becomes a bigger issue if players dislike the story you are trying to tell. Moreover, I would imagine that Jedi who romance their NPC's are going to be the majority of players - the former because of the lore and the latter because that's what you do in Bioware games. If the gameplay impact of being a Republic-faction Jedi with Dark Side status turns out to be disadvantageous to game mechanics, Bioware will have some unhappy customers. - WoW 4.3 update
This week, we're hearing details of WoW's patch 4.3. The mega-patch will include the now industry-standard cosmetic gear option that Blizzard has been resisting for about five years now. There's a new storage system that will save Blizzard disk space by having a vendor who will create a new copy of item number whatever upon request, rather than storing all the details of your existing item (e.g. enchant, crafted by, what bank slot it is located in). There will be new five-mans, which was basically expected.
The one thing that I find surprising is that the patch will feature the Deathwing raid, and therefore will presumably serve as the Cataclysm finale. I had expected this to be bumped to next year to shorten the window between Deathwing and the expansion now believed to be Pandaria. While it's not uncommon for the last raid of a WoW expansion to sit for 9-12 months, Cataclysm is already somewhat widely viewed as a failure and nothing from this list sounds especially game-changing. Unless Blizzard can finally deliver a WoW expansion in 18 months instead of 23-24, 2012 may not be kind to the WoW subscription count.
- Reinventing Warhammer
Werit has the details of the free to play Warhammer spinoff. My view on this project echoes Tobold's. Back in 2008, I genuinely enjoyed Warhammer's instanced "RVR" scenarios but generally found that the PVE game these battles were attached to did not compare favorably to the many other options out there. On paper, ditching the PVE game allows Mythic to focus on balance, while opening up the door to more exotic races/classes/heroes/etc that might have been harder to fit into a holy trinity PVE game.
However, as Tobold suggests, this revamp almost certainly guarantees that I will never pay for the existing version of the game again.
PVD On Summer Break
Public service announcement: PVD is going on end of summer break for the back half of August. Between vacation and various miscellany, I don't see a ton of time for either gaming or blogging about gaming in the next 2-3 weeks. Perhaps I could have found time to sneak in a post or two, but it's easier all around for me to close up shop and not worry about "deadlines". I should be back in time to wrap up PAX and laugh about how incorrect my incorrect predictions really were (hint: the main DDO prediction got blown out of the water this week, and even my Blizzcon predictions for October are looking shot).
Comments will stay open until I actually hit the road, and I may or may not get in another post before the end of the week. While I'm actually gone, all comments will be moderated for approval after I get back. Have a good rest of summer, and I'll see you all around the beginning of September!
Comments will stay open until I actually hit the road, and I may or may not get in another post before the end of the week. While I'm actually gone, all comments will be moderated for approval after I get back. Have a good rest of summer, and I'll see you all around the beginning of September!
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