Will Even Free Get Me Into DCUO?

John Smedley is off on a PR tour to try and make the case that DCUO's seemingly overdue conversion to a free to play model is in response to "player feedback" from PS3 players - which was loud and clear before the game ever launched - rather than a desperation move born of underwhelming performance.  In recent months, the game has: 

• Completed its merge down to the smallest number of servers the regional (US/EU) and platform (PC/PS3) restrictions will allow (4)
• Introduced a RMT cash shop, to zero outcry that I saw anywhere because no one seems to be covering this game
• Announced plans to charge an additional $10 fee, on top of the fees for the disc and the subscriptions, for a Green Lantern-themed patch that was presumably intended to coincide with the movie in June.  When Champions Online tried the same trick similarly soon after launch, shock and outrage forced Cryptic to reverse their decision. SOE reversed their course at the last minute with little fanfare - apparently having already realized that even the monthly fee was too much of an ask for many players, especially on the PS3 - when the patch finally launched this month.  

According to the obligatory FAQ, all of the game's current leveling content will be 100% free to download and play.  To the extent that the current content of the game is worth paying for, having all this content available for $0 to download and $0 in monthly fees may be an attractive deal, especially to the PS3 players who apparently make up 75% of the game's current audience.  Functional, completely free games that come with a prominent license to boot are not easy to come by for the console gamer. 

Whether the change actually results in more revenue is a separate question.  As nearly as I can tell, the restrictions on free players (upgraded permanently to "premium" with virtually any purchase - possibly including use of Station Cash balances from other games on the PC side) are things that I wouldn't care about as a tourist come to solo to the cap and then leave.  Character slots only matter if you're rolling alts (which I don't plan to), inventory slot restrictions can be dealt with (especially on a character you're not keeping around in the long term), and only the currency restriction sounds like a potentially significant issue. 

Ironically, this change fails to address the biggest complaint I've had about the business model since its launch - I want to be able to play the game on my large-screen TV with stereo sound and PS3 controller in hand, but I'm not sure I want to shackle my account to a device that sits in my TV room when I spend so much of my time elsewhere with my laptop.  I would have paid for this game if I had been able to share one account across the two platforms.  Instead, I'm still going to remain conflicted even after the game is free, because I'd still be forced to choose a platform to invest my time in.

The Science Fiction Convention And The Raid

I spent the weekend finally wrapping up the latest in George Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series.  I'd been saving the new book for my vacation in August, and I didn't quite get through it due to the 950 page length.  Anyway, finishing the book got me thinking about something from many years ago. 

Imagine that I told you that there was an all-new chapter that says what happens next, after the book that everyone paid some portion of the $35 MSRP to read, but that this new material was only available to people who showed up at a specific time and place to hear the text read aloud.  Everyone else will maybe be allowed to read this new chapter in five years. 

You might think that I'm telling a parable about raiders' currently-exclusive access to story content in MMORPG's, but it's also a true story.  Back in 2006, I attended two science fiction conventions where George Martin showed up to read chapters from the forthcoming book - chapters which ended up being exclusive to hardcore fans for far longer than anyone expected or intended.

George Martin has been criticised for the amount of time it has taken him to work on the novels, suggesting that he is falling shy of a responsibility to readers to finish the story, a common accusation thrown at devs for various reasons with various merit on MMO forums.  I would suggest that these folks are doing it wrong. 

Any given reader either is or is not enjoying the books; if you are, then does it really matter if/when the story ends, and if you're not, might you perhaps be purchasing and reading the wrong books?  Any given raider either does or does not enjoy the actual experience of raiding (through some combination of the gameplay and the company they keep).  For any given fan, the experience of attending the convention either is or is not worth the time and expense of attending. 

More to the point, there are ways for that experience to be unique - hearing the words in the author's own voice, as he holds a pencil to make notes on words he wants to tweak after hearing them aloud - that do not hinge on the exclusivity of the experience.  Millions will read the same chapters that we heard at those conventions five years ago, without diminishing the experience for the fans who showed up for a preview.  Perhaps MMO players - and the incentives that developers produce for us - could use a bit more of that outlook.

Easy Raids And Player Conversion

Rohan at Blessing of Kings is looking vaguely prophetic.  On Thursday, he wrote about a split between what he calls "transient" players - those only willing to tackle content designed to be completed in a single session - and "extended" players - those willing to invest greater amounts of time over multiple sessions in traditional raid content.  He wrote:

The single biggest problem with the endgame of WoW is that it persists in believing that if the incentives are just right, Transient players will transform into Extended players, and everything will work out properly.

In a followup post on Monday, he suggests that having a lower difficulty raid setting with automated group finding is a compromise solution that could provide transient players with an endgame, while preserving the more traditional endgame.  Today, we learned that Blizzard has been hard at work implementing his suggestion, and that the looking for raid tool in patch 4.3 will indeed send players into a lower difficulty level. 

Dealing with Transience
To greatly abuse numbers, I'd suggest that transient players make up 80+% of the MMO market - that's the approximately 5 million NA/EU WoW subscribers versus the approximately 500,000 subscribers to the most successful MMO's that pre-dated WoW. Some portion of that increase may be the fabled Blizzard "quality"/"polish", the popularity of the IP from previous games, etc. However, I just don't think that these things account for an order of magnitude. Instead, I believe the additional numbers are transient players, who Blizzard chose to invite into a previously closed genre by allowing them to solo to the level cap.

The challenge ever since has been how to entertain transient players now that they are here, providing the majority of the revenue for the genre and voting down the extended players (including the EQ1 vets who now work as developers at places like Blizzard) on questions about whether it's appropriate for expansion storylines to culminate in raid zones that only elite players can complete. 

Some games, like LOTRO, have effectively punted - that game's core story is now soloable, with group content as an optional additional-fee add-on.  Others have struggled to find the resources to tack a solo game onto a model that was intended for something else.  Meanwhile, a few hold-outs, notably WoW, have tried to hold the line for the extended old-guard, selling everyone the same expansion with the same storyline, but reserving the ending for not merely regular raids but harder "heroic" raids, with heroic-only encounters like Sinestra and the final phase of the Firelands Ragnaros encounter. 

Continuing the trend?
Assuming that this does play out the way it sounds like it will, transient players will indeed get to see all of the zones in the game.  The real question I'm wondering about is "why".  If the answer was "to provide more content, without having to re-design raids for 5 players", this plan would make sense.  However, according to the interview summary, the one of the goals of the system is to teach players how to raid for future efforts in the "real" difficulty settings.  If so, I believe the effort is doomed to failure because it continues the mistake that Rohan pointed out - the belief that somehow players who are paying to play a game on their own schedules can be convinced to switch over to more structured raid schedules, if only they can be made to see the light. 

Nothing that Blizzard or anyone else has attempted since 2004 has succeeded at this, and I don't expect that exposing players to 24 strangers in WoW's notorious random dungeon pool will do the trick.  Meanwhile, if Blizzard intends to reserve the real ending of the raid storylines for players who do the traditional non-easy versions of the raid, I doubt that most transient players will be impressed. 

In principle, this whole thing should have limited impact on "real" raiders, who are supposedly raiding because they actually enjoy raiding.  If the plan succeeds, real raiders might even see more experienced recruits coming out of the raid finder.  That said, to the extent that some raiders are motivated by exclusivity, Blizzard may see some customers heading for the exits. Whether this number will be offset by increased retention among players who can now PUG all the raids remains to be seen.

The Curious Case Of The Dissappearing Rift Podcasts

As someone who plays and writes about many games, podcasts are a hugely important source of gaming news.  Anyone can type up an article to convey the same information, but a good podcast will give you a real sense of the game's community, and why the stories matter (or do not).  Throw in the fact that I can listen while not in front of a computer, and I literally don't know if I'd still be able to do this blog without podcasts. 

Which is why I find it interesting, sad, and perhaps a bit disturbing that, as Rift hits the six month mark of release, I'm on my third Rift Podcast in search of a fourth. 

The Rift Podcast
Around a year ago, when I started hearing rumblings about this game called Rift that people were getting excited about, my first real info came via The Rift Podcast - the oldest post I have tagged with Rift is actually a link to one of their old episodes.  To this day, I associate Rift's login screen music more strongly with the podcast than the actual game, and the interviews definitely played a major role in letting me know what this game was about. 

The partnership formed by the three girls - Arithion and Desikis the podcasters, and Cindy "Abigale" Bowens at Trion - accomplished something that may never have been done before, at least on such a scale.  Ari and Desi were given pre-beta NDA's so they could come in each and every week and hold live interviews with the people actually building the un-released game.  Exclusive access to the devs sounds like any podcaster's dream, but some of the stories Ari told late in the show's run made it sound like managing this working relationship was much more work and pressure than a typical podcaster has to go through.  Likewise, I'm sure that Cindy was taking at least somewhat of a risk in bringing outside people onboard to talk to everyone from the community team up to Scott Hartsman.  Fortunately for everyone, it paid off.

The Rift Podcast shut down shortly after the game finally launched, as Ari was suffering from health issues, and I was genuinely glad to hear that she's fully recovered.  In the mean time, the dedicated Rift slot in my podcast playlist was up for grabs.

Rift Watchers
I'd actually been listening to several of the other podcasts that opened up as the game hit open beta, but my new favorite was Rift Watchers.  There was no hot Austrailian chick, and Gavin did once threaten to hunt down and camp the corpse of Brian "Psychochild" Green because of something I had tweeted - apparently he thought "Green" Armadillo was somehow a cover name for the more famous developer.  Other than that, the show was great, with player round tables and a notorious call-in phone jingle. 

Then literally everyone involved suffered from nigh simultaneous cases of new or more involved jobs, additional projects, etc, and the folks decided to go their separate ways.  (Amusingly, poor Ferrel was finally promoted from recurring guest to official co-host the week they canceled the show, which sounds like something Joss Whedon would do.)

Player Versus Rift
So, it was back to the podcast pool yet again for a third podcast.  This time, I settled on Player Versus Rift.   Their sense of humor is a good change of pace from some of the other shows on my playlist, and I suppose I can support their choice of the name (which has absolutely nothing to do with me as far as I know).  So everything has been going well for like all of a month... and then out of the blue Casey announces that they're ending the show because he has a new job or something. Planes bleep it all. 

Morals of the story
The first moral of the story is that if any of you know a Rift podcast that you'd really like to see shut down in a week or two, let me know so I can add them to my hitlist and make that happen for you - this post is really all about me after all.  :)

That said, I wonder if there is something up here.  Podcasts open and close all the time, but this rate of Rift-related podcast attrition seems unusually high, especially since everyone seems to still like the game as of when they signed off.  Is it just inevitable that pre-launch enthusiasm will die down, as podcasters realize how much of their potential gaming time they have to spend working on their shows?  Or is there something else going on here? 

I don't know, but I suppose I have some dead air in which to think about it as I debate which Rift podcast to kill next.  :)