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.
Triumph of the Flying Jetski
My SWTOR Trooper hit level 25, and obtained his first real mount over the weekend. It looks vaguely like a giant hovering Jet Ski, and it adds 90% to my out-of-combat travel speed. The added effect of this boost can be overstated when you consider that all characters get a permanent 35% non-combat sprint boost at level 1 as of patch 1.2. The mount only takes half a second to activate, but it disappears nigh-instantly upon combat, so it definitely isn't worth mounting up between packs of mobs. Still, it's a marked increase in speed while crossing the outside world.
The main reason why I was able to pay the 43,000 credits for the training and the vehicle was courtesy of SWTOR's crew skill system. Each character is allowed three professions, and it appears that the intent is to take one crafting profession, one gathering profession (which procures basic materials for the corresponding crafter), and one mission skill (which procures rare materials for the crafter, and other miscellany). However, pretty much all mission skills appear to operate at somewhat of a net loss of credits, probably to balance out the fact that you can have two or more missions going at once while AFK.
Instead, I've gone with Slicing - an odd gathering skill that does very little for crafting but does find literal safes full of credits scattered around the landscape. There are also slicing missions and I've had extremely mixed luck with these, generally breaking even. (I've heard these were more lucrative in previous patches.) While I suppose it's hard to complain about breaking even while earning skill points, in general I'm sticking to the guaranteed returns of looting lock boxes.
Meanwhile, my other two slots are occupied with the Biochem crafting skill and Bioanalysis gathering skill. Bioanalysis produces all the materials I need to make common medpacks (potions) and stims (longer stat buffs) with Biochem. There are some NPC costs associated with training and materials, but in general this is a very low cost way to obtain all of my consumables. So, I'm basically getting everything my character needs and operating at a net profit from crewskills alone, which makes all of my quest rewards and drops pure profit.
I hear mixed things about the other crew skills, and I can't make use of any rare recipes I learn through reverse engineering (a process in which crafters are reimbursed for destroying the common items they make for skill points) for lack of the associated mission skill. That said, I would not hesitate to recommend this particular combination to any other newbies looking to purchase their first speeder.
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| The big black things do not appear to be functioning cannons. |
Instead, I've gone with Slicing - an odd gathering skill that does very little for crafting but does find literal safes full of credits scattered around the landscape. There are also slicing missions and I've had extremely mixed luck with these, generally breaking even. (I've heard these were more lucrative in previous patches.) While I suppose it's hard to complain about breaking even while earning skill points, in general I'm sticking to the guaranteed returns of looting lock boxes.
Meanwhile, my other two slots are occupied with the Biochem crafting skill and Bioanalysis gathering skill. Bioanalysis produces all the materials I need to make common medpacks (potions) and stims (longer stat buffs) with Biochem. There are some NPC costs associated with training and materials, but in general this is a very low cost way to obtain all of my consumables. So, I'm basically getting everything my character needs and operating at a net profit from crewskills alone, which makes all of my quest rewards and drops pure profit.
I hear mixed things about the other crew skills, and I can't make use of any rare recipes I learn through reverse engineering (a process in which crafters are reimbursed for destroying the common items they make for skill points) for lack of the associated mission skill. That said, I would not hesitate to recommend this particular combination to any other newbies looking to purchase their first speeder.
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.
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.
Account-wide Minipets and WoW World Events
WoW's Children's Week holiday is live once again, and I finally picked up the last of the ten minipet rewards. (I skipped the event a few years in a row back when each pet you owned took up a slot in your bank, so ironically the final pet I needed was from Vanilla.) I went on Warcraft Pets to update my pet collection and noticed an interesting tidbit they picked up from WoW Insider.
With the new account-wide pet feature in Pandaria, this feat will no longer need to take multiple years, as it did for me. Rather, players with enough eligible alts will be able to collect one pet on each alt and potentially wrap up their collection in a single year. The same change potentially affects a number of other holidays - along with the Darkmoon Faire.
With the new account-wide pet feature in Pandaria, this feat will no longer need to take multiple years, as it did for me. Rather, players with enough eligible alts will be able to collect one pet on each alt and potentially wrap up their collection in a single year. The same change potentially affects a number of other holidays - along with the Darkmoon Faire.
- If you previously collected minipets on more than one character, obviously your workload just went down dramatically.
- Likewise, some events have currency token limits that make it very challenging to collect all of the rewards in a single year. With the change, you will be able to farm the pet on an alt while saving tokens from your main for stuff that is not shared (though I'm a bit fuzzy on what will and won't be shared by the time the expansion lands - mounts? achievements?).
- If, like myself, you only collect pets on one of your characters, this change gives you a choice of increasing the rate at which you gain pets at a cost of increased time investment.
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