Victory over the Doff System

Over the weekend, my Star Trek Online main hit rank four in the final remaining duty officer commendation.  As such, he has completed all of the assignment chains and all of the ranks currently implemented in game. I can continue to gain commendation exp up to 150,000/100,000 in each category - this will supposedly grant a headstart against any future ranks that are added.  I am also free to continue to improve my crew via recruitment, and to earn various currencies.  Overall, though, there is very little within the system itself that is of use to my main.

(My Klingon alt is also making steady progress - she has rank 4 Marauding for all the teleports, and is slowly completing chains despite roster limits - I have not paid to increase her roster size, and do not intend to.) 

DOFF missions award dilithium ore, which is required for certain types of crafting and purchases and can be exchanged for Cryptic cash store points through a player exchange.  As of now, my earnings have added up to around 1400 CP (plus 800 CP that I actually purchased).  A portion of that balance went to unlocking the energy credit limit for my account (400 CP) and to increasing my main's duty roster to 200 (580 CP), leaving me with around 1200 CP in spending currency - $15 worth.  This is more than half of the cost of the high level premium ships in the cash shop, though my income rate is dropping due to a steadily increasing exchange rate and diminished time in game. 

That said, the scorecard I'm actually tracking right now is my energy credits.  Now that I no longer need more officers for my crew, I'm selling stuff on the exchange for hundreds of thousands of energy credits daily.  I don't really need energy credits for their own sake - I don't actually play any of the conventional game and therefore have little need for gear - but it would amuse me to pick up one of those unethical lottery box ships that people are wasting over $100 in real money on in exchange for in-game currency. 

Of course, if I did this, I would be indirectly financing Cryptic/Perfect World's gambling activities.  The person who paid money for keys to open lottery boxes only to put the ship on the exchange did so because the roughly 80 million energy credits were worth the real money to them.  The players who buy my surplus duty officers are in turn providing me with the credits to convince that other player to buy lottery box keys.  On one level, this is a good thing because it is a way for my presence in the game to contribute income even when I personally am not paying - good for the game economy.  However, it also means that it's effectively impossible for anyone to boycott the lottery system unless they give up the entire in-game economy. 

Not sure how I feel about this, and I guess I have a good while to find out - I am less than halfway to the energy credit balance I would need, and I don't even want the Ferengi ship that's currently on offer.  It's definitely an interesting quirk to the system though - no wonder so many players feel so powerless to stop them. 

The Backwards Approach to Funding MMO Development

Let's say that you wanted to go forth and start a new chain of ice cream shops.  You would not go to the State of Rhode Island for $75 million with which to develop new ice cream technology for a simultaneous worldwide launch.  Rather, you would get a loan and open one shop with as few employees as possible.  Then, if you are reasonably successful, you'd go back and ask for money to open more shops.  At this stage, you might be told that you're still too big a risk, but that the investors will buy you a cart from which to sell ice cream made at your existing location on the local beachfront. 

This feedback loop is critical because the requirement that you demonstrate success before taking on additional debt helps keep you from getting in over your head.  If, for whatever reason, someone gives you more loans than you can repay, one day your employees are all out of work, your company is gone, and the State of Rhode Island is suddenly the proud owner of $1.4 million in R.A. Salvatore Amalur fanfic and a game that could be a hit if only you had 300+ employees for at least a year to finish it. 

I get that the analogy is not that simple.  There is colossal investment required in back-end systems and technology that players will never see, much less pay money to finance, before your game's first rat can be coded and killed.  Unfortunately, it appears that the economics are precisely that simple.  Whomever puts up the $100+ million to finance the game is taking their chances with remarkably little evidence that you can succeed.  It's only after the game is launched that development can proceed (or not) rationally with resources allocated based on revenue - a successful game like Rift gets the continued investment to slowly add features, while an unsuccessful game sees layoffs, merges, and possible shutdown. 

MMO development needs to get away from the approach where games spend ages in development - with corresponding costs - and emerge to the consumer only fully fleshed out and AAA-quality (or, more likely, bust).  There needs to be a way for games to succeed - or, yes, to fail - earlier in the process.  The alternative is to continue to see success defined primarily by whose fundraisers are able to keep the doors open for long enough to finish the un-finishable - a prospect which is going to get harder as more games go $100+ million into the hole.

Random examples
A few random ideas that have been tried with varying degrees of success:

• The browser game Kingdom of Loathing launched in 2003 as basically a page where you would click to be told a joke and granted relatively arbitrary stat points.  This was okay because the humor - not necessarily the gameplay - was the product, and things like classes and content got added to the game over time.  
• Fan-favorite Diablo-alternative Torchlight was originally a prototype for a future MMO, though it's unclear whether/when said MMO will ever materialize.
• The folks behind the Pathfinder MMO made the somewhat controversial move (see: Epic Slant) of using Kickstarter to fund a technical demo.  On the plus side, this is how things should work - demonstrating fan interest while simultaneously moving the project forward.  On the downside, the ultimate goal is to secure the funding to go back to the old model, and fans may be left holding the bill (and some souvenirs) if the project never gets that big investor.
• The Storybricks Kickstarter campaign (which I've covered previously and looks unlikely to succeed unless someone wanders up with over $220K at the last minute) sought the approach of crowdsourcing a product that is as much of a back-end technology for a future game as a game in and of itself.  Psychochild has made the point that projects which have been funded through previous Kickstarter campaigns have been effectively sequels or otherwise possessing built-in audiences.  Fate of the project aside, I don't know that this one case will definitely answer whether this project - currently an alpha world-building tool - is too abstract/early for end users to be willing to buy in. 

Is this type of approach really limited to indie games like KOL, or is there some way for that players would accept to buy into the development process earlier (preferably without being taken for their money in the process)?

Lowering The Price of EQ2

In EQ2, SOE has the dubious distinction of developing the only major MMO that I otherwise enjoy playing but routinely do not play due to their business model antics.  That said, a questionable business model attached to a product that is worth playing is one sale away from being a done deal.

This weekend is a 50% rebate sale on EQ2's Station Cash store, which includes expansion packs and non-recurring paid subscriptions.  This is not an especially great time to buy Station Cash - a double SC sale, which happens more frequently, lets you pay half as much for the SC you want, while a rebate sale requires you to pay the regular price and gives you SC back afterwards.  It is, however, a spectacular time to SPEND Station Cash.

A few weeks ago, I decided to spend $20 for 6000 SC at the last triple SC sale - enough to cover the 4000 SC expansion and a one month non-recurring subscription for 1500 SC so I wouldn't need to start paying for gear unlocks again until I hit the new level cap.  For some reason, though, I held back on spending the SC after paying for it.  My patience paid off.

That $20, tripled and then instant-rebated, bought me the $40 expansion, three months of subscription status (3897 SC) and still over 2000 SC left from the most recent purchase (4352 total counting a previous balance).  The tough call now is whether to extend my subscription out from August through November (leaving me with around 2000 SC left after the rebate) or hold onto the balance in anticipation of being charged 4000 SC for another expansion in December.

Anyway, PSA: If you already have SC and are looking to buy stuff in EQ2's store, this is a good weekend to do so.

Marginal Return on Content

Anjin asks whether the layoffs at Bioware are a sign of trouble or business as usual.  I'd suggest the answer is a bit of both - losing staff is business as usual for a game that lost about a quarter of its customers in the previous quarter.  This move comes at about the game's five month mark, which is a bit late for the traditional ship-then-sack treatment.  At a minimum, the game's subscription performance can't have helped their case to keep more people on board.  That said, the game is still the number two subscription MMO at the moment, which would seem to make it a bit early to be abandoning ship.

The more concerning possibility, then, is that EA does not like what they're seeing in terms of return on investment for new content.  We know from the beta that Bioware has great tools in place to map out how content is used.  These tools may now be telling them that daily quests aren't helping them retain players who are out of story content.  Meanwhile, my experience has been that the solo content on a planet runs for a couple of hours, which can't be a great return on the development investment needed to create that much content. 

Overall, it is going to be very interesting to see whether the game ever focuses on advancing the solo story content beyond its current set of endings, or whether they continue to focus on quality of life features and concede that players will simply leave as they finish the story.