Watching NPC Story in Theramore

WoW's expansion launch non-event is live, which means that level 85 players are now free to preview the level 90 Fall of Theramore scenario five levels early for one week only.  I suppose my expectations should have been low given that Blizzard has been going out of their way to note that they did not want to spend lots of development time on an event that would be here for one week and then gone forever.  Even so, I have been disappointed, and the biggest factor has been the story.

As Rohan notes, we're effectively reduced to watching a small window into a tale that only makes sense if you have read the associated novel.  Assuming that you aren't afraid of spoilers, WoWhead's summary details what appears to be the entire contents of the book.  It is only with this additional context that the story even begins to make sense - both the motivations of the characters to upend a truce that has been in place since Warcraft III and the details, such as how the Focusing Iris (widely seen by players in the puggable raid finder version of Dragon Soul) ends up involved. 

This is a bit disappointing coming from a company that originally made the decision never to spam players with more than 250ish characters of quest text when they could instead be showing players the story in-game.  Part of the mystique of the old Alliance Onyxia attunement questline was how the players actually were the heroes who unveiled the black dragon's treachery.  Reading the synopsis of the novel, there are numerous places that could have been opportunities for players to participate in a major lore event that does not seem to have needed to happen prior to the expansion launch.  Instead, all of these things are reserved for another medium, and players in the actual game are just left to view the aftermath.

Don't get me wrong, I don't always expect my characters to be the most powerful/important characters in the lore of the game.  LOTRO somehow manages to make the player characters seem significant even though some NPC noobs named Aragorn, Gandalf, and Legolas (stereotypical Elf Hunter), et al keep stealing all of the best kills.  Blizzard just doesn't handle the presence of external story material as well, hasn't done so for a number of years now, but they seem happy with how they're doing it.

(Ironically and cleverly, author Christie Golden has written your Alliance characters - yes, yours personally - into an un-named cameo appearance.  Apparently someone failed to tell her that the scenario was 3-player instead of the customary 5, but the idea of having Jaina acknowledge the presence of un-named Alliance allies in the book is a relatively clever tie-in.) 

Other general comments:

• Scenario gameplay is a reasonable group-like experience that can be completed by three DPS players, though you can expect to spend more effort on staying alive through use of cooldowns and other class tricks that often get shelved with a real tank and healer.  There is also a focus on pulling multiple soloable mobs, such that each player can take their own share if no one player can tank all the mobs at once.  As a solo player, I think they nailed the gameplay, in that it's much more like what I actually experience when playing the game. 
• I assume there is a limit to how many instances can be up at a time, as the system displays wait times of up to an hour (though I usually wait a fraction of that).   
• The loot seems nice enough, though it's unclear what if anything determines what items you will get, how many times you can expect to run the event if you're after specific items, etc.  On the downside, it may not be worth paying for gold to gem and enchant gear the week the expansion comes out, but at least you can keep the stuff banked for future transmog/appearance use. 
• I didn't get to try the event on my Horde warrior, as he does not possess the required gearscore and I simply don't care enough to farm for this problem.  Judging from WoWhead's video, the scenario appears to be as close to mirrored as it could be given that the Horde has to win in preparing to destroy the city and the Alliance has to win in cleaning up the aftermath.

Accountability In the Post-Subscription Era

I've heard several generally insightful podcasters commenting on the relatively ban-happy policies of Guild Wars 2.  I'm disappointed that many people do not state the obvious - due to the lack of subscription fees, ArenaNet loses no recurring revenue when it bans a customer. 

We don't have the data to tell whether bannings in Guild Wars 2 is actually more prevalent in other games since none of the studios routinely publicize such numbers, but one can certainly imagine that removing the subscription fee removes a financial incentive NOT to ban a customer.  Sure, a banned player might eventually have opted to pay for microtransactions or expansions, but it's nowhere near the guaranteed revenue of someone who is happy to pay $15/monthly for the opportunity to troll.  Moreover, their conduct also affects the tone of the community in a way that might influence whether others stay and pay. 

Looking beyond this issue, we are in a somewhat unprecedented scenario in which two separate major titles - Diablo III and GW 2 - launched within a six month period never intending to collect a subscription fee.  Both sold seven digit numbers of copies at $60 a head.  We have some free to play games that have over a million users - few of whom are likely to have paid $60.  We have a small number of subscription MMO's that actually have a million former subscribers.  Neither category of game intentionally chose that outcome. 

Even if most players will never pay for additional transactions, both titles are franchises with at least some incentive not to ruin their respective brand names.  See, for example, Blizzard's scramble to add an alternate advancement system upon determining that the base game lacked staying power, when in principle they could have shrugged, secure in the knowledge that people who run out of stuff to do have already paid.  It will be interesting to see if anything more substantial than policies about banning people for abusing their group-mates in chat changes as this type of model becomes more common in online gaming. 

Re-Capped In EQ2

Lyriana finished the newly added Qeynos timeline, and in the process hit level 92 - the EQ2's current cap.  There may have been a small amount of cheating - I took a detour to kill some fishmen in Velious to fill my exp bar to 99.9% prior to turning in the last quest, to ensure that Antonia Bayle would personally award me the final level.  This milestone puts EQ2 back on the list of games in which I currently have max-level characters - for almost two weeks until the fall expansions start launching, I can claim nine max-level characters across seven different MMO's. 

I was decidedly underwhelmed with plans for the Age of Destiny expansion when it was announced.  The "optional" expansion bundled 20 AA's (I currently sit at 311/320) with several features that I didn't really see a need for, but no new content.  I still don't plan to re-roll to try the new class, and I have no particular interest in the game's dungeon designing feature (which has had a mixed record).  However, one feature that I did not expect to get any use out of - NPC mercenaries - makes a lot more sense when presented in context with a level cap increase and new content. 

I still think there is a real concern that the amount of content in the new update may not have been quite enough for a full level/gear reset - in particular, the last two levels would have been much more painful if I didn't have some left-over subscription time, as non-subscribers must send half of their exp gain to AAXP.  Still, the content that they have added continues to be good and the mercenary feature is a big help in getting to see more of it.  Meanwhile, executive producer David Georgeson seems open to at least re-considering some of the non-subscriber issues I've been grousing about, so perhaps some of these will change in the future. 

I have a few in-game goals that may or may not get in this fall.  I'd like to take Lyriana over to the Freeport side to see some of the new content, collect evil-side housing and mercenaries, and incidentally try and fill out that AA cap for the first time ever since I've been playing the game.  Meanwhile, though there are limits to how much time I'm willing to spend on virtual house decoration, my house item situation is actually getting serious enough to merit at least some level of attention.   For now, though, another personal MMO milestone is in the books.

The Captive MMO Audience

Roger at Contains Moderate Peril suggests that MMO players tend to forget that they are also consumers.  He notes that we are fast to blame for-profit companies that kill games for monetary reasons, but slow to hold service providers we are otherwise fond of accountable for failure to provide services.  This sounds reasonable in the aggregate, but I don't find that I have either of these problems.  I also spend almost none of my time doing social activities, like raiding or PVP, that would tie me down to a specific product.  Perhaps these things are related? 

At issue are delays to the Riders of Rohan pre-purchase compensation package.  Roger correctly notes that Turbine accepted payment in full in advance for pre-purchase of a product with a promised date that Turbine failed to meet.  This might in most other circumstances be considered breach of contract.  Instead of complaining, I and various others actually praised the move as a way to deliver a more polished product at what may also be a more strategic time.   

The guys at Penny Arcade once quipped that Blizzard had developed a business model in which they rent players' friends to them on a monthly basis.  No matter how early or late, how buggy or how polished, everyone needs to buy the new content when it is released if they are to play together.  (This part isn't unique to MMO's - I've seen friends pester each other to buy new maps for FPS's, and I don't believe any of them ever received a cut from the games' publishers for this peer pressure marketing campaign.)  A player who does, as Roger suggests, feel that they are not getting acceptable service finds their friends held hostage - there may be various alternative games on the market, but the odds of reassembling the same group are low. 

By contrast, I have the luxury of acting like a pure consumer because there's no one waiting on me to get the new content to fill out their raid group.  I never considered pre-purchasing Rohan, because I know from past experience that Turbine will offer steep discounts within a month or two (the new date is not that far from Black Friday).  I'm not thrilled with Turbine's decision to bundle in a bunch of extras I don't want to justify a higher price tag for the expansion package, but I don't need to pay the premium that will be required of the captive portion of the audience. 

Ironically, the cost of expanding the MMO demographic beyond the traditional social, group-oriented player may have been that the market actually is less tolerant of the things that studios got away with in 2005 when it was a smaller but more loyal playerbase.  For good or for ill, perhaps millions of players are now free to quit games like WoW and SWTOR precisely because less of the MMO audience are captives.