As has been reported at various fine news and blog outlets, Project: Gorgon has hit Kickstarter. I've been tracking this project via the blog of its creator for over a year now, and the effort is fascinating in how transparent the development process has been.
As I mentioned last week, I have some concerns about the planned business model, but to some extent these fall into the "Kickstarter claims not to be a store" camp. The plan is for a sandboxy, quirky, creative world where a class named "Dark Geologist" barely failed to make the cut and players must learn to die in creative ways if they wish to become a necromancer - who may or may not also be a werewolf (I'm not clear on what happens if you combine the two). This project is on Kickstarter precisely because it's not the sort of thing that's making it to stores these days.
It's going to be interesting to see where this project shakes out - they are aiming at a sizeable sum when viewed in terms of the numbers of small contributors they would need to hit the mark, but working in their favor is the fact that the project is unique enough that it's hard to put an objective value on it. Between respect for what they're trying to do and general enjoyment that I've gotten as a reader of Elder Game over the years, I'm definitely rooting for them.
EDIT: Aside, despite having been a reader of both blogs for years now, I somehow never realized that Eric's wife was "secretly" (real name signed at bottom of blog) Mania of Petopia fame. Any of you who have ever played a Hunter in WoW, or simply been curious about all the pets they can tame, are probably familiar with her work.
Eight Years, Nothing Learned?
I haven't been tracking Pandaria that closely, but today's blue posts strike me as an obvious "did they REALLY not see that coming?" issue. For some reason, the current PVE justice point tier (obtained by puggable 5-man content and others) was offering item level 450 gear while the PVP honor tier (obtained via battlegrounds) was offering item level 464 gear.
Blizzard somehow thought that the PVP secondary stats on the PVP gear would make it unfavorable for use in PVE, but having it be an entire tier higher in base stats was apparently more than enough to offset this. And thus, players were farming battlegrounds - or even converting their justice points into honor points at a large loss to buy PVP gear instead. Blizzard will now be normalizing all the items into the middle of the road and adding some extra PVP stats to the PVP items to offset the lost stats.
I wonder what it was that made this so hard to foresee? The cardinal rule of MMO incentive design from the last eight years - and I've seen Ghostcrawler acknowledge this - is that you cannot change player preferences with incentives but you CAN and will change player behavior. Putting gear that is otherwise difficult to obtain on a PVP vendor is one of the most common ways to screw this one up. I recognize the desire to have the incentives be desirable to all players, but the impact of getting this particular one wrong is too great.
Blizzard somehow thought that the PVP secondary stats on the PVP gear would make it unfavorable for use in PVE, but having it be an entire tier higher in base stats was apparently more than enough to offset this. And thus, players were farming battlegrounds - or even converting their justice points into honor points at a large loss to buy PVP gear instead. Blizzard will now be normalizing all the items into the middle of the road and adding some extra PVP stats to the PVP items to offset the lost stats.
I wonder what it was that made this so hard to foresee? The cardinal rule of MMO incentive design from the last eight years - and I've seen Ghostcrawler acknowledge this - is that you cannot change player preferences with incentives but you CAN and will change player behavior. Putting gear that is otherwise difficult to obtain on a PVP vendor is one of the most common ways to screw this one up. I recognize the desire to have the incentives be desirable to all players, but the impact of getting this particular one wrong is too great.
Missed Of Pandaria
For reasons that are relatively independent of the merits of the product in question, Mists of Pandaria is the first WoW expansion that I have not picked up on launch day. Real life has been busy, as has my queue of online efforts. Blizzard products tend to do better than most in staying at full MSRP, but the price won't go up. Perhaps this is a statement, but I think it could also be over-stated.
In the short term, I am faced with several deadlines, hard and soft. LOTRO's expansion arrives in just over two weeks, bringing with it a level cap increase that I'd rather pass on until I finish the current content. I have about two more months of paid time in EQ2 remaining from the insane discounts back in May. We don't have a firm re-launch for SWTOR, but they had previously suggested November.
I have every reason to believe I will eventually get around to Pandaria, and no reason to believe it will be disappointing - if anything, it will be interesting to see whether Blizzard succeeded in returning the game more to its original roots. In the interim, if I do have time there's actually a relatively large amount of stuff that I can pursue without owning the expansion - pet battles, low level panda alts, and trying to catch up on archeology without having the gathering exp affect my leveling experience all come to mind.
The reality is less of a no vote and more of a not-now vote. Not the message Blizzard wants to hear, I'm sure, but it certainly could be worse - somehow, I think they'll survive.
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| Missing Expansion |
I have every reason to believe I will eventually get around to Pandaria, and no reason to believe it will be disappointing - if anything, it will be interesting to see whether Blizzard succeeded in returning the game more to its original roots. In the interim, if I do have time there's actually a relatively large amount of stuff that I can pursue without owning the expansion - pet battles, low level panda alts, and trying to catch up on archeology without having the gathering exp affect my leveling experience all come to mind.
The reality is less of a no vote and more of a not-now vote. Not the message Blizzard wants to hear, I'm sure, but it certainly could be worse - somehow, I think they'll survive.
F2P: Necessary At All Costs?
One-man Indie MMO producer Eric at Elder Game has a math problem. The costs that he faces for hardware alone mandate that his game must maintain a certain benchmark in revenue per user - below that threshold he must add additional servers faster than he gets revenue with which to pay for them, and the game actually loses more money more rapidly if it becomes popular.
This is no academic blog discussion - Eric has been doing unpaid work on this project since at least June 2011 and will only see a return on his considerable investment if the game is successful. And yet, he considers and immediately dismisses the idea of NOT supporting free players. Supporting free players is "a fact of the market" because the amount of competition in the genre makes it "hard to keep people around unless you have a compelling free-play option". This decision made, Eric will do his best to optimize his server code and assume the risk that his business model will render the product literally unsustainable if the proportion of non-subscribers is too great.
Readers of this blog will know that I am no great champion of the mandatory subscription fee. However, two factors make me wonder if it would not be the lesser evil in this case when you consider A) the potential consequences in terms of sustainability and B) the fact that the one-man team now needs to take time away from making the best game possible in order to plan how to support a free and a subscriber tier, with the relevant billing and game mechanics in place. Incidentally, I'm hardly the game's target demographic - it sounds more sand-boxy and group oriented than my usual far - but the model he's describing sounds like precisely the type of optional subscription model that I generally DON'T end up paying for.
All of that said, I'm not certain I can say that his premise is wrong. Having a monthly fee is not a complete deal-breaker for me, but I am increasingly biased in favor of games whose business model does not meddle so directly with when and how I play the game. Case in point, the Secret World, which is still limping along with both a box price and a subscription fee, rolled out a free trial program recently. There is no rational reason to complain about a trial that does not cost money, but I find myself unusually irked that the terms say you only get the fourth and fifth days of trial time if you play enough during the first three.
Perhaps we really are at the point where a free to play option is actually essential because the alternative is too restrictive on players' ability to try your product. If so, perhaps Eric is going to need a bigger boat.
This is no academic blog discussion - Eric has been doing unpaid work on this project since at least June 2011 and will only see a return on his considerable investment if the game is successful. And yet, he considers and immediately dismisses the idea of NOT supporting free players. Supporting free players is "a fact of the market" because the amount of competition in the genre makes it "hard to keep people around unless you have a compelling free-play option". This decision made, Eric will do his best to optimize his server code and assume the risk that his business model will render the product literally unsustainable if the proportion of non-subscribers is too great.
Readers of this blog will know that I am no great champion of the mandatory subscription fee. However, two factors make me wonder if it would not be the lesser evil in this case when you consider A) the potential consequences in terms of sustainability and B) the fact that the one-man team now needs to take time away from making the best game possible in order to plan how to support a free and a subscriber tier, with the relevant billing and game mechanics in place. Incidentally, I'm hardly the game's target demographic - it sounds more sand-boxy and group oriented than my usual far - but the model he's describing sounds like precisely the type of optional subscription model that I generally DON'T end up paying for.
All of that said, I'm not certain I can say that his premise is wrong. Having a monthly fee is not a complete deal-breaker for me, but I am increasingly biased in favor of games whose business model does not meddle so directly with when and how I play the game. Case in point, the Secret World, which is still limping along with both a box price and a subscription fee, rolled out a free trial program recently. There is no rational reason to complain about a trial that does not cost money, but I find myself unusually irked that the terms say you only get the fourth and fifth days of trial time if you play enough during the first three.
Perhaps we really are at the point where a free to play option is actually essential because the alternative is too restrictive on players' ability to try your product. If so, perhaps Eric is going to need a bigger boat.
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