Faux F2P

I’ve played a fair few free to play MMORPGs by now, everything from oddball action fantasy games like Dragon’s Nest to traditional conversions like Lord of the Rings Online.  I’ve played games where the cash shop really isn’t necessary, and others where not using items from the cash shop makes playing the game more an adventure in walking on broken glass than a fun, relaxing hobby (my apologies to all you broken-glass-walkers out there, I don’t mean to malign your hobby).  I find I am less irritated by games that make cash shop items necessary when the game itself is completely free – no box price, no startup cost, no subscription, just the cash shop.  I find I am very irritated by games that make cash shop items necessary when the game itself costs money up front – since most F2P games that started as F2P never charge for the client, I am of course mostly referring to games that have converted from subscription to F2P, or some hybrid thereof.

My City of Heroes account recently converted from VIP to Free, and overall I have to say I am not happy, at all, with the way things have worked out.  When Paragon Studios first announced the free to play change (City of Heroes: Freedom) I thought it sounded like a good idea.  They made a big deal of the fact that past subscribers would have “premium” accounts rather than just free accounts.  In their defense I don’t think they ever detailed what that meant, but nevertheless they implied it was a big deal.  My subscription time for City of Heroes clocks in around 40 months.  I beta tested the game, I paid full retail at release, I beta tested City of Villains, and bought that at full price too, and picked up Going Rogue the moment it came out.  In short, I’ve invested a LOT of money in the game over the years, and that apparently set my expectations a bit high.

The first thing that happened upon converting to a free account was that all my character slots locked.  I have characters on three servers – Pinnacle, Virtue, and Freedom.  Logging into Virtue I had 2 server slots and 3 global slots available.  Checking Pinnacle I had 2 server slots and 3 global slots available.  Checking Freedom I had 0 server slots and 0 global slots available – I couldn’t unlock a single character on that server without spending money.  Not one.  Ooo . . . kay . . . not exactly fair, but I wasn’t that invested in my villain characters anyway.

So I went back to Virtue and unlocked the two characters I’ve mostly been playing lately, my level 50 tanker and my level 28 corrupter.  I logged in my tanker to see how he was affected and discovered he’d lost access to all his Incarnate abilities.  Not only are free players barred from participating in Incarnate Trials, anything you earn while a VIP is lost the moment you stop subscribing.  That would be like raiding in Lord of the Rings Online and getting your epics stripped away if you stop paying.  There’s also no way to access the Incarnate system without paying a monthly subscription – you can’t unlock the content in the cash shop, it’s subscribe or go home.  It left a bit of a dirty taste in my mouth, and I certainly haven’t logged my level 50 in since as he has nothing to do.

Then I unlocked my corrupter . . . or rather I tried to.  He has the Time Manipulation power set, something he’s been using for the past few months.  It turns out the Time Manipulation power set is VIP only so that character was now unplayable . . . unless I cared to jaunt over to the cash shop and plunk down about $10 for the damned thing.  I didn’t care to, but I did want to keep playing this character, so I bought some points and finished unlocking him.  In my opinion my subscription should have paid for the right to use that powerset, but clearly Paragon Studios doesn’t agree. 

I logged my corrupter in, and immediately noticed that my salvage and auction house storage inventory had shrunk considerably.  I was now over my inventory limits and had to sell off a bunch of stuff.  The salvage inventory was especially tight, and made working with the invention system pretty painful.

I then went to a trainer to adjust the colors of my corrupter’s powers and discovered I couldn’t – free players are denied that feature, which really felt like an unnecessary cosmetic handicap.  I tried to access First Ward, a zone I’d been running missions in, only to discover that it was VIP only and I’d have to buy access to it if I wanted to keep going.  I did, so I did (using up the last of my Paragon Points).

By this point I was getting pretty disgusted.  As a veteran player who’s sunk hundreds of dollars into CoH I expected I’d be able to go longer than five minutes without getting a ham-handed reminder of the fact that I wasn’t a VIP any more, but that expectation was thoroughly crushed.  Everywhere I turned there seemed to be a barrier to entry, and this was with just a few minutes of play!  I have to compare that to Lord of the Rings Online, where my existing characters were essentially untouched, and only had to deal with content walls once they’d leveled up enough.  Lord of the Rings didn’t strip anything away from my characters when they converted to free, it just demanded payment to access additional content down the line.  CoH on the other hand, seems determined to make my characters feel second rate while VIP players enjoy the “real” game.

It turns out that all the “premium” status on that free account means is that you get to keep most (but not all) of the things you’ve actually paid for in the past.  So if you bought an expansion, you get to keep access to it.  If you bought extra character slots, you get to keep them.  If you purchased costume packs, you get to keep those costumes.  Wow, I get to keep things I paid for!  What a deal!

I can only imagine how severely limiting it must feel to play as a new free player.  Almost all the additional systems in the game are blocked.  You can’t use the auction house, you can’t use inventions, you can’t access the Architect system, you can only use some of the archetypes and some of the powers, you can’t use a lot of the costume options, etc.  They’re not free players, they’re trial accounts.

If I was a new player and tried to play CoH, I’d quickly lose interest and stop.  I think that’s probably contributed to why the player population of CoH didn’t spike much with the release of Freedom.  Server populations seem roughly the same now as they did before.  I’m sure there’s been an uptick, but pretty small compared to the huge boost games like Lord of the Rings Online and DC Universe Online have seen.

The City of Heroes free to play conversion seems very similar to that of Champions Online.  To the best of my knowledge Champions hasn’t exactly boomed as a result of the conversion either, and maybe there’s a good reason for that – the Turbine method for converting a subscription game seems to work, the crippled-game-unless-you-pay-through-6000-paygates method does not.

At this point I don’t feel much desire to play CoH as a free game, it’s just annoying.  I also don’t feel much desire to subscribe with SWTOR just around the corner.  So I suppose I’ll play it just enough to get something out of the money I spent on my corrupter, and that will be that.  I think in the end, I wish it had simply stayed a regular subscription game instead of jerking me around with false free to play promises.

A Plague of Free-to-Play

There are a lot of free to play games out there, with more and more coming out just about every month.  You can’t throw a brick without hitting a F2P MMO that’s in closed beta, open beta, or beta-that’s-not-really-beta-since-we’ll-take-your-money beta, and if you can think about a popular genre and do a google search, you’ll find a F2P MMO based on that genre, or close to it.  Just to reiterate, there are vast numbers of F2P MMOs floating around the internet, and you’ve probably never even heard of 95% of them.

 

Sadly, a great many of them are absolute garbage.  This should come as no great surprise to anyone, as F2P games have long had a bad reputation for being terrible.  What might be a surprise though, is that some of these games are getting decent budgets and plenty of marketing, even coverage on major sites like Massively, but are still garbage.  Not just garbage, but derivative, formulaic, uninspired garbage.

There are a lot of companies shoveling this stuff, Aeria, gPotato, and dozens more, but one of the biggest culprits right now is Perfect World International.  They’ve seen a lot of success in China, and are expanding aggressively into the U.S. market.  I get e-mails from them, their games are all covered by Massively, they have advertisements all over the place, and the games are all pretty awful.  Based on screenshots, videos, and ads I’ve tried most of what Perfect World is peddling, and in almost every case I’ve spent more time downloading the client than playing the game before uninstalling it.  They have a clear formula for all their games that I’ve tried so far, such that I feel confident it’s just a standard feature for all their games:

• Clunky UI
• Muddy, low resolution ground textures
• Terrible animations
• Click-to-move interface
• Game before world, forget immersion
• An inventory box that spits out free rewards when you level
• Generic, uninspired artwork and monster design
• Heavy armor melee class, two handed melee class, dual wield melee class, magic caster, priestly caster, archer.
• Meaningless levelups (start at level 1, see nothing new until level 5)
• Kill x, collect y, and go to z quests. 

Slap together some new environments, give it a new name, and voila, new game!  It’s War of Perfect Immortal Heroes, now with demon knight special class!

A few years ago the market had been trending towards higher quality F2P games, but that trend seems to have died in the new trend of subscription games converting to F2P.  Whether that was the cause, or just a coincidence I don’t know, but I keep trying new F2P games and they keep being absolute garbage. Sometimes I feel like I installed a virus rather than a game and need to disinfect my poor computer once the game is gone.

There are some very solid, very polished and professional F2P games out there – Allods Online and World of Tanks are both excellent examples.  I’ll note that they’re both Russian in origin, which begs the question – is the mindset of the Chinese gamer so different from that of western gamers that Perfect World International has been able to prosper so greatly off the junk they peddle?

I find it quite disturbing that Perfect World International (PWI) recently purchased Cryptic Studios, along with Champions Online, Star Trek Online, and Neverwinter.  They have since insisted Neverwinter become more of an MMO, and the feature list now reads almost like Dungeons & Dragons Online.  Except we already have Dungeons & Dragons Online, and it’s already F2P.  How is a Cryptic version of the same thing going to be useful?  I’m not a big fan of Cryptic’s recent offerings (though STO really isn’t that bad), and had no hopes for Neverwinter anyway, but if PWI starts buying up more western studios, how long until they start imposing their business model on games that really weren’t designed for it?

Hopefully they’ll be smart enough to recognize the western audience is not the same as the Chinese audience, and develop accordingly, but for all I know the proliferation of garbage games will continue until it’s hard to see the good games through all the crap.

A brief mention of politics

This is not a political blog.  However, the current antics in Washington D.C. are making me sick.  The members of congress should be ashamed of themselves.  Putting personal political gain ahead of the nation's well-being is indicative of the worst type of politicians.  This is not a partisan critique, both sides are acting like squabbling little children and need to grow up and learn how to compromise like every other person in every other profession.

The founders of the U.S. quite clearly set up the two party system to generate legislation that met in the middle rather than being dominated by one extreme or the other.  In some ways, the uncompromising hard-line attitude being held by certain members of congress could be seen as unconstitutional -- certainly its not constructive.

Polls have repeatedly shown that most Americans support a budget approach that both cuts spending and increases revenue.  Those members of congress claiming their hard-line uncompromising approach is "the will of the voters" need to get their heads out of their asses and start paying attention.  Republicans need to accept that removal of tax breaks for big corporations and the rich are widely accepted by voters.  Not, of course, the rich voters lining their campaign coffers though, so clearly there's no self-interest there.  Democrats need to accept that deep cuts are needed to get government spending under control.  Pet projects are going to die. Deal with it, the government doesn't exist to be your little plaything.

As voters we only have one recourse.  If members of congress won't do their damn job, vote them out in 2012.

Enough with the WoW Phishing spam already!

Has anyone else noticed a real uptick in the quantity (and sometimes quality) of WoW phishing spam lately?  I'm getting them on 3 e-mail accounts, only one of which has ever been associated with Blizzard in any way.  They keep sneaking into my inbox by fooling my spam filter into thinking they're actually from Blizzard.  The most recent one I've been getting is a carbon copy of Blizzard's "come back for 7 days free" e-mail, except it lacks the personalized touches of the real Blizzard mail, and of course points to a phony sign up site.

I've also been getting Battle.net phishing spam.  There used to be little to no value in a Battle.net account, but now that it's linked to your WoW account I guess that's fair game too.  Sigh.  I've even had people trying to sign up for Battle.net using my e-mail accounts.  Double sigh.

It's all getting pretty tiresome.  I'm not sure I'd especially care if my WoW account DID get hacked, except I have no doubt the day after my account was hacked and stripped I'd get yet another phishing attempt (or three) in my inbox.

Open Request to MMO Developers

Hi, I'm a gamer.  More specifically, I'm a pretty invested MMORPG gamer.  I consider myself reasonably typical, or at least typical enough to be representative of a decent portion of the MMO gaming population.  Undoubtedly NOT a majority, but probably enough to support an MMO at a decent level.

Please, please, PLEASE stop making so many fantasy MMORPGs.  I think there are something like 376 either coming out this year or currently in beta.  They're all essentially the same.  The vast majority of them will never see a dime from me.  I'm sick to death of them.  If I want a fantasy MMO, guess what?  I can already get my fantasy MMO fix in almost any flavor I can imagine, and quite frequently for free.  All you developers announcing your hot new fantasy MMO are wasting your time.

Make something else.  Anything else.  Kudos to Funcom for the Secret World.  The game may end up sucking, but at least it sounds interesting.  At least it's different.  I'll at least give Bioware a golf clap for Star Wars: The Old Republic.  It may end up being a reskinned fantasy MMORPG, but at least it looks different and is trying a few new things.

I've already beaten the sci-fi thing to death, so I'll leave it be, but what about a modern warfare MMORPG?  An economic based world-wide sea trading MMO?  Steampunk?  Gothic horror?  Shadowrun?  Robotech? A football MMO where you play an individual player?  I mean, come on!  I could probably think of 20 games given half an hour, and yet the industry continues to churn out fantasy game after fantasy game after fantasy game.  The market is saturated.  Let it go already.  I understand all the most successful MMOs have been fantasy ones.  You're not going to steal that market from WoW.

Seriously, if you HAVE to do yet another fantasy MMO, can you at least do something different with it?  Make it a dragon wars setting where everyone rides around on dragons all the time.  Set the game in the realm of the fae and have players take on the roles of light and dark sidhe battling it out for supremacy.

Just . . just do something new.  Geez.

Good Science Fiction MMORPGS - The Lack Thereof

Why are there no science fiction MMORPGs that play like a science fiction novel in the way that there are so many fantasy MMORPGs that play like fantasy novels?  From EQ to Rift you create a character (the hero of your story), explore the world, go on adventures, interact with numerous characters, fight "big bads", and eventually reach a pinnacle of character development that eventually ends the game for you.  The most obvious example of course is if you just finished reading Lord of the Rings and you hop into Lord of the Rings Online you're going to feel a strong connection to the game, and enjoy a setting that feels like a fantasy novel.  Though less blatant, most fantasy novels have elements that you can see translated into most fantasy online games.

I've yet to experience this with science fiction games, few that they are.  EVE Online is one of the best science fiction MMOs I've encountered, but it certainly doesn't feel like any science fiction novel I've ever read.  Where is something that feels like The Culture setting?  Or Peter F. Hamilton's Commonwealth?  Or hell, any sprawling space opera type story of exploration and adventure, mixing starships and hand-to-hand combat, aliens, monsters, and robots?  Star Wars Galaxies and Star Trek Online both have the right trappings, but the wrong execution.  I play STO now and then, but the gameplay just doesn't feel right, plus the Trek universe is fairly limiting.  Star Wars: The Old Republic looks promising, but Star Wars has always felt more like fantasy in space than real science fiction.

I would love an operatic style science fiction MMO that made me feel like I was living out one of my favorite science fiction novels (see examples above) but I don't think there's anything like that even on the horizon.  Mythic's long-ago cancelled Imperator (they gave that up to make WAR?!) might have done it, but alas that ship has sailed.  If someone wants to front me $40 million or so I'll make my own :)

Rift - Cry Me a River (for real this time)

So Phase 2 and 3 of the big Rift River of Souls event occured on Saturday.  What?  You missed it?  Welcome to the club.  A very big club.  Phase 2 and 3 were finished on most servers in about 30 minutes.  Since most servers also had huge queues, chances are good it was over before you could even log in.  I don't know if I missed the event because of the queue, or if I wasn't even queuing until it was already over, but either way I missed it.

I have to say I'm extremely disappointed in Trion on this.  I already had concerns about the whole Phase 1 event, but Phase 2 and 3 were complete travesties of game design.  I don't know who thought two weeks of lead up to a 30 minute "one-time-only" finale was a good idea, but they need to be smacked upside the head.  How could anyone think this design would make the playerbase happy?  Even the players who actually got to participate are (generally) not very happy, as it was laggy, buggy, and often virtually unplayable.  Then there's the rest of us who wanted to participate but were denied the opportunity due to timing and/or queues.  Really?  This is what you're going to use to hype the game?  "We have live events!  Come subscribe so you can blink and miss them like everyone else!"

I'm willing to cut Trion some slack on the technical server-side implementation, as this is their first event of this magnitude.  They've also stated they're going to compesate people who were stuck in the queues (somehow).  They are even extending Phase 1 for another week and will re-run Phase 2 and 3 next weekend.  I'll give them a little credit for trying to make amends.  However, the complete and utter design failure behind this event is not really forgivable.  Any random player could have told them their design for Phase 2 and 3 was insanity, so it boggles the mind how this could get the ok at a developer that has otherwise demonstrated a high level of finesse and craftiness in their designs.

I'm going to offer Trion a suggestion on how to improve this that might make most players happier.  I'll even do it for free.  Instead of making Phase 2 and 3 a one time event, make it repeat every 3 hours all day long.  Yes, some people will see it twice, or three times, and it will break the immersion of the story for them.  Oh well.  Most players will only see it once, and to them it will be as if it only happened once.  Repeating the event throughout the day will break up the population in each zone, reduce queues, and dramatically increase the number of players who actually get to participate in the event.  Is that so hard?

I know my "solution" will reduce the coolness of the event for some players, and does reduce the immersion by having the finale play multiple times.  But you don't get happy customers by excluding them from content that will NEVER BE ON THE SERVERS AGAIN by only making it available for 30 minutes.  In the post-WoW world, everyone expects accessibility to content.  You can't blatantly deny that accessibility and expect to be competitive.  I'm still enjoying the game otherwise, and am not going anywhere anytime soon, but I'm sure lots of players have rage-quit over this whole debacle.  And it is a debacle.  Instead of creating a crowning moment of awesome, Trion has given players a reason to doubt their capability and foresight.