The mere mention of “microtransaction” used to make me completely ignore a game, write it off, and immediately form a negative opinion.  Has anything changed?  Only slightly.  I still believe that 99% of games that use a MT business model are crap and that they should be written off and ignored.    Not all of them are crap though.  Finding even one that is a gem makes me question the idea just slightly.

Ideal: If a MT system is going to work then it must sell me items that I want to buy and not items that I feel like I have to buy.

Can such a system exist?  It just might be a paradox.  These cash shops work by giving people free to play games with a cash shop full of things they want to buy but also that they have to buy.  Worse is that the items they have to buy are consumable or temporary and will be gone quick enough that the players return to buy more because they feel compelled to continue purchasing.  Eventually the games become more expensive than a subscription model to the point of being Play to Pay.

Finding a game that uses a business model but is also worth playing because it’s a good game raises all sorts of problems.  First, why the business model instead of a subscription model?  Clearly they must feel that they can make more money with the business model.  Red flags should be going off everywhere now.  You’ll never make more than a subscription model if you can’t get people using your cash shop.  By design, cash shops require players to use them in order for them to work.

Whether it’s epic gear or mandatory consumables, the player will always be driven to the cash shop by the game in some way.  If we’re battling them purely on principle, and we stick to our guns, every business model I have ever encountered loses right here.  However, if I set the principles aside for a second (not diminishing them mind you) and look at the practical application, perhaps some form of balance might be found.

Making up a scenario (that will sound familiar) for the sake of argument, let’s assume that the most obtrusive MT a game sells is a potion.  If you buy the potion and I don’t then you’ll have a slight advantage because you will have 40% more HP.  Most people would then say this is being “forced” into using the cash shop to remain competitive.   If the cost is something like $0.05 for the item, and it’s expected that you may buy a few per day, we’re looking at two things. 1) an obtrusive cash shop but 2) Not a lot of money.  Setting aside our principles which would be screaming to be unleashed at this point, we can walk away paying less than a subscription fee.  Throw in a few more extras for yourself and you can even still pay under a subscription fee’s cost.  If players set a budget for themselves at a firm $14.99/month, is the business model workable for games that don’t blatantly cross the line?

I’m wishing that I could take a stance on this issue and say one way or another that this is workable or not.  The greater part of me is clawing at my insides to get out and scream “HERETICS! YOU SHALL ALL BURN!” at even the thought of buying anything from a cash shop.  But there’s one little part inside saying “this can work if the game is worth it…”

I guess the stance I’m taking at this point is that there are some games that defy logic.  There are business model games that should clearly be subscription model games — everything about them screams AAA subscription model with Mill+ subs, but a business model is used and one tiny little fly in the ointment is added to make people want to use the cash shop.  Do we throw out such games or do we give them some thought?  I’m truly torn.

Conceding that microtransaction models force players to use the cash shop by nature and that an ideal cash shop can never exist, is it possible that a high caliber game can come along and justify use of that cash shop as long as it remains at least somewhat reasonable?

Where once there was no room for discussion now lies a tiny crack for some rational consideration …. maybe.

Dawnwarden (left) and Keen (right) posing at the end of CB4.

Update: An hour after this was published Gpotato released news announcing that beta has been extended one week until the 10th. Time to play an alt and help friends I guess. If you’re interested in playing you can just make a gpotato account and play now since they do not require a beta key anymore.

Closed Beta ends in three hours and I think all of us playing can’t wait with hopes that Open Beta (considered launch) will follow shortly.  It’s been a journey.  In fact, it’s been a magnificent journey.  I’ve been praising the game for some time now so I won’t slobber all over the details which you can find by browsing my Allods entries.  However, there’s something special I want to share with you guys to conclude my closed beta testing entries.

I was lucky enough to get the opportunity to test out Astral Ships! I’ve made a lot of friends in this beta and today a couple of them surprised me with an invitation to crew a brand new Astral ship.  I met them in the hangar at Novograd where the ship was docked and the crew (my group members) were finalizing preparations for departure.  Decisions had to be made about who was going to take the helm, who would use the visor, who would monitor the scanner, who would handle repairs, and who would defend the ship.  In a few minutes jobs were handed out.  I was tasked with repairs — a job that I’ve never done (not that I’ve done any) but one I was excited about.  We departed from our hangar and warped rather quickly to the Astral.

Engines warmed up, which I could actually hear, and we began to move.  I got chills.  Someone was actually controlling this massive ship that I was on!  I watched him turn the wheel and we began to move at an angle… in real time!  There’s a bit of a learning curve.  The crew member on the visor gave him instructions on where to go and it took about 15 minutes to learn to work together and navigate the Astral, but we eventually got a little bit of a handle on it.  We saw allods in the distance and sailed by a couple of them.   We were actually sailing and working together to move this massive ship.

We eventually sailed into an area and the astral turned red.  We couldn’t tell if we ran aground on one of those astral thingies or if we had sailed into an area we shouldn’t have, but the ship started sending warnings.  The shields started draining and the adrenaline kicked in.  I ran to the basement, grabbed the goblin by the hair, and dragged him to the area that the ship indicated was damaged.  How do I use this thing?! Warnings were going off everywhere and everything was breaking and I ran as fast as I could to the next station but it was too late and we were doomed.  We blew up and were sent back to the hangar.  Repairing the ship would cost 40g and 10 hours or we could do a quest and lower it to 3 hours.

The video I’ve attached highlights my journey into the Astral for the first time and I hope it captures the feelings that I tried to portray.  This was really unlike anything I have done in a MMO before.  I’ve never been able to set sail in a vessel with team members that each had to play their own role.  I’ve never seen, in 3d, a world move around me as -I- am in control.  I’ve never experienced being apart of a crew that has to defend its own ship and fire cannons at others controlling their own ships. It’s different than something like STO or even Darkfall where you can sail ships.  The depth that this type of gameplay can add to exploration is immense.  While Allods has done an extraordinary job, I can’t help but imagine the power this could have in future games.

Who would have thought that Allods Online, a free to play game, could accomplish what so many have wanted for years?  Regardless of how the game ends up with its cash shop or whatever may happen, these accomplishments can not be diminished.  We were all a bunch of noobs and had no clue what we were doing, but the epic feeling of crewing a ship with 6 people — real people working together — was unmistakably unique and just as amazing as you could ever imagine.  Getting them at launch and sailing with a guild crew, perhaps even in an armada, is my dream right now.

Watch the Video!

I think Cryptic hates success.

This is a fine example of what NOT to do with your Cash Shop and what NOT to do with your newly released licensed IP MMO.

Know what insults me more than the nickel and diming?  Not the fact that Ferengi are only 1/3 the cost of Klingons.  Nope.  It’s that the female Ferengi are…*wince* wearing CLOTHES!    That’s a crime I tell you.

The last time I wrote about MMO death penalties was in 2008.  I know the topic is not a new one, but I always like to revisit subjects like this and strike up new discussions.  Two years is like an eternity in MMO time and it’s expected that opinions and thoughts on a topic will change.  New games release and new death penalties

What is a death penalty?  I like the word penalty for a few reasons.  It implies a negative.  Just by the definition alone, a penalty is a punishment, a required payment, a painful consequence, a disadvantage, or a handicap.  That about sums up what we know about every penalty in MMO’s, right?  LOTRO will give you dread, Darkfall you lose your stuff, EQ you lose experience and have to find your corpse if you want your stuff back, WoW you get sent back to a graveyard for a ghostly-corpse run and item damage, DAOC you lost exp but could mitigate it by returning to your gravestone, in Allods you’re debuffed and all your stats are lowered by 25% for a period of time, and so on.

Death penalties in MMO’s are needed because they add tension and they make the player think about what he is doing instead of rushing in.  As I’ve always said, no one should want to die.  Death should be feared, unwelcomed, inconvenient, and it should bring with it a sting that would make you not want to experience it again any time soon.   Without a penalty like this, death would be meaningless and it would trivialize everything in the game that has to do with death.  If you lost nothing, including time (which is the most valuable commodity that everything comes back to in a MMO), then facing a dragon would not scare you; exploring deep into unknown territory would not be as exciting; defying the odds would be less satisfying.

Finding the right penalty for each game is important.  Obviously losing your gear permanently in a game like World of Warcraft is inappropriately harsh.  Likewise, having to run back to your body in Darkfall would be equally inappropriate.  When does it cross the line?  In Allods Online, a game currently in closed beta at the time of this entry, the death penalty was changed to be harsher.  The original death penalty took the player to a waiting area called purgatory where they could wait a period of time based on their level and frequency of death.  To leave purgatory early they could bribe their way out by spending a reagent called myrrh which they could purchase from a vendor.  The new death penalty keeps the purgatory system but adds onto it a debuff that lowers stats by 25% and can stack up to 4x based on the frequency of death and lasts longer based on the level of the player (~50 min at level 40).  To remove the debuff, players can spend additional myrrh.  When all is said and done, a max level player will lose ~3.5g and be sent back to a respawn point.  To give you some sort of frame of reference to go by, I have an average of 200g on me right now at level 40, Astral Ships cost 1500 gold, and an average green item can vendor for 10-20g.

Have the developers in Allods Onlone gone too far, or is the death penalty now just right?  As someone who plays the game at max level, I hate dying now.  I don’t like losing my money and I don’t like having to pay a lot or get a debuff.  I don’t like being sent back to a respawn point.  I do not want to die and I want to avoid it at all costs.  Yet, I acknowledge that death can be overcome and does not stop the forward motion of my character’s progression.  As much as I hate it, I have to admit it accomplishes what a death penalty should.

Some people want no death penalty at all in every MMO they play and others want perma-death.  The perfect solution is somewhere between those two extremes.  Here are some of the death penalties that I think work well.  Feel free to comment with yours.

Exp Loss – Works well in a game like DAOC.  You lose exp but regain some when you get back to your gravestone (corpse) or get rez’d by a cleric.

Exp Debt – You go into debt and must work off the debt with half your experience before you start gaining exp again.  It doesn’t work well in a strictly quest-to-level game unless there is an enormous excess of quests.  Works very well in sandbox games and games with more kill-to-level systems.

Item Damage – This works hand in hand with many death penalties to boost the sting.  Repairing gear costs money.

Debuffs – Whether you work it into the lore or not, a debuff can be a way of charging people coin or making them wait and both of those things hurt.  These tend to be considered cheap death penalties if they do not cost coin or last a short period of time.

My absolute ideal death penalty works hand in hand with my skill system.  My ideal MMO is a psuedo-sandbox and has a skill system masking experience gain.  To explain it as simple as possible, you basically gain experience for what you use and then allocate that into corresponding trees.  If I use a sword I gain sword experience.  There is also another form of exp called pvp experience which can be allocated to gain points in the PvP tree.  When you die in PvE combat you take on a hefty exp debt that must be worked off.  If you die in PvP, you lose PvP experience which is allocated to unlock abilities useful in PvP but do not incur any exp debt.   The higher up you are in the PvP tree (the more exp you have) the more you lose.

I’m very curious to hear other ideas on death penalties and how you would go about implementing them.

Tonight I dinged level 40 which is the highest level in Allods Online.  It’s was a long journey that spanned four phases and a couple of months.  I can honestly say that I enjoyed every minute of it and can’t wait to start all over again but this time for keeps.  Throughout the leveling game I met dozens of people that I consider friends and some that I now consider enemies.  I quested, raided, ganked, was ganked, did large scale PvP fights, explored dungeons, tested bugged content, chatted with GM’s, but most importantly I saw what I wanted to see…

Allods Online is a finished game full of polished content.  Logging in each day I found myself prioritizing the things that I would do because I knew I could not accomplish everything.  From the moment I logged til the moment I logged out there was always a load of activities filling my plate and at times it was even overwhelming… in a wonderful way.  Here’s the best part:  I’ve only scratched the surface!  That’s right, all of the things I did were things that we all get to do while leveling up.  At the max level there are heroic daily dungeons, world raid bosses, world PvP (yes, even with the new pvp flags it happens), and most importantly an Astral world to explore in ships that can sail a vast open world full of bosses, loot, and PvP.

The adventure is just beginning in Allods Online and I’m excited to play everything I just finished all over again.   I’m excited that my community has a polished and finished MMO to call home and I’m excited that I actually know it this time because I reached the max level instead of holding back.  Sometimes spoilers are a good thing.  If you’re looking for a guild you’re welcome to check out ours!

Below is a video with some clips of a few things and places I saw in CBT4. 

Christmas in... January?

“Version 5″, as this patch is called, rolled out on the Allods Online NA servers this afternoon and with it came many major changes to the game.  Being level 38.5, and leveling and playing with what is essentially the vanguard of beta testers, I want to comment on how these changes will affect the game.  I won’t be addressing every major change but you can view all the changes on our forums.

PvP Flagging – The new flagging system switches the game from being a “WoW PvP Server” to a “WoW PvE Server”.  If you don’t know what those are, essentially your character was vulnerable to PvP in level 23+ zones.  You used to be able to attack anyone or be attacked unless inside of a quest hub.  The new system enables a flagging system where you can opt in/out of PvP.  When your flag is on you’re vulnerable.  When your flag is off you’re safe.   However, there’s more to it.  EXP with the PvP flag on is boosted to 110% and EXP with the flag off is dropped to 90%.

Does this change the feel of the game?  YES.  Going from a completely open PvP system to a guarded one makes an enormous difference because it changes the feel of the game.  Here is where the exp boost and penalty come into play though.  I want the exp boost.  By taking the risk of having my PvP flag on I am being rewarded with 20% more experience than someone who plays it safe.  If you’re truly against being vulnerable when you don’t want to be then turn your flag off, but accept that you’re sacrificing for that safety.  This truly may be the best of both worlds and a very nice take on the flagging system.  There -will- be people flagging for the bonus and there -will- be people playing it safe.  Which side will outweigh the other… time will tell.  One comforting thing about it all though is that the Astral PvP will be open pvp regardless of your flag, and that’s where the “endgame” happens.

Death Penalty – In addition to the wait time in purgatory, you now receive a debuff that renders you basically a potato.  You’re not going to kill anything with the debuffed stats.  You now have to spend Myrrh to remove this debuff in addition to any Myrrh you spend to bribe your way out of Purgatory.  Myrrh costs gold and gets used faster than you think.  The debuff also stacks if you die back to back — up to four times.  At level 40 a single death will cost you ~3.5 gold.  That’s not exactly chump change given how much I die.  Does this ruin the game?  Not at all.  Death wasn’t bad enough and it played into the game.  People would zerg rush attackers by dying and respawning quickly.  There needed to be some sting added.

Fortune Tellers added to the Capital City

Zone Fixes – Coba Plateu has been fixed along with a few other quests and zone problems.  I have heard nothing but rejoicing after the patch from everyone when questing because more quests were added to the 30-35 areas and the quest rewards are functioning properly.

Polish and Additions – A massive wave of polish and updates to much of the game were brought about in the patch.   The capital city received a few updates, the UI received numerous updates, the chat functionality was updates, the quest system was changed, and overall the polish of the delivery in regards to much of the information was updated.  For example, my combat log is functioning much better now and my ability to track quest progress and know what I need to complete world mysteries has been improved.  There are now Fortune Tellers in the capital city that will give you hint at where you should be leveling or major things you should be doing at your level.    It’s a very clever way of helping people and making it blend into the city.  NPC’s, gear, graphics, ui, and other visual changes were added that simply improved the game further.

It’s Christmas! – Since this patch was released in Russia in December, the devs decided to leave in the Christmas event for us so that we could have fun.  Fun masks, cute quests, nice cosmetic gear, and actually some very good gear that you can get if you work your Holiday Rep up to Respected.  It’s nice to see that they’re going to support events like this in-game and give the community some attention.

There was a definite swing towards the cash shop in this patch.  I’m not going to lie and say it means nothing either.  The ever-so-slight drift scares the crap out of me.  They changed the treasure chest system to be 1 per day instead of being able to get a treasure chest from each zone thus making it more enticing to buy chests from the shop (remember, random items in them).  They improved the usefulness of stat potions (buffs you can buy from the cash shop), made “perfume” more important, and just overall made it more enticing for people to spend money.  Does any of this break the game?  No, it really doesn’t.  The perfume changes have me really wondering though, but I feel too ignorant about it to really comment one way or another.

The patch itself provides the potential to leave the game in a petter position than it was before.  The polish and additions to the game are all -good- things.  It’s simply the changes to the core of the game, such as the PvP flagging, that I want to see play out before I declare an absolute success.  I’m going to reach level 40 sometime tomorrow and I’ll bring you more of my thoughts as I experience (hopefully) the Astral ships as well as high level dungeons.

Massively Multiplayer may just be a tag or a marketing slang term now to some, but to others like myself it has real palpable meaning.  When I think of a game as Massively Multiplayer I have immediate expectations of certain aspects of the game.  In my idea of what constitutes a MMO, which I expect differs greatly from yours, the following things are necessary.

• Large-scale social interaction
• Collaboration/Cooperation with other players to accomplish goals/objectives
• A persistent world
• The game world continues without interaction

I do not have a magical number of players that I feel are required to make something ‘massive’ because I consider these types of games to be qualitative and not necessarily quantitative.  There does, however, need to be enough that we can consider it “large-scale”.  There must exist between this large number of players the means to and the necessity for social interaction.   Cooperation with other players is an important part of this interaction.  Where social interaction can end in a chat window, cooperation picks up and ensures that players are actually doing things together and relying on the participation of the other player in order for actions to happen.  In essence, this means that the game should not be single-player.

A persistent world is one that exists regardless of whether or not the player is there.  For example, if no one were in Orgrimmar (Orc capital in WoW) today it would still exist waiting for players to enter.  This differs from the idea of creating instances for players when the world is needed.  A world appearing to meet the needs of the player but being turned off or not being there when the player is away is not a persistent world.  An example of this would be the battlegrounds in World of Warcraft or the missions in Global Agenda.  The world there is not persistent.  I’ve also added the point that the game world must continue without interaction.  This is slightly redundant if you’re able to include that within your understanding of persistent, but I wanted to include it in there to further address the issue of creating a world at the demand of the player instead of the player being created to participate in the world.

Now let me combine my ideas about RPG’s with the ones about MMO’s to create what I feel makes a MMORPG:

• Story plays a central role, and the players are involved as characters participating in the world while this story unfolds.
• Large-scale social interaction and collaboration bridge involvement with a two-way interaction between the game and/or other players.
• A persistent world that continues regardless of the interaction from players.
• Combat is more considered than a pure action game and incorporates tactical concepts.
• The player’s character grows over the course of the game developing skills, abilities, etc.

There aren’t many MMORPG’s being made anymore in my opinion.  I think that most fall into some sort of “MMOG” subgenre and in many cases they’re starting to create their own.  It would be nice to see a MMORPG again but I’m beginning to think that the games have “evolved” or “lost their way” because players do not enjoy this style of game — or do they?  I think it’s harder for a team to create a MMORPG because of the way in which the world of the game and the social interactions and story must be a central focus rather than the individual being the focus.

If your ideas differ from mine I would be interested in reading them.   Please feel free to include yours, especially if you’re going to critique mine, so that we can have some form of discussion.

Closed Beta Test 4 began about five days ago for Allods Online.  Sticking with my initial plan to level as  far as I can go, even after thinking I had abandoned this plan once, I’ve now reached level 35.  Past phases have gone fairly smooth and felt much more like marketing phases than testing phases because the involvement of the testers was not needed for anything more than grammatical corrections, syntax errors, finding tooltips that were wrong, and things of that sort.  There were never any big game breaking bugs or mechanics flawed that warranted mentioning.  That isn’t the case with Phase 4.

This phase has been a rollercoaster.  For the first time I actually got frustrated with the game and for multiple reasons.  The first has to do with bugs regarding quests.  Coba Plateau is the zone where you complete levels 31-34 — the only one in fact.   Entering the zone and picking up quests I immediately noticed that there was a lack of them.  Usually I’ll enter a quest hub and be inundated with !’s but here there were three.  Not entirely unheard of though; sometimes quest chains and other quests open up from just a few entry level quests.  Not the case.  With 40% of a level left to go I found myself having to grind in order to reach the next level.  More quests opened, but this time I noticed that they gave less exp and there still were not many of them.  At level 32 I had to grind 60% of the level.  At level 33 I had to grind 50% of the level.  The problem continued.  At level 34 I had to grind 30% of the level.

All of this was reported on the forums and we did our best to make sure this issue received the attention it deserved.   On the second day of this phase we already recieved an announcement on the boards stating the issue is known and they’re working to resolve it.  Yesterday a GM appeared next to a group of us while we were hunting (we have no idea why…) and just started chatting with us.  Some of the conversation can be seen in the screenshots below:

The GM said that they have been trying to release a patch but they’ve been met with some complications and they’ll get it out asap.  This felt like a real tester moment for me.  Actually talking with GM’s during a beta test in person is a fun process.  Even though it doesn’t actually mean much, feeling involved like this does give me the sense of involvement in the process beyond just posting on message boards or leaving feedback.  It reminds me of the days of Alpha testing The Realm and older games when the testing participation involved writing reports and doing things similar to the QA and actual in-house testing teams.   Felt good.  (LoL at the rage quit comment, btw)

Bugs are also a big problem.  It’s not just a lack of exp in Coba.  Many quests are actually broken.  The anomaly quest, the quest to find the 3 defectors, the quest to kill Goblin troopers, and more.  The bugs are weird.  Some quests like the goblin troopers are broken for everyone since the goblin troopers do not exist in the entire zone.  Some quests are broken for some and not for others like the anomaly quests which chooses randomly which anomalies work for some people and not for others.   This just compounds the issue of having to grind when quests that are appearing are bugged.

Since I’ve now had to grind almost two+ entire levels I feel it important to note something.  Grinding isn’t as bad as it sounds if you do it with fatigue.  For all the complaining everyone has done that killing mobs nets such slow exp, how have we been able to level in our 30’s by grinding?  The reality of the situation is that it’s actually faster leveling by grinding in Allods than it is by questing and doing content in others.  In a matter of just a couple hours of grinding I can pull out 50% of a level.  In the last 10 levels of a game that’s actually not too bad.  It’s nowhere near as fun as questing and I do not condone it, but the facts can’t be denied here:  It’s nowhere near as slow as games like Aion.  (This coming from a slow killing class, btw).

The next bit of feedback that I want to leave has to deal with the zone itself.  Coba Plateu looks great.  When I first entered the zone I was overjoyed to see a sort of desert safari wasteland.  It has great atmosphere and the mobs that populate it, like Rhinos, Tigers, Horses, Ogres, Goblins, etc., are all fantastic.  The problem is with the layout.  The zone is split in two by a wall erected by goblins — I think it’s called the Cordon?  Getting past this wall is a pita because there are only a few entrances.  Once on the other side, all the mobs hit like trucks.  I was killed in a matter of just a few hits by almost everything on the eastern side.  Yes, my gear sucked(s) at level 34 which hurts badly but these mobs were especially cruel.  The quests that we did obtain sent us double backing every other quest and going back to places we had gone and killing bosses we had killed three times for three different quests.  Getting killed on the eastern side meant 15+ minutes of wasted time.  Add in bugs and this zone ended up being the worst experience I’ve had in the game yet.  Oh well, it’s testing in a beta phase and I can accept that.  Note though that the Russians had these problems too and theirs was patched.  Why are we retesting content that has already been fixed?

Now that I have left (even with a few quests left) Coba, I am in Coldberg and ready to continue questing in hopefully what pans out to be a zone that isn’t bugged.  Amidst all my problems, I am still enjoying the game and I’m ready to begin the final leg of my journey to the level cap.

I’d like to add to the end here that the GM also told us that Astral Ships would be made more readily available to testers instead of having to go through the building and financing process.  This is good news!