Recently, I found myself back in the world of Azeroth, or to those who need more information: World of Warcraft. I’ve been playing that game off and on for years, and recently I ran out of stuff to play, deciding I’d fire up the game again and see what I’ve missed.
Now, to catch up our story, when we last left our characters in the sword and fantasy world, I was level 85, and the last expansion was Cataclysm. Since then, there have been two expansions: Mist of Panderia and Warriors of Draenor. Well, Draenor is brand new (weeks old) and Panderia has been out for a while. But to get from 85 to 90, I had to go through Panderia, at least until I could go to Draenor, where the game lets me level up to 100.
What I wanted to talk about was Mists of Panderia, which from what I’ve been reading didn’t get the most stellar of reviews. And I can understand why. As I played it, it felt very much like an attempt to parody the world of China, and to do that it introduced a new race of Kung Fu Pandas. Yeah, I’m not kidding about this.
But after all of that, I found a couple of really interesting tidbits to keep me going. And those tidbits were specifically story related. To give you an example, I was playing through the story and at one point you have to relive the incidents that a Dwarf engineer went through. Now, the voice over is a Scottish dwarf who has probably one of the funniest voices in the game, and just listening to him narrate made the game fun alone. But then there comes a time where he’s spotting for a sniper and then befriends a raccoon, which the sniper then kills. Now, this may sound kind of harsh or violent, but it was probably one of the funniest scenes in the game by far, because this poor dwarf took the whole cartoon violence very seriously and for the continuation of those missions NEVER forgave his partner for killing his pet raccoon. The whole banter was quite inspired and well worth the play through.
And that’s the point. I think a lot of games are missing the sense of fun that Blizzard tends to invoke in its games. At one point during the beginning of Draenor, you meet a new soldier on the frontier, and his name is something like Newbie Greenguy, or something like that. It reminded me of the one noob character they had running through Cataclysm who the undead npcs were always trying to kill off, just to get him out of the game and out of their hair.
Those kinds of funny moments are truly inspired, and I wish there were more of them in other games.
But for now, I’m happy finding them whenever I can. And sometimes you find them in the strangest of places. One of my favorites for the longest time was when I found a Dwarf Fishing Rod, which was actually a shotgun. It’s one of those jokes that takes you a second to get, but it so cool when you finally do.
One of the new trends in online computer gaming is the free to play model, which shouldn’t be confused with the Buy to Play model. Let me explain the differences in where computer gaming is today.
Buy to Play: The Buy to Play model is where you buy the game, and then you get to play it forever for free. Usually, the game is expensive, like $59.99 for both Diablo III and the same price for Defiance. The upside to it is that you continue to play the MMO forever, but you had to pay the full price for the game beforehand. How the company makes money is both from the initial sale and from any purchases you make in the game after that. Also, if they create an expansion pack, they’ll charge you for that. Almost every Buy to Play MMO I’ve bought has been a waste of money. Diablo III was the first of the lot, and it sucked badly. It was fun in the very beginning, but after a short while you started to realize that the whole game was designed around Blizzard’s desire to get you to spend money in their auction house. There was little value, and the game got stale really, really fast.
Defiance was a bit more fun, in my opinion, but it was mainly an unfinished game that kept promising to be so much more. I paid extra money for the downloaded content that they were going to be providing, but they’ve been really slow at doing that, so basically I stopped playing and lost the money I spent for downloaded content that they never got around to providing. They keep promising it, but promises are nice fantasies that don’t generally pan out.
The third of the buy to play games out there was Sim City, which was the latest version of a very popular franchise. The beginning of the game was a lot of fun, almost like playing Sim City 3000 again for the first time. And then the game sort of collapsed on itself because it was designed badly so that once your city hit a certain size, it basically just imploded on itself and became a nightmare to fix (translation: not fun). They keep putting out fixes for the game, trying to win back the very pissed off customer base, but as I was very pissed off with the game, all I noticed them doing was trying to port the bugged game over to Mac while ignoring addressing any of the issues that were wrong with the game, almost as if not admitting it would make the problems go away. I have no intentions of going back to the game any time soon.
Another version of the Buy to Play model was Guild Wars 2, which was a lot of fun going from Level 1 to about 30, and then the game just became tedious (at least for me). Others are still playing it and having a great time, but it never did much for me after a certain time. The game relies on other people playing with you, and as the game becomes less and less populated, the game becomes that much more difficult.
But Guild Wars 2 falls into the main reason I decided to make this post. You see, now that the game has been bought, the developers rely on the player base to continue making purchases to keep the game afloat. I’ll talk about that in a second. This can work if you offer something of value to the customer playing the game, but what I’m seeing is that game companies are becoming very greedy, wanting to charge you for all sorts of stupid stuff, which makes paying for it that much more tedious. An example: in Neverwinter, the latest of the free to play games, if you want to buy a bag to carry things in, you can’t ever make one but have to actually buy one from the “Zen” store, which basically has translated to $10 for a bag to carry around 24 items. A bit expansive for something that should have some way in the game to create, which it basically doesn’t. You might be able to buy a bag from another player through the auction house, but essentially, that player bought the bag through the Zen store first, so Neverwinter always gets its money. All mounts cost money, as do most companions (your partner in the game) that’s decent enough to rise above Level 15 (a purpose companion can rise to Level 30).
Some of the MMOs that used to be pay to play have become free to play, or buy to play after having failed as a pay to play type of game. These are games like City of Heroes (which closed its doors a short while ago), Star Wars The Old Republic, Lord of the Rings Online, The Secret World, Rift, Star Trek Online, and several others that used to be regular pay to play games. A few have remained dirhards, refusing to change to a free model, like World of Warcraft and I think Everquest (although I haven’t checked on that game in years, so who knows what happened).
The moral of the story is that these games exist mainly because there are players like me who are willing to pay for incidentals in the game. Now, before I go any further, I just wanted to say that I’m quite willing to pay for items in a game, if that keeps it going. I paid for a lifetime membership to Star Trek Online, mainly because I felt I wanted to support what was a very entertaining project. But when I feel like I’m being targeted for crappy sales tactics, I start to get annoyed. Guild Wars 2 did that to me, and it’s why I finally left the game. I had bought a hundred or so dollars worth of items, and mainly got annoyed at how crappy the items were in lines of cost. Star Trek Online and Neverwinter, both owned by the same company, have one of the most annoying pay items in the game, which are boxes you open with keys you have to buy, and the hope is that you might one day get a great item (a cool ship in Star Trek or a Nightmare mount in Neverwinter). Having opened several dozen boxes in Star Trek Online and about 30 boxes in Neverwinter, I”ve gotten nothing but junk, which means I’ve spent $30 on each game getting absolutely nothing of value. The fact is: You can’t buy a nightmare mount on the Zen Store, so you have to play their rigged lottery in order to actually try to get something decent. It’s the sort of thing that keeps me from wanting to spend money on a game, especially when I’m exactly the kind of player they want: Someone willing to spend money in a game.
That, to me is why the free to play model is not working. As long as you give crappy value to your products that people have to pay to get, your game is going to fail. City of Heroes suffered this way. I spent money in that game, sometimes just wanting to support a game I really enjoyed. But the value for the things I paid for were atrociously one sided (leaning towards them, not me). While the failure of that game had more to do with NCSoft being a shitty company than the game failing, their market could have probably gone a great deal of distance to have done better.
Some of the pay features of these games are really bad. I’ve heard nothing but bad things about Star Wars The Old Republic, in which they didn’t add any value by the pay store, but actually took value away from processes already in the game and then charged you for them if you wanted to get them back. That’s a crappy model for a pay store in a game. I used to play the game back when it was pay to play, and the game’s failure, to me, was that it had nothing to do at the higher levels. My understanding from others is that they haven’t done a great job of fixing that, figuring they’ll get a whole bunch of new players to run through the levels before getting bored (ignoring the players who left due to lack of content).
So what’s the solution? Start producing goods in the game that are both interesting and have value. Star Trek Online does get a bit of this right by creating new ships you can buy. Unfortunately, they don’t do enough to distinguish those new ships from the ones that used to be in the game. But it’s the right track. Neverwinter can do better by discontinuing the stupid drop boxes or by making the items that come in those drop boxes be worth a lot more value to the player. Right now, it’s like gambling at a casino where the slot machines are stuck on losing readouts each time you play them. No one wants to pay for that.
Unfortunately, like City of Heroes, I doubt the developers even care, or they may care but aren’t willing to put forth the effort to make the changes needed, convinced people will keep paying long enough to get them what they need as a payout. Defiance is an interesting variable to watch as the game was a lot of fun, but needed so much more. People tell the developers this on the game’s message boards, but you get the immediate thought that the devs just don’t care. Or they care but it’s too much work to implement change. It probably doesn’t help that Trion fired a great deal of the staff to “save money”, but that’s a subject for another post..
Recently, I started playing Star Wars: The Old Republic, often shortened to TOR. Up until this time, I was a huge fan of World of Warcraft, as was practically every other computer geek on the planet. However, having always been a fan of Star Wars, I figured that when it came out, I would have to try it out. But part of me intended to pass on it until I found out my friend Jason was going to be trying it out, so I decided on a whim, so was I. After buying the Collector’s Edition for somewhere around a million dollars, I installed it, updated the patches and then listened as the infamous John Williams music started up, announcing to the world (you should hear my sound system on my computer) that I was now playing a Star Wars game, as I really like this type of games and other games I play online such as Casino games which are easy to find in the olympic kingsway casinos online.
And I did. And still am.
What I did want to say about the game is that because it is made by Bioware, a company well known for some of the best games in the past, but also known for games with great storytelling, it should not be surprising that this MMORPG was one that focuses specifically on the story. Now, having said that, I should make a disclaimer. Not all the stories in this game are alike, meaning that some are better than others. I’ll get into that in a sec.
The game takes place thousands of years before the known Star Wars universe, which means that whiny Luke Skywalker won’t be born for many years to come, and the brooding Anakin Skywalker, badly acted by the lousy actor who played him, also won’t be along as well. This means that they have somewhat of a fresh universe to play around in, just keeping in mind that they can’t really become too inventive because it a) is part of the Star Wars universe and George Lucas would have a cow if you veered too far off from his IP, and b) it is based off a series of games created by Bioware called Knights of the Old Republic, which means that some of the elements in the game are based on events that have taken place in that IP. But having said that, they do a good job tying all of that together.
As a new player, you get to choose which side you want to be on, either the Republic or the Empire, which if you are familiar with the Star Wars movies, isn’t really all that different from the latter day period of the movies. Instead of the Empire of the movies, the Empire is one of the old Sith and the Republic is, well, the Republic. Except that in this Republic there are jedis. LOTS of jedis. Not just Luke, the old guy with the lightsaber and the Muppet guy.
So you get to choose your class then. Now, if you’re like every other Star Wars fan, you’ll choose a jedi, which is what I did. And a few days into it, I realized it was a mistake. The reson it’s a mistake is not because a jedi is not fun to play, because they are a great deal of fun. It’s a mistake because the story is exactly what you expect. You’re a jedi, you’re learning the Force, and you’re doing good for the Republic. Not much of a stretch. I can see how some people thought the story was kind of stilted. Because it is. It’s still better than 90 percent of the stories in other games, but it was still stilted.
So I then rerolled as a trooper, which is a fighter for the Republic, someone without jedi powers. And immediately, the story became Bioware’s and not George Lucas’s same old story. And it has turned out to be really decent, full of intrigue and betrayal, the kind of thing Bioware does extremely well. Let’s just say that I’m not looking forward to the rest of the story lines that don’t involve me being a jedi.
What I did want to talk about, however, is the whole concept of storytelling in games. Sadly enough, games don’t do these very well. Especially MMORPGs. World of Warcraft is a great game, and it has a huge backstory to it, but to be honest, every time I hear a bit of the story, I feel like I’m listening to something written by a ten year old who is trying to keep your attention while you’re driving and you’d rather listen to the radio. Every game I’ve ever played with Bioware has been one with a great story, even if the game wasn’t that great, although even that hasn’t been the case. Their games have generally been very good.
The problem is that it’s very hard to keep a gaming community based on storytelling alone. One reason WOW does so well has nothing to do with story but because it does gaming well. It’s a lot of fun, and it keeps people wanting to come back to the experience. With a game that is based on story alone, there’s only so long you can keep the player interested, especially if the story doesn’t change multiple times into the game. If you hit 50th level, and you have no new content to play through, the chances are pretty good you’re going to become very bored with the game, which means they either have to become like Blizzard and create a great gaming experience, or they’re going to have to keep reintroducing new story elements into the universe to keep up with their players. And keeping in mind that some of these players play 24/7, that’s a big order to fill.
I have great hopes for this game, mainly because I love the IP, and I love their storytelling elements. But if they can’t sustain it, then it will be one of those great footprints in the history of games, and that will be truly sad. So, here’s hoping they can keep it up, because if they do, they’ll always have me as a customer.
An interesting story has been going around the news waves lately. According to the Guardian, Chinese prisoners are being forced to play World of Warcraft and farm gold to sell to players of the game. If you play this game, or one like it, this is an all too common story, and it’s often been on the periphery of the game. Lots of lazy players tend to want to take the easy road by using real world money to buy the work it would take them to actually play through a lot of the drudgery of the game itself. However, it’s not the gold selling story that I want to focus on, but on the telling of the story itself.
The original article appeared in the British news site paper, The Guardian, and it can be found here. However, when I first read the story, it was reposted on a World of Warcraft official forum, after having been reposted from an article that appeared on Mashable, which appears here. The first article was written by Danny Vincent, in Beijing, for The Guardian. The Mashable article was written by Lauren Idvik. In Idvick’s article, she essentially paraphrased the original article, quoted actual quotes from the actual article, and acted like it was a brand new story. As I read this second article, all I kept thinking to myself was: What purpose did rewriting someone’s article actually do? There’s one piece of “new” information offered in the newer article, and that’s a borrow from the New York Times, in which the author paraphrases that $2 billion of virtual currency was traded in 2008.
This is a common problem that has started to occur with blogs. Rather than actual articles, we’re receiving a lot of rephrased articles from bloggers who are paraphrasing articles actually published from more legitimate sources, kind of like a Twitter of news articles with the attribution (mostly) but a fantasy put forth that the new article is actually offering new insight. In the beginning, this wasn’t that bad because most of the time, bloggers were offering new information, or commentary that supplemented the original article itself, but now, like this one article, the rephrasing of the article doesn’t actually offer anything new, but rehashes the exact same story and puts someone else’s byline on it.
Having been alerted to this phenomenon, I started looking at this same story, following the Google links to see where else they might bring me. Digital Trends has an article by Andrew Couts, who uses the same information from the Guardian article AND includes the $2 billion piece of information but gives no attribution to where that information occurred (missing the fact that Idvick’s article at least attributed to the New York Times). Couts’s article has a one paragraph introduction to the concept, but after that almost all of the information is rephrased from the original Guardian article.
Techspot‘s Matthew DeCarlo uses the same article from the Guardian as well, and when he then uses the $2 billion figure, he indicates the information comes from the China Internet Center, whatever that may be. According to the original New York Times article that seems to be sporadically used by others without attribution, “nearly $2 billion in virtual currency was traded in China, according to the China Internet Network Information Center.” That article was actually written by David Barboza on June 30, 2009.
I’m not saying anyone’s actually doing anything dishonest, but at the same time there seems to be a lot of reporting going on based off of previous sources that aren’t getting the credit that they probably deserve. It’s one thing to quote a story, or even to post a story and then comment on it, but what seems to be happening is we’re getting a lot of stories being rewritten for the sake of sounding like they’re brand new and from other sources. There’s not been any actual attempt to hide the original sources, but that doesn’t mean we’re getting a lot of transparency at the same time. A lot of “reporters” seem to be making a career out of reporting other reporter’s stories, and that concerns me.
Now, having said that, I wouldn’t be surprised if I’ve done something similar in the past, although not to this extreme, but having pointed this out, I will definitely go out of my way to make sure that when I print someone else’s information, I do it because I want to give attention to someone else’s story, not somehow try to act like I’m the original reporter of information I did nothing more than read in another newspaper just like anyone else could have done.
1. Blizzard changed its mind. I wrote recently about game companies jumping the shark, and how Blizzard Entertainment was making a seriously, horrible mistake by intituting REAL ID on its customers. The customers went nuts and protested until they practically couldn’t do it any more. The CEO of Blizzard wrote a Blog Post in which he stated, “um, sorry, we hear ya and we’re not going to do what we said we were going to do.” Wise move, and you have to admire the maturity of a company for knowing when it needs to take a step back and reconsider an action. The whole thing was obviously about trying to capitalize on their customers and make insane profits above their already normal INSANE profits, but fortunately they didn’t derail their whole company to try to increase their profit.
2. Stupid politicians. I hate political season, which seems to be almost year round these days. This morning, I was on the shuttle bus when I heard a campaign ad that essentially went something like: “Michigan is suffering badly. It’s performing the worst in the entire country. So send Justin Amash to Washington to fix things!” Or something as stupid as that. Basically, I’m thinking, um, Michigan has problems, so sending a State Representative to Washington is NOT a solution. It means sending someone from a messed up state to Washington to make a messed up country. Sometimes, I think these people just don’t think these things through. It’s not Washington they’re complaining about in that ad. It’s Michigan, so unless their plan is to send Amash OUT OF MICHIGAN TO FIX MICHIGAN because he’s responsible for screwing things up, I don’t really see the point.
3. Stupid corporate contest campaigns. Pepsi is running one right now that involves Major League Baseball. The point is: You collect bottle caps until you have three of them that match, and then you send them in for a free baseball cap. Really? That’s it? I’ve had about 40 diet Pepsis that are part of this campaign, and today was the first time I actually got one that was a duplicate of another (meaning I got two of the three I need). Now, mathematically, I didn’t even think that made sense, but I don’t even have three of the same, and I’ve already gone through 40 sodas. Stupid contest, and the pay off is equally stupid. For the 50 or 60 sodas I’ll need to drink, at least give me the chance to win something cool. Oh, and every now and then I get a cap that offers me 15% off of MLB crap. Really? And read the fine print. It is valid ONLY if you buy $75 worth of stuff. I don’t think there’s $75 worth of MLB junk I would ever want in the first place, regardless of the discount.
4. Movies. They’ve sucked lately. This whole summer should have been discontinued. Not a single movie really worth the money. And the prices of movie are astronomical. No good news on that front at all.
Years ago, I used to be a seriously addicted Ultima Online fan. I played it every day. I became a counselor in the game, which meant I officially worked for EA as one of the in-game special operators who helped other people who were having problems in the game. I ran community events that were quite popular. I mean, I lived and breathed the game.
Then EA decided to do something really stupid. The game population was having problems at the time due to a segment of the population that was preying on other players. The forum community was in an uproad, demanding something be done about it. There were all sorts of alternatives EA could have taken, including to continue to ignore the problem. But they decided to take the easiest route, which was to create a completely “safe” environment in the game by completely duplicating the entire world and then making that “new” area safe. Oh, sure, you could stay in the dangerous area, or you could go to the completely safe area and eat candy canes with the rest of the safe population. And that’s what everyone did. And the old lands died out because no one went there.
But something else happened, too. People stopped playing the game because it became too easy. You couldn’t be killed, and suddenly the game seemed like a joke of its previous existence. So people left in droves. And then new games appeared, like Everquest, so that became the new stomping ground. UO died out. Oh, sure, it’s still around, but it’s a shadow of its once great self.
To me, the reason was that the owners of the game listened to the players, and then when it came time for really listening to the feedback, they decided to take the easier path and then stopped listening. The players, pissed, and practically screaming at the developers, kept begging them to listen to what was happening to the game. The developers not only didn’t listen, but they closed down the forums, figuring that as long as they didn’t have to listen to the complaints, then the problems didn’t exist.
So a LOT of people just dumped the game. I did as well. I realized they weren’t paying attention to the players any more, so I went and found another game.
Fast forward some years to Star Wars Galaxies, and wow, it’s like they didn’t learn a thing. What’s even funnier is that some of the same names were there making the same mistakes. When the game started going down hill, instead of listen to the player base, they went ahead and completely changed the game to one they thought players would want to play. Boy, were they wrong. The player base disappeared overnight. Realizing they made a mistake, but refusing to admit it, they made another abrupt change, causing the few remaining players to say “screw you” and leave. The game is less than a shadow of its former self. To this day, they refuse to admit they did anything wrong, but in all areas where they discuss how to screw up a game, Star Wars Galaxies is ALWAYS mentioned as the showcase of an example of what NOT TO DO EVER.
Well, fast forward to today, and we have the most popular game on the planet for MMORPGs: World of Warcraft. Yesterday, they made an announcement to do something that has me shaking my head because it’s like I’m reliving those two previous examples over again.
You see, some weeks ago, WoW decided that it was going to implement this new feature called REALID, which meant that in order to group with your friends, you had to present your real identification and play as yourself, not as a character name. If someone wanted to know who you were, they would know. This pissed people off, but Blizzard, the maker of WOW, said that you don’t have to use REALID if you don’t want to. Then they announced yesterday that in order to use the forums for WOW or their new game coming out called Starcraft 2, you have to use REALID. What they didn’t really mention is that as their parent company Activision is now partnered with Facebook, this is more about giving identification information to Facebook than it is in presenting a new way to socialize in the game. People are pissed. People don’t like having their ID out there when playing a game.
To prove how dangerous this is, one of the trash-talking employees for Blizzard stated it was no big deal and put his own information out there. In no time, all of his private information was out there, and suddenly his phone was ringing off the hook from angry players, and his Facebook account had to be shut down because of the onslaught of attacks. The problems he’s experiencing are still going on. Blizzard’s response wasn’t to realize they made a mistake but to unofficially announce that its employees wouldn’t have to comply with REALID, just the players would.
This has started a nightmare of bad publicity for Blizzard, which is treating it like the old ad business, thinking that as long as people are talking about Blizzard, it must mean good business.
I’m starting to hear A LOT of people talking about dumping WOW because of this. And that’s interesting because up until now I’ve always believed that the only thing that could ever destroy WOW would be WOW itself. I just didn’t think it would happen by allying itself with the scuz bucket that is Facebook.
This should play out to be a very interesting situation. I’ll be watching this closely.
