F2Pocalypse 2013

So let me get this straight. In the news in the last few days:

LotRO added a patch with Hobbit Presents, a new gambling-style lockbox that they spam daily at players. Why bother with giving lockboxes a chance to drop from a monster? Just shovel them at players and try to rake in the cash. And LotRO added a literal in-game store shopping mall in Bree.

SWTOR’s new patch supposedly adds nothing but store items.

And Rift today announced that it’s going Free To Play. But it will be fair with no tricks or traps–they promise. Bill Fisher says the stigma of F2P is going away, but if it is, then why do they have to make that promise in the first place?

This is probably the main reason that Hartsman left Trion. It’s because the man is a god of integrity, like I always said. He’s really cute too. Can I say that without being reverse-sexist? I’m not sure, but I did. This is the way of the kitty.

So. I said I’d never blog about LotRO again, but since I quit the game, I feel like I can make an exception to say that I hope it dies in a fire. I hope they pull the license. I hope it shuts down ASAP so I never have to hear about it again.

My elves have diminished, abandoning the world to the greed of men. And women, in this case.

I made my goodbye post. I updated my LotRO Interface page to say that I will no longer be supporting those 14k downloads. I’m leaving my LotRO boxing guide up on my blog. It’s top post today, I think from some press it got in the forums.

Boxing is kind of a rebellious activity. It’s also a way for players to get as much from F2P as possible without paying. It’s okay with me.

I’ve almost condemned Neverwinter also. I’m still on the fence. I was reading the 1500+ post F2P-complaint thread in the forums until the mods closed it down and ejected it with no explanation. I heard about the Orwellian world chat spam whenever someone wins the lottery. I heard about the high prices for basic things. The double-diamond earning weekends or whatever.

To be fair, I don’t just assume the whiners are right. Neverwinter might be the most smokin’ deal going in an MMO right now. Once you wade through all of the currency exchange rates and calculate out a monthly estimate of what you mind need–it might well be fair. (A degree in accounting or a genius IQ is useful for playing a F2P game.)

F2P is just not a game I want to play. I want immersion, not a meta shopping experience where I buy things for my characters like they are barbie dolls. F2P is a symptom of the sickness that is pervasive in American culture.

So the kitty is now left with WoW, Guild Wars 2, Skyrim, and Dragon Age 2. Guild Wars 2 is double-dipping, but it’s non-obtrusive. I haven’t really needed the store yet. The store will move forward, though. The corruption might be inevitable.

On a positive note, I’m working on a fun new comic strip titled “The Forsaken Inn Of Unplayable Races”. It’s a place where races go when they aren’t wanted in an MMO. It’s cute. I’ll have it posted soon. A new strip is needed in the yonder sidebar to replace the one about SWTOR.

More Reading:

TAGN on Rift F2P

Guild Wars 2 Writing And Immersion: Superb

I’ve played Guild Wars 2 for one week now, and I continue to be impressed every day. I’ve played my usual, same-old MMO for so long that I’d forgotten how real fun felt.

Today I went on a guided history tour in the human capital city (Divinity’s Reach.) I took the opportunity to get my “walk” hotkey set up and learned some things about Kryta political history.

I also realized that the Asian looks in the character creator are explained by Cantha, which was a GW1 expansion after I quit playing it. Kryta is a melting pot situation.

I really, really like the character naming setup in GW2. You’re allowed multiple names with spaces. So if “Robert” is taken, you can try “Sir Robert” or “Robert Ross” or “Sir Robert Of Beartown”. This scheme is a boon for roleplaying.

Maybe you want to be a monk, so you’ll want “Brother Robert” or something. The hard part is trying to determine whether the honorific “Sir” is even appropriate, or if it’s supposed to be “Ser”, or if you should be a “Chief Engineer” or “Mistress” depending on your race, or just skip the whole thing because it’s too pretentious and isn’t you.

I’m so impressed by the game writing. GW2 delivers a starting story that is personal, and reasons to defend that beseiged city, explained in a way that is believable. You get a feeling that things are at stake, at risk.

Other games I’ve posted about lately (i.e. Secret World and Neverwinter) failed to provide you with a friend in the game, a “Smiling Jack”, someone to make you feel welcome and give you a connection. Some of the GW2 races start you right off with selecting a friend or sibling that will play a part in your story.

Human characters also select a deity. Unlike Neverwinter, which (iirc from beta, it may be different or changed) only describes the deities and lets you pick one, the GW2 writing makes it personal through the writing.

For example: “Melandru … can be found in every harvest and every flower. She smiles upon those, like me, who have an affinity for animals. I am a follower of Melandru.” Personal. This works.

I’m not far into the personal story plots, but so far with two races, I’ve noticed a classic pattern of writing good fiction, as described and recommended by Jack Bickham et. al.:

• Hero has a goal.
• Hero fails to achieve goal, suffering a setback.
• Hero has to come up with another plan.
• Another setback; the stakes get higher and higher.

My new character, Shar Katzdottir, is a half-Norn, a bastard daughter of a Norn fortune-teller who spread her stockinged cards during hard times for a wealthy Elonian. Shar killed another client who made her mother disappear. She fled the city and lived in the Kryta wild for a time, learning intuitively the ways of her Norn heritage and communing with the cats as a Ranger.

When Shar dared return to the city out of loneliness, she lived on the streets until she befriended Quinn, who gave her a bed to sleep in. “This is her story” as the GW2 writing says. This is good writing with a brilliant economy of style. I’m looking forward to more.

In other news:

In other news, the CCP Eve Fanfest was last week, and they revealed some World of Darkness things. WoD News is the best source of info. Politics. Backstabbing. Fashion, and some sort of follower crafting system maybe like TOR. You’re a vampire queen. You don’t want to darn stockings or do embroidery.

The names Edward and Bella were also announced to be banned. CCP has a modest team of 70 people on WoD now, and the release won’t be before 2015. This makes fang-banging kitties a little sad. For perspective, Blizzard’s new MMO, the “Titan” project, has 150 people on it now, per rumors.

We are expected to hear more about Blizzard’s Titan this year, which is slated to test in 2014, and possibly release. The best current situation sum-up I’ve seen is over at Titan Focus.

Guild Wars 2: First Impressions

So I was looking for a new game, and Guild Wars 2 won the showdown by virtue of going on sale (again) for $40, plus offering a free trial key, which I picked up from Curse on Thursday.

A few keys might still be available. I don’t know. I thought about giving a heads-up on my blog, but the download was super-impressively fast, and then I was in the game playing.

GW2 is an amazing and beautiful game. It kind of reminds me of Aion but dialed up to 12. It’s a single purchase to play with no subscription fee, which did gave it an edge over SWTOR or Mists of Pandaria, other possibilities.

Guild Wars 2 also offers Spanish, which is another perk for me. This is enabled by a mix of voice and text that is very effective. When the mechanics of the story delivery are invisible, you’ve got it right. The Sylvari (the GW2 plant-based rendition of pointy-ears) turned out to be pretty cool.

Sylvari is the race for me, and I think Thief is the class. I’m still depressed over quitting my L65 Burglar in the other MMO I play, because the Burglar just doesn’t stack up to my Lore-Master for various reasons. Well, the GW2 Thief can swap daggers for dual-wield pistols in a heartbeat, so that’s an issue solved.

I’ve looked at countless videos and articles about this game, and lots of good things have been said. I don’t want to go crazy on all of the good things. I could write a long essay. For example, Angry Joe’s fun video review on this is memorable. He rates the game a 10/10 with a “badass seal of approval”, a game that belongs in your “liberry”.

The dynamic (public) quests and cooperative gameplay really are a big deal for MMO innovation, and a lot of fun. I’ve been revived a number of times by other players, and it’s a warm fuzzy for sure. On the other hand, I know that GW2 has issues with dungeons due to no holy trinity, and lack of a trinity means lack of group roles, so how deep can the cooperation hole go?

Also, what happened when I tried to /thank cooperative people for giving a poor thief a hand? Um. Nothing. Nada. In fact, the list of GW2 emotes is a little short at the moment.

Another trivial thing that shocked me was no lipstick. Ten minutes into creating my first character, I was alt-tabbing and searching Google in disbelief. Surely, I thought, there is a hidden color picker somewhere. Nope. Dolce & Gabbana have left the building.

So the only flaw of my character is her lips, which are an off-body color. Still eminently kissable. No need to panic.

Supposedly one of the GW2 writers is disappointed that a great majority of players are choosing Human, so players are widely missing the great stories he wrote for the other races. Well, it seems obvious that if the races are ugly, less people are going to play them.

Exhibit a: those poor Trolls in WoW, ever vying with Dwarf and Gnome for least played race in the game. I’ve tried a half dozen times to make a female Troll, but it’s never, ever going to happen. It’s going to be the same with the female Asura in GW2.

There is no good-looking female hair for Asura, while there are many more and better hair options for human and Sylvari women. Asura and Charr women also have NO breasts. Who wants to be a member of a race with no breasts? Maybe Asura are actually amphibians of some kind, but Charr are surely mammals, aren’t they?

This is admittedly kitty logic and not rocket scientist logic, but still valid.

Asura could have been properly cute, but instead they look like walking salamanders. And I don’t mean D&D salamanders, which are more attractive. Maybe they were going for a Harry Potter house-elf look. I don’t know.

So, the kitty conclusion is: here GW2, take my money, thanks for the free trial key. I love you. This is the game I want to play right now. The word on Neverwinter is two more classes in the works. I’ll be waiting on those instead of showing up at launch next week. That’s fine.

Syp (or maybe we are back to Justin Olivetti again per the current byline) interviewed Andy Valesquez this last week and did get an interesting explanation on why so few classes at launch in Neverwinter:

“We figured that if the classes we released were really good, people would stick around to see what comes later, as opposed to if we put out a bunch of classes that are whatever, then nobody will care when we say that class 10 is coming next month.”

Here’s hoping that works for them.

Best Of: MMO Youtube

Tonight I sat down for a few hours and watched Youtube videos of Guild Wars 2 and Elder Scrolls Online at E3. Here are the two that were most interesting and informative. I hadn’t seen these yet. I liked seeing the armor and relic displays from Elder Scrolls in the first video. The second video is a well-made GW2 review that was just posted today. This video echoes my own skepticism about whether such a simple skill bar can be interesting and not “spammy”. The Elder Scrolls bar is supposedly even more simple.

I also saw a good video that went over the Guild Wars 2 cash shop. It looked like a basic prototype of the LotRO store. You can buy bank space, character slots, +10% damage and -%10 damage, +100% XP, and lots of cosmetics and fun items like fireworks and polymorph potions. Why haven’t I played the GW2 beta? I’m not pre-ordering for access. I applied twice but wasn’t invited, and I haven’t gotten a key any other way. So far I’ve seen mostly positive things. Hope you enjoy the videos.

The First Pillar Is First–Dragon Age 2

Before the launch of SWTOR, Bioware talked a lot about their new model of four pillars of game design: Exploration, Combat, Progression, and Story. Bioware uses characters with strong motives to energize their Story pillar because characters are the heart and soul of story. Characters move mountains, ravish princesses and princes, and start wars.

What’s the heart and soul of Progression? I’d say it’s the hero’s journey–the desire to venture forth to battle, seek treasure, overcome obstacles, and become powerful and great. Everyone wants to live a hero’s life. So what about Exploration? The first pillar is the first for a reason–it’s of first importance for fantasy fiction. We often take it for granted.

Aside from the continued simplification of DA2 , which is more a matter of opinion, (I’ve been trying to come up with a good euphemism for “dumbing down” because the phrase is getting stale) setting is the main weakness in the opening chapters of Dragon Age 2.

The Bioware devs were apparently so close to their project that they didn’t write for the average Jane. I didn’t even realize until I’d played Dragon Age for a few hours that this was a city campaign. The narrator just said a short blurb about Kirkwall during the boat voyage cinematics, something like this:

Kirkwall–the city of chains. A free city, in a manner of speaking.

And some other vague historical things that I didn’t bother write down after making a new character to verify whether or not I was imagining my perception of this. Speaking of historical things, everyone has probably read Robert Howard’s fiction, for contrast.

Know, oh prince, that between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the years of the rise of the Sons of Aryas, there was an Age undreamed of, when shining kingdoms lay spread across the world like blue mantles beneath the stars – Nemedia, Ophir, Brythunia, Hyberborea, Zamora with its dark-haired women and towers of spider-haunted mystery, Zingara with its chivalry, Koth that bordered on the pastoral lands of Shem, Stygia with its shadow-guarded tombs, Hyrkania whose riders wore steel and silk and gold. But the proudest kingdom of the world was Aquilonia, reigning supreme in the dreaming west.

Okay, we’re psyched to go to seek our fortunes now, right? Gather your party and set sail for the tombs. Meanwhile, I know almost nothing about Kirkwall or the Free Marches where the city of DA2 is located. It’s probably somewhere in the depths of the journal that I’m supposed to be reading but never really do.

This design, by the way, is a real weakness of Bioware’s voice-over imperative. You speak to NPC’s and go back and forth with one-liners, but this isn’t close enough to describe a world, so you get these big “info dumps” in fiction writing terminology–you read a huge essay on a tablet or something.

Guess what is considered a no-no for fantasy and sci-fi writing? Info dumps. Avoid them, because your reader gets bored. Try to weave setting into the action and dialogue instead–something MMO writers so often just don’t do. Guess what? This latter strategy doesn’t work for Bioware. Voice file sizes will go haywire. Players will get bored listening to NPC’s drone on about backstory.

And with respect to the Exploration pillar, what can you really explore in Dragon Age 2? Linear dungeons with dead side-passages that lead to trash. The city overall is really nicely designed, though–the areas are big enough and the art and architecture are beautiful.

Bioware claimed that Dragon Age is the spiritual successor of Baldur’s Gate (these classics are on sale right now by the way–buy one get one free until the end of February at Good Old Games). I admit that in DA2, I’m finally feeling this a little bit. This is a really good thing.

You’ve got the snarky party banter. You’ve got this great city where random things do seem to happen, and adventure seems to be everywhere. My point is that I wish I felt a lot more of the good vibe of a great city adventure campaign–with more attention to the “first pillar.”

Also, I greatly admire the stylish, sleek maps and interfaces in DA2–this is some brilliant artist work–but the tried-and-true realistic fantasy art romances me better. (The art in the map graphic above is my own.) I kind of have the same reaction to the new stylistic, modern-looking maps in LotRO, which I’ve gone back to playing a little bit in the past few days–as predicted.

I signed up twice today for the Guild Wars 2 beta–once for English and once for Spanish. You too can throw in your bid for the next two days with the hopes of being chosen. Visit the article on Massively.com if you need a link.

I hope GW2 is great and surprises me, but I can’t help but feel like–as with SWTOR before launch–the game is slightly overrated right now. The similar combat system as the original, combined with the desire of Arenanet to put GW2 on consoles, are also speed limiters on my enthusiasm. The WvWvW PvP sounds interesting, but it makes no sense at all to me in terms of immersion.

Hitler, Rift, And What Class To Pick

Something we like to do here at KittyKitty is to collect information and links in one online place for later reference, and a bunch of videos kind of floated into the radar this week, so here you go.

Rift

These videos mixing Hitler and Rift may or may not be funny, depending on your perspective. Note they also contain quite a lot of F-bombs and other language that may be offensive to people. A thread posted in the Rift forums by Haristo, one of the authors, tipped us off today to these.

Hitler Opens A PvP Rift.
Hitler finds out Rift is better than WoW.
Hitler finds out Mages were nerfed again.

SWTOR

For something more wholesome, MMOGamerChick made a list a few days ago of the videos for the eight SWTOR base classes.

The “Fem-Shep” Trooper class (voiced by Jennifer Hale, the same as the female Shepard from Mass Effect) is pretty compelling from the voice alone as well as the big guns, but it would be weird hearing Fem-Shep in a different context. Yes? On the other hand, Force lightning is hard to resist. It’s just plain sexy. So…the Sith Inquisitor video kind of blew me away. It almost isn’t surprising that this class has been leading popularity polls by a wide margin for quite a while.

The Smuggler is at the back of the pack in that linked poll, making it look like the Smuggler is an underdog class. One of the Bioware writers singled out the Smuggler in an interview (with a grin on his face) as having a really wild ride for a story. How will the class mechanics (i.e. cover) work out in practice? This could be one of those little-played, much-appreciated classes.

Remember that each class in SWTOR splits later into one of two advanced classes, which is another consideration. Last I’ve heard, you can’t change your advanced class once chosen, but the ability to do so is still in consideration by Bioware. Your advanced class plays no role in your overall class story.

Guild Wars 2

A crop of new, high-quality Guild Wars 2 videos have also surfaced in the past few days, including the same type of class/race video show-offs as the ones above for SWTOR. You can check them out in HD at Gametrailers.

The MMO Bingo Game

Today Beau Hindman posted an article on Massively about grinding. The most interesting concept to me as that grinding is often used as a pejorative term by players–no one seems to like it.

Yet players in fact create the grind by demanding content and accomplishments, while the developers need to give them a hamster wheel to run, while at the same time managing how much rewards are given away.

Beau suggests that we need to leave grinding behind and outgrow it.

I don’t think we’ll ever outgrow it, as long as we have a significant number of players with an enormous thirst to play and play and play, then get bored and quit if there is nothing left to do, and as long as the game makers themselves have a reward system that involves keeping players playing as long as possible. I’m not seeing either of those situations going away any time soon with the usual subscription models.

Word on the street is that Guild Wars 2 will “not feature a grind”, among its other innovations, and it will be interesting to see how that turns out. (MMORPG article on GW2 progression.) If any game will be capable of bypassing the grind pit, it might actually be Guild Wars 2, which uses a different monetization and is not so entirely invested in keeping players on the monthly sub treadmill.

I like grinding, and see it as a way to achieve things and feel a little bit special in the game, and get something done on my own time. This is why I liked LotRO so much, and part of why I didn’t like them selling out every grind in every way. I have a lot of time. That’s my resource to use for achievement.

Other players have a lot more skill and fortitude in PvP than I do. Other players have a big guild and lots of friends to raid with. Ventrilo and the ilk, necessary for raiding, seriously hurt my immersion.

So what’s the deal with the Bingo in the above picture? It comes from a comment to the above-linked article at Massively. Borick unfurled a comment that startled me in its profundity. Crazy wisdom, or just crazy? Is the end game gear grind like a bingo game? You be the judge in the quote below, and tell me Borick isn’t taking a page from Dennis Miller at the end.

It took me a few minutes to understand “engineering arbitrary reward systems”. I take that to mean the situation of just dumping so much loot on the players that the loot becomes meaningless (“Monty Haul”), and the players run the game and get anything they want.

A grind is what happens when diminishing returns set in. When players feel rewarded, then the energy falls under ‘work ethics’. When the players do not feel rewarded, then the effort becomes a grind.

People can become disenfranchised because they lack skill or confidence in a competitive environment. They can become disenfranchised because they are competitive players held down in a noncompetitive environment.

Everyone becomes disenfranchised whenever developers start engineering arbitrary reward systems at the expense of giving freedom and power to the players.

One can say that the grind has remained constant or become more refined, but what about the rewards? Outside of a few ‘world firsts’ of dubious prestige, what leverage do players gain from the grind anymore?

“The Grind” was far more rewarding and exploitable in the early days — items with iconic effects or best-in-slot overpowered tweakiness. Nowadays we’re just filling in our Bingo card of ‘cheevs while waiting to consume the next scripted regurgitation from hackneyed developers.

Ground Target This, Guild Wars 2 Devs

Feel good? Is it working for you? No? It isn’t working for me either, darlings. It was just yesterday that I lamented seeing the dreaded ground-targeting blob skanking sneakily through the Secret World video that I linked. Now Jon Peters blogs about the Guild Wars 2 combat system and I cringe again.

Let’s start from the beginning.

Everyone gets a heal. Fine. Sounds just like the Old Republic. I’ll tentatively buy the idea of better and more epic solo play that way.

Everyone gets a rez. Interesting. Weird, but predictable. After all, is there any way left to make defeat in an MMO even more trivial?

Shared boon system. I liked the boons in GW1. I just liked the word “boon”. This is the most interesting system revealed here. The complexity should get very interesting. Of course, since everyone can do every role, it will take a lot of communication and organization to set up who is doing what boons, which is a drag for PUG’s. “More social”? Maybe. More dynamic? More like chaotic for Joe and Jane player.

No allied targeting. Right away this seems inaccurate. So everyone’s combat rezzes are ground-targeted area-effect? Really? I’m sure that I’m going to struggle with having no skills that will target allies, just as much as I’m going to dislike clicking a skill, moving an area effect graphic around, clicking again, waiting for the animation to go off, and then hoping I did some good on a battlefield that is already different than when I wanted to cast the area effect in the first place. I hate it in Age of Conan. It works fine in Dragon age. You can pause the game. Again, I think I’ve been spoiled by LotRO.

Diversity. Rotating roles and covering for other players. I feel the devs are greatly focused on their PvP endgame experience here. Diversity to me just means uniformity. Everyone can do the same things, so no one is special or feels like they are particularly important to the group. This is actually the stated design in the list of goals at the end of the blog post–everyone in the group is expendable.

Mobility. This is good. It’s the one area where LotRO combat can be really weak. So often one gnashes the incisors when attempting to strafe an Epic Conclusion.