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The Daily Grind: Does Steam influence your MMO habits?
A few weeks ago, our sister site Joystiq posted a story about Incredipede, an indie game whose slow sales over a four-month period were eclipsed by a single day's worth of sales on Steam. And when I looked back through our coverage of MMOs on Steam, I realized that the platform has quietly become a big deal for our genre, too; MMO publishers clearly believe Steam is a place they need to be. Final Fantasy XI's expansion landed there in recent memory, as did The War Z, Age of Conan, APB Reloaded, and dozens more. My own Steam account shows EVE Online, Champions Online, Lord of the Rings Online, and Spiral Knights, just to name a few. The convenience of Steam and the fact that my friends congregate there is the key draw for me, in spite of my lingering distrust for such services, so today, I'm wondering whether I'm alone. Are you guys more likely to download and try an MMO, F2P or otherwise, if it's on Steam? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
The Daily Grind: If SimCity is an MMO, what should we call actual MMOs?
Earlier this week, EA president Frank Gibeau doubled-down on his company's earlier claims about SimCity's MMOness, suggesting the game was built as a "massively multiplayer experience" from the beginning. Rather than pick on Gibeau's comments (already done), I want to consider what would happen if we admitted defeat. What if we just accepted that the term MMO has been utterly co-opted for online singleplayer games -- what should we call "real" MMOs instead? My colleagues suggest "persistent massively multiplayer online" -- PMMO, I suppose (would we have to change our name to "Persistently"?). While I like the idea of bringing back an old-school term like "persistent," and while it would certainly separate games like EverQuest from games like Diablo III, I worry it also excludes MMORPGs that make heavy use of instancing (and therefore aren't as persistent as they seem) even as it includes games with persistent characters but not worlds. What do you think -- is it time to give up on the term MMO and adopt something else? Do we retreat to the imperfect label "MMORPG" or begin the hunt for a brand-new acronym? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
The Daily Grind: Do you use in-game guild-finding tools?
Massively's sister site WoW Insider recently ran a poll asking its readers about the use of World of Warcraft's looking-for-guild tools. Approximately 56.9% of the respondents said they'd never used the tool, but a whopping 17.5% said they had. That 17.5% seems a staggering number to me, but then, I know my experience is abnormal; I've been in basically the same guild with the same core group of people for my entire MMO career. I just can't imagine treating a guild the same way I'd treat a group or a raid -- opening up a looking-for-guild panel and ticking all the right boxes until the tool found me a guild that at least on paper met my specifications. It just seems artificial and ephemeral to me. But clearly, it's been of value to almost a fifth of WoW Insider's readership, and since finding a good guild these days is apparently a pain in the rear, I'm calling that a good thing. So now I'd like to pose the same question to the broader MMO community. Have you guys ever used a looking-for-guild tool in any of the MMOs you play? If not, do you stick to traditional methods like ads on forums or chatting up people you meet in person? And if so, has the guild-finder ever led you to a permanent home? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
The Daily Grind: Do you still play your first MMO?
With Brad McQuaid's return to EverQuest in the news this week, nostalgia has invaded our comment section. The most veteran of our MMO commenters mused about the days of meditating into spellbooks, losing levels on death, embarking on corpse runs, and waiting on the boat. No one even mentioned camping for jboots, begging to be put on a list for a spot in a dungeon group, or having your raid planejumped right before your eyes! I think old-schoolers know that the old days had more than their fair share of problems, which is why most of them are probably playing Guild Wars 2 or The Secret World and not Asheron's Call or Anarchy Online. Or are they? Are more people living in classic MMOs than they let on? My first was Ultima Online, and yes, I do poke my nose in once or twice a year, but it hasn't been my "main game" in a truly long time. What about you guys? Do you still play your first MMO? And if you've ever gone back, was it as you remembered? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
The Daily Grind: Are /follow commands taboo?
Earlier this week, World of Warcraft patched out a surprising mechanic present in the game for a very long time: the /follow command in battlegrounds. Blizzard community guru Bashiok explained that the primary goal was to curb botting in PvP, although apparently the team isn't too sad about the detrimental effect the change will have on at-the-keyboard multiboxing, either. What Blizzard doesn't appear to have anticipated was the effect the tweak would have on visually impaired players who rely on /follow commands to kick butt. World of Warcraft isn't alone in shunning the /follow command; Guild Wars 1 famously limits following, and Guild Wars 2, to the delight of some players, omits it entirely, which is sort of a pain in the butt when I need to go AFK and can't just follow on my guildies for 30 seconds as we run to the next orangie. I'm annoyed at that, so I can only imagine how upset people awesome enough to PvP blind feel at having their lifeline to fun stripped away after so many years. So what do you guys think? Is this a good change for WoW and other MMOs? Do you think the potential for harm to blind players or legitimate AFKers should outweigh the potential for harm by botters and multiboxers? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
The Daily Grind: Should player homes decay?
One of the issues plaguing player housing in MMOs is what to do with those houses after the player-owners have left the game or stopped paying for their subscriptions. In Ultima Online, the granddaddy of all MMO housing, your home drops to the ground if you haven't paid your sub in 90 days (and your shardmates can loot all your stuff in a grand free-for-all!). In Star Wars Galaxies, your house stayed standing until it ran out of pre-paid maintenance money, which worked pretty well to help the active players reclaim city space until maintenance was turned off for a few years in consideration for hurricane victims. Even games with instanced housing feel the space crunch. In Lord of the Rings Online, failure to pay your maintenance fees in-game leads to the eventual return of your lot to the public pool and your having to buy back all your loot from an escrow NPC. MMO developers are torn between the desire to lure back former players with the promise that their houses are still intact and the desire to keep the world, instanced or not, clear and open for paying or active players. So what do you guys think -- what should be the more dominant goal? If you step away from a game, should your character's home decay? And if it did, would you ever return to the game? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
The Daily Grind: Should gender and race matter in MMO character creation?
Camelot Unchained, Mark Jacobs' upcoming RvR-based MMO, is dipping into the old-school well in more ways than one. One design feature that caught my eye is the promise that racial and gender choices will influence character stats. MMO players are pretty used to the ancient RPG idea that some races or species are going to be better at magic or archery or punching people in the face or pressing Will of the Forsaken than others, but non-cosmetic gender differences are something that very few MMOs embrace. Even accidental gender imbalances send players into a tizzy. The implication in CU is that these initial starting stats will be changeable based on what characters actually do, such that an Elf woman who does nothing but swing hammers will bulk up or Viking thug who practices his poetry will see that reflected in his charisma skill (I am making these examples up). But the idea that my character might start at a stereotypical disadvantage still bugs me and makes me wonder how many min-maxers out there will just play to those stereotypes because they feel they must, thereby homogenizing the character makeup of the whole game. What about you guys? Do you think that gender and race/species should matter in MMO character creation as it matters in certain other RPGs? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
The Daily Grind: Is powergaming via PGC tools acceptable?
Any game that implements a player-generated content system runs the risk of creating a system that's more fun -- or more lucrative -- than the original game itself. Players of the now-sunsetted City of Heroes, for example, were forever finding ways to turn experience and currency gain within the player-content tool known as the Mission Architect to their advantage. Imagine designing a mission with mobs that deal nothing but fire damage, then bringing your fire Tanker with her anti-fire shields to blaze through a group's worth of mobs while soaking up the levels and loot. Overpowered? Most definitely. Fun? Frequently, especially when you just wanted to level up your 50th alt to get to the good powers. Exploitable? Some people did consider such activities to be expoits, and to pacify them, the developers brought so many nerfhammers down on the system that by the end, it was seldom used except by the most diehard storygoers. This same battle is now being waged on the forums of Neverwinter, which game will also implement a player-generated content system that allows participants to design and play each other's missions. Cryptic plans to curtail potential powergaming by limiting rewards earned through the tool, but there's always a danger of limiting rewards so much they're not worth the bother. Today, let's discuss what you think about the potential dangers of PGC. Are powergaming and farming acceptable uses of PGC tools like the Foundry? Do you prefer studios crack down hard on people who aren't doing it the "right" way? Or do you have a different solution? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
The Daily Grind: Would you pay to interview a developer?
Earlier this week, we reported on one of the stranger interview setups we've seen in a while. A player of Mortal Online who goes by the handle Aralis was given the chance to interview Star Vault CEO Henrik Nystrom about the state of the game. There was just oooooone little itty-bitty catch: Aralis landed the interview only because he'd been the top donator to the game in January. In fact, he'd ponied up $1000. The interview is fraught with a few other issues, such as the fact that Nystrom dodges some of the player's questions and smooths over others, which'd probably annoy me if I had just effectively spent $1000 for the privilege of emailing a few questions off to a dev I admired (but then again, I'm pretty used to getting my questions ignored for free). Readers also pointed out the weirdness of "donating" to an MMO in an era of free-to-play. But let's stick to basics. What do you guys think? Would you pay any amount of money just to snag a sit-down with your favorite developer? How much, and what would you expect, exactly, in return? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
The Daily Grind: What's the goofiest class name in an MMO?
If a game's gotta have classes, I say they need to sound awesome. I'm bored of Paladins and Assassins and Clerics and Warriors; I want to see Troubadors and Deadeyes and Tempests and Saboteurs and Disco Bandits. Some games, like Wakfu, have made class names into an artform: Foggernaut. Xelor's Sandglass. Sram's Shadow. What I don't get is why a Western game company would go to the trouble of implementing class names that sound like weird translations or just generic words mashed together. I'll forgive Korean devs for the Sheath Knight. I'll forgive sandboxes for mundane Bureaucrats and Beggars. But Neverwinter's Great Weapon Fighter is just screaming for a rewrite. Or at least a hyphen. What about you guys -- what class name would you like to see stricken from the roster of your favorite MMO? And what names stand out as the most badass? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
The Daily Grind: Would you buy a console to play an MMO?
Imagine there's an MMO you really want to play (for some of you, this is going to take a lot of imagination, but pretend, for just this question, that you actually like playing the MMOs you play). Maybe the game is going to connect to an existing MMO in a novel way, or maybe it's that $300,000,000 ultimate sandbox you've been hoping for. This theoretical MMO is just perfect for you, and you need to play it like yesterday. Except that it's coming out on consoles, and only on consoles for the foreseeable future. And it's a console you don't already own. Nooooooooooo! I picked up a PS3 partly for this reason -- to play PS3-exclusive games like Journey. But an MMO? That would take a lot more doing; it'd have to be a truly compelling world that offers something I can't get anywhere else. Whether or not it's your thing, DUST 514 is asking just this question of gamers, but it wasn't the first and it surely won't be the last. So what about you? Would you buy a console just to play an MMO -- if not DUST, then some other game? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
The Daily Grind: What's the absolute worst MMO economy?
I'm known around Massively as a total player economy junkie. Crafting is nice and all, but trading is really what gets me excited. Auction houses, hawking wares in global chat, buying and selling on player vendors -- however it's done in the MMO du jour, that's where I want to be, playing the market and PvPing via brains rather than bloodshed (shed tears are another story). So when an MMO's economy goes belly up, I get annoyed. Really annoyed. Guild Wars 2's economy, for example, is not the shining light of the MMO industry I'd hoped it would be. It might be better than Guild Wars 1's since at least it has player crafting and an auction hall, but the supply and demand balance is an epic trainwreck, one that more resembles the tacked-on economies of games released in 2002, not 2012. I'm not sure it's the worst one ever, but it's certainly on the list. So let's hear some others that deserve to be on the list: What's the absolute worst player-run economy an MMO's ever offered? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
The Daily Grind: What MMO are you embarrassed to admit you play?
One of the silly questions I posed the Massively staff during our end-of-2012 awards was about embarrassing MMOs that we play. But we didn't publish the answers, partly because we couldn't come to any consensus. Glitch took my vote; browser games are still looked down on, no matter how creative they are. Among the other writers, Clone Wars Adventures cropped up, as did RuneScape, Free Realms, Habbo Hotel, and Star Stable. It wasn't just "kids games" making the cut, either. Mike lamented the fact that World of Warcraft is a "punch line" in the community and that "serious" MMO players can't play it. Jef said Lord of the Rings Online makes him want to shower after he logs out, while Patrick argued that Champions Online's apparent lack of developer resources makes for a sad experience. But the other reason we didn't publish our responses was that most of us just aren't deeply embarrassed about playing anything. As Eliot put it, If you're playing an MMO, you have absolutely zero ground to make fun of someone else for playing another MMO. This is something that really gets under my skin, the idea that some games are somehow cooler than others. MMOs are just plain fun, and there's no reason to be embarrassed by anything you like to play. I'm happy when anyone finds a fun game, even if it's a game I'm personally not fond of. Follow your bliss, people, and hold your heads high. So where do you stand? Are you embarrassed to play a certain MMO, and if so, what is it? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
The Daily Grind: What was the MMO screw-up of the year?
I almost miss the carefree days 2011, when the MMO screw-up of the year was such an easy call: the time when a studio deleted an entire MMO from existence by accident and without any backups. Oops! But 2012? 2012 is trickier. I mean, you've got charging for hotbars, $50 hobby-horses, pandas, NCsoft closing a profitable game, the TERA lawsuit, the implosion of 38 Studios, the clownshoes of The War Z, innumerable banning scandals... we have a lot to choose from. So let's get busy choosing. What do you think was the MMO industry screw-up of 2012? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
The Daily Grind: How much game time is just right?
The comments on an article earlier this month made me realize that somewhere between "too casual" and "too hardcore" lies a vast, undefined region of acceptable gaming habits. In that comment thread, one gamer who admitted to playing Lord of the Rings Online for 40 hours a week for three years was picked on for spending as much time playing as you might expect out of a full-time job. In the same thread, several people made reference to "idiot casuals" who are ruining the MMO experience in World of Warcraft, the implication being that casual play alone makes one an idiot. Both of these comments prey on ugly gaming stereotypes: the guy who plays so much that he neglects the rest of his life and the guy who plays so little that he bumbles along incompetently at the expense of skilled players. I might be naive, but I don't think either one of these guys is the norm. I've always assumed that most people out there are playing as hardcore-casuals with reasonable levels of both competence and time invested. What do you think -- how much game time is "just right" to become skilled at MMOs without degenerating into the basement-dwelling-loser archetype? Is "just right" even possible? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
The Daily Grind: When was the last time a character creator didn't tick you off?
For me, it was PlanetSide 2. Admittedly, I usually prefer insanely robust character creation systems; give me five million options or go away, right? And yet even with all the options, those games with the very best character creation systems -- a moment of silence, please, for Star Wars Galaxies and City of Heroes -- were saddled with their own strange quirks, like crazy boob sliders, insufficient tools for making non-European characters, and an obvious disdain for aging or overweight or otherwise socially unacceptable toons. You can have 50 different mohawk styles, but if you want wrinkles, realistic breast physics, or a waist thicker than your wrist, then god help you. By limiting options to four heads per gender (only one apiece European) and by making sure my female character is believably muscled and armored, PlanetSide 2's character creator manages to secure an advantage over more robust systems. By going minimalist and choosing to leave out almost everything instead of only one or two things that make me question the designers' motives, SOE has effectively curtailed complaints. But is that worth it? When was the last time a character creator didn't offend you? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
The Daily Grind: Why so much hate for MMO tourists?
MMO hobos. MMO tourists. MMO locusts. MMO vagabonds. MMO hoppers. MMO jumpers. MMO dabblers. "The MMO Burnout crowd." So many names for people who move from MMO to MMO, and none of them nice! We don't pin these labels on people who sample the best of other forms of entertainment. If you devour a Firefly marathon one night and descend upon The Hobbit the next, we don't call you a cinema locust. If you play soccer today but tennis tomorrow, we don't sneeringly describe you as a sports tourist. If you read T.S. Eliot this week and J.K. Rowling the next, I'm not going to deem you a book hopper and kick you out of the cool kids' book club! Not everyone sees MMOs as worlds that must be lived in for years to be appreciated or enjoyed, and I doubt I'll shock anyone by arguing that many MMOs aren't even designed for long-term consumption; some studios plainly expect us to come and go and return again later as we might return to a beloved old book. I myself prefer a cozy, long-term sandbox home, but I can understand why other people choose to dabble. So why all the hate for the so-called MMO tourists? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
The Daily Grind: What degree best suits an MMO developer?
Until relatively recently, the idea of a degree in game development seemed bizarre. That means that most of today's industry vets didn't start out planning to make games their career. You might expect programming degrees, art degrees, management degrees, creative writing degrees... but you're likely to find stranger degrees by far, marine biology and ancient history among them. That's even true in games journalism. Massively is staffed by pilots, farmers, historians, claims adjusters, clergymen, artists, salesmen, ex-military, radio announcers, teachers, musicians, and yes, even some full-time writers and editors. It's a weird place, and that diversity widens our perspective. Raph Koster of Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies fame recommends that budding game developers acquire a broad education, not necessarily a specialized game design degree. Learn to program, draw, and write, he says, but "don't choose a narrow education. Choose a broad one. History, economics, psychology, art, science. A classic liberal arts education is the best training for a designer." What do you think -- what degree best suits an MMO developer? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
The Daily Grind: Do sunsetted games owe us refunds?
When Tiny Speck announced last week that Glitch would be shutting down come December 9th, the studio simultaneously did something that few closed MMOs do: It offered complete refunds for past subs. Sure, some companies have offered free game time or bonus cash-shop currency for their other games, but that's usually small consolation. NCsoft grudgingly provided refunds for unused timecards and long-term recurring subs when it set City of Heroes' closure date, but virtually no one provides a complete refund of all the subscription money you ever paid for the game. On Black Friday, it seems as if half the world is out shopping, looking for a good deal and with money on the brain, so today's an appropriate day to ask: Do sunsetted games owe us refunds? And if you were offered one, would you take it? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
The Daily Grind: Do MMO crossovers break your immersions?
When I was a kid, I read a post-Vietnam fantasy novel called Doomfarers of Coramonde that should have ruined crossover fiction for me forever. I just couldn't take seriously an Army hero whisked away by magic and plunked into a world of dragons and castles and sorceresses. MMO crossovers can likewise break my immersions. I'm not talking about sequels, and I'm not even talking about the unholy marriage of EVE Online and DUST 514. I'm talking about Funcom putting leet pets from Anarchy Online into The Secret World's cash shop, which is a thing that did in fact happen yesterday. It joins the Ultima Online ankh necklace my character wore in Warhammer Online on the list of bizarre cross-MMO promotions that really don't make a whole lot of sense in-character. Why in the world would my character in TSW have an adorable leet pet from the the planet of Rubi-Ka? What's next -- cupid wings on Ewoks? Oh. Right. So what do you think, morning crew and minipet-hoarders? Does this sort of promotion satisfy some deep craving, or does it just break your immersions? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
