It's Friday!

Among the many jobs I have worked at, one of them was in a factory. There is an old expression that stuck with me from those days – no matter how tired you are, come quitting time on Friday, everyone has energy.  It’s Friday, welcome to the road to the weekend edition.

The Road to the Stars…

If you haven’t read the running conversation under this week’s “Game You Wish You Could Love” article, it’s all about Eve Online. But there is one game that we here at No Prisoners, No Mercy love even before it hits the shelves: Star Trek Online. Now mind you, these days we take anything that comes out of Eurogamer with about a truckload of salt. They are reporting, however, that Cryptic Studios has announced the official release date for Star Trek Online, which they are saying is February 5, 2010. Now mind you we are well aware that if there is anywhere that Murphy’s Law rears its ugly head it is producing games; and so that date may not be set in stone. However, at the risk of jumping the gun (for even in the world of interviews things change) we have the perfect source to ask…

Mr. Bill Roper who has kindly agreed to an interview about one of our favorite games  – Champions Online. The accompanying article prepared by our own Fran has been completed but we are going to make you wait until the audio portion is recorded.  While Fran and I are busy winging (or in my case teleporting) our way across the skies of Millennium City it occurred to us that while CCP is still talking about “walking in stations” everything we have seen from Star Trek Online so far (and that is only what we read) tells us that players in Star Trek are already footloose and fancy free instead of floating around in a pod full of primordial goo.  We only have one question left…

Who do we have to bribe to get a beta code (we missed out on the lifetime offer for Champions Online)

Dragons Age…

Dragon Age Origins has finally arrived and with it, an article over at arstechnica.com entitled “Dragon Age Launch Fails” (available here). If the article is to be believed, there are problems – here is a quote:

 “The problem? EA and Bioware require you to sign into their own websites, with their own accounts and login information, to allow you to access the bonus content from your purchase. That process, it seems, is broken for many users.” – Ben Kuchera, Arstechnica.com

I am not sure why the good folks at Arstechnica are having problems but no one at the modding group I belong to called “The Engineering Guild” (available here)  seems to be troubled at all. In fact everyone at The Engineering Guild has been planning their mods for Dragon Age Origins since long before the game came out.  And one thing is for sure, no one can say the devs at Bioware are not on the ball where the modding community is concerned – the tool set was released with the game and is available here.

Getting Hammered…

It was not that long ago that my goblin shaman finally retired from Warhammer Online for good…but maybe someone might follow in his place. Why? Here’s why..

Werit had an article this week  (and if you don’t read Werits blog why not? It’s good.) reporting that the new 10 day trial for Warhammer Online has been extended – indefinitely. In other words, while players are still limited to Tier one they can now play longer than 10 days. In fact they can play as long as they want.  Here is the article. Let’s hope that this is not only true, but that those who participate will max out at the top of the Tier One levels. After all, Tier One is where I had the most fun; especially in the Empire RvR lake. Either way, another one of our favorite sites, The Ancient Gaming Noob, has an interesting post this week about the possible consequences of the new trial (available here) entitled “a mass of Tier One Twinks”

Meanwhile back at the (post apocalyptic) corral:

Meanwhile the Wandering Goblin is reporting that Interplay and Bethesda (makers of Fallout 3, one of my favorite stand alone games) are still fighting it out in court for the rights to produce a Fallout MMO (which I read is set to expire this month for Interplay). The article is available here.  So while Interplay and Bethesda have been busy playing dueling lawyers I have been busy in the post apocalyptic world of FALLEN EARTH.  And if you want to know a bit more about how things have been going for the dev team over at Icarus there is nothing like hearing it straight from the “horses mouth” as it were – or in this case the project managers mouth.  Yes, Mr. Colin Dwan, project manager for Fallen Earth was kind enough to share some time with us earlier this week. The interview has been through the editing process and will be the top half of show number 48.

The folks over at Wizard 101 have been asking the No Prisoners No Mercy team to come back and play in their world again. As for me, I will be spending time buzzing through the skies of Millennium City faster than a speeding pullet and learning my way around the post apocalyptic Fallen Earth. However, I will not be playing any more Aion Online. For me I believe it is finally time to hang up my wings. I will be in good company, however as Werit appears to being hanging up a similar pair of wings and talks about it in an article here called Farewell Aion.

The last straw…

Werit’s article touched on a couple of points that, for me, were the last straw. Here are the quotes:

“Abyss.  The Abyss sounded interesting on paper, but in reality it was one big gank fest.  Allowing ranks 25 through 50 to fight in the same space, without a bolster, just was not fun.” – Werit

 ”Leveling.  It’s a long way to the top if you want to PvP.  I am a big fan of PvP leveling and Aion just does support that style of gameplay.” – Werit

“Guild.  There are quite a few CoW’s [presumably his guild] who play Aion and I will miss grouping with them.” – Werit

Pvp is  one place that place that Warhammer did it right and NCSoft  still hasn’t learned. If you are going to make a game where the focus is primarily on pvp make sure you can easily level with pvp. The interesting thing about pvp is that everyone talks about balance but what most people really mean is they want the scales tipped in their favor.  As far as balance is concerned I still like the approach Warhammer took (every class is strong against some and weak against others) as opposed to World of Warcraft’s approach (Micromanage all the classes until you manage to tick off just about everyone but rogues). And while Werit said he will miss some of his guild mates, the best thing about organizations that cross multiple games like The Older Gamers is that you will still see the same people in other games.

Stinking out loud…

There is little doubt that anyone who surfs the waves of the blogsphere has not heard about the ‘Blizzard Cash Shop” by now. Earlier this week Fran wrote about this at the end of her “Homey doesn’t like pugs” article.  John Woods echoes our (that’s the royal we) opinion in his article over at www.mmorpg.com.

“By raising a gigantic stink about this particular move on Blizzard’spart, the only thing that is going to happen is that next time, when a company actually does do something offensive like charge a subscription and offer game-enhancing items within a store, is that no one is going to listen to the horde of people that are crying foul.

By reacting and over-reacting negatively every time even the slightest thing is done that might possibly be controversial, the voices of the fans get easier and easier for game companies to ignore. This, my friends, is not good for our genre and opens the door to truly unscrupulous actions by others.” – John Wood, MMORPG.com ( available here )

Now on to the next section…

The Lore Behind the Game

Lets start with a bit of fiction about Fallen Earth Lore.  Enjoy the story. See you on the other side of Friday.

- The No Prisoners No Mercy team

Most people have memories of their past: playing with childhood friends (or a lack thereof), parents, perhaps a sister or two. People often look back on times spent with families (and not necessarily fondly).  Her memories didn’t extend past the last half hour. In fact the only thing she could remember was her name, and that was only because it was tattooed across her upper left arm, that and a mass of Celtic scroll work. A similar tattoo adorned her right forearm, with two matching tattoos on each of her right and left leg, that went all the way up to her thigh.

Nobody messes with Auntie Maim

At least she assumed they did. She hadn’t stopped to take that good of a look. After all, she had spent the last half hour dodging bullets, running for her life through the hallways of what the voice called “Hoover Dam” (at least she presumed the voice meant “Dam” and not “Damn”) and generally just getting irritated.  What she was most irritated at was a voice over an intercom that had insisted on calling her “clone.”

“Listen clone…”

There was the voice again.

“Auntie…or Maim…you choose” she said.

There was a slight pause, then the overhead speaker crackled in to life once again.

“What?” it said hesitantly.

“Call me Auntie, or Maim, but I am tired of this dehumanizing ‘clone’ crap. Why do you keep calling me ‘clone’? I got a name for you and it isn’t Elaina Winters.”

“Well I…” stammered the voice over the loud speaker.

“Look,” said Auntie sternly, “I may be a ‘clone’ but I’ve got a good memory and it’s not too late for me to come back to that control room of yours and kick your ass around the block a few times. And if I can find this ‘Alec Masters’ and his Lifenet buddies who do the cloning in the first place I am going to kick their collective asses a few times just for good measure.”

“Look you need to trust me…” said the voice that Auntie had come to know by the name ‘Winters’”

“Ya sure – how do I know you didn’t make up this whole ‘Shiva virus caused end of the world’ crap just to get me to help you escape? How do I know you’re not just using me?” said Auntie sneering.

“I’m not just using you, said Winters trying to soothe things over a bit. Didn’t I get you past all the soldiers?”

“Ya – I suppose. Most of ‘em anyway.” said Auntie.

“Have I steered you wrong so far?” said the voice on the intercom.

“Well no…” said Auntie hesitantly. Then she continued, “so what’s next?”

“O.K. now that you’re clear of the soldiers and mutants you’re going to need a way out of the dam. In the next room you will find a small all terrain vehicle. The keys are in it. Take the ramp straight toward the outside as fast as you can.”

Just as the voice told her, there was a small four wheeled vehicle in the next room, and the keys where in it. “How lucky was that?” thought Auntie. She hopped on the ATV and gunned the motor. She twisted the accelerator and tore off down the ramp as fast as she could. Half way down the ramp there were soldiers behind make shift barriers of ruined cars. Auntie dodged the bullets and the barricades and soon found herself at the foot of a steep incline with a drop off at the top. Then she heard the voice again. It came through a speaker set into the ceiling just behind her.

“What are you stopping for?”

 “I don’t know if this little four wheeler can make the jump” said Auntie.

 “You’ve got to hurry.” said Winters.

 “Why?” asked Auntie.

 “Well, there is one thing I failed to mention” said Winters.

 “Which is?”

 There was a slight pause. Then the voice that was Elaina Winters continued.

 “Well…because the ATV isn’t just an ATV?”

 “Why not?” asked Auntie.

 “Because there’s a bomb strapped to it.”

Tourists or searching for something different?

It has been one month since Aion Online has hit the shelves and about the same for Champions Online.   This is right about the time where a gamers mind turns to “virtual tourism”  – the end of the first free month. The following was in the recent release of the “October Community Address” from Aion Community Team:

“You’ve told us that it’s difficult to advance within certain level ranges. To address this issue, we’re planning to raise quest experience, in addition to reevaluating the experience rewards characters gain for individual kills. We understand how frustrating it can be to repetitively kill enemies. Our goal is to limit the need to mindlessly ‘grind.’” – The Aion Community Team (full address is here)

Both gamers and those who make the games expect potential customers to come and take a tour of the new game world. And it is certainly expected that not all those who arrive in that first free month of a games life cycle will make the virtual world one of their new homes.  The question still arises, however, what happens when a game fails to turn a “virtual tourist” into a new “virtual resident”.

This was one of the questions that My Co-host Fran, and I will be discussing with Tipa from West Karana and JMO from MMO Voices on an upcoming No Prisoners, No Mercy (NPNM) show.

When Paul Barnett discussed the matter with us, he likened the process to someone who leaves a girlfriend, hoping to find someone better, but always ends up yearning for the “love of their life” – whatever that first game or mmo happened to be.  There certainly must be something to that; for the “first love” of many players is World of Warcraft (WoW) and that is the game against which all others seem measured. Yet while investors and “triple AAA” developers alike hesitate to do anything other than what is expected, that can be one root causes of virtual  tourism.

What exactly do games “expect”?

Take 1 million gamers and ask them what they are looking for in a game and you are likely to get one million different answers. In the end analysis, no doubt the gamers themselves aren’t sure what they are looking for but will merely know it when they find it.  If the product you create is “approachable” as Scott Hartsman told us on an earlier there will be any one of a number of players who view themselves as the “core” of your customers and say “its too easy” (as happened in WoW after the Northrend expansion).  If it takes too long to level, for whatever reason (see Aion Online comments above) there will be yet another sector of gamers that will react as if you shot their dog. To paraphrase the great U.S. President Lincoln…

You can’t please all of the people some of the time so you had best please a few of the people most of the time.

As you will hear TIPA point out on a future show, many players take a tour of a new game world hoping to find something different and end up finding the same game they just left.  After all, who needs another WoW when you still have the WoW icon on your desktop? Mythic Entertainment started with a tabletop game named Warhammer where a great battle will often find three armies pitted against another, the survor always ready to pounce on the weakened victor. What they gave us (all considerations of art style aside) was  a game with one side pitted against the other…more of the same game mechanics used in just about every game that hits the shelves.

Aion Online, on the other hand, can’t seem to decide what it is. Yes, they have called it a PvPvE game.  An interesting approach but it is still a two sided game because the third side is controlled by the AI (the “E” in PvPvE).  If a gamer, such as myself, joins looking forward to new and innovative pvp I end up dieing on the vine as I try and wade through 25 levels until I get to pvp (Yes, I know about rifts but that isn’t pvp, that’s a slaughter).

This is why I will always applaud the independent game developer who dares to do something different.  There may be those in the gaming community who, in their ignorance, will sneer and call such games  a “niche of a niche”. What such games present to the mmo community are something that is desperately needed – someone who marches to the beat of a different drummer.  When a developer finally breaks out of the mold of game mechanics that are tried and true, we can finally go out looking for something different and find it.

See you online,

Julie Whitefeather*

*Brought to  you from a bed in a convent, somewhere in Illinois.

Because I said so thats why...

Because I said so…

There is no more presumptuous a pundit than a blogger who perceives themselves to be profound. That’s my story and I ‘m sticking to it…

Why?

After a brief trek around the “blogosphere” lately I have been left feeling as if I had a rubdown with coarse grade sandpaper – in other words just irritated beyond words. (well almost beyond words or I wouldn’t be writing this would I?)  Now I appreciate that a blog and even a column is a given person’s opinion. That after all is what, generally speaking, brings you to a web site.   What is not acceptable, in any way, shape or form, is when an individual – and often it is someone with all the perception of a box of hammers – presumes to speak for all gamers.  Just think of it.  World of Warcraft has more subscribers than Switzerland has residents. Farmville, the flash based browser game has five times more than that.

To my knowledge (and I may indeed have it wrong), neither NCSoft, nor Cryptic Studios has announced how many subscribers they currently have for their respective games, Aion Online and Champions Online.  If I were to hazard a guess, it would no doubt be safe to say that neither game has one million subscribers or their marketing departments would be screaming it from the rooftops.  Even when Funcom just shipped  1 million Age of Conan boxes (not sold) they started shouting it. To which my response was, of course, shipped? Shipped where? Down the hall? Across the street? To the other side of town? Still, both games are likely to have at least several hundred thousand subscribers in their first month.

So here we are, a scant few weeks out for both Champions Online and Aion Online, and already we have seen bloggers pronounce edicts directed at both games along the lines of “The Honeymoon is over”. 

Quite frankly I haven’t seen such a load of crap since I was the caretaker for 1,000 rabbits (and that’s A LOT of rabbit crap).

It doesn’t matter if I don’t like a game. In the long run, it doesn’t even matter if columnists for places like PCGamer like a game. No one, no matter who they are, has the ability to speak for everyone. Consider movies such as Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.   Time and again reviewers plagued us all with their considered and self described “expert opinion.”  Yet when first weekend sales were counted up, the educated opinion of those reviewers who hated the movie may as well have been blown out their rectum as set in print. The movie, as well all know, was a financial success.

It's your game after all...

So if you enjoy playing a game, or are considering purchasing the game, don’t put it off just because some nebulous voice cries out in the streets of the global village that is the internet that a game “stinks” or that people no longer enjoy it any more. Or that players are quitting the game.  Tell the reviewer, columnist or blogger to blow it out their posterior and try it out for yourself.

After all, when it comes to the games that you, the reader, play, there is only one opinion that counts…

Yours.

 See you online,

Julie Whitefeather

There is a moment, at the end of the movie Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (the version with Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka) where Willy Wonka turns to Charlie and says, “Do you know what happened to the little boy who suddenly got everything he ever wanted?” In response to Charlie’s quizzical look, the famous chocolate maker replies with a smile and says…

“He lived happily ever after.”

That’s the question we ask ourselves today – would we be happy if we had it all handed to us on a silver platter?  Players across the myriad mmo gaming worlds strive to have the best armor or the fastest spaceship.  But does the attaining of the object of a desire matter more than the struggle to achieve it? Some of the unhappiest people I have known are living in four story mansions and driving BMW’s. 

But what if you could have literally anything in a gaming world you wanted? What would you do? Would it make it you happy?

The easy road or the hard road?

I used to see the player who managed to receive the giant bug mount from the opening of Ahn’Quiraj in World of Warcraft (Wow). It was the only one of its kind on each server. From time to time I would see him just sitting out front of the bank in Ironforge as if to say “I have a giant bug mount and you don’t…hah.” Bank sitting, after all, is a well established pastime in many games.  This can, of course, occur in any one of many given areas where players gather such as auction houses. But you can only gloat so long before you get bored I would think. However, greed is not what this article is about.  What it is about are two games that are very popular at the moment, the games that are the “it” place to be, and the approach they have taken to leveling speed.

Keep in mind, however, as we have discussed before, all of this is tempered by what Paul Barnett called “Perceived leveling speed” when he appeared on the No Prisoners, No Mercy show.  The idea being, that if you are used to lighting fast leveling, even normally paced leveling will seem impossibly slow to you.

The game of the moment, the talk of the town (and the gaming communities across the internet) is, of course, Aion Online.  Increasingly, if you mention those two words, it will be followed closely by a third word (or at least a derivative of one). That oft coined word is “grindy”.  There is many a player who will tell you that trying to level in Aion Online is much akin to attempting to watch the grass grow.  I myself am level 23, and so far have only found levels 15 through 19 to be a bit slow.  Again, this is further tempered by the fact that gamers tend to have more than one definition of “grind” when it comes to leveling.  Some will tell you it only applies to games were you run out of quests and are forced to just go kill monsters to level. Others will tell you that it refers to any game where you level slowly.   However you term it, there is little doubt that in adapting Aion Online for western audiences,  NCSoft has chosen to leave in at least some degree of slower paced leveling. Oddly enough, this is also accompanied by what seems to be a “push” to have players attain higher levels so they can pvp; sort of a “push me – pull you” effect like the famous llama from Dr. Dolittle.

Compare this to what Lead Game Designer for Champions Online, Randy Mosiondz, had to say on the subject recently in a Becket Massive Online Gamer interview:

Becket: The proposed level cap at game launch will be level 40 – I managed to level my first character to 28 in just a few days and imagine I could hit the level cap in about another week or two. Was the decision to make this process so quick a deliberate one?

Randy: Part of it is that we wanted to appeal to casual gamers a bit more. If you look a few years back, in order to reach level cap it took hundreds and hundreds of hours and there were people really getting tired of the grind. As newer gamers come out, they are a little more forgiving to players because there are a lot of casual gamers who want to play the game and see advancement but don’t want to spend 20 to 30 hours just to gain a level.

 Two different games, both vying for a slice of the same gaming market, both with vastly different approaches toward game development – which will be garner long term success? Obviously there is some truth to what Mr. Mosiondz has to say about making games friendlier to the “casual gamer.” After all, it is one of the favorite complaints in World of Warcraft circles – that raiding is too easy now.

Time will, of course, tell which game will grab the greatest piece of the market action. The answer also depends on how one defines “success”. There was a time when John Smedly told us all that if a game paid to keep the servers open that he considered it a success.  However, that doesn’t always seem to be the case these days.  It would be difficult to tell by past track records because those involved with both games have had successes and failures.  One might be tempted to point toward Aion Online’s success in the country where it first came out, but that doesn’t mean it will be successful here.

Of course, nothing says that gamers can’t choose both, and perhaps they will. However I can’t help but think of the war of words that Mythic Entertainment (or whatever they are called these days now that EA has reorganized them) and Activision/Blizzard had when Warhammer Online first came out.  Activison/Blizzard told us all how players often indulged in what we call “virtual tourism” – going out to take a look at a new game, but returning to your regular game.  In the end, it appears that the gaming market may have been “working as expected” – at least as far as the developers and producers of World of Warcraft expected.  So while everyone is deciding whether or not to take the easy road, the hard road, or both roads I will be venturing down both (at least for now).

 See you online,

Julie Whitefeather

I pity the developer...

Polishing the polish by Julie Whitefeather

There was a time when if anyone this side of the Pacific Rim had admitted to playing an “import” game they would have received a quizzical look normally reserved for people who extolled the virtues of Bill Clinton at the Republican National Convention.  Back then, reactions to an enthusiastic support of the Micro-transaction business model would have been garnered right along with the same sort of reactions reserved for people who intended to marry their sister.

Yet what a difference a year or two can make.

Here we are and an import game named “Aion Online” is the talk of the town (and most blogs) and the “it” place to be for many a gamer.  There are a few blogs creeping up here and there, with sometimes proud announcements that they have un-subscribed to Aion Online.  There have even been the occasional well thought and long considered reviews that announced simply “it sucks.”

For all that, however, Aion Online has been out for at least a year in Korea, and to my understanding is quite a success there.  Yet the increasing popularity of import games has created a new phenomenon in gaming hasn’t it?  Aion Online, and other imports as well, may have been out in other countries for quite some time. In fact, the games in question may even be so polished that their glow would provide significant candle power. But just let audiences in the U.S. have access to the game and all bets seem to be off.  The good devs at NCSoft have to start polishing their game all over again.

Pity the poor developer, who works their fingers to tiny little nubs. As the announced release date approaches the developer will expect to spend so much time working on the game that their own families will start to look unfamiliar.   The day of open beta finally arrives, and some blogger, who has spent less time playing the beta than they did on the crapper that same day, promptly announces the game “sucks”. The release date comes and goes and blogs all over the internet begin to announce the short comings of the game, nearly always conflicting, and sometimes within the body of the same article.   Some bloggers decide to enlighten us as to what buying Aion means about us (wow I’m glad that debate is over), while still others try and tell us that Aion Online is nothing more than another version of WoW: two games that are about alike as pigs and eagles (they both have feet and that’s about it).

While gamers debate amongst themselves whether games move too fast, too slow, are too easy, too hard and a myriad of other perceived “problems” it isn’t just the game developers who are listening to and reading the comments across the internet – investors are listening as well.  As we recently discussed with Dr. Richard Bartle on the No Prisoners, No Mercy show, rather than spend so much time complaining about games, we should spend some time praising developers who are willing to try something new, even if we don’t agree with their reason for doing so. When economic times worsen, investors are always far more cautious. Few will be willing to invest in anything that is not already “tried and true” and western gamers by and large are not doing anything to change that.  

In the end, I pity the poor developer who has to spend part of their day trying to beat down the reputation for success attained by companies like Activision/Blizzard and Electronic arts, while they spend the rest of their days trying to please a fickle western gaming audience.  All the while they also have to deal with some imbecile who thinks one game is like another simply because they share some of the same basic game mechanics.  It wouldn’t surprise me one bit if occasionally, just occassionally, some producers of mmos threw up their hands in disgust, flipped U.S. gamers the proverbial “bird” and said go buy a console game and “play with yourself”.

See you online,

Julie Whitefeather

Coming to a game near you!

What do Medieval Europe and Aion Online have in common?

They are both beset by a plague spread by rats – only in the case of Aion Online the rats are called Gold Sellers. As we discussed earlier in our virtual pub (“Methinks thou dost protest too much”)  gaming forums are full to the brim with players complaining about gold sellers. Bring up the subject at any gathering of gamers and you will soon have a room full of gamers screaming about the evils of RMT (Real Money Trading).  And as we all know they wouldn’t exist if no one ever used their services.

You can't keep a gold seller down.

I started the article by comparing gold sellers to plague rats. Perhaps they might be more appropriately compared to zombies. After all, they are just as hard to kill.  Like water seeking its own level, gold sellers try and find every possible path to players.  NCSoft has tried denying players the ability to use general chat before level 5; and now they have extended that denial to whispers. All that happened was that gold sellers are forced to level up a bit before they hawk their wares. Fortunately there is a setting in Aion to take yourself off the listing of players in any given area (just type “/anon”), but that only cuts down on the offers to sell gold.  Try to hide from the gold sellers by setting your status to “anonymous” and the gold sellers use the trade channel to sell gold.

None of this is new territory of course.  Even the 800 pound Activision/Blizzard Gorilla hasn’t been able to stop gold selling.  Activision/Blizzard regularly bans more accounts for buying and selling gold than some games have subscribers, yet still they come back …undead…unstoppable…and unbelievably persistent.  Even when the creators of World of Warcraft (WoW) stop all other avenues of access the gold sellers resort to spelling out the name of their website using dead player corpses in the middle of WoW’s virtual cities.

No matter how big of a shotgun NCSoft uses, there is little doubt that they will ever be able to kill the gold selling zombies.  Activision/Blizzard has been trying for years and all they have managed to do is decrease the level (and believe me even that is greatly appreciated).  Sony Online Entertainment  (at least in some cases) seems to be taking more of a “if you can’t beat them,  join them – then dominate the market” approach.

As any good Doctor knows, it is far better to treat the cause, rather than the symptoms. 

At face value, the cause of RMT might seem to be the people selling the gold in the first place. The true cause however is the reason the gold sellers exist at all.  That reason, of course, is the very structure of the games we play (and here I differentiate between a game world and a virtual environment like second life).  What might seem to be the place to begin the virtual surgery, to cut out the cause of gold selling,would be the reason for the need.

Right?

Players in Aion Online, for example, will find that one of the many money sinks is the hideously expensive cost of crafting.  You can’t simply mine iron and turn it into steel…instead there is a character selling the required “extra ingredient” – someone who is more loan shark than NPC.  Every game has money sinks. If it isn’t crafting it will be the hideously expensive mounts that are sought after in WoW.  What needs to be called in to question, however, is what keeps players coming back for more in the first place.  Why as gamers to we continue to pay a subscription to play a game?  Why is it that developers feel the need to appeal to greed to string players along and keep that income stream coming?  Is it impossible for gamers to play a game simply to enjoy playing?

We should, of course, look to what is traditionally called the “end game”.  Unless you have some massive budget you can’t keep tacking on more levels or more content (the latter being Turbine’s once promised solution in the case of Lord of the Rings Online). No matter how fast you produce content, players will always outstrip your ability to produce it. You can try having a player vs. Player centered end game, and set artificial goals for players to accomplish to keep them interested. A recent effort along those lines, Warhammer Online, is no longer the “fair haired child” they once were. You can make quests repeatable, but even that gets old (Witness the case of the many “dailies” in WoW).

In the end, however a developer tries to stop gold selling (or beat them to the punch in some cases) I think one of the most likely outcomes is expressed by Dr. Richard Bartle in a comment to his recent article over at Terra Nova. The article is called “Taking a Gamble” and is available here:

“There will always be players who consider RMT a bad thing, and who will seek to find virtual worlds where it is proscribed. For these players, a subscription-based MMO has a competitive advantage. In the great scheme of these, these people will be outnumbered by the majority, who don’t actually want to play games (or aren’t able to) the whole time. In absolute terms, though, it will still involve a substantial number of people.” – Richard Bartle, in a comment to “Taking a Gamble”

See you online,

Julie Whitefeather

Ass Hat

Not long ago I listened to an interview with Dr. Richard Bartle as the guest. He spoke of when he and Roy Trubshaw created MUD, the multiuser text based game that was to serve as one of the bases of all that would come later in the world of MMOs.  Dr. Bartle spoke of how he “saw the power” in what they had created. What stood out to me the most where the following words:

 “We had a way to make places where people could go and become themselves. For me it was always a thing about freedom. I always wanted people to be able to be free to be themselves.” – Dr.Richard Bartle on the creation of MUD

The monkey wrench that we have all, as gamers, thrown into this particular utopia is a little thing called a global village.  It is a concept engendered by author Marshal McLuhan describing how the world has become small village, brought about by electronic media, facilitated by the instantaneous movement of  information about the globe. Now consider that he made the concept popular back in 1962, long before the internet, and you have a man who was a bit of a prophet.  Yet, as with any case where you bring people in to close proximity to one another for any length of time, even if it is virtually, you will end up with a classic case of “familiarity breeds contempt.”  Add in the perceived anonymity of the internet (and here I say perceived because much of our lives is on the internet) and you have a situation where that contempt will come much sooner than it normally would have. We have stepped out of the mud and simply “stepped in it”.

Enter the “asshats.”

If Diogenes’ “Hermit” was looking for an American retailer that enforced the ESRB rating instead of an honest man, he would still be looking. In an era when the internet has replaced the television as an “electronic babysitter” the age restriction of who should be allowed to play a game has little to do with reality.

Unfortunately the ESRB rating for Aion Online is only “teen” – barely a week into the game and I would pay real money for NCSoft to have thrown enough violence into the game to have it merit a higher rating. The unfortunate side effect of the aging of generation that was around at the birth of the mmo (mine) is that a younger generation has moved in behind us. Now I am not saying that it is unfortunate in all cases; far from it in fact.  But put together enough virtual citizens of enough virtual countries and you will have a great big barrel that will hold more than just a few bad apples. 

I may be free to be myself – free of judgments based on race (other than ones in game faction of course), nationality, religion and what have you.  However, at the same time, others are free to be themselves. This means they are free to have guilds named “We crap on children” and fulfill juvenile fantasies by naming their characters “yourwhore” and “Grabmyrod” (all too common during these, Aion Online’s opening weeks). It’s a bit hard to enjoy a game developer’s well crafted lore, when someone’s 14 year old is crafting names for their character that belong on the stall of a men’s room and not flashed across my computer screen.

Still, any utopian society, virtual or no, is likely to have its problems.  As much as I enjoy Aion Online (especially the visceral, as NCSoft describes it, combat animations) I can only hope the second month of the game holds true to the course of that of most other mmos.  Once the first free month is up my great hope is that the virtual tourists will have moved on to whatever the next “it” game out there will be.  And that, my friends, really will be freedom. 

See you online,

Julie Whitefeather

How much for the women?

Goldseller X: “Your women. I want to buy your women. How much for the women? Sell them to me. How much for just the daughter?”

Julie: “What?!”

Goldseller X: “The little girl. How much for just the little girl…”

Julie: “What are you…”

Goldseller X: “Sorry. Force of habit. Buy my gold – cheap. 24 hour service.”

Julie: “Leave me alone.”

Goldseller X: “How about power leveling? Don’t you want to ascend?”

Julie: “I’ll ascend you into low geosynchronous orbit if you don’t leave me alone.”

Goldseller X:”Powerleveling – just 3 days to get to level 30″

Julie: “What’s the sense in that?”

Goldseller X: “What?”

Julie: “What’s the sense in that? Why buy the game if I am going to let you play it? Where’s the sense in that?”

Goldseller X: “Well so you can…”

Julie: “Never mind. It was a rhetorical question.”

Goldseller X:  “A what?”

Julie: “A rhetorical question, not meant to be answered. You know…like yours. Now go away.”

(short pause)

Goldseller X: “Do you want to buy gold? Cheap. 24 hour service.”

Julie: “You just asked me that. I said no.”

Goldseller X: “I thought you might have changed your mind in the last five minutes.”

Julie: “So what’s your half life?”

Goldseller X: “My what?”

Julie: “You’re half life. You know – like radioactive waste.  You guys operate on the same principle don’t you? Once you exist you are nearly impossible to get rid of.”

Goldseller X: “I never thought of it that way.”

Julie: “I read an article once that said cockroaches would be the last thing existing on earth after everyone and everything else dies.

Goldseller X: “I think I know where this is going…”

Julie: “If the cockroaches inherit the earth I think you guys will inherit the earth from the cockroaches.”

Goldseller X: “Look. We supply a service. I wouldn’t exist if no one ever used the services.”

Julie: “Contract killers provide a service too, that doesn’t mean I want one in my bedroom.”

Goldseller X: “I’m not in your bedroom.”

Julie:”Yes you are. I’m on a computer terminal in my bedroom.”

Goldseller X: “That doesn’t mean I’m there.”

Julie:”You’ve got a point. Come to think of it, it’s worse than that. You’re in my mind. It’s like a voice I can’t get rid of. It’s like I’m hearing voices. It’s like…like…”

Goldseller X: “Like a bad disease for which there is no cure.”

Julie: “That’s right.”

Goldseller X: “So?”

Julie: “So what? What do you mean so?”

Goldseller X: “Do you want to buy my gold?”

Julie: “I thought we already established this. The answer is no.  Don’t you guys have something you can make a living at that is less annoying?”

Goldseller X: “Like what?”

Julie: “I don’t know…like a slaver, a contract killer, a drug pusher. Just about anything else, just so long as it isn’t here. Just let me play Aion in peace.”

(another pause)

Goldseller X: “NOW would you like to buy my…”

Julie: “So you insist that you are just providing a service right?”

Goldseller X: “And…”

Julie: “How about I pay you to go away for just the next hour that I am here?”

Goldseller X:”To leave all the men and women here alone for just an hour?’

Julie: “Yes. That’s it exactly. How much?”

Goldseller X: “You couldn’t afford it.”

Julie: “How much?”

Goldseller X: “Really. You couldn’t afford to have me leave all the men and women here alone for an hour.”

Julie: “O.K. Then how much for the women?”

Patience my...

Me thinks thou doest protest too much...

When Scott Hartsman was on the No Prisoners, No Mercy (NPNM) show (and shame on you if you have to Google the name to find out who he is) one of the aspects of gaming that we discussed was gold selling.  Having experienced the opening day jitters of Aion Online all I can say is this: I’m glad China outlawed gold selling – it has had such a tremendous effect on gaming.

I am sure there are myriad reasons the Government of China had for banning the sale of virtual goods for real money, but it is a law that will be incredibly difficult to enforce in the first place.  And to throw yet another wrench into the works, China is far from being the only country that has gold sellers.

Now I am sure those who where there on opening day, right along with me, will point to the long ques to get on to the popular servers.  In fact, at one point I heard a voice from the other side of the room cry “TWO THOUSAND ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHTY!”

But it is not the ques that filled me with angst. Oh no. As we have spoken about before, my friends, any time a company releases a new game, the number of servers available at start is just a crap shoot. Add to that the number of people who purchase the game just for the thirty free days that is pro-forma in the industry and you have one perplexing problem.

But it is not the number of servers that has me perplexed.

Nope.

As Mr. Hartsman pointed out to us on the NPNM show, time and again his forums were filled with players who were not just aggravated with gold sellers, but despised them.   Yet for all that, gold selling continued to be a problem in Everquest.  Such is the way it is with all games.  As gamers we  have all come to expect that. Still, it must certainly be a case of one hand not knowing what the other is doing – for while one hand is typing out a message of protest on a video-game forum the other is reaching for a credit card to buy gold.

While some players have been busy complaining about waiting ques (and long ques are not always a bad thing as we discussed earlier) others where finding that there accounts have already been banned…or so it seems.   Over at a game site I happened upon this morning called Gamer Limit there is an interesting article by one Colin Robinson, entitled “joking about selling gold earns a ban“.  Here is an excerpt from the article by a perplexed player who emailed Gamer Limit after finding himself banned “allegedly” (as they say in legal circles) for “joking about selling gold”:

“I managed to log on one of the low population servers as soon as they brought it online, played for about 45 minutes, then when I hit level 5 (the level you need to use the regional chat), I joined in a conversation about the future of the game. I made a somewhat antagonizing remark to someone who said they would be buying kinah as soon as it became available, as if I was a gold farmer. I typed “YOU WANT BUY MIRRION GOLD? 1 MIRRION GOLD FIVE US DORRA” or something stupid along those lines, and got some ‘lols’ from people who clearly knew I was kidding. We talked about how full the chinese servers were of bots, and how chat was flooded 24/7 by gold sellers on asian servers. I said it would probably be a day or two before they started spamming chat and botting in US release, and then two minutes later I was booted from the game, and greeted by that message when I tried to join again. ” – “Redmoons” quoted on Gamer Limit

While the author of the article feels that this means NCSoft is getting off to a “questionable start” it appears that it hadn’t occured to either the author or player in question that the ban just might be for being a cross burning racist. 

 It seems, however, that all the gold sellers and leveling services pre-ordered the game and jumped right on to the early start. I hadn’t been online more than a minute than I was barraged with whispers from players with names like “fgytxz” offering their services – the most perplexing of all where the leveling services…

“Let me understand this,” I thought to myself, “I just paid Fifty plus dollars to purchase a game so I can relax and enjoy myself, and this person is offering to power level my character to the level cap in three days?” 

Sure, and while I am at it I can just give the anonymous player with a name that looks like a really difficult jumble (an all too common sight) a call once a month to let me know how my character is progressing. In fact, why even play the game at all?  Of course there is the slight chance that availing myself of said anonymous player’s services would soon result in my social security number and bank account number being plastered all over the Internet.

I have never seen the sense of it. 

Yet, as all things in an open market, there wouldn’t be a supply if there was no demand.  So while some players will be busy complaining about long waiting lines, and others about being banned for “joking about gold selling.” I for one would like to take a moment and applaud NCSoft – no, to cheer them from the rooftops for being tough on gold sellers and buyers.  It is a valiant fight and always a difficult one.  After all, when considered as a whole,  as gamers we rarely seem to have the phrase “live and learn” as part of our vocabularies.

So as I busy myself about the business of cheering NCSoft for their business acumen let me paraphrase yet another line from the immortal bard which began this article.

I come to bury gold sellers, not to praise them.

See you online,

Julie Whitefeather