Life is a Mind Bending Puzzle

In part 1 I reflected on how successful free to play is as a business model. In part 2 I looked at a flaw in that business model that could leave it open to competition. Now I want to ask what business model might be better for online games in the long run? The common flaw that I see in both the traditional subscription model and the free to play model is that customers are not paying for the costs they incur. In a subscription game casuals pay too much and committed players pay too little. In a free to play game casuals pay too little and committed players pay too much. To date "lock in" has tended to distort the market and prevent real price competition which would expose this inefficiency but if some smart competitor starts offering "equal status transfers " where you can carry all of  your accumulated standing from one game to a new one then that lock in could quickly become irrelevant. The best protection against this form of competition is to charge custo...

The biggest flaw I can see with current realisations of the free to play model is that a company relies on relatively small set of committed players to generate almost all of their revenue while a much larger number are enjoying some of the benefits of the game while paying little or nothing. Case in point: Tobold, a committed player,  has spent €250 and has enjoyed 2,500 tank battles (if I am reading him correctly). I, a more casual player, have spent €10 and have enjoyed 400 tank battles. Of course direct comparison of tank battles is not the full story and it is entirely possible that Tobold has gotten great enjoyment out of acquiring and using high level tanks while I have wallowed in the low end. Nevertheless I can say I have enjoyed my time and I am certain that Tobold did not get 25 times more entertainment from the game than I did despite having spent 25 times as much. So in a free to play game committed players are subsidising the more casual. Cross sub...

World of Tanks has a very successful business model. They have an entertaining game which has attracted millions of players and a lot of those players are spending significant  amounts of money on the game. A recent post from Tobold suggests that he has already spent €250 on the game and can see himself continuing to spend €100 per month in the future. Perhaps the most significant feature of all this is that those players who have spent money on the game seem very content to have done so. The most common comment is "It was worth it". You cannot argue with success and this is clearly a successful business:  Customers who are willingly spending money and who are happy with what they are getting for it. The success of World of Tanks marks another milestone for so called "free to play" games. Adding this success to previous reports of increased profits from companies who switched their games from subscription only to free to play has left very little room for tho...

Wikipedia defines grind as "the process of engaging in repetitive and/or non-entertaining gameplay in order to gain access to other features within the game" . I don't really do grind. When Painkiller asked me to repeat all of the levels on a harder difficulty setting just to unlock a bonus ending I declined. As far as I am concerned I have finished the game. I don't really do grind. Its not that grinding is always a bad thing. Think of knitting, think of fishing. Many hobbies of older times worked on similar principles. There is something relaxing about doing the same familiar task over and over in the knowledge that the repetition will eventually add up to a longed for reward. Indeed it could that in today's "I want it now" world grinding in games is a welcome return to delayed gratification and may even be good for the soul. Nevertheless I don't fish and I don't knit and in gaming I don't do grind. That puts me at something of a disad...

In my experience one of the most important steps to taking control of your own mmo gaming is to make an informed decision about your  approach to end game content. During the leveling game you can log on and do whatever takes your fancy, comfortable in the knowledge that everything you do helps you level up a little bit. Once you reach end game the paths to progressing your character are likely to require much more focused playing, are likely to involve long repetition  and may even depend heavily on luck. I think that in this environment it is vital to know what you are getting in to. Decide what you want to achieve and most importantly decide what you are prepared to do to get it. I helped out in a radiance dungeon run last night (running one of the starter dungeons which helps people gear up for raiding). It was an enjoyable encounter that was quite tricky in parts although the old timers had ran it so many times they knew all the tricks. When we killed the final boss ...

I have been playing a lot of Lotro recently and I am enjoying it very much despite there being a number of things about the game which could drive me to despair if I let them: the legendary weapon grind, the virtue grind, the radiance / raid progression grind.  The trick, for me, to not getting demoralised by game features I detest is the realisation that my characters don't have to be "the best". All they really need to be is "good enough". This is a very simple and you might think obvious position but it takes a conscious decision to embrace its implications. Game chat, game forums and gaming related blogs bombard us with specifications and stats. It takes a real effort to avoid slipping into a min-max mind set. It is well worth this effort though. It gives you the freedom to ignore those aspects of games that you don't like.  Adopting this position has improved my enjoyment of the game immensely. To borrow a phrase from previous commentators: I have le...

After TF2 last night I logged into Lotro and spotted one of the frequent invites for "Bounty Quests" in kin chat. Bounties are a form of daily quest that give lots of item experience and have become a regular routine for Lotro end gamers. I have been focusing on my low level LM alt so I had never done a bounty quest but I decided to sign up with Throg my level 60 to do them at least once before they get nerfed! Doing the bounties turned out to be a pleasant half hour swift traveling around Middle Earth to dispatch a number of bosses. I began to think that joining the regular bounty runs could be an enjoyable and rewarding daily diversion. The item XP from bounties would be very useful for rapidly skilling up legendary weapons. ... but of course it wouldn't make sense to skill up any old crappy weapon so I should probably start grinding instances or farming gold in order to get my hands on a decent legendary weapon. ... and of course I would need to start farming relics in...

In Dungeons and Dragons terminology I have a "lawful alignment" when it comes to game playing. I generally accept the goals that developers set out for their games and I play the game the way it is intended to be played. In single player games I will make a genuine effort to complete the campaign without cheating and in multiplayer shooters I am the guy making repeated suicide runs at the flag when everyone else is upping their personal kill ratio with spawn camping. This willingness to accept the path the developers set out for me does not suffice when it comes to mmorpgs. In many cases the official goals set out by the developer (perhaps to grind the best suit of armour or to top the pvp charts) are not something I can realistically achieve and in other cases the developer has created a huge list of inconsequential mini goals (such as achievements or titles). In EVE the developer doesn't even set goals which at least is a realistic approach. Given this environment the ...

Looking at my list of likes and dislikes about mmorpgs the most stark conflict is my love for all things group related contrasting with a dislike of schedules, organisation and planning. Group activities require organisation. No organisation, no group. One outcome of this conflict is that it limits my ambition within the game. I fully accept that challenging group content such as instances and raids is the most exciting and engaging part of mmorpgs. I also accept that in order to have a reasonable chance of overcoming these challenges you need planning, you need raid schedules, you need loot rosters. At the moment I don't want to participate in scheduled activities so that precludes me from partaking in these group activities. It's a choice. Luckily I also like pugging. I enjoy the randomness of pickup groups and I am tolerant enough to accept that you don't get efficiency in a pug. I am happy using pugs to get through lower level group content. There is a moral dilemma re...

In the last month I logged 82 hours of Lotro time. It looks like I am officially playing an mmorpg again. In this post I am going to list all the things I like and all the things I don't like about mmorpgs with the aim in subsequent posts, of trying to draw out some conclusions of how to approach mmorpging in a way that gets best personal value out of such a substantial time investment. Things I like about MMOs (in random order) 1. Group content. Any group content. Tackling challenging content with a group of mature, competent players, tackling arbitrary content with a group of mature, agreeable players even tackling arbitrary content with disagreeable players is OK as long as I can have a laugh about it afterward. 2. Soloing to the best of my ability - learning to use new skills, learning how my character works. I particularly enjoy challenging solo content - taking on group content alone, stretching myself to the limit of my abilities. 3. Observing my character grow more powerful...