I’m on this week’s episode of the MMORPG.com podcast, “Game On: Epic Slant Press Edition“, talking about RIFT’s move to free-to-play. Thanks a lot to hosts Adam and Chris for having me on — it was a ton of fun!

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In my post about RIFT last week I mentioned feeling like a bit of an MMO dinosaur. The things I value in my massively multiplayer games — community, group problem solving, rewards for completing difficult or time-consuming tasks — have fallen out of favor recently with both players and developers, and while the market goes where it will I still wanted a game to play.

I moped about it for a day or two, honestly. “I need an MMO that still values old school style”, I thought to myself at some point. “One with an emphasis on teamwork and difficulty and slowly working towards goals an– oh shit. EVE.”

And that is how I came to start my new life in space. My mission: be social, throw myself into group activities, embrace the infamously inconvenient game design, and see just how much of my pining for the old MMO dinosaur ways is nostalgia and how much is truly how I like to play MMORPGs.

Day One

The first thing I did after creating my character and logging into the game was join a Corporation (guild). A discussion site I frequent has a smallish corp that seems full of chill adult nerd types, so that was my first stop. Even here, though, I had to go through a series of tests, sending emails around with secret codes and whatnot to prove my identity and that I was probably not a spy coming to steal space valuables. Truth be told, I enjoyed the extra layer of skullduggery.

Once that was sorted out, it was time to actually learn how to play the game. One of my new corp-mates said that my many years of MMO experience would make the learning process faster, but I’m not sure how true that is. EVE has.. many menus. Many. Maaaany. At one point in the very first tutorial the game reminds you to close UI windows when you no longer need them, because otherwise your entire viewport very quickly becomes stacked up with information grids.

EVE newbie interface. Image from GiantBomb.com. Click for big!

The trend towards streamlining the first few minutes of an MMO and packing them with action doesn’t seem to have made it to CCP’s headquarters in Iceland. For example, shortly after I undocked for the first time I realized that I didn’t properly pick up a quest. I managed to figure out how to turn around and head back to the station, and then I had a very peaceful 10 minutes or so while my pod slowly putt-putted its way back. Was it the most exciting use of my game time? No, but it made me laugh and I certainly learned a lesson about checking I had everything I needed before jetting off into space.

I will have plenty of time to learn these kinds of lessons before I meet up with my corp. Along with the basic introductory tutorial there are 50 advanced tutorial missions that teach you skills in Business, Industry, Military, PVP, and Exploration. These missions are optional, but they give skills, ships, currency, and other bonuses that seem useful for a new player so my plan is to work through them. (I’ve finished the intro tutorial and about half the Military missions so far.)

While I’m doing the tutorials I can start training my skills. Even my casual corp has a list of strongly recommended skills that will take players anywhere from two weeks to a month to learn. That’s right — it could conceivably be a MONTH before my character is properly prepared to jet off and meet up with the rest of the corp. Things do not move quickly in EVE, it seems.

Speaking of proper preparation, I have already managed to earn my first PVP death although it was a little underwhelming. At one point my game crashed while logging off, and I guess my little pod was left drifting through space. When I logged back on I was in a strange location with an automated “Sorry you got blown up” letter in my mailbox. I look forward to being a more active participant in my death in the future.

Tutorials and skill training started, corp joined, and a space death. Day One of EVE: success!

If you look at my Raptr or Steam stats it looks like I haven’t been playing any games recently. In actual fact, I have been playing hours and hours and hours of a game but it just happens to be the untracked browser-based Kingdom of Loathing.

KoL has been around for just over 10 years, and probably most gamer enthusiasts have poked at it at least once by now. But for the uninitiated, KoL is a RPG that is infamous for combining clever, sassy writing and extremely deep gameplay. Each day players get a limited number of turns to play, although that number can be increased through consumables. There are very few graphics in KoL, and those that do exist are all done in a minimal black-on-white style. (That stick figure over to the left is probably one of the more in-depth graphical moments, it being my character Laplume in a goblin costume. Obvs.)

KoL has many of the familiar trappings of RPGs, although mostly with delightfully silly names. There are classes (like Accordion Thief and Seal Clubber), a myriad of main and secondary stats, gear drops, familiars, consumables, and quests. On a micro scale, the goal of KoL is to level up your character from 1 to 13 or so, beat the final big boss (the Naughty Sorceress), and then sacrifice yourself for the good of the world. Yes, that’s right: you die.

Or at least that incarnation does. Unlike most RPGs, character development in KoL mostly comes from repeatedly leveling up (and then dying). The run from level 1 to death is known as an ascension, and as ascensions stack up you will accumulate special skills and gear and familiars and just know-how that will make your character more powerful even at level 1.

An example of my wardrobe

Running the level 1-13 quests over and over again, even if you change your class around, sounds a little dull right? Oh hell no. For each ascension you can pick a number of different variables to shake things up. Try choosing a different difficulty, and pick one of a number of special ascension “paths” like oxycore (no extra turns from food or booze), or Bad Moon (limited familiar options and unlucky adventures), or Zombie (be a zombie with special skills but no access to stores and stuff because, um, you’re a zombie). Currently, new paths are added about every 3 months.

One of the neatest things about KoL is the flexibility in content. You can farm for rare items, you can play the notoriously unstable marketplace, you can work on collections and trophies, you can take on the clan (guild) raid dungeons. If you hate spare time and love numbers, you can focus on speed ascensions and nerd out over math and strategy to come up with the most optimal way to go from start to ascension with your particular set of skills and familiars. Try to hit a new personal best in either days or turns spent!

The strategy rabbit hole goes extremely deep if you like that sort of thing, and boy do I. I started playing KoL in 2009, and I usually can play it for about 3 months before I have to stop because all my friends have forgotten who I am and my dishes have become a sentient life form. (It is entirely possible to play the game without obsessing over turns, but just not something I’m good at.)

Although there aren’t any synchronous multiplayer activities, there are plenty of asynchronous interactions and global chat channels. Clan raids require group participation but are organized by turns (“you open X gate later, then in a few days I’ll go kill Y and send you half the loot”), which is nice for people with limited playtime.

KoL is a game that benefits from research. If you want to play, I advise checking out the wiki. The game is free, and if you play now or in the future say hey to Laplume.

“Keep in mind that there’s a fundamental difference in the way of thinking and the way you need to design games if you do take them free-to-play.

Take a free-to-play game or a social game, where the business is all about – the social games’ word for it is, ‘going whaling’. The idea is you have a paying player subsidising the play of, potentially, dozens or hundreds of other users. And so you have to be willing to create a game that has the ability to make huge sums of money from relatively small numbers of people.

Once you decide that you are going to enter the whaling business, it’s a different mindset and a different set of goals you’re designing for entirely.”

- Scott Hartsman, November 16, 2011

This morning RIFT announced that it’s going free-to-play. Trion, I am disappoint.

I’ve been a RIFT subscriber since the day it launched, back in 2011. I haven’t actually been playing the game that entire time — sometimes I am playing a lot, sometimes I am playing very little — but even when I wasn’t playing I felt comfortable giving Trion and RIFT money for being an awesome game and an awesome company.

Admittedly much of my response is an emotional one. I like games that emphasize virtual worlds and being social, that have group problem-solving, and a healthy amount of content that takes a long time to finish or requires a high degree of concentration. I know this makes me something of a dinosaur amongst players, and today’s announcement feels like another sign that my kind of game is a thing of the past. I don’t like that feeling, obviously.

I have other, more logical reasons to dislike this decision too!

1) As Scott Hartsman says in the above quotation, being free-to-play changes how a game is developed. You no longer have to worry about producing regular content updates, something RIFT was previously famous for, to justify subscriptions. Instead, the monetization goal is to tune your content to encourage cash shop purchases. I find the former to be much more in my favor as a player than the latter.

2) Trion has already said that they will be offering boosts and gear in the cash shop. (On Twitter they even implied that some of the gear will be equivalent to higher tier dungeon and PvP gear.) And herein lies my fundamental dislike of cash shops: they are all about giving people ways to not play the game, rather than making the game good. Buy gear, buy housing, buy XP boosts, buy gold — it’s like you don’t even have to play the game at all! Creating a game that people will spend money to avoid playing seems like crappy game design.

3) F2P encourages transient players. In my opinion, there is a reason why the free-to-play model and the “3 month MMO” problem started trending at the same time.

I accept that what I’m looking for in an MMO is not what most people are looking for in their game. While I’m glad that many folks are loving the current marketplace, I miss feeling like part of that. Such is the price of being old and opinionated and stubborn, I suspect.

Cash shops. Every game’s got one now, particularly MMOs. It doesn’t even matter if the game is free-to-play or subscription — cash shops may have once merely been part of a payment model, but now they’ve broken out into being a feature.

I’ve gone into my dislike of cash shops in general before. I think they can be done well, but rarely actually are. Too often a game is hobbled for non-shop players with extraordinary XP grinds or tiny inventory slots, or relies on some of the more skeevy psychological elements to lead people into buying. (Here is a hint: if we all mocked Zynga for it two years ago, don’t do it now.)

Ellyndrial was ranting in IRC last week about cash shops, as he’s wont to do, and it made me wonder how they ended up being so ubiquitous. Why did everyone suddenly decide that games need cash shops and players will love them? Was there some kind of referendum I missed?

After a little reflection I realized that there was a referendum, and I voted in favor.

This is the sparklepony, known formally as the Celestial Steed. It was released in April, 2010 by Blizzard for World of Warcraft. It was one of the first account-wide mounts in the game (if not the first?). The Steed matched your fastest riding speed, and it sparkled. It was sold for a mere $25 on the Blizzard Store.

The pony made $4 million dollars in the first week. That’s over 140,000 purchases. As I recall at the time, most players mocked themselves for buying it — $25 was more than a month of subscription, after all — but we bought one nonetheless. When I logged on after work the day it was announced, Dalaran was a sea of shiny ponies.

In retrospect, I don’t think I would have bought the Celestial Steed if I had known how much it would galvanize the industry to each create cash shops of their own. We thought we were buying a slightly overpriced horse, but instead we were buying an entirely new payment method.

I don’t much have a point, except it’s funny how little purchasing decisions can become huge industry or genre game-changers.

(Pony image from MMO Champion, natch.)

This week on Cat Context we eat a lot of virtual candy from the Candy Box and get the inside scoop on what it’s like to go from game player to indie game developer.

Recently occasional special guest Mangle from gamer to full-time indie developer, and now people all over the world are playing his first mobile title, Flower Pot. We sit down with him to talk about “life on the other side”. Does making games change how you play them? Is the app store over-saturated with indie titles? Can developers use their powers for good and make money?

Mangle tells it like it is, gives some tips on designing your first game, and makes the rest of us feel just the tiniest bit bad for our “entitled gamer” moments. (Just a bit. Not much.)

Also under discussion this week is viral sensation Candy Box! We try to figure out why it caught on so quickly with many players, and what lessons it might have for MMOs.

As always Liore is joined by the most excellent Arolaide and Ellyndrial.

Send your questions or comments to podcast@lioreblog.com, tweet @Liores, or call our voice mail at (347) 565-4673 and be entered to win a copy of the Humble Bundle – Blendo Games edition on the next podcast! (That includes Atom Zombie Smashers, 30 Flights of Loving, and more!)

It would be downright awesome if you gave us a vote on iTunes. :)

* The website for Flower Pot and the Flower Pot iTunes Store link
* Candy Box, the addictive viral browser game
* Free Music Archive page for our theme, in THE crowd by The Years

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Listeners of the podcast will already know that I tried out Neverwinter in one of the closed betas, and along with Arolaide and Ellyndrial I tore it apart on the show. While the animations were truly terrible at the time, my real problem with the game was it didn’t add anything new to the MMO genre. Why does this game exist? Why would I play it over anything else currently available?

Neverwinter launched last week — okay look they’re calling it an open beta but there’s no character resets and we all know what’s really going on here — and I was surprised to see a very positive response to the game on social media and blogs. (Ardwulf called it a potential surprise MMO hit of 2013, which seems appropriate.)

Perhaps I had been too hasty in my judgement? The client was still on my computer, so I patched it up and gave Neverwinter another shot. After a few hours of playing, I.. remain unconvinced, but I suspect now that the problem is me and not the game.

But let’s start with a disclaimer — I have only put 5 or so hours into this launch version of Neverwinter, which admittedly is not a lot. However, for three days in a row whenever I sat down to play the game the servers were down, including a “scheduled” 4 hour maintenance window during prime time on Saturday night. I mean hey, launches are tough and Cryptic is hardly the only company to see their servers go up in flames during a launch, so while I don’t see this as some permanent black mark on their record it certainly meant I had less exposure to the game before writing this.

I rolled a Devout Cleric because I cannot stop creating healers. The intro experience has been vastly improved from the beta. The interface seems on par with other “action MMOs”, although I don’t think any game yet has figured out a smooth way to toggle from aim mode to UI mode (it’s the ALT key in Neverwinter, which feels awkward to my hands).

Launch changes aside, the game still doesn’t feel fresh to me. I realize that the D&D/Forgotten Realms lore  has been around well before many modern MMOs were just a gleam in a dev’s eye, but nonetheless Neverwinter has been released after them and comparisons are inevitable. In fact, playing the game made me realize that I am so tired of many MMO and Tolkien-esque fantasy tropes. I have come to twitch at the sight of yet another quest giver with punctuation over their head. I am no longer charmed by Dwarves calling out for ale in Scottish accents. I am over transparently grinding boars to gain skill points to kill more boars.

While playing the game I kept thinking that it was essentially Lord of the Rings Online, only with no ring.

As I said before, judging by my peers’ reaction to the game this is more a reflection of me than of it. I think that I’m finally burnt out on standard fantasy MMOs with standard MMO mechanics and standard F2P cash shops.

All that being said, there are a few elements of Neverwinter that deserve special recognition. The first is The Foundry, which lets players create their own dungeons and encounters for others. I’ve heard some complaints that the tools are limited, but at least it’s a new idea and I think people are enjoying it. For me the most unique part of the game is the Neverwinter Gateway, its associated website. From there players can look at their character’s armory, use the auction house, send and recieve mail, even craft. And it’s all available for free! The Gateway is honestly the best set of web tools that I’ve seen with a non-browser MMO, and I’m hoping that other developers steal the idea.

All in all, Neverwinter is a serviceable game that I wish I was enjoying as much as most others seem to be. However, I think at this point in my “MMO career” I need something more than serviceable – I want new ideas, new lands, to be amazed. We’ll see if burnout has caused me to set my expectations too high.

I travel over the Canada-US border a lot — at least once a month — and because of that I’ve developed a healthy fear of border guards. In most cases they’re somber yet polite, but occasionally a guard is cranky and there are few worse feelings than realizing that you just became their unlucky target.

(As as aside, I do have a good border guard story. One time a few years ago the guard asked why I was travelling to Seattle, and I told him I was going to hang out with people I met in World of Warcraft. He jovially responded, “World of Warcraft?! That game is for babies. Real gamers play Everquest II.”)

It was because of all my border experiences that Papers, Please by Lucas Pope caught my eye. Described as a “Dystopian Document Thriller”, the game is still in beta and just yesterday was accepted to Steam through the Greenlight program.

In Papers, Please you play the border guard at a checkpoint in some imaginary Eastern European-esque country. Your job is, quite simply, to not let the wrong people into your country. In practice this is much more difficult than it sounds.

There are a myriad of things to check with each person, including matching up their documented height and weight, work visa details, interviews about the purpose of their visit, and much more. You’re aided by a system to check discrepencies (for example, clicking on the passport photo and then on the person in front of you will confirm or deny that they are the same person) and a resource book that lists things like the various valid passport issuers in this imaginary region.

As if that wasn’t stressful enough, you have 9 in-game hours at your post each day and you’re only paid for how many people you process during that time. The result is a careful balancing act of accuracy and speed. Go too fast and you’ll let in the wrong people and be fined. Go too slow and you can’t pay your heating bill and your family slowly freezes to death. (I’m not even joking — you get family status updates at the end of each day.) Sometimes your office hours will be cut short by a rogue protester rushing the gates, or you lose precious time conducting long strip searches for contraband.

There were moments when I wanted to let someone in I shouldn’t, rules be damned, like when I had to split up a husband and wife. This game isn’t as realistically bleak as something like Cart Life, but it also revels in its stern Cold War atmosphere.

I really enjoy puzzle games, particularly logic and observation puzzles, and this is a fun one. Although the graphics are pretty basic, it has solid atmosphere and gameplay, and yes, actually gave me a little sympathy for my real life border guards. I can’t say that this game would keep me occupied for more than an hour or two in it’s current state, although more content has been promised in the final version, but considering it’s free right now that’s a fine deal.