“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.

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.

EA resolution update: Still holding firm! On the one hand I am really not sorry I missed the Sim City debacle, but on the other I am sad to be missing out on the new Mass Effect 3 DLC, which has been getting rave reviews from ME fans. NO EA in 2013!

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Last week TERA managed to separate me from some of my hard-earned cash. It’s not the first cash shop to lure me in — I, too, know the shame of owning WoW’s sparklepony — but it’s certainly the first time I’ve ever spent money in a free-to-play multiplayer game. I swore this day would never come, so what happened?

Don’t Nag Me!

You can ask my Mom or any employer I’ve ever had — I do not like being nagged and micromanaged. I was playing LotRO when they switched to the free-to-play model and even with a subscription I never could get past the coin symbols all over the interface. It was immersion-breaking for sure (and that’s coming from someone who usually doesn’t notice that kind of thing) and just felt like nagging. Did you know you could pay real money to take this horse now? Or try this quest? Or visit this zone? Or… GOD STOP TELLING ME WHAT TO DO, GAME.

Tera, on the other hand, puts its cash shop behind an icon in the main menu and otherwise never mentions it. Heck, the shop wasn’t even in the game for the first week of f2p. I appreciate that relaxed attitude. In fact, the closest TERA gets to nagging is reminding players how long they’ve played every hour, which is a holdover from its South Korean design roots.

Don’t Limit Me!

The most popular free-to-play payment model for online multiplayer seems to require limiting gameplay to prompt people to buy things. SWTOR has limits on how many dungeons you can run as a free player, EQII limits the quality of equipment that free players can wear, and Age of Conan requires people to subscribe to access last year’s expansion. It’s difficult to play many of these games for free without being made to feel like you’re a second class citizen. (“Please sir, can I have some more hotbars?”)

TERA, on the other hand, has a model closer to buy-to-play* titles like Guild Wars 2 and The Secret World, although you no longer purchase anything up front. The entire game, from 1-60, is available to free players. There are no limits on content, all races and classes are available, all dungeons, and so on. The result is that I’ve been able to get a thorough look a the game over the last month.

Instead of limiting free players, TERA and other positive F2P models add value for paid/subscribing players. Don’t remove access to content if I’m playing for free — give me bonuses. Elite (subscriber) level in TERA gives things like broker house posts with no fees, instant teleports, and a fancy pony, all of which are totally sweet, but my actual core gameplay changes very little.

Take My Money!

So the game doesn’t nag me and I can access all the content without spending a penny. Why did I spend money?

Convenience, certainly. Once it became clear to me that TERA is my new “dabblin’” MMO, I went for the time-saving measures of the Elite subscription. (Seriously, unlimited instant teleports to major cities makes my game-life a lot more awesome.)

Cosmetics are also a big draw, although I know that not everyone likes playing dress-up. I haven’t yet bought any costume gear, but I have my eye on a pair of black hipster glasses for my elf the next time I get the urge to spend money. Buying a month of Elite also gave me a shiny pony and a flaming halo that is totally useless for anything except looking awesome, and I am certainly not immune to looking awesome in games.

The final motivator, though, was just really liking their F2P model. I don’t want games to nag me. I don’t want them to create content gateways for freeloaders. I voted with my dollars, and me and my fancy halo regret nothing.

* “Buy-to-play”, or as we used to call it, “buying a game”. *roll eyes*

In a post from last Friday Mr. ThatAngryDwarf wrote about a conversation he had with myself and Arolaide on the Zombie Invasion in World of Warcraft. In his post he good-naturedly called me an MMO Anarchist, and after some consideration I think he’s right. In fact while reading his post I was somewhat struck by how my very strong “small-p-political” beliefs in social democracy and the common good often go right out the window as an MMO player. So what’s the deal, me?

One of the reasons I have gravitated to the MMO genre is because I find people to be fascinating. I’m endlessly interested in how social structures are formed in new games, or even just how two players will react to the same situation in totally different ways. Game mechanics are important, and certainly I’d be hard-pressed to keep playing a game with miserable mechanics, but it’s people interacting with each other that creates the real long term content.

This probably isn’t a very contentious line of thought until one starts to consider trolls and griefers. If MMOs ideally let people interact with each other freely, won’t some players be caught in the crossfire? Lowbies will be corpse camped to frustration, questers will be deterred from completing tasks by zombified players, someone will zip in and nab the resource node that you quite obviously wanted. These unpleasant events are not something I enjoy being a victim of and certainly not something I try to do myself, so surely I must be in favor of removing them through moderation or a change in mechanics? My answer is: no way, man!

Giving people the freedom to be kind or mean or greedy or charitable is how, in my opinion, great content is made. People, in all their chaotic glory, are the best content of all.

Don’t believe me? Look at some of the more memorable stories to come out of multiplayer games! There was the guy whose character was “kidnapped” in DayZ by a gang of armed bandits. I still remember the name of Biny, the gnome who infamously blew up a packed auction house in Ironforge with raid boss Baron Geddon’s Living Bomb debuff. There’s Fansy the Famous Bard who brought the fight to the “evil” guys on Everquest’s Sullon Zek server, or the guy who killed Lord British in Ultima Online, or pretty much every great story you’ve ever heard about EvE Online.

Every last one of these events is technically griefing. The culprits all interrupted people’s gameplay without their permission. Events like these are also part of the reason I started playing MMOs in the first place. Bollocks to a world and its players that always follows the rules — chaos can make things pretty exciting.

(I should mention that my appreciation of chaos goes exactly as far as the borders of a game. The minute the real world gets involved, whether it’s using slurs or divulging someone’s personal information or threatening to confront a player in person or whatever crazy thing, I’m back to being a fan of the hard line.)

MMOs are too static as it is, with worlds that remain basically the same for years between expansions. Giving players the freedom to be honest and terrible and surprising and delightful … that’s the real dynamic content of a virtual world.

Wildstar has gotten a lot of press lately, and while I’m keeping an eye on the game there’s a lot that puts me off it too. One of the biggest concerns I have is about the character models we’ve seen so far. They’re just.. not.. interesting. Take a look:

Humans
Pretty standard. Chick, broad-chested dude. I never play humans in MMOs.. they just seem too mundane given the option of creatures and elves and things.

Granok
Eh, the stone lady is okay. Also, another broad-chested dude.

Aurin
Ah ha haha. Playboy Bunny. Broad-chested rabbit dude. This is the class your little brother will play.

Cassian
Look, I will give Wildstar credit where it’s due — this woman looks like she’s ready to kick some ass. Also, older broad-chested dude with an enormous glass of wine!

Drakin
Oh THERE’S the bikini plate. The demon guy is clearly Wildstar’s answer to WoW’s trolls. $10 says he talks with a weird accent.

Mechari
So to be fair it’s from pre-game art but seriously. For what possible reason does this robot have giant metal robot boobs? I just.. I don’t.. I don’t understand. Anyway, last but not least we have a broad-chested robot.

There are two races yet to be announced, so this is all still up in the air, but at this point I’m not really interested in what I see. All the models have really similar silhouettes, and at least in these examples virtually all of the organic characters are white. Otherwise, there are only minor differences: It’s humans, but with bunny ears! No, humans as robots! No, humans as.. evil humans!

I wanna get excited about Wildstar because I like being part of a good old fashioned groundswell, but so far the character models just aren’t helping.

(Thanks to Teerack of the Something Awful forum for putting these images together.)

So why have I been playing TERA lately? It’s free, and kinda weird, and my elf is pretty. I guess I’m fairly easy to please, at least for a little while. As the latest AAA title to go free-to-play, TERA has seen a resurgence in the past couple of weeks. Want to check it out yourself? The following tips might help.

TERA’s payment model is surprisingly playable. All content is free without restrictions, and the game never nags you about buying things. The new cash shop has the usual features for sale like extra bag slots and appearance changes, along with fancy costumes and weapon skins. “Founders”, or folks who paid money for the game previously, get to queue skip on busy servers.

Lost and confused? The quest log holds many answers. If you’re looking for a certain mob for a quest or an NPC, open your quest log (“L”) and click on any of the blue links in the description. You should see symbols pop up on your map telling you where to go.

You can also check the log to see where you are in a quest chain: future quests will be marked with “Not Yet Unlocked”, and clicking on them will show their pre-requisite quest.

TERA Quest Log

Turn off Area chat. (Global chat is generally more reasonable.) Man, okay, so I know you have seen some version of this tip for just about every multiplayer online game ever, but I have never quite so sincerely meant it. If you want to know what you’d be missing, I have a summary below.

lOrd.420: I’m 14 and I learned how to swear damn hell shit bollocks
Juicer: I WILL FIGHT YOU IRL BRO DO YOU EVEN LIFT?
NiceGuy: um, it’s ephebophile, please

I am not even kidding. Save yourself, leave area chat. This brings us to…

Problematic shit! TERA’s got it. To be fair as Talarian pointed out in comments here the other day there are also hyper-sexualized male characters who are not traditional power fantasies.. although they have those, too. Basically while there is a wardrobe system that allows you to eventually attain some degree of pants, if you play TERA you have to be prepared for all the ladies to fight in heels and ride side-saddle. If that’s not your bag, I certainly understand.

creepy mobs!

Level 11 is a good level. At level 11 you can take a pegasus to the first major city. If you follow the breadcrumb quests from Newbie Island you’ll then get a free fast horse mount, and you can start learning professions from trainers. (Although you can begin harvesting almost immediately at level 1, and you get XP for it too.)

The mailbox is a dude. For some reason both sending and receiving mail is done through Banker characters, who have a little key symbol on your map. Talk to him and select the “Parcel Post” option.