MMOs and the PC vs Console debate

MMORPG.com recently carried this article addressing the future of MMO gaming, specifically the possibility of a platform shift from PC to console. After reading the article and a few pages of the reader comments related to it, I’m left with mixed feelings on the whole subject, especially after the Champions Online dual-platform release announcement.

Yes I am exclusively a PC gamer, though I do once in a while enjoy getting together with friends to play some silly console game for a lark. I am unrepentedly pro-PC and firmly believe in it’s superiority as a gaming platform, yadda, yadda, yadda…

That being said, some of the points brought up by the pro-Console crowd did strike a chord with me. A few noted that playing an MMO on a big screen HDTV would be quite an experience. Others brought up the fact that grinding while lying on your living-room couch would be the ultimate in comfort and luxury. These characteristics of console gaming do indeed look appealing to me and would, I think,  represent a refreshing change of pace from what PC based MMO gaming entails.

From this I find that my mind has been ( slightly ) opened to the whole idea of console based MMO gaming, although there’s still a long way to go before making me a believer. Will be interesting to see where this all leads to two or three years down the road.

Champions Online, meh!

So I just finished reading the IGN preview article on what to expect from the upcoming Champions  Online. Being a huge superhero fan ( although not a comic collector ) and  a long time City of Heroes / Villains player, the news of an another super-powered MMO in production definitely caught my attention.

Before reading the preview I was already familiar with the Champions tabletop RPG, although I never played it myself ( I was a Villains and Vigilantes player ) and the idea of an MMO based on that rule-set did indeed look to me like a promising venture.

What dampened my enthusiasm somewhat was reading that it was going to be a dual platform release, PC and XBOX, which inevitably entailed that it’s combat system was going to be more action-oriented than the traditional button-mashing, and slightly more strategy oriented, MMO combat systems. This concession to the twitch-freak console market saddens me because I am not at all into that kind of game. I have somewhat gotten used to this trend of injecting action elements in computer RPG games to try and broaden their appeal but I find that inevitably, a lot is lost game-experiencewise when manual dexterity becomes the prime factor in advancing the storyline. When I think of Champions Online I immediately have visions of the disappointment that was for me Marvel Ultimate Alliance.

Yes I am one of those turn-based combat fans, a true dinosaur in today’s gaming environment. I long for the days where you had to think your way through a fight instead of simply reacting quickly and hitting the right combos. That being said, I have been able to adapt to the growing twitch based gaming culture, an example being my playing and enjoyment of DDO’s action-oriented combat system.

It’s still a bit early for me to write Champions Online off and I know I will not be able to resist trying it. Maybe if I find that I can get into Age of Conan’s action combat system then I just may find that I am also able to stomach Champions Online’s  twitch combat too. Here’s hoping…

Lotro in for the long haul

I just saw here on Massively that Turbine, makers of Lotro, and Tolkien Enterprises, have agreed to extend the game maker’s license at least till 2014, with an option to extend it further till 2017. So Lotro is definitely going to be a long-term player in the whole MMO market.

This news isn’t such a surprise since at the moment only a small portion of Middle-Earth, Eriador, can be explored by players, leaving a rather vast number of development possibilities for the rest of the world.

This is great news as far as I am concerned. Although I was initially a bit disappointed by the game, I have gradually warmed to it and would now enjoy playing it on and off over a long period. What gets me really excited though are the possibilities concerning the further development of Monsterplay. I’m hoping that over the long-term, Turbine will re-examine this part of the whole game experience and grow it to it’s full potential i.e. a proper PvP component of Lotro rather than just a sideshow.

The thought of new PvP zones gets me drooling and I am keeping my fingers crossed that with this renewed licensing deal, in the near future big things will come for Lotro Monsterplay. 

The Witcher Enhanced Edition and the Wait and See syndrome.

While Multiplayer RPGs are by far my biggest time-sink, I have not forgotten my single- player RPG roots and still do indulge these types of games from time to time. Hence this post about the recently announced Witcher Enhanced edition, that you can read about here.

This new version, coming out in May, promises to add about 5 more hours of gameplay and also furnish much needed performance improvements, particularly on some of the insane load times.

Now as an relatively savvy MMOer I, like many others, know that immediately jumping into a newly released title is often asking for trouble since by doing so one often ends up beta testing the game. I also follow the “wait six months before trying it” axiom oft-mentioned by many gamers. A little patience allows me to play a better polished and balanced product as well as have access to all of it’s features ( that rarely make into initial release ).

From this Witcher Enhanced edition announcement I gather that I will also have to adopt the MMO Wait and See methodology with single player RPG titles because frankly, although I do enjoy the game, I will not replay to see the extra features that will be added to it in May, although I am really bummed out about missing out on them. This trend of re-releasing games in a better / improved format is nothing new I know, but it seems I never really had been consciously aware of it till now.

I guess I will be playing the PC release of Mass Effect in somewhere in 2010 then.

Where to set camp next month?

In two weeks my current subscription to Lotro expires and I am beginning to think about which game to revisit. DDO, Vanguard, CoH/CoV and SWG have all had recent updates that pique my interest. Then again I just joined a kinship in Lotro so there is some incentive for me to ( gasp!) renew my sub for another month.

Decisions decision…

Lotro Monsterplay Rant

In Lotro Monsterplay, you get to play the “bad guys”, either an orc, a warg,  or an Uruk, colloquially known as a “creep”, in a non-ending fight against members of the Free Peoples, otherwise known as “Freeps”. This takes place in a self-contained PvP zone called the Ettenmoors, which freeps can enter from PvE. Creeps , on the other hand, are confined to this zone and can never leave.

About three months ago, when I felt Lotro PvE was getting stale, I decided to give Monsterplay a try and rolled up an Uruk Blackarrow ( basically an archer, like Lurz ). Some years ago I had sworn off any kind of PvP after playing Starfleet Command fairly competitively for 3 years and basically burning myself out on the constant pressure to win and the urge to maintain a “top jock” rep. But after mellowing out a bit with time I realised that I was ready to re-enter the jungle that is PvP gaming.

I was pleasantly surprised by the experience, the rush of fighting for my life against a sentient and devious opponent injected new life into the game for me. I got really immersed in the whole task of taking and defending keeps and fighting for the glory of Angmar. But three months later, the initial thrill and magic has faded and I am in fact starting to feel mounting hostility and contempt towards my freep opponents. It all stems from what is addressed in this post on the Lotro forums, which basically says that the game creators, Turbine, never intended for people to get so involved in Monsterplay and actually become dedicated creep players, situation which has led to some pretty serious imbalances in gameplay.

 ( Biased opinion warning now in effect )

You see, Lotro Monsterplay is very much tilted toward giving freep players a good time, very much at the expense of fools like me who actually take this part of the game seriously. Their toons on the whole vastly overpower their creep opponents, this is supposedly to reflect Lord of the Rings lore, and to some extent the movies,  where the main protagonists seem able to routinely obliterate whole regiments of baddies with ease. I don’t have a problem with this from the conceptual standpoint. But from a gameplay standpoint I think it just plain sucks.

The end result of this whole approach is that as a creep player, it often feels like you are logging on essentially to provide some hero-wannabe freep player his feel-good fix of obliterative pwnage. Turbine does seem to think that creep players are a marginal part of it’s game’s community, one that can be tapped to provide it’s freep players with an additional incentive to maintain their subscriptions, basically by allowing them to take their toon into the Moors and stomp their creep opponents in a decidedly one-sided fight.

I don’t know if this is such a wise attitude for them to adopt, since creep players are also paying customers. I myself am getting more and more tired of pandering to freep players who insist on having PvP take place exclusively on their own terms, in an unfair field of play. My initial goodwill towards some of these power-hungry players, and Turbine, is dwindling quite fast. I know many of my creep brethren, like me, see this as a reason to not renew their subs.

Will what I just stated sadden freep players or cause them any sort of concern? Of course I know it won’t. Most seem solidly entrenched in their attitude of entitlement to uberness and quite comfortable with this state of affairs. I wonder though, how they will feel when as time goes by there are less and less people willing to show up as a creep and participate in their one-sided show?

I’m still going to stick around and see if some light at the end of the tunnel materializes, and if it doesn’t, I’ll just go quietly and think it’s too bad some player’s greed for power ruined something that had some promising potential.

There, I feel better now.

MMO nomadism

In my post on altoholism I already alluded to the fact that these days, I rarely play a game for more than a month at a time. I usually hop from one to another when I feel a certain staleness is  starting to set in. I never keep two concurrent subscriptions active, not for any real cost related considerations but simply because I like to fully invest myself in whatever MMO I am playing at the moment, even if it’s just for a short while. Which I guess is why I get bored rather quickly.

I often read or hear on pod-casts that some people will keep 3 or 4 subs going at any given time, which to me is rather strange. But then again, I can see how it can have it’s advantages, allowing them to keep a certain link with their guilds and characters and stay in the mix of things so to speak. By doing this they avoid experiencing the abrupt cutoff that someone like me goes through when adopting a “rotating sub” scheme and can keep a steady pace of advancement going for their their various characters.

I have to say that my method of doing things has isolated me somewhat from my fellow gamers, making it hard for me to commit to a guild. I usually don’t even bother joining one since I know I will be disappearing for an extended period of time a few weeks after coming aboard.

As time passes though, I am inclining more and more towards the multi-sub or multi-alt model of MMO gaming, simply because my MMO jumping ways are making me quite lonely ! Who knows, one day I just may become an MMO social butterfly, flitting from one game to another in order to maintain my extensive in-game social network!

We shall see…

MMOs and the credit card chargeback

Massively recently ran an interview with SOE CEO John Smedley, which you can find here.The part that caught my attention was where he talked about the high number of credit card chargebacks gold farmers were generating for his company :

Massively: Earlier you mentioned the problem of farmers with regards to Station Access. I know that’s something the company feels very strongly about?

John Smedley: I think the issue of farming is higher on the radar now than it ever has been. The behinds the scenes things are really frustrating. A lot of these farmers are essentially stealing from us. What they do is they charge us back all the time. They use a credit card –sometimes stolen, sometimes not – to buy an account key. They use the account for a month, and then they call the credit card company and charge it back. We have suffered nearly a million dollars just in fines over the past six months; it’s getting extremely expensive for us.What’s happening is that when they do this all the time, the credit card companies come back to us and say “You have a higher than normal chargeback rate, therefore we’ll charge you fines on top of that.”

This bit really caught my attention because I just finished a 16 month contract working in the chargeback department of a small bank here in Montreal and I can readily attest that MMO games companies do indeed suffer a lot from this kind of situation.  Smed is not exaggerating the amount of money this can cost a company in losses from transaction reversals and penalties. 

Other industries that do a high volume of their sales via on-line credit-card transactions, like MMO companies,  do also suffer a very high profit loss from this kind of fraud. Examples that immediately come to my mind are long-distance phone service providers and airlines which sell tickets via the Internet. This is an inherent risk of doing business via the World Wide Web.

What Smed didn’t mention though is that these chargebacks can also cost banks a lot of money, mainly in operating costs. Indeed, processing these reversed transactions forces banks to allocate significant amounts of resources to what is essentially a loss generating activity. Chargebacks generate a significant amount of incoming calls that have to be processed by a Customer Service agent and also force banks to maintain large anti-fraud / Security departments in hopes of minimising losses from this kind of activity. In addition, they can often generate significant extra work for Merchant Services departments who have to explain to companies like Smed’s why they have been debited money and why they have been have been imposed monetary penalties.

So gold-farmers are not only a plague for MMO game companies but also a real nuisance for the banks who issue the credit cards used to defraud them as well as those who count the defrauded company as one of their merchants.

Altoholic ?

I was recently listening to the Equal Perspectives pod-cast on VirginWorlds and one of the hosts, Troy, was talking about his preoccupation with how his various alts were rapidly filling the character slots of his two EQ2 accounts.

This got me thinking about this whole “altoholicism” phenomena in MMOs, specifically regarding the fact that I don’t seem to suffer from it! Indeed, rolling up alts to my main is not a very appealing activity to me, never has been, and likely never will be.

That being said, the above statement is still a tad hypocritical on my part, because although I am not an altoholic in the strict sense of the word, I do still in fact suffer from a mild form of this affliction : instead of rolling up alts within a given MMO, I roll up alts in a variety of seperate games. Which is why I rarely play the same MMO two consecutive months. When I get bored with my main toon, I don’t, like a lot of people,  log-on with one of my alts within the same game-world but instead jump into one of the characters I rolled in a completely different on-line setting.

This started after 7 months of playing my templar in EQ2. I was tired of standing at the back spamming heals to the glory hounds fighting upfront and wanted to experience some of the action for myself. So instead of rolling a barbarian berserker or another melee class, I went over to WoW and rolled up an undead rogue to get some DPS goodness going! After I got tired of that, I went to City of Villains and rolled up a meatfisted Brute to experience some tanking goodness. And so on…

The reason why I do this is because I absolutely HATE redoing content. Experiencing the same instance from a different perspective is just not that appealing to me. I love taking my time to stop and smell the roses, exploring to the fullest every nook and cranny of a game-world. But I only want to smell those roses once.

So I guess, in a way,  this “deviated altoholicism” in which I partake is really just a method by which I suppress or compensate for my latent altoholic tendencies.

p.s. :If Dr Phil is reading this, please call me, I’d love to be on your show!

Inaugural address.

Well, here I am,  finally surfacing from anonymity to take my place in the blogosphere ! I hope that I will be able to provide some worthwhile reading and am a bit curious to see where this whole thing will lead to !

Stay tuned for something more substantial in the coming days ! 

Hounde