Rift Goes Pay-For-Others

Rift's newly announced "Free-to-Play" relaunch was so obvious that even I saw it coming.  One of their more interesting decisions harnesses an emerging trend in payment models - turning the traditional RMT incentive structure on its head with a system that encourages people who have money to pay for others to play the game. 

It's a subtle but important distinction that makes sense when you look at the incentives and motivations for why people pay real money for stuff in MMO's.  On paper, this approach could be much better for gamers than many of the other things that have been tried. 

Traditional RMT - Paying for Progress (to Win?)
Traditional "Real Money Transactions" (RMT) - people buying swords or accounts on Ebay, currency from illicit third party sites, or all of the above from official exchanges - is motivated by a desire not to play the game.  The buyer wants to obtain something - currency, a pre-leveled character, etc - that they could in principle earn in game.  For whatever reason - lack of time, unwillingness to group, lack of interest in timesinks that are a prerequisite for endgame, etc - they are unwilling or unable to earn their incentive the traditional way, but they have money they are willing to part with. 

Setting aside all of the logistics, legalities, ethics, and design issues that these systems inevitably raise, you are left with a fundamental problem - a game that people are willing to pay NOT to play.  Blizzard accidentally took this to the logical, absurd extreme in Diablo III, where it became so easy for players to buy gear with trivial amounts of gold on the auction house that nothing the player ever earned in game would be relevant. 

Unless you have designed your game in a way that requires one playstyle as a prerequisite for another - most commonly requiring people who want to raid with their friends to first grind out 90 levels solo and then run random PUG's to get the gear to be useful to the raid group - there is no scenario where the player who pays for progress isn't ultimately going to wash out that much faster for having done so. 

Paying for Others
Beyond the traditional RMT, we are seeing a growing trend - regardless of genre and type of payment model - towards games that somehow allow one player to pay another's way.  A few examples:

• EVE was the first game to my knowledge to implement a mechanism they dubbed PLEX, effectively an in-game time card that is bought with real money, can be consumed to extend your subscription time, and is also free to be bought, sold, bartered, stolen or destroyed like any other in-game item can be in EVE.  SOE has adopted the same system (minus the thievery and destruction) in EQ2, and I expect more will follow.
  
• SWTOR's free to play model didn't make a lot of sense to many people - myself included - in part because it did not seem to ever make sense for someone who is NOT subscribing to pay money for the game.  Weekly access to content like PVP added up to around $8/month, but you also had to pay significant one-time unlock fees for gear and other things you'd need before you could start on this discounted (but still hobbled) plan - and if you wanted to add in a second type of content unlock, such as raiding, you actually failed at math because you'd be paying more than the subscription but getting stuck with greater restrictions. 
  
  The difference in this model is that every single unlock in the cartel market can be resold for in-game credits on the auction house.  I was dead wrong when I assumed that this secondary market would be unsustainable because people would not pay real money for the paltry number of credits a non-subscriber can pay them.  Even the most expensive unlocks and items can be had for affordable prices because people are unwilling or unable to earn amounts of credits that I consider to be trivial - Bioware is even expanding this market by adding a consumable, resellable item that pulls credits out of non-subscribers' escrow accounts.  In a perverse way, it makes sense to be a non-subscriber who gets less for the money because it's someone else's money.  
  
  The real story with SWTOR is that the number three (optional) subscription MMO in the West is quietly convincing some demographic of players (probably casual Star Wars/Bioware fans who have money and aren't interested in learning to crew skill or farm dailies) to pay significantly more than the standard monthly fee in exchange for credits.
  
• Rift's new model will feature a variant of PLEX that awards not game time, but rather the game's new item shop currency.  It's not clear whether this currency can be used to purchase subscription time (which sounds unusually optional, though we need more details to be sure), but it can definitely be used to purchase all kinds of items.  Many free to play games offer some mechanism for gifting stuff from their cash shops - sometimes for resale to other players (and sometimes at the players' peril when it comes to scams) - but this is not a common mechanism and Rift is the highest profile F2P relaunch to do anything like this.

The difference between pay for others models and traditional RMT is subtle, but important.  One side of the demand curve is still driven by people who wish to trade real world money for in-game currency.  The other side of the demand curve is driven by people who want to play the game - presumably because they enjoy playing the game - but are unwilling or unable to pay for the game. Under a pay for others model, the person with the money can pay that person's way in exchange for their in game currency. 

Why making the non-payer valuable is a win for everyone
What happens to people who choose not to pay under the various payment models?

• Mandatory subscription fee: The player who is not willing to pay leaves, thereby ceasing to support the game and indirectly removing the incentive for the developer to address their concerns.  Meanwhile, the player with excess money has no legitimate way to spend it, as their $15 is all they can pay.
• Traditional free-to-play/buy-to-play: Assuming the system isn't so poorly monetized that no one pays and the game goes under, the player who is not willing to pay is still asked to pay and still leaves as a result.  The player who is willing to pay more than $15 can do so, and becomes disproportionately valuable to the developer as a result.  However, they can also lose in the long run, as the financial incentive for the developer is to find ways to "encourage" them to pay even more.
• Pay-for-others: Instead of leaving the game, the player who is not willing to pay becomes the incentive for the person with more than $15/month to spend their money.  Theoretically, this can keep all of the players within the community (good for their friends, paying and not), while retaining a financial incentive for the developer to support their whole community, not just the "whales".  

It will be interesting to see how this all plays out.  The one thing you cannot do is go back and restrict things that you gave away later if you're not happy with the revenue, and Rift is giving away so much stuff that they won't have much left to sell if this plan does not work.  They are also offering entry level gear for cash store (and thus indirectly in-game-currency) purchase, which could alleviate some of the entry barrier issues for new max level characters by letting them skip the much despised PUG grind and pay for what they need to join their friends in raid content. 

A final note - this change causes the ranks of mandatory subscription MMO's to dwindle further.  We will now have WoW (losing a million subscribers per quarter, with Activision predicting that the numbers will drop further by year end), EVE (which offers a very unique experience that can't be had anywhere else), the online Final Fantasies (assuming that 14 launches and survives) with their strong subscriber numbers from the Japanese market ... and then we're down to stragglers and titles on life support.  It would not surprise me to see some of these titles join EVE in offering some sort of mechanism for players to pay for others going forward, especially if Rift's new model works out. 

PVD @ Game On: Epic Slant Press Edition

Over the weekend, I put in a guest appearance on Game On: Epic Slant Press Edition.  Chris of Game by Night and Ferrel of Epic Slant are now hosting the official podcast of MMORPG.com and were kind enough to have me "back" on their show after two previous appearances on their old show, The Multiverse.  Topics of discussion included:

• Buying all of the cash store things for in game currency in SWTOR (my "what I've been doing" update)
• Camelot Unchained meeting its Kickstarter goal
• Neverwinter's soft launch
• Final Fantasy XIV's forthcoming relaunch (ironically, this game has now been in the news all three times Ferrel and company have had me on their show)
• Ferrel's upcoming card game, Havok & Hijincks

One of the things I like about podcasting with these gentlemen is how it's a reasonably casual conversation about MMO topics of the day.  That said, the new and popular short format (we covered all of that and more in under 35 minutes) does take some mental preparation, and I'm definitely appalled at how many vocal pauses I managed to fit into such a short time. 

A few bonus comments that didn't make it into the show one way or another:

• EA's quarterly earnings call confirmed that SWTOR is below half a million subscribers, which would make it the number three subscription MMO in the west behind WoW and Eve... before you count all the cash store revenue.  Players may or may not like the direction that future development takes, but I don't think there's much question in the short term that they're making money. 
• To clarify a comment I made on the show, I would hope that no one who backed Camelot Unchained is going to be surprised or impatient that the game is going to take two years to launch (which was clearly stated).  The point I was trying to make is how much patience players will need to have if we get to mid-2015 and the game still needs work.  There will be no possibility of delaying the launch because they won't have the money to keep paying their staff.  Meanwhile, thousands of people will have been playing the game in pre-alpha and alpha for over a year, many of them paying hundreds or even thousands of dollars to be allowed to do so. 
  
  If people aren't happy with what they're seeing by the middle of the beta, will they be patient, urge folks to keep the faith, and remain subscribed when the game launches (assuming they haven't already paid for lifetime subscriptions)?  Or will word of mouth take a sharp and unforgiving turn for the worse?  This is not a title that can afford to have its early adopters burned out or disillusioned before the game launches, and they will have to make the project work in an unusually public fashion due to how much access they sold as Kickstarter rewards. 

Hope you enjoy the show!  

Action, Interface, and Communication/Community

A few otherwise unrelated tidbits from podcasts have me thinking about how the design of current MMO's may be affecting their function.  Specifically:

• The folks at OotiniCast have been discussing gaming peripherals of late.  It started with a conversation about gaming mice with ever increasing numbers of buttons (I actually own one of these, a story for another day), keyboards with macro keys, use of controllers/gamepads to run your PC like a console, or even keypad replacements that move your non-mouse hand to a device that can't type.  The common thread is that all of these things take your hands off the typing keys - if you want to type in chat, you're literally taking your hands off the controls to do it.
  
• Action combat continues to be the buzzword in recent big budget MMO's.  Never mind that having ground effects players have to run out of has been in MMO's for years now.  Never mind that increasing numbers of games are taking away auto-attack features in favor of requiring a click or keypress for every single swing and adding in some sort of dodge-roll mechanic.  (Aside - if you're making a game, I get that you need to build hype, but don't expect me to be impressed if your game has the above features, since they are pretty standard these days.)
  
  The beta reviews of the FFXIV relaunch are remarking that the game's global cooldown - 2.5 entire seconds - feels long in an era where it's usually half that in other games.  The common thread is that the pace and level of interactivity required by modern MMO action combat makes it especially likely that you will pay if you do take your hands off the controls.

Some portion of this may be unavoidable.  Players are quick to criticize both combat systems that feel non-responsive and the downtime that gave players in eras gone by more opportunity to sit around and chat.  Perhaps the issue is that we're still working on the technology that would make integrated voice chat less bad - it's telling when so many people voluntarily install, run, and sometimes pay for third party voice software. 

Even so, I wonder if all of this isn't part of what is driving the sense of limited community in modern MMO's.  I've been running group flashpoints using the group finder on some of my low level alts in SWTOR, and I do make an effort to say some things in chat, but I'm very conscious that this is likely reducing my performance if anyone is watching that closely.  Maybe none of the characters in my groups are in guilds that are recruiting, or maybe my performance is that bad, but it does seem striking to me that I have yet to be offered a guild invite when grouping on an unguilded character. 

How can you have community if you can't communicate? 

Incentives Driving 3-Month MMO Tourism

Psychochild has a post up suggesting that the current churn amongst MMO's can be blamed on soloing - he phrases it more diplomatically, but his identified cause of the problem is that people are not forming community "social fabric" because they are not grouping, and his suggested fix is to somehow make grouping more attractive than solo play.  There's little I could say directly on this topic that hasn't been said before (including by myself in 2009), but I think it's worth taking a minute to examine a tangent - the incentives that drive modern MMO tourism.

Incentives for and against being a tourist
My central thesis for MMO incentive analysis is that incentives can be effective in changing player behavior but are highly ineffective in changing player preferences.  What incentives are at play for and against a player's decision to depart a game after the hypothetical 90 days?

• (Real World) Money: Unless you fall into an edge case in the business model, the amount you pay will correlate with the amount you play.  If the game has a monthly fee, that cost is obvious, with a financial incentive to quit the game as soon as possible in exchange for $15/month added back to your disposable income.  In some cases non-subscription games have a high one-time start-up cost followed by no recurring expenses, but for the most part the studio has a strong incentive to continue to get something out of people who are signed onto their servers consuming their bandwidth.  
• Diminishing Returns for Progression: Whether the game is rewarding you with the next chapter in its story, the next increase to your character's level, or especially the addition of new abilities that significantly alter how you play the game, most key rewards in MMO's are decidedly finite.  The longer you play, the more likely that you end up on the "treadmill" of working to obtain slightly stronger gear to face slightly stronger mobs instead of more interesting rewards.  By contrast, just as your time in your existing game is getting less and less rewarding, starting over in a new game means going back to the fun end of the incentive curve. 
• Attachment: Even a solo player is going to feel some attachment to their character after dozens of hours /played spread over weeks or months.  Here is where Psychochild has a point about "social fabric" - if you have real friends and attachment to the community, that may be an incentive not to leave a game that you would otherwise be done with.

So far, so good for Psychochild's approach - two key incentives to leave a game can potentially be offset by a social incentive to stay.  So where is the problem?

One Unwilling Raider's Tale
To draw from my personal experience - I'm a dirty soloing MMO tourist so clearly it's all about me - I can say that the incentive system worked as intended for me in World of Warcraft circa 2005-2006.  I had run out of levels to gain and quests to solo, but I had gotten to know the folks in my guild (which actually made the oft-attempted transition from relatively open recruitment of leveling players into a reasonably successful 40-man raid guild).  My choices were to quit the game or start raiding, my personal incentives at the time favored the latter.  So I changed my behavior, and off I went to kill Nefarian.

What did not change was my preferences.  I would rather be spending my gaming time working on less difficult content - the kind that can be beaten in one evening by a PUG.  Instead, I did something I fundamentally did not enjoy, that required reporting to play at fixed times and spending non-raid nights preparing - far too much like a job instead of a game for my tastes. 

As soon as there was a second MMO where soloing to the level cap (well, almost) was viable, I canceled my WoW subscription and headed off to the newly launched LOTRO.  I've returned to WoW repeatedly given the opportunity to do so on my terms - i.e. new expansion content I could solo or new easy group content that I can experience without a fixed schedule - but I've never gone back to the raiding game that I never liked and only played because that's where the incentives of that particular era lined up.

The Downside of Choice?
In addition to all the other things Blizzard did right, WoW had a key advantage - as the innovator who brought solo play to the MMO space, Blizzard had a few years in which a player like myself didn't really have meaningful alternatives, short of going back to single player console games.  Blizzard did not need to worry about losing my money after 90 days and they were able to use that dependable stream of revenue to finance a better game for everyone. (Albeit with a disproportionate focus on new raid content.)    New games today don't have this luxury. Instead, more than one game with solid potential has been gutted when its population fled early and its staff was trimmed to match. 

Philosophical questions aside, I am not a player who has a preference for the type of gameplay that fosters strong "social fabric".  Now that I have a family, I have time constraints that would prevent me from doing so even if I wanted to.  The odds that you will find some incentive so strong that I will change my behavior to something that I don't want - and may no longer be able - to do in today's crowded marketplace are near zero.

And thus my advice to Psychochild is simple - it's not 2006 anymore.  There are enough online solo-friendly options these days that it's a waste of your resources to offer a solo option and then undermine your efforts by trying to make it somehow less attractive than grouping.  If you want a niche game that focuses on grouping, don't waste your developers' resources and your players' time by offering a less attractive solo option that will ultimately lose out to all of the many games that do solo content better. 

Mid-April Outlook

It's been a few months since I posted a round-up/outlook post, though I suppose some of what I've been doing can be inferred from what I've been posting about. 

• I finally got back to the level cap in WoW a few weeks back, and I'm not opposed in principle to continuing on into the endgame.  The problem is more practical - where in my schedule to find time for this stuff.  The current expansion sounds like it is doing some interesting things in terms of story tied to daily quests (i.e. hit a new tier of rep, see some new plot).  The problem - not new to this expansion - is that I can get story of similar quality from other games without the grind requirement.  I never finished Cataclysm's Molten Front storyline, and I'm told that LOTRO has a similar feature around rebuilding a city in Rohan that will probably fall off my plate for similar reasons. 
  
• DDO remains a back-burner project for me, but it's one that I actually pick up from time to time (albeit usually just for one evening if the mood strikes me).  My character has some interesting things coming in his next few levels, and it's possible that his entire build is going to be blown up by a massive overhaul to the game's enhancement system that is now in early development.  If I can get to level 20 before that happens, I will have the option of true reincarnating to start over as a build that works with the new rules.  I'm willing to call this a goal, though I don't know if it will happen. 
  
• A year and a half into its run, SWTOR seems to have settled in as my current MMO of choice.  I have long-term concerns about the game's business model, but in the short term I have only scratched the surface of things that interest me in the game. 
  
  My Trooper is now halfway through the (brief) expansion story, my Agent will probably follow close behind, and I could see spending at least some time at endgame on one or both of these characters.  (Aside: One small but significant difference between SWTOR and other MMO's is that all reputation scores are shared amongst your legacy and mirrored across factions - both characters add to my legacy reputation while playing through the new content.)  
  
  Given enough time, I could imagine someday completing all six of the remaining class stories.  My next two 50's should be my level 20 Sith Warrior and either my Jedi Consular or my Sith Inquisitor (both currently level 12) to complete all four class buffs for my legacy.  The fact that I can look at my character select screen and legitimately consider clicking the "play" button next to five separate characters in the same game is something that I can't imagine in any other game at the moment. 
  
• I don't know that anything new is likely to make its way onto my schedule in the near future.  If I had to pick a wild card, though, based on current info, I'm surprisingly intrigued by the relaunch of Final Fantasy XIV.  Perhaps this is more of a game that I WANT to like based on the IP than a game that is likely to be suitable for my gaming style.  Perhaps the magnitude of the improvements to the game won't live up to the hype.  I sat out the game's first launch and I probably won't be there for day one of its second launch, but I could imagine giving this game a shot sometime later this year if the word of mouth goes well, especially if they offer some form of free trial. 

What are you all looking forward to these days? 

A Week Post 2.0 In SWTOR

SWTOR's patch 2.0 has been around for a week now - along with the expansion for those who pre-purchased early enough to comply with EA's "early access" ultimatum. (Aside: I have heard no outcry, or even mention, of this unprecedented marketing move amongst the SWTOR sites I read, so presumably this tactic is here to stay.)  I chose to hold off in favor of waiting until the next time I would be subscribed anyway to play on alts, in order to qualify for the lower subscriber pricing. 

The timing mostly worked out for me, in that the extra week was enough to get my Operative across the line to level 50.  A few observations from the intervening week:

• Class Changes: Like most MMO's which award a point per level to spend on a talent/skill/etc tree, the SWTOR team faced the challenge of how to deal with adding five new points for the five new levels.  Their solution was uninspired - they added five points of generally uninteresting filler requirements to each existing tree to ensure that the five new points would be consumed getting back to the character build you had prior to the expansion.  My Operative felt especially hard hit, having just gotten to the point where she could have some off-tree points before the patch, only to immediately re-invest them back into her main tree. 
  
  This irritation aside, I don't have too many complaints on the class fronts.  There were some tweaks, in particular to some of my medium use cooldown (~60 abilities) on both my Vanguard and Operative.  Both seem to play mostly alright. 
  
  The other (mostly) minor annoyance is the addition of uncontrollable giggling to my Operative.  This audio cue is intended to provide players with a better indicator that they have gained a resource type used for certain special abilities.  Unfortunately, it does make you sound like a homicidal school girl, giggling every time you knife a foe.  I've chosen to play my Operative with some light and some dark so I guess it doesn't entirely kill my chosen characterization, but I've had other players comment on the giggling and it is a bit of a jarring addition.
  
• Currencies come and go: Each planet players encountered during the leveling game previously had its own planet-specific token currency.  The good news was that you had zero incentive to hoard the things to get better gear on the next planet.   The bad news was that you might finish the planet without enough to purchase what you wanted, and end up with multiple rows of unspent commendations in your currency tab.  (This was especially problematic for non-subscribers, who currently cannot lift the penalty on NPC vendor prices by any means other than subscribing.  Werit's datamining suggests that this unlock may be coming in the future.)  Now all the planetary commendations through level 50 stack, which effectively reverses the good and the bad.  Now you can save up, but you have an incentive to wait for higher levels to get the best possible gear.
  
  In other news, all old endgame currencies (four that I can recall) were merged down into one legacy currency, and there are now three new tokens for the new endgame (the lowest of which can be earned in some of the older content).  I suppose this is no better or worse than anyone else has done it - at least SWTOR has a currency tab so all these things aren't taking up space.
  
• Pleasant surprise on stability: For a patch of this scale, 2.0 has seemed remarkably stable.  Downtime to deploy the patch was minimal and servers came up ahead of schedule.  There have been some cosmetic bugs, like world bosses spamming red text to the entire planet, but I've seen much worse from releases with far fewer moving parts.  Kudos to the team for what looked like a smooth launch from where I sit. 
  
• A Non-Spoiler Word On Spoilers: Technically not at all related to 2.0, but I've found myself strangely willing to read spoilers for my class story.  This seems counter-intuitive, but also in some ways empowering.  To the extent that the game is a work of interactive fiction, knowing the major plot outcomes (if not necessarily everything that is going to happen along the way) means that I'm making an informed decision on what kind of story I would like to see.  I don't think that knowing all of the major decision points hurt my enjoyment of the tale any more than knowing the outcome of the Lord of the Rings trilogy or other tales harmed the enjoyment of the path it took to get there. 

 Next stop Makeb, and we'll see how this new planet fares. 

Fruits of SWTOR Double Exp

SWTOR celebrated the run-up to its new expansion with four consecutive double exp weekends (but no non-weekend days), and I used the time to work on my Imperial Operative.  I advanced from level 19 to level 45, completed half of Chapter 1, all of Chapter 2, and skipped the entire first planet of Chapter 3 due to having greened out all of the content before I arrived.  In the process, I claimed the Agent/Smuggler class buff and 40 presence for my legacy.  As is often the case when an exp bonus changes my crowded gaming calendar - bear in mind that I was up against the wire to hit WoW's level cap - the underlying exp curve has some quirks (deficiencies?). 

As a matter of principle, I don't see much point in experience boosts - especially such massive ones.  You get exp for playing the game, you either are or are not enjoying the game, and if you are enjoying the game then why make the game end more quickly?  (Shintar wrote on this topic part way through the promotion.)  Typically, when you see me grabbing at exp, it's more because there is something I'm less fond of that stands between myself and exp. 

In SWTOR's case, the challenge is that Bioware spent large amounts of time crafting great story content scattered amongst eight classes.  Short of extremely drastic measures - such as four consecutive double exp weekends - you will need to complete shared generic content for your faction, which is generally less interesting and does not change on future characters, to make your levels.  If you are also playing as a non-subscriber - which I do sometimes in SWTOR - you have even less leeway to skip content due to several stacking penalties on your exp gain.

As a result, the point of playing the double exp for all it was worth was not to skip content - though I did skip entire planets (while focusing my questing efforts on planets I saw less of during my first playthrough).  Rather, the point was to save the content for future characters.  That I will mostly likely be positioned to play the new expansion on both factions, using my previously level 50 trooper and my soon to be level 50 agent is a side bonus.