Author: Jason

Removing Grouping – Part II

Gaming

Last time I talked about communications, because to me that is the single most important aspect of an MMO.  The reason I play is the other people.  But I know the social aspects aren’t why many people play.  To many people the most important thing a group does is provide status updates.

One of the key elements in modern games and the focus on the trinity design (tank/heal/damage) is that joining a group puts the other players’ health and other stats on your User Interface where it is easy to keep track of.  In this way, grouping and raid groups become vital to the game.  Can you imagine playing a game where you couldn’t see the health of the other members of your party?  Imagine having to call out for every heal or assist.  Most games these days even include buffs on the UI so your priest can tell if that armor spell he casts has worn off or been dispelled.  Sure, these elements didn’t always exists, but with them being so predominant in games now, could we do without them?

Without the group structure, if you wanted to retain these UI status updates, you would need another way to get them.  So, instead of restricting this capability to groups we could unhook it and make it available always.  Target a player, click on an option button on the target element, select “Pin to UI” from the menu and they get added to your screen just as if they were in your group.  There might be some technical limitations to this, perhaps a maximum number of people you can pin to your UI, and it would be nice to know who has pinned you (so you can yell at a healer who doesn’t have you, the main tank, pinned), but I definitely think that a group of designers could sit around and hash out all the problems and find solutions to make this work.

This solution, of course, is more labor intensive than just joining a group or raid, so there might be resistance to such a change.  But I think the overall increase of utility would be worthwhile.

Movie Round-Up: December 25th, 2009

Reviews

It’s Christmas, so these are going to be short and sweet…

Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel:

No.  Just, no.  Not if you paid me.

It’s Complicated:

You know, reading the description of this movie, I wouldn’t mind seeing.  But I’m certainly not going to pay $10 to see it in the theater.

Nine:

Just like the movie above, it looks like its going to be decent, but not at the theater.  I’ll wait for this musical on Netflix.

Up in the Air:

I’m a big fan of Jason Reitman’s work, especially since Thank You For Smoking.  And George Clooney is great.  Everything I’ve heard about this film is good news, so I totally want to go see this.

Sherlock Holmes:

Oh, hell yes.  I’ve always liked Holmes, but not when he just stood around out-thinking his opponents.  I prefer Holmes to have a touch of action and adventure to him.  From the first trailer I saw of this I knew I was going to see it, and see it I will.

The Last Christmas

Writing

As promised, here is my holiday short story.  It begins like this…

He hadn’t thought of himself as anything more than Santa Claus in many years. Since he’d been passed the mantle he’d just enjoyed the magic of the position. He spent three-hundred sixty-four days of the year in his village workshop, with just one night out to deliver toys to all the girls and boys who still believed.

It was a dwindling list of names, but more so this year. Around April the list very nearly cut by half in a single day, and steadily it had fallen until around mid May. After that is dropped in chunks every now and then with one more sharp decline in early October. By December first, when the village usually kicked into overdrive to finish all the toys, there we barely more than a hundred names left, less as he loaded up his sleigh on Christmas Eve.

… you can read the entire thing here.

The Failure of the Free Weekend

Gaming

If you have ever played an MMO, you know what I’m talking about when I say “Free Weekend”.  If not, here’s the run down.  You subscribe to an MMO, you play a while, then you cancel.  Every now and then (about once a quarter) the company will blast an email out to all the inactive accounts and tell them about a “Free Weekend” – a Friday afternoon to Monday morning period – where their account will be reactivated for free!  You can just log in and play like you used to!  This email will also probably include a list of the latest features/changes of the game, and often will coincide with some sort of event for the non-canceled players, like double experience or the beginning of a week/month long holiday event.

One of the things I said in a post last week was about Free Weekends being on your schedule not mine.  This is true, and is the biggest flaw, in my opinion, to the Free Weekend promotion.

There are, in my experience, three kinds of people who cancel a game subscription for an MMO:

  1. Switched to another game. This player may have been playing your game and enjoying it, but something new came along and off they went.
  2. Bored with your game. Not the same as the person above, this individual isn’t going anywhere in particular, they just ran out of things to do in your game and are taking a break.  They usually only cancel after not logging in a couple of months, but eventually they do.
  3. Not enough time to play. This is me.  I’ve got other activities and things like console games and I just don’t have enough time to make paying for the game worth it, or my time is so erratic and there are enough gaps where I’m “wasting money” that I give up the occasional romp in order to keep the money.

The first two types are often best lured back in by patches and expansions that either add more content or fix issues that lead them to quit.  In fact, the guys at WoW can probably give you hard numbers on how many reactivations they get before/after patches and expansions.  Even so, the Free Weekend can work on them as well.  These players still have the time to play, so the weekend offer is there to convince them to give the game they left behind another try, and maybe sign back up for that subscription.

For me, however, I left because my playtime is erratic and scattered.  Nine times out of ten, I get a Free Weekend offer for a game I used to play and then find I don’t have time to take advantage of it.  Monday comes and I say, “Oh man, I missed another Free Weekend!”  For the third player type, rather than just unlocking their account for a set weekend, companies should consider giving out a Free Weekend Key that the player can redeem any time.  Of course, the key needs to be locked in to the specific account to prevent creating a secondary market for selling keys, but this way I could unlock my account for the free couple of days when it works best for me.  No more smacking my head about another missed Free Weekend.  Instead, when I find myself with nothing to do on a random Saturday, I can open the email and select a Free Weekend Key and go play because I have the time to play.

This doesn’t entirely solve the problem, since I would still be unlikely to resubscribe unless my schedule changes, but it would allow me to occasionally dip my toe back in the game and keep it fresh in my mind for when my schedule does change or my budget frees up some extra cash.  But as it stands now, once I cancel and because I miss every Free Weekend, I’m more likely to buy a new game when the time comes than return to an old one I haven’t touched in ages.

Removing Grouping – Part I

Gaming

Before anyone freaks out, no, I’m not advocating solo play, nor am I actually suggesting that the grouping mechanic be removed from games.  This is simply a thought exercise.  This and the posts that follow in this series will take a look at aspects of what grouping bringstechnologically and if we can retain it while removing the mechanic of forming a formal group unit.

Note: Please keep in mind that all discussion that follows is from my own experience, so if I mention that some game did something first, don’t yell at me because some game I never played actually did it first.  Who did what first is actually irrelevant to the discussion.

The first element that comes to mind for me is communications.  Joining a group in most games provides you with a group only chat channel.  At one time this was necessary because it grew out of the design.  Some games originally only had two forms of communication: local and whisper.  Local would be just saying things and the people in range (in the room or on the screen) would see it.  Whisper was something you said directly to another player and only that person could see it.  Occasionally, games would have yelling or shouting, allowing people in adjacent rooms to see; and global, usually used by GMs to inform the entire game/server of something.  But onceEverQuest came out, and local became distance limited and shout covered only the single zone, and the game had a formal group object, they needed a way for group members to talk to each other across zones without using masses of whispers and relaying information.  Since then, most games now have the ability for players to create their own chat channels for any reason at all.  With that, rigid group chat isn’t strictly needed anymore.  Sure, its nice to have a channel you automatically join when you join a group, but since part of this is to eliminate group joining, we’ve established that the communications, if needed/desired, can be handled without the formal group.

In fact, to some degree, players don’t seem to care about group chat anymore.  When it comes to raiding or even guild chat, many people (though certainly not the casual majority) have moved over to 3rd party voice chat like Ventrilo.  This contributes to games becoming more “silent”, in my opinion, as members of your group may be happily chatting with their friends while they button push their group role with you.  I’d say this, on some level, is borne out by the recent LFG tool implement in World of Warcraft.  In that tool you can easily, almost instantly, get a group and go run a dungeon.  However, those players may be from different servers, so social interaction becomes less important beyond the dungeon and the combat happening “right now” since you are not likely to play with them again.  That is, unless they love playing with you so much, or you with them, that one of you decides to pay to move their character to a new server.  Given this, WoWcould remove group chat today and replace it with a Wizard 101 style of menu selectable phrases (“Thanks!”, “Help!”, “Kill this [insert target monster]!”, etc) and most people wouldn’t be adversely affected by the change.  They might even welcome it since the silence of a group could simply mean that everyone knows what to do and how to play, and not that people are being anti-social.

Movie Round-Up: December 18th, 2009

Reviews

Did You Hear About The Morgans?:

Yes, I did, and I’m only interested in half of you.  Maybe its just me, but I often find Sarah Jessica Parker to be the weakest part of every movie she is in.  I even sat through the Sex in the City movie and loathed every scene she was in while I was only bored with the ones where she was absent.  Hugh Grant, on the other hand, I tend to always find charming and funny.  So, I half want to see this movie and I half want to never ever see it, which means I might catch it on Netflix one day when it is available for streaming and I don’t have to waste a shipped disc on it.

Avatar:

Oddly enough, I have the same 50/50 attitude for Avatar.  On one hand, if everything I have seen and heard about the plot of this film is true and its basically Ferngully or Battle for Terra or one of the many other films with the same plot, then not much about it will shock or excite me and I’d rather pass.  On the other hand, it is a special effects and action extravaganza, and I prefer to see those sorts of movies on the big screen where they really shine.  I guess I can only hope that the known plot elements so far are a giant head fake and the real plot of the movie will be different and new.  I remain on the fence about whether or not to see this in the theater.

Finished with Monthly Subscriptions

Gaming

This isn’t a condemnation of the monthly subscription model for MMOs.  In fact, I think it is still a great thing, and preferable to the heavy handed item stores than some games use instead of a subscription.  However, over the past couple of months I’ve come to realize that as much as I love MMOs, games with a subscription model are largely a waste of my money.

Why?  Well, back in the day, I started playing Ultima Online and I gladly paid their subscription because I played every day (almost).  The same was true of EverQuest and of all the games that followed.  Some games I didn’t stick with for very long, a few months or a year, but even then when I was paying I was playing.  In the last year or so I have taken up a number of other activities, such as more reading, programming in my off time, writing, playing console games, and more.  The net result is that my MMO playing time has become fairly erratic.  One month I may play an hour or two every weekday and a couple of longer sessions on the weekend, the next month I may not log in at all.

Its the not logging in at all part that ends up bothering me.  I hate paying for something I don’t use.  Sure, I can just cancel and resubscribe when I want to play, but doing that is a hassle.  On the other hand, I didn’t play Wizard 101 at all in November and it cost me exactly zero dollars and I didn’t have to cancel.

I’m not saying that Free-to-Play is the wave of the future and all games need to do that, however there is a disparity in the subscription model.  It’s like going to an all you can eat buffet, paying the $10 and then only eating about $1.75 worth of food because you weren’t really hungry.  I wouldn’t mind seeing some games in the US adopt the pay by hour model used in the Asian markets.  I’d love to be able to buy a block of X game hours for Fallen Earth, and if I don’t log in for a month, I don’t use any hours, and when I do log in, all my hours are still there, waiting for me to use them.  No canceling, no resubscribing, just easy.  It would even be great if a game supported both models.  Let people subscribe for $15 a month for unlimited play if they don’t want to worry about how much or how little they play, let people who don’t want a recurring payment and don’t mind watching their hours buy 75 hours for $15 ($0.20 per hour) instead.

I will say that the one thing the subscription model does is prevent me from maintaining active accounts in multiple games.  I’d love to be able to pop in to EQ or DAoC or any of a number of other games for a couple hours once in a while, but re-upping for a full month of subscription makes the whole thing simply not worth it.  However, if all those old games had a pay by hour model, I’d gladly toss $5 on there every now and then in order to keep some hours available for those days when I just want to go play something different.

All this hoping and wishing aside, however, the fact remains, as of today I am officially finished with monthly subscription MMOs.  I want to play a number of them but I just can’t justify the cost given the amount of time I’ll play and the little spare money I’ve got for entertainment.

From a developer/producer standpoint, consider this.  While the need to unsubscribe might garner you a couple extra months of fees from me before I realize I’m not playing and cancel, the need to resubscribe if I’d like to put my toe back in the water is very likely to keep me from coming back.

Cats & Bags, Ledges & Jumping

Random Thoughts

Mostly, this post exists entirely to commit me to action so that I can’t back out and if I do people can call me out on it and say, “You said you were going to, then didn’t!”

Last year, I sat down on December first, thoroughly disappointed that I’d failed the NaNoWriMo, again, and thought to myself, “What I need is a smaller goal.”  So I decided I was going to write a short story and post it on Christmas Eve.  The story that I wrote, however, was very very depressing.  Not that I had intended to write something light and happy, but my initial turn toward darkness wound up being a death spiral into oblivion.  In the year since I didn’t post it I’ve only read the story twice and hated it both times because it was not only dark it was needlessly so.  It wasn’t just dark, it was black.  There was just nothing redeeming about it at all because it wasn’t even well written.  Obviously, I didn’t post it.

So, another NaNoWriMo has gone by and I didn’t win, again, but I had the same thought as last year.  That I just needed a smaller goal.  I kicked around the idea that sparked last year’s short and decided that since I, personally, am not in such a dark place this year (last year in addition to failing the WriMo I was also unemployed and a number of other things) I would take another crack at it.  I am very pleased with the results.  I still need to make another pass or two at it for glaring errors and then give my editorial staff (wife) a shot at it, but I do think it will be ready before Christmas.

As such, I am stating here and now that I will be posting a short story on Christmas Eve.  It is entitled “The Last Christmas” and I hope you return to read it and enjoy it.