Taugrim's MMO Blog

Back in January 2010, I predicted that Social Gaming may kill the traditional MMORPG industry. This was after the spectacular failures of two huge IPs that launched in late 2008:

• Warhammer Online (WAR)
• Age of Conan (AoC)

The developers for those games make the mistake of over-promising and under-delivering, a cardinal sin for any business.

EA Mythic set the expectation that WAR would launch with 24 classes and 6 capital cities, but shortly before launch they cut 4 classes and 4 cities. The game client was unstable (multiple CTDs a night for me even a year after launch) and the servers simply couldn’t handle mass RVR without crashing or lagging severely. The “lakes” RVR while leveling was one of the most enjoyable PVP experience I’ve ever had, but the game fell down at endgame in T4. A game that hyped RVR couldn’t handle it.

I didn’t play AoC, but I kept tabs on the community. Funcom set the expectation that AoC would ship with DirectX 10 support – it was written on the box – but DX 10 wasn’t there until 6 months post launch. The game in Beta had serious performance issues and bugs, and Funcom unwisely drew attention to a “miracle” patch right before launch. It’s like saying “we’ve done a crappy job but finally got our act together, really!” Gamers loved the leveling experience from 1-20, but unfortunately the content team did not maintain that standard of quality from 21 to endgame. Rumor was that the writers across leveling zones had little or no interaction.

After WAR, in 2009 and 2010 I played several other “new” games to the Western market: Aion and Allods Online (AO). Aion’s grindfest killed my interest before I even reached level cap. AO had a terrific Beta experience go into the toilet when the game developer implemented a Death Penalty mechanic that basically made the F2P game a P2P game. I stuck with AO as paying to play wasn’t an issue for me, but I eventually quit due to the lack of appealing endgame content.

The failures of these MMORPGs unfortunately coincided with the incredible surge in growth and popularity of Facebook and Social Gaming. Money was being funneled into Social Games for obvious reasons, as I wrote in that Jan 2010 article. I grew increasingly concerned that developers would lose the financial backing to publish new MMORPGs, which typically cost tens of millions of dollars to launch. All any executive or VC had to do was point at the high cost and high failure rate to say it wasn’t be worth the risk. The MMORPG market was facing a vicious cycle, whereas Social Gaming was in a virtuous cycle of wildfire growth.

I went back to the safe haven of WoW in May 2010 after hearing that much of the tedious grinding in WoW had been removed. I enjoyed the latter parts of WotLK and then Cataclysm, which finally brought back meaningful challenge in PVE. Although as Josh “Lore” Allen recently pointed out to me, I am in the 1% who wanted things to not be faceroll, and the other 99% of the population had gotten used to the faceroll joke that was WotLK Heroic content.

While Cataclysm was my favorite WoW expansion, by mid February I was restless / bored with it. A fellow gamer, Castorcato, sent me a link to the talent calculator for a game I hadn’t heard of. RIFT. Looking at the talent calculator for an hour sold me on trying the game. Castorcato said that RIFT in Beta felt like the good things from WAR again, and I got very excited.

RIFT’s launch was the smoothest that I’d ever seen for an MMORPG. It blew me away. The game had bugs of course, but the level of polish was phenomenal, so it was able to meet the “is this as polished as WoW” standard question from the gamer community.

At WonderCon 2011, I asked a panel with Scott Hartsman (Exec Producer, RIFT), Dirk Metzger (VP Publishing, Zentia), and Nick Huggett (Customer Experience Manager, Runes of Magic) about the viability of the MMORPG market given the past couple years and their responses were highly encouraging. I also spoke with Scott after the panel about how Trion was able to launch a AAA-quality MMORPG.

As you may know, I’ve been critical of RIFT’s 1.5 and 1.6 patches – IMO they’ve derailed the great progress being made for PVP from 1.0 -> 1.4. But there is no denying that Trion has shown that AAA-quality launches of new games are doable, with the right mindset and execution. Trion has also brought a healthy amount of innovation to the MMORPG market – in particular with RIFT’s superb spec system and the game’s integration with social media.

So we started 2011 with a bang with RIFT, but that isn’t the end of the story.

EA BioWare is launching SWTOR later this month. I started researching SWTOR once I saw what was coming in RIFT 1.5 to determine whether it was a viable option for me. Long story short, SWTOR has greatly exceeded my expectations in Beta and I am pumped to play it at launch.

My guess is that RIFT has been a significant financial success for Trion Worlds, and I expect that SWTOR will be the same for EA BioWare.

This is great news for fans of the MMORPG, regardless what game(s) you play. The more success stories in the industry, the greater the degree of financial investment into game developers, which means more new games for us.

Thank you Trion Worlds and BioWare for delivering!

Follow Me

Twitter: @taugrim
Stream: http://twitch.tv/taugrim
YouTube: http://youtube.com/taugrimtaugrim
Facebook: http://facebook.com/taugrim
GAMEBREAKER Host for “The Sanctum” RIFT show: http://www.gamebreaker.tv/category/the-sanctum/
GAMEBREAKER Host for “The Republic” SWTOR show: http://www.gamebreaker.tv/category/the-republic/

I wanted to share with y’all an exciting milestone. During my 15th session of streaming, my TwitchTV channel cracked 100k views and 1k followers:

With the NDA lift for SWTOR on November 18th, I’ve been streaming SWTOR PVP action every day with live commentary.

Much of the traffic is due to my having access to General Testing, which is a limited pool of people compared to the Weekend Tests – i.e. there are a limited number of people who can even stream at this time.

That being said, viewers have been providing very positive feedback for my stream, and this has been a huge encouragement to me

Being a resource to the gaming community has been my passion for 6 years, but until recently it’s been a hobby not a vocation – what I’ve been able to do has been limited to free time outside of work. Recently I made the leap to “give it a go” as a full-time job.

Your support is essential in making this a financially viable and sustainable job transition, and to the extent I do this full-time the more content I can contribute to the community. Therefore here are my asks of you:

1. Spread the word on social media and on the SWTOR forums, and tell your friends and guildees
2. Stick around through the commercials on my stream. I want to create a positive viewing experience so I won’t be spamming them
3. Keep giving me the constructive feedback. In just a week I’ve learned so much from you about streaming and SWTOR

Thank you!

Taugrim

Follow Me

Twitter: @taugrim
Stream: http://twitch.tv/taugrim
YouTube: http://youtube.com/taugrimtaugrim
Facebook: http://facebook.com/taugrim
GAMEBREAKER Host for “The Republic” SWTOR show: http://www.gamebreaker.tv/category/the-republic/

Kind of a crazy milestone, considering I started making videos for fun and to illustrate the concepts from my class Guides for various games.

I don’t talk too much about RL here, but I will share that I’ve started working with TGN recently.

If you haven’t heard of TGN, it’s Gamer TV on YouTube, with thousands of videos produced by a network of Directors who cover dozens of games. I’m very excited to be part of a new media company that covers the gaming industry, for 2 reasons:

1. Companies such as TGN will command an increasingly larger piece of the content viewership pie over time, as “new media” continues to complement, supplement, and displace traditional media. The content game has changed radically in the past decade! Content is no longer produced solely by traditional networks and studios, and the Internet / mobile / social media have changed the dynamics of content distribution and access. We’ve all seen the rich impact that blogs have had in terms of how news and information are shared and discussed. Online video is the next wave
2. I love making gaming videos (duh!)

Speaking of great video content, I was a guest on gamebreaker.tv’s Aug 9th RIFT show The Sanctum.

Check out the show and let me know what you think

The two most common requests for videos I get on YouTube and here on my blog are:

1. requests for more depth of content: “make more [Rift Warrior / Prot Pally / etc] videos”
2. requests for more breadth of content: “can you make videos of [X / Y / Z] classes or [A / B / C] games?”

To date, the limiting constraint for the number of videos I can publish is the amount of free time that I have. Given that constraint, I made the decision a while back to provide depth of content, e.g. 1 class at a time for 1 game.

For example, when Rift launched back in February, I rolled a Warrior as my main character, and as I leveled him up I made a series of narrated videos for the class and wrote an in-depth Riftblade Warrior Guide. It was not until more recently that I started creating videos for different classes, namely Rogue and Cleric, even though I had played around with alts.

That being said, what I would love to do is create videos for multiple classes for multiple games concurrently. The implication of delivering that much content is that I would need to invest more time into blogging and video creation. Making a video for me takes an order of magnitude more time that writing a text-based blog article like this post. For each video, I have to capture illustrative footage, watch it to find scenes with educational value, edit the best segments, narrate, iterate, and finally render and upload the finished product.

IMO, my videos provide distinctive value because of thought and intention that goes into creating them. That may sound arrogant, but if you perform any of the following searches on YouTube, you’ll see multiple videos from my channel on the first page of the search results:

• “rift pvp” sorted by rating
• “rift pvp” sorted by relevance
• “prot pally 85 pvp” sorted by rating
• “prot pally 85 pvp” sorted by relevance

So this brings me to the YouTube Partner program. Basically the Partner program enables a YouTube user to monetize their videos. If I were a Partner, I would take a careful and thoughtful approach toward ad integration that so that viewers would have a positive experience.

Every now and then I have checked on the YouTube Partner page to see whether my channel was eligible. The traffic on my YouTube channel has gradually grown, and this month I cracked 2k subscribers. Recently the “Apply Now” button on the Partner page returned a different result: it didn’t tell me I didn’t qualify, which it had in the past. So I applied.

At the time of application, here were my statistics:

• >2k subscribers
• >85k channel views
• ~885k upload views

YouTube provides general guidelines but not specific numbers (e.g. # of subs, # of views, # of thumbs up, etc) for approving new Partners. I understand that – they need to have the flexibility of approving whichever applicants they see fit. From what I’ve read over the past couple weeks, applicants have very differing experiences as far as getting approved or rejected.

I received the rejection email from YouTube today, which is the boilerplate rejection letter, except for the italicized text (emphasis mine):

Dear taugrimtaugrim,

Thank you for your interest in the YouTube Partner Program.

Applications are reviewed for a variety of criteria, including but not limited to the size of your audience, country of residence, quality of content, and compliance with our YouTube Community Guidelines and Terms of Use. At this time, we are unable to accept your application because your channel does not contain sufficient original content. You may find the the following resources helpful in making your channel eligible for the YouTube Partner Program:

• Copyright Tips
• Partner Program Basics: Criteria for partnership

Thank you for your understanding.

The YouTube Team

I read through the links provided above, and I understand that YouTube will not approve Partner applications for channels that simply show video game footage. Video game vids (usually with music overlaid) are a dime a dozen on YouTube.

However, the last 80+ videos I’ve made over the past 2.5 years are all narrated educational videos, and I have received thousands of comments/messages/tells from players saying that my videos (and written guides) have been a huge help to them. And I know that there are other video game commentators who are Partners. So it’s not that I was applying for something that YouTube had never approved previously.

Needless to say, I’m really disappointed with the outcome for my application

I didn’t get into blogging with the expectation of it evolving into an income-earning job. I blog and make videos because I love gaming and I enjoy teaching and helping other players. I believe my getting turned down by YouTube’s Partner program is bad not just for me but for folks who appreciate the kind of content I publish. Frak!

Had I been approved, this post would have looked very different, and I would be here writing about how I was going to be greatly expanding my coverage of MMORPG games and classes – in short that you’d be see a lot more videos from me covering greater depth and breadth (more games, more classes). And I would be able to justify the much greater investment in time, because I would be compensated for it with the experience of learning the Partnership aspects of YouTube (valuable knowledge IMO) and with some incremental income – who knows how much but anything is better than nothing, amirite?

/sigh

Trion shared their proposed class/spec balance update today, and they are planning to:

• Re-work (balance) Pyro Mage’s Ground of Strength. It its current incarnation GoS provides total CC immunity indefinitely for the Mage plus the ability for their spells to stun, and this is rather imbalanced in PVP
• Increase Rogue melee and Marksman damage

The timing of the balance update makes sense – there has been sufficient time since 1.1 went live for the community to get its arms around the changes and to identify problem areas.

To date, players have often framed their feedback quite negatively. E.g. some players have been equating Trion to “Failcom” (aka Funcom, the maker of Age of Conan) and to Electronic Arts / Mythic Entertainment (the maker of Warhammer Online).

Both are unfair comparisons, but players have been badly burned since 2008 by games that were over-hyped but under-delivered, and Trion is experiencing the backlash from players who are now understandably wary of game developers.

While I am not going to predict what degree of commercial success Trion will have or whether Rift is the fabled “WoW Killer” (and as I wrote elsewhere that’s the wrong question to ask), Trion’s actions with and after launch show me that they get it. I have high confidence based on what I’ve seen and heard that Rift will continue to improve and that Trion is listening to the community.

Hopefully over time the majority of Rift’s players will perceive that as well.

As I have stated previously, Rift has been by far and away the best MMORPG launch I’ve seen in over 2.5 years, including Warhammer Online, Aion, and Allods Online. What has made Trion’s launch of Rift successful? Multiple, synergistic actions:

1. Trion didn’t launch until the game was ready. As Exec Producer Scott Hartsman said to me at WonderCon 2011, they were not going to launch until the game was sufficiently stable and had sufficient content
2. Trion has been unusually communicative about upcoming changes with the community. Examples: the Dev Tracker forum functionality to track all posts by Trion employees, Trion’s participation in 3rd-party fan podcasts, and their honesty in answering my questions in person
3. Trion is willing to make the tough calls to bring classes and specs into balance, even if the decisions are unpopular in the short term. I’m not going to tell you the balance in 1.11 is perfect. It’s not. Balance is an iterative process, and considering that we are ~7 weeks from launch, balance is reasonably good, even better than what I experienced as a 2k Arena Protection Paladin in World of Warcraft’s Cataclysm expansion Patch 4.0.6

Class / spec changes for the sake of balance can be hard on the community, but they are absolutely essential for the long-term health of a game.

UPDATE (2011/04/22): OK, maybe I spoke too soon. On the Alpha 1.2, the CC immunity and 30% stun proc for Ground of Strength have not been touched. /sigh

UPDATE (2011/04/29): before I forget, the stun proc was removed from GoS in the first update to 1.2 notes published on 4/26. I think the indefinite full CC immunity is still an issue.