There are two takeaways from the panel that I wanted to discuss:

1. the team size and ballpark burn rate
2. the parallels of working across disciplines between the gaming industry and online business

Team Size and Ballpark Burn Rate

Rich and Dallas talked about the massive headcount involved in delivering the work:

• 30 Producers / Project Managers
• 75 Designers
• 80 Engineers
• 40 Platform
• 10 Localization
• 10 Audio (not including LucasArts)
• 140 Artists
• 280 QA

That’s 665 people total! What is not clear is whether that was the max concurrent team size, or the number of people involved in the lifetime of the project, etc. My impression is that it was the former.

When you know the headcount numbers, you can ballpark the resource costs, i.e. the sum total for of the costs per resource for compensation, benefits, training, equipment, licenses, etc. If we were to assume an average cost per resource of $100K* per year, that’s a burn rate of $67MM USD annually, excluding costs for PR / Marketing, Community Management, hardware / network / data center costs, etc.

* Keep in mind I’m not saying the average salary of a BioWare team member living in Austin is $100K per year. $100K is a ballpark figure that includes not only salary but all of the organizational costs per resource listed above.

So when we hear numbers being thrown around for the cost of developing SWTOR running in the hundreds of millions of dollars, they’re not unreasonable. A team of that scale generates a significant burn rate of millions of dollars on a monthly basis, and the extent to which such a massive team is structured to deliver effectively and managed effectively has a huge impact on the total costs and quality of the deliverable.

Parallels of Working Across Disciplines Between the Gaming Industry and Online Business

One of the big aha’s that Rich and Dallas had was the critical importance of setting up “strike teams” that were multi-disciplinary, i.e. teams that consisted of Designers, Engineers, Artists, QA, etc to work on specific issues and solutions. After the panel, people from other development shops, e.g. from Microsoft’s XBox 360 team, shared that they recently came to the same realization.

What I find interesting is we reached the same conclusion in the Internet business space over a dozen years ago. Launching online products and services required close collaboration across multiple disciplines: Product Managers, Information Architects (who define the site / app structure and functionality from the perspective of the user), Content Writers, Graphic Designers, System Architects, Front-End Engineers (the ones writing the web scripting / pages), Back-End Engineers (the ones implementing the middleware, business rules, databases, integration with other systems, etc), etc.

The good thing is that as developers learn to better execute and manage these large-AAA launches, the smoother the process should be and the better the end product for gamers.

Follow Me

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

At GDC 2012, I interviewed En Masse Entertainment COO Patrick Wyatt on bringing TERA, a Korean MMORPG game, to the West (North America, Europe).

Here are notable segments from our conversation:

• 1:02: respective roles of the developer (Bluehole Studio, BHS) and the publisher (EME)
• 2:08: specific changes being made to the game for the West. In terms of process, BHS owns making the game code changes, and EME facilitates this process by designing the changes to be implemented and synthesizing feedback from the community
• 6:27: how BHS is making different versions of the game for different locales
• 8:30: Patrick confirms that the core combat mechanics remain unchanged for the West
• 9:24: the hitbox implementation. Range/reach across hitbox sizes has been normalized, so a Baraka and Popori have the same reach for attacks. Character size does influence easy it is to be hit or healed
• 10:56: decision to go with Frogster as the publisher for EU TERA
• 11:42: establishing EME as a premier game publisher, in terms of their relationship with game developers and the community
• 17:02: EME’s analytics capabilities to understand what players are doing

For more discussion on this interview, see the thread on the TERA official forums.

Let me know your questions and feedback.

Follow Me

Twitter: @taugrim
Stream: http://twitch.tv/taugrim
YouTube: http://youtube.com/taugrimtaugrim
Facebook: http://facebook.com/taugrim
Host on GAMEBREAKER: http://www.gamebreaker.tv

When I attended GDC back in 2010, “Social” was the big buzzword as there was a lot of attention paid to the burgeoning Social Gaming market. Skimming this year’s schedule, “F2P” (Free-to-Play) and “Cross-Platform” are the hot keywords.

Why the shift in focus?

Let’s talk about F2P first. In a nutshell, the business model is to entice players to download and try your game and convert some of them to paying customers. The concept has been around for years and as the Internet’s infrastructure has matured, it has become an increasingly cost-efficient and viable distribution platform.

Most Social Games have been F2P from inception, as the games are very lightweight to download, require no separate (e.g. Facebook Apps / Games) or minimal (e.g. App Store) installation, and have viral incentives to encourage players to rope in their friends.

However, the traditional gaming markets, PC Gaming and Console Gaming, have their roots in physically-shipped boxed products and the games were – prior to a few years ago – impractical to distribute en masse online as the game downloads were huge relative to the average customer’s bandwidth. The costs of real-world distribution are significant.

The synergistic rise of high-speed Internet access by ISPs and the maturation of CDNs (Content Delivery Networks) has made it feasible and viable to distribute even large games over the Internet. E.g. everyone I know playing SWTOR, which launched 3 months ago, downloaded the 20GB game instead of waiting for installation discs. Contrast this to Blizzard’s The Burning Crusade expansion for World of Warcraft just 5 years ago, where I dragged my wife with me to Target in the East Bay to stand in line with hundreds of other diehard WoW gamers at midnight to buy the game. (The game sold out about a dozen people after us, and there was a near nerd-riot LOL).

So the distribution side of making heavyweight MMORPGs F2P is there. But what about the monetization side? This in my opinion is the bigger challenge. How do you create a game that is sufficiently enjoyable without paying that it attracts and retains players, while still providing virtual goods and other perks that a fraction of the playerbase will gladly pay for? And how do you do this for massively-multiplayer games without creating a game that is essentially “Pay-to-Win”?

F2P is a bad word to the majority of MMORPG players, but that is mainly due to poor design and implementation rather than the concept being flawed itself. I’ve had both positive (Knight Online back in 2005-2006) and negative (Allods Online in 2010) experiences with F2P properties. Back in KO, one of my guildees, a pizza shop owner down in Brazil, was forking out hundreds of USD a month to maximize his enjoyment of the game, and I became a monthly sub ($15 USD) because it was worth it to me as a full-time working stiff who valued his free time.

The PC and Console Gaming industries have the benefit of watching what has worked with Social Games, which have proven that players will pay for convenience and for virtual goods, e.g. cosmetics / customization / in-game items, etc. Microtransactions FTW.

It’s only in recent years that some of the larger mainstream MMORPGs have transitioned to F2P, e.g. Turbine’s LOTRO and NCSoft’s Aion. Industry analysts and bloggers have been predicting the end of P2P (Pay-to-Play) games for a few years now, and while the industry is moving in that direction, P2P games are not dead yet – see EA/BioWare’s SWTOR and ArenaNet’s upoming Guild Wars 2 launch.

One huge reason why games are still P2P is that game developers need to recoup their sunk costs to reach product launch. E.g. the estimates for SWTOR have ranged anywhere from $100-200+MM USD. (The ironic thing: the most common complaint I’ve heard about SWTOR is the lack of endgame content or issue-free content. But hey we’re gamers and we’re never satisfied, amirite?).

And here’s the basic problem: how to make a P2P game scale its customer base over time. Having a hefty (e.g. $50 USD) price tag is a significant deterrent to acquiring new customers. Arguably no developer has figured it out aside from Blizzard with WoW, and even Blizzard started offering WoW to level 20 for free last summer.

As MMORPG developers sort out F2P, what I expect to happen is for the large-scale AAA-quality launches, e.g. the RIFTs’, SWTOR’s, and GW2′s, to be continue to be P2P at launch to recoup the sunk costs, and for those games to eventually transition to F2P but with mechanics that entice players to pay on a recurring (subscription) basis, expansion basis (GW / GW2), or microtransaction basis. We’ve already seen Trion Worlds offer new mounts (spider!) for a microtransaction even though the game is P2P and requires a monthly sub. This shift from P2P to F2P for a given game may be necessary to achieve a sustained net-gain of customers over time after the initial “burst” of customers at launch. And to do it right means that the developer would need to consider F2P mechanics before the game transitions from F2P to P2P.

Follow Me

Twitter: @taugrim
Stream: http://twitch.tv/taugrim
YouTube: http://youtube.com/taugrimtaugrim
Facebook: http://facebook.com/taugrim
Host on GAMEBREAKER: http://www.gamebreaker.tv

• 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/

• 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.

When Patch 1.1 went live, the forums were flooded with threads by players claiming that their class had been unfairly nerfed, especially players of my Warrior spec Riftblade. I have been skimming or ignoring the whine-oriented threads on the Warrior forums, as most of the negative viewpoints are not grounded on actual game mechanics and are narrow in their perspective.

That said, there was one thread that caught my attention today: Get your flame hats on. The creator of this thread complained about a podcast from a fan site, and the topic of this podcast was Producer Adam Gershowitz on Class Balance & Patch 1.1.

I listened to the entire podcast, and it’s well worth your time if you want to hear Trion’s perspective on the current state of the game. The interviewer asked a lot of sharp, perceptive questions – and keep in mind the podcast hosts are players and not Trion employees. One particularly interesting comment from Gersh was that once certain specs were brought into balance in 1.1 (e.g. Saboteur), it made issues with other specs much more visible. Gersh said they are looking at Rogues and that they will look at abilities such as Pyro’s Ground of Strength.

I’m pleasantly surprised how much material Trion has been providing on Rift – I haven’t seen this level of interaction with the community from any major game developer, ever. While some people say that Trion hasn’t innovated with Rift, I disagree. Just thinking in terms of community, Trion provides

• Highly visible developer-to-community communication, e.g. via the Dev Tracker forum and fan site podcasts
• Social media integration for player-to-player communication – e.g. you can record and upload videos while playing straight to YouTube

These are clearly differentiated, intentional distinctions in the current market.

I am going to continue to check out The RIFT podcast and blog when I have time as the content is high quality. If you see other interesting news or insightful material, please post links to it.

P.S. I am level 50 now, and IMO Riftblade is still viable @ 50 in PVP, and I have really good footage from Rank 1 (beginner) 50 World PVP and warfronts. I haven’t had time to work on my next video yet. I’ll get there, stay tuned.

It was awesome to hear the perspective of the panelists on my question. On the panel (in order of speaking):
- Scott Hartsman, Exec Producer, Rift
- Dirk Metzger, VP Publishing, Zentia
- Nick Huggett, Customer Experience Manager, Runes of Magic

I am encouraged by the launch of Rift thus far – Trion has shown that it *is* possible to deliver a high-polish, content-rich game at launch and that the industry is learning from recent spectacular failures.

At WonderCon 2011, I caught up with 3 of Trion’s employees, Exec Producer Scott Hartsman and Community Managers Elrar and Zann, about their recently-launched MMORPG Rift.

Transcript

For full disclosure, these were questions I came up with on the spot, and this was an ad-hoc conversation – the Trion guys didn’t know what I was going to ask.

Me: You came on board about 2 years ago, so how did you help shape or change the direction of the game?

Scott Hartsman (Exec Producer): For me it was really about taking a look at what had already been done, what was already in place, and figuring out how to get from where they were to where we could launch a game that was AAA. And it was amazing to me how much was actually there. I mean it was by far one of the most functional teams with functional technology, and we were in the process of getting the game from Dev mode to Beta mode and later Launch mode. So it was more about guiding, and it really wasn’t about coming in to be Thor with a hammer.

Me: So you had a great staff to work with, a talented staff?

Scott: Yes, an amazing staff.

Me: So how did you guys make the decision as far as the timing of the launch, because I’ve been really impressed with the game after only 5 weeks. I’ve experienced no server downtime (Editor’s note: there have been maintenance windows but they have typically shorter than a half-hour, not the several hours unplanned downtime I have experienced with new titles), no client crashes, no unplanned downtime. So how did you guys, how did you build a case to wait long enough until the game was polished enough to launch?

Scott: It was really simple. We had support all the way up to the Executive Board. All the games that have all flopped in the last number of years have largely flopped because they either didn’t have enough to do or they fell down. And so to us those were the 2 key things, that until we were confident that we were stable, until we were confident that we had enough to do, no one was going to let us launch, so we didn’t have anyone kicking us out the door before it was ready.

Me: So you guys were all aligned about the timing of the launch?

Scott: Everybody was.

Me: That’s good because I feel like that’s been part of what has really killed several titles, the perception of the players.

Scott: I agree.

Me: Congratulations and thank you so much for your time.

Scott: Absolutely, very nice meeting you.

————————————————————————

Elrar (Community Manager): We are the voice of the Development team when they are too busy working. We’re there to field the questions from you guys and then go to the Development team, let them know about it, and we get information back.

Me: You guys made a conscious decision to host your own forums and there is a lot of debate about [doing] that, there are some really good articles I’ve read such as Taming the Forum Tiger, it talked about the risk of having your own forum versus letting other people  host it. So, how do you guys feel about the interaction with the community, because I feel objectively that the community over-reacted a little bit to some of the changes being put in place in 1.1. People are unhappy with changes, even to those things that are objectively “overpowered” that have been tweaked. What do you do with that?

Elrar: So the first thing you always need to keep in mind is that change is hard, so, when you change something there is inevitably going to be someone who doesn’t like it. So you take that, and then you go: “OK, now is he reacting to the change or to a negative effect of that change?” Once you find that out, then you go: “Is that negative effect a valid concern, is that something we might want to look into?” And then from there we pass that on, and then Development team will take that and use all the metrics they get from the game and the qualitative information they get from the players and combine that to come up with the best decision possible. So, not all negative feedback is bad, and we try and understand why do players feel this way and then address that. Either it’s a perception issue or an actual issue. How can we explain it or improve it so that you come to accept the changes more easily?

Me: If there are inaccurate perceptions about the state of the game or state of balance, how do you guys shape or influence that, because people are going to believe whatever they are going to believe, and I think sometimes people tend to react emotionally on the forums?

Elrar: Sometimes we just need to let it simmer, let people just go out there and play the changes. And then eventually they might come back in a weekend and go “OK, I’m into this” or “I’ve found a build that plays the way I want, e.g. really big crits or something like that.” People adapt to changes, they’ll figure out how [they] can enjoy the game. It’s a very small percentage of people who actually just go “this was too much and I don’t want to play this anymore.” And you know what, sometimes it’s perfectly understandable. Sometimes it’s just not the game for you. There’s so many more people who eventually go “I understand why they made the changes, I don’t like them because it makes my class less fun, but on the whole it makes the game more enjoyable for everyone.”

Rift Schwag FTW!

Thanks Scott, Elrar, and Zann for taking the time to share your thoughts. As the t-shirt says, we’re not in Azeroth anymore

• Warhammer Online
• Aion
• Allods Online
• Rift

Rift’s game developer, Trion, has been remarkably savvy in how they have handled the game thus far, in particular by:

1. Not over-hyping their game then under-delivering. My impression is that Rift has mostly spread by word-of-mouth; my gaming friend Nathan and real life friend Gaardarun both raved about Rift from Beta
2. Delivering a stable, polished game at launch, with a clear path for implementing frequent updates/fixes with minimal downtime. The game servers have been taken down for maintenance at times, but the longest I’ve seen so far is 30 minutes, and Trion has managed expectations on downtimes pretty well. I.e. there hasn’t been that 12-hour unplanned downtime that we all dislike
3. Borrowing innovations from other games. Rift has taken some of the best mechanics and design features from games such as Warhammer, including the PVP mechanics for “tanks” such as Guard, Taunt, Hold the Line, etc and Detaunt. And other game features such as Achievements, Guild Achievements, Guild Ranks, etc that originated in Warhammer (and which Blizzard also copied)
4. Designing the most flexible spec system ever, which is both fun-to-play and IMO shields Trion from the class/spec griping from the playerbase

That last point has huge implications. Consider the following example with WoW. You roll a Paladin to heal at endgame as Holy, but you are unhappy with nerfs or issues for your spec. What are your options?

• Continue to play the spec and hope for future buffs, or
• Re-spec to Protection or Retribution and re-gear, or
• Roll a different Healing class, re-level to endgame, and then re-gear

Those are all crappy options to me, given that I value my time and what I enjoy most is endgame not grinding to get back to endgame. I know some people have been conditioned to accept the current market standards and would say “suck it up and re-level, it’s what I did” but I think that is a lousy customer experience.

With Rift, you can simply change which 3 of the 9 talent trees you are playing as a Healer (Cleric). Rift’s flexible spec system protects players from making a steep time investment in a class that they are later unsatisfied with for whatever reason.

The other implication of the spec system is that there are fewer opportunities for (real or perceived) imbalance between specs for the same class. Everyone knows a spec change has a low switching cost. No need to re-roll, re-level, and re-gear from scratch.

Is Rift the next “WoW Killer”? I don’t know and frankly don’t care. It’s the wrong question to ask – the right question is whether a game supports a virtuous cycle:

Trion made the right decision as to when the game was ready to launch, thereby avoiding the irreparable damage that was done by launching too early, as we saw with Warhammer Online and Age of Conan.

Will Trion continue to re-invest in the game over time? It’s too early to tell, but my impression is that they have a sharp management team, a perception further reinforced by an interview with Trion’s Marketing head back in December that I read today, while trying to find paying subscriber numbers. I haven’t been able to find those numbers yet – if you see any good articles please link them.

From a bigger picture perspective, Trion gives me hope for the “traditional MMORPG” market. Just over a year ago, I expressed concern that game developers were moving away from traditional MMORPGs and instead investing in social gaming. Trion shows how to do traditional MMORPGs right.

Please keep in mind that this is my honest, objective opinion. Like many of you, I’ve been burned by bloggers who hype up new games which only end up disappointing.

AO’s Closed Beta was a very positive experience for many players. So what happened at the start of Open Beta? To understand the situation, let’s discuss the basics of a F2P (free-to-play) game from a player perspective:

1. you don’t have to pay for the game client
2. you don’t have to pay for game account(s)
3. you can play the game without having to pay, or you can optionally pay for virtual goods and/or in-game “buffs”

The success of a F2P game depends on the game’s ability to acquire new players and convert some of them into paying customers without alienating the non-paying players, who are advocates for the game and may eventually convert. Typically 10% or less of the playerbase of a F2P game spends real money on the game and the other 90% of the playerbase plays it for free.

An Example of Savvy F2P Core Game Design: KnightOnline

There is a lot of cynicism among players regarding F2P games, but I have played a game, KnightOnline (KO), that had a savvy design for its “item shop.” Let me first state that KO had some major game design and implementation flaws – notably the game was very hackable and exploitable. I’m not here to say that KO was a “good” game, but KO elegantly supported its item shop via two game mechanics:

1. the magic anvil for upgrading items
2. the buff scrolls for PVP

The magic anvil was usable by anyone, and you could upgrade any gear piece or weapon to +1, +2, etc up to +8. Each plus rating granted a significant improvement to the item’s performance, and typically players tried to get gear up to +6 (very good) or +7 (excellent) or even +8 (amazing). And for the cool factor +8 weapons glowed! However, there was a catch: when you attempted to upgrade an item, if the upgrade failed the item was destroyed, and as you tried to upgrade the item to higher plus ratings, the probability for an upgrade to fail increased. KO’s item shop allowed you to buy an item called a “trina” for $15 USD which would increase the success chance of an upgrade by ~20%. This may not sound like a good deal, but consider that upgrading from +6 to +7 had a ~25% success chance, so a trina brought that up to ~45% or almost double. For some players, the risk of having a very rare weapon or item burn in the upgrade process wasn’t worth the time it would take to farm it again, so they would purchase trinas (in my case mostly through a monthly subscription) to use when upgrading very rare items starting from +5 and up.

In KO, you could get equivalent buffs from either a player priest or from buff scrolls. Enemies could place a debuff on you that would cancel out a priest buff or scroll buff. But here’s was the catch: when you removed the debuff, any priest buffs would need to be re-applied, whereas if you had a buff scroll, once the debuff was removed you still had the buff effect. Simply put, buff scrolls were simpler and more reliable from a playability standpoint.

So when I played KO back in 2005 you didn’t have to pay to play the game, but I and others in my guild eventually signed up for the optional $15 USD monthly subscription because we felt it was worthwhile to do so. And that’s how the F2P model should work – you get hooked, you see the benefit of paying, you become a paying customer. Some of our guildees paid more than $50 USD per month – more than triple your typical P2P monthly subscription – to buy virtual goods such as trinas. One guildee, a business owner from Brazil, was paying $100+ USD per month.

KO’s game developer made some F2P changes after I quit playing in 2006 that I thought were poor ideas, such as login queues for players who didn’t pay. But I saw firsthand how the trina concept and buff concept successfully motivated players to pay real money for virtual goods. It was incredible to witness from a business perspective.

The Paradox of Allods Online Planned F2P System

Now that I’ve described a functional F2P example, let’s talk about the game mechanics in AO at endgame and the implications for the players. When you die at endgame you get a debuff, Fear of Death (FoD), for 51 minutes that lowers your stats by 25%, and the debuff can stack up to 4 times.

Currently you can remove the debuff by getting resurrected by another player. However in version 1.0.07.07 resurrection will not remove the debuff so your options are:

1. spend in-game coin, or
2. wait until the debuff wears off, or
3. use an Item shop consumable called Perfume, or
4. some combination of the above

Perfume costs $13.50 USD for a stack of 20, and they last 30 minutes each. Therefore if you die 20 times a month and decide to use Perfume to remove the debuff each time, you’ll be spending $13.50 USD per month, which is conspicuously close to the industry-standard monthly sub of $15 USD. The FoD / Perfume mechanic effectively turns AO from a F2P game into a P2P game because the game experience of not paying will be lousy. The game operator and developer are not going to pull the wool over anyone’s eyes about this.

The kicker is you get the FoD debuff if you die in PVE or PVP. This is more harsh than the item repair costs incurred when dying in PVE in WoW. The FoD mechanic has major implications in terms of growing the playerbase and the extent to which players will participate in activities such as PVP where death is part of the experience. I was hoping to see robust, active PVP in endgame for AO, but with the FoD mechanic, it’s not going to happen.

Who is to Blame for the Allods Online Situation?

Some players are claiming that the game operator gPotato is pulling a  “bait and switch.” Certainly, gPotato has culpability in terms of the initial outrageous Item Shop pricing, e.g. $20 USD for a backpack with 24 slots instead of the 18 you start with.

However, the situation may go much deeper than just the game operator. Check out the following comments from a Russian player regarding the game developer:

Guys if u r really do not understand what is going on, i will explain to you from Russian point of view. Firstly – original developer team stopped developing Allods Online at CBT1-2 at Russia, because Nival – company developer, merged with astrum and mail.ru, main game designer left this project because he had another point of view on this game before he could finish it, new director came, after that Allods progress stopped almost completely, mail.ru bought AstrumNival so at this point game was destroyed, because mail.ru is the most greedy russian game service platform.That explains why they cannot fix music and sounds easily, why it tooks so long of them to fix bugs, why animations are partly ruined and Kanian fem for example run through ground, and explains why there are bugs in game that were already fixed before, they just do not know the code well, and they are not capable of further Allods creation. Allods original developers and designer are working now on project that has Dota like gameplay, and that explains why you have a feeling of unfinished good game,because allods creation was stopped at Closed Russian Beta. But however they see the situation so they r trying to make the maximum profit out of game until it will be too late, because they r not capable of programming anything really new, because they have not developed this game, period. even russians not happy with shop, not even game not finished but i found myself not able to afford stuff

If that information is correct, the game changes in version 1.0.07.07 are being designed and implemented by people who were not part of the original development team. Yikes.

When a game has contuinity in the development team’s leadership and staff, it’s reasonable to expect the following positive outcomes:

• there is clarity on the game’s business model
• there is consistent alignment on the game design: the core game mechanics, the direction for content, and how to improve and evolve the game over time
• there is consistency in the quality of implementation because the development team has learned over time how to architect, design, develop, test, and scale the game, and they know the code base inside and out
• there is a consistent feeling of ownership by the people working on the game – it’s “my game” as opposed to “someone else’s game that I’m working on”
• there are strong relationships between the game developer and its customers (the game publishers and game operators) and they collaborate to create a compelling player experience that drives revenue

However, as noted in the comments above, there may have been significant turnover in the AO development team at both the leadership and staff level. It’s unclear to what extent there is a development team that is continuing to work on the game.

I truly hope gPotato and the game developer can sort the situation out in a way that makes sense from a business perspective and from a player perspective, because AO is an excellent game property.

Update @ 8pm PST, 22 February 2010:

There is a great thread by galethbg regarding the ownership structure and history of the companies involved in AO’s development. This at least gives me some hope that there may be some stability and continuity on the AO development team. Hopefully the game developer will heed the worldwide player feedback on the upcoming changes and adjust them in a more reasonable fashion.

In addition, gPotato is now solicting feedback about the Item Shop on their forums, which is a step in the right direction.

Update @ 1am PST, 23 February 2010:

gPotato has posted an article that communicates the development team is intact and that gPotato is evaluating the Item Shop prices based on the feedback thread listed in the previous update.

Update @ 3 March 2010:

gPotato has reduced the prices in the Item Shop to what I consider reasonable levels. Good news for fans of AO!