Switch to free-to-play makes a mess of LOTRO community, film at eleven

Many were the dire predictions that the LOTRO community would take a nosedive in quality once Turbine launched the new free-to-play business model. And they were right – sort of. This last week, reading the LOTRO forums has made me want to bash my head against a wall due to the stupidity and selfishness of a large slice of the community.

Needless to say, I’m not talking about the influx of new players since the game went free-to-play. I’m talking about a large slice of the old-timers.

Here’s a quick summary of what Turbine have done with LOTRO. Last week, you could:

• Pay $15/month and play the game, or;
• Pay nothing and not play the game

This week, you can:

• Pay $15/month and play the game, or;
• Pay nothing and play the first few zones, with some restrictions on bag space, etc., or;
• Pay one-off fees to unlock zones worth of quests, as well as other traditional cash shop perks such as mounts, storage space, etc.

You may notice that this week, you have exactly the same subscription option you had last week, plus the option to pay as you go, plus the option to at least log in and do some stuff for free. So, naturally, a large slice of the player base chucked a colossal tantrum and started carrying on like spoiled two-year-olds because Turbine didn’t give them everything in the game for free.

The core of the tantrum being people who felt that having purchased the base game box (Shadows of Angmar, aka SoA) at some point in the last few years should entitle them to unlock all the quests in all the zones in the base game. This is nine zones, which would cost a little over $50.00 to unlock one by one, and would, effectively, give anyone who ever had an account during the pre-free-to-play era a lifetime subscription. The majority of them could quite comfortably cancel their subscription, never spend another cent, and enjoy the game in a manner scarcely distinguishable from how it was previously when they were subscribed (since most character restrictions, like bag space, riding skill, trait slots and gold cap, are waived for characters created or played while a subscription was in effect).

Such a scheme would, as far as I can tell, basically destroy Turbine’s revenue stream, and kill the game. But regardless, it all boils down to one simple thing: these whining ungrateful little shits have just been given a bunch of stuff for free, not had anything taken away from them, and they’re screeching and crying as if Turbine just stole their teddy bear at gunpoint.

It makes me sick. Fortunately, I can mostly avoid it by staying away from the forums, and in-game, with the relatively inoffensive new players and their stupid names, “your gay lol” idiocy, and inane chatter about how WoW sucks balls and is the worst game ever made / WoW rulez and is a million times better than LOTRO. I’ll take a week of that over an hour of whining brats trumpeting their sense of entitlement.

In other news, I was quite proud when I got the ”Undying” title on my Warden. I’ve done it again:

And I’m even more proud to have achieved it with a completely untwinked Burglar on a new server – and a new server suffering from some heavy load and lagspikes - than I was with my Warden kitted out with the best weapons and jewellery that my other characters could craft.

One must queue to simply walk into Mordor

Something I have never seen before in LOTRO:

 

This was on the new server Crickhollow I chose – there was also queues on a number of other servers. Looks like I’m not the only one enjoying the free-to-play relaunch!

LOTRO Free Middle Earth arrives

So, Turbine’s new “Free Middle Earth” free-to-play version of Lord of the Rings Online has landed, hot on the heels of EverQuest II Extended. I jumped on briefly last night, creating a new character on one of the four new servers, to see what was happening.

First of all, the game is buzzing just as crazily as EQ2X. The server was packed with players, and from the conversations in chat, quite a lot of them are entirely new to the game. I think there is definitely potential for this to replicate the success Turbine had with D&D Online when they relaunched that as free-to-play.

Secondly, LOTRO was always an attractive game, but since I last played, I’ve replaced my PC with a new rig. The patch that accompanied the free launch added DirectX 11 support, and by happy coincidence, my new machine has a Radeon 5770. So I enabled the new DirectX 11 stuff, cranked all the settings up to high and turned on anti-aliasing, and now we are talking a seriously attractive game.

 

Those looks, running at a rock solid 60 fps, definitely put a smile on my face. It’s hard to believe that this game is well over three years old and has had its graphics kept up-to-date like this.

I haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about LOTRO’s free-to-play / subscription hybrid model yet, but I have to say, I expect it to be much better suited to my playstyle than EQ2X’s “subscribe or bust” approach.

EverQuest II Extended – does it hit the mark?

So, it’s of course old news by now that Sony are launching a free-to-play version of EverQuest II, known as EverQuest II Extended. It is technically still in beta, but there will be no character wipe between now and “launch”, so effectively, it is launched.

I played EQ2 a while ago. Can’t remember exactly when, probably mid-2008 when the pre-Lich King ennui made me suspend my WoW account. There was a lot to like about it, but ultimately, I didn’t feel it distinguished itself enough to keep my interest, as well as suffering from a few key issues like boring combat and a low server population.

But certainly my memories aren’t entirely negative, so I decided to check out the new F2P incarnation of the game. I’ve played a few sessions this week, getting my Barbarian Inquisitor to level 16, and have some opinions about the hybrid F2P/subscription model that Sony have come up with.

The hybrid model

We saw this idea when D&D Online went free-to-play – there is still the option of a traditional $15/month subscription, but it is supplemented by a greatly restricted free option, with microtransactions to unlock various restrictions. Turbine have also announced a similar model for the upcoming free-to-play change to Lord of the Rings Online.

EQ2X is similar – you can play for free (“bronze” membership), you can make a one-time $10.00 purchase to remove some of the restrictions (“silver” membership), or you can pay a monthly or yearly subscription (“gold” and “platinum” membership). And I get a strong feeling that Sony’s goal is to push people, not towards casual play and microtransaction purchases, but towards the subscription plans.

What do you only get with a subscription? There is a membership plan matrix here, but some highlights include:

• Access to all classes - only 8 are available without subscription. You can’t even buy them individually, although I believe Sony have said that are planning to add that to the shop.
• Access to the highest levels of ability upgrades.
• Access to the highest grades of equipment, Legendary and Fabled.
• Access to the broker system – although, again, this is to be added to the non-subscription accounts in the form of tokens on the cash shop, i.e. a cash fee for every item you wish to buy or sell on auction.

To me, that is starting to feel more like the bronze and silver memberships are an extremely generous free trial, rather than a genuine free game.

What I don’t think will work well

Class and race restrictions. The free game only allows access to 8 out of 24 classes, and 4 out of 19 races. On the face of it, selling access to classes and races might seem a good model, but the problem is: you need to get F2P players hooked in order to get them to spend money. And once they’re hooked, do they want to buy access to a new class and race, and then ditch their existing character to reroll from level one? I wouldn’t be terribly inclined to do so.

Chat restrictions. Bronze members cannot use “broadcast” channels, such as /auction, /level, /shout, or any other chat option that broadcasts to a large amount of other players. Many people feel that this both makes the game feel rather empty, compared to the buzzing chat channels people are used to; and also that it makes it rather hard for new players who are still getting the hang of the game to actually ask questions or seek help! This feels more like a restriction you’d put on a free trial account to discourage spammers than something you would inflict on people who you see as genuine customers.

The broker restrictions. I love to see a vibrant economy in a game. I’ll reserve judgement on this one until I’ve properly checked it out for myself, but I’m worried that banning non-subscription players from buying and selling at auction will seriously hurt the economy – and that this will hurt the subscription players as well as the free players.

Legendary and Fabled item restrictions. I’m not enough of an EQ2 vet to know how restrictive this is, but I’ve already read of the disappointment of finishing an epic quest chain and receiving a reward that you’re not even allowed to use! It has also been suggested that this renders group dungeon runs pretty pointless for free players since the loot will be unusable. But this is also an opportunity for Sony: why not sell consumable “legendary and fabled attunement” tokens in the cash shop, so each such item you get your hands on requires a nominal real-money spend to use?

But we’ll see

Look, certainly the game is drawing a crowd. Certainly, comparing the starter zone I’ve been playing in this week to my experiences of two years ago, it’s chalk and cheese. There are a lot of players running around. And this is playing in Australian evening time, not prime time. I’m having some fun, and I’ll certainly carry on giving EQ2X a chance to see how it goes this time around for me.

Community through labour

Back when I was involved in an ill-fated startup company, I used to share an office with our partner company, a games studio. The guys there were a convivial bunch, all pretty young, all male, united by making games at a place that was, frankly, something of a sweatshop. They had a bit of a regular thing going where they would generally go out drinking at the local pub on Thursday nights - and then often shamble into work on Friday morning rather the worse for wear.

One day, one of the newer guys asked one of the old-timers, "Why do we do this to ourselves? Why don't we go out for a drink on Friday night so we don't have to get up and come to work the next morning?"

The response? "Because on Friday night we go out with our real friends."

What's the point of this anecdote? Keen from Keen & Graev's has been writing a series of blog posts on "Old MMO Mechanics I Love and You Probably Hate," and this morning I read part three in the series. He's talking largely about mechanics from the original EverQuest here, and the common theme of group camping, rare spawn camping, dungeon camping etc. seems to be the community this engendered.

Hanging around with a group of other players while one person goes and pulls mobs back to the camp to be killed? To the current MMO generation that probably sounds like a bad thing, that would happen if people ran out of content and were forced to grind XP. To Keen, this was "the most fun [way to level] because it allowed me to socialize with people and form a connection with others playing the game. This was a catalyst for a very, very close-knit community later."

And this is what made me think of socializing with workmates. I've worked for eight different companies in my career as a programmer and I have really enjoyed the camaraderie at all of them. When you spend a lot of time with people, working in a common cause to do something that can often be boring or frustrating, you make friends. But you know what? I've made friends doing things I enjoyed doing too, friends that I shared interests with, not just an employer. Making friends while doing something boring is a consolation prize, not a reason to do something boring.

And that's why Keen is right to predict that I would probably hate these mechanics.

How quickly is it OK to judge an MMORPG?

So I got into the closed beta of Battle of the Immortals, an isometric style MMO being translated from the Chinese by Perfect World Entertainment. I wrote a moderately lengthy post about it on the mmorpg.com forums which I may fatten up into a blog post, but the quick summary is, I played for a few hours, got to level 24, and didn't like it, concluding that it was (a) a confusing, poorly translated mess and (b) considerably less fun to play than Diablo II (my main point of reference for isometric action RPGs), despite that game being almost ten years old.

Anyway, I was taken to task by one of the regular posters there, who reckons that my opinion is not going to be taken very seriously when I've only seen the early game, and not tried PvP (which, apparently, becomes accessible at level 31). Basically, he said, all games are the same from level 1-20, and not a single one is any good.

Needless to say, I disagree with this. If there was not a single MMORPG which was any good for the early hours of play, this hobby would have been dead in the water a decade ago, and it certainly wouldn't have been my main leisure activity these last six years. But it got me thinking: just how quickly can I judge an MMORPG without being unreasonable?

My thinking is, as someone who has tried an awful lot of MMOs, that I can judge pretty quickly if a game is no good. Every MMO that I have spent any significant amount of time playing - Horizons, WoW, EVE Online, LOTRO, EQ2, Runes of Magic, Atlantica Online - has had something to it that hooked me right from the start. Whether it was immediately fun gameplay, intriguing mechanics, story, or just plain being different from the crowd, they all made me want to log back in and play more.

Battle of the Immortals did not. I played a couple of sessions and had to force myself to even log in to play a third to get as far as I did.

So, while I can conclude that every game I have enjoyed had some hook right from the start, I can't necessarily argue that no game which did not have that hook would be entertaining. It's very possible that there are games that I've tried for a couple of hours and ditched, which would have opened up and become genuinely entertaining if I'd given them a better chance.

But, you know what? I don't care. I'm not starved for games to play. If a developer can't manage to build an early game which isn't boring, I don't feel bad about denying them the chance to wow me with their endgame. I think possibly the biggest blight on this genre is that developers have learned that Achiever-type personalities can be lured into playing games which simply aren't fun in order to achieve in-game goals, and for that reason feel they can avoid making gameplay their number one priority.

Imagine playing an arcade shoot-em-up which isn't very good. Endless waves of similar enemies, no variety, a single slow-firing gun on your ship. You're about to walk away with your pocket still half full of change, when someone tells you how awesome the final boss battle is.

Do you bang your head against an un-fun game for hours (spending a bunch of change in the process) to try to get to this supposedly fun boss battle? Or do you say, "screw that, I'm playing 1942 instead, that game rules."

I'm of the latter school of thought. If you can't make your game fun to play from the start, there are other developers who can.

Turbine makes me an offer I can't refuse

All the LOTRO expansions you don't already have, plus a month's play time, all for only $9.99? Now that's an offer too good to refuse. I jumped onto LOTRO's latest free weekend this morning, knocked over a couple more stages of the now-soloable epic questline (finally, Dori, you are free, after a year or so on my quest log!), and then found this deal being advertised.

I haven't actually applied the key to my account yet, since hey, I'm playing for free this weekend, might as well make the most of it! And I have to say, I'm not sure that the Mirkwood expansion offers a whole lot for my puny level 39 self. But $9.99 to lock in a month's playtime, and getting my account fully up to date with the latest expansion in the process - that, I had to say "yes" to.