Flyv's Warcraft Blog

The stupidity of game distribution and MMOs

It's open beta season in MMOs, with Aion, Champions Online, Fallen Earth, Cities XL, etc all fighting for some buzz. Part of the marketing cycle is the beta, and the suits behind Aion and Champions Online are busy beavers promoting the hell out of their games via distribution channels. And while it does work to build some excitement, it's abusive to gamers.

Abuse #1 is the lock FilePlanet has on so much online distribution. The marketing guys at the MMO companies have been convinced to let FilePlanet not only exclusively host downloads, but also exclusively hand out closed beta keys. Both Aion and Champions Online had periods where the only way to access the beta was by having a paid-for FilePlanet account. Requiring gamers to pay FilePlanet to access a buggy pre-release game is wrong. Champions later had beta keys available for non-paying FilePlanet members, which isn't quite so bad. Only FilePlanet is a terrible, awful user experience. Why would Cryptic want to interpose that company between itself and its customers?

Abuse #2 is the pre-order of retail software. Champions Online provided five different preorder options, with varying perqs:

1. GameStop: costume, flight at level 1, early start
2. Walmart: fancy box, micropayment money, early start 
3. Best Buy: vanity pet, damage resistance item, early start 
4. Amazon: costume pieces, micropayment money, early start
5. Direct2Drive:  costume pieces, no early start 

The most confusing part of this all is the lack of early start at Direct2Drive: Why do that to only some of your customers? They're pissed. 

It's also disappointing that they'd have so many different mutually-exclusive bonuses. The cosmetic stuff and micropayment money don't bother me so much, but flying at level 1? An item that helps you avoid damage? Presumably they won't matter much later in the game, but why give those abilities to some customers and not others?

The answer to why is simple: a business deal. Separate deals, actually, negotiated between Cryptic and each distributor. That explains the FilePlanet beta stuff, too. Money is changing hands, or at least services in trade. It's the customers who suffer, whether by missing out on cool stuff they can't get any other way, having to wait a few more days than others because they pre-ordered from the wrong place, or simply having to deal with crappy service.

I don't really understand why, but traditional retail distributors still have some sway over game publishers. Even MMOs, where you buy the box once and then have a years-long relationship with the publisher. Why aren't all MMOs just available for digital download directly from the publisher? There's no copy protection issues. Bandwidth is pretty cheap ($0.15/gigabyte at retail rates). Gamers don't want to have to go to Walmart to play a game and the local GameStop has long since relegated PC games to one bottom shelf in the back corner. So why do MMO publishers persist in screwy marketing deals?

Update: Champions Online is now on Steam. Why did Cryptic keep that deal a secret?! Purchases via Steam get an in-game pet and some cosmetic effects. "While supplies last". Hurry and act now; we can only manufacture so many rows in the database!

Eve Online: back, then gone

About three years back I played a lot of Eve Online. It's a very interesting game, unique in MMOs. The game's main strength is that it's mostly player-created content. You don't fight NPCs in meaningless raids where the boss resets every week. You go to war with alliances of hundreds of other people, taking their territory or defending your own. It's pretty great in the abstract. Also the game has the most complex economy of any online game. A very deep crafting tree, true supply and demand with market cycles that span months, and an interesting mechanic of multiple markets and difficulty transporting goods to keep the market lumpy. Fun stuff.

Coming back to Eve was fun. A lot of the game was familiar, and my old knowledge was still useful. But a bunch of things changed too. The game's been rebalanced. The economy has shifted some. And they added a whole new tier to the game. Tech 3 gear, wormhole space, Sleeper NPCs, all new and interesting. It was fun coming back with a big enough wallet that I could do what I wanted and a bunch of new stuff to explore.

Except, well, the game has the same old problems. The actual gameplay, the button pushing, is boring. "Piloting by menus", as someone else said. The PvP is too intense for me, too. All my Eve friends talk about the adrenaline rush of a fleet fight, and it's true that PvP feels very real in some weird way, but I'd rather play games to relax than to get amped up. I much prefer Warhammer's casual PvP mechanics to Eve's three hour chess games followed by 90 seconds of lag-drenched terror.

I had some fun with other parts of the game. I got very good at the new Exploration mechanics, system scanning. I understand how w-space operates now pretty well, and am impressed that CCP built a new type of space catered to small corporations and casual players. And I jumped back into my old trading games for a bit, always a bit fun. But there's too many other games to play to keep repeating the same old one.

What finally did me in is CCP's customer support failure. My account lapsed out of subscription before I could apply the $15 PLEX sitting in my hangar. The solution for this is to petition for a 24 hour reinstatement to let you apply the gamecard. Only now CCP's petition system is broken so I can't view the answer they gave me. When I petitioned about that they emailed me to say "oh yeah we know it's broken, we're trying to fix it". I just can't be bothered.

I'm still fond of Eve and would suggest anyone interested in MMO design spend some time with it. The big problem, though, is it takes several months to get up to speed with the game and find a corporation that shows you the fun side of things. Too bad, there's a lot of great ideas in Eve that I wish other games would adopt.

It's time for a new genre of MMO

Just finished playing around with the Champions Online open beta. It seems like an OK game. Nice graphics engine, responsive action oriented combat, and a fantastic character editor that lets you make your toon unique looking. The game basically looks like City of Heroes 2, which is particularly bizarre since Cryptic sold City of Heroes to NCSoft about a year after starting work on Marvel Universe Online which then became Champions Online, the game that's coming out this month. I think there's really only room for one superhero MMO in the world, it's a bit surprising to me that NCSoft has no leverage to stop the old team from making a new competitive game. Then again City of Heroes had major game design flaws, and a brief play of Champions Online suggests it is exactly the same game design, only embellished. Hope that works out better than it looks.

But really I'm here to say it's time for something new. The tutorial level for CO is just like every other MMO out there. Here's your third person over the shoulder view. Here's your character portrait with health and mana (um, energy) bars. Here's your XP meter. Here's your hotbar with a jillions slots for abilities, buttons to press. Here's your aggro management, and your tanking abilities, and your combat against things of similar levels and your item drops and upgrades. Sure there's some small innovations in the game design, some improvements like the mix-and-match power sets. But basically it's the same game as Warhammer, as Warcraft, as Everquest.

When Everquest came out and hit it big every major investor and game producer took notice. "Hey, subscription revenues; there's a good new business model". Warcraft sealed the deal, making it clear there was a lot of money to be made in MMORPGs. And now we've got a zillion competitors, some well funded and some not, some good and some not. But they're all the same damn game. I'm tired of it. Also it seems stupid to try to compete with Blizzard on their own turf. They're uniquely good at making Warcraft, I wouldn't want to go head to head against them.

Where are the innovative MMOs? There's Eve Online, which is incredibly innovative and rich and deep and deadly boring to actually play. There's Puzzle Pirates, which is clever and sort of fun but ultimately too simplistic and childish. Where else can we find unique MMOs with some gameplay other than hotbar based combat?

How do you chat in a console MMO?

CCP just announced Dust 514, a very innovative sounding new FPS/MMO. The launch announcement was all about it being a console MMO, although I imagine a PC version will come. There's also Champions Online, coming out in dual release for PC and Xbox, but Tobold claims the UI is much more console oriented.

I'm delighted to see MMO designers working on console MMOs. But how is that going to work socially? Half the time people spend in PC MMOs is chatting. Not so much about the game, but other random stuff. People telling dumb jokes, blowing off steam, chatting about their girlfriend problems. MMOs have always been IRC chat with dress up dolls and that casual textual interaction is a big part of their stickiness. How is that going to work on a console?

Consoles have no keyboards, no facility for text chat. There is voice chat. But voice chat is hideous and awful and is the first thing you have to turn off in any online game. It's terrible in pick-up groups, where the whiny kid is no longer typing "you faggit you didn't heal me" but is now shouting it in your ears. And it doesn't work for casual social conversation in a guild-size group, because in voice chat only one person can talk at a time. Voice works OK for immediate tactical discussion, but really only if one person is talking; no chance for the minions to contribute observations. And of course, no side-channel whispering to pass the time while the raid leader sets up the next pull.

There is one major console MMO: Final Fantasy XI. I've never played it. How well does it work as a social game? Is there any data on guilds or player behaviour that sheds light on how well MMOs work without a keyboard for chatting?

Warhammer cheating

I got my first taste of Tier 4 RvR in Warhammer yesterday. It was definitely better, socially, people were more organized and there was no PUG-related bickering. It was also pretty bad, technically. The game gets really laggy with 200+ characters all attacking and defending a keep. Which is a shame, since 200+ character fights is what Warhammer should be all about.

And where there's lag, there's bugs. And exploits. I don't know if it's true, but several people in the game thought one specific character was using vgbuddy, a Warhammer hack. Here's a few of the advertised features, along with a demo video.

• MapTele: open your map and click on ANY location to instantly teleport to
• Line of Sight: attacks your enemies through walls and objects 
• 5 user defined speedhack settings
• Self-Rez: respawns where you died
• SlowFall: reduces falling speed
• ... 

I've got no idea if the thing really works. I won't cheat at online games and you'd be a fool to type your password on a computer after installing something like this. But having seen all the various lag related bugs in Warhammer I can believe some of them, particularly the movement related exploits and the line of sight hack.

Exploits like this happen when the game server trusts the user's client too much. Building a teleport exploit is trivial if the server relies on the client to tell it where the person is standing. If the client says "no, I'm over here now" and the server believes it, then poof! you teleported. Hopefully no MMO servers are so stupid as to simply believe that a character moved all the way across the map in an instant, but more subtle versions of that kind of exploit are harder to protect against. And a line of sight exploit is particularly pernicious. To do it right the server needs to be doing LoS calculations for every pair of players at all times, which means the server has to have all the zone geometry loaded and be doing a lot of complex math. That's a lot of work and it wouldn't surprise me if Warhammer (and Warcraft) trust the client to do the LoS calculations. Which leads to exploits.

Game servers have tried over time to be more secure, but in the end they seem to have given up. Instead most online games are protected against cheating by software like Punkbuster (common in FPS games) or Warden (Blizzard's cheat protection for Warcraft). These systems are basically forms of DRM or copy protection, preventing the user from running banned software on their computers. They mostly work, but it's an arms race. Apparently Warhammer does use Punkbuster, and vgbuddy proudly claims "Punkbuster proof". Maybe Mythic is losing the race.

Leadership in social games

The fun thing about online games is it's a social experience. The problem with social gameplay is it requires leadership. You need someone to lead the raid or call the strategy for beating the other team. And you need leadership in the long term, someone to run the guild and see to the social organization.

Leading is tough. You're no longer just pushing the game buttons. You're talking to people, making strategic decisions, bearing the responsibility. And the folks you're leading are there to play a game, not follow orders, so there's not much discipline. It's a pretty chaotic environment and very few people want to try to lead; fewer still are good at it.

I'm surprised online games don't do more to reward and encourage leadership. In the real world leaders get paid more, or own the enterprise, or at least get respect for their efforts. I can't think of a single online game where the reward for leadership is more than some sense of self-satisfaction.

Good leadership is rare in online games, but when it's present it makes all the difference. In Tier 3 on my server Order has been totally demoralized. Destruction has dominated everything for two+ weeks and any time Order has tried to fight back they quickly get thumped down. But when one side dominates everyone loses. There's no long term reward for controlling the map, only for fighting, but with one side so far down no one wants to fight.

Until two nights ago. When a leader showed up on the Order side out of nowhere and took charge. He started small, taking over a few Battlefield Objectives, rallying the troops. When he had enough people following him he led the group to take a keep. Then he said "we are going to defend this keep" and spent his own gold to reinforce it. And now Order has held that keep for most of the last two days. We're still on the ropes, we can't really break out because Destruction still fields larger numbers. But our leader keeps launching new attacks with actual strategy and tactics and for an hour or two we're doing great, winning fights. There's active RvR again, some actual fun.

He's a good leader. He communicates well, he stays positive, he gives others credit. And he tends to win. So here's the thing: he's so good, I suspect he's a Mythic employee. Some customer service rep, or maybe engineer who likes playing the game. I've got no evidence for this, it's just a feeling. He understands the game strategy very well, and he's so confident that he can lead the random folks who turn up that it feels like it's coming from some position of hidden authority. 

And why not? Wouldn't it be great if the guy who has made Warhammer fun for me again was a Mythic employee? Why not have some people playing the game get compensated in some way for making it fun for other players? Full time employees are expensive, so that might not be cost-effective. But why not have good guild leaders get free subscriptions to the game? Or give strong raid leaders extra loot, or at least some vanity titles or items that reward good leaders for their effort?

One last Warcraft login

When I quit WoW three months ago I had terrible timing; my account had just renewed for three months. Well that time is now finally expiring and I logged in one last time to take care of some stuff. Felt a bit sad, a lot of memories came back immediately on logging in. And already new things to see; nice touch that my feral forms are white, to match my hairstyle. But in the past three months I haven't missed the game at all and like having all that time back. I'm resolved to never get as deep into an MMO again and am a happier person for it.

I will say this for WoW though, it works a lot better than Warhammer. I'd forgotten how nice it was to play a game with really fast graphics and no network lag. There's a great article about all the problems in Warhammer and what went wrong with the game. But it doesn't emphasize the number one WAR problem for me: it just doesn't quite work right. In fact I'd say no MMO works as well as WoW. There's a lot to be said for 60 fps and < 300ms lag. (Team Fortress 2 has that property too, as did Counterstrike; I think it's part of why those games have longevity.)

While I'm here let me suggest you also read Tobold's recent series on "Why we play", particularly the article on Gameplay. 

So I can only advise everyone who wants to design a game to spend a lot of time and thought right at the start on the combat system, or whatever other basic repetitive unit of gameplay the game has. There is no use at all in developing a huge world, or tell stories through quests, if basic gameplay isn't fun.

I'm playing two MMOs (casually) now: Eve Online and Warhammer. Eve fails entirely at basic gameplay being fun, although there's enough other interesting stuff to make it rewarding for me to go back to it after a long absence. Warhammer is frustrating: it's almost fun, but the technical problems and game balance issues keep it just this side of really working.