Snaffy's Space | MMO Fansites

Okay, so Tauren are far from slim...

I just wanted to let you all know that my second post is up over on my new WoW blog. Snaffy is almost level 23!

And stabs you in the back!

Muahaha. Eeeeebil.

I just wanted to stop by and let you know (if you still have me on your feed reader!) that there's a new project I'll be working on over the next few months. A World of Warcraft project...

I know! For shame (or shizzle, no wait that's not right)!

Given that I have a few spare hours per week these days I thought I'd tour through levels 1-60 on a new Tauren Druid before the old world changes forever. A few RL friends of mine wanted to dip back into WoW once Cataclysm came out, so I'm basically checking in a bit early. Of course, this blogging adventure is also a devious ploy to help me build Google rank for the leveling guide review part of my site too.

My Aion guide review site did really well, and I'm hoping to duplicate its success once Cataclysm launches.

Anyway, if you're interested in checking out what I'm up to, I'll be posting over there. Hope to see ya! :)

Oh, I'm on Emerald Dream (RPPVP) with Keen's crew.

So here's a random post about some random MMO thoughts I had in my head. I'm not actively subscribed to an MMO, nor am I playing any betas, trials, or F2P titles either. It's a bit strange that I still have MMOs on the brain but I guess you never really lose something that has been such a big part of your life. With that said, here we go.

Traditions, tourists, and tigers. I'm speaking of traditional MMO development, WoW tourists, and Asian Tigers specifically. The basic concepts I have floating around my head are that MMO traditions are changing, WoW tourists have an interesting effect on the industry, and Asian developers/investors might just be ahead of the curve. In my mind, these all come together in a weird sort of way.

Traditions

For many years, the MMO business model was exclusively subscription-based. The past couple years have shown the emergence of real-money-trading as a viable model. Subscription MMOs have proven to be the most lucrative money-maker for studios, but the catch is that you really need to maintain a subscription-base that is properly proportioned to your maintenance costs, new development costs, original development costs, and a few dozen other things.

Traditionally, most players have given slack to developers who release not-so-ready subcription-based products. Unfortunately for developers, this is changing due to a wide selection of competing subscription, F2P, or otherwise MMOs. Back in 2001 there were few quality MMOs with roughly 2.5M shared subscriptions between them. By 2008, there were roughly 16M active subs. The market is growing and so are expectations.

Many other traditions are breaking, but the ones I mentioned are sufficient to back up the rest of what I have to say.

WoW Tourists

What can be said about these unique and interesting creatures? They play WoW. They are legion. They are willing to give new MMOs a shot but almost always come home to roost. This has had a big effect on the Western MMO industry, which even now hasn't been able to mitigate against.

Tourists help build the hype for new MMOs and also add fuel to the wildfire of negativity that follows shortly after release. They boost closed beta signups. They bring open beta servers to their knees. Investors and developers alike see the WoW population base as a potential goldmine, which is falsely verified by their afforementioned engagement in the pre-release hype and beta processes. The developers try and fail to mimic the WoW success model, which dilutes the genre. But that's okay because many investors are scared to put "stock" in much else anyway.

WoW tourists aren't evil. Investors aren't evil. Developers aren't evil. They just mix together like oil, water... and rocks. Syncaine has an interesting thought on how they might finally blend.

Development Tigers

Making MMOs is risky business. They cost a lot of money, take a long time to build (even when they don't work as indended), and when released, are competing with more newer and established titles than ever before. Have the Asians figured it out?

Please correct me if I'm wrong as this is second-hand knowledge I'm about to pass along. Let's me explain it as it was explained to me.

In the West, subscription-based MMOs are developed basically as I have described above. In the East, however, many studios are taking a different path.

Instead of cramming as much content as possible into the release-ready version of the project, they scale way back. Instead of investing tens of millions into development and marketing, they scale way back. As a result, instead of taking 3-4 years to release an MMO, they crank them out much faster.

I believe the old saying goes, "Fast, cheap, good: pick two?"

It's an interesting concept. Even with Western MMOs, people complain about devouring content too quickly. They still whine about the quality. In fact, they even bitch about the development speed. If most people are going to complain, you might as well go with the fastest, cheapest option, right?

If a new title doesn't gain traction in the Asian market they simply nuke it. Oh well, at least it didn't cost much or waste too much of anyone's life developing it. If it does, however, they will invest more time and money into it. You can't make something cheaper or faster to develop after the fact. You can raise the quality though.

My assumption is that this would also allow them to try out wild and crazy design concepts without much repercussions for failure. I'm sure a lot of them totally bomb, but talk about a potential breeding ground for true innovation.

It should be mentioned that most of these titles are F2P with an RMT element. As a player, you may be bombarded with a shitstorm of... well, shit, but at least you can try it all for free. On the other hand, it would suck to really latch on to a title only to have the project dumped.

So how does this all fit together

I wondered to myself if we'd ever see that kind of development here in the West. MMOs developed the Asian way would be nearly tourism-proof. It might be riskier for the investor but the smaller budgets would be attractive. Developers could stretch their creative muscles and have more freedom to truly innovate. Players would have a greater variety of titles to choose from as well.

There are some negatives as well but it's definitely interesting to think about. For one, the MMO wall at your local game store will start to resemble the Wii wall with a huge amount of truly horrendous wastes of time and money.

Hey folks. I know I haven't been writing a lot on my personal blog lately. Sorry about that! There are only so many hours in a day and between family, work, play, and my other writing gig, it's been a bit hard to maintain things around here. I'm still searching for that happy medium.

One of the great things about working at Massively is that on top of more traditional news commentary they also want original and interesting features. Many of the best ideas I've had for big posts that could have been written on this blog have actually become posts over at Massively lately. Here's a new one I'd like to share.

http://www.massively.com/2009/07/01/what-audiences-should-mythic-have-targeted-with-warhammer-online/

The basic idea behind it is that I believe WAR really could have done well if they focused entirely on RvR. Unfortunately, putting all their eggs in the RvR basket would have never produced an MMO capable of competing with WoW no matter how good it was (by sub numbers). There simply aren't as many of those kinds of players out there. Instead, Mythic went with the wide-appeal WoW-killer model that tried to perfectly balance PvE and RvR. Unfortunately, trying to please too many people diluted the quality of their feature set because they spread themselves too thin.

I believe WAR can be salvaged in two ways:

- Continue to strive toward the perfect balance of high quality PvE and RvR content (that doesn't mean 50/50 btw). Basically, PvE shouldn't take anything away from the RvR experience and vice versa. Depending on your mood of the evening, you should be able to focus on either aspect of the game (or maybe even both) without feeling like you're missing out. This is the hardest approach

- Totally shun PvE and focus entirely on RvR (i.e., War is everywhere - design the game like a giant WoW PvP server with several refinements). This will totally limit your audience and growth potential, but it will easily make your MMO the most badass PvP/RvR option on the market. Heck, you could even go with a six-way realm WAR model.

In both cases, Mythic should reduce the overall grind so that players don't feel completely locked in to one character. Of course, bugs, performance, blah blah blah need to be fixed too.

I wrote up a Daily Grind question over at Massively this morning but I thought it might be fun to discuss the same idea from a slightly different angle with you. My question to our readers was "Once you've played (and enjoyed) MMORPGs, can you ever go back to (and enjoy) single-player RPGs?"

When I look at both RPG-types, I see three S's and three C's that differentiate them:

SPRPGs emphasize story, stats, and strategy
MMORPGs emphasize community, collaboration, and competition

Due to their more limited focus, SRPGs tend to really excel at the three S's. Have you ever had the story in an MMO actually bring tears to your eyes or really evoke any other strong emotion (other than anger and frustration due to bugs or imbalance)? SRPGs really let you dig into your character as well, micromanaging stats, abilities, and characteristics to a greater degree than most MMORPGs. Finally, the PvE strategies for boss fights generally trump those found in most MMORPGs, however, I might call this a draw if the MMO supports PvP/RvR and PvE (e.g., WoW).

MMORPGs have all three S's found in SRPGs, but usually to a lesser degree. To make up for this, they focus on three C's. Your only friends in an SRPG tend to be NPCs whereas MMORPGs give you real live players to interact and bond with in game and out (e.g., guilds and alliances). Collaboration takes this a step further by allowing you to actually work with others towards a common goal. Competition allows you to take your stats, strategy, community, and collaboration and test it out against others, while the only competition in SRPGs tends to be against yourself (e.g., beating FFVII in 45 hours vs. 70, while unlocking entirely new zones, summons, and chocobos *bwwwwark*).

Another major difference is a sense of accomplishment versus a sense of the "Neverending Story." It felt great beating a game like FFVII but I also felt like I had wasted an immense amount of time because I completed it completely alone in my parent's basement (hey, I was a teenager!). There really is no end-game in an MMORPG and any time you reach the cap it is usually only temporary as they unlock new content and challenges for you to experience. Don't take that comment to mean I'm a fan of vertical progression/mudflation as an expansion strategy, because I believe you can accomplish the same thing with horizontal expansion.

This is all basically coming down to the same conclusion as my Daily Grind piece, which is that I really can't bring myself to play SRPGs now that I've experienced MMORPGs. It's all fine and good until you consider the final difference I see between both game-types. MMORPGs always seem to suffer from polish issues, which I see as a huge flaw with the genre. I realize the complexities of MMORPGs, but I still believe we can improve in this area by leaps and bounds.

I think there will always be a place for SRPGs but as more and more folks get online, I predict MMORPGs will eventually take over as the dominant form. The only thing really holding them back right now is story and polish, but once developers can crack that nut, I think the floodgates will open. As instances, zone phasing, and solo viability become more mainstream in MMORPGs, why would anyone but the most introverted "hardcore" person bother playing an SRPG anymore? Heck, I'd even call myself pretty introverted and a mostly solo gamer and I still play MMORPGs over SRPGs.

I'm looking at you to prove me right, BioWare! *cough cough*