Except there’s one decision they’re not sure about: Flying Mounts.

As Jeremy Gaffney explained to me earlier this week, the decision seemed like a no-brainer when they built the world four years ago. Now they’ve had a chance to think about it and gather feedback from the community, there doesn’t seem to be a clear way ahead. Some desperately want flying mounts, while others are dead against them.

But why? And is there a solution that can satisfy both camps?

The Failures of Flight

If you look at other MMOs on the market, there’s only one that offers flying mounts. While RIFT and SWTOR have eschewed the idea, World of Warcraft has allowed players to take to the skies since The Burning Crusade. It was such a popular move that Blizzard revamped the old world to accommodate flying mounts there as well. By all accounts, players want to fly.

There’s a very compelling reason too: WoW’s approach to flying makes it incredibly easy to get around. You can avoid mobs that you have no desire to fight, drop on top of a mining node or herb without fuss, and kill rare creatures quickly. There are a couple of other benefits, like being able to get a different view of the world or having more mounts to collect, but the overriding factor is convenience.

Permitting flight – particularly with the WoW model – also introduces a fair set of problems for games like WildStar and Guild Wars 2, where the verticality of the world is used in a number of ways.

• If part of the game involves accessing hard to reach places, such as jumping puzzles, Explorer Path challenges, Loftite Crystal challenges and other areas where gravity may be non-standard, then flying mounts make all that trivially easy. These are significant content-breaking issues.
• For PvP servers, a large part of the content is being able to kill (or rescue) other players. Being able to fly up and remove themselves from risk (or stalk the zone like a vulture) creates problems at both extremes.
• For PvE servers, it means that you’re less likely to encounter others on your adventures, purely through comparing a 3D volume to a 2D plane, particularly when questing.
• Exploration achievements become much easier with flying mounts. If there are gameplay systems that interact with how many achievements you have, that content starts being pushed from mid to elder game.

More importantly though, will WildStar actually require you to leave the city and travel anywhere? If LFD queues and raid portals are the norm, the only time you’d head out into the world is if you’re going farming for resources. There needs to be an elder game reason to travel throughout the world that’s more than digging up plants or rocks. If not, the whole argument becomes moot – mounts become a bigger version of baseball cards.

In-Flight Maintenance

Warcraft’s flying mount mechanism has a problem. Once you get past the initial joy of being able to fly around and reach all those hidden places, it actually becomes pretty boring. You fly up, you hover, you make a coffee. There’s no risk or effort to it at all. That’s part of the attraction, but it’s incredibly dull.

Also, do flying mounts actually fit in Carbine’s scrappy sci-fi universe? We’ve seen spaceships and shuttles taxi our characters around, but in an era where Nexus is full of robots and monsters desperately trying to kill you, should you feel safe in the skies? Odds are you’d be a sitting duck crashing into the ground faster than you can say Missile Lock.

And for those saying that if you don’t like flying mounts just don’t use them, that’s not really an option. MMOs are about two choices – the most optimal way, and the wrong way. Stick to your speeder while everyone else jets around overhead, and you’ll miss out on every resource node in the zone. That and everyone will be sure to whisper you about your dumb choices.

So, if we were to have flying mounts, how should Carbine consider implementing them? The WildStar Central forums have come up with a whole bunch of suggestions, some of which are better than others. I’m not going to claim credit for these, but I am going to pull them apart a little.

A favourite is to give flying mounts a gas tank or rechargeable battery that limits their range. While it sounds appealing, it doesn’t stop the problem of circumventing Explorer quests or jumping puzzles. Just mount up, hit the gas and make sure you land at the right spot. It also means that players will hop from refuelling station to station or, if the fuel cells recharge themselves, just bunny around from resource node to node. After all, they’ll all be marked on a map within a week.

How about having no-fly areas around puzzles? While it sounds simple, it’s actually horrible to immersion. Aion did this with their flight system, and every so often you’d smack into an invisible wall like a wasp hitting a window.

Another suggestion is to allow free flight, but have designated take-off and landing strips. It sounds tempting, but in reality it just becomes a taxi that’s under player control. Sure you might want to take the scenic route once or twice, but after that it’s just a dash to your destination.

There’s also the suggestion of disabling flying mounts on PvP servers, or asking players to complete all missions in a zone before they gain flight certification, or have only certain safe zones allow free flight. Again, these feel like inelegant kludges to try to allow a scrap of flying somewhere – it’s like having a car that you can only drive on the racetrack.

Flying Hazards

The big question is: do flying mounts (or any mounts) need to be off or on? Can they be made more interactive or riskier? Should there be effort involved in keeping them airborne, and does that need to be limited? Should the skies be filled with danger?

The idea of having living skies full of warfare is an incredibly tempting one, and pulls back memories of X-Wing vs Tie Fighter. But is that the game that Carbine’s trying to make here? Start off down the slope of flight physics and weapons systems, and that’s coders and designers pulled off from making other cool stuff. While I’d love asteroid belt space battles, I also want them to finish the game.

There’s also the option of fixing flying mounts at a maximum altitude to keep them in range of monsters (and players) on the ground. While it’s great to be able to take pot-shots at someone and knock them out of the sky (my hours clocked up in Planetside 2 can attest to this), it still doesn’t stop the puzzle shortcut problem.

Which, in the end, leaves one option.

Earn Your Wings

Being airborne in Aion was great – it involved skill to keep yourself above the ground. You could actually flap your wings to fly in some areas, but it was possible to glide almost anywhere. And it was gliding where the biggest challenges lay – using judgement to push yourself out as far as possible.

It’s a method that FireFall uses too. Leap on a glider pad and you get fired off like a paper plane, using your own judgement to keep going as far as possible. You can’t hover or hang in the air with a glider, and actually staying off the ground requires a fair amount of skill.

Gliding could be incorporated into WildStar as well. With a little bit of work from the existing physics engine, it should be possible to simulate gliding as a temporary buff granted to players. By allowing players to rock forward and back, or tilt side to side, they should be able to control where they head towards. And, because it’s more skill-based, there’s the social aspect of showing off your control to friends.

Of course, hitting the ground shouldn’t be without risk. If you mess things up badly, you should expect to play a visit to the Holocrypt. Such is the risk of going airborne.

There’s also the path integration. Allow sufficiently advanced settlers to drop down a glider pad, either in fixed locations or anywhere in the world, for other players to use. You could have an extreme sports circle climbing the highest peaks just to glide jump off them. There’s the potential loftite and low-gravity interaction which makes them more interesting as well.

And going back to the Explorer path and jumping puzzle issue, it becomes less of a problem. Because gliders don’t give much altitude, it’s going to be tough to start a quest and glide to the endpoint unless you’re very skilled, and in that case you’re rewarding skill anyway.

The key thing is that flight becomes challenging. And in becoming challenging it also becomes fun, not just the first time you do it but every time you do it. And that is WildStar.

Like this? Try these other related posts:

• To The Future!
• Claiming Sanctuary From Griefers
• In Defence of the Trifecta

NEW: A Guide to Mana Obscura. All 200+ posts in topic-led guides on a wide range of MMO subjects.

© Gazimoff for ManaObscura.com, 2013. | Permalink | 7 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: flying, mounts, wildstar

This weekend was jammed solid with choice for MMO gamers. SWTOR had just ushered in the mission chain to gain HK-51 as a companion droid. Trion launched RIFT: Storm Legion earlier this week. Planetside 2 wrapped up its open beta, while City of Steam started theirs. If you’re into online gaming, you were literally spoiled for choice this weekend.

And, of course, Guild Wars 2 started their much-vaunted Lost Shores Event, combining three days of nautical adventure with an open invitation to everyone with a friend already in the game.

It’s also been a weekend of bugs, as if some technophobic Midas has been creeping around server farms globally, disrupting code and torturing servers. No game has been completely error-free, but some have suffered more than others. And when games suffer, the gamers suffer with them.

Take Guild Wars 2 for example. Ignoring the small concern that the team eschew the notion of using public test servers, the Lost Shores event started with a small handful of bugs. Nothing major or crippling, unless you take into account the 24 hour limit to complete this initial phase. Arenanet subsequently relented on this, retaining some of the fixed quests into the second day.

By far the most damaging part of the event was the mass combat, starting with the Karka Invasion on Friday. Even with overflow technology limiting the number of players in each area, Guild Wars 2 struggled to cope with the sheer weight of gamers zerging giant crabs. The server-side lag and unresponsive combat was just a prelude for the grand finale on Sunday.

The Karka invasion was due to close in a “multi-hour” event, starting at 8PM GMT. So far, so good. An escort mission started, where players rushed to help a Lionguard Demolitions expert plant a series of explosives in a giant-crab hatchery.

This is where the event descended from frustration into farce, as strained systems struggled to deliver player-versus-crab combat on a massive scale. First, there were the invisible mobs that couldn’t be targeted, but that you knew other players were attacking.

Can you see what it is yet? Nope, me neither.

Once the crabs appeared, so did all their attacks. Which included large amounts of incredibly lethal area effect damage. Leaving you to wonder why your ankles are dissolving in a puddle of crustacean stomach acid.

HOLY CRAB! ACID!

The massive periods of lag – 30 seconds to a minute of frozen combat at times – meant that dodging out of the way was a fleeting dream. If you’re lucky, the downed state would be there to greet you.

Rally! For the love of cogs, rally!

If you’re not so lucky, you and your band of heroes would be defeated by the oversized urchins Again.

I see dead people

And again.

Sleeping competitions. Serious business

And again.

Are you a bit crabby, or just shellfish?

Once you managed to blow up the hatchery, a second event started. Escorting an ancient Karka crab proved too much for some people, who decided to call it quits. It also proved too much for some servers, who began offloading players by handing out disconnects. This was the last straw for the login server, who went out to lunch.

Garçon? I would like ze lobster, s’il vous plait.

There are lessons here, some of which come from the school of bleeding obvious, and some of which came from Warcraft’s Ahn’Quiraj event some six-plus years ago.

• If you know that servers are going to be stressed, go easy on the AoE damage. Give mobs tons of health, but don’t pile multiple deaths and repair bills  onto an already frantic playerbase.
• Don’t run a major refer-a-friend weekend at the same time as a major event, especially when you haven’t tested the crap out of it. And that includes “what happens when a ton of players all rush the same zone event”
• Make sure you dish out rewards for everyone taking part, even if the server they’re playing on goes out for lunch.
• If you’re not going to reward players with XP and loot for killing veteran crabs, make sure to give them something in return for punching buttons and staring at a server-induced slideshow for 2 hours.

There are arguments that you get what you pay for, and Guild Wars 2 costs nothing beyond the original game. But there is a cost: time, effort and in-game resources. In an era where there’s a huge amount of choice in online gaming, unreasonable costs are likely to see players choose something else.

UPDATE: Arenanet have swiftly moved to assure players that those taking part would be rewarded, and they’re working on a way to get those sent out. But despite their desire to surprise players with new events, calls for a public test server are only likely to grow.

Like this? Try these other related posts:

• Gaming: The Journey to Service Saturation
• Just Listen You Idiots!
• The Trans-Temporal MMO Sausage

NEW: A Guide to Mana Obscura. All 200+ posts in topic-led guides on a wide range of MMO subjects.

© Gazimoff for ManaObscura.com, 2012. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: design, guild wars 2

But why does it happen? Why do experienced companies who are used to building and maintaining these types of systems continually run into these kinds of problems? Why are they, in many cases, unable to thoroughly test these kinds of systems. And what can be done to make sure that gamers still have a good experience, even if some features are unavailable?

I’m going to try to tackle a handful of these issues, explaining what companies can do, but why they also don’t help cater for every example. And while I have experience of designing massively multi-user systems myself, the usage patterns relating to MMO gaming are somewhat different to an online shop or customer service portal. Don’t start lambasting developers for what I write here, ‘kay?

The ‘Stress’ Test

MMO games are in a bit of a bind at the moment. Many of us play for the story or questing experience, which means that if you provide long beta sessions, players can experience the best parts of your game without paying a penny towards it. This isn’t great, as it can eat into your release-day sales. On top of that, some actively avoid betas so that their launch-day experience isn’t ruined by knowing all the spoilers.

Which is where beta weekend events and stress tests have come in.

These are great in theory: you can look at player behaviour, analyse how they interact with your underlying systems, and come up with reasonable predictions on how heavily these systems will be used on launch day. Which is great, for a given normalised scenario. If something doesn’t work, players tend to shrug, maybe file a report, and move on. Because hey, it’s beta.

The problem is, these tests don’t help with judging system performance under a live load. You have a small subset of users who actively test systems, who are like gold dust to you (especially if they file reports). And you might funnel them through a limited set of hardware in order to stress performance more, such as having a limited number of worlds up and running. But they don’t help with testing the limits of shared and centralised services such as A&R (access and registration, more commonly known as signing up and logging in), or item shops.

If you want to heavily test a service like A&R, it’s actually pretty difficult to do. The database cluster might be rated for so many thousands of operations per second, while the application cluster above might be rated in a similar way. Then there’s proxies and firewalls on top of that, as well as intrusion and DDOS detection and management. On top of that, MMO games are geographically distributed platforms. Your A&R service might need to support queries from a number of game servers located in data centres around the world.

The easiest battlecry is to say “Simulate everything!”. Build test harnesses that bombard your A&R service with millions of requests for account creation, payment and login. But:

• How do you generate the test data? Random?
• How do you perform random queries across the dataset?
• Can you build a test system that can test – and validate – millions of simulated, geographically disparate,  user transactions, without spending a ridiculous amount of money on it?

This third point’s the killer. Anyone can generate masses of data, but it’s being able to shunt queries in at such a high speed that they actually stress the gargantuan service you’re trying to overload. That’s hard.

The Button Masher Senario

So I have my A&R service, and I flick the switch and allow gamers to start logging in. Word gets around and traffic starts quickly building up. But what happens when the number of requests coming in becomes greater than my service can handle?

• Player presses the login button
• Request gets sent to A&R platform
• Request times out
• Player presses the login button
• and so on…

It’s likely that the application layer of the A&R service has solid buffer management that ditches stale requests that are older than the client timeout, but it’s the effect of unresponsive systems generating further requests into them that I wanted to demonstrate. From both a simulation standpoint and an engineering one, this is trickier still.

Setting the Engineering Bar

Here’s a question for you: do I design a system that can handle three times the anticipated normal traffic load, or do I design it for three times the predicted peak load?

As a supplemental, I will only ever see that peak load at launch. After that, I expect load to fall within the normal X3 threshold for the rest of the life of the game. I know that MMOs typically fall back to 40% to 40% of their subscriber base two months after launch, so I’ll have even more capacity.

Oh, and building the system to handle three times predicted peak will cost ten times more.

This is one of those difficult tradeoffs. On the one hand, I want to deliver the best possible experience to gamers. But on the other, that’s a truck ton of money that I’d like to spend on creating new content instead. This is the producer or project manager’s decision, and it’s not an easy one to make. Developers do not have a bottomless bucket of money to throw at a problem, especially after spending five years creating something.

The Solution?

There’s no perfect playout here. You’re either going to spend a heap of cash on something that’s going to benefit you a couple of months at most, or you’re going to have tight running systems and a mass of fallback plans. In 99% of cases, the second option is the one that gets picked. And that fallback plan is everything from leasing temporary additional capacity, through to tweaking system and queue parameters, and into community management and communication strategies.

From a design standpoint though, you decouple as much as humanly possible. A broken item shop shouldn’t bring down your game. Certain in-game services might be unavailable to ensure that your databases are prioritising certain key requests (such as logging in). Ensure that your core systems are up and running, and everything else can be toggled off until things stabilise. Other than that, keep talking to your players and let them know what’s going on.

And finally, for those asking why MMOs became this complex: it’s because we ask for them to be like this. We want flexible services that let us play with our friends in an easy and frictionless manner. We want to be treated as part of a global community. We want barriers to be broken down. What’s happening is a step in the right direction, but these aren’t easy things to deliver.

Like this? Try these other related posts:

• No Related Posts

NEW: A Guide to Mana Obscura. All 200+ posts in topic-led guides on a wide range of MMO subjects.

© Gazimoff for ManaObscura.com, 2012. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags:

So what exactly are people buying?

This is not a games console in the traditional sense. Ouya seeks to change the relationship between developer, platform owner and consumer. Instead of having expensive development kits and closely guarded marketplace access, the team behind Ouya are keen to make it as easy as possible for developers to get on to their platform, using pricing and payment models that are right for them. By building their own console, rather than relying on someone else’s platform, the team behind Ouya can control each point in the process.

The box itself is also intriguing, once it’s looked at indirectly. The hardware is based around the NVidia Tegra3 system-on-chip, something you’ll also see powering the Asus Nexus 7 tablet. It’ll also be running Android 4.0, meaning that the operating system will already be taken care of. While Ouya’s focus will be on the USB joypad, the ecosystem and the front-end, hackers will be eager to take this thing apart and start playing with it. In many respects it’s almost a premium-grade Raspberry Pi. And just like with mobile devices, there’s an opportunity to bring out a faster, more powerful and backwards compatible version each year.

But none of this is truly radical. Apple and Google have been doing similar things with their platforms for smartphones and tablets. Valve have been using Steam to do similar things for PC. Bringing that kind of engagement and pricing model to our big-screen TVs would certainly be a dramatic disruption to the status quo, but that’s all it would bring. We won’t be seeing next generation graphics on the Ouya, just images intended for a seven-inch screen blown up for our 42-inch plasmas.

It also finds itself in a precarious position. All it takes is for one of the existing walruses to roll over and change their stance, and Ouya’s unique proposition evaporates. It’s also possible that some enterprising coders transplant the Ouya wrapper onto other Tegra or Android based kit, eliminating the need to shell out on the hardware. Should that happen, it becomes a straight contest between Ouya, Google Play and Amazon’s app store.

For me, the intrigue of Ouya harks back to the days of Spectrums, Commodores, and Amigas, where your games machine was also your development box, where anyone could code as long as they had time and patience. But considering that anyone with a PC can start developing for Android, and anyone with a Mac can start coding for iPhone, the need for this little box of wonder seems moot.

Over 25 thousand of us have already put our cash down for the console, with many more likely to join them before the deadline expires next month. But even if the first production run nets Ouya an installed user base in the hundreds of thousands, I wonder if we’ll still be talking about the console next year. Whether it can create – then ride – the wave of change, or be wiped out in the wash, remains to be seen.

Like this? Try these other related posts:

• Mobile MMO Missteps

NEW: A Guide to Mana Obscura. All 200+ posts in topic-led guides on a wide range of MMO subjects.

© Gazimoff for ManaObscura.com, 2012. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: console, kickstarter, mobile, ouya, tegra

As a result, I tend to do this for all my new characters, even if I don’t end up roleplaying with them. So when I created a new Bounty Hunter in Star Wars: The Old Republic, I gave him a backstory. Who he is, where he came from, who he knows. That kind of thing. It’s your typical trashy pulp sci-fi, but I thought I’d share it, if only to raise a laugh.

The name’s Cargo Stuggs. Yeah, laugh it up. Dad thought it would be a genius idea to ask some grand Sith for a powerful, strong name in some fancy foreign language. He only found out what it meant after the naming ceremony. The Sith laughed a good one, right up until Dad put a blaster bolt between his eyes. Didn’t laugh much after that. Bastard.

Dad’s always been fancy with a blaster pistol, though he did everything he could to stop me following him. ‘Bay’, he used to say, ‘Enforcing aint no way to make a real living. You get yourself a proper thinking job. That’s where the real credits are. No one’s made their fortune breaking legs and shaking down. You gotta use your skull. Right kid?’

Yeah, I know what you’re thinking. The old man had a point. Guess that’s what comes from leaving the farm on some backwater planet for the ‘untold riches’ of Nar Shaddaa. It’s a harsh bump when you realise the streets round here aren’t exactly paved with credits, and the only ones making money are the Hutts. The rest of us, we’re just blips in their machines.

He ends up working for one of them. Found out he was ‘over-qualified’ for regular manual work, so he earns his stamps muscling for one of the small-time loan sharks. You could say Dad had a talent for it, with arms like durasteel girders and a look that’d make you shit yourself. Made enough to keep us in food and digs, at least.

Tried to help as best I could, though there’s not much going for lanky goons with no learning. Dad got me a spot at some chemical plant his boss had connections with. Things were great till I got half my face burned off during maintenance. Got paid off to keep schtum about it, plus all this face furniture. Itches like fury though. Cheap black market stuff.

So I figured that with all this metalwork I’m carrying around, I might as well look at getting in the slicing biz. Stuff’s a cakewalk anyway. All you’ve got to do is stroke a few egos and the local sliceheads open up like Corellian Clams. The good ones mind, not the ones we normally get. After a while I’m holding my own, pulling in easy money from peeps who want info either dug up or vanished. A couple of keystrokes here and there, and these guys are throwing their credits at me.

‘Course, the good times had to end sooner or later. Dad enforced the wrong guy, got a bounty on his head. Literally, it turned out. Not many people walk away from having a speeder dropped on them. Leaves a mark. Crappy Circo Systems junk as well. No respect.

With the old man gone, I was pretty left to fend for myself. Got a payout from his boss, used the credits to buy the box we were living in. Nothing fancy, but I was too lazy to crate everything up and ship it someplace else. ‘Sides, I’m sure there’s one or two traps on his stuff that he didn’t tell me about.

I figured that since slicing’s such easy money, I might as well make a go of it. It sure beats knocking doors and beating skulls, and I aint exactly got the qualifications for handing out beatings, right? So I put my name out, offer my skills and sit back to see who bites. There’s a lot of hungry fish in that pool, my friend.

There’s three rules to slicing: don’t ask too many questions about the gig, don’t get cocky and don’t get caught. ‘Course, I had to go and break every single one of them. Bragging about the jobs you’ve done is great advertising, but say too much or hit the wrong ears and you’re staring down the wrong end of an enforcer’s blaster. So you do this kind of dance with the truth, giving enough bait to lure in new biz without earning the wrong kind of name.

Sometimes there’s the jobs that your gut says you shouldn’t take. Then you start thinking about the credits you’ll make, and if you can pull it off without getting vaped. Everyone gambles in Nar Shaddaa, ‘xcept most aren’t doing it at the sabbac tables. You make the call, play your cards and hope that it’s your hand taking the pot. These are high stakes, and you’ll lose more than your shirt if you play big and crap out.

My big gamble? Taking a job way above my grade. I was in some cantina, nursing a flask of some foul local ale, when the best dressed Rodian on the moon comes over and says he’s been looking for me. He calls for a drink, tells me he’s looking to set up a slicing team for his boss. On retainer.

I try not to choke as he mentions some big numbers. I mean really big. It’s the kind of job that can set you up for life. My brain is screaming at me that the green guy’s dodgy as hell, that he’s probably working for some Hutt who’s even dodgier. Then he talks about the custom slicing facility they’re building, and that does it for me. Everyone has their weakness, and mine is hot tech in gleaming cases.

Ever seen a Rodian smile? The way their whole snout deforms, scared the crap out of me. But he knew he had me. We agreed to meet up later that week, he finished his glass and walked. Me, I was still trying to figure out how bad it could get. Wouldn’t have long to find out.

So, the next day I’m grinning like an idiot, hanging around some shady part of Network Access while I wait for the green goon to show up. He doesn’t take long, bringing his Hutt boss along for show. I’d seen the Hutts a few times, but it’s nothing like being up close to them. You’re never quite sure if they’re smiling, got gas or are just plain nuts.

We head inside the facility that they’ve put together. It reminded me of a hospital, all stark lights and clean smells, really weird compared to outside. Strangely quiet too, once we were past the guards in the entrance hall. I’d have probably paid more attention if the Rodian hadn’t started gushing about his plans. Started talking about some big name data jockeys that were way above my pay grade and the fancy tech they’d shipped in.

We stopped at a door pretty much like any other. The Rodian punched a code into the access panel to slide it open, then invited me in. The room was a bit small and kinda dark, but I like it like that. All decked out in brushed metal and transparisteel. Sweet. ‘Course, then the Rodian had to ruin it all. He made some smartass comment about welcoming me to my new home, before sliding the door behind me.

That’s when it clicked, that and the Hutt laughing as he slithered away. Stupid Hutts.

It wasn’t long before the jobs started coming in. Messages on the terminal. Slice into this system. Change that data. Reprogram this. Sabotage that. I tried ignoring them, only they have ways of making you compliant. Turned out the guards posted out front ain’t paid to be friendly.

I needed to get out, and I could have sliced the access panel. But where’d that get me? The guards outside had guns, and I ain’t fond of getting shot at. So I sat and I sliced, doing the jobs that most in the biz would turn down flat. I don’t mind cleaning a profile or two, but I draw the line at remote wetworks.

Getting the word out to someone on the outside turned out to be pretty easy. I sliced into a few random places on the ‘net. Public boards, GTN listings, that kind of thing. Made it look like part of my regular slicing work, just in case anyone was watching. Did the job nicely. Just needed to hope it would land with someone willing to bust a few heads.

Didn’t have to wait long for a response either. Got a reply from ‘Blu’, a known slave breakout specialist. Hadn’t seen the guy in person, but I heard he was top notch in this line of work. He told me to carry on, keep my head down and be ready at any time.

A week later and I’m ready to give up. I aint heard anything back from Blu, and things were going from crap to hell. Turned out that the local bigwig Kabbura the Hutt was holding some kind of group hug elsewhere in the complex, so everyone was all over the place. Still, it meant they forgot my orders more than not, which was great by me. Wouldn’t want to disrupt anyone’s beating schedule.

Which is why I should have been ready for it. Right when the big boss is busy schmoozing with the hangers-on, the door, complete with surrounding wall, explodes and is almost instantly vaporized to a shower of pebble confetti. It’s a pretty impressive pyrotechnic stunt that leaves me cowering behind my console. As I peer over the top I hear two sets of footsteps crunch in the gravel. Even now I don’t believe what I saw.

As the smoke cleared and the dust was settling, there stood two beautiful dames. These girls – a blue-skinned twi’lek and a human redhead – were perfectly toned, with curves in all the right places. They stood there with their blasters raised up, looking at me while I crouched there, mouth open. After all, it’s not every day that you’re rescued by two babes in slavegirl outfits, right?

I didn’t get much time to enjoy the view, as these girls were all business.  I remember making some smartass comment, trying to act all smooth, and that’s the last I remember. Next thing I remember, I’m on some cramped cargo-ship screaming out of atmo. Waking up from a K.O. in the middle of turbulence is not in my top ten. But I’m outta there, away from the slicing console and Kabbura and the Rodian and.. and my Dad’s stuff, and the slicing gangs I hang with, and the cool bars, and the tech shops. It’s like two sides of the same meckin’ coin.

We work out a plan, and we head back to Nar Shaddar. Red says she’ll take me on and look out for me while we work out what to do next. It aint going to be pretty, but it’s gotta work. Somehow.

Bastard Rodian.

Following from there, it only seemed right to create a few examples of things he might have implanted in the Holonet:

GTN – Your Interstellar Marketplace!

HEAVY DUTY SPEEDER BIKE – EXTENSIVELY MODIFIED!

You are bidding on a custom made speeder bike, designed from the blueprints up to be a tough, reliable workhorse with all of the latest creature comforts. Based on the classic Speeder Bike design, this beauty has been reinforced with a solid Durasteel frame and plated with thick Mandalorian iron. Fitted with twin antigrav jets for both speed and comfort, the toughened cantilever arms are guaranteed to take the bounce out of almost any terrain you drive over.

This speeder bike has seen substantial service with a number of owners, so we’re starting the bidding low on this one! She still runs fine, wit[/break][codeinsert][textstream][ttl=5]I seek assistance in escaping a situation. More details to come. Watch the boards. Not everyone is willing.[/textstream][/codeinsert][resume]h replacement parts easy to get hold of and nothing that a good Cybertech can’t fix. This red beauty could do with a respray, but then again who couldn’t!

Interested in taking this unique speeder for a test run? Hop on down to Gowring Je’Davvy Used Speeders. You’ll find us on Nar Shaddaa; just follow the bargains!

ExoticRomance | The best Interspecies Dating Site!

>MALES SEEKING FEMALES

entry> Trying for a Twi’lek

Middle aged, well-financed male human seeks female Twi’lek for companionship, entertainment and possibly more. Former dancing girls, former slaves [/break][codeinsert][textstream][ttl=5]I need an exit from this place. Co-ords to follow[/textstream][/codeinsert][resume] and so on are of particular interested. I’ve had a great life, now let me improve yours. Holonet Box No. 271828

BOUNTY NETWORK | SINGLE BOUNTY ENTRY

listing> UNCLAIMED

filter> location=”Nar Shaddaa”, result=”LIVE,OBJECT”, value=”50000C7”

results> HUTT CARTEL OPERATIVE: SLAVEMASTER DROSH

SLAVEMASTER DROSH GAARCH, believed to be residing in NAR SHADDA. Species is GRAN, approximately 1.7m tall. Usually accompanied by at least three guards, usually also GRAN or RODIAN.

Requirement is LIVE BOUNTY ONLY

REASON: SLAVEMASTER DROSH arrived on NAR SHADDAA with a collection of twenty slaves, which he later sold at auction. On delivery, these slaves would then overpower their guards[/break][codeinsert][textstream][ttl=5]Aid required to release indentureds, reply to this message to confirm support. Co-ordinates to follow.[/textstream][/codeinsert][resume], escape and return to SLAVEMASTER DROSH, where they would later be sold to another client. This continued six times, until SLAVEMASTER DROSH attempted to sell the same slaves to a previous client.

DELIVERY: Suspended in Carbonite, delivered to co-ordinates [redacted] on NAR SHADDAA, message sent to holofrequency [redacted] to confirm drop.

PLACED BY: Hutt Clan [redacted], Hutt Clan [redacted], Hutt Clan [redacted], Hutt Clan [redacted], Hutt Clan [redacted], Migrant Merchants Guild.

 

Like this? Try these other related posts:

• Managing Limited Game Time
• The Back Seat Guild Leader
• A Socially Aware Warcraft?

NEW: A Guide to Mana Obscura. All 200+ posts in topic-led guides on a wide range of MMO subjects.

© Gazimoff for ManaObscura.com, 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: fiction, roleplay

The past few months have seen a dramatic change. I’ve gone from a hobbyist blogger to becoming a staff writer at ZAM. I’ll still be writing there every week, so make sure you’re following me on Twitter to stay updated. I’ll also be attending Rezzed in Brighton, Gamescom in Cologne, and Eurogamer Expo in London. Let me know if you’re heading to any of these!

I won’t be shutting Mana Obscura down anytime soon, so all historic posts and archives will remain up. Keep me in your feed readers though, as there’s no telling when I’ll return. This isn’t a goodbye, more of a “back in a bit”.

In the meantime, if you’re looking for more great content to read, you’ll find many fine and stimulating writers in my blogroll.

All the best,

Gaz

Like this? Try these other related posts:

• You Can Write Too!
• Getting Started with MMO Blogging
• Fear of the Fansites

NEW: A Guide to Mana Obscura. All 200+ posts in topic-led guides on a wide range of MMO subjects.

© Gazimoff for ManaObscura.com, 2012. | Permalink | 7 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: blogging, hiatus

Back when I was a kid, we used to go to the games store and buy a cassette tape. We’d take it home, play it into the machine, and wait half an hour to play the game we just bought. Sometimes it’d work, sometimes it wouldn’t. Sometimes it would randomly crash, or the last few levels would be impossible. We also had no internet, which meant no patches. We had a tape, to enjoy or not, as we chose.

Today’s gaming industry is radically different. Gamers are spending incredible amounts of time in multi-player games of one form or another. We’re consuming downloadable content to extend the lifespan of games we’ve bought. We’re using networks to interact with each other, from console variants such as Xbox Live, through to publisher or developer related ones such as Steam and Battle.net.

Games are becoming increasingly reliant on this back-end network to deliver significant parts of the experience. While this transition from Gaming as a Product to Gaming as a Service has benefits for both sides, what risks does it pose? How do we critically appraise a game that’s heavily reliant on these service components? What is the importance of reputation? And what happens when this service-based industry reaches saturation point?

What is Gaming as a Service?

The easiest example of this is an MMO. In order to deliver the massively multiplayer experience, a large proportion of the game is hosted on the developer’s servers. You might make an upfront payment, subscribe for a monthly fee or dabble in microtransactions, and in return get a certain amount of usage.

The same is true of many other games that you’d not traditionally consider. With Battlefield 3, Call of Duty and many other titles, the goal is to encourage gamers to hang onto their copies of the game and encourage others to try them out, generating sales beyond launch week and reducing the number of copies that go into the pre-owned loop. Even though there’s no recurring cost beyond DLC, the games are still being sold with a significant portion provided as a service.

There are currently a variety of models used to support gaming as a service, with the MMO model being the most commonly understood. There are also streaming models such as those used by Gaikai and OnLive, and revenue protection models such as those used by many console games. When it works well, both the developer/publisher and gamer get something out of the deal.

Scoring the Service

As games have started to include significant online components, the remit of game design has become much broader. One the one hand you have game systems such as combat, movement, player interaction and all those other ludology elements. Meanwhile, on the other, there’s the system architecture, game engine, networking infrastructure and other back-end elements that support the delivery of that game.

It’s the fusion of these two elements that creates the overall service we receive. A game can have some interesting mechanics, great art style and superb narration, yet still be disappointing because of poor game architecture. But how should we critically review a game that’s artistically sound, yet hindered by a platform that’s not performing as well as we demand?

I’m going to use Diablo III as a bit of an example here as it’s still fresh in our minds, but the same principles apply to other games delivered as a service. Some places, such as Joystiq (review by Mike Schramm), purely rate the game on if it’s worth our time to play, largely discarding service elements and focusing heavily on the entertainment value delivered. Others like Polygon (review by Arthur Gies) take it on a case by case basis, arguing that based on Blizzard’s track record that launch-day problems would be resolved.

There’s also other extremes. IGN (review by Anthony Gallegos) made no mention of the service based components, what they delivered or how they performed. By contrast, PC Gamer (review by Tom Francis) calls attention to the issue and the limitations caused by it early on in the review.

Across all reviews listed on MetaCritic for Diablo III, there’s a range of opinions from critics on how central the delivery of the service is to the game. Just like with other elements, different critics and outlets have differing opinions on how relevant this aspect is to the overall score. Some, such as a profanity-laden rant from Jim Sterling, call out the service delivery aspect and its negative impact on the playing experience in an individual article.

I think we’re also seeing reviews based on reputation. Blizzard is known for building reliable, stable gaming services in the form of World of Warcraft and Starcraft II, and some reviewers referenced this reputation when describing the launch-week issues. Eurogamer (review by Oli Welsh) compared the launch to MMOs such as Star Wars: The Old Republic, suggesting that Blizzard should have done more work around protecting the quality of service delivered.

Game Service Architecture, Delivery and Support

The big thing about moving towards gaming as a service is the support model that’s provided with it. While it’s clear that critics and fans are prepared to forgive short term drops in service quality, we are much less likely to forgive poor support. Unfortunately developers, publishers and platform owners are only beginning to wake up to what’s involved with supporting an army of gamers.

It’s possible to compare the level of service support we get from a games developer or publisher, with other service industries such as banking, insurance or mobile phone service. With each of these service sectors you’ve reached saturation – there are very few people who don’t have a bank account or mobile phone, meaning the only way you can attract new customers is by offering better service (interest rate, terms, etc), better support, or both.

The same will eventually happen to gaming, where it becomes harder for console owners and publishers to create new gaming audiences. We’ve moved on leaps and bounds with the advent of casual gaming and smartphones, but eventually there’s going to be a point where it’s impossible to cram any more game down gamers’ throats.

I don’t think we’ll see gaming become a full commodity or utility, but I do think that we’re already starting to go slightly down that path. To use the Diablo III analogy again, do you pick the expensive but highly polished hack and slash from Blizzard, or the slightly rougher but significantly cheaper Torchlight 2? Do Blizzard/Activision offer you better support than Runic/Steam? Are you a fan of one or the other? Do either of them have a reputation for particular levels of service quality?

It’s also clear that developers are looking for ways to be disruptive in order to gain traction. NCSoft/ArenaNet’s approach with Guild Wars 2 is deliberately designed to lure players away from competitors like World of Warcraft by introducing a significantly changed approach to the fantasy MMO, together with a pricing model with a much lower upkeep barrier. It’s likely that developers looking to dominate other gaming genres are looking at the overall service mix for their new titles with the intent of being as disruptive as possible to gain market share.

Tales such as this, where players receive sub-standard support, are going to become increasingly significant. We’re reluctant to invest time and effort in playing a game and developing characters or ranking within that game, if there’s an elevated element of risk associated with it. Although these are great opportunities to turn gamers into fans, it’s also a chance that without action it’ll turn gamers into flight risks looking elsewhere for fun. This isn’t a big deal in a market with a clear dominant leader, but is likely to become more problematic as the gaming market evolves. Just ask the telcos.

The Evolving Gaming Marketplace

Over the next five to ten years, we’re likely to see a number of changes in the way gaming as a service is delivered to us, both in terms of consolidation and platformization (such as Battle.net 2.0 and Origin), but also in the development of disruptive models. As Jim Sterling so passionately proclaims, it’s going to be up to us as gamers to make it clear how we want this to evolve.

I’m personally not clear how things are going to shape out. Will we see a rush to the cheapest price, as publishers slash prices in order to increase market share? Or will we see them look to improve service quality and service support so that every dealing we have with them is a joy instead of a joke? It could go either way.

Either way, turbulent waters lie ahead for all of us. The only thing is this: accept the status quo at your peril. That goes for gamers and publishers alike.

Like this? Try these other related posts:

• On the Shores of Lag
• Guild Wars 2: Spellcasters Quick Guide
• Becoming The Nomad

NEW: A Guide to Mana Obscura. All 200+ posts in topic-led guides on a wide range of MMO subjects.

© Gazimoff for ManaObscura.com, 2012. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: design, GaaS, gaming architecture, gaming as a service

Over the last five years, I’d argue that our perceptions have changed. Guild Wars 1 and 2 introduced the “buy the box” model, delivering a high quality game while still using the subscription free microtransaction model. We’ve also seen several MMOs transition from being subscription based to free-to-play and becoming successful as a result. Lord of the Rings Online, Star Trek Online and EverQuest 2 are all positive examples of this change in model.

This year, a new trend emerged. After reading a number of blogs I’ve seen the same phrase repeated again and again. “It’s a great MMO, but I’ll wait until it goes free to play before I play it.” We now expect subscription based games to fail and eventually switch to a free-to-play-model.

Have our previous experiences conditioned us as consumers to expect games to switch to free to play? Are we becoming congested with too many games we want to try and not enough time to play them, so we’re cutting back on the ones we subscribe to? Or is it just a polite way of saying that we have no intention of playing a game, either at launch or for the foreseeable future?

My own suspicion is that there’s elements of all three. With pre-launch betas becoming larger in size and scope, many of us get the chance to try an MMO before we put our hand in our pocket. Instead of buying the box, subscribing for a few months then ditching the game for something else, we elect to bide our time, drifting from beta to beta while we wait for a bargain. A game might grab our interest, but we have a ready-made, plausible excuse for why we shouldn’t buy into it.

But is this healthy for the industry? With subscription-based MMOs still being developed, are we discarding them out of hand? It’s possible we’ll see a reduction in subscription games, forced by changes in customer behaviour. What’s much less certain is if we’ll see future games take the same route as Guild Wars 2 and avoid subscriptions, or launch as completely free to play. It’s also possible that we’ll see MMOs switch to a single player RPG (such as Warhammer 40K: Dark Millenium), or cancelled completely.

There’s also the economic impact – is it a sign of these austere times that we’re more reluctant to pay a monthly subscription for a game? I think this is partially true – I’m cutting down the number of games I subscribe to and playing the remainder more. I’ve also dropped secondary accounts I had for some games. But I’m still happy to drop a three month sub on a new game to see how it fares post-launch.

Are we likely to return to MMOs if they switch to free-to-play? I’m still undecided on this. Lord of the Rings Online and Star Trek Online have failed to pull me back in. Everquest 2 hasn’t managed to grip me for an extended period. But that’s largely a lack of time. What I play changes from month to month, and while I have a few core games I still play, I rarely get the chance to return to older titles.

What next for MMOs? Stick with subscriptions or forge ahead with freemium? Ultimately, I think that it’ll be the player rather than the developer that decides.

Like this? Try these other related posts:

• The Declining MMO Market
• How Warcraft Will Never End
• Free to Play: MMO Retirement?

NEW: A Guide to Mana Obscura. All 200+ posts in topic-led guides on a wide range of MMO subjects.

© Gazimoff for ManaObscura.com, 2012. | Permalink | 18 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: free to play, subscriptions

It doesn’t matter what MMO I talk about, I’ve only ever played two thirds of the game. It doesn’t matter if it’s World of Warcraft, RIFT, Star Wars: The Old Republic or any of the countless other worlds I’ve kicked around in. Whatever the game, I’ve avoided PvP completely.

I’ve not always been like this: back in the vanilla days of WoW I’d play my hideously overpowered mage and have huge amounts of fun. Looking back, I think that my interest in PvP plummeted when all these special rules and exceptions came in. Resistance gear. Diminishing returns. Trinket rules. Yadda yadda. It went from being one game to three, all forced together like three unruly brothers.

Which is why the last few months have been incredibly strange. On the one hand there’s Guild Wars 2, where I’ve spent huge chunks of my beta time in World versus World (versus World versus World… etc). And then there’s Warhammer Online: Wrath of Heroes, a game that I’d describe as MMO PvP without all the MMO crap that goes along with it.

If you’ve been watching the MMO blogsphere, reading my articles on ZAM or generally following Kill Ten Rats, you’ll have noticed that a large chunk of Guild Wars 2 is made up of what I’d describe as “inclusive” PVP. There’s no vital talent spec or special gear to succeed in WvW. Just dive in and away you go. Competitive PVP is still there in smaller battleground matches, but for big mosh fights you can go with what you have.

I first played Warhammer Online: Wrath of Heroes three weeks ago, but since then I’ve been playing the game almost every day. By putting a 15 minute time limit on matches and stripping down the concept of arena PvP, there’s a streamlined route to getting into the game. No prep-work beyond a five minute tutorial, no gearing up, no talents to choose. Just in and fight.

The strange thing is, my niche in PvP is completely different from my DPS spellcaster roots. In Guild Wars 2 WvW I’m more comfortable playing a Guardian, with the ability to take a bit more damage but still have some spellcasting. In Wrath of Heroes I tend to stick to a tiny healer named Glowgob and a tiny Skaven rogue called Ikkrik. They’re all loaded with survivability, can deal a bit of damage and hold their own against most others.

Interestingly, both games are also microtransaction funded. While I’ve dabbled in the paid pool for both games, it’s not something that’s completely necessary. What I would say is that it helps you get where you want to go quickly. With Wrath of Heroes, you can either unlock a hero by playing hours of matches to earn gold, or you can pay cash and unlock it instantly. After facing the prospect of having to grind for PvP gear in full-fat MMOs, you can guess which route I took.

That said, there’s one way in which all forms of PvP are still absolutely identical, and that’s that people are generally mindless idiots that don’t listen. They don’t fight near the flag/artifact/objective/thing. They don’t focus their damage on a single target. They don’t stick together in a group and they certainly don’t listen to tactics or strategy. As a result, the easiest way to decimate your opposition is to get organised, communicate well and generally kick ass. It’s the kind of stuff that Gnomeageddon and Cynwise have been preaching for years, and it still works.

What I find slightly harder to understand is why there’s this desperate desire to push the eSports agenda into large scale MMOs, as if it’s somehow going to translate to the average joe having an occasional arena match. Why not just build a dedicated PvP game that’s intended to pull in the heavyweight eSports players but is also accessible to newcomers, and leave MMOs as the slightly unbalanced but largely fun thing that they traditionally were?

While I love the PvP action I’m now getting from my games, I don’t think that they’ll encourage me to play PvP arenas in MMOs. The PvP game is too divorced from the PvE experience to be meaningful for me any more. With other games able to provide a more accessible and rewarding PvP experience without any overly cumbersome barrier to entry, I’m already sold on where to spend my time.

(Note: Inspired by Gordon’s rant about why he doesn’t like raiding)

Like this? Try these other related posts:

• On the Shores of Lag
• The Trans-Temporal MMO Sausage
• Guild Wars 2, Keybindings & Razer Naga

NEW: A Guide to Mana Obscura. All 200+ posts in topic-led guides on a wide range of MMO subjects.

© Gazimoff for ManaObscura.com, 2012. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: guild wars 2, pvp, wrath of heroes

I’m incredibly excited by the future of MMO gaming. This year alone, the launch of TERA, Guild Wars 2 and The Secret World shows that developers aren’t afraid to experiment with new concepts in order to keep the genre alive and fresh. The free-to-play market is also bubbling away, with Firefall, Warhammer Online: Wrath of Ancients, and Tribes Ascended offering us new and unique experiences.

If anything, the free-to-play model has shown Western studios that it is possible to make a good quality MMO without the overhanging subscription free. Although we’ve seen many top-flight examples switch from subscription to free-to-play and do well, it’s likely that some of the next wave of MMOs will directly choose similar model, even if there’s a box fee attached to get started.

The trouble is, MMOs have a long lifespan. World of Warcraft has been running since 2004, but there some that started even earlier that are still in operation today. By coming up with alternative ways to generate income from MMOs, developers can keep their games running with much smaller player numbers. For new entrants looking to make a splash, the MMO marketplace is getting pretty congested.

Slicing the Sausage

There are two ways in which MMOs can differentiate themselves – thematically and mechanically. We don’t want to be paying for games that have similar settings and similar mechanics, as they don’t offer us new experiences. Cut away the story and you’re left with an identikit experience.

If you collect all of the different MMOs and arrange them by the time period they’re set, then  compare their complexity on  art style, story, strategy and so on, you end up with a rough sausage shape. This Trans-Temporal MMO Sausage bulges where there are several MMOs with similar settings and offering a range of styles, and thins out where there are only maybe one or two fairly superficial games.

This means that there’s some very familiar sausage-meat in the regions of medieval high fantasy and far-flung spaceship-faring future. Creating a an MMO with a theme in one of these periods relies on huge amounts of effort to be unique in terms of mechanics, story delivery and so on.

But this also means that there are opportunities. Although 1800s era Steampunk is often cited as a possible choice (indeed, the whole range from 17th to 21st Century is ripe for exploration), there’s also the classical and prehistoric eras available. In the future, cyberpunk (as characterized by Deus Ex) and other near-future non-apocalyptic options are possible. It’s more challenging to try and produce games that fit these periods without being a history lesson, but alternate history/alternate reality games such as The Secret World are examples of how this could give writers space to create fantastic stories.

Cutting the sausage another way, there’s also the way of looking at how our games are made, from the simplistic to the complex. As an example, this is why Guild Wars 2 is gaining momentum even though it’s high fantasy – many of the mechanics and concepts it uses are either completely new or radically different to others in the same space. It also means that offering something different, such as a medieval MMORTS, has the potential to stand out.

That complexity doesn’t just have to come from mechanics. It can be choices like art style (realistic versus simplistic), story delivery (text quests versus fully voice acted), action style and so on. Whatever criteria are important to you can be added to give the sausage some cross-section.

Stating the Obvious

For MMO veterans, this is nothing new. We tend to stick to our current game because of the relationships we build while playing it, and only tend to switch long-term if something significantly different gains enough critical mass to hold us. We might dabble in several different games, but we tend to only stick to one or two.

It’s for this reason that I’m dubious about announcements like The Elder Scrolls Online. From what I’ve read and heard about the game, it’s largely following a Warcraft-style experience in a fantasy setting, with possibly some Guild Wars 2 questing elements thrown in. While the lure of the franchise might pull some players in, I don’t think there’s enough there at present to make it sufficiently unique to those who aren’t familiar with the game world. Times may change as more news comes out, but currently it feels like the wrong game at the wrong time.

Examine the Sausage

If I were looking at developing a new MMO today, I’d look at plotting out my own sausage. Look at the games currently on the market or likely to come out over the next couple of years that I’m likely to be competing with, and see if they create any bulges. If there’s places where the sausage is particularly thin, they’re ripe for me to exploit. That leads on to new types of gameplay, and so on.

While pulling on an existing franchise is great for growing the overall MMO playerbase, it’s completely new settings combined with radically different settings that have the biggest potential to succeed in a genre where players mostly stick to what they’re playing unless there’s something sufficiently different to pull them away. It’s why I’m enthusiastic about this year’s MMO releases, and why I’m hoping that it’s something that continues in the future.

Vive la différence!

(sausage image from David Monniaux on Wikimedia Commons)

Like this? Try these other related posts:

• On the Shores of Lag
• Just Listen You Idiots!
• Guild Wars 2, Keybindings & Razer Naga

NEW: A Guide to Mana Obscura. All 200+ posts in topic-led guides on a wide range of MMO subjects.

© Gazimoff for ManaObscura.com, 2012. | Permalink | 7 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: difference, guild wars 2, sausage