We Fly Spitfires – MMORPG Blog

So it’s official: Star Trek Online will be released on 2nd February 2010 in the US and 5th February 2010 in Europe (hopefully the usual head start programs will apply and us Euros can get early access along with our American buddies). Not really surprised at such an early release date as after all of the tidbits of news I’d been hearing about STO, I was expecting it. Still, it does make me very cynical about just how polished and ready the game will be. Call me a pessimist but I’ve been playing MMORPGs for a long, long time now and seen my fair share of games being released when they just aren’t ready.

However, trying to objective about it all, maybe STO will be just fine and perfectly polished and good to go. Perhaps I’m too used to Blizzard’s relaxed attitude towards deadlines (turns out Starcraft 2 won’t even beta until next year) and thus feel that if something doesn’t take a dog’s age to release, then it won’t be ready enough. Cryptic may have been working on the game for years already or using some fancy new engine and tools which makes development a breeze so really I shouldn’t pass any judgement until the game comes out and I can try it for myself.

Still, I worry. See, I’m a worrier, it’s just in my nature. We haven’t had the slow build of hype over 36 months to prepare us for this game and the thought “they just want to get it out before Cataclysm destroys every other MMO along with Azeroth” keeps pervading my mind. However, with any luck time will prove me wrong and my worries will be to no avail.

P.S. I’ve decided to avoid the Star Trek Online open beta and just wait for the official release (or pre-order head start). I’m jaded with the whole beta experience and, right now, I feel like I can continue my internal hype machine enough to wait.

In a moment of utter lunacy, I decided to purchase the Pandaren Monk pet for World of Warcraft so I could see what all the fuss was about and review it for my blog. It comes with a hefty price take in the UK (£9, more than my monthly subscription and about 30% more than the US equivalent) but heck, it’s only money right? Plus half of it goes to the Make-a-Wish Foundation charity so that makes me feel a little better.

The purchase process was very slick and easy and I have to take my hat off to good web design when I see it. I mean, it’s so easy, you’re money almost falls out of your wallet into their system so kudos to the Blizzard Store web developers. Integrating the pet with your WoW account to claim is also very simple and well guided plus there’s a nice option to send the code off to someone else for a gift. No doubt Blizzard have eyed up these cute pets as being potential Christmas presents.

Pandaren Monk in WoW

I’ll need to let everyone know that at this point my wife caught me buying the Pandaren Monk and wasn’t very pleased with me splashing out £9 on virtual goods. I managed to convince her that it was important research for my blog but I’m not sure she completely bought it. Tip for everyone else – make sure you buy your online pets in secret lest you risk the infamous wife aggro.

Anyway, a few minutes later I was logged into WoW and had my little, chubby monk out ready to entertain me. Meh. Yeah, it’s kinda fun. I guess. The panda pet does look very cool and the animations are really nice. He will bow when people /bow to him and every so often he will squeal and jump around doing some kung-fu moves but other than that he just follows you around like any other vanity pet.

The Pandaren Monk is a nice pet, no doubt, but to be honest I’ve already forgotten about it. I’m just not sure exactly what to do with it apart from occasionally break it out in highly populated areas just to show off. If I’d received this pet as part of an in-game promotion or quest reward, I’d be very happy but I’m highly skeptical about whether it deserves it’s excessive price tag.

So to summarise: pet, nice; price, bad. But the most burning question of them all, is it worth the money? In my opinion, no, it’s not.

Oh and you can’t rename it. I don’t really understand why not and it’s a big shame as my wife was hoping I could rename it after her. I think she’s just watched Kung-Fu Panda once too often.

Something SOE does quite well in Everquest 2 (and presumably some of it’s other games) is encourage loyalty from their player base. They have a very simple mechanic called veteran rewards which allows you to claim fluff items, titles, experience potions and the like depending on how many days old your account is. It’s pretty basic and appeals to vanity but I always found it a nice little addition.

Being one of the first subscribers to EQ2 meant I had an exceptionally old player account and I used to take a small amount of glee by being one of the first to access a new title or fireworks display. It was also kinda cool to be able to show people that you were a founding member of the game and veteran player through your title even if you’d just rolled a new alt. It was also an easy way of letting people know you weren’t a complete noob.

I’m surprised these veteran rewards weren’t more heavily utilised by SOE in EQ2 (I think they decided they could make more money by selling people fluff items than by giving them away based on account age) and also that this type of loyalty scheme isn’t more heavily advertised in other MMORPGs. I doubt it would actually cause people to keep their subscriptions active even once they got bored of the game but it’s certainly nice to receive a little thank you from the developers for being such a loyal gamer. Plus, I think there’s also a certain amount of pride that a player can take by letting others know that they are a longstanding member of their MMO community.

Having taken a quick peek on the Internet, it appears that Aion has just introduced a veteran reward system of it’s own, offering a batch of goodies for players who stick it out every month up to 6 months (and beyond I’m guessing). Maybe it help people get through the dreaded grind that I keep hearing about.

Personally I find the concept of veteran rewards and player loyalty quite appealing but whether or not it’s actually effective or not is anyone’s guess. What do you think?

Of course the big news today was that Blizzard have entered the micro-transaction scene and are now selling in-game pets, bound to your account, via their online store. Can’t say I’m really surprised as Blizzard have been slowly introducing more and more paid services over the years and I feel like it was only a matter of time before they started selling in-game items. Expect more fluff and vanity items and probably even exp potions in the months to come.

I can’t say that I’m particularly bothered about the introduction of purchasable pets although I have to say that I’m shocked at the price. A single pet will set you back a hefty $10, 2/3 of a normal US monthly subscription. Note how I said US. Yep, Blizzard have decided to jump on the UK exploitation bandwagon (we always seem to pay over the odds for everything here) and charge a staggering £9 per pet. That’s more than my monthly subscription of £8.99!!

Let me put it in perspective: £9 for the pet, at the current conversion rate, is the equivalent of $14.9. Apparently Blizzard thinks that the WoW subscribers in the UK will swallow paying 33% more than their American counterparts. Other Europeans don’t fair much better and are expected to €10, almost as much as the British.

I know the “Europeans as 2nd class citizens” topic is a pretty old and tired subject but inequality irks me. Even when one considers taxation, it still doesn’t explain the crazy price tag that Blizzard have stuck on their European pets. It’s even odder when you consider that this virtual good doesn’t have any differing distribution or manufacturing cost for whatever part of the world it’s purchased in. It doesn’t need to be shipped over or imported from Alabama to Albania for instance.

It all boils down to greed. And that gets my goat.

The original term, as far as I know it, was MMORPG – Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game. It spawned when the concept of the RPG game was taken live across the Internet and introduced to hundreds of thousands of players in a simultaneous world (I don’t know how the term MUD fits into this or even if had anything to do with the term MMORPG so feel free to shed some light on it if you know). Since then people have often shortened the term to simply MMO and used it to define RGP style games like World of Warcraft and Everquest.

The term has also been prefixed onto other classic gaming terms like FPS giving, you guessed it, MMOFPS. Tabula Rasa for instance was often called this (whether that was truly accurate or not) and now we’ve got the forthcoming Global Agenda which certainly fits the bill quite aptly.

Aside from being shortened to more conveniently describe MMORPG, you have to wonder if the term MMO isn’t actually a genre unto itself. Technically speaking there are lots of MMOs out there. Quake Live is a MMO and so are games played over Battle.net. They’re “massive”, they’re “multiplayer” and they’re “online”. So really we could define MMO as any game that involves a lot of players over the Internet, not necessary something that fits into the Ultima Online or original Everquest gameplay style.

Although this may all sound like pedantry waffle (and it probably is), it could have quite a big impact on the future of our gaming. If MMO really is a genre by itself, then the barriers that define games are going to start dropping and we’ll be seeing vast varieties of them going massive, multiplayer and online.

It also shakes up our traditional definition of MMORPG. Take Torchlight for example. Runic have stated that they will release a “MMO version” but, frankly, that could mean anything. It might end up being a vast world spanning multiple servers like World of Warcraft, a single world like EVE Online or something like a heavily instanced, arcade style world like Warrior Epic. Either way, it will be interesting to see.

So there you have my take on what “MMO” is. What does this really mean to me though? Well, not much other than I’m probably going to have to change the strap line for my blog. We Fly Spitfires – MMO Blog? Doesn’t quite roll of the tongue the way MMORPG does

One of the toughest things about the MMORPG genre is that it’s not always possible to take your friends with you when you change game. People tend to find a MMO they enjoy and play it over long periods of time (months, if not years) and that’s great for forming strong bonds and friendships but it does mean that if you want to try something new, you can often find yourself standing on a fresh new world, knowing no one, whilst all of your old buddies are still playing your previous game. And that sucks.

Maybe it says a lot about the transient nature of our online friendships (and that actually these friendships aren’t as real as we think they are) but I’m not sure I buy into that. I think the relationships we form online are real, it’s just that they’re subject to harsher circumstances and conditions. Much like if one of your real life friends moves to another country, we can all still keep in contact with our online friends via guild forums, MSN Messenger, Facebook and Twitter but it’s never the same as actually playing the same MMORPG with them.

I’ve faced this experience quite a lot over the past 12 months when I found that the MMORPG interests of myself and my friends from Everquest 2 started to diverge. Most of us got burnt out with EQ2 and decided to try Age of Conan when it was released. After discovering we didn’t like it, some of us moved onto Warhammer Online (although some stayed in AoC) and then, after discovering we didn’t like that, we all kinda just split up. Some went back to EQ2, some (like myself) tried World of Warcraft and some took a break from MMORPGs all together. It’s a shame that we find ourselves in the situation were we can’t all find the perfect game to play together but, I suppose, that’s life.

Something which would be a somewhat remedy to this situation (and something I’d really love to see) is a ubiqituos chat client throughout all MMORPGs. Sure, you might not be able to group together but at least you could still maintain a cross-game friends list, chat ability and perhaps even a cross-MMORPG guild. I think there’s potential here to standardise some of these features and help close the divide between games and players.

The concept may sound a little radical but it’s not as far fetched as it first might seem. After all, SoE implement cross server and game chat and enabled players of EQ, EQ2 and SW:G to chat between each other and join public chat channels. It was a very clever idea because it allowed people to play other games in their catalogue without worrying about loosing contact with their current friends and guild.

Of course, I’m now facing this exact same dilemma again as I feel the desire to start up a Horde character in WoW. Swapping sides from Alliance means loosing contact with all of my friends and guild and that really irks me. Well, maybe it’s just time to invest in my own VoIP server.

Although I participated in the World of Warcraft beta and even imported the USA version of the game before it was released here in Europe, I got stuck into Everquest 2 instead and didn’t properly start playing WoW until the end of October 2008, just over a year ago. In my year of Warcraft I haven’t accomplished as much as many other players – I haven’t hit level 80 yet and I haven’t done any raiding – but instead I’ve played it in a very casual style and thoroughly enjoyed it.

I think WoW has been the right game for me at the right time. Previously my MMORPG gaming had been a lot more full on and time consuming and I think I just needed to tone it down for a while and enjoy a game that is, by design, very easy and casual. WoW’s like taking a bath, there’s nothing new or unexpected and it’s very comforting and relaxing. I’m sure I’ll get bored of WoW (probably sooner rather than later, depending on how long it is before Cataclysm comes out) and the itch to get stuck into something more fulfilling will occur (I had it with EVE Online a few months ago) but right now it’s doing me just fine, say thankya.

Anyway, for your interest, here are couple of things I really like about World of Warcraft and a couple of things that drive me crazy.

The Good

Immersive World

One of reasons I started playing WoW was because I was very disappointed with Warhammer Online. WAR felt just like a giant arcade game with no sense of immersion or the player existing in a vibrant, living world. Warcraft, on the other hand, does this very well and when you log in, you feel like you’re in another world.

Casual

WoW is designed to be easy and friendly. It’s not a hardcore game and it’s not for players who want a huge challenge. Yeah, people say that it’s dumbing down the genre and that may well be true but there’s plenty of MMORPGs out there now that cater for different audiences and I’m happy enough with the one Blizzard have aimed their game at.

The Bad

Community

For a MMORPG, WoW has a terrible, terrible community. I’ve never met so many rude or childish players in all my life. For someone that successfully championed the PUG for years in Everquest 2, WoW completely destroyed my faith in grouping with strangers. Ironic and sad.

Infrequent Expansions

I know Blizzard pride themselves on being able to release games and expansions whenever they’re totally ready and never before but, c’mon, MMORPGs really need a continuous stream of content to keep people interested. EQ2 has had some fantastic expansions that really helped grow the game and SOE’s yearly release rate kept me interested for over three years solid. I worry that Blizzard’s slow expansion schedule will cause me to bore of WoW prematurely.

Anyway, there you have it. A year of WoW for me has come and gone. I wonder if I’ll still be playing it come November 2010?