Author Archives: Abalieno

wtf?!

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I need other bloggers assistance. Mind does not compute as it did not when SWG announced the NGE.

(source)

VANGUARD: SAGA OF HEROES FINDS A NEW HOME
– Sigil Games Online and Sony Online Entertainment In Talks To Co-Publish Sigil’s Ground-Breaking New Game –

May 5, 2006 – Carlsbad & San Diego, CA – Sigil Games Online and Sony Online Entertainment LLC (SOE), a global leader in the online games industry, today announced that Sigil is working with Microsoft Game Studios on an arrangement to acquire the rights to its highly anticipated massively multiplayer online (MMO) game, Vanguard: Saga of Heroes. These efforts have resulted in a tentative agreement for Vanguard to be co-published by both Sigil Games Online and SOE. All three companies will be showing the game at the upcoming Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) as they work closely together for a successful transition. Vanguard: Saga of Heroes is scheduled to launch this winter.

“As the development process is ongoing and constantly shifting, it became clear that MGS and Sigil had varying visions and direction for the title’s development,” said Brad McQuaid, CEO of Sigil Games Online. “In the best interest of Vanguard, it was decided that we would buy back the publishing rights from Microsoft.”

As co-publisher of Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, Sigil assumes greater control of marketing and PR, while maintaining responsibility for game development, community relations, media relations, customer support, and quality assurance. Under the terms of the agreement, SOE will provide distribution, marketing, hosting and back-end support — including billing and technical support — for the game. Additionally, SOE is tentatively planning on adding Vanguard, upon its release,to SOE’s Station Access™ subscription plan. Station Access allows players to enjoy all of SOE’s MMO titles for one low monthly price.

“We are very excited to be working with so many old friends at Sigil,” said John Smedley, president, Sony Online Entertainment. “Vanguard looks beautiful and has an incredibly rich game world. It’s the type of game that will appeal directly to SOE’s hundreds of thousands of players and should fit in perfectly with the current line-up of games available in Station Access.”

”This decision was made mutually by Sigil and Microsoft, in the best interest of the long-term goals for the title,” said Phil Spencer, General Manager at Microsoft Game Studios. “As a key Windows development partner, we will continue to work with Sigil to ensure Vanguard’s ongoing success.”

First guess: Vanguard is nowhere ready and Miscrosoft decided to bail. I wouldn’t be surprised if this will lead to a one-year delay.

Second guess: It makes absolutely no sense for SOE to keep three identic games competing between each other. Two were already too much. This could lead to two scenarios. The first is that Vanguard will never release and the development reabsorbed into EQ2, the second is that it will release but it will fail so loudly that it will be shutdown shortly after.

But then I know that SOE never does anything logic. They bought and still support Matrix after all. They are really mimicking NCSoft’s portfolio strategy and absorbing all potential competitors. Even if they suck.

Instead there’s one thing I’m pretty sure: right now Microsoft is regretting to have dumped Mythica in favor of Vanguard, if someone remembers what I mean.

And one thing is ABSOLUTELY sure: Vanguard will be delayed indefinitely.

Smed: I have to say I’m incredibly impressed with Vanguard. The game is awesome, and I think from our perspective it’s going to be something we’re very proud to be associated with.

This will be pasted again in bold when the game will be released. If it will be released.

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What PvP means in WoW

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Ubiq posted something that I thought I posted myself. It was kind of a deja-vu.

Actually I cannot remember if I really posted it or just wrote in my “notes” file to write about later on, but I clearly remember to have counted all the PvP and PvE servers a while ago and I still have the numbers I noted down:
55 normal servers
73 PvP

I’m bringing this up now because I’ve seen wrong conclusions being drawn about these numbers, so here are my precisations that I also wrote in the comments over there.

The first wrong assumption is this one:
The most successful PvP in WoW isn’t “MMO PvP” – it’s counterstrike style PvP.

This is false and those number demonstrate the exact opposite. The “counterstrike style PvP” is what we have in the form of “BattleGrounds” and these are available on ALL servers. There’s no distinction between PvP and PvE servers here. No reason to pick one instead of the other.

But still, what those numbers show is that the players are split in half. If one half of these players has chosen the PvP servers IS NOT because they want to play in the BGs, because these BGs are available on all servers. Makes sense?

So what is the distinctive trait between PvE and PvP servers? The world PvP. Half of the players have chosen a PvP server because of the “world PvP”.

Those players are there despite that kind of unique PvP offered in the PvP servers is almost non existent and was completely neglected by Blizzard.

Those aren’t just players who want PvP. Those are players that are there for a form of PvP that Blizzard doesn’t even support.

I don’t think this is a negligible detail. The very significant conclusion is that the players are asking for a type of PvP that Blizzard is NOT SUPPORTING.

And don’t fucking tell me that EVEN in the PvP servers the “world PvP” is almost dead and everyone just plays in the BGs. OF COURSE, but this happens because of the lack of support to a WORTHWHILE ALTERNATIVE. The players can only follow the best route available and this depends on what is offered. This doesn’t mean that there wasn’t a DEMAND for other forms of PvP. A demand that Blizzard ignored till today.

It’s like a seed. Players arrive with expectations, then they have to adapt. In this case Blizzard just didn’t take advantage of the expectations of those players.

Now the other wrong premise (in the sequel):
The PvP servers are emptier than PvE servers.

This is also false. I don’t have exact numbers but I’m sure that the number of active players between PvP and PvE are near. The proof of this is that Blizzard not only launched an equal number of PvP and PvE servers when the game was released, but continued to do so since then. It’s obvious that there was a demand since the number and type of new servers is determined by population requirements.

On the other side it is true that a good number of PvP servers have a very low population. But even here there’s a reason.

This is a trend I observed since the very beginning and that can be generalized to other games:
– In the PvE case the players tend to move on the servers with less population, where they have less competition (divergence)
– In the PvP case the players tend to amass on fewer servers, looking for good-sized communities (convergence)

The result of this is that the PvE server have usually a better distributed population, while the PvP servers have sharp highs and lows, with servers overcrowded and servers that are basically empty. The players tend to converge instead of diverge as in the PvE servers. Such is the nature of PvP, without other player you can just stare a wall. So the players look for playable and popular environments. Instead in a PvE server, beyond your guild, everyone else is insignificant if not an annoyance. This is why it’s much simpler to ask a raiding guild to move on a “clean” server, they actually desire it. While it’s much harder to make a consolidated PvP guild to move on a underpopulated server. It would be a sacrifice.

Yes, the players joined and still join the PvP servers with set expectations. I’m one of them. These expectations may be deluded but they are still part of an original motivation. The form of mixed PvP and PvE in WoW is still what drives the players to the PvP servers because it can be extremely fun. It adds a variation to a kind of gameplay that instead would be monotonous and dull at times. It enhances the social fabric and interactions, it makes the zones become alive. It makes the game feel more like a “world” where the players have some significance instead of ignoring each other. The environment becomes much more part of the gameplay in a open PvP field than in a static PvE pull.

This doesn’t mean that it is always as fun as it can be. I believe that a huge improvement would be to get rid of levels, but this would be off-topic here. The point is that the players are there for a potential that isn’t fully delivered.

A seed momentarily without water.

(continues here)

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Fewer points

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Fewer points of interest continuing the thoughts here below. With some redundancy.

– The characters are created on a server selected by the system. This coincides to a familiar “single-player gateway”. First few steps learning the basics of the game.

– Server travel is possible under certain rules to keep the population and factional balance between the servers even.

– The PvE is instanced and divided into two types. The first type is “small worlds”. Mmorpg-like instances hosting hundreds of players and working as social hubs. The second type is “adventures”. Private instances opened by the players for small groups up to raids.

– The PvP is sharded and persistent, as most of the current mmorpgs are structured through different “home” servers. Every character is always bound to one and just one home PvP shard. There are portals in all the PvP shards leading to the PvE “small worlds”. From there the players can go back to a different PvP shard if they want so. Shard travel would require the player to re-bind.

– Guilds are also bound to a shard, as are the characters. A guild can be moved to a different shard, but it will get dispossessed of territories conquered, shard-based resources and other forms of progress.

The idea of these points is to define the scope of the plan. The server travel system is there to regulate the population and faction balance on the PvP servers, while the PvE servers are simply instanced on necessity. Bringing together the need of persistence for PvP with a massive PvE world that can still remain balanced.

The barriers between the players are still there, for example in the form of PvP shards. This creates smaller, manageable communities. At the same time these barriers are kept permeable, so that the players can move past them. Join friends through the PvE instances or rebind to different PvP shards.

While moving between PvP shards is possible, the system is also planned to encourage the players to settle in their home shard to reach a stability. This is why the guilds are also bound and they cannot conquer territories and participate to PvP on multiple shards. The goal is to create server-specific realities, economies and social connections. So that the PvP isn’t felt impersonal and dispersive.

Balancing massive worlds

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As anticipated there’s something fundamentally wrong in the announce from Blizzard to “disperse the players”. This because from mmorpgs you would ideally expect the exact opposite: connect the players.

This is a topic of a general importance and something I often ranted about because it brings together design and technology. Often these two are treated separately and it is why so many recent games have huge problem to balance the server population, high and off peaks, high and low levels and even the factions in a PvP environment.

It is not a case that one of my first ideas was to find a solution to all these problems together. A basic structure planned around some core goals that I’ve always seen dismissed (or considered too late) in the current mmorpgs.

In the meantime a few mmorpgs made smaller steps toward that goal. While WoW got swamped with a inappropriate server structure even more aggravated by the foolish decision to divide the servers by timezones (that forced them a quick backpedaling by removing them in the servers tab just two weeks after launch with an hotfix) and forbid european players to play on the american servers, other games like FFXI and Guild Wars went through a more conscious planning phase and effectively achieved very good results.

We all know that in Guild Wars the whole world is instanced. As a zone reaches a certain population a new instance is created and the arriving players are moved there. This makes possible a dynamic adaptation: if there are only a few players around, one zone is enough, if there are more players to the point that the problem is the overpopulation, then they get splitted.

This brings to two important goals. The first is to keep the servers balanced, avoiding crashes, instability and cronic lag. The second is to keep high and off-peaks also balanced, which is important to have the PvP arenas always playable, for example. See in comparison how it is absolutely impossible to join a BattleGround in WoW during the morning. And notice again how their plan to cluster some servers is still inappropriate since it is still a fixed mechanic opposed to a dynamic, self-adapting one. The same limitation of the clustering plan made by Mythic (which is merely a less-dramatic server merge).

FFXI also tried something in the form of WorldPasses. Here the solution they found is more debatable since it’s considered as a huge annoyment by the majority of the players. The bottom line is: it worked, but it also pissed off everyone. In FFXI you cannot pick the server where your character will be created, instead the choice is automated so that the population is spread evenly between all servers. It is obvious that this is a major problem if you are trying to join your friends who already started on another server. So there was the possibility to override the automated choice with the in-game purchase of “WorldPasses” that could be used at the character creation to select a precise server. Simply put: a “referral code” given to you by someone already in the game. This code cost some in-game money so you still needed a player already there buying the code for you. Which was still quite annoying.

This mechanic was harshly criticized and still is. But it undoubtedly worked as expected and FFXI is today the game that has achieved the best population balance of any other mmorpg. It worked perfectly. All the servers show similar numbers and are equally populated. The decision to use “global server” to bring together players from all nationalities also allowed them to keep high and off-peaks almost uniform during the 24h cycle. With the considerable advantage that there are less risks that during sharp high peaks of population the servers start to lag and crash.

An undesirable rule that was still worth the pain? Only if there weren’t better solutions. And yes, I have one.

A better solution could have been about taking the WorldPass mechanic and overturn it. Instead of requiring established characters to buy referral codes to allow other players to join, they should have locked completely the possibility to choose where to create the character. With or without the WorldPass. Your character would be created in a server chosen by the system, without offering you the possibility to override this choice in any way. Then you would have the possibility to buy directly (and not through other players) a WorldPass working as a “server teleport system” so that your character could be migrated to the server of your choice. This would have removed the pressure to find the WorldPass as the very first thing you need to play the game. Letting you start to play wirthout worrying where you finish, because you will always have the possibility to move somewhere else later on. The server choice isn’t anymore a cage or an impassable barrier separating you from your friends.

What I described is exactly what happens in Guild Wars. The system itself picks the zones where you’ll finish, but if you arrive at the instance 9 while your friends are in the instance 3 you can still easily join them by picking manually where you want to go. Guild Wars has demonstrated that this is possible.

Now the problem is that GW isn’t a real “virtual world”, nor the VW is something in its objectives. It’s a different kind of game and it leaves out the traits that really define a “massive” online game (like “persistence”). The ideal of a virtual world. Even if it’s exactly in THIS ideal that the technology in GW would be useful.

You could argue about this “massive” idea. It is common to say that having thousands of players around you doesn’t really add anything worthwhile because, even in the best scenario, you’ll only interact with a few of them. The rest is chaotic, disorienting. It would just bring to something unmanageable. But again, this is false. Games like Eve-Online have concretely demonstrated that while you don’t interact directly with every single other players, these players still affect the game-world, so they still indirectly interact with you. Not just a potential, but something concrete. When these systems reach a decent amount of complexity (the systemic approach) every single element in the system has a weight and an effect on every other.

It’s important to segment the playerbase and create groups to keep the game and its community on a manageable level (for game designers and players). But it’s also important to make these barriers, these “wrappers”, permeable.

Permeable barriers.

Permeable barriers in the sense that they exist for an useful purpose, but at the same time they don’t become also restrictions.

Instead of a cage, they would become lines drawn on the ground. They define a space and help to organize it, but at the same time they still allow you to cross the line if you need to. They don’t trap you. They don’t isolate.

This concept of “permeable barriers” is a general one that I reused for other design core systems. Not only the server infrastructure, but even the class and the aligment system. Offering the players to experiment and never remain stuck in a state they don’t like. A system that can remain flexible and adaptable in every part. A system that remains open so that you can access all the content without unsolvable restrictions. A system that could “connect the players” and, in particular remain always accessible. Including instead of excluding. Opening doors instead of shutting them in your face as you try to pass. Something that “moves along” and favors the social fabric instead of going against it as another obstacle.

These are all goals from where I started. My system is based on a very simple principle. Think to the game servers as containers and think the players as water. The idea is to introduce the water into the system so that is kept balanced uniformly between the containers. From the very beginning. Then there is the possibility for the water to mix and move between the containers, but through a system of rules so that its level would be always kept even.

We have already seen in Guild Wars and in WoW (with the server migrations) that the players polish themselves if you give them the possibility to do so. Noone wants to play on a overcrowded, lagged server as noone wants to play on one that is empty. This balance happens spontaneously, this is the point. What is important is to design a dynamic system that can compensate and solve these core problems radically. As I often wrote my system is just a possible implementation but what is important is that these problems are tackled appropriately and not months after release when shit happens as with WoW. At that point it’s too late and you’ll never be able to go back and plan the server infrastructure differently.

Two moments.

One is about replacing the level system with a skill-based system to avoid the segregation and division of the players.

The other is planning the server structure so that it can valorize what these game can offer. Meet and play with your friends and other players you don’t know yet. Removing all the obstacles in the mmorpgs currently on the market.

Random thought

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I was just thinking that it wouldn’t be conceivable to start hosting official interviews and previews on sites like this one. We just select and comment things we pick outside, we don’t produce content directly, nor we are a vehicle for anything. External observers.

But I really cannot understand how the game companies can find acceptable to give previews, interviews or whatever else to more official and commercial sites when these sites put on the same page a bunch of ad banners publicizing the competitors.

If I was giving out an official interview or preview, I would pretend, at the very least, to not have competitors publicized in the same page and, often, even between a line and the other.

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David Allen? This name sounds familiar…

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Or he is back or this is a case of homonymy.

Noone remembers David Allen? Come on, there was much drama around him. He is the guy who started Horizon before he quit and was replaced by the other clueless guy (David Bowman). Then he went to start another company without any concrete foundation (Pharaoh), planned big and failed again. I think in the meantime he only delivered a crappy “Eye of the Beholder” clone. More or less on the same level of the Glitchless guys and Dawn.

I went digging old links and stuff but got bored quickly. You can find some legendary stories here, though. The internet is rich if you have time to waste.

Summarizing, this is part of the golden age of mmorpgs when everyone thought you could homebrew one in a garage with a bunch of amateurs. I thought this age was long over and that we didn’t believe anymore on fairy tales.

Instead he is back. At least for a laugh.

“As a group of dedicated gamers, we feel that the design of Crusade marks the direction we would like to see the industry go,” said David Allen, co-founder and CEO of QOL. “The MMOG subscriber base is growing at a rate that the current quality of products cannot keep up with. We must raise our vision of what is held as innovative and learn from what has been successful. Stay grounded while reaching for the stars. That is what Crusade is about – taking MMORPGs to the next level.” David continued, “we are also working to establish a strong player-developer relationship that allows the player base to actively participate in the ongoing development of the game by interacting with our team members to provide detailed feedback on what is important to gamers. Evolving the core concept and design of Crusade during development based on player feedback is key to developing a successful product.”

Yeah, sure. /yawn

I’m sure he can see the stars.

Some people REALLY never learn. It seems time didn’t pass at all, they took him back out of the wardrobe and he’s still saying the same stuff with the same confidence.

Just the other day I was writing how we really don’t need another mmorpg. In particular amateurish ones that are dead before even entering the very first day of development. The day of brand new companies who pretend to do a mmorpg as their very first project are over. If you want to be in the industry and have a talent to offer, join one of the companies who are already out there and do your best to make things as good as possible. As I wrote, all these game worlds have huge potential and they only need resources, execution and good ideas.

There’s so much to do. And noone needs another pretentious shoebox sold as a mmorpg.

You can be sure he won’t go anywhere, but you can be also sure he’ll try again. How sweet.

Something fundamentally wrong

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I don’t really know what to think.

I don’t really understand how a Producer’s letter for a mmorpg can start with this resonant objective:

Dispersing the Population

I mean, it’s just wickedly wrong.

I know the reasons, the situation and all the rest. I know what it means and why they talk about this.

But think to what a mmorpg really should be. There’s obviously something that just isn’t working as it should.

Something at the core.

At least this is followed by something better:

The new zones added to the game in The Burning Crusade will increase Azeroth’s current land mass by 25 percent. To insure that Azeroth continues to feel vibrant and populated, we will be increasing the player caps on all our realms by the same percentage.

EDIT: I was thinking about this. They are adding another starting zone for each race so the “space” for the entry levels will be upped of 1/3, which means 33%. I also guess that there will be less content in percentual connecting the early and late game, leaving more of it for the 60-70 range and the endgame.

Now if we think about the expansion it’s quite obvious that there won’t be many reasons to reroll new characters. I suppose that the large majority of players, or returning players, will log in their level 60s and rush to 70. This means that 90% of the newbie characters as the expansion launches will be of the new race. So we will have an overload of one noob zone while the other three are deserted. In the longer term all four will return to their semi-empty status.

The rest of the players will be once again packed at the cap, or moving toward the cap. Considering that 90% of this endgame is trapped in private rooms, the percent of the land mass added won’t really matter much. There will be another temporary overload and then another stagnation at level 70.

Considering that the current cap is around 3200 players the 25% increase will bring it up to 4000.

—
They also say that this summer they’ll finally open the character transfer service and they hint they’ll use this as another way to balance the servers.

Scheduled to go live this summer, this feature will allow players to move their characters, within certain restrictions, to a realm of their choosing. This means that player’s will now be able to join their friends on other realms without the need to wait for a pre-set mass realm transfer. In addition, this will also contribute to a balancing of the player load from realm to realm, which again is a specific way for us to reduce realm queues and lag.

I’ll return on these arguments because they are of a general importance and Blizzard’s workaround is lame at best.

Anyway, it’s quite sad to read a producer’s letter just about hardware issues.

“Yes, two years have passed and we are still swamped trying to unfuck a fundamentally flawed infrastructure.”

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Do One Thing

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Both Darniaq and Ubiq wrote some thoughts after an interview with the Garriott’s bothers and I think they bit a poisoned leaf (Darniaq thinks aloud but doesn’t seem to arrive at a conclusion).

I find those marketing strategies fundamentally flawed and I expect there will be a backlash sooner or later. It’s true that there’s a group of casual mmorpg players with ADD that jump from game to game, but I see this as a periphery of larger consolidations of players. I wouldn’t base any business on a completely unreliable target. It’s foolish.

Darniaq summarizes that strategy in two points:
– Portfolios are good. Why offer one title when you can offer many?
– Retention in a game is good. Retention in your portfolio, better.

The scenario doesn’t look so well, from my point of view. A miriad of mediocre games that could have a potential, but that are destined to have a forgettable and brief life.

I can imagine some players trying a new game as it launches, but I really cannot imagine that, in a year, players bored with Dungeon Runners will go buy Auto Assault. Come on. This strategy could work while we are still in a mmorpg frenzy phase where everything is undecided. In the longer term I think the dust will settle and the purchases will be more driven by the confidence the players have in a product and a company.

My point of view here is somewhat rigged because I don’t see the “churn” as a feature. But as a standard of quality. A solid playerbase means that the game has a value, so it’s a general definition of “worth”. Trying to embrace it would mean embracing a mediocrity. Favoring volatile, forgettable experiences. Swarming the market with a bunch of products to disorient a noob customer.

It could work till the market is chaotic and immature, but I don’t see this as a good strategy in the longer term. I’m from a completely different school: do one thing, invest everything you can on it so that it can be the best possible. This is the only way I see to hope in a growth. Betting on the quality of what you can do, your dedication and commitment to offer the best service you can.

NCSoft strategy looks instead more like a market speculation, at some point they’ll need a magistral exit strategy.

I also don’t understand how their ideas apply to the single company. It may make sense for NCSoft to have “casual subscribers”, but how can the single games survive without imploding? Chasing the mediocrity grounds the quality, it doesn’t improve it. Things go progressively worse, not progressively better.

I don’t know. I really cannot understand how it can be better to disperse the resources on multiple projects that will be short-lived and with no future, compared to instead *consolidate* the resources to do something right. And when you got something right you can work to build on top of what you achieved. This is the only way I know to hope in a growth. Working toward a goal, reinvesting. Adding bricks to a solid house instead of building a bunch of shacks that will be blown off by a weak wind.

I always wonder what could have happened if SOE used and reinvested all its resources in one game instead of spawning multiple ones. Every time I hear about a new mmorpg in development I roll my eyes: do we really need another?

I’m a wannabe designer, but I’d never try to start from zero in a brand new company even if I had the possibility. That’s a recipe for failure and this industry needs a consolidation of resources and talents. Not more fragmentation and more unfinished, amateurish projects with no future. We had enough already of those. “Bring together”, join the efforts. Every single game world has a huge potential, it just need ideas, resources and a good execution. Not a wipe and a restart every two steps.

Building things so that they can last. So that they can be solid. If we are two groups with similar goals it makes sense to work together so that the house can be more solid. It’s part of the cooperation.

I hope that in the future won’t get swarmed by a bunch of mediocre titles competing over a tiny group of players. Instead I hope there will be more aggregation. This is how I think the market should be tackled.

Even from the perspective of the development good results only come from well-oiled teams that learnt to work together and perfectioned what they can do. Blizzard came out of that. An high churn is never good. It isn’t good for the communities as it isn’t good for the developers.

It’s true that “communities are portable”, but seconding this concept never brought to good results. When SOE built EQ2 the former EQ players didn’t move to it. They moved to WoW. I think communities try to choose an home with a roof that appears solid and doesn’t drip. There are of course swarms of players that float around these consolidations, but I wouldn’t found a market on them. You are trying to survive of the breadcrumbs of passing players.

It would be interesting to map the migratory fluxes between games if we had precise, disclosed data. But I suspect that the major ones would be unidirectional. Because the core point is this one: how many come back? I still think that these players are more on a research driven by a dissatisfaction. As the market matures I think we’ll see the opposite of what Ubiq says. The players will know better what they are looking for and will become less incline to move. Harder to seduce with inconsistent hype.

I also don’t think that the companies that NCSoft “hosts” will like to be used as disposable fuel.

This is how I would rewrite those two rules:
– Better do one good thing to which you commit and dedicate than a bunch of mediocre ones.
– Retention is an health measure, even (and in particular) in a competitive market.

Rome wasn’t built in a day. Nor it was made of paper. (!?)

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