Star Trek Online: Here We Go Again!

[Ghambit]

You are in the minority. Get used to it.

Minorities are the future
  errr 

[Modern Angel]

I fail to see how a world which is going to serve up actually different persistent online games like APB and Global Agenda is regressing. There will be no worlds; there will be attempted innovation. Sorry about the former, time to move on.

[Shatter]

Wow is this thread derailed, but I like it. I think we're out of useful STO topics.

It seems like things are crystallizing into three main ways to be successful in the MEDIUM (thanks Haemish):

1 - STO type games; plan-to-fail; make your money back quickly and then shut down at some definite point in the future. AoC, WAR, Aion (?) are in this bucket. One or more of these may fall under #2 (time will tell)
2 - start small, stay profitable, serve a niche and steadily improve: cf Eve-Online, LotRO
3 - big-budget, big idea, long-term; WoW is the only successful recent example of this now. UO and EQ got a free pass for being first movers, but no one else will.  AC and DAoC got a free pass also, but it was already wearing out by then.

I think it also bears pointing out that like most overnight successes, Blizzard took 10 or more years to position themselves for success with WoW, both in terms of IP and in gathering a team that knows wtf and establishing a base of technology to build from without breaking the bank by starting from scratch.

The above is only really persistent worlds. There is a whole other sub-medium of less-persistent worlds: GW and Planetside come to mind.

Ok I think you are mixing #1 up some, well at least your examples.  A plan-to-fail game, well basically the last 2 from Cryptic would fall under this category, but AOC, Aion and WAR were not intended to be that way.  Not to mention that AOC will have been out 2 years this May and has an xpac coming out soon, WAR 2 years in Sept and Aion already has future content planned ahead this year and isnt doing bad.  More then likely these 3 will be around for the next 2 years even in some limited capacity.  Those 3 dont fall under category 1.  In fact, you could almost add a 4th category which is big budget, designed for longevity but didnt make the grade.  Ideally this would be number 3, but a failure in its attempt.  Also, timeframe / life of the game mostly dictates the category so is 5 years min the req't for #3?  2-3 years for #1?  

[LK]

Global Agenda is an MMO if you consider Chrome Hounds to be one. I consider Chrome Hounds to be an MMO; it's still a persistent world, even if you're not occupying it with a 3D avatar and able to move freely around it. But that's the threshold. Moving anywhere beyond that point takes it away from MMO land.

[Jayce]

Wow is this thread derailed, but I like it. I think we're out of useful STO topics.

It seems like things are crystallizing into three main ways to be successful in the MEDIUM (thanks Haemish):

1 - STO type games; plan-to-fail; make your money back quickly and then shut down at some definite point in the future. AoC, WAR, Aion (?) are in this bucket. One or more of these may fall under #2 (time will tell)
2 - start small, stay profitable, serve a niche and steadily improve: cf Eve-Online, LotRO
3 - big-budget, big idea, long-term; WoW is the only successful recent example of this now. UO and EQ got a free pass for being first movers, but no one else will.  AC and DAoC got a free pass also, but it was already wearing out by then.

I think it also bears pointing out that like most overnight successes, Blizzard took 10 or more years to position themselves for success with WoW, both in terms of IP and in gathering a team that knows wtf and establishing a base of technology to build from without breaking the bank by starting from scratch.

The above is only really persistent worlds. There is a whole other sub-medium of less-persistent worlds: GW and Planetside come to mind.

Ok I think you are mixing #1 up some, well at least your examples.  A plan-to-fail game, well basically the last 2 from Cryptic would fall under this category, but AOC, Aion and WAR were not intended to be that way.  Not to mention that AOC will have been out 2 years this May and has an xpac coming out soon, WAR 2 years in Sept and Aion already has future content planned ahead this year and isnt doing bad.  More then likely these 3 will be around for the next 2 years even in some limited capacity.  Those 3 dont fall under category 1.  In fact, you could almost add a 4th category which is big budget, designed for longevity but didnt make the grade.  Ideally this would be number 3, but a failure in its attempt.  Also, timeframe / life of the game mostly dictates the category so is 5 years min the req't for #3?  2-3 years for #1?  

I'll take that criticism.  Maybe the plan-to-fail model doesn't exist and they're all either the Guildwars sub-medium (STO) or failed #3s.

I haven't been following the three I indicated in #1 except at a really high level, so I'm not surprised I missed the mark.

edited to add: A failed #3 can turn into a #2 if it's handled right, I think.

[Shatter]

Aion IMO falls under 2 if you only count the money spent to develop it for NA/Europe since it was mostly some westernizing and translation.  In that sense its a small budget MMO that is likely making money since its not losing people at a rapid rate like WAR or AOC did. 

[Nebu]

Aion IMO falls under 2 if you only count the money spent to develop it for NA/Europe since it was mostly some westernizing and translation.  In that sense its a small budget MMO that is likely making money since its not losing people at a rapid rate like WAR or AOC did. 

This is the part that puzzles me most.  I'm not sure why, exactly, Aion is having better retention.  I guess providing a less-fucked-up alternative is the new model for MMO success.  I've played Aion, AoC, and WAR and both WAR and AoC had far more potential to be a good game than Aion did.  Aion just screwed up the endgame implementation less by being very bland. 

[HaemishM]

The key to MMO success is to fail just a little bit less than the last MMO that came out. 

[Modern Angel]

What makes you think that AoC isn't profitable? What makes you think that WAR isn't profitable, even if it's not enough for EA's bottom line? I think there are some wild inaccuracies out in the public about definitions of success and profitability in the MMO world. It's really easy to get caught up in the layoffs and downsizing when a game doesn't meet pie in the sky projections but it really is workable to go a long time with 40k subs, even for a behemoth like the aforementioned games.

Set aside the quality questions of STO, specifically, and SOE games, generally; the real lesson is that if you're realistic about numbers going forward you can and will be just fine.

[HaemishM]

I would think the constant server closings on WAR would lean one to think they weren't profitable. I can't speak for AOC.

[Modern Angel]

I would think the constant server closings on WAR would lean one to think they weren't profitable. I can't speak for AOC.

Let me rephrase a little. These games come out with intensely high expectations. They beef up staff, they get more server capacity than they need. So rather than saying they're profitable maybe it's better to say that they can be profitable moving forward. I mean, PotBS is going to launch an expansion soon. PotBS. AoC is, and soon. WAR's probably the worst example to concentrate on just because they could be chugging along fine for years if they were still independent but EA isn't going to put up with Funcom or Flying Lab profit margins.

[caladein]

What makes you think that AoC isn't profitable? What makes you think that WAR isn't profitable, even if it's not enough for EA's bottom line? I think there are some wild inaccuracies out in the public about definitions of success and profitability in the MMO world. It's really easy to get caught up in the layoffs and downsizing when a game doesn't meet pie in the sky projections but it really is workable to go a long time with 40k subs, even for a behemoth like the aforementioned games.

Set aside the quality questions of STO, specifically, and SOE games, generally; the real lesson is that if you're realistic about numbers going forward you can and will be just fine.

Something can be not profitable without hitting the shutdown level.  The analogy isn't perfect, but game developers can recoup some of their fixed costs, like engine development, by using it in another title.

This is especially true in MMOs because the variable costs (servers, bandwidth, maintenance/CS staff) are low relative to the fixed costs of making the game in the first place.  (At least I'd imagine so.)

[Malakili]

These games come out with intensely high expectations.

For people whom the MMOG experience is new, there are really no expectations. The first time is special.
For WoW players, there's no expectations because the only game that exists is WoW.
For veteran players, there's no expectations because you'd have to be stupid to expect anything at all.

I'd say expectations are low across the board and frankly, most fail to hit even that.

I think you overestimate the amount of people who convince themselves THIS TIME will be different. I mean, they fall under you heading of "have to be stupid." and maybe so, but that really isn't the point.

[Lantyssa]

What makes you think that WAR isn't profitable, even if it's not enough for EA's bottom line?

The "upwards of $100 million" pricetag which was bandied about when the game is down to fewer servers than I have fingers on one hand.

[Malakili]

I think you overestimate the amount of people who convince themselves THIS TIME will be different. I mean, they fall under you heading of "have to be stupid." and maybe so, but that really isn't the point.

It'd be hard to overestimate them considering I didn't even list them as a possibility. I'm sure there are tons of them, but frankly, they'll convince themselves again and again, so high or low expectations, the problem is never the game.

Err, I meant underestimate.   

[Venkman]

Aion IMO falls under 2 if you only count the money spent to develop it for NA/Europe since it was mostly some westernizing and translation.  In that sense its a small budget MMO that is likely making money since its not losing people at a rapid rate like WAR or AOC did. 

You can't look at it like that though. Aion NA/EU wouldn't exist at all for not all the development and technology resources that went into the initial first-market launch. Without the Korean launch, the game would have first launched in the NA/EU, and given the state of Beta, would have been yet another one with a high first day low fourth month. Much of its quality and relative completeness is because we were not the first market to bang on it for a year.

[Sheepherder]

Asia would be an excellent trial market for MMO's if they weren't all grunk.

[Venkman]

It is an excellent trial market. If you design the game they want rather than try and hack together something the western audience has been conditioned to apologize for 

[Kageru]

An MMO can fail without closing down the servers. It's the point where development of the title is stalled because the owner is not willing to invest sufficient resources to stop population decline. And of course the population is declining because the game is aging and the player-base realises the owner has put the product into maintenance mode. So while vanguard and warhammer are still running, and possibly even making a trickle of profit, they are almost certainly dead games.

I consider cryptic to be innovators in "plan to fail" game design. Even their server architecture is more about scaling downwards gracefully. Seeing servers closing down and endless merges being a good way to convince people the game is doomed. Almost all the other titles dreamed of being WoW competitors (or L2 in the case of Aion maybe) no matter how much delusion that belief required.

[UnSub]

instead of just designing a large, open, virtual world.

 

An MMO can fail without closing down the servers. It's the point where development of the title is stalled because the owner is not willing to invest sufficient resources to stop population decline.

At some point it doesn't matter what is reinvested into a title, the population is not going to come back in sufficient numbers to justify the investment. EA could pour $1 billion into UO and players aren't going to all come flooding back (and besides, spending money on a title means changing something and groups of existing players always get pissed when something gets changed).

Or look at CoH/V. The Q4 2009 figures are out and at a rough estimate (very rough) CoH/V is sitting at the 75k player mark. When its next expansion comes out - one that NCsoft has allegedly built up Paragon Studios for - I don't think it is going to bring back 125k players to CoH/V and put it back into its glory days population-wise.

MMOs have a lifespan. Although I'd like to see Cryptic execute what they've been doing better, I can't fault the business model of designing titles that are profitable at 100k players. The past few years have shown that making games that are profitable at 500k+ players doesn't work out well for studios.

[Malakili]

Indeed, hell, even though CO has a bad rap, and CoX is looked upon much more favorably, most people who play Champions (or at least the ones I've read on the Champions boards), that try to go back to CoX think the game feels clunky by comparison.  Heck, i tried CoX "late" (years after release), but before I played Champions and I thought it felt clunky by comparison to the other things I had played.   

My point being that your lifespan thing is definitely true, if for no other reason that things tend to have a lot better feel when they are newer, though not all the time, and going back to old engines just feels...rusty or rickety or something.  Heck, even Diablo 2 feels a little iffy after playing Torchlight recently (though its not the best example, because it still feels pretty decent). 

[Venkman]

MMOs have a lifespan; however, there's no consistency to it. UO is still active and that game has been marked as dead since I started in this medium   

Any game still live is either making enough money unto itself to support it or it fulfills some separate business need. Not all these games need to be entirely self-contained profit generators. You can have a "line profit" that allows for one sink and two faucets for example. Other times it's ok to dump money into a losing proposition if it gets you the next big thing. For example, CO to get to STO, or adding new games to continually refine the shared resources of an instracture like SOE has.

[Malakili]

MMOs have a lifespan; however, there's no consistency to it. UO is still active and that game has been marked as dead since I started in this medium   

Any game still live is either making enough money unto itself to support it or it fulfills some separate business need. Not all these games need to be entirely self-contained profit generators. You can have a "line profit" that allows for one sink and two faucets for example. Other times it's ok to dump money into a losing proposition if it gets you the next big thing. For example, CO to get to STO, or adding new games to continually refine the shared resources of an instracture like SOE has.

Well, whether a game is "living" or "dead" is probably more along the lines of saying "does anyone still care about this game" than actually a measure of if it is still running.  Tons of MMOs have communities that keep it going, but that isn't necessarily saying much. 

[Count Nerfedalot]

Wow is this thread derailed, but I like it. I think we're out of useful STO topics.

It seems like things are crystallizing into three main ways to be successful in the MEDIUM (thanks Haemish):

1 - STO type games; plan-to-fail; make your money back quickly and then shut down at some definite point in the future. AoC, WAR, Aion (?) are in this bucket. One or more of these may fall under #2 (time will tell)
2 - start small, stay profitable, serve a niche and steadily improve: cf Eve-Online, LotRO
3 - big-budget, big idea, long-term; WoW is the only successful recent example of this now. UO and EQ got a free pass for being first movers, but no one else will.  AC and DAoC got a free pass also, but it was already wearing out by then.

I think it also bears pointing out that like most overnight successes, Blizzard took 10 or more years to position themselves for success with WoW, both in terms of IP and in gathering a team that knows wtf and establishing a base of technology to build from without breaking the bank by starting from scratch.

The above is only really persistent worlds. There is a whole other sub-medium of less-persistent worlds: GW and Planetside come to mind.

Ok I think you are mixing #1 up some, well at least your examples.  A plan-to-fail game, well basically the last 2 from Cryptic would fall under this category, but AOC, Aion and WAR were not intended to be that way.  Not to mention that AOC will have been out 2 years this May and has an xpac coming out soon, WAR 2 years in Sept and Aion already has future content planned ahead this year and isnt doing bad.  More then likely these 3 will be around for the next 2 years even in some limited capacity.  Those 3 dont fall under category 1.  In fact, you could almost add a 4th category which is big budget, designed for longevity but didnt make the grade.  Ideally this would be number 3, but a failure in its attempt.  Also, timeframe / life of the game mostly dictates the category so is 5 years min the req't for #3?  2-3 years for #1?  

I'll take that criticism.  Maybe the plan-to-fail model doesn't exist and they're all either the Guildwars sub-medium (STO) or failed #3s.

I haven't been following the three I indicated in #1 except at a really high level, so I'm not surprised I missed the mark.

edited to add: A failed #3 can turn into a #2 if it's handled right, I think.

Hmm, the Plan-to-fail model certainly exists, even if Cryptic is the only practitioner.

It's your second, start small, stay profitable and improve model I'd say hasn't actually been tried yet, with the possible exception of LotRO.  I'd thought Cryptic was going that route with CoH, but they just abandoned it instead of growing it into a full world/game.  But Eve, and most everything else not Cryptic or Blizzard like EQ2 and AO and AoC all seem to fit a pattern more like "Aim way beyond your reach, fail miserably, but hang on and slowly build/improve over time to something better than your original goals, only without the moneyhats you would have gotten had you released with that quality."   

And then there's another category you missed which we could call the Fail-to-Plan model:  Horizons, SWG, HL, TR, and perhaps WAR 

[Riggswolfe]

Well, STO patched in some level 43+ content last night. It's not much but it's a little. It'll be a long while, if ever, before I see it so I'll let those high level guys beta test it for me.

They also did some other bug fixes and such. Not a big deal but thought it was interesting they put in a little. It seems to be setup to prep the high level players for the upcoming "raidisodes."

[Shatter]

Well, STO patched in some level 43+ content last night. It's not much but it's a little. It'll be a long while, if ever, before I see it so I'll let those high level guys beta test it for me.

They also did some other bug fixes and such. Not a big deal but thought it was interesting they put in a little. It seems to be setup to prep the high level players for the upcoming "raidisodes."

Check your credit card statement :P

[Riggswolfe]

Check your credit card statement :P

Oh?

[Surlyboi]

Still playing. About a level away from captain. I got jumped by mirror universe Terran Empire ships last night. That was actually kinda fucking cool.

[Stormwaltz]

I just reached Lt. Cmdr over the two-day snow "vacation," and got my first real ship.

In the short term, I feel pretty badass ripping the shit out of mob battleships with my Jammers, Tractor Beams, and ability to blow out their subsystems. It probably helps that science ships are effectively shield tanks.

I got into one of the random mob Skirmishes in Regulus (?) and was tooling around with an escort guy. We weren't grouped, but he followed me around. At one point we got jumped by the flagship group. The two BoP's dropped quickly, but were were getting hit hard. I pulled for open space to get fighting room, then took out two Escorts while the other guy dueled the Flagship. I raced back and jammed/tractored it while he finished it off. At the end we were both down to under 25% hull.

Felt good. Hopefully it won't get old too quickly.

[Jherad]

Still having fun - but I'm Captain 2 now, so not much more to go...  I've nearly beat the game.  

I'm barely grouping at all. No, scratch that, I'm NOT grouping at all - even in fleet actions, I'm doing my own thing. It's a total parallel-play experience (a trend I'm seeing more and more in online games). I see all the other players in all their pretty spaceships, I watch the chat channel for a bit, then go off and solo an instance. I actually enjoy that - I hate forced grouping, but it is kinda regressive I suppose.

I fly an escort, and feel a little guilty about following around a single cruiser or science ship in a skirmish-type encounter. I'm absolutely guaranteed any and all loot. And I'm not going to start a group.

[Surlyboi]

Don't feel guilty. I've been flying around in a science ship and an escort and been able to pull more than my fair share of loot in every community fight. If they can't keep up, they're doing it wrong.

I ran up against a group of cardassians in a communal group with a guy four levels higher than me, his loot take was maybe 10% and he got blown up at least five times. And this was after I beamed a few engineering teams to his ship.

[Shatter]

Still having fun - but I'm Captain 2 now, so not much more to go...  I've nearly beat the game.  

I'm barely grouping at all. No, scratch that, I'm NOT grouping at all - even in fleet actions, I'm doing my own thing. It's a total parallel-play experience (a trend I'm seeing more and more in online games). I see all the other players in all their pretty spaceships, I watch the chat channel for a bit, then go off and solo an instance. I actually enjoy that - I hate forced grouping, but it is kinda regressive I suppose.

I fly an escort, and feel a little guilty about following around a single cruiser or science ship in a skirmish-type encounter. I'm absolutely guaranteed any and all loot. And I'm not going to start a group.

SPSTO - Single Player Star Trek Online?

[Jherad]

Curious. Unless there's a stealth XP nerf that I've missed, they've just (potentially) made leveling even faster, by having repeatable exploration missions start their 30 min timer from when you start the mission rather than when you finish. If you're so inclined, you can now do them nearly back to back.

[Venkman]

Well, whether a game is "living" or "dead" is probably more along the lines of saying "does anyone still care about this game" than actually a measure of if it is still running.  Tons of MMOs have communities that keep it going, but that isn't necessarily saying much. 

This is just a variant on "does the game matter". It matters to the companies keeping it alive for the players paying to pay it. And it certainly matters to those trying to figure out how to enter the space, because it's these games that make the money.

It mostly doesn't matter to the people chasing the next game to invest themselves in personally or financially. But they're the ones the hype machines target

[Triforcer]

I'm having fun and still a few weeks away from the moment I suddenly, in the middle of a quest or PvP that was fun until that exact second, log off and never ever logon again.  My MMO breakups are always abrupt and total.