Cataclysm

[Paelos]

Stock prices on ATVI have been rather shifty during this process. Meanwhile, Take Two has been kicking their asses.

If you bought a share of Take Two on the day Cataclysm released, you'd have made 42.5% on your money in 6 months.
If you bought a share of Activision Blizzard on the day Cataclysm released, the stock would be unchanged after 6 months.

 

[Numtini]

This, like the facebook real ID thing, is surprising in that it's so tone deaf to the community. That's usually Bliz's strength.

Real ID friends grouping would have been useful to me, I transferred to another server because my friends raided 9pm-1am. I can't do that, so I found a 7-10pm guild. But it was really a "we're online to raid and not much else" thing. In the end, the behavior in the cross server LFD drove me out of the game.

[Xanthippe]

This, like the facebook real ID thing, is surprising in that it's so tone deaf to the community. That's usually used to be Bliz's strength.

FIFY

Haven't these tone deaf changes all been since the Activision-Blizzard deal?  Certainly seems to fit in with the "fuck the players, we just want their money" attitude of Bobby Kotick.

[Paelos]

This, like the facebook real ID thing, is surprising in that it's so tone deaf to the community. That's usually used to be Bliz's strength.

FIFY

Haven't these tone deaf changes all been since the Activision-Blizzard deal?  Certainly seems to fit in with the "fuck the players, we just want their money" attitude of Bobby Kotick.

No, the deal was struck in July 2008, shortly before Wrath released. Ghostcrawler was hired in February 2008. All that was before Wrath launched in November. The "fuck the players attitude" didn't show up until 2010.

[Merusk]

Changing a corporate culture takes time.  I've mentioned the interview with Kotick I read in Game Informer a year or more ago that illustrated how he was changing Blizzard.  These changes do indeed fall along the lines of his greater vision.  I'll see if I can hunt down the magazine but chances are I've tossed it.

[Paelos]

You mean this?


EDIT: It's fake, but funny. Thought I'd point that out.

[Merusk]

No, that's not the one, it was in the paper mag not online.  In it he specifically mentioned training game designers to think via cost:benefit analysis spreadsheets vs. "is this fun and would the players like it?"

[Ratman_tf]

No, that's not the one, it was in the paper mag not online.  In it he specifically mentioned training game designers to think via cost:benefit analysis spreadsheets vs. "is this fun and would the players like it?"

Hey, man, remember, It's a business. Fuck the players, just get their money. 

[Paelos]

No, that's not the one, it was in the paper mag not online.  In it he specifically mentioned training game designers to think via cost:benefit analysis spreadsheets vs. "is this fun and would the players like it?"

I don't disagree with that philosophy. There's a lot of shit you could put in the game that players might like but wouldn't actually keep them playing and subbed. The appearance tab is probably one of those items, as is housing. The problem is when you forget that smaller projects with a lesser individual value can create a larger benefit in aggregate. Or in the case of Cataclysm, trying to extend subs by making content more tedious and difficult, and adding on fees to features in an arbitrary manner that confuses your players.

[Merusk]

It also forgets that the latter is the reason the company was bought for 18 billion and not the 7million Kotick scoffed at in 1995.  

http://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2010/01/18/news-kotick_3a00_-activision-could-have-bought-blizzard-for-_2400_7-million.aspx

[Ingmar]

Housing is actually pretty 'sticky' content, I know a lot of people who stayed subbed to DAOC just because they were afraid of losing their housing plot and deciding they wanted to come back later.

[Rokal]

For most MMOs, housing isn't. It's only the ones where housing is in public areas, and if you lose your house you won't be able to get the same thing when you come back. You'll probably end up with something in a much different (less desirable) location. Housing in EQ2 or LOTRO isn't very sticky for this reason.

[Ingmar]

LOTRO housing is basically the same as DAOC's - stuck off in instanced districts.

[Numtini]

If you unsub to LOTRO, your house is locked and you have to pay an in game price to get it back, but it's yours forever. The end result of this has been that most districts have only one or two active players in them and the rest are zombie houses--often decorated for a seasonal holiday long past.

I always thought AC had the best idea for housing, public in the world housing for the elite or lucky and instanced apartments for everyone else.

[WindupAtheist]

I know that in UO the in-the-world housing resulted in tracts of urban sprawl thanks to the map having been drawn back when it was some OSI skunkworks thing that was expected to run for a year or two with a couple hundred players per shard. How did it work out in SWG?

[Numtini]

I know that in UO the in-the-world housing resulted in tracts of urban sprawl thanks to the map having been drawn back when it was some OSI skunkworks thing that was expected to run for a year or two with a couple hundred players per shard. How did it work out in SWG?

The last time I played SWG, it was huge sprawls of abandoned housing. They let you name your house and frequently they would be used by disgruntled players to send a message. I remember outside of the big city on Wanderhome, one of the first houses you saw was named "This game sucks, off to play FFXI"

[Paelos]

Housing only works if every jackass can't have a house, and they are promentently displayed in towns and serve a purpose. Guilds should be the ones affording actual houses. Examples would be renting out the apartments and houses in Stormwind, with the rest of the players living in a instanced shanty town in the sewers.

An example of use would be private guild portals to the other towns, a collection of crafting use items like forges, the guild vendor, a guild bank, and kill trophies you can hang on the walls.

[Lantyssa]

Sprawl around the major hubs, as people set up cities as close to the big cities as possible.  It also had the effect of nuking any spawns within a kilometer or so of city hall.  Since you couldn't drop a shuttle port until you were large enough, minimum a month I think even if you had the players, only the most dedicated groups put their city far out of the way.

It was interesting in seeing what developed, and each server was unique, but city centers probably should have been fixed locations.  Maybe pre-defined plots for building.  I did like that you could choose your houses, and the freedom to place within the city was nice since you could use terrain to change your scenic vista, but the impact on the game world was significant.

Really I think the best solution is an instanced neighborhood for guilds, and the instanced shanty town as Paelos suggests for the unguilded.  Maybe a few rare houses in the world.

[Paelos]

To be fair though, SWGs "worlds" were mostly barren wastelands populated by my mining robots.

[Dren]

I'd still be playing if there was housing in WoW.  It kept me in UO for much longer than it should.  That's just the way it works.

[Malakili]

To be fair though, SWGs "worlds" were mostly barren wastelands populated by my mining robots.

Which kind of makes sense for star wars. 

[Paelos]

To be fair though, SWGs "worlds" were mostly barren wastelands populated by my mining robots.

Which kind of makes sense for star wars. 

It also makes for a shitty game. I can draw a map in detail of several zones in WoW from memory. I can do the same for DAOC. I can't think of a single defining characteristic of a SWTOR planet.

[Numtini]

I can't remember much about anywhere in SWG other than the zone line between my house and Theed because I was a tailor and people would buy things, get to there, and then complain I had ripped them off because their new clothes disappeared.

[Xanthippe]

Changing a corporate culture takes time.  I've mentioned the interview with Kotick I read in Game Informer a year or more ago that illustrated how he was changing Blizzard.  These changes do indeed fall along the lines of his greater vision.  I'll see if I can hunt down the magazine but chances are I've tossed it.

Reported here.

At the Deutsche Bank Securities Technology Conference in San Francisco Sept. 14, 2009:

Jeetil Patel, Deutsche Bank Securities - Analyst
"What do you think the retailers' willingness these days is to hold inventory on the video game side? Are they building positions today or are they still very reluctant and very careful of how they are buying?"

Bobby Kotick, Activision Blizzard, Inc. - President and CEO
"I don't think it is specific to video games. I think that if you look at how much volatility there is in the economy and, dependent upon your view about macroeconomic picture and I think we have a real culture of thrift. And I think the goal that I had in bringing a lot of the packaged goods folks that we brought in to Activision 10 years ago was to take all the fun out of making video games."

"I think we definitely have been able to instill the culture, the skepticism and pessimism and fear that you should have in an economy like we are in today. And so, while generally people talk about the recession, we are pretty good at keeping people focused on the deep depression."

Cataclysm reflects this change in culture.  How great is it when the people working for you are constantly looking over their shoulders, worried about keeping their jobs!

A short history of Activision Blizzard...

[Rendakor]

An example of use would be private guild portals to the other towns, a collection of crafting use items like forges, the guild vendor, a guild bank, and kill trophies you can hang on the walls.

This is what killed EQ2 for me; guild halls were so feature-rich that the week after they were implemented every city zone was totally empty. It turned the game from an MMO into a set of instances with a shared chatroom, and I'd hate to see it happen to WoW.

If they put (guild) housing in WoW it should mostly be for flavor/fun, and not a city replacement.

[Sjofn]

I always thought AC had the best idea for housing, public in the world housing for the elite or lucky and instanced apartments for everyone else.

That sounds kinda cool. I'd still have my place to decorate like a dork, but it wouldn't all be sealed away.

[Hutch]

I always thought AC had the best idea for housing, public in the world housing for the elite or lucky and instanced apartments for everyone else.

That sounds kinda cool. I'd still have my place to decorate like a dork, but it wouldn't all be sealed away.

The initial implementation of AC's housing was to have a finite number of houses, villas, and mansions scattered across Dereth. They didn't cook up the instanced shantytowns apartment complexes until a sufficient number of people had complained, because they wanted secure storage too. And they hadn't logged on, day one, next to the house they'd staked out.

if you had a house, you got more hooks to hang decorations on. That was the primary benefit of getting your own house, vs an apartment.

[Rokal]

If you unsub to LOTRO, your house is locked and you have to pay an in game price to get it back, but it's yours forever. The end result of this has been that most districts have only one or two active players in them and the rest are zombie houses--often decorated for a seasonal holiday long past.

I always thought AC had the best idea for housing, public in the world housing for the elite or lucky and instanced apartments for everyone else.

I thought this was changed at some point, maybe for F2P, so that you could actually lose your house to another player if you stopped paying. Even so, you could still go to an identical neighborhood and buy the same house.

AC is an example of sticky housing. You don't unsub from that game if you have one of the public houses.

[Numtini]

Well I think instanced housing can be a bit more robust than ACs, but I like the general notion of having a limited number of plots set aside in the world with instanced habitrails available for the masses.

AC also had a steep upkeep cost for large houses, not in game currency, but in some sort of token that had to be quested for (can't remember the name of it). That made it hard (or impossible?) for someone to squat solo on a guild hall size building. And it limited in world housing to active players--no just paying your subscription fee and not logging in.

[Nebu]

DAoC and LotRO did instanced housing well.  LotRO just suffered from a lack of hook points and some of their location choices, but the flavor of housing was good.

[Lightstalker]

I criticized LOTRO's housing at the time because there was no reason whatsoever to be outside in the housing zone if you didn't have a house there.  What they ought to have done was put the crafting resources (forges, workbenches, etc.) and city utilities (inns, banks, auctionhouse, etc.) in different housing instances to encourage foot traffic and community.  Then it matters that you have a house 'near the forge' and you increase the perceived value of instanced content for different users.  Their housing zones were ghost towns all the time, it felt like a real missed opportunity since there were really quite lovely and diverse.  At the time it was harder to get off your horse than to buy a house in LOTRO, and very rarely would you see another person in a housing instance.  I actually patched up last night and played for a couple hours and I saw 3 other players the entire time.

What I'm saying is that instanced housing lets everyone have the same resource quality but when everyone has the same resource quality there is no reason to interact with each other.  For a game community that can't be a good thing.  Put popular and necessary resources in the housing instances to drive foot traffic, or they'll always end up ghost towns.  e.g. In WoW this housing instance has the Trade District Bank, that housing instance has the Trade District Auctionhouse.  You can be in the 'city' and go to that instance directly, but also move from instance to instance to move through the city at the ground level (the SoCal highway vs. surface street approach to city travel). 

[Ingmar]

I criticized LOTRO's housing at the time because there was no reason whatsoever to be outside in the housing zone if you didn't have a house there.  What they ought to have done was put the crafting resources (forges, workbenches, etc.) and city utilities (inns, banks, auctionhouse, etc.) in different housing instances to encourage foot traffic and community.  Then it matters that you have a house 'near the forge' and you increase the perceived value of instanced content for different users.  Their housing zones were ghost towns all the time, it felt like a real missed opportunity since there were really quite lovely and diverse.  At the time it was harder to get off your horse than to buy a house in LOTRO, and very rarely would you see another person in a housing instance.  I actually patched up last night and played for a couple hours and I saw 3 other players the entire time.

What I'm saying is that instanced housing lets everyone have the same resource quality but when everyone has the same resource quality there is no reason to interact with each other.  For a game community that can't be a good thing.  Put popular and necessary resources in the housing instances to drive foot traffic, or they'll always end up ghost towns.  e.g. In WoW this housing instance has the Trade District Bank, that housing instance has the Trade District Auctionhouse.  You can be in the 'city' and go to that instance directly, but also move from instance to instance to move through the city at the ground level (the SoCal highway vs. surface street approach to city travel). 

The flip side of that is it kept the actual cities as hubs, which is almost certainly what they preferred to have happen.

[Malakili]

I criticized LOTRO's housing at the time because there was no reason whatsoever to be outside in the housing zone if you didn't have a house there.  What they ought to have done was put the crafting resources (forges, workbenches, etc.) and city utilities (inns, banks, auctionhouse, etc.) in different housing instances to encourage foot traffic and community.  Then it matters that you have a house 'near the forge' and you increase the perceived value of instanced content for different users.  Their housing zones were ghost towns all the time, it felt like a real missed opportunity since there were really quite lovely and diverse.  At the time it was harder to get off your horse than to buy a house in LOTRO, and very rarely would you see another person in a housing instance.  I actually patched up last night and played for a couple hours and I saw 3 other players the entire time.

What I'm saying is that instanced housing lets everyone have the same resource quality but when everyone has the same resource quality there is no reason to interact with each other.  For a game community that can't be a good thing.  Put popular and necessary resources in the housing instances to drive foot traffic, or they'll always end up ghost towns.  e.g. In WoW this housing instance has the Trade District Bank, that housing instance has the Trade District Auctionhouse.  You can be in the 'city' and go to that instance directly, but also move from instance to instance to move through the city at the ground level (the SoCal highway vs. surface street approach to city travel). 

The flip side of that is it kept the actual cities as hubs, which is almost certainly what they preferred to have happen.

I'm pretty sure this was explicitly the reason why, I seem to remember some dev diary about it or something like that.  I think LOTROs housing was very good.  It gave me storage, a social area for my guild (we had a guild house, and a bunch of us had houses in that same instance), and was just fun to customize.   Well executed in my opinion, perfect, I guess not, but as far as theme park DIKUs go, its probably as good as its gonna get imo.

[Simond]

If they put (guild) housing in WoW it should mostly be for flavor/fun, and not a city replacement.

If they ever put (guild) housing in WoW, Activision would launch it as a 'Premium' product.
With the housing items as purchased DLC.

[Paelos]

I don't think I've seen a decision garner 11 capped threads in sequence to debate on why it sucks. And yet, the RealID cross server premium grouping thing has done it and kept rolling strong.

Anybody want to start a pool on how many capped threads it will go?