MMO Subs are a dead model - John Smedley

[tgr]

Hm. So basically it's the Ubi-Assassins Creed model of needing your internet connection to be on and available all the time to play singleplayer?

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/gaming/2011/08/05/blizzard-surprised-by-diablo-3-drm-reaction/1
I seem to remember that one of the arguments was singleplayer characters being used online, and people hacking those, and this was combating that, or something.

[Merusk]

Yes, just like AC.  Lots of gnashing of teeth and blase "it's 2011 you should have a high-speed internet connection" responses in reply to it.

Yes the argument was it's so you can't hack games and disrupt the economy.  Fuck that I'd love to hack a game and play it modded as I do with most games once they bore me; but this has all been covered in the D3 megathread.

[Paelos]

You have to make a choice when you want let people trade items for cash. You either make them always connect online and store their characters where only you can hold them on your corporate servers, or you let them play offline and let 3rd party sites make all the money trading your shit.

[Mrbloodworth]

... People still care what Smedley thinks? When the last success your studio had was EQ1, and that was more a fluke than a planned outcome, global prognostications need to be taken in that context.

Kinda my thought too.  I tend to think the title of the thread should be "SOE is a dead studio - John Smedley"

But, its not.

[Draegan]

Just chiming in, but the best F2P MMOG that I ever played and spent money in (more than $5) was DDO.

Unfortunately content and the fun lasts only up to level 12.  But there really is soooo much to do.  After 12 there is too much grind and too much needing a group.

[Paelos]

The only F2P MMO I've spend money on was Puzzle Pirates.

It's cute and I like it.

Shut up.

[tazelbain]

No PP was done extremely well.  Their F2P model is still the standard to beat.  It is simple. It treats payers and non-payers indiscriminately.  It is self balancing.  The in-game and RM economies are integrated.  Anyone know of any drawbacks of this system?

[Rendakor]

You have to make a choice when you want let people trade items for cash. You either make them always connect online and store their characters where only you can hold them on your corporate servers, or you let them play offline and let 3rd party sites make all the money trading your shit.

Or, you allow both. A single player/LAN/direct connect mode that lets you mod/hack your way to victory, and an "always online" mode with the official cash auction house.

[Paelos]

I'm not sure you could open the box that way and keep it clean.

[Numtini]

Another agreement. Puzzle Pirates should be an industry standard for how to implement a cash shop based game.

[Hutch]

I'm not sure you could open the box that way and keep it clean.

You couldn't. Allowing offline modding/hacking is incompatible with a real-money online Auction House. Activision wants to reap the benefits of skimming the AH transactions, and at the same time they want to avoid being the target of class-action lawsuits. Thus, everyone has to be online to play D3, whether you're going to use the AH or not.

[K9]

Meh, K9 beat me to it.

But yeah, no subscription and all characters (not just multiplay) must be hosted on battle.net, so they've got to cover those server costs regardless of how you - the individual - play. Apparently the "well it goes to pay for server uptime" part of the sub fee is no longer a monetary burden.

Hm. So basically it's the Ubi-Assassins Creed model of needing your internet connection to be on and available all the time to play singleplayer?

I might end up skipping D3. I'll see. I love me some co-op of this kind, but I also like being able to futz around occasionally on breaks or trips on my work laptop, etc, and I'm not exactly able to access battle.net at those times.

And Unsub's post just reminded me of having Guild Wars and a bunch of expansions for it. I never got out of the training areas. 

I read they were doing something whereby most of the business was being run client side. I think a lot of the hate towards "always online" is simply ire for the sake of ire. The amount of time I am using a computer not connected to the internet is next to none, and I suspect that goes for pretty much everyone making the complaints. The system will be closer to SC2 I think, which works pretty well and unobtrusively.

[Merusk]

You also don't live in the vast rural swaths of the midwest.   I know even 5-10 miles west of me you run into spots where there is no such thing as an "always on" connection as I drove through some of them this past weekend.   Dialup or nothing and we all remember how reliable dialup was.  That's only 25 miles outside of Cincinnati, not the middle of nowhere Montana.

[Paelos]

My response to the rural argument is that if you want to be rural and throw off the shackles of the city, don't expect the city to program with you in mind.

[Speedy Cerviche]

Yeah, it's not exactly reasonable to expect cutting edge IT connected right to your doorstep when you choose to live in  rural areas with under-developed infrastructure.

[Ingmar]

I think if a normal MMO tried to implement pay features the way Puzzle Pirates does people would shit bricks, actually. Items that decay completely and you have to rebuy every month, with a doubloon cost every time you replace something?

In a non happy pirate co-op puzzle game setting, people would freak.

[Paelos]

I think it would make more sense if raids dropped more items but they decayed regularly. And you bought the badges to raid. And you could sell those items for gold. And you could buy badges with gold if you wanted!

[tazelbain]

I think if a normal MMO tried to implement pay features the way Puzzle Pirates does people would shit bricks, actually. Items that decay completely and you have to rebuy every month, with a doubloon cost every time you replace something?

In a non happy pirate co-op puzzle game setting, people would freak.

Spiral Knights has the same model without item decay so its not essential.

[Merusk]

Yeah, it's not exactly reasonable to expect cutting edge IT connected right to your doorstep when you choose to live in  rural areas with under-developed infrastructure.

Hi, welcome to 40% of the US.

Ooooh.

Dumbasses.

[WayAbvPar]

40% of the land mass or 40% of the population?

[Rokal]

I don't know that F2P titles are really going to be all that much different  I'm not any more likely to spend money in two MMO cash shops in a month than I'm likely to be subbed to two MMO's.

The difference is that if you drop $5-6 bucks on some content in one of these games it doesn't vanish at the end of the month. I'm much more willing to play multiple F2P games when I know that whatever content/unlocks I buy will persist even if I stop playing in a week and then don't touch the game for months. I avoid the games that do have decaying content access, which are just sub MMOs with a different name.

Just chiming in, but the best F2P MMOG that I ever played and spent money in (more than $5) was DDO.

Unfortunately content and the fun lasts only up to level 12.  But there really is soooo much to do.  After 12 there is too much grind and too much needing a group.

How well you can solo past 12 depends heavily on your class. That said, I don't think it's a coincidence that my highest level character stopped at 12. They've added some more 12+ content to the game in the last couple patches, which seems slightly more solo-friendly, but you'll still run into lots of quests that are tough alone.

[Paelos]

40% of the land mass or 40% of the population?

Only 21% of the US lives in rural areas.

[Merusk]

40% of the land mass or 40% of the population?

Population.  1/3 of the total doesn't have 'net access at all - whether by choice or location.

The internet isn't as widespread as the tech industry would like to believe - or wants to make you believe so it's not turned into a federal program.

http://www.slate.com/id/2252141/
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/02/almost-a-third-of-americans-still-dont-use-the-net.ars

[Numtini]

Choice or location is a big difference.

Is it possible to play these games with dialup or satellite or are they subject to lag. It's a significant difference whether you're validating an install by the internet or whether you're stuck with lag from "playing online."

[Draegan]

How well you can solo past 12 depends heavily on your class. That said, I don't think it's a coincidence that my highest level character stopped at 12. They've added some more 12+ content to the game in the last couple patches, which seems slightly more solo-friendly, but you'll still run into lots of quests that are tough alone.

Well, you could solo, but progression is snail-like where it gets tedious and boring.

[Ingmar]

Have you tried post-henchmen?

[Paelos]

Population.  1/3 of the total doesn't have 'net access at all - whether by choice or location.

That one third, for the most part, is prohibited by cost. I doubt they are worried about the game, nor should a publisher worry about them when making designs.

In fact Comcast is trying to bridge that gap of cost through a new program http://news.cnet.com/8301-30686_3-20108897-266/comcast-offers-cheap-broadband-to-poor-families/

[shiznitz]

The rurals (as I will call them, no intention to denigrate) will get wireless internet before they get wired high speed.  It makes no sense to build physical lines into the deep country when wireless is much cheaper and fast enough.

[Draegan]

Have you tried post-henchmen?

I haven't played in over a year, probably 2, whats the update?  Last time I played, you always had henchmen running with you.

[Ingmar]

I don't know when they added henchmen, I just came back after like 5 years. The store-bought ones you can have several of out at the same time, I have to imagine that helps the soloability at higher levels.

[Rokal]

I don't know when they added henchmen, I just came back after like 5 years. The store-bought ones you can have several of out at the same time, I have to imagine that helps the soloability at higher levels.

They were added when the F2P conversion happened. If you spend in-game gold on them, you can have up to one hireling out at a time. If you are buying them using store points, you can have up to 5. They do help with your ability to solo, but I don't like using them. It feels too much like babysitting dumb AI. If you don't mind the micro that is required to get them playing well, you could use them to do all of the non-raid content in the game.

I used them a couple times on quests that specifically required more than 1 person to hit levers and such, but I wouldn't say they made the game any more fun.

[koro]

Choice or location is a big difference.

Is it possible to play these games with dialup or satellite or are they subject to lag. It's a significant difference whether you're validating an install by the internet or whether you're stuck with lag from "playing online."

Dialup is somewhat playable depending on the game: WoW and most games pre-2006 or so tend to be okay over dialup, though I've heard of people struggling with most modern MMOs. I had a friend who played Champions and got stuck on dialup for a time. The game was essentially unplayable due to frequent disconnects and extremely long load times due to slow data transfer.

Satellite is essentially worthless for anything other than web browsing and straight-up downloading, though. Unless things have changed significantly in the past few years, satellite frequently has an even slower upload rate than dialup.

[Kageru]

Using a constant internet connection as copy protection is still pretty dumb though when the game doesn't need it. As most people have realised it irritates and narrows the range of your customers while in the end probably still being hacked.

lol. I actually forgot I have CoH installed on my PC till I read your post. I'd probably add World of Tanks if you could install via Steam, but I just can't be fucked with many things otherwise.

So did I. Apparently for 837 days since CoH helpfully mentions when you last logged into a character. Hard drive space is cheap, my windows partition is just for games and I always meant to come back to it. Though in practice the patcher didn't seem too happy when I tried to use it :)

[Sheepherder]

Satellite is essentially worthless for anything other than web browsing and straight-up downloading, though. Unless things have changed significantly in the past few years, satellite frequently has an even slower upload rate than dialup.

You can play WoW on satellite, and that's about it.  If your ISP oversells their bandwidth though it can be fucking miserable at times.

[Hayduke]

Using a constant internet connection as copy protection is still pretty dumb though when the game doesn't need it. As most people have realised it irritates and narrows the range of your customers while in the end probably still being hacked.

The always-on requirement isn't solely a piracy deterrent.  More importantly it's to keep the cash shop free of dupes and hacks.