Auto Assault NDA lifted

[Glazius]

AA may achieve that nirvana of in-game advertising: see dilapidated Coke billboard, shoot dilapidated Coke billboard and ram the remains, scoop up shinies. Halfway across the world, another dilapidated Coke billboard spawns silently just beyond sight range, and the cycle continues.

This of course assumes companies are willing to see age-worn versions of their advertisements and allow players to blast the hell out of them.

--Pollyanna, er, GF

[HaemishM]

RMT is the future.

Micropayments are the future. RMTing connotes the sort of unlocked uberness of weapon or armor purchases. Micropayments meanwhile are more abstract. It's the difference between EQ2's Exchange Enabled servers and everyone being able to buy an Adventure Pack.

Yes. Hell. Fucking. Yes.

RMT is a stopgap measure. Ad sales for game developers are not going to be about improving the game, they are about IMPROVING PROFITABILITY. Collecting that money for in-game ads has fuckall to do with making a better game, it has to do with making a game more profitable.

RMT is one option for a non-subscription MMOG, or a profit center for a subscription MMOG. I don't think either RMT or in-game ads will do shit for removing the subscription fee for NEW MMOG's. AO's free thing? That was after the game was creaking with age. You probably won't see an ad-supported non-subscription MMOG. And we still don't know if the Guild Wars model is profitable.

But a micro-payment, per-use thing? THAT could be the sweet spot. Hell, DDO is tailor-made for that type of thing, and if DDO had gone that route, I might have been all over it. As it was, I couldn't pay $15/month for what was offered.

[Yegolev]

But a micro-payment, per-use thing? THAT could be the sweet spot. Hell, DDO is tailor-made for that type of thing, and if DDO had gone that route, I might have been all over it. As it was, I couldn't pay $15/month for what was offered.

I agree.  If I could pay Turbine $15 to run a single character to level ten, I think I'd be in there now.  D&D is about the character, not the world, really.  If I wanted to do all of DDO again with a cleric instead of a magic user, another $15... or whatever price.  $10 might be better, but you get my point I hope.  A new module comes out and I can either pay full price to reroll and play the whole game, or pay maybe 33% of full and have an unretired hero do the new content.

This system would also allow a way to remove the "do a dungeon more than once" thing.  It would also allow a system wherin Turbine could release a module for a particular level range and people would be able to roll a, say, new level 7 and do the module.  Just like the PnP game.  This speculation is probably all from The Great Toothless One, but anyone at Turbine can feel free to print this out and pin it on their cube wall.

[Venkman]

If that could be done through an out-licensing arrangement, where the module developer got a cut based on the people who bought the module and could support the hosting/bandwidth/service with that money, then I think it could work.

As it is though, MMOs have significant costs for both the recurring game stuff and the people who maintain it. Except maybe for Blizzard, I don't know of any developer or publisher rolling in gobs of unspent cash from their MMO(s). It's because they're fulltime jobs for the full life of the game, from Alpha to shutdown. Nobody has a metric yet to say how long an MMO should stay live, so everyone still assumes perpetuity.

That's perpetual game stuff and people to maintain it. And that means long term budgets, scalable assessments, and all the normal rigors of any established company. The best way to ensure there's money to be distributed is to lock people into a rolling fee.

It's hard to mess with the formula.

But I think it will be messed. The value of $14.99/mo is becoming more and more questionable as the cost to justify it continues to increase. $14.99 brought a lot more content and wholesale game design changes to EQ2 than $14.99 brought to WoW, and yet EQ2 maybe has with the best of estimates 5% of the players WoW has, and therefore pulls in 5% of the money.

Micropayments would benefit SOE more. This is one reason I think they keep chasing the strategy. It can also benefit others though because nobody else is Blizzard.

[schild]

Micropayments, RMT - call it whatever you want. They denote the exact same thing. Using real money to buy content. I sure as shit didn't mean RMT through IGE was the future.

[Yegolev]

That's perpetual game stuff and people to maintain it.

Isn't DDO mostly instanced?  GuildWars?  Bueller?

[Krakrok]

In game advertising in an MMO with technology like Massive's goes far far beyond a banner ad or even product placement. With a system like Massive's the advertiser can tell *exactly* who looked at the ad, for how long, which parts of the ad they looked at, and from what angle. In other words unless you lied in your Account profile and pay only by time cards advertisers can know your name, age (or date of birth), sex, where you live and whatever other personal information you filled in and tie that into the ads you looked at.

Our company had all those demographics for 1.5 million users during the bubble and nobody wanted them. They just wanted to blow out as many ads as possible. Even now for the most part there isn't huge demand for those kinds of demographics. Context sensitive "if you like this then you might like this" is more important to advertisers right now than full demographics in my opinion.

[Alkiera]

I kind of like how it works here.  When your in a bit of a scrum and killing stuff left and right it's not uncommon to pick up 9 or 10 things in quick succession.  After the fun dies down a bit you go sort through the random drops and see if anything worthwhile is in there.  The better stuff for your level seems to come 'broken' though and you either need to go fix it or try and find someone who can before you can equip it.  My best loot though has all been the mission earned stuff.

I am still a newb though and not even to level 10 yet so YMMV later on.  I have also been studiously avoiding the boards this time and have absolutely no idea whats coming or what I am doing in the bigger scheme of things.

I dunno, most of my good stuff came from drops, playing as a BioMek Agent.  The quest stuff was generally not as good, in my experience.

As for the broken items, and the crafting system in general...  Garbage.  Absolute garbage.  I never managed to craft anything, as I never found any items that only required a skill of 1.  Everything that was broken either required skill > 1, or a tier2 skill, which requires you have a previous skill over 50 or so.  Terrible.  From what I could figure out, crafting consists of the following steps:
1) Find trainer, buy first point in crafting skill of choice.
2) Find broken item with skill requirement of 1(good luck).
3) Collect crap.  This is the easy part, crap drops off everything.
4) Refine crap to the level required by the item in question.  Low level stuff seemed to only require one level of refinement.
5) Go to repair place, and repair item.  Hope to $DEITY_OF_CHOICE you manage to memorize the item in the process.
6) Gain a skill point?(Never got this far, this is kinda assumed.  No idea how it handles skillgain vs difficulty)
7) If you memorized the item(base 55% chance, if it was a simple item) Go to 5, or maybe 3, and grind up skill on the memorized item.  Otherwise, go to 2.

The hardest part, from my experience as a biomek from 1-5, was step 2.

Alkiera

[Murgos]

There are skill trainer thingies now that you can buy for like 1 clink from certain vendors.  Once you have the skill memmed go to town on grinding it.  My problem with it is finding all the little odds and ends you need for the combines.

[Trippy]

And the announcement all of you have been eagerly awaiting (drum roll please):

Auto Assault has gone gold

In stores April 13th.

[Murgos]

I've enjoyed my time in Auto Assaults beta, as much as I've enjoyed most of the betas I've been in (which is almost all of them) and I think that they have a profitable game on thier hands. I think maybe that it is to much of an MMOG and relies too much on MMOG constructs like leveling, hitpoint, armor class and spells.  I would have prefered cool cars with guns driving really fast, which it almost is - it just doesn't quite get there for me.   There is nothing there to make me tell someone not to play it but I'm not going to be picking it up at retail.

[Mesozoic]

And the announcement all of you have been eagerly awaiting (drum roll please):

Auto Assault has gone gold

In stores April 13th.

Ditched my pre-order for GW:F.  Not that NCSoft cares...

[Modern Angel]

It's in no way ready to go live. The experience is still fucked with different advancement for different factions, it's bloated, crafting is still mind boggling and pointless, still no need for a group. I had such high hopes. Another also ran.

[Telemediocrity]

Waitasecond.  This game is called "Auto assault".

And there's memming skills?  Jesus christ, talk about devs being stuck in predetermined mindsets.  I haven't played the game, and from what I hear it's decently fun, but that kind of unimagination on the part of a dev team would make me extra wary to pick up the game - the same spidey sense that's steered me clear from RF Online despite quite a few interesting features.

But a micro-payment, per-use thing? THAT could be the sweet spot. Hell, DDO is tailor-made for that type of thing, and if DDO had gone that route, I might have been all over it. As it was, I couldn't pay $15/month for what was offered.

Maybe it's just me, but I've never judged whether or not to play an MMO based on subscription cost; I'm not particularly moneyed, but  15 dollars a month for anything that provides more than 5-10 hours of good entertainment is fine in my book.

A game like DDO, of all the MMOs out there, I would think would have people the least concerned about subscription costs.  It's structured in such a way that if you set it down for six months and come back later, the world hasn't really shifted under your feet; so why wouldn't someone who's concerned there's not enough content simply subscribe until they beat everything, unsub, come back a few months later when there's more content, and sub for a month again to play the new stuff, plus any oldies-but-goodies they missed?

The whole "I'm not willing to sub because I'm worried about the rate of content creation" reasoning seems like a vestige of Dikus hence rather than a reasoned response to the current crop of pick-up-and-put-down friendly games.

[5150]

Given I couldnt even get this bloody game to run on my PC (either my XP32 or 64 build - same issue) and that _no one_ on theofficial forums seemed to give a damn I'll wait until there either a downloadable trial or this thing hits the bargain bin

[JoeTF]

My short review:
It's a medicore game - a weak 4/10 in single player game standard. There is just no way in hell rationalize paying 15 bucks per month for it. No fucking way.

To list few things:
-UI sucks A LOT:
It's even more ugly than SW:EaW. For God's sake - if you're going to permanently waste 15% of screen with some stupid bitmap, you could at last add some shadows! All pop up windos are unmovable, and they shows up in worst place (like over chat interface, which is worst chat interface have ever seen!) with map being worst - it pops in middle , taking 90% of you seeing space. After 6 months of bug reports, begging, whining, and threating the autostacking of inventory items is still not working (you can have like thousand items into stash, and you have to stack everything BY HAND).
-physics are NOT THERE:
All damage is modeled over level difference. Two examples: You can run over and splash lv1 pedestrian, but colliding with exactly the same, but lv20 pedestrian will make your 4 tonnes car speeding over160 km/h bounce back or go flying. you can demolish buildings, and trees, but it's still about damage. running into stuff will slow youdwn by ~50%, but shooting into it will demolish everything. Even if everything is huge house and you're shooting with sub-machine gun turret (aka pea shooter). The game also bear record for worst use of rag-doll physics - AA devs use it only for corpses, whose whole purpose is to make you stuck if you drive into them. Of course, there is no environmental damage - you can run into cliff with over ~500 mph and you won't get a single scratch. Regarding jumping - earlier in beta cars felt like mine train soldered to the ground, now you get the impression that you're driving a huge, helium filled balloon.
-everything combat is totally level dependant:
It doesn't mean a anything how you drive and aim - if you're going against high level mob, even if it's a huge truck and you're firing at it from one meter away, you will still get 70% of MISSES. Same goes for your defence - auto aiming npc turrets will hit you no matter how good driver you are, and your uber armor will let you absorb even most ridiculous amounts of damage.
-storyline is totally butchered:
When I got a a quest named "Dye another day IV", I just fucking crl+alt+del out of game. Yeah, that is what 99%l the quests looks like. they only differ by type/amount of creatures to kill and a fucking appendix. If you're curious, "dye(...)" quest ends at number 5. you get five quests and all they differ is a fucking number in a quest name. Not to mention, that all the quests are totally retarded per se, like "our outpost at xxx is having problems with thugz, go kill 6 thugz rollers to make outposts guys life's easier" Now, at firest glance, there is nothing wrong with it, however the fucking map have over 200 thugz rollers all the time. I could set up macro, and kill 1,000 of them within an hour, and they would still keep spawning just as I turn around. So how the fucking fuck is killing mere 6 of them going to accomplish anything?
-there are a lot of bugs/unbalances:
Crafting tree lacks certain skill, which makes it impossible to get half of it. Entire progress in the game is done by missions, but there are still several level long gaps in them (lv 23-26 gap would mean weeks or really painful grinding!)     

and there are more...

[Viin]

Maybe the card game will be better?

[Modern Angel]

Card game? That is... wow. Just wow.

[Der Helm]

Wow, this sounds so bad, I think I will give it a try.

Just so that I can say I played it at release. :-D

[Mesozoic]

I see AA and DDO in the same kind of light:  developers trying to see how little they can offer and still charge a monthly fee. As such, I hope that both suffer disastrous failures, so that the answer from the players will be:  "More than this, please try again."   

[Modern Angel]

I'm still trying to process the fact that they've got a card game tie in when the game itself doesn't work right.

[Mesozoic]

I'm still trying to process the fact that they've got a card game tie in when the game itself doesn't work right.

I assume the cards are filled with typos and printed with game info on both sides.

[tazelbain]

I see AA and DDO in the same kind of light:  developers trying to see how little they can offer and still charge a monthly fee. As such, I hope that both suffer disastrous failures, so that the answer from the players will be:  "More than this, please try again."   

Good point.  If you are trying to make a MMOG "on the cheap" you're better off making a single player game.

[Telemediocrity]

I see AA and DDO in the same kind of light:  developers trying to see how little they can offer and still charge a monthly fee. As such, I hope that both suffer disastrous failures, so that the answer from the players will be:  "More than this, please try again."   

What the devs are offering is fun - the other stuff is just a means to an end.  DDO offers far more in the way of fun (IMHO) than AA.  Maybe it's just my econ background showing, but cost requirements for the devs (how much do they have to spend on servers, etc.) doesn't strike me as the determinant factor in an imperfect competition market (MMOs) for how much they charge for a game and how often.

I could imagine devs charging a monthly charge to play a completely singleplayer game - and if the game was fun enough, I'd pay it.

[Mesozoic]

Some people may find DDO fun, but by many accounts the fun only lasts for around 20-30 days.  An odd subscription model.  Apparently players are expected to stick around waiting for more content, but Turbine has been less than clear about what players can expect.  And this approach - where a team releases a game with a bare minimum of content and then strings players along on the hope of something to do?  Yeah, it needs to fail.

[Mesozoic]

I could imagine devs charging a monthly charge to play a completely singleplayer game - and if the game was fun enough, I'd pay it.

I would not.  I'm not ready to abandon the concept of software ownership in favor of an open-ended cost structure, just because it meets some arbitrary fun threshold.  Life is not just about having fun, its also about controlling the costs associated with that entertainment.

[Telemediocrity]

I could imagine devs charging a monthly charge to play a completely singleplayer game - and if the game was fun enough, I'd pay it.

I would not.  I'm not ready to abandon the concept of software ownership in favor of an open-ended cost structure, just because it meets some arbitrary fun threshold.  Life is not just about having fun, its also about controlling the costs associated with that entertainment.

Correct me if I'm wrong - but is your basic argument that the MMO market's pioneers irrationally lowballed the price structure given what people were willing to play, and you want to make sure the asymmetrical nature of price pressure (If you go lower on price than the other guy, people will have to follow you, but if you go higher, they'll often stay where they are to get a comparative advantage) is maintained for as long as possible, to the consumer's benefit - a form of rent-seeking made possible by the imperfect competition in the market among a limited number of prominent MMO firms?

Sounds right to me - but then, it creates a tragedy of the commons effect.  We (MMO consumers) would all gain rent from following your lead and taking a unified stand as to which price structures are acceptable, to the detriment of the MMO companies.  However, as individuals our happiness would be maximized by simply playing what's fun when the costs are worth the fun provided, thus weakening your unified stance.

Your position seems analogous to ad-hoc collective bargaining - and that's not without merit, but it's difficult to make it work.

[Mesozoic]

Are you writing a dissertation?  Because I'll need to be credited in there somewhere.  Call me Dr. Sexy, MDDO.

[Telemediocrity]

Are you writing a dissertation?  Because I'll need to be credited in there somewhere.  Call me Dr. Sexy, MDDO.

Nah, I talk like that in RL too, sometimes.  Plus liberal use of the term "goatfucker".

[Furiously]

I could imagine devs charging a monthly charge to play a completely singleplayer game - and if the game was fun enough, I'd pay it.

I would not.  I'm not ready to abandon the concept of software ownership in favor of an open-ended cost structure, just because it meets some arbitrary fun threshold.  Life is not just about having fun, its also about controlling the costs associated with that entertainment.

Correct me if I'm wrong - but is your basic argument that the MMO market's pioneers irrationally lowballed the price structure given what people were willing to play, and you want to make sure the asymmetrical nature of price pressure (If you go lower on price than the other guy, people will have to follow you, but if you go higher, they'll often stay where they are to get a comparative advantage) is maintained for as long as possible, to the consumer's benefit - a form of rent-seeking made possible by the imperfect competition in the market among a limited number of prominent MMO firms?

Sounds right to me - but then, it creates a tragedy of the commons effect.  We (MMO consumers) would all gain rent from following your lead and taking a unified stand as to which price structures are acceptable, to the detriment of the MMO companies.  However, as individuals our happiness would be maximized by simply playing what's fun when the costs are worth the fun provided, thus weakening your unified stance.

Your position seems analogous to ad-hoc collective bargaining - and that's not without merit, but it's difficult to make it work.

would you please stop using "-" that's my gimmick.

[Krakrok]

The AA card game has nothin' on the official AA 'explosion' ringtone.

[JoeTF]

The AA card game has nothin' on the official AA 'explosion' ringtone.

at least their marketing team does the job :-D

[Trippy]

Just in case Auto Assault's stellar gameplay was not enough to entice you to buy the game they are giving away spots in the Tabula Rasa closed beta to the first 200 people to subscribe after their free month has expired:

http://www.autoassault.com/community/promotion_01.html

In theory you can send in a postcard to enter the promotion but they don't say exactly how many postcards they will be drawing so my guess is it'll be just one.

Edit: fixed link

[schild]

The Auto Assault Card Game is actually pretty cool. They're in open beta if anyone wants to tool around.

[Krakrok]

That promotion link is broken.


They are getting a pretty good traffic spike from all the advertising they are doing (see chart). The Amazon sales rank seem kind of crappy for today (~#1000 for the standard and ~#2000 for the collectors) but that might be because they are all preorders still. For a comparison one of the DAOC boxes is at sales rank ~#256. AA is at #2 and #4 on Gamestop for sales today though.

AA also has a propaganda contest (saw it on BrokenToys). My entry (Boomtime) clocked in at way over the 60 second video limit. The entry I submitted is a stripped down version of Boomtime but YouTube hasn't approved that version of it yet. Suffice to say it didn't turn out all that great.