Anyway, as Justin says in his article, lock boxes are gambling. You are paying real and/or in-game (varying by MMO) money for a chance to win a prize. That’s no different from a slot machine in Vegas, buying a state lottery ticket, or buying a raffle ticket at a school fundraiser. But like many other activities, gambling itself isn’t wrong, it’s that it can be abused.

I take issue with Justin’s second point though, where he mentions that the house always wins. This is the point where I think lock boxes diverge from other examples of gambling, since it’s not costing the developer anything to “pay out” like it is a casino. I also don’t see any sinister intentions behind not publishing odds. Truthfully, I don’t think developers know with any certainty what the odds are on winning a particular item from a lock box. Random number generators can be a little goofy at times, and I guarantee if they did post odds that there would be lot’s of players double checking those odds and raising a ruckus if their results were at all different.

I also disagree with his comment about feeling like deleting a lock box was a waste. I have the opposite reaction. I enjoy deleting lock boxes in Star Trek Online because I know I won’t be opening them, the Exchange is saturated with them so they don’t sell, and they take up valuable inventory space.

I do agree that the legality issue is in its early days, and hopefully the practice doesn’t get any games banned from some countries. Like F2P itself, I think lock boxes are a trend that’s going to be around for a while and if you can’t ignore or tolerate them, then you’ll need to take a break and wait for the direction of the industry to shift again.

Lock boxes are tacky, but in my opinion they are more jarring to see in Lord of the Rings Online than STO. Fair or not, Middle-earth is a more serious setting in my mind and I have less tolerance for commercialism in it than I do with STO or any other MMO. But even as tacky as they are, I don’t see lock boxes as tarnishing the F2P model. Personally, I find Turbine’s habit of putting items in their store to fix not-fun gameplay mechanics rather than actually fixing them much more tarnishing than lock box keys. I can ignore and delete boxes after all, but it’s much harder to ignore the progressively ridiculous number X of monsters I have to slay for deed Y.

As far as public sentiment and private actions, I think it’s really a wash. It’s the same reason why no one can really gauge the overall reaction to the end of Mass Effect 3. Unhappy people are motivated to be vocal, and happy people have moved on. Lot’s of MMO players claim to hate lock boxes and post daily on forums about how much they hate them. But forum goers are a small percentage of players in any game, and I would bet money that a size-able number of those haters still buy keys and open boxes. In the end, all a developer has to go on is their metrics. They know how many accounts they have, how many players that have on a nightly basis, how many boxes are dropping, how many keys are being purchased, and how many boxes are being opened. Apparently those numbers point to lock boxes being worthwhile, otherwise they’d be gone.

Honestly, I’ve gotten bored with the entire topic and its surrounding drama. It’s been beaten to death and nothing new’s been added to the conversation recently except for one thing. Lock boxes are only one step removed from RMT. So far MMO developers have been pretty careful to make sure that money only flows into the system, and I assume that’s to avoid government regulation and taxation (not/never been/don’t want to be a lawyer so I could be wrong). Blizzard though has started to experiment with that in Diablo 3, and I’m sure if that goes well then we’ll see the practice tried out in MMOs as well.

Basically, they’re adding a new PvP map based on Stillmoor where you join up with one of three factions. Each faction comes from an alternate version of Telara, and each has a different philosophy of the purpose of Ascended. It’s a three-way battle over control points between the Ram (believing the Ascended should rule), the Lion (see the Ascended as protectors), and the Raven (think the Ascended should ascend further). It actually does sound interesting, but it’s not enough of a draw for me to go back to the game at the moment.

This is another:

I can’t watch this without laughing so much that tears start.

Usually when this happens, even if it’s a game I’ve not had any previous interest in, I’ll start to get interested or curious and often end up getting it. This sometimes turns out well, Skyrim, and sometimes turns out poorly, Deus Ex: Human Revolution (because I’ll bring it up any chance I get, I guess). Most recently, seeing how much fun a few MMO focused friends who were are in varying stages of MMO burnout were having playing Tera, got me to buy the game and give it a shot despite my apathy-bordering-on-dislike for the art style.

The Secret World is another game that I’ve had zero interest in, both because of the setting and the fact that I’ve never Funcom launch a game well. This weekend was apparently the first beta test after the NDA dropped because I started seeing a lot of Twitter messages and blog posts about it. Oddly though, it’s had zero impact on my interest level, so I think I’m safe (except I probably just Murphied myself).

The other up and coming game is Diablo 3. I barely played the original game and never bothered with the sequel. For whatever reason I was just never hooked on it, in the mid 9o’s I was much more interested in the Age of Empires series. Happily, despite nearly everyone who plays games that I know planning to play this, I’ve still had zero interest.

I do feel a little bit left out, but really it’s a blessing. I’m neck deep in games I already own or pay subscriptions for that I should be playing instead.

So anyone else skipping either of these titles?

Of course ZeniMax Online has it’s work cutout for it. Skyrim, Oblivion, and Morrowind are massive open world RPGs with large modding communities and point-n-click combat. None of which works well in an MMO, or at least hasn’t yet. Plus, ZeniMax Online has apparently been working on TES Online since 2007. This means that they’ve probably not been able to incorporate the things that Skyrim did so well into their designs. Even more important, a lot of the recent innovations in story telling (SWTOR) or combat (GW2/Tera) or dynamic events (Rift) are likely not part of the design.

Still, it’s hard to tell much for certain yet since there’s very little official information out there. The few things I’ve watched or read mention pretty standard combat (which is disappointing) but three faction PvP which is excellent and makes me think of Dark Age of Camelot.

At this point I’m just curious. It’s way too soon to be worried or excited about TESO, but it looks like May and June are going to be full of news and videos about the game, so we should see soon if The Elder Scrolls Online is worth adding to my list of games to watch.

Like just about every MMO player (or so it seemed) I played Guild Wars 2 during the recent beta weekend. Despite never playing Guild Wars 1 for longer than a week, I’ve still been interested in how the sequel would turn out. ArenaNet still has problems to fix, they’ve resolved most of the issues I had with the original game. All of the invisible walls are gone making the world more inviting to explore. The towns are no longer glorified game lobbies.

My only complaints about GW2′s beta weekend were the lag and the art/animation style. The lag was something I expected and was totally reasonable given the volume of players that ArenaNet was supporting. The graphics and animations weren’t something they really needed to address, it’s just that the Asian influenced art style has always something I’ve tolerated rather than enjoyed.

All in all, I enjoyed GW2 as much as I’d hoped I would. The only surprise to come out of the weekend has been a renewed interested in trying GW1 again. This must be the fifth or sixth time I’ve tried to let the game hook me, so I don’t give it good odds of succeeding this time, but I would like to have some emotional connect to the old world as I think it’ll give me more appreciation for the changes when I start playing GW2.

Tera

Even more surprising to me than an impulse to give GW1 another shot, is the fact that I bought Tera Online and have been enjoying it. Tera’s not something that’s been on my radar at all. The Eastern art style and animations (especially the running animations) are really not my thing. Because of my GW2 weekend, renewed interest in GW1, and several friends really enjoying the game, I ended up buying the digital download from En Masse and rolling an Archer on the PvE-RP server.

The combat is definitely the strongest feature of the game for me. There’s no tab targeting, so position, timing, and aim are important to winning fights. There’s no auto attacks, instead a primary basic attack is bound to the left mouse button. There’s also the ability to set up skill chains, so instead of manually having a rotation where you go through ability hotkeys, you can link multiple skills together and then start a chain with a hotkey but then press space bar to fire off  chained skills. Initially this sounded pretty bland to me, but in practice it’s quite fun.

Unfortunately the combat is really the only fun thing for me about the game. The art is definitely beautiful, especially the environments, but the characters and animations are something I play in spite of not because of. The lore and quests in the game are also very standard. Too be honest, I haven’t given them much of a chance which is pretty out of character for me. I’ve even been skipping the cinematics that play during major points in the main story line. I think it’s because Tera doesn’t feel like a game I’ll be playing past the free month (or maybe the first subbed month) so I’m just sprinting through the game taking whatever fun I can from the combat systems.

Tera is basically MMO candy. I feel a little guilty playing it, and I don’t expect much longevity from it, but I’ll enjoy it while it’s fun and move on once it’s not.

Second, Scarybooster is having Bloggerpalooza this week. He emailed a bunch of bloggers, including myself, a few questions and he’s posting the results all this week, so go check them out.

Third, there’s a trailer out from Bethesda for a (new to me) game called Dishonored that looks amazing. It is of course mostly, if not all, cinematic but the premise and setting both look really interesting to me.

First, I want to give a heartfelt thanks to Al Rivera, aka Captain Geko. Last year was a pretty rough year for STO and I was pretty down on the game in January. Then Podcast UGC had an epic two and a half hour interview with Geko which gave me some much needed hope for the future of the game. It also marked a renewal of the transparency and community engagement that have been trademarks of Cryptic over the last two years which had both faded during the last third of 2011 while the F2P conversion was taking place.

Which brings me to my second thank you. Geoff Tuffli, aka Heretic, is in my opinion the gold standard for dev-player communication. He’s been the driving force behind the excellent Duty Officer system, and he’s done an absolutely incredible job in engaging with the player-base both through the forums and via in-game channels.

While I have a lot of respect for the entire team, given what they’ve gone through in the last year with the Atari to Perfect World transfer and then the F2P launch, I think Geko and Heretic deserve special recognition. Thanks so much for all your hard work guys.

This is the third year for Developer Appreciation Week, started by Scary from ScaryWorlds.com head on over an check out his posts.

It feels strange highlight a game that I’m not currently playing, even more so since my subscription lapsed about a week ago. But that has everything to do with lack of time and nothing to do with the game itself. Rift occupies an odd niche in my gaming ecosystem. I played it rabidly at launch and hit the level cap with the initial wave of players. Then my guild collapsed and so did my interest in playing.

I’ve tried since to recapture my initial interest but have yet to succeed. Even after only a couple months’ absence, the game feels completely different because of the speed and volume of Trion’s updates. The Rift team is constantly tuning and adjusting the game, and they are also adding new content faster than any MMO developer I’ve ever seen. At some point in the future, when I next return to Telara, I expect it to feel like a new game.

Thanks Trion, you’ve set the standard for MMO live teams.

This is the third year for Developer Appreciation Week, started by Scary from ScaryWorlds.com head on over an check out his posts.

I was playing STO the recently and in the general chat people were discussing the new mining daily that was implemented. I’ve played it myself and had fun bouncing around the asteroid, playing the beam alignment mini-game. I never once thought about how much dilithium I was earning or how much time it was taking. Rarely do I ever think of the word efficient while playing a game. Not the players I was reading though. They were complaining about how little they got from it and they’d be better off doing other dailies to get dilithium. Fun for them was getting the most dilithium or skill points, etc., per hour spent in the game.

There’s very little overlap between players like me and min-max players, so I want to put out a general thanks to all game developers that have to grapple with pleasing everyone all the time. Thanks for everything you do.

This is the third year for Developer Appreciation Week, started by Scary from ScaryWorlds.com head on over an check out his posts.