Blue Kae

So yesterday Massively did what they should have done instead of their pseudo-news post regarding STO developer Borticus’  comments on lock boxes, and published an editorial in their regular Perfect Ten column and that focused on lock boxes. While I’m not a fan of lock boxes myself, I can see where market realities make them a necessary evil, but it’s most definitely a slippery slope.

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.

When I first heard the news that Trion was adding three faction PvP, my assumption was that they were adding a third faction to the game à la Dark Age of Camelot. The reality is quite a bit different. I’m disappointed, but it’s really my own fault. I think it’s because of the recent Elder Scrolls Online news combined with Trion’s reputation for putting out insanely large and rapid content updates. The silver lining though, is now I’m not as tempted to resubscribe to Rift.

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.

While reading through my RSS feeds this evening a title caught my eye from Massively:

Star Trek Online dev unconcerned with losing global playability for the sake of lock boxes

Uh, what? That sounded incredibly out of character for any of the developers from the STO team, so of course I clicked through to read the whole thing, and then I covered my face with my hand and sighed.

Basically, Jeremy Randall (Borticus) was chatting with some players on the Jupiter Force fleet forums (of which he’s a member as well, or was before he joined Cryptic, I assume he still is) about the lock boxes and what might happen if some countries decided they’re illegal. Jeremy’s opinion was that STO would become unplayable in those countries rather than lose the boxes, because the revenue from them is apparently that good.

It was immediately apparent to me that this is just Jeremy’s opinion being expressed in a discussion among friends. It’s not news. Were this in a press release or on the official forums, then it would be news. Had someone at Massively wanted to use this as fodder for an editorial that would’ve been valid. But it wasn’t posted in an editorial, it was posted as a news item, and that is crap in my opinion. Plus, the wording of the title and the flippant tone of the article (as well as the appended update) make the whole thing feel like link bait to me (and I really considered removing the link above at this point).

What really irritates me is now either the Jupiter Force forums will go closed for fleet members only, or Jeremy will no longer be able to take off his developer hat when chatting with friends. Both of those outcomes suck. The Star Trek Online team is among the most communicative of any MMO live team that I’ve seen, and I really hate to see events that make that seem like bad policy.

Just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you should, or that you have to.

It the announcement that’s been the talk of the Internet over the last week. A lot of people are surprised, which surprises me. The Elder Scrolls (TES) is an RPG, so it’s not surprising to me that Bethesda and ZeniMax Media Group are interested in moving the franchise into the MMO space. There are subscription fees calling after all.

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.

Guild Wars 2 & 1

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.

Star Trek Online went down unexpectedly last night for a few hours. I only ran into the tail end of the outage as I was working on some Enterprise model kits, so it didn’t actually impact my playtime much, but I did realize something.

There really are a lot of people playing STO since the F2P relaunch.

Now, I pretty much already knew this because there’s been a noticeable bump in the number of ships orbiting Earth Spacedock and DS9,as well as a major increase in sector space traffic. But seeing how fast the outage thread grew last night really highlighted for me how much the playerbase has grown.

I’ve been thinking more about last week’s post on Star Trek Online, F2P, and lock boxes. I’ve looted a few lock boxes since then and left them sitting in my cargo bay. I’m still not planning on spending money or dilithium on keys, but I’m not as bothered by having them show up as drops as I expected.

Judging by the number of messages I’m seeing in game announcing when someone wins a Galor, there are a lot of players spending money or dilithium on keys. I’m sure that having lock boxes as drops and keys in the store generates more sales than just having the boxes in the store. A player might not think to buy a box from the store, but if their in the game and loot a lock box then they’re more likely to purchase a key.

I’m still not a fan of the practice but there are a lot of people in game having fun with it. Besides, the more money that Cryptic and Perfect World makes, the more they can reinvest in the game. More money means more content designers creating story missions, more programmers adding features to the game engine, and more systems designers working on new game features.

Some interesting news today from Cryptic, Daniel Stahl is back as the Executive Producer of Star Trek Online.

I was wondering if he was going to take up his old position. He returned to Cryptic from Zynga in December after only two months away, but not to his original position. I assumed either Dan wanted to do something different or Cryptic had some candidates in mind for EP and they didn’t want to cancel interviews in mid-stream.

Whatever the reason, Dan is back, and now I’m wondering what will change. Are we going to see the Engineering Reports and Ask Cryptics return? I really hope so, although maybe the Engineering Reports probably need to have a blinking neon disclaimer added that its contents are not promises. I always understood that, but I work in the software industry and understand that plans change.

I’m also curious to see if and how much of D’Angelo’s style of producing rubs off on Dan.

One thing I don’t see changing is Cryptic’s approach to F2P. I read quite a few forum comments from people who seem to be expecting the direction of the game to revert to what it was months ago, and I don’t think that’s likely to happen. I really doubt it’s even an option for Dan to pursue. Regardless of the change in Captains, I expect to see more lotteries and special but rare ships in the coming months.

Cryptic’s announced another round of lottery boxes for Star Trek Online. I was mildly interested in them as I was reading through the Dev Diary, until I got to the part at the end where I read you need a key from the C-store in order to open them.

Blarg.

I really don’t like this. For starters, I’m not a gambler. I don’t like going to casinos or race tracks or buying scratch offs.

Beyond the gambling aspect, I prefer to have the store ties in games as minimal as possible, since I’m a subscriber. I can develop selective blindness so I can ignore the C-store and D-store buttons on the UI, they’re much more subtle than the gold bordered boxes Turbine uses in Lord of the Rings Online. But I really don’t like the idea of getting a lockbox as a loot drop from regular play and then having to go to the store to get a key to open it. Suddenly there’s something that is coming into my inventory which is directly pushing me towards the C-store. That’s okay for non-subscribers, after all Cryptic needs to make money both to stay in business and to reinvest in the game, but not for a subscriber.

Before F2P, C-store items were always nice optional things to have, and I spent money on quite a few uniforms, bridge packs, and ships. But as far as I can remember, there was never an item or mission that I came across in the game that directed me to go make a purchase, I always had to go to the store to seek it out.

So, depending on what the market looks like, I’ll either be discarding any lockboxes I get or putting them on the Exchange (too bad there’s no way to sell them for dilithium). Despite this lockbox stuff, I’m still completely excited for the start of The 2800 Feature Episode Series 4 this weekend. It’s like Star Trek is back on television!

It’s been a really really really long wait. Really. But it’s almost over. The next Featured Episode Series for Star Trek Online, The 2800, starts on Saturday, February 11th, and focuses on the Jem’Hadar fleet lost in the Bajor Wormhole in the DS9 episode Sacrifice of Angels. I couldn’t be more excited, and I’m looking forward to running the first mission with Fleetmates.