reroller: a warhammer online and mmorpg blog | Rants and raves about Warhammer Online and other MMOs.

May 12, 2009 by nick

Cancelled, but not forgotten

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Cancelled, but not forgotten I cancelled my WAR account yesterday. No, it’s not that I don’t enjoy the game. I’m just finding I haven’t got the time to play it these days. In fact, I haven’t played much of anything on the PC, just the odd Xbox 360 (often Arcade) game to kill time.

Sadly, my account had just auto-renewed for six months a couple weeks into April, so I’m stuck with a semi-inactive account until October. So there are good odds that I’ll be back in the game, off-and-on, until then. I might even go and try out the new Land of the Dead zone once it’s released to the general public.

I’m not sure what’s worse; the fact that I still enjoy WAR and can’t find the time to play it, or the fact that I’m just plain afraid of the enormous time commitment that any good MMORPG entails. I’m sure a little bit of it is that the current crop of MMOs really aren’t cutting it for me, either, but I used to be able to play for hours on end many times a week. Now, I’m lucky if I can scrounge together an hour or two on a weekend to sit down and play without feeling guilty for not doing something productive instead. Responsibility is the bane of my existence… and hell, I’m not even all that responsible. :)

In any case, what I’m getting at here is that I’m not going to be blogging here quite so regularly anymore (quite obviously, if you look at my last month and a half’s worth of posts.) I’m probably going to put the main reroller site on hold (again) as I put the finishing touches on a bunch of major new additions to Protagonize. I also have another site in development that I want to have up and running sometime this summer, or more likely early in the fall. Once the dust has settled on all of that, I’ll probably start gaming (and blogging about gaming) again in earnest.

Until then, I really have to buckle down and focus on one or two projects at a time to get anything done. In order to do that, I know that at least one of my projects needs to take a back seat, and the unfortunate victim is this blog (and the main site to come later.) I’ll still write off-and-on, but I don’t want you to get your hopes up.

Cheers, and thanks for putting up with my sporadic posts for the last couple of months. Sometimes life dictates where you need to spend your time, so I’m trying to get everything organized and follow life’s (hopefully sage) advice.

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Posted in: Blogging, Miscellaneous, Warhammer Online, reroller | Tagged: cancelled, mmos, real life, reroller, time, warhammer

April 15, 2009 by nick

Bringing the single-player experience to MMOs

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Ack. Been a while since I posted anything, hasn’t it? Yeah. Life has a funny way of monopolizing any free time you think you have, and then you realize two weeks have gone by since your last post… ugh. Well, I’m here now, aren’t I? That’s what counts. *cough*

I used to be an avid single-player RPGer as a kid and later as a teenager. I played most of the big PC releases in the late ’80s and ’90s, from Betrayal at Krondor to Daggerfall, Baldur’s Gate to Planescape: Torment, with a particular focus on high fantasy, which I’ve always enjoyed reading. That interest fell away once I started playing MMORPGs, starting with Ultima Online and then through Dark Age of Camelot, World of Warcraft, Age of Conan, and now WAR. I’ve picked up the odd single-player RPG in the last few years, but most often I’d buy the game, install it, play it for a few hours, and then leave it on a shelf while I returned to my MMO “hobby”, forgetting about it entirely. The last games I did this with were Mass Effect and The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion (both on X360), which I still regret not playing through. Thankfully, I still have both games, so I may give ’em a go again down the road.

Interestingly, I picked up Bethesda’s newest release a couple of weeks back, Fallout 3, and sat on it for a few days before having time to actually sit down and play for a straight stretch. I’ve always loved post-apocalyptic settings for my sci-fi, but I hadn’t played either of the previous Fallout games and I really wasn’t familiar with the game’s history at all. I sat down last weekend and went through the character creation process, played through the tutorial, and worked my way out of the starting area and into the blasted, mutant-filled landscape of Earth, circa 2277. And damn, I was impressed.

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Posted in: Age of Conan, Guild Wars, Miscellaneous, PvE, Single-player RPGs, Warhammer Online, World of Warcraft | Tagged: bethesda, fallout 3, mmorpgs, mmos, rpgs, single-player, xbox 360

April 1, 2009 by nick

April Fools’ be damned, Zork makes its return

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Apparently the folks over at Jolt Online have a keen sense of humour, as they managed to launch the latest iteration of the Zork franchise on the one day of the year that most wouldn’t contemplate launching a new product — aside from a statuatory holiday, of course.

If you happen to be a fan of stick-man mainstay Kingdom of Loathing, Jolt’s Legends of Zork is right up your alley. Except it has a much nicer interface and a solid IP behind it. Not to discourage you from trying out a Pastamancer, but Zork is a pretty familiar franchise to anyone who grew up gaming in the ’80s and early ’90s like myself. The latest entry in the series is unlike the previous point-and-click adventures produced by Activision in the mid-’90s in that it’s a completely web-based “casual massively multiplayer” environment, much like the popular MUDs (multi-user dungeons) of old.

Here’s the catch: nothing good in life is free. The latest of the Great Underground Empire’s offspring operates using a variation of the freemium business model now prevalent on the web — you can get a taste of the game for free, but if you want the advanced features, you’ll need to shell out some real-world dough. The game provides you with 30 Action Points a day that you can utilize to your heart’s content, but after that, you’ll need to either pay or earn those extra Zorkmids via a nifty system of surveys and other devious means (i.e. they actually make money with this thing somehow!)

If you’re smart about it, you won’t let it become too much of a habit; play casually, as the game was intended, and your Action Points will pool up on the days you don’t happen to show up, so you can play longer when you actually have more than a few minutes to sit down. In the meantime, you can always keep tabs on what’s going on via the official game blog, or Jolt’s twitter feed.

I’ll write more about the game when I have a little more time (and APs banked) to sit down and explore it fully. In the meantime, don’t let that grue eat you on the way out.

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Posted in: Industry News, Miscellaneous, New Releases | Tagged: 2009, activision, browser games, casual gaming, freemium, jolt online, kingdom of loathing, launch, legends of zork, mmos, zork

March 26, 2009 by nick

Choppa reroll, LFG!

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So I finally caved in, after not playing for a few weeks. I’ve been sick with some kind of nasty stomach flu and off work for the last 4 days. Thus, feeling sorry for myself earlier in the week, I rolled a Choppa.

FOTM ftw.

Of course, the same could be said for the reams of Slayers you’re seeing on Order right now. I don’t think I’ve seen so many dwarves in one place before… ever. Reams and reams of those crested, frothing, red-haired, tattooed midgets running around, whirlwind axes beating the tar out of you the minute they wade into the front lines.

Now, as most of you who read this blog regularly probably know, I’ve been playing Order pretty steadily since the game launched. I have a 40 Warrior Priest, a 32 Swordmaster, and a variety of 20s over on Skull Throne. I’ve played a few Destruction alts over that span, getting a couple to the Tier 1 cap on Monolith. I had some cash banked from my multitude of lowbies on Monolith, but I decided to try something new, this time around.

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Posted in: PvP & RvR, Rants, Warhammer Online | Tagged: choppa, fotm, guilds, iron rock, lfg, reroll, rvr, scenarios, warhammer, welcome

March 21, 2009 by nick

Making microtransactions more socially acceptable

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Microtransactions. There, I said it. A dirty word to some in the gaming industry. Or maybe just misunderstood and poorly implemented?

There’s a commonly-shared belief in the gaming marketplace that games with no monthly fee that are microtransaction-supported are unpalatable to the “serious” MMO gamer. Microtransactions, which offer an alternate (or additional) form of payment to the traditional subscription model, have been looked down upon for a long time, the general sentiment being that they encourage spammers, gold farming and sales, real-money trading (RMT), and pretty much every negative activity in the MMO book.

Now, I’ve written about microtransactions and real-money trading in MMOs before, but from a different vantage point. This time around, I’d like to explore a couple of options that I see as viable ways to monetize an MMO with microtransactions (and in turn, dropping costly subscription fees) in a way that doesn’t anger the majority of the player base and get a rise out of half the gaming bloggers out there. Obviously, this has been expounded upon by any number of gaming industry professionals and many people much smarter than myself, but I figured I’d take a stab at the concept coming from a the perspective of someone who develops web-based communities, as opposed to coming from a game developer’s mindset.

Challenging the misconceptions

The way I see it, MMOs are at their core simply online communities like any other format, be they social networks, message forums, etc. They engage and involve the user to an extraordinary extent, and provide a much richer user experience and interface, but they function based on the same principles that power most communities. And there are a few things you can do to encourage good (and bad) behaviour in most online communities.

The problem with the way microtransactions have been implemented in online games to date is two-pronged:

They remove the barrier to entry to the game, introducing undesirable users into the game. These users would then spoil the community via abuse of the system like gold sales, spamming, etc., encouraging negative behaviour in the process.
They alienate the actual gamers themselves by preventing them from growing their characters without spending money.

I’d argue that most or all of the worries people have about microtransactions are either unfounded or based on discrete examples of how they’ve been integrated into games in the past. MMOs have evolved, so why can’t the way payment is handled evolve along with them?

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