Bill Roper – Computer Game Poison?
The ugly way Roper drove Hellgate: London and Flagship into bankruptcy is legendary. The greedy subscription model for an action RPG Diablo clone was an exceptionally bad idea. His constant arguing and fighting against respecs was rancid icing on the rotten cake.
In light of that, it was a real head scratcher when Cryptic hired him and made him Executive Producer of Champions Online. I must admit, while I enjoyed a lot of things about Champions Online, I’d been waiting for and worrying about Roper’s influence.
With the full opening of the Champions Online microtransaction cash shop (C-Store), those fears were apparently well founded.
I never understood where the heck Cryptic got off adding a cash shop to a full price + monthly subscription game. That’s not just double dipping, that’s triple dipping. I am fine with meta-game functions having an extra cost (server transfers, character renames, etc.), but actual game content should not have a fee in a subscription based game.
Cryptic’s constant resistance to making a decent respec system for Champions Online had boggled my mind since the beginning. Any kind of build/spec type advancement system needs a good respec feature. CO’s fully open ability system absolutely REQUIRES it. The flexibility is great, but with flexibility comes the ability to easily and quickly screw up your character.
When I read the details of the C-Store, it all became clear: $12.50 for a character respec. They designed a system that effectively requires frequent respecing, and then charge $12.50 per respec. Amazing. And with almost weekly patches that dramatically change (nerf) abilities, it is impossible to know how a power you have today will perform tomorrow.
In most MMOs, respecing your character either has quests or a gold cost equal to an hour or so of game time (or less). But in Champions Online, you pay $12.50. Unreal. Absolutely unreal.
If CO were a stock, I’d be selling short right now. The population is plummeting, and the decision making behind this C-Store does not inspire confidence at all. One can only hope that Roper will go back to voice acting and writing manuals after he kills this game.
I personally don’t find subscriptions to be an entry barrier. $15 isn’t a major investment to see what a full game is like, or to jump back in with old friends and see how a previous MMO has changed. I’m a very competitive player which in an MT based game would probably translate to the same amount of spending and likely more just to try the game. Most of my friends by and large think the same way.
I am inclined to agree with you that MT based games are better for not so competitive casual players, or people who want to play with friends who are casual gamers. And that seems to be most of the audience these games have captured so far. So really there’s room for both subscription and MT if properly implemented and targetted towards the right group of players.
Seems too that perhaps there needs to be more classification of types of MT’s? I dont see all MT’s being of equal consideration.
dv0rak: WoW respecs are a totally valid comparison. You can’t change your class in CO either, because there are no classes. If you design a game system to be open, you don’t then go against that by making the respec system MORE RESTRICTIVE than games that have less open ability/skill systems. That makes sense. That’s called “designing at cross purposes” and it rarely ends well for a game.
serith: $15 is a HUMONGOUS barrier to re-entry if someone is just mildly curious, or they are driving in their car and remember something about an old game, etc. On Threshold, I cannot even begin to count how many times old customers have returned because they remembered something from 5+ years ago and thought “hey, I’ll pop in and see what’s up on Threshold.” But they definitely would not have done so if they had to fork over $15 for the privilege.
A well designed game doesn’t have to mean that MT guarantees people who pay money have all the advantages. A well designed game has caps and balance in place so you can’t just MT your way to dominance.
As for people who are competitive: what about the normal human beings who can’t play an MMO 80 hours a week? Should they be doomed to ALWAYS be totally and hopelessly inferior compared to the lifers who live their entire life in an MMO?
How about this totally generic example. There is no game like this, so I this is hypothetical. Imagine a game where every class has a “top set” of armor. If obtaining that armor required 100 hours of gameplay and $0 or 20 hours of gameplay and $20, I consider that pretty balanced. I think a setup like that actually creates a MORE level playing field and then makes competition between those types of people more about skill rather than who has the most money or who has the most time to spend farming/grinding/etc.
Storm: You are definitely right. Not all MT systems are created equal. Some create a situation where not buying MT stuff means you will be a peasant. Others are far better designed, and MT purchasing is a way to have more variety or to speed things up compared to those who play an insane amount.
You’re still comparing apples to oranges. No matter how many 50g respecs you purchase in WoW, you will never make a warrior into a healer. You can slightly tweak the way that warrior operates, but that’s it. You’re still going to be wearing plate. You can’t equip a staff. You can’t cast any spells.
Blizzard has set their game up to limit players’ ability to move a character from one role in the game to another. They don’t allow rogues to heal. They don’t let warriors do ranged dps. They don’t let mages tank. They have done this deliberately, because the time you spend leveling that second character means revenue for them. Several weeks of subscription time just to hit the level cap again.
Most games have these sort of subscription-extension structures in place, just in different forms. The ability to AVOID SPENDING WEEKS OF TIME is what Champions is selling for $12.50, and is the option that most other games I know about DON’T OFFER AT ALL.
Blizzard gives you no option but to spend weeks re-leveling. Champions already gives you more options (roll alt, farm resources, spend dollars), lets you pick the one you want, and yet somehow, Cryptic is the one that’s screwing you?
Now, about those hour-of-farming respecs: Cryptic has talked about giving players the option of doing cheaper “line-item” respecs of individual powers without requiring all the other ones in the stack to change as well; THAT is the equivalent of what you’re pointing at in other games, and yes, it will be good when they add that. But it’s not the end of the world until they do.
They are also working on setting it up so characters gets a free full retcon at the level cap – see this week’s dev chat, after the C-Store respecs went live, where they said that.
If they’re as OMG OUT TO GOUGE YOU as you made them out to be in your post, they’re really bad at it.
The class canard is irrelevant. So what if a warrior can’t become a mage. That’s a class based game. You take a game as it comes, and a class based game has classes whereas an open system game is open.
Furthermore, it is already possible to make a single character that can tank, dps, and heal. So respecs aren’t going to change the ability to change role on the fly. Their “build” system even encourages it.
It is utterly retarded to make an open system game, and then make it MORE RESTRICTIVE than a class based game by limiting respecs. Again, that is game design at cross purposes, and it is always a FAILURE.
“Cryptic has talked about giving players the option of doing cheaper “line-item” respecs”
If I had a dollar for every feature an MMO dev “talked about” doing, I’d be rich. Heck, with some shame I must admit that if I had a dollar for every feature *I* “talked about” coding for my own games, I’d be rich. Talking about a feature is not even close to the same as designing, coding, and implementing it. And now with the $12.50 respec, Cryptic has a lot less of an interest in making those line item retcons happen.
If they’re as OMG OUT TO GOUGE YOU as you made them out to be in your post, they’re really bad at it.
No way, they are great at it. Look at the false scarcity they created with the bogus “sorry guys, we ran out of lifetime/6 month subs” that created a massive run on them.
Look at the way they have their diehard fanboys lining up to blow money on the C-Store as a way to show their solidarity. It reminds me of Star Wars fanboys buying 30 tickets for Phantom Menace because they wanted it to beat Titanic. The fact that all that money simply made Lucas and partners rich, and gave absolutely ZERO benefit to the ticket buyers was lost on them.
Muckbeast:
From what I remember of Threshold it was definitely on the better designed side of the MT games, especially compared against F2P MMOs. And you do make some good points insofar as how MT could work in traditional grind/time based MMOs. The problem is even in that setup, the way these games are designed it’s never just the one suit of armor or weapon you can buy and be done with it. There’s plenty of continous expenditures such as consumables to worry about (This is one of those areas where Threshold did a better job, not having uber consumables for the sake of making players spend money).
Ultimately I don’t see any game where you win by investing 100+ hours of grinding for top gear as competitive. In my mind competition = skill, and that’s where I think you get the huge problem with MT and competitive games. By and large if something is desirable enough for people to buy…it’s also powerful enough to tilt the playing field well away from skill.
So I guess it depends on the kind of game you’re going for. If it’s a game where you are exchanging money for grinding time then yes….a well designed MT system could be quite worthwile for the reasons you outlined. For people aiming to compete on basis of skill with more persistence….I don’t see MT working half as well.
I think the root problem still remains though, from what I”ve seen EVERY MMO with MT is currently designed so you buy your way to utter victory.
As a game designer who believes strongly in the power of good design, I agree that a good MT system all comes down to the design. I appreciate that you’ve noticed Threshold’s MT design has been assiduously designed to not be a replacement for skill. Believe me, that isn’t easy. Making things people want, without making them “I WIN” buttons is tough.
The cheap and easy way is to just make MT items that are so uber and bad ass that of course people want to pay for them. But that alienates a lot of people – people who might have been good MT customers. People don’t like feeling like you held a knife to their throat in order to get them to buy stuff. Funny that, eh? (example: Cryptic’s $12.50 respecs).
I think the whole “buy your way to victory” is an extension of the “grind you way to victory” design that has taken over. This gets us back to the numerous times we have talked about making player skill count for a higher percentage of the “success equation” than gear.
Yep, with those free respecs they just handed out to all characters, Cryptic really is screwing over their customers.
So you can cure hunger by giving someone one hamburger?
The free retcon they are giving out is a nice bandaid, but it doesn’t solve the greater problem. Furthermore, it took them almost a month, and they only threw out that crumb after the negative feedback was overwhelming.
It will take a lot more for them to reverse the tide than a single, one shot, free retcon.
They are still charging $12.50 for them in the C-Store, and they still cost 990g in-game.
If people have to sit around and hope for a free retcon instead of being able to actually count on having them when they need them, that is not a good position for players to be in.
Players are much better off with a legitimate, affordable retcon system that is there for them when THEY need it, rather than a rare, random free one that is handed out when the devs feel like it.
Halloween event started yesterday. All manner of complaints sprung up on the forums prompting Daeke to post this in one of the complaint threads:
http://forums.champions-online.com/showthread.php?p=1317824#post1317824
Daeke: “We’re changing almost all of the things you mentioned in this thread: Zombie Apocalypse minimum level, Open Mission timers, Crypt level access. Bill’s writing up a Blood Moon State of the Game right now with all the details.”
So I guess that one day few hours testing on ptr they only allowed pretty much bit(pun intended) them on the arse.
But it gets even better.
Then Bill Roper posts his “State of the game address”.
http://forums.champions-online.com/showthread.php?t=86983
In the first paragraph to introduce changes and more snake oil promises for the future, he shows, yet again, his ineptitude:
Roper(aka chronomancer/foxbat):
Happy Haunting, Heroes!
The Blood Moon has risen and we’re off to a howling good start with our big event. We’ve already seen our first players unlock the new Celestial power set, noticed some Takofanes action figures in tow, and seen a lot of lycanthropic heroes taking a bite out of the werewolf hunters out there. The Zombie Apocalypse is in full swing, and all in all, things are getting scary in and around Millennium City. In this time of undead uprisings, we wanted to spread some calm amongst the community and bring some treats to all you tricksters out there:”
How can it be a “howling good start” when you’ve so many complaints of it prompting responses from Daeke pointing to Roper’s “state of the game” which seemingly was also prompted by these and other issues?
How can it be a “howling good start” when you feel the need to say you “wanted to spread some calm amongst the community”?
See, he managed to contradict himself, lie, and show yet again how really disconnected he is from the playerbase. Completely arrogant and patronizing.
The rest of the post he made is even more patronizing and examples of his not really knowing what is going on(like live character transfers to PTR).
At any comical rate, he did mention that there’s going to be a way to earn retcons implemented and character slots earned (seemingly for each toon you raise to 40). Im of the mind though that it will be another bait and switch or worse.
Hahahaha.
Daeke basically posted: “We are changing everything. Everything is broken. We know this. We are working on it.”
Roper: “We had a howling good start.”
Is Roper a liar, completely clueless, or both?
Bill Roper is a fraud. Look no further than HG:L to figure that out. That he continues being a fraud is no surprise. He’s a hatchet man these days – loot the game for all it is worth, then shut down the project.
I had a crazy idea while discussing this with my wife. Follow me for a moment.
Perpetual Entertainment was massively screwing up the Star Trek MMO, and Paramount was pretty nervous. In late 2007 Paramount shut it down due to lack of progress. Cryptic swoops in with a nice demo mockup, and lands the Star Trek license. That was a sweet move on their part.
Then on January of 2008 they somehow manage to land the Star Trek license.
Cryptic picked up the Marvel/MSFT license on September 2006. They had already been mucking around with some code before that – a few months, maybe a year, nobody knows for sure. By February 2008, Marvel and MSFT decide they aren’t happy with the state of the game. At the time, they blamed it on the inherent inability for anyone but WoW to make acceptable profits in the MMO market. This was obviously a dodge, since they re-licensed Marvel for an MMO a year later to another newbie developer (Gazillion Entertainment).
This left Cryptic scrambling. They probably felt their game wasn’t good enough to release without the cachet of a license, so they looked around desperately for one they could get. DC was already taken, they failed with Marvel, so they didn’t have a lot of options.
Champions is a pretty obscure pen and paper ruleset. I doubt they had to pay much to buy it – especially since part of the deal was immediately licensing back all pen and paper game rights to the previous owners.
So now they have a license that at least gave them somewhat of a name and made them different than “City of Heroes 2.”
But what they know internally is that this half baked super hero game of theirs is probably not going to save the company. What is going to save the company is that Star Trek license they landed a month before losing Marvel.
So what’s a company to do?
Well, my PURE CONJECTURE THEORY is that someone really smart at the company made a shrewd business call. He decided that CO needed to just get wrapped up and finished, and start generating cash. They would use that cash to fund the completion of Star Trek Online, which would be the real flagship game of the company.
There are a zillion reasons why this would be a smart move – I don’t really have to go into them here.
Now, the next part…. and man, if this actually happened it would be such a brilliant Machiavellian act that I would be forever impressed…
If you know CO is basically cord blood for Star Trek Online, eventually CO is going to fail. If it is going to fail, who is going to take the blame?
Enter Bill Roper – recently disgraced by the Hellgate failure. Why not hire a guy with a reputation for failure, and leave him holding the bag when you are ready for Star Trek Online to take over.
Assume Star Trek Online comes out 6 months from now and does well. They finish milking the CO customers for every last penny through the cash shop, and then right around its 1 year anniversary you close up shop. You give the lifetime subscribers a free month or two on Star Trek Online. That’s no skin off your nose and it just boosts your STO player base. Heck, give them 3 months. They still have to buy the game (and STO is probably going to have a cash shop too).
With the blame fully on Roper, and a gaming community more than willing to accept the belief that it was all Roper’s fault, you fire him and move on.
That’s a lot of conjecture, I know. But you gotta admit it is plausible. And if it is the truth, the CEO of Cryptic and Atari are geniuses.
I completely thought this to be the case as well: that Roper would be used as a scape goat.
But here is another thought.
Paramount has already once dumped a developer.
Failure of Champions along with mired progress STO(just like it was mired with Marvel’s)eventually causes Paramount to dump Cryptic/Atari.
Atari takes a few members of Cryptic on and absorbs them into the company while giving pink slips to the rest and Cryptic is shut down and used as a write off for taxes and blamed on ineptitude of the directors and the bad economy.
Jack Emmert, like the Traveler he is, goes and look for his next mark. Most likely getting a mix of iffy MMO designers and marketers and plenty of naive/green coders and starts up a new company. Rinse and repeat as needed.
—–
On another Champion’s note, it seems that they’re starting to try another crack at the “Positive” media spin.
Zam’s BFF review part 3 is prominently featured on the front page of Champion’s site. Its important to mention that it is a reversing of the the last 2 parts of his reviews which essentially slammed the game.
Colin Brennan from Massively also posts (yet another) positive review at the same time that is being touted in the forums.
Of course neither of them are getting any incentives or benefits for doing so at the same time on the heels of the recent plethora of issues plaguing the game and just before the Free Return trial holiday weekend….
I think since STO is already in beta, it may be too late for Paramount to pull the plug. But who knows.
As for Massively: they also recently wrote a total joke of an article giving CO a total pass on everything bad about the C-Store.
It would seem to me that Cryptic/Atari has used some wise advertising money when it comes to Massively.com
[...] different servers, while offering the same game. There will be companies who do a great job and companies who pull jerk moves. Thing is, you can’t map “microtransaction” to Jerk and [...]
re: Cash Shops
Massively had a really good article, based on a presentation the biggest Korean developer of free games gave. Among the many many things brought up, a couple big ones stood out to me:
* An ingame, tradable $ currency is mandatory. This essentially squeezes value out of the people who’ll never pay you directly. Essentially, it’s RMT where the real actual economy dictates prices, and not the developer. Gets some of that Forum Gold money.
* Gating areas between the morlocks and non-morlocks is an extremely bad idea. The people who buy an area feel lonely and nag their friends to come, their friends feel angry at being nagged and milked, just causes bad feelings all around in a game. Bad feelings are bad.
D&D Online’s revamp seems to get a lot of this right.
It’s just… man, people have already spent years and years on this, not reading their advice is like intentionally walking off a cliff.
re: Mr. Roper
We all had Psyduck level headaches when he was hired. “Why?!” we wondered. “Fall guy” was the general consensus.
In one interview he claimed he read the forums, but he hadn’t logged on for six months. This was when the forums required a log in. So he either had a sekrit account or is a lying liar who lies.
re: Travis and Runic Games
Travis was a class act and was the polar opposite of the Flagship experience. It’s an abomination what happened to Mythos, and I hope Torchlight comes close to being as good.
Mythos could have came first and been profitable, and Hellgate could have been an actual finished game. It’s wacky that every startup feels compelled to make a massive blockbuster as their first game.
re: Hellgate
Garbled second hand translations of this has brought us some rumors:
* Some employees of Redbana have been caught stealing credit cards from a backdoor in their billing system.
* They plan on moving the development to Korea to keep a closer eye on things.
* Thoughts are going around about making a “Hellgate 2″ to get around the distribution rights Namco has in some places in the world. The zombie can still come back and eat us all as we sleep.
BryanM: “It’s just… man, people have already spent years and years on this, not reading their advice is like intentionally walking off a cliff.”
No doubt BryanM. I am pretty fanatical about reading as much as I can about the trials and tribulations other companies face when dealing with non-subscription business models. Despite my own 13 years experience with various non-subscription business models, I still try to learn as much as I can from other people’s successes and failures. It amazes me that companies with 0 experience in the area don’t feel the same need.
“It’s wacky that every startup feels compelled to make a massive blockbuster as their first game.”
And it is illustrative that companies like Blizzard did the opposite. They made small games first – including RPM Racing for the Super NES, Battle Chess I and II for the PC, and the relatively famous (now) The Lost Vikings also for the SNES.
Re: Hellgate 2. Wow. Seriously?
The conversation they must have had still makes me giggle:
“Mr.Roper, we’re not going to lie. This thing is going to go down in flames. And when it does, we’re going to need to fire someone. We’d like that someone to be YOU.”
The “Hellgate 2″ rumor is an in-quotes wink wink nudge nudge sort of thing. Rearrange the deck chairs on the titanic, then release it as a “new game” to be able to distribute it outside Korea.
The only thing they really could do at this point is revamp everything fundamentally and try to successfully rebrand it. Hanbitsoft probably should have let the bank keep it, but I guess they’re stubborn and wanted to break even on their investment.
The ways Hellgate disappoints is both grandiose and subtle. Here’s something I remembered from my Let’s Play years ago:
Now, the game has two systems to throttle ranged fire. Most games use a “reloading” time out after X shots, but Hellgate isn’t most games.
First, there’s the inaccuracy system. You have a reticle that grows larger and larger rapidly as you hold down the button, making it less likely for a shot to land. The weapons that use this system encourage you to shoot things point blank if you can survive, since they’ll kill things much more quickly there than at range.
Second, there’s a “power” system, which goes from 100% to a number less than 100% quickly. This throttles the damage directly. Beam weapons tend to use this one.
Finally some of the ranged weapons just let you shoot, throttling be damned, but they fire once every three seconds which is kind of boring.
So in the Let’s Play I made extreme use of a weapon called an “Eruptor”. It creates a field of fire on the ground and doesn’t take crap from anyone – it’s kind of cool actually.
The Eruptor uses the power system.
I eventually realized the fields of fire it created would be overwritten. Overwritten by wimpier fields if the button was held for more than a second. Since the fields lingered for several seconds, this meant the optimal way to use this thing that could cover the screen in fire was to squirt a little bit of fire every two or three seconds.
Pouring streams of sprinkly death fire into a guy was kind of fun, but they designed playing that way to be playing badly.
The one design flaw/hurdle I can’t figure out how to fix was how they had the guns act like spells. Diablo II had javelins that could explode into bolts of lightning – how do you make a skill that turns a Hydra Gun that shoots five streams of poison into something, visually, viscerally, even more cool?