2) Tom and Jerry MMO from Turner Interactive. WTF? It will supposedly be released first in India. Are Tom and Jerry super popular over there or something?

3) Study on assumptions gamers make about people based on the looks of their avatar.

I hope never, but I fear that is a pointless hope. Last night I read this article: Google Stops Wi-Fi Mapping Project After “Mistakenly” Scoring Personal Data. It got me thinking about the accelerating violation of “customers’” private information for profit by so many companies out there.

Zynga has already gone down this path with so much of their gameplay based on nagging people into spamming their own friends about their games for free marketing.

Facebook and Google are legendary for it.

When will we have our first MMO that makes the gathering and selling of customer data a major part of their business model?

As a gamer, how much of this would you tolerate? And try to be honest, because the continued use of Facebook and Google by so many of us shows we are actually willing to tolerate quite a lot.

How do you think an MMO could successful move in this direction to make money without completely alienating their customers?

Subscription MMOs often run various promotions and events to try and lure people back. Sometimes they are called re-activation weekends. Often these events coincide with other special events like double XP (note this), new content, special events, etc.

A few days ago I received an email from LOTRO trying to convince me to return. Among the amazing incentives were:

1. 5% bonus xp.
2. Free stable master travel.
3. Collect tokens from defeated monsters and trade them in for special rewards.
4. Play your old characters.
5. Play LOTRO for $9.99 a month

Lets break that down a bit. #4 and #5 are kinda stupid to even list there. #4 is freakin’ obvious, and #5 is the same price everyone pays…. yipee. #2 is functionally irrelevant. Even as a lowbie I never even paid attention to stable master travel. #3 is vague, and might be interesting, but most likely the rewards are meh or silly.

So the big lure, and the thing they listed FIRST, is the “whopping” 5% bonus XP.

Who is the idiot marketing buffoon who came up with this idea and rammed it home?

Who in the heck is going to give a crap about 5% bonus XP?

I cannot remember the last time I saw a major MMO have an xp related event that was not 50% or more bonus XP. The common bonus is DOUBLE XP (+100%).

Does anyone know someone at Turbine they can ask about this? Because this has to be one of the most laughable MMO promotions I’ve ever read.

But to make this more than mocking LOTRO’s promotion, let us also discuss the larger issue:

1. How important do you think it is, and how much focus should be put on, luring back former customers at an MMO?
2. What methods do you think are likely to be most effective at doing so?

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.

But when I think about it in more detail, it starts to make me nervous.

How much is someone’s MMO character worth? What if a character is lost and:

1. Cannot be restored.
2. The backup lacks expensive, virtual items.
3. The account is banned – wrongfully in the customer’s eyes – and he sues for the value of the accounts/items/gold.

There are a lot of tricky, difficult issues when it comes to the valuation of virtual property. As MMO developers, we need some kind of codified legal protection here. We need a legal ruling that all characters, gold, items, etc. are completely and totally the property of the company. Unless the company chooses to cede those rights (as with Entropia-like games) then this property ownership needs to be absolute.

Otherwise, we have some potential legal disasters coming in our industry.

Hyper customization is the primary USP (Unique Selling Point) of CO. There are no classes. There are just tons of powers to choose from. This is wonderful and all, but right now you can only respec your last 10 choices (not just of powers, but stat training, boosts to powers, travel abilities, etc.).  As you can imagine, it is INCREDIBLY easy to gimp your character given the millions of training possibilities. Even if you don’t gimp your character, you could easily ruin the fun of it with a few choices you regret a couple levels later.

It is my opinion that Champions Online will fail without a full respec option. Players will not tolerate the situation as it is right now. Currently, people are being told to “do some research before training” and “use a character planner” (which are made by third parties). Hello MMO Elitism! Again, those of us with experience playing or making games know how asinine that advice is. Most people want to PLAY games, not research them. The real reaction people are going to have when they mess up a character and have no recourse is to create a recourse – /cancel subscription. Obviously, that’s bad for business.

I expect that sooner or later, Cryptic will realize this and have to implement a full respec. The fact that they have to be dragged kicking and screaming to this OBVIOUS realization is mind boggling.

What shocks me is they should already have learned this lesson. The same thing happened in City of Heroes, and that game was LESS customizable and harder to gimp your character.

This circles back to the point I made near the top. What does this say about Cryptic’s management and leadership? Who is making bad decisions like this one (or like the ones in my sleazy marketing post)? Is it Bill Roper? He is now the “Design Director” and Executive Producer of Champions Online. That’s a pretty nice followup job to driving Flagship into bankruptcy and murdering the otherwise promising Hellgate: London.

Oh, and what was one of the things players wanted in HG:L but Roper and crew fought them on? Respecs. What else? LAN play.

Seeing any lessons for other game developers? I do.

Valve’s Newell: How About Community Financing For Games?

Newell continued: “What I think would be much better would be if the community could finance the games. In other words, ‘Hey, I really like this idea you have. I’ll be an early investor in that and, as a result, at a later point I may make a return on that product, but I’ll also get a copy of that game.’”

The Valve boss concluded: “So move financing from something that occurs between a publisher and a developer… Instead, have it be something where funding is coming out of [a] community for games and game concepts they really like.”

The article includes one example of a game developer actually doing something like this:

In addition, indie game developer Daniel Benmergui (Today I Die) “is pursuing a variable patronage model for his next game” on his website — with different amounts of donations giving rewards spanning from a mention in the game’s credits to a customized version of Daniel’s previous games.

That is very interesting, but I think the only way this will happen is if someone comes along and organizes something on a macro level. Someone with a real love for the industry, a lot of money, and enough reputation to get tons of hype. Like hmmm maybe Gabe Newell himself?

Interview: Free Realms

I wish I had been able to get her to ask more poingant questions about the harsh dropoff between free and subscriber.

Some of you (like me) might wonder what you get for being a paid member. Unfortunately, Free Realms uses a subscription for its paid features, rather than a direct pay-for-perks system (where you pay specifically for what you want). The things you get for paying are actually quite significant.

One of my writers wrote a detailed guide about it:

Guide to what you get for being a member in Free Realms

Check it out!

Was being born in 1971 the perfect time to be born a geek?

• It meant I got to see Star Wars in the theater, 13 times, at ages 6 and 7, exactly when it would overwhelm my sense of wonder.
• I got an 8-bit computer at exactly the age when boys get obsessive about details, and I spent days PEEKing and POKEing and typing in listings from magazines and learning how computers actually worked.
• It meant at least half the new games I played were actually new ideas.
• And yet I got to play real pinball machines.
• In real arcades.
• New Wave science fiction was the used paperbacks laying around, and I got to read cyberpunk and steampunk as they were invented, and see SF when fandom was not yet a media circus.
• I got to play D&D from as close to the beginning as most anyone.
• And feel like I had inside baseball knowledge during the D&D scene in E.T., which the other folks in the theater didn’t get.
• I was there for when the X-Men were new and fresh
• I got to high school when PCs were becoming ubiquitous.
• I got to college when Macs were on Apple campuses, and actually useful.
• And when you had no choice but to use libraries for research, so I actually learned what real research is.
• And I was too young to feel cynical about Dead Poets Society.
• I got onto the Internet after it was tiny, but before it was mass market. So I got to see and use most of the tools and software that were key to its evolution, as they were used, then replaced, then discarded. Pine, gopher, Usenet, Mozilla…
• I read Sandman when the issues first came out.
• I got into the games business before it was mass media, but got to ride the wave.
• …and also got to see the Web unfold…
• …and got Wikipedia and Google just in time for when I didn’t need to use libraries anymore…
• …and see some of the science fiction coming true.

What do you think the best “Geek Year” was to be born?