Creativity can be deadly

I realized today that I have no clue whatsoever what the term “MMO” means anymore. I gave it some thought and came up with “An MMO is an online, real-time game where other people affect can your game.” That’s pretty vague. Clearly there are games which call themselves MMOs and can be played as if they were MMOs, or as if they were solo RPGs. I don’t know. I just know the old definitions don’t work.

Take World of Warcraft and the current flavor of the month, Tiny Speck’s Glitch. One is the most popular MMO in the world (well, if you don’t include World of Tanks, though the developer does). The other is a super casual browser-based game where you can’t even kill stuff. The two games share almost no features, yet both are MMOs. I give up. If you can play your game and can see another player when you do so, it’s a MMO.

Which is going to make writing these Daily Blogrolls SO EASY. Checkers? Is it online? MMO.

The blogging world has changed quite a lot since the last time I was doing these (and work crushed my free time). People are leaving drops of content all over the Internet, on Tumblr blogs, on Google+, on Twitter. I’ll still be pointing out great posts by the bloggers in my blogroll, but I’ll be trying to collect some of these other far-flung bits of wisdom as well.

Before I get started, an update on my MMO gaming: DDO on Sunday nights, D&D fourth edition on Thursday nights, and Glitch. Driver issues have killed EQ2 — I can’t play it. I’ve been poking around in Rift. I’ve started working on the Saint’s Haven quests in Dragon Nest. Mostly Glitch for MMOs, though.

Beau Turkey has done a heck of a write-up on Glitch, btw.

Fighting giants in DAoC beta

It’s been ten years since Dark Age of Camelot went live? Wow. I remember calling it “EQ Lite” based solely on the screenshots they released in the early rounds of beta. When I got into the beta myself, I realized just how impressive an achievement the game was. Yes, it clearly had been influenced by EverQuest, but it was its own game and would become one of the influences that would form the mechanics behind World of Warcraft.

It would be physically impossible for anyone to spend more time in a game than I spent in DAoC. Scott Jennings, Mythic’s one time DBA, has a wonderful post from Matt Firor, DAoC’s original producer, one what it was like to ship an MMO before the market was crowded with hundreds of them.

It was a different world.

Star Corsairs

After taking the world by storm with his sandbox browser MMO Golemizer, indie MMO dev Dave Toulouse is set to unleash his second game, Star Corsairs. It’s an updated take on the old space exploration / trading games of the 80s (most notably SunDog) combined with the mining, ship construction and PvP of EVE Online. And maybe a smidgen of Star Castle. Explore, take on missions to protect the Federation, construct your own starship, blow stuff up, free to play. I’ll have more on Star Corsairs when I’ve played it more.

Donate, and he’ll name a star after you.

Speaking of indie MMO development, Andorov posted an excellent list of 15 important steps to wild success in indie MMO development.

Rule 4: Create a good company and MMO name. Recruiting for Joe Schmoe’s Awesome MMORPG is going to be a lot more difficult than Excelsior Games’ Islandia: The Re-Islanding. Most non-visionaries (which I may also refer to as dumb f**ks or DFs), though talented, are simple folk and easily impressed.

Lucent Heart, the “zodiac-inspired” dating MMO, not content with merely connecting up guys playing guys and guys playing scantily-clad girls, is about to unleash dance battles upon the world, says Anjel Syndicate.

Create your dance from dozens of dance steps, re-create music videos, and .. well, if a collection of Minstrels can do System of a Down in LotRO, I suppose a bunch of angel-winged schoolgirls can do Thriller in Lucent Heart!

See ya tomorrow!

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It's Dwaggin Season

I got this mysterious e-mail the other day, it was simply a list of tasks to perform…

1. log on to Lord of the Rings.
2. Find skirmish camp outside Bree gates.
3. talk to people there and get set up with a soldier and do the intro
   skirmish run.
4. Press Control+J to get the skirmish panel.
5. Select the Siege of Gondamon Skirmish.
6. Second boss to the end is a dragon.

There was a dragon to be killed. Gondamon needed my help to kill it. Do or die, it would be done.

One of the cool things about the free-to-play version of Lord of the Rings Online is that I never have to worry about anything more than just waiting for the patch to download. I hadn’t played LotRO for six months, but my level 37 Captain was still waiting for me — right in the Bree skirmish camp, as it turned out.

Her armor was still a little worn from her previous skirmishes, but a quick trip into Bree and a willing armorer sorted that out. My chestnut mare and I were back outside Bree in only a few moments. I summoned my pilgrim herald to my side. He was looking a little tired, wanted to know what the heck had happened to me. Disappearing for six months during the time of Middle Earth’s most desperate need.

I explained how I was imprisoned by a Necromancer. Or something. He seemed dubious, but I don’t pay him to question my comings and goings. I am a Captain of Men.

The Siege of Gondamon

In the Siege of Gondamon skirmish, a solo adventure for characters 20+, it’s your job to protect Mathil, Gondamon’s ruler, against the forces of darkness. The NPC Guardian, Minstrel and Loremaster trainers will each guard an approach to the city and signal enemy approaches. It is your job, along with your skirmish companion (a warrior in my case) to make a stand and defeat the waves of enemies and the occasional lieutenant or general that joins the battle.

The worst time to be trying to remember how to play LotRO is while there are waves of enemies coming at you. Questions I asked myself like, “how do I heal myself”, and “how do I heal myself DAMMIT”, and “OMG WHERE IS THE FRICKIN HEAL BUTTON” constantly arose and I soon watched Mathil die and myself returned to the skirmish camp.

I took a few minutes to look over the buttons, put up my buffs, and in general remember the reactive way Captain abilities work. Fortunately, I’d long ago set up my action buttons such that I generally just needed to work from left to right and push what got activated in that order, using the monster death-triggered heals as appropriate, and using the herald to cast his heal as well.

Second time was beauty. The Loremaster trainer died, making attacks from the west a little more urgent, and during the final wave I was forced to retreat to the center of the ruins where Mathil himself could help with the defense after the surviving NPCs left the ruins to bring the fight to outlying camps.

Banners were raised, trumpets were sounded, both I and my warrior had to retreat a couple of times, but in the end it was the dragon Nethgarch whose corpse lay cooling on the marble steps and not mine.

Very fun. I don’t know why I don’t play LotRO more!

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We’re way behind on our latest project at work, so I’ spent most of Friday working. I did take a break, though, to log on and participate in the final Beta 3 invasion event this afternoon. I’d spent all night (until 4:30AM) leveling my cleric from 12 to 20, and though I didn’t get a chance to visit the Iron Tombs, I did want to help keep Freemarch free. I’d leveled from 16 to 18 in a raid group at one of Thursday’s invasions. That also earned me nearly enough planar currency to get some nice epic items. I logged on, joined in, and earned enough to get some “purple” leggings. Good stuff.

While waiting for the servers to get turned off, I ported over to the Guardian lands and tried to invade the scholar’s grove. Those places are MADE for PvP — as you near an enemy stronghold, the familiar rift/public quest panel gets added to your quest display, and you get a nice list of goals that need to be met in order to capture the area. First, kill the guards. Then destroy the wardstone. All the while fending off the enemy players, who are being summoned to the area by broadcast warnings.

I could post a lot more about Rift — lots of people are. It’s all a reminder of the similar enthusiasm around Warhammer and Age of Conan etc, where the betas were incredibly fun and everyone was stoked. When the games went live, the laid back beta fun turned into laser-sharp focused achievements and min-maxing.

Will this happen to Rift? Of course it will.

Anyway, let’s see what’s on the collective blog-consciousness, this start of a new year.

Ex-subscription MMOs

2010 was a year that saw a lot of new acceptance for the “cash shop” model. Previously known as “free to play”, I’m really very tired of cheapening of the word “free”. There ARE free to play games where the majority of players never pay a cent in any way, but it’s hard to build a business plan on that.

As Keen puts it:

…the bottom line is that AAA games aren’t being released as F2P — that’s how they retire or reinvent themselves as a plan B.

That probably depends upon Keen’s definition of “AAA game”, which I suspect means “game that charges a monthly subscription”. I doubt the makers of Tera or, say, Lucent Heart, consider their games anything less than AAA, despite being released on the cash shop model. Keen might also extend his definition to exclude Asian imports… and then that runs right into Allods Online, the Russian MMO that mishandled its cash shop to the anger and disappointment of its many fans.

Moving on, Muckbeast points to a newly cash shop converted MMO, Lord of the Rings Online:

I think it was a wise move to do it before it seemed desperate. All available information pointed to LOTRO doing pretty well with subs, but Turbine must have been inspired by the success they had with their own game, DDO, and went for it. Doing it before it smells desperate is smart.

Star Trek Online

I don’t care what some people might say — I had a hell of a lot of fun with Star Trek Online in its first year. If I don’t play right now, it’s only because there’s so many games out right now that I simply don’t have time to spend on a game where I’m max level on one character and near max on another.

Sente of A Ding World looks back at his career in STO’s Federation; the ships, the missions, the crafting and the player-generated content, and pretty much likes what he sees.

EVE Online

Grats to Stargrace of Nomadic Gamer, who finally achieved one of her long time goals in EVE Online by flying the pseudo-capital mining control ship, the Orca. Is this the only ship with a hangar that can dock at stations? Anyway, grats!

EVE Online is still giving me the hard sell with its latest campaign to bring me back for five days.

Tipa Pinneau,

Five free days of game time and the free CONCORD Echelon are almost gone. Reactivate before January 3rd and get:

• Five Free Days of EVE Online
• The CONCORD Echelon, a frigate-class codebreaker ship
• Thousands or even Millions of Skill Points that are waiting for you as a result of the recent Learning skills change

As an added bonus, when you reactivate, you can get 60 Days of EVE Online for only 19.95.

I had my mouse finger on the link, ready to resub. I probably would have, if I remembered the trick to docking my borrowed battleship in my corp’s hangar so I could jump clone back to Empire space, leave the corp, and just go back to making stuff and playing the market. Why I thought my gameplay style (updating spreadsheets and spending only a few minutes each day online) was at all compatible with a nullsec corp, I’ll never know.

Rift

Via Pete Smith, Dean Takahashi of VentureBeat actually called “Rift” a WoW-killer… Thankfully, the Trion guys didn’t take the bait.

VB: What is your marketing message these days about your game being the “WOW killer”?

DR: Well, to be clear, no one in Trion has ever said that, and I don’t think anybody in Trion ever will. If you look at the lineage of great MMOs, starting with Ultima Online, you see generational improvements. Ultima Online was the first commercial success in the MMO business, but it was two-dimensional and weighted toward players fighting other players. That wasn’t much fun for the new players. EverQuest came along with 3D animation and players fighting against the environment. It was a real commercial success and it was prettier. Still, it had its bugs. World of WarCraft came along in 2004. It was an improvement on what came before and it was very polished. Within that game, you could have some great solo experiences. Other games have tried to emulate it.

WoW-killer. When I hear a game labeled a WoW-killer, I only expect the worse from then on.

While not actually planned in the game, as far as I know, Rift Junkies has a video some player made of some potential PvP “souls” for each of the four callings. While there are certainly instanced battlegrounds in the game (as many PvPs in Meridian kept reminding me), there is also going to be a strong world PvP component — and I just can’t see giving invaders access to tools that defenders (in that case) would not have.

Chris of Level Capped wonders just how sustainable the “rifts”/public quest model will be once the game goes live. Everyone looks back to Warhammer’s public quests, which were fun and community building in beta, but turned out to be largely abandoned soon after the game went live.

Arkenor of Ark’s Ark has been posting a blow-by-blow play through of the beta from the perspective of a dwarf on the Mathosian front lines. Great stuff if, somehow, you haven’t got your fill of the game yet :)

Stargate Worlds

Via Massively, an interview with Cheyenne Mountain’s Jim Brown, who talks a bit about the game and the company and has some words of hope for those who’d like to adventure in the Stargate universe. Have to admit that it’s the perfect backstory for an MMO. Through every gate is a new world…

Tabula Rasa

A new year puts everyone in a nostalgic mood, and we’re back with Sente again as he waxes nostalgic in a gallery sharing his best time with Richard Garriott‘s follow-up to his legendary Ultima Online:

I miss this game… or at least I miss it where it was at some stage after the crafting became somewhat decent and before they screwed up the user interface. Of course I do choose to not think so much about that the game did not have any alternate leveling paths as in entirely different zones and that it was really bad at handling disconnects when you were in the middle of a mission or even wore running some missions in an instanced area.

Well, maybe it’s best left in the past after all. Tabula Rasa probably would still be around today if it had launched on the cash shop model.

Garriott is now a firm believer in the cash shop genre, by the way, having bent his considerable MMO and RPG making expertise toward Facebook games — Port Casino Poker (previously Sweet Ass Poker) and its innovative follow-up, Port Casino Blackjack.

I don’t really have anything useful to say about the guy whose games once kept me glued to my Atari 800 for hours and days on end. But I’d like to embed the video from his website.

“Pioneering game developer, explorer, adventurer, award-winning entrepreneur, and global ambassador for space travel privatization.” Now making boring ass Facebook games. And I LIKE Facebook games!

Core Blaze

Via Big Download comes word of Core Blaze, a MMO that uses the Unreal 3 engine along with a detailed physics engine to make a lifelike world built on Eastern myth blahblahblah. That isn’t the interesting part. Here’s the interesting part:

“Moreover, numerous in-game dynamics such as geography, weapon alignment while fighting, team compatibility and the character’s own element will contribute to player’s overall development in the game.”

Well, people have been asking for a fantasy FPS for some time… but I’m not sure Core Blaze is it. Looks to be treading ground Vindictus has already passed.

Finding Neverland Online

I’ve just started following Viiral of Epic-Hero.com. Viiral’s blog showcases the latest in Asian MMOs; pretty cool stuff. You can find the latest and greatest about new games such as Tera there. His latest post brings us “Finding Neverland Online”, a game which doesn’t look to have fallen far from the DOMO/Florensia tree as far as graphics and UI go.

I take it all back. This no eyes girl gives me the creeps.

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It was a 7.1 gig patch, but I did managed to get into Flying Lab’s Pirates of the Burning Sea last night, and spent a little more time with it tonight. Just went through the tutorial, did some of the Yuletide quests, joined a “society” (guild) named La Fédération, and wandered around the starting town. Veteran players were being helpful over the nationwide chat and the server was hopping. One server for North America, one for the EU, and a test server. I haven’t played PotBS for a couple of years, but I was very much impressed by their improvements to the land game. The NPCs sing, dance, and make the town very much a lively place to stroll — see the video at the end.

There’s a bit of rough sailing today, though; read all about it after the break.

To play World of Warcraft is to be hacked. I found out recently that my account had been used to spam gold sellers over a bunch of servers, and I never give out my password to ANYONE. AND I have an authenticator! You just can’t win. Some of the best minds with some of the best computers in the entire world devote all their time and energy to hacking WoW.

I’d like to say I’m shocked and surprised that this kind of stuff goes on in EVE Online, but seriously, EVE is all about the criminal underground. I haven’t checked lately, but I’d be willing to bet some ISK that there’s skills you can train to hack more efficiently. Toldain, with whom I shared one corp for a few weeks and another corp for about an hour, recently got hacked to the tune of THREE BILLION ISK. There was a time that would have been big news, and the thief would be bragging about it everywhere. Now, it’s just something that happens so often that CCP’s customer service doesn’t even blink an eye. Trying to sell Toldain’s character on the EVE forums, though — that was a nice touch.

DragonChaser Pete recently had his Lord of the Rings Online account banned for suspected hacking; not on his part, of course. Turbine managed to catch the hackers before any harm had been done, thankfully, but there’s a lesson in Toldain and Pete’s troubles: Go to your games and change the passwords to them all, right now. Because if you ever used your game password as the password for any other website, odds are you’re going to be hacked. No authenticator will save you if they really want to get in.

When you’re at a party, do you snipe from the edges of the conversation with hurtful remarks, or do you draw all the attention to yourself? Tesh draws the parallels between WoW groups and holiday gatherings in his treatise on Social Tanking.

You’ll never find someone as militant about smoking as an ex-smoker. And you’ll never find anyone quite as down on World of Warcraft as an ex-WoW junkie. As Cataclysm’s launch draws near (6 DAYS OMG!), Syncaine’s tirades against the world’s most popular game of all time and forever continue with a treatise on why WoW (and games like WoW) can never possibly do PvP better than EVE Online.

He has a point. The Ancient Gaming Noob wrote, just today, that “we get called griefers for daring to engage in PVP on a PVP server.”

Oh, wow — Massively’s Game Archaeologist is looking back at RuneScape! I remember playing that game way back before it looked so nice. Can a return to Nexus: Kingdom of the Wind be far behind?

And lastly, via Cyanbane, word is NASA is going to make an announcement of an astrobiological discovery that will affect the search for extraterrestrial life. So, I guess we’re finally going to meet the aliens that landed here fifty years ago?

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World of Warcraft’s forthcoming Cataclysm expansion (1 week away!!!!) is still setting fire to the blogroll today. Hey, if all a MMO has to do these days to generate some buzz is destroy the world, well, I have a couple candidates who could use some devastation.

I logged on to Vanguard yesterday evening to check on how my characters had fared in the big colossal server merge last July, and was shocked to find that whenever it was I last logged into the game, there had been no patches since. For a game that has had zero developer support in eleven months, the community there still seems vibrant and positive. You just can’t kill a good community.

You know? Forget EQ Next. EverQuest doesn’t need another reboot. EverQuest players are never going to jump ship to a completely new game, anyway. Why not VANGUARD Next? Come on, let’s start a petition or something.

Crunchy hot blog stuff after the break.

The Armadillo that is of a Greenish Hue wonders if maybe he didn’t need to twink his Cataclysm alt in quite as much heirloom gear, given how unchallenging and railsy the new content turned out to be. It’s telling that he’s already thinking about the next expansion AFTER Cataclysm.

Pete of Dragon Chasers flits five years into the future with a glimpse at how Blizzard will make World of Warcraft even easier. Better get your time machine checked, Pete. That wasn’t years, that was MONTHS.

Spinks was stunned to realize that there’s actually a New Star Trek vs Old Star Trek vibe going on in the Shattering — sure, the 1-60 lands may have a new story, but to the NPCs in the Burning Crusade, imminent destruction by Illidan and the Burning Leagion still threaten, and Northrend still groans under the weight of Arthas’ treachery.

Frogster announced a partnership with Chinese MMO giant Shanda Games to bring a new F2P, item-shop funded game designed for Western audiences to North America and most of Europe in 2012. Since the world will have ended by then, I probably don’t need to point out that they have previously partnered with a Chinese MMO company to bring a F2P, item-shop funded game designed for Western audiences to North America and most of Europe a couple years ago — Runes of Magic.

So, well, now there’s going to be a new one. The game will be developed with the cross-platform Gamebryo engine, which offers the possibility of a console port at some point.

Via Massively, we’ve learned that Flying Lab’s Pirates of the Burning Sea has gone Free-to-Play. This is a game that needs to be kept running, for diversity if nothing else. Pirate-themed MMOs have not exactly set the ocean on fire.

Please, give me a moment. I just found out Kaozz hates me. :( Or am I just a snob?

Anjin of Bullet Points finally found his true online love — crafting, via EQ2X, the F2P version of EverQuest II. Someone get him into Star Wars Galaxies, STAT!

It’s official, Massively will absolutely print any news about fantasy softporn MMO Tera they can dig up. Their latest windfall? Loading screens from the Korean version of the game. Someone paste “Sekrit TERA pics” to the front of a Victoria’s Secret catalog and drop it in the mail to the good folks at Massively, would ya?

Lastly, the brave Melmoth of Killed in a Smiling Accident uncovers the hidden perils of Lord of the Ring Online’s new “assist” feature.

See ya tomorrow, and enjoy yourself in whichever realm you roam!

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Lord of the Rings Online launched as a free-to-play game today.

No, wait.

The gates that had been shut beyond the memory of Man groaned open on hinges made of dwarven stone, mithril-inlaid runes pulsing a message nobody living could read…. BE FREE….

No, no, no.

In Evendim, did Lysistra, a Capitan of Men, foresee
A day of future memory when Eriador would be free
Not from Sauron’s minions, not from Saruman’s lies
Not from Archet’s bandits, nor from the Shire’s pies
Only freedom from quiet, freedom so bold,
freedom from mail delivery, thirty days old

Does that work? I don’t think that really works. It’s Lord of the Rings! It inspires bad poetry and people talking in rhyme and stuff.

Lord of the Rings relaunched as a free-to-play game yesterday for anyone who had ever subscribed, and Friday for everyone else. While parts of the game are free to play, and there is a path, as tedious as it may seem, to get to the edge of Moria without paying a penny, it would be a mistake to start in LotRO thinking Turbine won’t ever earn your credit card number.

You WILL be paying, make no mistake. It would be more fair to think of LotRO as a game where you can try different races and classes to some arbitrary level — let’s say, 20 — before you really have to start worrying about how much it will cost you. Well before that level, though, you’ll have come up against the “unlock” button — a hint at something that sounds like fun, and all you have to do is press unlock and spend some Turbine Points (which, through some error, were being given away for random actions… I earned 30 for logging in and getting on my horse).

I’d gotten bored with the LotRO quest grind when I was a subscriber, and even paying nothing wouldn’t make me enjoy the endless killing of wildlife one bit more, but skirmishes — they sounded cool. Skirmishes are instanced encounters sized for your group and aided by hirelings which you can customize to a large extent with Skirmish Marks you earn from successful completion. You can also choose to relive certain “classic” dungeons, all from the comfort of the skirmish window.

After going through the skirmish tutorial, which leads you through two sample skirmishes dealing with the retaking of Bree (this was given at the skirmish camp south of Bree; your mileage my vary), I was absolutely ready to continue on. The skirmish window had a nice variety of fun little encounters. I chose to defend Amon Sul from undead and….

PAYWALL. It had taken me approximately fifteen minutes to hit the edge of free content as a 37 Captain. Since I have bought the Moria expansion, that’s open to me later on, but other than that, it’s just boring killing grinding. The fun stuff, I’d pay for.

What the heck. Amon Sul needed defending, and my credit card is my shield. Card in hand, I went to the store to buy Turbine Points and unlock a few skirmishes and… was denied. The store just generated errors.

So, that ended my peek into LotRO F2P for that night, anyway.

I will definitely be checking back when their store is working. I want to play with the skirmishes. I even want to see Moria.

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Dungeons & Dragons Online started fairly strong for a new MMO, peaked early and fell into obscurity. People complained, loudly, that for a game built on the Guild Wars model (multiplayer hubs leading to solo/instanced content), they charged a bit much. Guild Wars, its inevitable competition, was after all free to play once you bought the box. Guild Wars also offered single player party play, a fairly unique combat mechanic and a strong RPG plot to take players through the story.

DDO, by contrast, had short story arcs called modules which had to be repeated ad infinitum in order to progress. Solo play was difficult for most classes. Turbine stepped up and fixed the flaws. They introduced many more modules, eased solo play with the addition of hirelings, and in the end, made a subscription optional. Similar to KingsIsle’s Wizard101, players could purchase modules to add options to their gameplay.

It worked wonders. DDO was on everyone’s mind; the population exploded with F2P players, and a good number of them opted to become subscribers and get everything for one monthly price. Nearly everyone would take advantage of the DDO Store.

Had Turbine caught lightning in a bottle, or was this the kind of lightning that never strikes twice?

Facing similar drops in subscribers, Mythic’s Warhammer Online and Funcom’s Age of Conan opened up their new player experiences to new players forever, no time limit. Players were encouraged to download the game for free and give it a try. The games are now both modest successes, having never reached the depths to which DDO had sunk.

DDOs move to “Freemium” changed the game for every “B” subscription MMO. Publishers had to ask themselves if Freemium could turn their game around. Someone would almost certainly point out that Freemium is something World of Warcraft simply would never copy. ANY game could do Freemium better than WoW. By shifting into a new revenue model, the WoW behemoth suddenly wasn’t nearly so scary.

Bloggers fingered SOE and Cryptic as the next companies to flirt with “freemium”. SOE had already published one MMO, Free Realms, with that very model. Cryptic’s heavily instanced, zone-based games, Star Trek Online and Champions Online, would be a good match for the DDO model.

Turbine’s announcement that The Lord of the Rings Online would follow Dungeons & Dragons Online into freemium territory was a bolt from the blue. LotRO was not considered a failure by any means. XFire ranks it as the #4 subscription MMO in its list, behind only WoW, Aion and EVE Online. Like those others, LotRO is an open world game.

Unlike DDO, though, LotRO does not stray far from the MMO norm. Where DDO only really competed with the fairly old Guild Wars, LotRO’s move will place it against such F2P competitors as Runes of Magic and Allods Online, lush F2P games that were designed specifically around free, open game play with very optional cash shops. LotRO by contrast would turn most of the world silent, unless you buy quest packs — only the starter area quests are given for free.

Since it is difficult to level in LotRO without doing quests, this essentially requires players to buy the quest packs. At least, anyway, until they can do skirmishes in their 30s.

Unlike DDO, LotRO was always considered a “AAA” game, made with the highest production values and very popular. With many free weekends and other promotions, it’s likely that almost everyone who had an interest in the game, also had a chance to play it. DDO’s star fell too quickly for that.

Here’s the crux. The game is still pretty much the same as it ever was. If you’re still a subscriber, nothing changes for you. If you’d subscribed but let it lapse, you’ll still find the game as you left it. If you tried it and didn’t care for it, nothing will have changed enough to change your mind.

The Lord of the Rings Online is, I feel, too POPULAR to make the easy switch to “freemium”. It might have worked for Tabula Rasa, might still work for Pirates of the Burning Sea, but LotRO has had its time in the sun, and if its fires are now cooling, I can’t see the move to freemium as anything but a very risky move.

Click to enlarge

Just because I’m weird like that, I went to XFire and downloaded stats for a few MMOs. Now, I want to say first off that I don’t trust XFire ranks AT ALL, and I think any projections of XFire users into total subscription numbers is just fantasy. However, these are not the only stats tracked by XFire. They also track the number of XFire users that have played a certain game each day, and the total number of minutes XFire users spent in that game.

I believe we can assume that XFire users are typical players of their games — they wouldn’t spend significantly more or less time in the game than a non-XFire user. So, dividing the number of minutes played each day by the number of players each day, should give a fairly accurate idea of the time an average player spends in game per gaming session. Click on the spreadsheet image above or check out the Google Docs version. I’ve sorted the games not by XFire rank, but by the minutes/user.

The top half of the list is entirely subscription games. The three “freemium” games on the list — DDO, Wizard101 and Runescape — seem to have their success based on quick bites of adventure, and not the long, drawn out gaming sessions common to the more traditional MMOs. (I would be more thrilled with EverQuest’s appearance at the top of the list if they didn’t encourage people to stay logged in 24/7).

We can imagine that if World of Warcraft were suddenly to go freemium, that most everyone would choose to go that route — and that those players who let their subscriptions lapse between patches and expansions would instead check in occasionally and perhaps end up playing — and paying — more.

Turbine’s gamble will be proving that a “AAA” game can make up the potential loss of subscribers with revenue from thousands more free players using the cash shop.

I wish Turbine well, but DDO and LotRO are so different that I just can’t see DDO’s success saying anything at all about LotRO’s.

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Oh, this isn’t a real post. Just was so happy to finally get a horse in Lord of the Rings Online. I don’t subscribe to LotRO, but each time Turbine offers a free play weekend — or week, in this case — I log in and see if I can make enough to get a horse.

I was going to be riding last night. I WANTED the Spring Festival horse, but after doing a couple of the “spring leaf” events, I got bored and gave up on that project. I’d settle for the regular mount, if I could afford it.

I had auctioned off most of my 37 Captain’s harvests and other gear a couple days ago; last night I did the same to my two alts. I ended up with 4 gold and 100 silver — an all-time high. The riding quest was tedious — ride a horse to Bree, Michel Delving and North Downs, ending with a race around the yard.

It was worth it in the end. I’m now the proud owner of Brown Betty, my chestnut mare.

So; not a real post. Tonight is a non-MMO night, so tonight I will be (I hope!) starting my series of five IP’s that SHOULD be made into MMOs. Tonight: #5: Gunsmoke, the MMO.

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What wonders does the in box of mystery hold for us today?

Cryptic announces veteran rewards for players who keep an active subscription to Star Trek Online. Saith Cryptic: “Skill point bonuses, titles, costume pieces, character slots… Veterans will be rewarded every 100 days! Rewards will be retroactive, too!” Nice of them!

They’ve also announced a “Come back to STO” weekend and a “Recruit a Friend” program; all these kick off May 7.

*I* don’t think it’s too early for a “Come back to STO” free weekend, do you?

Funcom’s new expansion to their Age of Conan MMO, “Rise of the Godslayer“, kicks off a week from Tuesday, and if you pre-order, you’ll get an exclusive battle pet. “‘Pre-order today and receive the Loyal Kappa, a unique in-game pet that will aid you on the battlefield already from level 20.”

Clumsy language aside, Age of Conan has a history on relying upon pre-orders as an important source of income. If I remember right, AoC almost paid for the cost of its development with pre-orders and launch day box sales.

From now until a week from Tuesday, if you buy at least 5,000 of Wizard101‘s cash shop currency, Crowns, you can be the owner of a super-rare Lightning Bat pet. This pet drops from Wavebringer in Shatataki Temple, but few have ever seen one tamed. Now you can buy one!

Spacetime Studios has announced their new 1.1 patch to their mobile MMO Pocket Legends which adds new dungeons, item trading, shared banks, armor and so on. I just made level 20 in PL last night, so I’m kinda pumped about all these new toys :)

CCP has a new tease page for their upcoming Tyrannis expansion for EVE Online. Aside from the planet mining, they will be releasing a new web-based way to interact within EVE Online — EVE Gate, now available for testing. You’ll be able to chat with players in game, manage your contacts and so on. It doesn’t appear to allow you to actually buy/sell in the Marketplace or start production jobs, but it’s a start.

LotRO is having another free weekend — THIS weekend — as they kick off their 3rd anniversary celebration. Patch up the client and say hello to your old characters; I know I will!

Yesterday through tomorrow, Aeria Games is holding a 2x/3x No Death Penalty leveling bonanza to celebrate the launch of their latest expansion to Shin Megami Tensei: Imagine — Nocturne. If you think you have what it takes to be a demon hunter in a post-apocalyptic world, now’s your chance to grind some of those levels out.

And…. that’s about it for this week’s edition of Assault on the Inbox!

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Game: Huxley	IP: Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World“
In response to what he saw as a very naive vision of a future where scientific progress would turn the Earth into a utopia, Aldous Huxley wrote “Brave New World”, a novel of a “negative utopia”. In Huxley’s brave new world, technology has turned the human race stagnant, with people genetically engineered to be suited for their jobs. Drugs and sleep conditioning keep people happy in their roles as mindless consumers and workers. Films as diverse as Blade Runner, Gattaca and George Lucas’ THX-1138 have all explored the themes Brave New World set forth. The issues Huxley saw 80 years ago loom ever closer today. What has all this got to do with Huxley: the Dystopia, the MMOFPS coming ‘soon’ for the PC? Well, the title. Huxley is the last name of a person who wrote a novel about a dystopia. And … that’s about as much as this game is based on that IP. Huxley is set after a global war that leaves humanity divided into two subraces, the sapiens and the alternatives. They both fight monstrous hybrids for control of the powerful mineral lunarite. Characters can be one of three classes — tank, ranged, or melee dps, no surprises there. Innovative battleground maps such as “Part Pickup”, where the two sides struggle to be the first to complete a giant mecha, add flavor to the game. Huxley initially was going to support 5,000 players per shard, with battles being as large as 100v100. Since then, they have upped the max players per shard to 10,000, but lowered the maximum map size to 32v32. Announced in 2006, Huxley had a public beta last summer, but there’s been no recent word on a launch date.
Game: LEGO Universe	IP: LEGO
From their initial design in in 1949 to their modern form released in 1958, LEGO bricks have been keeping kids’ hands busy for more than fifty years. The LEGO empire, ruled from Denmark, encompasses not only their trademark plastic bricks, but amusement parks, robotics kits, full kid-friendly CAD/CAM design software and, naturally, video games. With LEGO bricks, you can design and make nearly anything you can imagine. In LEGO Universe, currently in closed beta and due out later this year, the power of your imagination (which is a stat in game) is used to construct not only your character, but your equipment, transportation, the city in which you live and so on. Carefully moderated in the same way as other kid-focused titles such as Toontown and Wizard101, kids have the freedom to build whatever they imagine and see it come to life in the game world. Players band together to take on the evil Stromlings and bring peace and happiness to plastic brick people everywhere. Building your own rocket ship and using it to travel to other worlds? Genius!
Game: Lord of the Rings Online	IP: J. R. R. Tolkein’s “The Lord of the Rings“
J.R.R.Tolkein’s epic-length follow-up to his children’s book “The Hobbit” tells the story of a world where peaceful people would have to learn to master the darkness in their own hearts in order to defeat the darkness that threatens to engulf the world — or, like the fallen leader of the Council of Wizards, Saruman, embrace it. Informed by memories of the lost, bucolic English countryside of his childhood and his experiences in World War I, Tolkein combined Nordic legends, his academic philological research and the tropes of heroic fantasy into the famous tale of an unassuming Hobbit and his eight companions who struggle against impossible odds to defeat an evil whose power they cannot imagine. Before Turbine’s “Lord of the Rings Online”, Tolkein’s works had been the subject of an earlier effort by 90s computer RPG giant, Sierra Online. In the frontier days before EverQuest arrived to restart the MMO field, Sierra Online struggled to bring Tolkein’s story to life with Middle-Earth (later: Middle-Earth Online, because you just can’t NOT have the word “Online” in the title!) A game with little or no magic, permadeath, with an emphasis on story and roleplaying and a de-emphasis on quests and combat, MEO was a victim of mismanagement, technical complexity, and EverQuest. Years later, Turbine acquired the “Lord of the Rings” license. Unlike MEO, which would have been set in a time after the events of the books, in the Fourth Age, Lord of the Rings Online would be set during the time of the books themselves. Players would meet and aid the Fellowship of the Ring in their struggles against the evils of Sauron and the armies of Mordor and take on missions and battles to hold back the tide of darkness to give the Fellowship time and opportunity to do their tasks. Thought at launch to have the most realistic chance of topping World of Warcraft from its leadership position, LotRO has settled into the comfortable position as the #2 subscription-based MMO in the Western world. Players have followed the Fellowship through the Mines of Mordor, the golden forests of Lothlorien, the evils of Mirkwood and soon, rumor has it, the plains of Rohan.
Game: Pirates of the Caribbean Online	IP: Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean
Pirates of the Caribbean was the last ride Walt Disney himself had a hand in creating. Originally intended to be a wax museum filled with static representations of pirates, advances in animatronic technology made it possible to build a water ride through stunningly animated tableaux depicting life as it might have been for a fictional pirate in the 1850s. At the end, a sudden drop down a waterfall brings riders back to the present day. Inspired by the attraction, Disney has to date produced three movies building on the theme of the pirate life. Starring Johnny Depp as the iconic Captain Jack Sparrow, the movies were such a hit that the ride itself has been changed to incorporate characters and scenes from the movie in an incestuous pas de deux. Originally intended to launch alongside the second movie in the series but continually delayed, Pirates of the Caribbean Online launched in October of 2007. Like Wizard101, PotCO embraces a free to play model at the start that eases into a subscription as the player progresses. Players meet and interact with characters from the movies, visit the movie locations, sail their own ships, participate in invasions and ship battles, and in general have a grand old time saying “yarrrr” and “yohoho”. The true number of subscribers are unknown, but XFire has it lagging behind Pirates of the Burning Sea, the other player in the “1800s Caribbean Pirate MMO” genre.
Game: Playboy Manager	IP: Playboy Magazine
I can only imagine the kind of spam I’m going to be getting after this article…. Sigh. The things I do for my readers! Playboy was launched in late 1953 as a “thinking man’s” girlie magazine. Along with pictures of nearly-naked women, Playboy was one of the premier outlets for fiction in its day, publishing novels such as Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451″ in its pages. Playboy was also noted for its long, in-depth, sometimes rambling interviews with the leading figures of the day — renowned novelist Alex Haley once interviewed Martin Luther King, Jr. for the magazine. Since the availability of easy and anonymous porn on the Internet, the fortunes of Playboy and its competitors have sunk, but the brand and its bowtie-rabbit logo remains instantly recognizable the world over. Jolt Online Gaming, a division of Activision and publishers of the browser-based casual games “Legends of Zork” and Utopia Kingdoms, announced last May that they were planning on doing to Playboy what they had done to Zork. From their press release: “In Playboy Manager, you play a crack talent agent managing the career of some of Playboy’s hottest up-and-coming models. Competing against thousands of other players, you will guide your model’s career toward her ultimate goal: Becoming a world-renowned Playmate with a permanent room in the Playboy Mansion!” Game play is said to be based on trading cards, and almost certainly features the same sort of turn-based, semi-interactive action featured in its other titles. The game is currently taking names for its closed beta test. AND, they promise, THEY WON’T TELL YOUR GIRLFRIEND!

Tune in tomorrow for IPs based on SPACE BATTLES!

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