Gevlon's "4 fun ppl" Theory

Gevlon has posted a very interesting, and quite insightful, take on PA's GIFT:

Let me offer the "4 fun ppl theory", which explains the widespread horrible behavior and the recent research:

Those we consider trolls are people with honest intention to positively socialize, but their extremely low social skills cause them to post hurtful or annoying things instead.

My formula is "basement dweller + audience + lack of clear rules or authority = total f..wad".

In some ways it is both a narrowing and a broadening of the GIFT formula.

In my opinion, this is the most interesting thing that Gevlon has ever written. It's unfortunate that it's posted to a small MMO blog. It deserves a wider audience than will read it.

Heh, the part I find most interesting is that Gevlon is famous for his "no-holds-barred" approach to "Morons and Slackers". Yet his diagnosis is almost charitable. A muscular charity, though, to be certain, with a hard-nosed approach to solutions.

Loyalty Rewards

Massively asks: How do you feel about Loyalty Rewards?

For the most part, I think loyalty rewards are unnecessary. The reward for subscribing is getting to play the game itself. If a game is good, it does not need external rewards to keep people subscribed.

That being said, there is one situation where loyalty rewards are useful.

As a general rule of thumb, you never want to make a customer feel stupid for purchasing something from you. Suppose a store sells you an item, and next week has a sale on that item. Many stores will allow you to get the discount if you bring in the receipt. Of course, most do it quietly, and some do it just to avoid the process where you return the first item and buy an identical item. But the basic logic is sound. You don't want the customer to regret purchasing the product early instead of waiting.

When it comes to MMOs, very often companies will offer marketing deals and special offers to entice new players or win back returning players. These offers are not available to current subscribers. Sometimes, if the offers are good enough, it can make a current subscriber feel like what they should have done is unsubscribed earlier instead of sticking with the game. That they made the wrong choice and now regret continuing to subscribe.

Loyalty rewards can balance this. Sure, the current subscriber doesn't get the special offer that the new or returning player gets. But the current subscriber gets the various loyalty rewards instead.

That's my position on loyalty rewards. If you are never going to have a special offer for new or returning players, you don't need loyalty rewards. But if you are going to have those special offers--and you almost certainly will--it's probably best to have a small loyalty rewards program to balance.

You don't want your customers to regret subscribing, or to avoid subscribing until the best possible deal comes along.

Warlords Cinematic

World of Orcraft recently unveiled the cinematic for the Warlords of Draenor expansion:



Still not as good as the Lich King cinematic:



(Whoops, wrong video. Real trailer is is here.)

In some respects, I wish Blizzard had not switched styles for the Lich King trailer. The next few expansion cinematics have all attempted to do the same thing and reach the same heights, and they have all failed.

Technically, the Warlords trailer is superb, as always. The graphics are outstanding.

The problem comes in the content. First, this is a very lore-heavy trailer. It shows the point where the timeline splits, when Grom, guided by Garrosh, chooses not to drink the demon blood. As well, a lot of the imagery is a direct reference to the death of Mannoroth in Warcraft III, only with Garrosh saving Grom. I really wonder how much someone who is not super-familiar with the Warcraft lore will understand.

The second problem can be explained with the question: Who are the heroes, and who are the villains, in this trailer? The trailer very heavily pushes Grom and Garrosh as the heroes. After all, they choose freedom over slavery, and are the ones who kill the demons. And indeed, if you go back to the original video in Warcraft III, Grom and Thrall are the heroes in that video.

But Grom and Garrosh are the villains of the expansion. The ones the heroes will be pitted against and ultimately defeat. Anyone who is heavily into the lore will know that. So you have a trailer which can only be understood by Warcraft fans, and at the same time pushes an emotional arc which contradicts what those fans know. That dissonance significantly weakens the trailer for the hardcore fans.

As for the non-hardcore people, the dissonance doesn't occur now, but will when they start playing the expansion. I think that will cause issues, unless Blizzard is setting up some crazy twist where we bring Grom and Garrosh back to the good side.

Hunts in FFXIV

For a very long time Blizzard has not allowed ordinary quests to be done in a raid group. When asked, they've always said that they feared everyone always joining large raids to steam roll content. In a lot of ways, it looks like FFXIV is proving this stance correct.

In the last patch, FFXIV introduced Hunts. Throughout the world, there are named monsters running around. The monsters have different difficulties: Rank B is roughly tuned for a 4-person group. Rank A is an 8-man group target, and Rank S are rare and require multiple groups.

However, SE did not include tagging with these mobs. Anyone who gets a few hits in gets credit for the kill and the reward.

So the etiquette that has developed is that if you find a Hunt mob, you announce it to the zone, wait for everyone to assemble, and then zerg it down. Doing this has made Hunts into the optimum method of getting endgame rewards, which has pushed even more people into doing them. You can actually see the effect on queues for instances and dungeons, as they are much longer than before.

Of course, since so many people are gathered in the zerg, there is no challenge. Interestingly enough, people who play late at night or early in the morning report that Hunts are a lot more fun when done in small groups, closer to how SE intended them to be done.

The obvious solution is to enforce tagging. Yet that might lead to uncooperative gameplay. I joined a guild group that was going after a Rank A in one zone a couple nights ago. We advertised in zone chat, and ended up with a full 8-man group and 2 others. It was nice that those two others could still participate and get rewards, rather than be left out.

SE could also greatly reduce the rewards. But then doing Hunts "as intended" is no longer a decent experience.

The other idea I've seen is to make Hunt rewards a "once a week" thing. You can only get rewards from a given named mob once per week. This is probably the best solution. It doesn't stop the zerg entirely, but it does thin it out.

All in all, FFXIV's Hunts are a cautionary tale for MMO devs looking to make world content for small groups.

10 Years :: 10 Questions

Alternative Chat is running a survey in advance of WoW's upcoming 10th anniversary. Here are my answers.

1. Why did you start playing Warcraft?

I was always interested in the idea of MMOs, though I hadn't really started playing any. Since Blizzard made WoW, I decided to try it out. However, it was actually sold out in stores, so I didn't get it until a few months after launch.

2. What was the first ever character you rolled?

My university roommate and I rolled characters on a PvP server. I made a Male Undead Warrior, and he made a priest. He stopped playing after a few months, but I kept going. I remember being a terrible warrior, because I didn't really understand the concept of threat, and so had a very hard time tanking.

I made it to about level 42 with that warrior. Then Blizzard introduced the PvP honour system. At that time, you got honour points for killing enemy players within a certain range of your level. At 42ish, I was just in range of the level 50s. The next couple of weeks were a constant barrage of ganks from level 50s.

I deleted that warrior in a fit of rage. I then created Coriel, my Female Human Paladin, on a PvE server. I think I made her because I had recently read Elizabeth Moon's Paksennarion and was inspired by the best and most hardcore paladin in all of fantasy! She's been my main ever since.

3. Which factors determined your faction choice in game?

My friend wanted to play Horde, so that's where we started. My second character was Alliance to see the other side.

As well, I love the Alliance paladins and their lore, so that's why I've stuck with that faction.

4. What has been your most memorable moment in Warcraft and why?

Doing Scarlet Monastery for the first time with a group of complete newbies. We were utterly shocked by Whitemane's "Arise, my champion!"

5. What is your favourite aspect of the game and has this always been the case?

I like questing and large-group raiding. I like seeing all the stories that Blizzard comes up, and I generally prefer to have done every quest before starting on endgame.

For raiding, I much prefer the larger raids, the 20-40 man ones. I like having specific responsibilities for different parts of the fight, and then seeing the entire team come together to accomplish a goal.

6. Do you have an area in game that you always return to?

No, I tend to move with the flow of the game and the expansions.

7. How long have you /played and has that been continuous?

I'm not currently subscribed, so I don't know my /played. Until now, I've been subscribed pretty much since the beginning, maybe with lapses of one or two months. However, I unsubscribed at the end of 2013, and haven't resubscribed since then.

8. Admit it: do you read quest text or not?

I read quest text. In fact, when expansions came out, I would turn Scrolling Quest Text back on to prevent the temptation of skipping it. I rather miss that option.

9. Are there any regrets from your time in game?

Yes. No. Maybe.

I wonder about this question a lot. Perhaps there's a universe where I didn't play MMOs and did something useful instead. But in reality, I probably would have just ended up playing other games or watching TV.

10. What effect has Warcraft had on your life outside gaming?

In some ways, not a lot. I do have this blog, and I've really enjoyed writing and thinking about things in more detail.

However, I do think it has affected me politically and philosophically though. I think that I am a lot more conservative because of my experiences in WoW. WoW is, for the most part, a level playing field. You can be anyone, you can be anything. And yet so many of us choose to behave badly when the restraints of normal society are lifted. I have come to a far more Hobbesian view of the world since I started playing MMOs.