posted
If you don't know what an MMO is, you're probably not the target audience. You're probably also healthier than I am. I recently posted this in a gaming forum and got a largely negative response. I know there's at least some people who play MMOs here, and I'm curious if the overall mindset will be different.
The basic question is, does this MMO payment plan appeal to you (assume some imaginary game that you'd personally be interested).
• You can download the game for free. You can play for free - for up to 2 hours a day. It gives you a 5 minute warning, then kicks you off. Unless... • You can purchase tokens you spend to give you a day of gameplay. One token costs $1.50. A batch of 12 of them costs $15. A batch of 24 of them costs $24.
Pertinent Elements of the Gameplay: • Upon playing the game, you find that most zones/quest chains/dungeons are designed so that the average player can complete them in about an hour and a half. • The game does not rely on "time sinks" for balance. (i.e. no running back to your corpse when you die, no long griffon rides. As soon as you start playing you immediately get to the fun stuff).
If at this point you're still unsure, one additional fact you might not recall at first: Assuming a 5 day work/school week, there are 12 days a month when you either do not have to get up early the next day or do have to be anywhere for most of the day.
Posts: 4136 | Registered: Aug 2008
| IP: Logged |
posted
I am not sure but I believe in pan-asia, Land of the Numerous Terrible MMO's, this system has not really found much support.
The closest the MMO world has had to a viable non-payer structure is Atlantica Online. Anyone can play for free, and you can blatantly pay cash to be uber.
Posts: 15421 | Registered: Aug 2005
| IP: Logged |
posted
There's a crucial difference between the typical micro transaction game and this. This idea occurred to me as a potential way to solve an issue I find with MMOs in general, which has nothing to do with the price. I want to wait for a few more responses before I explain what I was trying to do, if people haven't figured it out already.
Also: assume the game is genuinely fun. It's a full quality MMO made by a professional design team with the intent on being able to hold it's own against WoW (whether or not such a feat is even hypothetically impossible, just pretend)
Posts: 4136 | Registered: Aug 2008
| IP: Logged |
posted
Doesn't sound like an mmo I'd be interested in playing specifically because of the game mechanics you've described, but looking at just the payment plan, I think it would be frustrating.
Posts: 1676 | Registered: Jul 2000
| IP: Logged |
quote:Originally posted by Raymond Arnold: Also: assume the game is genuinely fun. It's a full quality MMO made by a professional design team with the intent on being able to hold it's own against WoW (whether or not such a feat is even hypothetically impossible, just pretend)
Ok. the game is very fun, but if you get cut off from playing to break the 'immersion' factor before the character is 'immersed' then the response is going to pretty much be this.
Game: INSERT CREDIT CARD TO CONTINUE Player: fffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff Player: *uninstall*
best put in an uninterrupted trial period.
Posts: 15421 | Registered: Aug 2005
| IP: Logged |
The inspiration came specifically from the game "Plants vs Zombies," whose demo I tried recently. The demo cuts you off after an hour. I felt a brief moment of frustration, but then two things occurred to me: One was that I had played more than enough to know I liked the game. A few days later I purchased it.
The other was that it was, honestly, pretty helpful to have a video game say "Okay, you can stop. Now go play outside or do homework otherwise get a life." The MMO idea came a while later as I was thinking about how to implement a design philosophy into a game that allowed it to be fun and encourage players to keep coming back, without also encouraging them to play for 4+ hours a day. (The plan outlined above is specifically intended so you can play for 2 hours on most weekdays and for more extended sessions on the weekends, and in both cases feel satisfied a the end.)
On the gaming forum the response was a combination of "I don't have a problem" and "Learn 2 resist temptation n00b." Which, well, is fair I guess. I definitely have a problem controlling my internet usage in general and it's something I should work on, period. But I also would really like to be able to de-stress for an hour after a day of work/school without having to worry about whether I'll get sucked in until 1 in the morning.
There are plenty of other activities I enjoy on a weekly basis, some of which I spend more money on than I spent on WoW, that didn't dominate my life to the extent WoW did when I was playing it. Maybe I'm alone here, but I'd like an MMO designed to be fun in the same way. Whether or not the above plan is the ideal way to go about it.
Posts: 4136 | Registered: Aug 2008
| IP: Logged |
posted
I like the idea and almost wish it was in place for xbox live, but that is pretty much becaues i only play xbox a couple days a week, and am forced to pay for an entire month at a time. Of course most people who play MMO's hate being bugged a kicked off and forced to not play whenever they want so I only think it would work awesome for some people, but really bad for most.
Posts: 856 | Registered: Jun 2007
| IP: Logged |
posted
Yeah, that's the sense I've been getting. The people I've asked at school have liked the idea. I definitely think there's a market for it, but probably not enough of a market for it to be financially viable. The only way to make it work is to include it as an optional plan with the normal full subscription.
Posts: 4136 | Registered: Aug 2008
| IP: Logged |
quote:Doesn't sound like an mmo I'd be interested in playing specifically because of the game mechanics you've described, but looking at just the payment plan, I think it would be frustrating.
This particular comment confuses me. The only game mechanics I've described is questlines that take about an hour and a half and NOT requiring players to wait after dying or deciding to travel places. That actually turns you off?
Posts: 4136 | Registered: Aug 2008
| IP: Logged |
posted
I can imagine this working for some games, but not MMOs. The MMO audience expects to play for long stretches of time. If you take that away from them, you're breaking the game.
Posts: 3950 | Registered: Mar 2006
| IP: Logged |
posted
The people who I personally have met and talked to for the most part have found the long hours they need to spend at once to be a problem, not a "draw" for the genre. I don't think there's anything inherent in the genre that should require you to spend huge blocks of time at once, it's just the way the games have been designed so far.
However, you're probably right that, regardless of what MMOs actually require to be good games, most people's expectations are such that they'd find a MMO that broke those expectations bizarre and frustrating.
The issue is that the primary draw of an MMO is improving your character over time. They have to make it take a long time in order to keep people playing. If they made it take less, people'd just get done faster and then get bored.
A possible solution to that that didn't hinge on payment structure would be to only let a character gain a certain amount of (or some other resource) per day, afterwards you can keep grinding for gold or continuing the story or whatever, but you won't be getting the maximum value for your time.
Edit: And yeah, I have heard about and briefly played Kingdom of Loathing, which might be a good place to start from. It's a fun game but obviously not quite the polished immersive experience that WoW is.
Posts: 4136 | Registered: Aug 2008
| IP: Logged |
posted
1) An MMO would have to be an awful lot of fun for me to dedicate more than two hours a day to it. The first time I had to spend fifteen minutes of my precious two hours explaining to a petulant twelve year old that no, I am not in any way, shape, or form required to form a team with him, I would probably let the game die.
2) While I don't spend two hours a day on any MMO, in the past good social interactions could occasionally make me spend more than that, usually for the company of a particularly enjoyable team and/or player. Unless the game has a very good means for allowing players of varied power levels to play (the ones who put in two hours a day and the ones who buy tokens to play more vs. the ones who put in two hours every other day, a week, or less), a lot of the social aspects are going to fail.
Posts: 3826 | Registered: May 2005
| IP: Logged |
posted
Raymond - yeah, you got it. Fine with questlines and such taking an hour and a half, but there's more to playing an mmo than questing or dungeon crawling or encounters. I enjoy exploring, which means traveling through a good sized world, tradeskilling, playing the market in the bazaar, screwing around with guildies, meeting random strangers and helping them out, hell, fishing while I read a book. So, yeah, that's going to mean some travel time. And I don't think I'd like to play a game where dying had no real consequence. There should be a challenge, it should hit you where you live, so that you and your group think about things like risk vs. reward. I feel like that means that one way or another you have to take some time to regroup after you die.
Travel time and a death penalty aren't just time sinks - they are (or can be) game mechanics that can bring people together, create an environment where people help each other out. It also makes achievements matter more. My fondest mmo memories come from time sinks.
But I'd better stop before I start waxing nostalgic. Suffice it to say that when games advertise that they cut out all the time sinks so that you can get straight to the fun, I cringe, because they often times have no idea what I consider fun in an mmo.
Posts: 1676 | Registered: Jul 2000
| IP: Logged |
quote:1) An MMO would have to be an awful lot of fun for me to dedicate more than two hours a day to it. The first time I had to spend fifteen minutes of my precious two hours explaining to a petulant twelve year old that no, I am not in any way, shape, or form required to form a team with him, I would probably let the game die.
2) While I don't spend two hours a day on any MMO, in the past good social interactions could occasionally make me spend more than that, usually for the company of a particularly enjoyable team and/or player. Unless the game has a very good means for allowing players of varied power levels to play (the ones who put in two hours a day and the ones who buy tokens to play more vs. the ones who put in two hours every other day, a week, or less), a lot of the social aspects are going to fail.
Huh. What MMOs do you play? What you're describing seems like you're turned off to the basic mechanics of every of every one I've heard of. Explaining stuff to stupid people is a byproduct of interacting with people period, and there's usually no reason you can't just ignore them if you want (some games even have a mute option). I agree that not being able to play with friends who aren't the same level as you can be frustrating. It's something I'd like to address but I'm not sure how unless you were doing something that wasn't an RPG at all. (You'd have to find a system of rewards didn't revolve around player power... more on this in a moment).
quote:Re: Time Sinks
I specifically included the "no timesinks" thing to address the concern that a 2 hour limit would be particularly unfair if 1/4 of the time is spent flying on a gryphon or running to your corpse.
I do think that there's a certain "immersive factor" that requires time to get no matter what. I also think that death requires a certain "disconnect" from whatever you were trying to do when you died so the death feels at least somewhat meaningful. Corpse runs are probably necessary to some degree so you at least feel like you died.
However, I don't think they need to consist of literally running to your corpse, which requires you to pay enough attention that you can't focus on something else, but is still boring and annoying. The WoW system also means you'll have some trips that take 10 seconds and some trips that take 5 minutes, depending on where the graveyard is.
I think a better "penalty" would be some kind of minigame - the faster you complete it, the faster you can either choose to return to your corpse or go back to a sanctuary. Res Sickness and Durability loss (or similar penalties) also strike me as unnecessary for the Death Experience to be meaningful, and require you to spend extra time grinding to make up the lost money. In the first 10 levels of WoW before they took effect, I still felt like I died.
An idea I had recently was for the Death Penalty to be cosmetic. Say you're doing a game where you start as a bland ghostlike creature. As you level up you gradually gain the form of a more badass demon or angel (sorta Fable-like). When you die, you revert back to the ghostlike creature and have to re-earn your badassness. (It'd probably best be a sliding scale so as you go up in level, you can quickly regain a look that was close to your original within an hour or so, but getting back the full polished look could take a few days).
Posts: 4136 | Registered: Aug 2008
| IP: Logged |
posted
I'm not holding up WoW as any kind of model for what I think an mmo should be - I think its flaws are many, death penalty included, and I like new and creative ideas for handling death. The minigame idea interests me. Some game developers have talked about having to do an underworld sort of game before being able to retrieve your corpse, but I don't know that it's been implemented anywhere.
Overall, though, I think we would disagree on the death penalty because I'm one of those crusty old people who thinks the WoW penalty is way too light to be meaningful, but my opinions are not shared by every gamer out there, obviously. Which is why I wanted to make it clear from the beginning that I'm probably not the target audience for your poll in the first place, just felt like throwing in my two cents as a gamer .
Have you tried Guild Wars or maybe D&D online? I only ask because those games, where you basically log into a central location and then group up to enter instances, is the only situation where I think your payment plan might work at all, and even then Sterling is 100% right about what it would do to the social aspects.
Posts: 1676 | Registered: Jul 2000
| IP: Logged |
posted
At this point (given fairly strong negative reaciton) I've been trying to think of alternative ways to accomplish what the original idea was going to, and I'm leaning towards a "you can only gain X skill points each time" thing.
However, I did actually intend there to be a "log into a central location where all you can do is talk for free" aspect. I forgot about it. I haven't tried a game that used that idea though, so I'm not sure about the ramifications.
I haven't actually played many MMOs, which is something I'd want to do before actually accomplishing any of this, but given that this is a "rough idea I might get to do in 10-20 years" I'm not too worried.
Posts: 4136 | Registered: Aug 2008
| IP: Logged |
quote:Originally posted by Raymond Arnold: Huh. What MMOs do you play? What you're describing seems like you're turned off to the basic mechanics of every of every one I've heard of. Explaining stuff to stupid people is a byproduct of interacting with people period, and there's usually no reason you can't just ignore them if you want (some games even have a mute option). I agree that not being able to play with friends who aren't the same level as you can be frustrating. It's something I'd like to address but I'm not sure how unless you were doing something that wasn't an RPG at all. (You'd have to find a system of rewards didn't revolve around player power... more on this in a moment).
Mostly, I've played City Of Heroes/Villains, though I played some of the MUDs and BBS games that preceded the current MMO scene.
I don't mind explaining things to people who just need help; I generally feel experienced players make things better for everyone when they do so, rather than just hurling insults at the "n00bz". But I have run into my share of petulant, abusive, and antisocial players as well. Sometimes they can be "/ignore"d, but first they have to show themselves for what they are. And sometimes, they're part of a pre-existing team, and ignoring them creates a general problem for team cohesion. In any case, bad apples are a lot easier to "write off" as individual bad experiences if all they're costing you is a little bit of time and energy... But that's harder to do when the game itself is restricting the amount of time and energy you can put into it in a day.
CoH also has, to my understanding, one of the better systems in place for characters of varying power levels to team together. More powerful players can make less powerful ones into "sidekicks", fighting at just under their level while they stay close, and the "sidekicked" player gains experience at a rate more commensurate to their "natural" level of experience. Conversely, less powerful characters have the option of making more powerful ones "exemplars" who fight like they were the same level as the lesser character, in which case the more powerful character gets no experience, but can either work off "experience debt" (death penalty) at an accelerated rate or gain extra "influence" (currency).
Despite this, I eventually ended up removing one of the friends who convinced me to start playing CoH in the first place from my communication list because I was getting tired of making theme characters to play with him only to have him move on to something else.
I fear it would attract the worst kind of power-gamers, but it would be interesting to have a game in which experience and knowledge were just that. You learn to fight better by learning the ins and outs of the fighting system. You learn the routes and shortcuts by traveling. You learn magic by discovering which runes work together. (Or having another player take the time to show you the ropes.)
Posts: 3826 | Registered: May 2005
| IP: Logged |
posted
One of my pet projects is to create an actual rune language with syntax that I can use in various games and stories. I definitely think a game based around combining runes would be cool. (So far I've seen kinda half assed attempts use runes, but there's no real logic to how the runes are combined so it basically comes to just randomly mashing stuff together).
Posts: 4136 | Registered: Aug 2008
| IP: Logged |
Printer-friendly view of this topic
![[Smile]](smile.gif)
.
