Broken Toys

I never advocated not giving people stuff to do in the game. That is what makes these different than glorified chat rooms. And, incidentally, why one can’t just use email to discard the game.

But the point I was making was that if all you are doing is providing a single player experience – guess what – we already have that else where. What should be more worrying: the second the player hits the You Win screen (or thinks that they do!) they will /cancel.

This is why I advocate designers should act as if they have a You Win screen. The designer should be confident that when the player sees that screen they *don’t* cancel. They would have formed enough of a bond to this world that they want to remain a part of it, to now become a contributor (if even by their mere presence) rather than just a consumer.

One reason why I’m rather jaded about MMORPGs is because of all the players who do try to treat it as a solo game (or at most a guild game). MMORPGs have changed from small towns where everyone says Hello into bustling cities where everyone is running about chasing after the next gold piece. I have enough of the city in the real world.

There has been a drop in peak usage and it’s pretty clear that the game is not doing outstandingly well because they’re both offering a free weekend of play next weekend and have already dropped the box price by $10.

However, I’d hesitate to say that the drop in population can be attributed to micro-transactions, or Bill Roper, or any other singular factor. It’s my fledgling game designer’s opinion that the reason why we’re seeing a drop in population probably has more to do with:

1. There’s always a major hit of peak usage soon after the release of a hyped MMORPG because when hype meets reality there’s bound to be a significant difference between box sales and people who actually decide it’s worth a monthly subscription.

2. There’s a general lack of social “hook” in the game to get players to keep playing Champions Online as an MMORPG when they could play an offline game.

3. The game mechanics in general are unaligned to the point of producing a problematic experience. I hit level 26/40 in 3 days of play, the developers panicked when they realized that in about a week of play players will have pretty much exhausted all their content, and nerfed the hell out of everything. Now, about 75% of the powers in the game are weaker than an alternative made available in the other 25% of powers, and so there’s that much less power variety to keep players playing.

That they have micro-transactions or Bill Roper is over there are significantly minor factors of subscription retention loss in comparison to these. (Granted, you could blame Roper for the later two problems coming about… but considering he sort of got into the game late into its development, he was probably just patching an already sinking ship, and may well have done a good job in that it’s sinking like a sponge instead of a rock.)

The later two factors are not irreversible, given the mutable nature of MMORPGs. Consequently, in 6 months Champions Online could be a much better game. The main question at this point is if there will actually be enough players left in 6 months for sustaining the game (and development team) to be considered viable. Can they turn it around? The deluded doomsayer says, ‘no, definitely not’ The equally deluded fanboy says, ‘yes, definitely.” Anybody else will say, ‘Nobody can see the future, so I guess we’ll see when it happens.’

I suspect that, much like DDO before it, Champions Online’s developers are going to learn that if they expect to land a predominantly instanced, not particularly massively multiplayer experience, they’d be better served by going free to play with micropayments instead of subscription-based. A monthly subscription carries with it certain player expectations towards massively multiplayer experience that just can’t quite be pulled off with what they have right now.

geldon: “1. There’s always a major hit of peak usage soon after the release of a hyped MMORPG ”
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Uh. Not after 1 month there isn’t. MMOs tend to grow for a few months and THEN they taper off. Raph Koster has a famously good set of graphs that indicate this as well.

I’m not going to assume all MMORPG’s patterns will be the same in this regard. Champions Online generally turns up the tempo on a lot of aspects, and I wouldn’t be surprised if this changed the time frame of how such a graph would perform.

geldon: “There’s a general lack of social “hook” in the game”
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Yeah. What’s lacking is enough of a game. For decades, MUDs didn’t have any special social hooks or tools. Some didn’t even have channels. But the game was fun enough to keep people around long enough to make friends.
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The social hook that CO lacks is enough stickiness to keep people around. I haven’t seen any of the original 30-40 people on my friends list for weeks, and 90% of our SG never login any more. Add to that the one server, instanced zones and you rarely run into the same people more than once.

Well, at least we found something we can agree on.

Saying Bill Roper is a minor problem assumes he was not behind a lot of the bad decisions that caused the rest of the problems in your post.
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He is the Executive Producer. You don’t think he had a say in all those nerfs, the lack of social tools/features, or the idiotic C-Store?
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Their absolute brain dead treatment of retcons/respecs hurt them from the VERY beginning. It is one of the most complained about (lacking) features, and has been since open beta. Bill Roper is a major reason respecs were not made more available to people, because he clearly has a philosophical problem with them. He fought them in Hellgate: London. How’d that work out?

You’re nothing if not consistent in your conviction that Bill Roper is behind all the problems in the game. Me, I tend to consider games of this magnitude to be a product of a consensus.

Not that I’m going out of my way to defend Roper. Aside from being a collaborator in several prominent Blizzard titles – and he’s not the only one to make these claims – I’m not exactly sure what he brings to the table. It’s just that being convinced he’s the ill behind everything is not properly spreading the blame around.