If you’re unfamiliar with what Microtransactions are, they’re items you buy in a virtual world that you pay for with real money, not virtual currently.  Today via Kotaku, they stated that EA’s upcoming Star Wars MMO might be microtransaction-based.

Rather than asking for a monthly subscription fee, ala World of Warcraft, EA boss John Riccitiello has strongly hinted that the game will instead be “microtransaction-based”.

Depending on how you’re thinking about this it could be good or a very bad thing.  Good if the items offered are not critical to the game, such as clothing, different types of mounts, basically anything that doesn’t have an direct effect on your character.  However if this means that I’m going to be paying real money to buy armor, weapons and/or skills then this could change the way MMO’s are played.

Buying virtual items with real money is nothing new however, people have been doing it on Ebay for years. That was until 2 yrs ago when they banned such auctions, however new sites have popup since, such as MMOBay.net to replace them, so you can argue that it won’t have a big effect on the gameplay.  But in my opinion you can never underestimate the greed factor of publishers.

MMO’s such as Second Life have been selling virtual goods for real money since the start, however the items being sold are purely cosmetic and player created.   Now EA and other companies such as virtualgreats.com are stepping in and trying to get a piece if not the whole pie for themselves.

If you’ve ever played the card game Magic or I guess Yu-Gi-Oh for the younger readers, you know you cannot be competitive without shelling out big bucks to create your deck.  I fear the same will become true of MMOs.  While it would be nice to play MMOs for free, I don’t want to feel like I’m playing a gimped version of the game because I can’t afford the $100 sword for my character.   I think the key here is to make the gamers that aren’t buying these items to feel as though they’re still getting the full game experience and still have a fair fighting chance in PvP and PvM as the players who are buying the top of the line equipement.

However another aspect to think about is crafting.  If EA decides that armor and weapons are fair game, how will this affect the in-game economy and craftsmen?  I can’t see it having a positive effect on it.  I’m not against the move away from subscriptions to microtransaction, I’m just worried that publishers greed will get in the way and that ephasise will be on making money in-game instead of making games better.

Lets face it, everyone at one point or another has intentionally killed themselves in-game to avoid having to walk back to town.  I myself have never played a MMO where I didn’t regularly kill myself as a means of travel.  However each time I do, I feel like I’m some how killing a part of the game for myself.  I mean the whole point to video games is NOT to die, however because of the extremely lame traveling rules nearly every MMO has, we gamers are almost forced to partake in the rediculas act of suicide in order to save ourselves time.

Let us examine the three traveling means that are most common in MMOs today.

Mount - The trusted mount which will about double your run speed (depending on the game) and be your primary form of transportation. While the mount is useful in many situations, it cannot beat suicide travel.  If I’m out completing a quest about need to go back to town to collect my reward, unless I’m very close, I’m going to be looking for a really high cliff to jump off of or a group of mobs so they can pumble me to death.  The mount is good for short distances or traveling to quest locations.

Waypoints – Nearly all MMO’s will give the player the ability to make any town their home location.  Then whenever they want they can just use that skill/item to instanly travel back there.  The problem with this is that most games have a extremly long cool down, 1 hr usually and you can only travel to 1 location.  While it seems very useful, I barely use this form of traveling, maybe once every time I play.  What I would like to see are multiple locations and a shorter cool down, which would make this acutally useful.

Town to Town Travel – Most games have some sort of instant travel from town to town, however there are almost always some sort of restriction. Restrictions might be something like, from Town A you can only travel to Town B, D and F.  Then from Town F you can get to A, C and R.  Then from R, you can get to E and H.  So if you wanted to get to H to begin with you’ll have to travel multiple times. Lame.  Other restrictions can be that each map only has one travel spot, so if you want to get to another town on the same map you’ll still need to run/ride across the map to get there.  There are a handful of restrictions depending what game you’re playing and all are just as lame.

I’m sure there are MMO’s out there that have a great traveling system, however I have yet to play one.  For me suicide is the 4th form of traveling and is actually the best in my opionion since most games have little to no death penalty and it’s instant.

My suggestion to developers is let it go, traveling around the map is boring as hell.  I should be able to travel from any town to any town(as long as I already visited once) in the game.  I should also be able to set more than 1 town using my waypoint item/skill.  I’m tired of killing myself, help me stop.

The servers for Warhammer has just gone down about 45 mins ago for the 1.06 patch updated.  Looking through the patch notes I’m happy to see that the planned changes for the Ironbreaker class aren’t as bad as originally posted, which were supposed to be released with the 1.05 patch.

The two major issues I had were how Grunge was supposed to build and decay for Ironbreakers.  Originally planed it would take much longer to build Grunge and it would decay much faster, which I argued would seriously hurt the class as most of our damage is based on how much Grunge we have.  Perhaps someone at Mythic read my article because they changed it yet again.

Decay
5/sec after 30 seconds of not being hit (Originally)
10/sec after 10 seconds of not being hit (Originally reported for 1.05)
5/sec after 15 seconds of not being hit (1.06)

So basically they shorten the time by 15 secs which I can live with.  10/sec after only 10 seconds would have been ridiculous.

Grunge built using Oath Friend

Originally 10 points no matter what the Grunge level is at.

(Originally reported for 1.05)
0 – 30 Grudge you gain 5 points
31 – 60 Grudge you gain 3 points
60 – 100 Grudge you gain 1 points

(Patch 1.06)
0 – 30 Grudge you gain 10 points
31 – 60 Grudge you gain 5 points
60 – 100 Grudge you gain 3 points

So here again they decided to increase it a bit more, which a good thing and I can live with.  Overall I’m happy with the changes planned for 1.06.  Even though I haven’t had a chance to try it out yet, from the patch notes it looks to be a pretty good patch, although I can’t really speak for the other classes.

Warhammer Woes at 60 Days

I feel compelled to do another installment here on how Warhammer online is progressing a little past the 60 day mark of going live. Those of you who have followed my writing on MMORPG.com and MMOCrunch may remember that I wrote my review of the game right before launch, and at the 30 day mark I wrote about the Top 5 Issues with the game. Now past 60 days, Warhammer Online finds itself struggling due to what I believe are 3 main problems that need immediate fixing.

1) Itemization

This is the first issue that is crushing my motivation to play. This is one of the 5 points I touched on in my previous Warhammer article and it remains to be a major problem. The stats on most if not all of the high end gear is horrible. I am almost inclined to think the stats were picked by a Mythic Dev throwing darts, they make little to no sense for their respective classes and seem almost random in the stats and set bonuses.

This is a major problem because the high end gear is one of the primary motivators to play. Unlike DAOC which had interesting realm abilities to chose from, Warhammer uses RvR gear as the carrot at the end of the stick to keep you wanting to advance and participate in RvR. The fact that the stats are so poor on these items completely takes the wind out of the player’s sails to participate and chase the carrot. Unfortunately this problem is not only limited to the RvR gear. I was fortunate enough to get 4 of my Sentinel pieces for my Shadow Warrior in a single run through Sigmar’s Crypt. In any other game I would be elated to be this lucky, but the excitement was quickly diminished when I realized none of the items were an upgrade, and the set bonus was actually worse then a lower level Bloodlord set. This needs to be fixed immediately, and if not before the end of the billing cycle, then there will be a further bleeding of subscriptions.

2) Overworld RvR Mechanic

The overworld RvR mechanic simply is not working. In a recent patch, Mythic claimed they made changes to the “Victory Point” system which determines how and when a zone will flip to the control of one team or the other. The patch claimed it would make scenarios carry less weight, thus putting more weight on the overworld and making zones flip faster. Yesterday my guild had an ORvR day to make a real push on the Destruction territory. After taking all the keeps and battle objectives in all 3 pairings, I was shocked to see that we were only halfway to flipping in 1 zone, and even less in the other 2 zones. Nobody wants to be forced to run public quests, which offer terrible rewards and are tedious, in order to flip a zone. Scenarios other than Serpent’s Passage still are not popping as needed, and I play on Skull Throne which is widely viewed as the highest pop server in the game. This leads to all the objectives being taken and being unable to progress, so people log off or go run mindless scenarios.

Another problem is practice of keep trading that has been developing as of late. In a recent patch, Mythic decided to make all keep lords to drop 3 gold bags 100% of the time when defeated. Unfortunately, players will always take the path of least resistance when trying to get stronger. It has become a common practice to see an Order Army and a Destruction Army deliberately avoiding each other and attacking undefended keeps for the easy gold bags. If you are out for loot, why would you attacked a defended keep when you can attack an undefended one a lot easier and get the same reward? On the flip side, why defend a keep if there no tangible reward for doing so? It is actually better to let them take the keep so you can take it back later and get 3 more gold bags. Even if I did want to defend, the keeps are taken so fast that the battle would most likely be over by the time I arrive. This entire system needs to be looked at quickly.

3) Contribution System

In case you haven’t been reading various Warhammer related forums, someone seems to have come up with a theory about how contribution is calculated that I have been unable to disprove after testing with my guild extensively. The theory states in short, that whenever you zone into an area, you are given a randomly generated contribution number before you do anything. This randomly generated value will stay with you until you zone or relog. I can enter a zone and be given a value of 900 while my friend gets a value of 100. We can attack a keep together and if I do nothing while he does all the work, I will still beat him in contribution when the keep lord dies. If we move the second keep we see the same exact thing happen, but only if he relogs or zones will his contribution rating change.

After collecting data from my guild, I can conclude that this theory not only seems viable, but likely. Knowing this, it makes it hard for me to want to try and help anyone during a keep fight since my contribution rating has been predetermined no matter what my actions are. I wouldn’t expect Mythic to comment on this because if they admitted that this was how the system works, the outrage would be massive. Now as much as it pisses me off to think this is true, the blow is softened by the fact that the itemization is so bad that the rewards are often times worse then most of the green items I have of lesser level.

The Billing Cycle

Warhammer’s issues are starting to catch up.   A week ago we crossed over into a new billing cycle for those of us who started at release. As I mentioned earlier, even on Skull Throne I am noticing some of the guilds disappearing, I looked up some of the biggest instigators of RvR on the opposing side, and a lot of them have large portions of their roster who hasn’t been on since the new billing cycle started. While I am sure some can be attributed to the Lich King, I can’t blame those who have decided to sit this out until the big patch.

If nothing changes during this cycle, this game is going to sustain serious damage to its subscriber base. Even if the diehards decide to ride it out, the premise of the game requires a lot of people to be playing and participating in RvR. The incentive to do so is not there with the 3 problems above. Mythic needs to prioritize issues that will drive people to quit. That new sound for the horn when I get on my mount is nice, but 4 of the classes are severely underpowered, the items are junk, the RvR system is flawed, and 2 new classes are not going to steer this away from the edge of the cliff.

Paragus
Co-Leader of Inquisition
www.inqguild.com