And now it's Vanguard's turn

Going Free-to-Play sometime this summer. Plus, they've got some of the old developers back to work on new features, though no details yet. Also no details on the F2P scheme, but it's quite likely to be very similar to the ones in EQ/EQ2.

I kinda enjoyed the time we spent in it when we had our little Qt3 invasion of it a while back, but I never got back to it once the activity level died down. I just didn't really have the time for something that would be rather lonely for an MMO. It did successfully capture that old-school EQ kind of feeling without being too punishing, and the crafting system was probably the best I've seen so far (minigame-based like EQ2, but with an actual challenge to it, and still room for customization of what you create).

Vanguard was weird in how it apparently doled out free time to people who had played in beta (me) but had never bought the retail game (also me). I ended up with something close to three months of free play long after it launched as a result.

I never got past the starting areas, though, topping out around level 7 or 8. It's not because Vanguard was a bad game, exactly, it just offered nothing especially compelling to keep me pushing ahead on my own. The crafting, which I never tried, may have done it, as I'm a sucker for a good crafting system. Maybe it's fortunate I didn't dabble in it.

Still no one considering the possibility of going the Guild Wars buy the box and dick about on our servers forever model. Bizarre, but I guess the standard mmo is so heavily oriented around grindy timesinks that it wouldn't work for them.

Aion will have this system implemented from the 11th of April on. Actually it's even better then Guild Wars since you won't even have to buy the box. But from that date on you'll have access to everything subscribers have access to now for absolutely free.
Only for US servers though, the EU is stuck with the Freemium system EQ2 and LOTRO and so on use since that side is now run by a different company then NCSoft.

Vanguard had some interesting classes and a lovely, expansive world. Assuming the F2P restrictions are not too bad -- which they will be, since it's SOE -- I'd recommend checking it out if you have some friends to level with. It can be a lot of fun going around finding all of the hidden dungeons. :) The game is not worth playing past 50, though (cap is 55).

It's weird. I was investigating various F2P games so I hit SOE's. I played FreeRealms for a couple of hours and found it cute, harmlessly fun, and not terribly annoying with the "hey subscribe! hey buy credits!" nagging.

Then I played Clone Wars Adventures for about the same amount of time and loathed it. Constant ads, popping up and covering the action. I went into the in-game store and told it to filter out things that you need to be a subscriber to buy, and things that you need RMT credits to buy, and all that was left was like five things.

So there's definitely not a unified F2P strategy across all their titles. Haven't looked at EQ or EQ2 yet since they went F2P.

GW is not a mmorpg, even calling it MMO is a stretch.

We shouldn't compare games like LoL, GW, D3 to F2P mmorpgs because that confuses discussion, its comparing apples and oranges.

Lum Oh you mean games that aren't making a profit, go free to play and then shut down?

Because that model sure seems to work well. You know, unlike the GW model of buy the box and play when you like. Which frontloads the profit and happens to be structured around minimizing running expenses and support requirements (both of which incentiivize a low/no grind model).

Yeah that model totally sucked. Definitely didn't crap out loads of money or anything.

The GW model seems like a poor fit for aging MMOs because any upfront cost is just going to be a massive barrier to attracting new players. You have to attract them with some level of free-to-play content, and then get them to pay. At that point you could make it a one-time fee to unlock nearly everything else (buff up the Silver tier of the current EQ/EQ2 system, basically), but the microtransaction model is probably just too lucrative, after all those reports of how games like LOTRO are making more money than ever now.

Quite possibly because the core mmo model, especially the theme park iteration, sucks donkey balls at long term retention.

Every single major MU* I can think of gave players a way to impact the real world framework on a single "shard" or what have you. They might not have been able to build structures or design things in every MU*, but they were given the ability to control interfaces between players and npcs (like justice guilds et al) or to be remembered. The focus was always on some form of persistence, because the idea of a legacy matters.

The modern themepark mmo is oriented around this revolting idea of canned impermanence (holy shit that is totally a word, I thought I was making it up) where no player is allowed true novelty and no player can have a true lasting impact. I'm not talking about EVE, or the way SirMolle shaped the game around himself for years. I'm talking about low level permanence. Without it, you're paying a monthly fee for nothing more than you'd get out of co-op in a standard RPG with friends, just spread over a longer period of time. You can see players reaching for it with their ambition to be first to this or that, or to create tools or maps. I don't especially know how you could do it in a modern mmo. Development is too expensive to be wasted on a small number of players, and anyway that's not the same thing. It might just be an artifact of small community sizes in muds that I can remember so many people. But what I do know is that there is no attempt to create and nuture diverse micro-cultures. The Horde mentality thing was a surprise that wasn't fostered by Blizzard, even though it should have been.

I guess the best thing to point to would be the commoditization of crafting and objects by auction houses. In muds, players typically sold via shopfront or similar, and UO kept up that strucure. The sales experience was rooted in face to face interaction, albeit often by proxy. The modern auction house is better termed an exchange, where faceless transactions of commodities go on without players ever knowing or needing to know the name of the person they are trading with. It's a terrible, dehumanizing system albeit extremely convenient. It's also a convenient metaphor for the commoditization of experience.

EVE is different in that despite it's utter suckitude as a game, it has a consciously nurtured metaculture plus a number of microcultures in many alliances. The CVA culture has nothing in common with the CFC culture, and both are entirely different from that of the DRF, Stain or PL. Not everything has permanence (who here today remembers the Confederation of Free Stars?), but every player knows that limited persistence or unique experiences are possible.

I guess what I'm wondering about is whether or not we can get the gameplay convenience of the themepark model without the commoditization of experience. And I think the GW series shows clearly why the subscription model is the worst possible funding mechanism for finding out.

Details are out, though it looks like it still suffers from the EQ/EQ2-F2P-style problem of missing a-la-carte options for features that are fairly important, making it feel like you have to wind up going for the full subscription anyway. You can at least treat it like a glorified extended trial if you just want to check it out, though.

Haven't server/database costs plummeted in recent years? I could buy server costs warranting $10/month back in 1999, but nowadays $15/month seems like highway robbery. And based on the average level of customer service I've seen in MMOs, the money sure as hell doesn't seem to be going there.

On the topic of NCSoft, I could see Guild Wars 2 really changing peoples' minds about subscription fees. It's not a pseudo-MMO like GW1, it's a real, big-boy, open zone model.

On the topic of Sony, they're not ever going to do anything right when it comes to F2P models until their brand new games at the earliest. Actually, it'd be a fair argument to suggest they'll never do anything right*.



*Exception: They kept EQ Mac alive, which is probably the only competent thing theyve managed to do since 2004.

What major MU* can you think of? How much did they charge per month to play? What was their customer service like if you had a problem?

I agree that the sub-model is on its way out, but I think you've attached an entirely separate argument to an issue about payment models.

http://vgplayers.station.sony.com/newsArchive.vm?section=News&month=current&id=1425

Apparently we missed this, someone posted it but nobody gasped in horror or glee. I am familiar with his idea of fun, and I think it is the opposite of actual fun.

I'm frankly gobsmacked that he got a job in industry again, after his complete botched attempt at being either a competent boss or a good leader. Hell, his company was literally defrauding Microsoft through most of his game's development.What normal person looks at the guy and says "Yep, lets give him another shot at this!"?

I think he must have friends to pull strings for him, or else the hiring standards at SOE are lower than I thought.

I've thought about this, and the easiest solution is that SOE was looking for people to work on Vanguard and McQuaid was one of the few to put his hand up. Because who'd willingly want Vanguard on their resume at this point?

Funnily enough, I'd just finished a blog entry on the fall of Sigil and there were a lot of commentary by some ex-employees that Vanguard isn't even McQuaid's game, that he was long out of the office by the time the title as we know it was "ready" to launch. If true, he's got even less connection to the game than some think.

Next up: Garriott returns to NCsoft, relaunches Tabula Rasa.

I thought it was widely known that McQuaid was sitting around in a fucking opiate haze for most of Vanguard's development. I've got an MP3 of him going "Dragons are real!" lying around here somewhere from an unpublished interview of that period.

I've read a number of comments saying the equivalent of "Now that the visionary McQuaid is back in charge, he'll take Vanguard to the place it was always meant to go before SOE ruined it!".

So no, not enough people know.

Everyone is missing the elephant in the room.

From Brad's Q&A linked earlier

His return accompanied with 5 months of silence is more shocking... Timing this announcement with the Vanguard F2P = Pure SOE PR move.

There was a large population of Vanguard players who thought Brad was the man and Vanguard was only a steaming pile of shit at release because Sony. I can't imagine Brad will end up actually doing anything for Vanguard (not like he did in the first place!) but the star power is invaluable to hooking former followers of The Vision.

Can someone please give me a definitive list of components of THE VISION? Here is what I have so far.

1. Fighting your way back to your own dead body, in the nude.
2. Losing experience and levels on death.
3. Item Loss
4. Ten minutes downtime between fights.
5. Waiting in line to kill a monster that spawns once every two days.
6. Turning the view of the game world off in order to regain mana.
7. Roaming, aggressive, flying level fifty monsters in the starter zones.
8. Clicking a skill ten thousand times before you are able to tell which way you are facing.
9. ???

When you think about them, corpse runs are very Cronenberg.

Sounds like every date night ever at the jackalope household.

Brad's AD&D campaign.

This was a guy who bragged about how 'hardcore' Vanguard would be and how much WoW was a flash in the pan and sucked WITHOUT HAVING EVER PLAYED IT.