First off, I'd like to comment that I think the title of this thread is misleading.  RMT is not unbalancing, nor is time disparity.  Games which use one or the other as a method to advance play are designed from the ground up (hopefully) for that style of play.  If you enter a game where RMT exists, and someone uses RMT there, the game is not unbalanced - you entered KNOWING the rules of that game.  If you want to balance the equation you are free to spend your money too.  Likewise, if you want to compete on time spent in time sink games, that's your choice - but you knew what the game was like before you started playing it.

The comments about "buying stuff is not playing a game" sorta bug me too.  Yes, it certainly is!  It's just not the *same* sort of game as one where you don't need to purchase things to play.  Consider Magic: the Gathering, a game where buying cards certainly had an impact on one's success.  Or golf, where quality of one's gear matters a lot.  Or car racing, where it matters even more.  Consider FPS games, where the quality of computer you have directly impacts your success against other players.  There are many, many games where commitment of money doesn't help very much at all; but there are just as many in which purchase of things to improve your game is an integral part of the game.

People often fail to remember what RMT really is.  Generally, RMT is not "pay X cash to get all the game rewards early".  Almost always, RMT purchases are things which you use for a while (sometimes even one shot, like potions) which improve the speed with which you progress.  They don't make you skip the fun - they make the game more fun for people, by reducing The Grind and making progression happen at a faster rate.  For some people, that isn't fun; for others, it is.

One thing I think is interesting here.  Most of the written comments have been fairly negative; but 42% of the poll responders have been positive, about the same number as say they would not play a permadeath game.  I wonder why that is?  Judging by the poll, there's quite a few people here who would be interested in trying a PD game out.

Originally posted by tillamook

Perma death is dumb, there is a reason it's not a mechanic in MMOs anymore.

I agree that there's a reason, but I think that reason is more about the style of MMO that is dominant right now (dikuMUD style) than anything else.  I completely agree that in a dikuMUD style MMO like EQ, WOW, etc., permadeath would be 'dumb'.

Of course, that's only one style of MMO, and there are many other paradigms which can be followed.  Diku is the easiest for devs to make and balance - and the style that is most popular right now.  That doesn't mean it's the only style available - far from it.

Originally posted by liddokun

Permadeath - lose everything you worked on for months... how is that fun ?

Well, that's really the main point of my first post here - it wouldn't BE fun, unless you didn't lose everything.  I was postulating a game where character development was secondary to actually playing the game and accomplishing real objectives in the game.  Basically, a game that wasn't a "PL my character to max level and get all the cool gear" sort of paradigm.

Originally posted by The-Nit

 OP makes a fatal mistake with perma death: he talks about LEVELS.

Perma death and levels cannot co-exist.

Perma death will only work in a skill based game.

Actually, I'm inclined to agree.  At least in that it would be FAR easier to design a skill based game than a level based one.  I tried to be even-handed in my post, but skill based would IMHO be much easier to design in convert with PD.  Even the "skill cap increase inheritance" system I mentioned in my OP pretty much relies on a skill based system.

It certainly doesn't make much sense to do PD unless it gets us something.  So - what does it get us?  Besides dead characters?  ;)

First off, it removes the need for a grindy game.  Since you're going to be going through character after character, players aren't going to want to do 'whack a mob'.  They want to do something that matters, something more meaningful to the game world.  Think ATITD, or Eve, or Shadowbane - something where the players are interacting with the game world more deeply than in most games.

Second, it adds an element of danger that most MMOs lack.  Which allows heroism.  Anyone here read Bartle's book, "Designing Virtual Worlds"?  I don't agree with everything he writes there, but he has an interesting bit on heroism in MMORPGs.  Basically, there isn't any, most of the time.  We play games where we have the illusion of heroic action.

But for something to really be heroic, there needs to be both risk and the inability to do something an easier route.  It's not heroic to swim across a croc infested river if there is a bridge there, for instance - it's stupid.  For that reason, the "delete your own character to make your own permadeath" suggestions miss the boat, because while the person who follows their suggestion faces risk, they do so without reason.

With PD, individual heroism becomes possible.  Trying to hold the bridge to buy the rest of your team time to flee into the castle is a real sacrifice, not an empty gesture because you will respawn in a minute anyway.  Jumping in to save someone against a beastie that's about to kill them becomes heroic, because you risk permanent death of your character.

In most of today's games, all of these things are empty acts.  We do quests and games call us heroes, but nothing we do in them really shows any heroism, not even in the context of the virtual world.  And somewhere inside, we know those actions are hollow.  The stronger the penalty for failure, the greater the chance to show heroism.  And PD creates perhaps the greatest possibility of all.

Originally posted by Gyrus

It's kind of weird - but C47 rides and JU52 rides on the way to a paradrop in WWIIoL often turn to homo-erotic chat...

When we're not discussing the sheep...

Ironically, that doesn't sound especially different from real C-130 rides to real modern drop zones...  ;)

Permadeath.  The word sends shivers down peoples' spines.  Developers cringe when the word crops up on their forums.  Permadeath has only rarely been accomplished in a modern MMO, although it once had a much more broad following in the MUDverse.

Permadeath is the end of your character when you die.  Diablo 2 called it "hardcore mode" - when you die, that's IT - roll a new character, start over, and do it again.

Obviously, in most modern games, permadeath (PD) would be a disaster.  Let's pick one of the easiest leveling games out there - WOW.  Imagine if you only had one life, in WOW.  I think some people might grind their way into the 30s or even 40s before dying, but can you imagine doing it all over again once you did?  Ugh.  :)  Now ponder a game like L2, where the leveling is dramatically slower than WOW.

It Just Wouldn't Work.  There, anyway.

I'd like to suggest that a PD game could work, assuming a few things.

1) Leveling is fast.  You can skill up a new character to "competent" levels in a very short period of time.  Maybe not have every skill, or have peaked them all out, but for example have a skill based game that rockets you up to a strong level in a couple of skills pretty fast.

2) Remove the progression of the character as the main element of the game.  In a game like Warhammer, the only things that really matters are how high your level is and how good your gear is.  Nothing else really sticks around in the long run, so those things become the focus of all your gameplay.  Make something else that focus - maybe a guild city that can be ranked, or an entire nation of them.  Perhaps each player has some sort of personal fief they build, that is inherited by future characters.  Something.  Something that you advance over time, that ISN'T your character.

3) Make the early game interesting, too.  Eve does something interesting, in that the resources dropped by "low level" mobs are still valuable even to the highest level players in the game.  Make what the lower levels do relevant to the overall goals and objectives of the game, and the player won't mind doing them.  Having to grind out the same rats, kobolds, wolves, and etc. over and over will bore people, so you need to make that content more meaningful somehow.  For example, if you wanted to add PD in Warhammer (bad idea, but suppose), you could make the lower level keep conquests CRITICAL to taking the higher level ones.  Suddenly, the lower levels are important because they are the only ones who can take those lower level keeps.

4) Make death a good thing.  OK, maybe not a good thing - but at least, give players some reason to not completely dread it.  For example, suppose that in your skill based game, players started with a hard cap of 50 in each skill.  Every time they died, though, a percentage of how much they had skilled up is added to that cap.  So someone who uses swords and skills up to 30 before dying gets say a +3 bonus to the cap next lift.  Next life, he gets to 53 - lives a long time - and then gets a +5 bonus to the cap when he dies that time.  Of course, skills that don't get raised, don't get bonuses at all (you don't want someone chain-suiciding to raise their cap).  With such a system, PD actually ties into the overall development of character over time.

Those are a few thoughts, anyway.  What do other folks here think?  I think the genre is almost ready for a real PD game, a sandbox game with PD built into it from the get go.

Originally posted by CDCosta

They count by anyone who ever made an account as a subscription, so all those free trials that they give out like candy are their numbers.

That, however, is probably not true.  They say active accounts, so they probably DO mean active accounts.  Expired free trials and USA/EU players who have turned off their subscriptions are almost certainly not counted.  However, as I posted above, they do get to count a huge chunk of their Asian playerbase forever, even if not actively playing, because those are free accounts which never expire (pay by hour clubs).

Originally posted by Thekandy

Originally posted by AerthanTN

Originally posted by MrTumN3s

Anyone wonder where all that money that Blizzard receives each month from its " 9 million players" goes to? I'm mean, its definitely not going into our expansions or patches, so wheres it all going?

 

Blizzard is usually pretty careful about not saying "9 million players", they usually say something like 10 million accounts, and they don't even say "active" accounts, so it could include gold farmers, banned accounts, even people who haven't played for years.  However Blizzard's parent company is a publically held company so they have to post their revenue numbers.  If you look at their revenue numbers and assume that subscribers are paying $15 a month they would have around 6.5 million active subscribers.  Some people might be paying less than $15 but at the same time this ignores all the other aspects of blizzard where they would have revenue, ie WoW box sales, server transfers, trading card game, diablo, books, etc. etc. etc.

 

 

Of course the number includes gold farmers, unless something changed rapidly fast gold farmers are not given free accounts to farm with.

You are assuming every player is paying $15 a month, which is incorrect.  People playing from most Asian countries (who represent a huge percent of WOW players now) are paying much less.

It's important to also remember that WOW 'suffers' under the same issue Lineage 2 has in determining active player count.  Most Asian accounts *never* go inactive.  Unlike US and EU accounts, where when you turn of your subscription your account is made inactive, in Asia most players don't have subscriptions - they pay by the hour to play in what are basically internet cafes for gaming.  So when a person starts an account under those conditions, they might never play that account again - but it will never go inactive, either, so it still stays in the count of total accounts.  ;)

It's sneaky, in a way.  Games with most or all of their market in the USA usually see a standard peak and then slow decline.  We won't see that decline very clearly at all in WOW, when it happens; because they will still be able to announce very high active account numbers, as most of their accounts will be free and never expire by that time.

Originally posted by Jefferson81

This is just not true because the non-PvP:ers outnumbers the PvP:ers with atleast 10 to 1.

That perhaps used to be true five years ago; it is no longer so.

In fact, even four years ago when WOW launched, their "pvp servers" (keeping in mind that every server had pvp, these just had more open range fighting) were more popular than the regular servers.  If you look at the last four years of MMO releases, virtually ALL of them have pvp as a major element.  That's not an accident - that's developers recognizing that players who appreciate having some form of limited, opt-in pvp are now the dominant demographic.

These are not kids, either.  ;)  Remember, the average MMO player is still 26 - the same as it was six years ago!  Daedalus shows only a quarter of players are teens and preteens.  So it's not some "rampant influx of kiddies" that has made pvp more popular.  ;)  It's that the playerbase has changed their taste over time.

Now, don't confuse opt-in pvp with full pvp - a very different story!  Although full or near-full pvp is gaining greater and greater traction (as seen by the heavy population on AOC and WAR open pvp servers), it's still nowhere near a majority.  But games lacking in some core pvp element are missing the mainstream boat.

There's still a substantial crowd of players who enjoy a totally non-pvp environment, mind you.  They just aren't the majority, anymore.  That started changing when DAOC released in 2002, and it's been continuing steadily ever since.  PvE only is still too big to be called a niche market, but it's not the main market anymore, either.

Guild Wars is a different game.  Heavy use of instancing means Guild Wars has MUCH lower overhead for bandwidth and server costs.

That said, it's pretty obvious that free to play games can and do make money, even outside of Asia (where they are the norm, not the exception).  They generally make their income using ingame stores, credit purchases, or some other "pay us cash to get special benefits" feature.

I like WAR, in general, but I'm going to agree here.  I think that there could be more meat added into the world pvp, to make it more pertinent.  When a keep is lost, it should NEVER be a "so what?" deal.  It should sting.  It should BURN.  You should feel it in your gut like a punch.  It should directly impact the gameplay of everyone on the side that lost, and drive them to do better next time.

That's "gameplay with a point".  =)  I don't mean that it needs to be on the level of say, Shadowbane - not everyone enjoys their play to be as intense and consuming as it was in that game!  Loss there was EVERYTHING - game over, or darn close.  But I'd still like to see some more oomph added to the world RvR end of things.

I could not disagree more with the OP.

Far from being dead, the PQs on my server are almost ALWAYS active, at least during "prime time" hours.  no, you can't find pickup groups for PQs at 4am, but that should come as no shock.  I can go wander around tier 2 or tier 3 zones (depending on which character I am playing) and find PQ groups already working the content at about half the PQs.  A lot of those groups pop over to another PQ once they've run that one a few times, too, so there's nice variety.

Chat?  Methinks someone has spent too much time in WOW.  WAR's chat is like Eve, and like AC, and like...oh, darned near every other game except WOW.  =P  Why on earth would I WANT to listen to the random spam scrolling by my screen from hundreds of people I don't know talking about random topics I really don't care about?  I like to listen to my guild, and chat with them - many of them I have known for 5+ years in many games.  I don't need to listen to Joe Random cracking inane jokes or some 10 year old asking for the millionth time how to do something that is in the manual.

Guilds?  Most guilds suck, V.  Fact of life.  This is nothing new.  Guids that suck, die.  Guilds that don't, go on.  My guild was formed almost nine years ago - we would never have survived that long as a "utility guild".  NONE of the guilds worth belonging to could be described that way.  I'm sorry you've had bad guild experiences, but please don't think that's the norm.  Perhaps, you need to start your own and build it into what you envision?  That's what I did.

PvP is outstanding, the best I've seen in a new game in YEARS.  Being able to hop into a scenario is awesome, and the open field RvR is really heating up.  We're off to go cap a couple of keeps tonight, and I expect to have perhaps 40+ Defenders online and raring to go.  I also expect decent enemy contact, because when people see a keep under attack on Volkmar, they come running.  Yes, even at tier 2 and 3.

People need to get it through their heads that this is Not WOW.  Let go of the preconceptions, and play the game for what it is, rather than for what you think it ought to be.  Or leave, and go find another game you prefer - there are plenty of others out there, and honestly - you're in the minority, so your absence won't be missed.  Almost everyone I've spoken to loves the game, and is having a great time.  =)

One nice thing is, there is no real One Grind; you can choose to do quests, smack mobs, do PQs, do open world RvR, do scenarios, raid lairs, etc.  Quite a lot of options to choose from, more than most games, really.  Gives you a lot of choices for "what do I want to do right now?"

Originally posted by Azrile

There are only two metrics that are really independant of 'hype'.

Where do players spend their time?

Xfire shows Warhammer falling about 10% week over week.  There has not been an increase in server load since the first launch.  There are just as many med/med servers and less servers that are full as there was the first week.

Are new people buying the game?

Amazon and others show Warhammer falling out of the top 20 in game sales already.  This is even a faster plunge than AOC which was able to maintain a top 10 rating for 3 weeks.   And in comparison to WOW which has multiple boxes in the top 20 four years after launch.

Did you even bother checking Xfire before you spouted this???  =)  Check it out:

http://www.xfire.com/games/who/Warhammer_Online_Age_of_Reckoning/

You'll see pretty clearly that the numbers there peaked on Sept 20+21, then have risen and fallen based on the day of the week ever since (dipping on weekdays, rising again on weekends).  Not that Xfire is the be-all of statistics, but it DOES show player minutes about the same on October 4th as they were on September 20th, two days after launch.

And Warhammer is still 4th on Amazon, only behind WOW's new expansion (12 million players...uh, yeah, it wins), Spore (most anticipated computer game of this decade), and a Nancy Drew game (OK, don't understand that one at all...).  Anyway, 4th place is still pretty high on the sales charts.  Certainly not "falling out of the top 20".

Hate it when people stoop to making fraudulent claims to make their point.  On the plus side, I guess people have decided they need to make bad stuff up about Warhammer, which doesn't shock me at all.  :)  So far I have been pleasantly surprised by the game.

New options for helms might be nice, too...  I am off and on ready to try something else instead of my 23/18 Swordmaster, in no small part because the conehead thing is HORRIBLE.  :)  Yes, I know it's lore for the Warhammer universe, but - ugh!  =)

Originally posted by Pynda

Just make sure you pick a good casual guild. My guild was advertised as being for both casual & hardcore players before release, underwent a leadership change the day after release, and has now become the hardest of hardcore. I saw 27 people booted just the night before last. The total given the axe or pressured to quit is now around 200, and rumor has it that anyone under level 20 is going to be cut today. I'm 19, so I suppose I could make it if I really wanted to. But it's a drag having your play style being dictated to you by fanatics.

What a horrible experience.  =(  Stuff like that gives guilds a bad name, I am sorry you ran into that.  Think on the bright side though: with behaviors like that, the members all know that they are Just A Number, and that the leadership only cares about them as long as they are producing for the guild.  Guilds like that don't last very long.

I've found my method - to selectively recruit only a few people at a time, and to look for new members based on who the player is, rather than the character - has worked rather well.  We're heading into our 9th year as a guild, so it seems to be working!  =)

Originally posted by Meridion

Maybe it's just the flash coming from the "communication above all"-LotRO-RP Servers but I start to stop playing to actually do something that involves social interaction.

M

It probably IS something like that... I keep wanting to play on a good RP server, and keep having guildmates really prefer the mainstream ones. I think I have them almost convinced to try sometime soon, though. ;)

The problem is, general channels in non-RP servers end up looking like, well, a mess. Random people talking about random things in a stream of chat so fast it's scrolls by at lightning speed. I just don't feel like trying to parse that for pertinent data. I turned it off in L2, WOW, and AOC, because it was always the same garbage.

I can certainly see the value of having a communication tool for RvR defenses - if it was really used for that, anyway. Problem is enforcing that. In DAOC, we'd use alliance chats for that, and I suspect we'll see the same thing happen in WAR.

And there already IS an easy to use chat in the capitols...  Anyone who doesn't know how needs to learn to RTFM.  ;)

I guess I just don't miss seeing random strangers complain or chatter aimlessly about random things.

If there was such a chat, I'd turn it off anyway, just be too annoying.  I generally have 20-40 friends online in my guild channel any given night anyway, so why would I need to listen to chat spam from other folks?  EVERY game I have seen with global chats, the darn stuff spins by too fast to read and play anyway.

If you want a good chat channel, my advice would be to find a good, active guild to join.  Or hang out in IRC channels and save yourself the $15 a month.  ;)

I fail to see why it will take a strong willed powergamer...  I am tier 3, and still make a level every 1-2 days.  And I'm NOT a hardcore player.  Heck, if I did nothing but grind scenarios, I could get a tier 3 level in 6-8 hours.

There's a few class balance issues, but...name one game that hasn't had them?  ;)  DAOC did, WOW did - they tend to show up more readily in pvp focused games.  It's a fact of the genre, and they'll change over time - last months FOTM class will be nerfed and some new class will be FOTM instead.  Always happens, always has, always will.  Play your class, play it well, play with friends and work as a team - you'll find you're effecive even if some other class is a tad overpowered.

Our guild groups ROUTINELY win scenarios, for instance; I mean, almost always, when we have a FG of guildmates in voice chat and in a scenario, we win.  Compare that to PUG scenarios, where it's pretty much 50-50.  Teamwork and good gameplay matter far more in this game than anything else.

Tier 3 PQs are great!  I have had zero trouble completing them, at least during primetime hours.  I mean, I just did two tonight - you can pretty much always walk up to a PQ, and find people there working it.  Maybe not every PQ every time, and certainly not at 6am, but during evening hours it's very solid.  This is Volkmar, a server with a higher than average number of elder guilds, and stronger players - so I think we have a crowd that leveled a bit faster than average, but give it another week and you should have a ton more T3 people on every server.

A couple of the T3 scenarios could have used more thought.  Tor Annoc (or whatever it's called, the lava cave one) needs a complete overhaul - it's a trash scenario right now IMHO, hate it.  ;)  Most of the rest are great, however, and require intense teamwork and focused effort to win.