WoD MMO details

[Fuchs]

I do not think that the average WoD fan is looking for the sort of mindless grind WoW offers. And as Eve proves - you can be viable with a smaller subscription base.

Which game would that be? A korean grindfest dead outside Korea?

[Username17]

EVE still has about as many players as a game like Aion has raiders.

I have no idea how many Aion players raid, but if it's anything like WoW numbers, EVE probably has more like ten times as many players as Aion has raiders. Even WoW has more like a third as many actual raiders as EVE has players.

The ratio of total accounts to hardcore raiders is really high. That Aion has ten times as many accounts as EVE is interesting, but when numbers are actually released, it appears that the raiders are considerably less than 1% of the total accounts. Remember that gold farmers and casuals do not raid.

If 14% of players of EVE hang out in nullsec, that is a bit over 45,000 people. That alone is probably more raiders than Aion has.

-Username17

[A Man In Black]

I do not think that the average WoD fan is looking for the sort of mindless grind WoW offers. And as Eve proves - you can be viable with a smaller subscription base.

Which game would that be? A korean grindfest dead outside Korea?

This is a headscratcher. You don't want to the WOD MMO to be a "mindless grind" or "grindfest" like WOW or Aion, but you do want it to be like EVE, where most people spend the bulk of their time literally grinding rocks into useful minerals or hunting down NPC ships for bounties. I think you have funny ideas about EVE based on the half-true stories that Mittani tells to anyone who will stop and listen to him. EVE is military-industrial complex the game, and the vast majority of the playerbase plays assembly-line workers.

I don't know what players actually do in your "roleplay and social advancement focused MMOG", but the idea that it's going to replace grinding is laughable.

I have no idea how many Aion players raid, but if it's anything like WoW numbers, EVE probably has more like ten times as many players as Aion has raiders. Even WoW has more like a third as many actual raiders as EVE has players.

Bleh, arguing a secondary point, but might as well. That's an article from five years ago.

More recently, 66007 guilds have killed a raid boss in the nine months since the most recent WOW expansion, according to one of the better data-mining sites. A raid group consists of 10 or 25 players, and I don't have any good data on how fluid a raid group is or how many people raid out of guild (and thus aren't included there).

It turns out I was talking out of my ass with Aion. Most of the endgame is instanced PVP combat, similar to WOW battlegrounds or WAR scenarios. Raids are not a major part of the game.

This has wandered from the point. You're right, most players in games like Aion, Lineage, EQ, or WOW don't raid. It's a prestige activity, dominated by heavily invested players, while everyone else grinds. But exactly the same thing is true of EVE, except that the prestige activity is fiddling with spreadsheets as a manager and/or commander.

Fuchs was suggesting that changing the prestige activity means that grinding goes away. That's charming but completely unrealistic.

[Fuchs]

I take it you never really got into the social/roleplay aspects of MMOGs? Recruiting followers and allies, gaining influence with other groups, getting support covert or overt, spying on enemies?

I've seen players thrive on such activities, gaining great prestige and renown while skipping the whole level and loot aspect. Add some pvp to the mix and you've got a nice mix for both socially oriented players as well as competitive minded ones.

Once you offer social gameplay, and advancement through other means than grinding, the focus of a game can change for those who play like that. I've seen and done it in the past.

[angelfromanotherpin]

I take it you never really got into the social/roleplay aspects of MMOGs? Recruiting followers and allies, gaining influence with other groups, getting support covert or overt, spying on enemies?

[Gx1080]

Here's an interview with the Community guys of the WoD MMO:



http://massively.joystiq.com/2011/09/22 ... #continued

[A Man In Black]

I take it you never really got into the social/roleplay aspects of MMOGs? Recruiting followers and allies, gaining influence with other groups, getting support covert or overt, spying on enemies?

I've seen players thrive on such activities, gaining great prestige and renown while skipping the whole level and loot aspect. Add some pvp to the mix and you've got a nice mix for both socially oriented players as well as competitive minded ones.

Once you offer social gameplay, and advancement through other means than grinding, the focus of a game can change for those who play like that. I've seen and done it in the past.

I have. I've also played enough MMOs to notice that you just offered a pile of buzzwords and a few mentions of what that hypothetical game is not instead of a description of actual gameplay.

And it's not as though getting rid of leveling/gear gets rid of grinding. After all, look at EVE.

[Seerow]

And being "everyone else" behind the hard core raiding crowd who gets catered to in every other MMOG doesn't suck harder?

WOW has more hardcore raiders than EVE has subscribers. Hell, I'd be willing to bet a second-tier game like Aion has more hardcore raiders than EVE has subscribers.

The WoW comment is true. Otherwise, basically no. EVE is in the upper bracket. Only barely, but it is there. There are basically three tiers of MMOs: WoW, everything else you've ever heard of, and essentially dead games. More recent numbers from brighthub:

* World of Warcraft – 12,000,000 (2011)
* Aion - 3,400,000 (mid 2010)
* Runescape – 1,300,000 (2009)
* Lineage – 750,000 (2009)
* Lineage II – 750,000 (2009)
* Dofus – 520,000 (mid 2010)
* Final Fantasy XI – 350,000 (mid 2010)
* Eve Online – 325,000 (2011)
* Lord of the Rings Online – 210,000 (mid 2010)
* City of Heroes/Villains - 125,000 (2009)
* Age of Conan – 120,000 (mid 2010)
* Ultima Online - 100,000 (2009)
* Everquest - 100,000 (mid 2010)
* Warhammer Online – 80,000 (2010)

Basically there are only three games with more than a million subscribers and there's only one game that has more than ten million. If you compare things to WoW, you basically don't get meaningful numbers. If you take that outlier away, you have 100,000 as the dying and/or dead mark and 200,000 as the mark of doing pretty OK. Games in the 300k range are actually the middle of the pack. Games with over a million subscribers are monster hits that drive the industry.

By any sane calculation, EVE is very successful. They aren't meaningfully competing against WoW, but
nothing in the whole world is actually doing that. The second biggest game is ten times EVE's population, but that doesn't mean that EVE is not doing well or that it is not a big fish as such things go.

-Username17

Holy shit I can't believe Dofus is that high on the list. I guess it is a lot more popular in its native France than here.

[tzor]

I take it you never really got into the social/roleplay aspects of MMOGs?

As others have pointed out, there isn't any. On the other hand ... I wonder what would happen if Zynga decided to write a MMOG ...

• Get 3 Hay Stacks: Clicking the green “Ask Friends” button will post the request to your Newsfeed. Only a total of 3 friends can click on the request in their Newsfeed to help complete the request, then once all 3 requests are fulfilled, any additional friends will receive the message “Whoa there! You can only help your friend once per feed. Look out for the next one!” (Can ask again after 5 hours)
• Harvest 10 Chandler Blueberries
• Improve the Cove to Level 1

I suppose if you replace the "Harvest ..." with "Kill 10 orcs" it might work.

[Chamomile]

Most MMOs have a guild feature, and a lot of them have some kind of bonus for being in one, and some way to PvP against other guilds (either just the two of you both organize gank squads and beat each other up like gangsters fighting over turf, or there's some kind of team-based PvP you can enter, or whatever). So, yes, there is a social networking bit built into most MMOs. Just not a very good one, and the WoD team doesn't look like they're actually going to be improving the "get guild of obsessed players together and gank everything" formula at all. And until I hear more about what "player-driven" means, I'm afraid it might just boil down to guilds ganking each other for bragging rights and not actually changing the game world at all.

[Draco_Argentum]

My WoW guild was once a super hardcore Shadowbane guild. SMS at 2am to get up and defend territory hardcore. They took over an entire server.

If you just read that and thogh, "sounds super lame for hardcore nerds" then welcome to my prediction for WoD. Stopping a few very hard core people from running the show is going to take design skills plus some spine.

[Username17]

By the way, I haven't actually seen it confirmed anywhere that the seven clans they are trotting out for the game are the original Masquerade 7 clans. I know everyone (including me) assumes that to be the case, but now that they've released the clan list, it seems weird to me that I can't actually find a copy of it anywhere. They apparently did a whole pageant about the seven clans or some shit, so it would be nice to know what the fuck they said about them. It's a new game, so even if they are just using the seven basic first edition clans, it's entirely possible that they (for example) decided to differentiate the Toreador from simply being Ventrue Concept with Brujah Disciplines like they were in the original.

And on the difficulty of keeping the lights on: I think it's pretty clear that you can keep your servers running indefinitely with a hundred thousand people paying ten bucks a month. For fuck's sake, that's 12 million dollars a year in gross. Those City of Heroes servers aren't shutting down any time soon.

-Username17

[TheFlatline]

Yeah I always heard the game was going to be oWOD hybrid, so I wouldn't be surprised to see clans being tweaked.

Now that their Grand Masquerade party is done, I can look into seeing what they've done with the vampire 20th anniversary. If they kept up like the blog was discussing, they'll have massacred physical disciplines like they did in nWOD, even though everyone who playtested the proposed nerfs said they sucked and were worse than useless.

[Username17]

I really really don't understand the physical discipline nerfing. They are just mathematically provably shitty options, and in actual play they suck even more because they sit in the slots where you're supposed to get things that are not only the power you bring to the table, but also the interestingness of your character.

-Username17

[Winnah]

I am curious about how some of the disciplines will be integrated. Mainly your mind control and spellcasting disciplines.

Makes me think about how pets will be involved, whether it is though blood bonds, Animalism, Necromancy, Thaumaturgy or things like Dominate and Presence.

It makes me worry less about 12 year old Gangrel griefers, more about the bastards running a Malk or Tremere.

I'll definately be paying attention to the development.

[TheFlatline]

I really really don't understand the physical discipline nerfing. They are just mathematically provably shitty options, and in actual play they suck even more because they sit in the slots where you're supposed to get things that are not only the power you bring to the table, but also the interestingness of your character.

I sort of understand the idea behind nerfing Celerity. Whichever team had the most celerity won. Period. You may take casualties, but you will be inflicting undefended attacks every round, and unless your soak was astronomical, that means you were going to win. A point of blood for up to 6 actions a round is really potent. But there are easy ways around that without doing what they did in nWOD.

However, what I don't understand is nerfing Fortitude, which originally wasn't the greatest but still kind of useful, or potence, which only becomes a force-multiplying piece of bullshit when combined with lots of celerity in melee combat or feral claws which deal aggravated damage.

So instead of having truly super human vampire disciplines (super speed, super strength, and being able to shrug off bullets), you have mild buffs that are so expensive that you're better off investing in something else.

[Draco_Argentum]

And on the difficulty of keeping the lights on: I think it's pretty clear that you can keep your servers running indefinitely with a hundred thousand people paying ten bucks a month. For fuck's sake, that's 12 million dollars a year in gross. Those City of Heroes servers aren't shutting down any time soon.

That kinda depends on what "those servers" are. I could see a six figure bill for space, power and cooling on a decent sized server farm. If you guess wrong and over provision you could be left holding a major bill for hardware that isn't doing anything useful.

[Username17]

And on the difficulty of keeping the lights on: I think it's pretty clear that you can keep your servers running indefinitely with a hundred thousand people paying ten bucks a month. For fuck's sake, that's 12 million dollars a year in gross. Those City of Heroes servers aren't shutting down any time soon.

That kinda depends on what "those servers" are. I could see a six figure bill for space, power and cooling on a decent sized server farm. If you guess wrong and over provision you could be left holding a major bill for hardware that isn't doing anything useful.

Sure. I could see a six figure price tag fairly easily. I could even see it in the high six figures. But your gross is eight figures. So the chances of you making money are I think pretty much 100%.

On less than 100,000 subscriptions, I think things might start getting nail-bitey. Warhammer Online is obviously in serious trouble. But on a 100k? i just am not super worried about the solvency of a company that has already done the major programming work and is now taking in 12 million dollars a year. And the characterization of EVE, which is raking in more than 42 million dollars a year as in any way hurting financially as being just sort of weird. I mean, that's low for a major sport's team (putting them on par with the ticket sales of like the Milwaukee Bucks), but it isn't like they have any players who cost them millions of dollars.

-Username17

[Lago PARANOIA]

I mean, that's low for a major sport's team (putting them on par with the ticket sales of like the Milwaukee Bucks), but it isn't like they have any players who cost them millions of dollars.

Do you mean... Lady Robyndraygonn, my 3rd-Gen Elven Vampire Elder with huge boobs and world-class gymnastic abilities and all of the magics isn't that important?

[Koumei]

The nerfing of physical disciplines can fall into one of three things:

A) "They're not interesting, so we'll make them shitty and then nobody will take them"

B) "Physical fighting is for those powergamey munchkins, and that's not what our game is for, so let's make it bad." - the same thinking that leads to such dumb statements as "This is a social game where your stats don't matter" and "You can't powergame in Nobilis"

C) "I heard about how in this one game, everyone was using their action for Full Defence, and then just using all their extra actions to attack! It was so broken, it was hard to fuck the players in evenly-matched combat!"/"All these new and inexperienced players choose them, that must mean they're too good!"/"I heard about how when people play Clanless and get to pick their own three clan disciplines, they pick Pot/Fort/Cel - that proves they're too good!"/some other story about people making suboptimal choices en masse and thus it must be too good.

[Blasted]

For fuck's sake, that's 12 million dollars a year in gross. Those City of Heroes servers aren't shutting down any time soon.

That kinda depends on what "those servers" are. I could see a six figure bill for space, power and cooling on a decent sized server farm. If you guess wrong and over provision you could be left holding a major bill for hardware that isn't doing anything useful.

Sure. I could see a six figure price tag fairly easily. I could even see it in the high six figures. But your gross is eight figures. So the chances of you making money are I think pretty much 100%.

On less than 100,000 subscriptions, I think things might start getting nail-bitey. Warhammer Online is obviously in serious trouble. But on a 100k? i just am not super worried about the solvency of a company that has already done the major programming work and is now taking in 12 million dollars a year.

The server farm my group runs costs $4M/year and it's fairly tiny. The big cost is personnel and it's easy to have a bunch of sysadmins and programmers costing that by themselves. (Not gross, but once everything is factored in.) If I needed a bunch of servers in disparate locations, with maintenance staff on call 24/7 and still did some development work, I'd be surprised to see much profit out of $12M.
Of course, push all your stuff onto a shared resource, such as EC2, and run with 2 programmers and a cat and you may have something.

Of course, this assumes that you have the customer base to use a bunch of servers in the first place. I'm not sure Warhammer does.

[Draco_Argentum]

The server farm my group runs costs $4M/year and it's fairly tiny. The big cost is personnel and it's easy to have a bunch of sysadmins and programmers costing that by themselves. (Not gross, but once everything is factored in.) If I needed a bunch of servers in disparate locations, with maintenance staff on call 24/7 and still did some development work, I'd be surprised to see much profit out of $12M.
Of course, push all your stuff onto a shared resource, such as EC2, and run with 2 programmers and a cat and you may have something.

Of course, this assumes that you have the customer base to use a bunch of servers in the first place. I'm not sure Warhammer does.

I think Warhammer's problem was they bought datacentre space for low millions of subscribers then made enough mistakes to ensure the Warhammer IP couldn't carry them there. Then they were stuck with over provisioned servers. Obviously no proof but I'm sure they were expecting big things from the IP.

I'm not sure what MMO's use on the back end in enough detail to speculate further. If you own the hardware its intensly expensive to get it wrong. That million dollar SAN that is 5x too large is a huge mistake. OTOH if you were with a cloud provider you could probably avoid paying for stuff you don't use, depending on the contract.

[Don Strudel]

I don't think CCP has realized that their attempt to cater to all those overweight and middle-aged LARPers will utterly fail on an internet full of trolls no matter what precautions they take.