Cap’n John kindly responded to the screenshot meme a bit ago, turning up some great moments. As an added bonus, Saylah made a comment that triggered an interesting thought. To quote Saylah:
“WOW certainly was the shiznit as they say. There’s NO denying how much fun I had in that game back in the day. My favorite zones were so much fun that I could probably start a new character, run thru them again for the 10th time and still have fun. Unfortunately, I’m not interested in doing what comes after level 20 in WOW anymore.”
The current WoW trial is a ten day, rather limited beastie. What would it do to the game to make the “trial” a perpetual free trial like Wizard101, and further, if mailbox and AH functionality were restored?
It would make the gold sellers very, very happy, I think.
I’ve wondered about that lately, actually. Tobold asserts that with the gold influx in Wrath, the market conditions have become somewhat less than amenable to gold sellers.
Of course, I’m very partial to the Puzzle Pirates solution for gold selling, but I’m well aware that WoW would have to undergo some changes for that to work.
Still, are gold sellers really still a huge issue? And even if they are, are the current trial restrictions really stopping them? It seems to me that while some of the spam might have gone down, the business itself found ways around such limitations.
I imagine they have no problems. I believe gold sellers farm on higher level characters, and then launder money down to trial accounts, which are then used for distribution and simultaneous advertising.
The only way to mess with that system is to prevent trial accounts from giving items to other people. CoX does this, but you also can’t receive items (can’t trade at all), which is lame since if you have a trial account and are a legitimate player, you probably have a friend in the game who would give you a few tasty morsels to whet your appetite.
I don’t know enough about the WoW trial – how could they make it permanent?
Currently the WoW Trial allows you to play vanilla content for 10 days. If you were keen, you could probably even level a toon to 60 in that time. But you cannot buy or sell anything on the AH, invite someone to a Group, or even message someone who doesn’t have you on their Friends’ List. Basically it lets you play their MMO game in solo-capacity only, although subscribers can Whisper you and invite you to their Group if they feel so inclined.
The way they could make it more permanent (& better) would be to allow you to play for as long as you like but with a Level Cap of 10 or 15, and also be able to play the Auction House. Why can’t a Trial Account Buy or Sell stuff on the AH? Oh yeah, because Trials are assumed to be Gold Sellers until they prove otherwise by subscribing.
That’s the problem with WoW’s Trial Accounts. In order to crack down on Gold Spammer/Sellers, Blizzard gutted their Trial Account to such an extent that a real Trial Player is probably more put off by the experience, than filled with a desire to subscribe.
That was my experience last time I created a Trial Account to get my fix (I’ll admit, it’s a damn fun game, and sometimes I create a Trial just to play for a bit and satisfy my craving.) I ran into two other low level players. We all had the quest to kill a bunch of Troggs (in the Quarry near Kharanos) but we each had to kill our own Troggs because we were all Trials and as such, none of us could invite the others to Group. It was a fun but frustrating experience and it actually turned me off the game.
I’m curious what the benefit would be to Blizzard if they did this. The only thing I can come up with would be that there’d always be lots of people around the starter areas.
BTW, Ryzom does exactly this on their newbie island, or at least they did when I played it.
http://www.ryzom.com/en/
Anarchy Online has an extended free zone as well. Puzzle Pirate has a huge amount of content for free players.
Mike Darga quoted Daniel James a while back (the Three Rings CEO, Puzzle Pirates captain) wherein he states in no unclear terms that even the “free” player is valuable to the game, as they still contribute to the game world, as well as a word of mouth vector, social fodder in-game, game economy, and general good will (branding). As the good Cap’n notes, the present free trial of WoW is less of a welcoming experience and more like a bad date. Yes, people can still see some of what makes WoW tick, but even then, it’s largely the solo game. Isn’t one of the complaints about WoW that it’s not social enough at low levels?
Beside that, the low level newbie areas are some of the game’s best designed spots. Why not champion that content? (Yes, I know, Blizzard has all but abandoned it, but I disagree with that move.)
I’d even go so far as to just open up Vanilla WoW completely free, all permissions, all areas. Keep the expansions sub zones. That’s where most of the lifers are anyway, and if you open up the “old world”, you can start to rebuild that sense of community that has all but been ceded to the race to the endgame.
Is it a perfect solution? Not really, and no, Blizzard doesn’t have a huge obvious reason to do this… but it may well be a good long term move.
Oh, and because I should probably explain my own rationale as a player, I’d be much more likely to buy the expansions and actually sub to them for a while if I’m invested in the main game, including having built up a character and made social contacts. Yes, those sitting on the level cap have done that already, but new players can’t do that all that well in the existing trial.
In fact, if I could play the game whenever I felt like it, but would have to sub for the time I wanted the cutting edge content, I’d be much more likely to actually pay the sub price, because I could schedule around the time I wanted to spend in the new zones.
Bottom line, they would actually be likely to get me to buy into the game if they let me play more without paying. That’s how Puzzle Pirates roped me in, as well as Wizard 101. I’ve given them each money, but Blizzard has nothing from me. I can do repeated ten day stints in WoW, but the limitations and lack of a persistent character just mean I dabble each time, rather than really commit to the game.
WoW isn’t alone in having an unfriendly trial — CoX, as I recently (re)discovered, is now the same. The fear of the gold seller ends up driving away the real people, while the gold sellers just find other ways around it.
Since you can now go from Auberdine directly to Stormwind and from Stormwind to Ironforge, you could actually level-limit or zone-limit chars to the newbie/capital zones — at least I assume you could? Just because it looks seamless when you run through it (apart from the visible shift in artwork
) doesn’t mean it has to be, right? I dunno.
Fact is though, if there *were* free trial accounts that weren’t limited, *I* would make some just to have more bag space. Because it’s a game that encourages you to collect crap while limiting how much crap you can hold, alts with space are premium booty.
Fact is most of us who are on the downward slide of the hill don’t *want* one game to rule them all anymore — at least not most of us commenting in various places. Anything that allows me to dabble in more games and connect with more of my ever-more-scattered friends would be welcome. Sadly, I doubt Blizzard plans to change their money-printing model anytime soon.
This becomes more interesting the longer I think about it (and insomnia has decided that I should get a lot of thinking done tonight).
I think about context a lot in game design, but usually in terms of goals or audience. I’ve been overlooking audience size and stage of adoption curve as aspects that should influence design decisions, but this thread has great examples of both.
When a game is just starting out, or has very few users, or little word of mouth, a really great free trial is just about the only way you’re going to hook people. You can also tolerate the risk of gold farmers a bit more, because it’s not as though you have enough players to tempt a successful gold farming market, or a huge playerbase that you’re afraid of losing. This example describes both Ryzom and AO pretty well.
When a game has been around for long enough and grown steadily enough to have a very solid subscriber base, like WoW, it’s relying on word of mouth and sheer ubiquity to attract new customers. WoW doesn’t even sell you its gameplay, it sells itself as a cultural force, and the thing that all your friends are doing.
Also, because WoW is such a huge game, it’s an absolute goldspammer magnet. Even players who buy gold hate being spammed by farmers, and will eventually get annoyed enough to quit. So, for a game with a very large playerbase, in retention mode, it’s more of a risk to allow free trial accounts to have much freedom.
Also, if they were to switch over to an unlimited free trial, it might actually cost them some subscriptions, as players who aren’t playing much but don’t want to lose their social connections decide to downgrade to the “free” model.
With all this in mind, the game that should really be adding a very robust free trial right now is Warhammer. They need to convince people that their new gameplay is very fun to draw them away from WoW, and they could use the warm bodies to populate low level RvR.
As Tesh has mentioned turning free definitely brought a lot of players back to Tabula Rasa. Pretty much every game on this list could benefit from this sort of treatment, although I think WoW at this stage isn’t one that would.
http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart3.html
“The fear of the gold seller ends up driving away the real people, while the gold sellers just find other ways around it.”
Exactly. It’s not the gold sellers who are put off, it’s the legitimate customers (or potential customers) who have to put up with the countermeasures. It’s not unlike the DRM/pirate situation.
Beside that, though, is it really gold selling that is the problem (it’s a byproduct of the grindy loot-centric game design), or is it the spam? If it’s the spam, and the gold sellers are getting around the system anyway, why not just write a smart spam filter and open the floodgates?
Ysh, you’re right to note the “one to rule them all” malaise. I suspect that such is, and always will be, the overarching problem with the MMO genre. That’s part of why I wrote earlier that it would be healthy to let MMO worlds die.
Oh, and yes, Mike, WAR would benefit more from opening the gates. That game lives or dies on RvR, which needs warm bodies. I still think WoW would benefit from it in the balance, but yes, newer and smaller games would get more. Ultimately, I think that any MMO would benefit from making the game as hospital as possible. That naturally means that some unsavory elements will muck up the place, but fixes for that really need to be targeted properly, like the spam concern over the economical concerns of gold selling. It looks like WoW is addressing the economy via Wrath’s tuning. Spam is very specific, and can and should be addressed separately.
Also, while it’s tangentially relevant, I completely agree with Lum when he categorically states that if your game has a gold selling problem, there’s something broken deep in the design. I point squarely at the loot lust level treadmill. It’s hard to change that for the most part, especially in WoW, but we really need to be solving the problem, not doing broad spectrum antibiotics, nerfing the trial experience.
I was also turned off CoX recently by the unfriendly trial. You really need to roll out the red carpet for your players these days if you want them to subscribe to a new MMO, given the way people tend to like the freedom of playing multiple games at once. Especially for MMO’s a few years old who are still charging $15/month…
A couple of other points:
One, if WoW is merely content to sit on its heels and polish the “endgame” for each successive expansion, it’s leaving itself open to the same sort of disruptive strategy that the Wii used to sneak up on the XBox 360 and PS3. The *game design* of WoW is more like the Wii’s homogenous “everyman” design than most of its competitors, but the *business strategy* itself is ripe for disruption.
Two, I’ve read elsewhere that Blizzard is taking a look at making the old world more interesting again, which might just make it more “deserving” of an active sub, instead of just consigning vanilla WoW to a leveling grind to bypass.
…I’ve got to admit, I’d actually rather see them revitalize the old world, rather than just ignore it, if only for the sake of overall genre health. It’s just that if they are going to continue to ignore the old world, they may as well open it up to “froobs”. They don’t value it enough to spend sub money making it significantly better, so why maintain the charade that it’s worth charging $15/month for? (Yes, because people will pay it, but again, that’s just Blizzard sitting on their hands.)
It’s not just gold sellers you want to keep out. Giving someone unlimited access to a full account is begging for trouble because it is an easy avenue for anyone to use to harass paying customers. This is the main reason why we don’t offer any sort of free trial for M59; in a PvP-focused game, you get people abusing the trials to build a quick, throwaway character to harass paying customers. Even when we segregated people to a separate area during the trial at 3DO, people still found one way to be annoying: create obnoxious names that insulted other people.
Tesh wrote:
why not just write a smart spam filter
I read it on a blog, so it must be easy, right? For your next trick, could you wave a magic wand and give us all ponies?
I’d like a red one, please.
I completely agree with Lum when he categorically states that if your game has a gold selling problem, there’s something broken deep in the design.
And you’re both wrong. As I’ve explained before: If I make $100/hour working, and I can buy 20 gold in LotRO for $20, it makes economic sense for me to buy gold unless I can make 20 gold in 12 minutes. (At level 30, I cannot.) If I make more money, the process of earning money has to be proportionally more fun for me to prefer that action rather than buying gold and spending my time creating financial derivatives or whatever kids do for money these days. For the kid making minimum wage at McDonald’s, the economics work the opposite way.
So, the “broken design” is that we haven’t figured out how to make the game more fun if you have more money in the offline world. I’m not working on that, since I’m a dirt-poor indie guy who rarely gets paid that $100 I theorized about above.
Brian, it’s true that different games will have different needs. That’s what Mike was getting at, and it’s definitely going to be something that needs to be considered. PvP heavy games in particular will have a higher jerk quotient, I suspect. Trials won’t work for everyone. Darkfall is another great example of that, and their highly regulated entry policy has even driven the perception of scarcity, creating demand. Of course, it’s still people lining up to be anonymous jerks to each other, so that part hasn’t changed. Jerkiness should be addressed directly, if it’s a problem. (And exploited if it’s a selling point, in Darkfall’s case.)
Still, my point is that trials can offer a vector to entry, and cutting that vector off at the pass to cull the inevitable internet idiots and spam is a bit like treating foot fungus with leg amputation. It works, but it’s not really treating the problem.
Specifically with spam, that’s just something that will happen in an internet game with chat enabled. There’s no way around it. Either accept that or write in filters. Whether or not it’s magic wanded into existence, the solution should be directly targeting the problem. Again, nerfing or omitting trials works, but that sort of broad spectrum solution has shades of the “baby with the bathwater” problem. If little companies like King’s Isle or Three Rings can handle spam, why not the big guys? It’s nothing magical, and that they don’t address the problem directly is a bit strange.
Likewise, the problem of gold selling isn’t trial accounts, it’s design that makes gold selling desirable. I’m a bit baffled that you’d say that I’m wrong and then point out the problem that I’m getting at. The core game impetus of acquiring gold *is* the problem (and game design that makes acquiring *stuff* more fun than playing), from whatever side of the economic sense spectrum. The Puzzle Pirates microtransaction dual currency blind exchange has largely solved this by allowing both the time rich player and the money rich player to meet in the middle and derive their own economic sense of fun. That other games persist in ignoring that solution *is* something broken deep in their design, whether it’s game design itself or business design. For some, it’s perhaps too late to change (WoW), but Three Rings’ doubloon oceans have been up and profitable for a few years now, and anyone looking to design games now should be looking at how they have solved the “gold selling” problem. (In a nutshell, remove the ability for third parties to profit off of your game design by directly monetizing the demand in-house.)
Jerkiness should be addressed directly, if it’s a problem.
Please present your solution, then send it to the White House. I’m sure the current administration would be happy to learn of a fool-proof way to make people stop acting like jerks about stupid things.
In other words, the problem is human nature, not anything related to the game. The only viable solution to address this directly is to put in draconian rules and increase the CS presence. That’s why it’s easier to go after the source of the problem. Basically, I think the proponents of the “open” trial periods don’t understand that this could actually cost you actual paying customers if it opens the floodgate of jerks into your game.
Most of the proponents seem to be selfishly motivated as well. The common response seems to be, “Fuck yeah, I’d abuse the hell out of that to play the fun bits for free!” Remember, these games are businesses, so when the options are:
1. Have restricted trials where some people may covert to paying customers
or
2. Have open trials where you have to increase CS presence, still possibly lose paying customers due to harassment, possibly lose other paying customers who are happy just playing the trial over and over, and possibly see an increase in paying customer conversions that may compensate for the paying customers you’re losing.
I think the choice is obvious. I know which one I’ve made in my own game.
Specifically with spam, that’s just something that will happen in an internet game with chat enabled. There’s no way around it.
You may not be able to eliminate it, but you can reduce it. Again, this is the reason for limited trial accounts. It means that your possible gold (and other) spammers have to invest some money into buying into your game. That also means that losing an account to the ban-hammer is going to be painful for them. Again, limited trial accounts are a much easier solution than writing a spam filter that tries to guess what is spam and what’s not.
I’ll address a last point in a subsequent post. This one is long enough.
The core game impetus of acquiring gold *is* the problem (and game design that makes acquiring *stuff* more fun than playing)….
It’s not just gold, though, it’s acquiring anything. Even acquiring reputation is valuable. A perfect example is Slashdot (http://www.slashdot.org/), where people used to sell accounts. Slashdot is just a discussion site, but some aspects were desirable such as low user ID numbers, or accounts with high “karma”. There’s no explicit game there, but the fact that an account can have certain attributes means there is value there.
Hell, in the future I’m sure we’ll see similar problems with a site like Twitter. Imagine the value of an account with a several thousand “followers”. Being able to blast off a few adverts will be worth a fair amount of money, even if people abandon the sold account. Remember, you read it from me first.
As far as addressing core design issues, smart people have tackled this issue. One such proposal can be found at:
http://thefarmers.org/Habitat/2004/10/kidtrade_a_design_for_an_ebayr.html
Take a look at what that design removes from a game and consider if you could have a WoW type game based on that design concept.
Note that it’s been 4 years since that concept was updated, and no games have bit the bullet and gone with it.
Three Rings’ doubloon oceans have been up and profitable for a few years now, and anyone looking to design games now should be looking at how they have solved the “gold selling” problem.
Sure, and Sony had RMT-enabled servers for EQ2 (and now Vanguard), but that doesn’t mean it’s the right design solution for ever game. You know me, I’m a huge supporter of the microtransaction model, but that doesn’t mean that it’s the “one true” solution for the problem. Most players don’t like the business model (right now), so trying to slap it into an existing game is going to cause problems. Hell, you can see the furor it’s causing with Vanguard. Now, imagine WoW trying to do that.
Oh, yes, there would be blood.
So, to summarize, a game like WoW could have open trials if they:
1. increase Customer Service presence,
2. invest in writing a smart spam filter,
3. take additional steps to retain customers who may be happy just playing the trial,
4a. change the core design of the game to eliminate accumulation of anything, or
4b. introduce unpopular RMT solutions.
I don’t understand why they haven’t done so already!
Indeed, I concur that it wouldn’t work for every game. We’ve settled that.
I’m not sure there’s “one true solution” to most questions in this vein.