World of Tank: an expensive free game

I’ve been playing World of Tanks for 6 month now. (Plus a few more month during Beta)

In total, I have spend 529€ on this “free” game, including:
6×10€ for the Premium subscription
50€ on 2 premium tank (one of them worth 45€)
30€ in crew training
120€ in premium ammo (that I bought at 50% discount price, and scarcely use, but sometimes, you don’t really have a choice)
over 250€ in Free XP conversion.

Almost all theses purchases were felt necessary to progress normally, or simply to avoid negative consequences in the gameplay. All of this spent on a game where you only have one single Game Mode: Random Battle. Gameplay is nice, although some bugs, or design mistakes still plague it for over a year now.

There is countless MMO on the market with much more content that only requires me to pay a subscription. But that’s precisely the issue. I don’t want to feel pressured into spending 15€ a molnth to play. Yet, I would happily spend 4 times that sum on another game if it provide a good gameplay and promise to never kick me out, even if I stop paying.

Free to play games: why so popular?

The market has been growing incessantly towards Free2Play games. Free2Play, or F2P, are online games usually distributed for free, but featuring paying options, such as paying story arcs, experience boost, auto-loot, auto-run, etc.
This grow is understandable. When a game is free, you can roughly achieve ten times the number of users you would get if it wasn’t. With a good game and a monetisation well balanced, you might achieve a 20% rate of user conversion (free users becoming paying users). With 20% of 10 times more players, you just doubled your benefits compared to a subscription model.

Lord of the Rings Online, DS Universe, Champion Online, Dongeon & Dragons Online, Terra online or even Aion were all saved thanks to the F2P model and are now generating more revenues than when they were still subscription based.

The freedom of F2P games :

The high number of players is essentially linked to the fact you can download and try the game for free. It’s very different from a free trial, because the player is not pressured into playing as much as he can before the end of the trial. Most F2P will require you to pay something to achieve high-level, but you are free to do as you like, until you reach that point, no pressure. Also, unlocking new content are usually one-time purchases. So once again, contrary to a standard subscription, you have no fear to waste your money. What you buy is permanent. Last but not least, should you stop paying a premium subscription, or stop buying any premium content, you are not forbidden to play the game (contrary to a subscription that would runs out.). This means that it’s really easy for a player to just run back to the game once there’s a big patch or a new mode. They just have to download and play. If this pique their interest, they will naturally resume playing & paying.

Time versus Money :

This is another very interesting point that explain the success of F2P games:
Some players have money, but not enough time. They can invest over 100€ in a month to grow fast and be effective in their favourite game. In a standard subscription game, they only have the option to pay a subscription, and nothing else. They could eventually buy services to external companies for power-leveling or real money trade, but that’s risky and it does not bring money to the developers.
Subscription based games do not provide options for theses people to spend as much as they would like, worse, they don’t have much time to play, so the classic grind might bore them to death, to the point they leave the game. (This is common to every players, but theses guys are willing to pay to advance faster! Let’s not waste this opportunity.)

On the other end of the spectrum, you have people whith lots of time, but not enough money to really afford games, or they don’t want to.
They represent a good 80% of the player population, and are usually refereed as “free-loaders”. While on first approach they might seem a useless group of players costing us money, they have a very important place in the ecosystem: they provide the meatbase on which out paying customers will grind. We make the progression very long, to encourage such players to either pay, or play a lot. Since their progression is slower than paying users, they are often stuck around mid-high levels when the grind become almost outrageous.
We also need theses players, because emptiness call emptiness. If there’s not enough players to play with, people will leave the game, no matter what. They might be free players, but they provide us an important service of playing a lot, and populating the servers.
Now this is very important, but nowhere should they fell obliged to pay. They are encouraged, sometimes very strongly, to the point the grind might seems outrageous, but it’s not a hard limit. If you place hard limits, you lose more players than with a soft limit.

Also, free-loaders doesn’t mean they won’t bring you money indirectly. In a world where money sinks are very strong, everyone will need money for the “sweet stuff”, and by allowing paying users to resell Premium items/boost/currency, you create a market where hardcore free-loaders can actually afford everything should they grind enough in-game currency to buy what the want on the market. Important note : Every premium currency has to be bought, and resold by a player. Don’t price your items with both currency. I haven’t analysed the full ramifications of the double price, but I don’t like the look of it. People would potentially grind a lot, never pay, it would fixate the exchange rate premium<->IG currency.
Anyway, free-loader are essential, because they will provide a population base, they will grind money and trade it with the casual paying users, who in return will spend a bit more money to trade them premium content.
By doing so, you open the game to potential players that would have never considered playing the game: Those who have money but no time to grind, and those who have time, but no money.

You can make it social :

With F2P monetisation, and the reselling I told before, you allow players to pay for their friends. Guild leaders could offer gifts to their members, and transform this into a social experience like paying the rounds in a bar.
Also, you can give the premium players a special status toward the other players. For example, a premium player could provide a 5% experience boost to the whole group, and thus, making him “special” in the eyes of him friends, as many will seek to group with such a useful player, assuring that the premium users will always have a good playing experience.

Just throwing ideas… but what if instead of selling one 50% experience boost, you would sell 5x 10% GROUP experience boost for the same price, as one package? Paying users would distribute the stacking boost among their friends and would always benefits the 50% boost, provided he often plays with the same friends?
Or what about an affiliated mentor/disciple system? If I pay/offer you a 50% experience boost, you automatically become my disciple, and 10% of the experience you will make is automatically awarded to my character as long as the boost is active? Or we split the bonus 25% bonus for the disciple, and 25% redirected to the mentor.
The same could be done for money. Imagine the situation: Free players would advertise their farming group, inviting Premium users to join them, or sponsor them, as they will receive back a percentage of the bonus XP/money.

Players would be able to build relations with other players based on mutual benefits. Add a ladder with the best farmers of the week, a “trusted” player system to avoid scam, or make sure that the tradable “boost” item is linked to the original buyer (so you know who gets the XP), and you’re good to go.

In conclusion, by adopting the Free to Play payment model, you make sure that your game gets more coverage as you have a lot more players, so it won’t die to inactivity, you also open your game to a larger public than subscription-based games, which in return, increase the potential benefits compared to a subscription-based model.

MMORTS: the rare breed

The MMORTS are a genre of MMO games fairly uncommon. Either they tend to be way too hardcore for the general public, or or too casual to the point they cease to be a MMO, and are just an online RTS with a persistent progression.

Here’s my thoughts on the subjects, and how would I try to make an MMORTS that appeal to a wide audience.

Start small, and then expand.

Did you ever get that feeling that we were creating MMO all-the-freaking wrong way?

Most Indy MMO (or developed by a small team) starts by advertising a big, wide universe. But what’s the point of a character running in a giant empty world?It’s boring.

Of course random generated maps with some SpeedTree are cheaper to make than a real game. but let’s cut the sarcasm for a moment:

A big empty world doesn’t bring much to a MMO. Specially when it spread the community all over it through quests, and no one really interact with other players.

I believe the best way to start with a small team is to develop a MOBA. (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena):
You start with just the pure gameplay & PvP, character progression, and all the core RPG elements of a MMO, then once you have a balance and a solid PvP, you can add a town to remplace ye old interface for your players to interact with each other, and show-off their characters out of the battle… then you can start working on the PvE, and expanding the universe.

Don’t you think this feels like a more doable project for a small team than just starting in all directions to make a MMO?
By starting with a MOBA, you can even release the game early, and help finance the growth of the game.

Crafting : an activity for everyone

Hi, I was reading about different MMOs crafting system when something struck me. They’re all making the same mistake!

I won’t be talking about the Auction house today. It IS a problem in almost every MMO, but that’s not today’s topic.

No… I will be talking about the fact that many crafters are all-knowing gods.

Ethical dillemia in a MMO

Recently, I’ve found a old article about what Jonathan Blow (creator of Braid) said about the MMO trend to make addictive games instead of good gameplay.

• Developers should provide activities that interest players “rather than stringing them along with little pieces of candy so that they’ll suffer through terrible game play, but keep playing because they gain levels or new items”, he says.

The original article

And I simply wanted to say THANK YOU Jonathan.

I know that addictive games are completely unethical. It’s not that different from drugs, or other addictive things. No matter what they says.
However, as a Game Designer, this is also something that we must thread carefully with. All the recent MMO company I’ve met were only talking about their incredible monetization system, and how to squeeze money out of the player.

I agree, we’re here to make money. That’s right. We need that salary to live. But I don’t think it’s an excuse to sacrifice game play.

It’s not that I’m against addicting the player to the game. Nah. I’ve always used all the weapons at my disposition, as long as its available. However, I don’t want to sacrifice the game play like some games were they force the low level players to fight against the highest levels. Supposedly, it encourage people to pay and advance faster in the game. This would require a real study, but I believe we are loosing a fair amount of customers with such “feature”.

Crafting in a Free-to-Play

Most crafting system as we know them were originary designed for subscription based games.

With the recents upcoming of F2P payment models, the crafting is often severely limited, or completely turned off without paying a Gold/Premium subscription.
The opposite would be to let the players freely access it, but that won’t really encourage them to pay for our game.

I would like to throw some ideas and concepts in this article that would design a F2P crafting system that remain fair for everyone, Paying and non-paying users, while still encouraging them to pay should they wishes to.

Permanent Death: can we really do it for a global public?

Among the few features we always hear about when an Indy MMO is about to come out, but quickly gets erased from the design later on, is the Permanent Death.

I would like to start a little brainstorm whether or not we can really make permanent death acceptable for the general public.

Stop punishing the players for playing your game.

Let’s face it, as much people will tell you they enjoy a challenge, in reality, no-one enjoy loosing stuff.

One of the first thing that should probably get removed (or transform) is the death penalty.  We have to stop damaging the player’s gear, or remove him experience every-time he dies. Specially in an online game since many of his death could be the fault of another player, his connection, a bug, or the server itself.
Dying over and over and loosing everything because of troubles not related to you is a deal-breaker. Our goal should always to reward the game for playing, and make his experience online memorable.
But that’s not the only point, here’s a few examples:

Black Prophecy, a grim state of the game

Black Prophecy is a MMO space opera. There’s so few games in the genre that I followed BP with great interest.

I played the game in beta, and went back recently after it’s release to see how it had evolved.

First, the game is extremely beautiful:

However, the general quality of it’s realisation leave much to be desired.

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