A Long Time Between Drinks

How Often Should Expansions Be Released?

Since the Wrath of the Lich King expansion was announced a few weeks ago, there has been quite a bit of commentary around the traps. The official World of Warcraft forums have been abuzz with forum posters offering many varied opinions.

One of the opinions that I’ve seen a few times is that Blizzard shouldn’t be releasing this expansion so soon after The Burning Crusade. Even though by the time Wrath of the Lich King is released it will be around a year since the release of The Burning Crusade. Part, perhaps most of this desire for a long gap between expansions is due to the effect on raids and the gear obtained through raiding.

Understandably, raiders don’t want the gear that they have worked so hard to get to become obsolete shortly after they obtain the last piece. At the same time, the experience of the last expansion was devastating on the raiding community. On my server, no-one wanted to raid just prior to the expansion. It became harder and harder to fill a raid. Everyone wanted to wait until it was released.

However, a long period between expansions leaves non-raiders high and dry. Getting from level 60 to 70 didn’t take quite as long as we originally expected, so that even a reasonably consistent casual player should reach 70 well within a year. If that player doesn’t raid, or participate in PvP, there isn’t a lot they can do apart from leveling up another character. Take too long between expansions and those players are likely to cancel their accounts until the next expansion is released. If something better comes along in the meantime they might not come back.

So how long a time should a company have between expansions?

To answer that, lets look at Everquest 2. Since it hit the market there have been three expansions and three adventure packs, and the fourth expansion is in the works and soon to be released.

In the same amount of time, WoW was released a fortnight after EQ2, Blizzard have released The Burning Crusade expansion and are just about to release Wrath of the Lich King.

However, the difference between the Everquest 2 and World of Warcraft expansions is that they are heading in different directions. World of Warcraft is expanding vertically. Each pack increases the level cap (and I’ve heard a rumour that each expansion will do this, but remember it’s just a rumour) and adds high level content but doesn’t add any real mid-level content.

On the other hand Everquest 2 is expanding horizontally. Each of the expansions has added a bunch of mid-level areas, as well as increasing the level cap once to 70. The Echoes of Fayder expansion brought back areas from the original Everquest, but made them accessible to a large range of players. The upcoming expansion Rise of Kunark will once again add a new race to play, expanding the bottom and middle of the game as well as increasing the level cap to 80.

If Blizzard is going to continue to expand World of Warcraft vertically, each time raising the level cap and adding higher level content, then the one expansion a year schedule that they have previously announced would be the way to go. Release more often and raiding will suffer. Release less often and the casual players will disappear.

Having said that though, my opinion is that expansion packs should be released often. I think the developers of Everquest 2 have worked out a decent balance in releasing new content for each content level. The altaholics like myself are happy because of new races and low level content. There’s plenty of different mid-level content around to explore, in fact you’ll out grow it before you can see it all. And there’s regular high-level expansions.

Personally, I think Blizzard should take a page from SOEs book on this one. They certainly have the capacity to do side by side development of expansions or adventure packs, and there is a definite need to expand the middle of the game. I’m not all that keen to do STV again. I’d love an alternate option for 30 – 40.

Tell me what you think. How long do you reckon the period between expansions should be?

I’ve Been Syndicated!

That sounds painful doesn’t it?

Don’t worry, the Mob hasn’t been visiting in order to fit me out with a pair of cement thongs. (You Americans call them flip flops I think.) It’s a lot less dangerous than that.

When I first started Stropp’s World I looked into a number of different ways to publicize the blog. After all, what’s the good of an online blog if no-one reads it, right? One of those ways was by joining a service called Blogburst (which sounds a lot more painful than a Mob visit) which feeds articles from different blogs and provides those feeds to different news services.

After joining up I promptly forgot about it. Until the other day when I received an email inviting me to join. I checked and it turned out that I was still joined up. What’s more was that it turned out that a couple of my articles had been syndicated.

Both USA Today and Reuters picked up my article about the opening of the Fury Beta, while USA Today also picked up my post about how Lord of the Rings Online is planning regular updates. Click on the links to see the articles.

I’m pretty chuffed about this. It’s pretty cool to see my articles presented on not just one, but two major news portals.

Vanguard Server Merges Coming Up

A couple of months ago, Sony Online Entertainment announced that it was going to merge a number of the Vanguard: Saga of Heroes servers. The date for this has now been confirmed for Thirteen existing servers will be merged into four new servers.

At the conclusion of the merge there will be 2 US PVE, 1 EU PVE, and 1 US PVP server.

• Thunderaxe, Woefeather, Gulgrethor, and Hilsbury will be merged into Xeth. (PvE US) This will occur on the 28th of August.
• Targonor, Florendyl, Flamehammer, and Shidreth will be merged into Seradon. (PvE US) This will occur on the 29th of August.
• Gelenia and Infineum will be merged into Halgar. (PvE EU) This will occur on the 30th of August.
• Tharridon, Varking, and Frengrot will be merged into Sartok. (PvP US FFA) This will occur on the 30th of August.

For more information check out the news release, or the forum posts on the merges.

That’s a lot of merging going on. I have to admit though that I’m wondering if this will save the game. I don’t think Vanguard will be shut down if things don’t pick up, well not right away anyway. But if the merges don’t get the game world feeling more lively, it’s only a matter of time. After all look at Auto Assault. When I played the trial a few weeks ago it seemed there were heaps of players. Far more than I’ve seen in Vanguard. Still, NCsoft has recently shut Auto Assault down.

Whenever I’ve played Vanguard, I’ve never seen more than a few players on at any one time. This doesn’t give me the impression of a lively, dynamic world. And that’s what a MMO has going for it. Lot’s of players interacting to make my virtual-life interesting.

Getting more players together should make the world seem more alive, at least in peak times. And if the devs can fix up the issues, especially the technical ones, Vanguard might stop leaking players.

Let’s hope so. A game like this deserves better.

BTW, sorry for the lack of posting this week. Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been a bit fluey, and while I’ve still been going to work, I’ve been pretty thrashed in the evenings. Hopefully things will start picking up as I shake this bug off.

The Politest Spammer Ever

I was just going through my Akismet spam checking for false positives when I came across this little beauty.

hello , you have a very nice site, but Im hired to leave advertising comments on sites, sorry i hate to do it but i have to . If you dont like advertising comments please send me an email with your site address to tedirectory(at)yahoo(dot)com and I will not write on your site. Sorry for inconvenience.

Needless to say I’m not going to respond. After all you know what happens when you do let them know you’re alive. But I have to admit this is the first time I’ve encountered a spammer who has apologised in advance of leaving spam. Full marks for effort.

There’s no need for me to respond either. Only a tiny amount of comment spam ever leaks through Akismet, and it always seems to get held in the moderation queue. Up to now Akismet has blocked over 16000 spam comments. And what does get through is deleted within a few hours.

So Mr. Spammer, if you’re reading this, here’s my answer to your query. I don’t like spam, and I don’t want you to leave it on my site. But even if you do, know that you are wasting your time because it will be stopped by Akismet. BTW, I suggest getting a job where you don’t have to annoy countless thousands of people.

Furious Million Dollar Tournament

Auran, the Brisbane based developer of Fury, has announced that they are holding a global Fury tournament with a million dollars of prizes up for grabs. That’s a million dollars Australian by the way which works out to around 844,000 US dollars. Although the way the exchange rate has been lately, by the time the tournament is complete it will probably be a lot closer to a million US.

The tourny is scheduled for the 15th, 22nd, and 29th of September. This is prior to the official release of the game, which is due in October. Auran is hoping to get over 600,000 participants, including both teams and individual players.

For those of you who are interested, you can get more information and details on how to download the free pre-launch client from unleashthefury.com.

One other bit of goodness from this announcement is the news that Auran will be providing an Australian based server. That should help keep the ping times down. Especially welcome for a fast paced action game like this. It’s a pity that Blizzard still hasn’t given Aussie players some locally based servers.

Update: The Gamecock Media Group has announced the official release date for Fury as the 9th of October. You can now preorder Fury from Gamestop.

Lord of the Rings Online Book 10 Update

Turbine is releasing the next free content update for its Lord of the Rings Online MMO next week on the 21st of August. The following features will be included:

• The Epic Continues! – Amarthiel, introduced in Book 9: Shores of Evendim, has reclaimed the palantir of Carn Dûm and is now seeking to make Annúminas her new seat of power as she searches for her lost ring of power: Narchuil. The Dúnedain stands against her as the Rangers mount a last, desperate attempt to wrest the palantir from Amarthiel. Before she can find Narchuil, a most dangerous opportunity presents itself that may give the Dúnedain the advantage they need to blind the eye of Angmar.
• Legendary Play – Once in the Ettenmoors, players can experience monster play in a completely new way by spending their Destiny Points to play as a powerful Ranger of the North or a terrible Troll to offer a strategic advantage to their allies in the battle for control of the Ettenmoors.
• Critter Play – Friendly barnyard animals love squawking around the landscape, exploring chicken coops, hunting for worms and more! Players can now explore Middle-earth from a different – and sometimes unexpected – viewpoint as a chicken, the first of many new playable critters that will be added to the game in the future.
• New Reputation and Bartering Systems – Book 10 introduces the Reputation and Bartering systems. The Reputation system enables players to earn positive and negative standing with different races and groups in Middle-earth based on both monster kills and quest completions. The Bartering system allows players to trade trophies earned in battle for rewards such as armor sets or mounts.
• Over 100 New Quests – The story continues for players as they aid the Fellowship and encounter new adventures, new dungeons and over a dozen new monsters.
• Enhanced User Interface – The game’s UI is now customizable. In addition to being able to skin your UI with a unique look, Book 10 will enable players to access sliders in their ‘Options’ panel to scale the size of individual elements of the UI to their liking.

It looks like Turbine have been hard at work. One of the complaints that I have heard the most about LotRO is the lack of content, especially at the upper middle levels. It seems though that they are addressing these concerns by regular new content. So far the game has been out for nearly four months and Turbine have released two fairly major content updates. Okay, they haven’t released the second yet, but it’s only a week away.

At this rate, expect Books 11 and 12 to be released before the year is out. And I doubt it will be much longer than that before the first major expansion. Probably around next April.

Extended Maintenance for some WoW Realms

Blizzard have announced extended maintenance for a number of their realms starting on Monday the 13th of August, and a second set of realms starting on the 14th of August. The downtimes are expected to last approximately two days. You can see the list of affected realms on the forums here.

Already the cries for reimbursement are echoing through the forums. Considering it’s a whole two days out of a monthly fee of fifteen dollars, that’ll be a $1 refund.

Of course, there’s always another server to play on. Roll an alt.

The last time that Blizzard did these extended maintenance downtimes was a couple of months prior to the release of The Burning Crusade. At that time they needed to upgrade the hardware to cater for the new content. It has me wondering if the Wrath of the Lich King expansion is perhaps closer than we expect. It’s only about four months to Christmas, and if Blizzard were considering releasing in time for the holiday season, it would be sometime in late November. That way they have boxes in stores ready for the buying season.

On the other hand, it might just be time to upgrade old hardware.

Age of Conan Delayed

With all of the announcements of preorders and business models over the last couple of days, it’s inevitable that there will be some bad news.

Funcom today made the following announcement:

Durham, USA – August 10th, 2007 – Funcom announce a new release date for ‘Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures’. The highly anticipated MMO is now set to release on the 25th of March 2008. By setting a new release date for the game, Funcom can continue the focus on honing, polishing and improving the heralded qualities of the game, ensuring a fantastic MMO experience when it launches next spring.

“We naturally regret that we have to push back ‘Age of Conan’. However, after careful consideration, and analysis of recent Beta feedback, we believe that the new release date is in the best interest of the gamers, our company and our owners,” said Trond Arne Aas, CEO of Funcom. “We are fully committed to delivering games with absolute qualities, and in the current MMO marketplace we know that only the best is good enough to truly succeed. With the new release date we have therefore given ourselves more time to meet and deliver on the massive expectations for the game. We are certain that our choice will ultimately pay off, and that all ‘Age of Conan’ players will get a special online experience.”

”We are honored by the immense reception our game is constantly getting, with an astounding amount of positive press coverage, awards and magazine covers, but we still see that we need to polish some aspects of the game even further, especially when it comes to the entry barriers,” said Gaute Godager, founder of Funcom and Producer / Director on ‘Age of Conan’. “With the added development time we can now deliver something even more unique and powerful, something which is worthy of the incredible Conan legacy.”

‘Age of Conan’ is consistently mentioned as one of the most anticipated PC games in development. It has received numerous magazine covers and awards, including ‘Best MMO of E3′ awards from IGN, GameSpot, GameSpy and Yahoo. ‘Age of Conan’ is a key title in Microsoft’s Games for Windows line-up, as well as being a showcase DirectX 10 title for nVidia. The game is currently in general Beta, and applications for testing are available at http://www.ageofconan.com.

Age of Conan is the second MMO that Funcom have released. While I wasn’t there for the initial release of Anarchy Online, I heard about a lot of the fallout after I did start playing. AO had a really terrible release day. There were all sorts of problems with the servers and the game. Funcom however, managed to get on top of it pretty quickly and a month or two later delivered a pretty solid and fun game that is still going strong.

However, I’m not sure the end of March will be the best time for them to release Age of Conan. With the October 30 release date it looked like they didn’t have too much competition. Sure there’s Fury and possibly Tabula Rasa to compete with. But, next March it’s looking like they will be up against Warhammer and Wrath of the Lich King which are both ‘expected’ in the first quarter next year.

Both of these games are king-hitters in the MMO genre and the releases are going to capture a huge amount of player attention. If any of the other games that are due later this year are pushed back, the competition will be even more intense.

Still, I think players would prefer the game to be in a good state on it’s release, even if they have to wait longer for it. It’s disappointing to hear that a game (or anything) that you’ve been waiting a long time for is going to be delayed. But it’s a lot more disappointing to pull the wraps off and find a game that’s not all that shiny underneath.

What do you think; will this delay, and the possibility of an Age of Conan release around the same time as Warhammer and the World of Warcraft expansion affect your decision to buy AoC?

Fury Business Model

I found the announcement of the business model for Fury today by Auran rather surprising, and rather welcome. Auran are not taking the traditional path of making all their players pay a monthly subscription. Instead the basic game will be free to play with the option to pay a subscription to remain as an immortal.

The hook is that all players, when they first activate their accounts start as immortals for the first month. Then in order to remain as an immortal, they must subscribe for US$9.95 a month.

Immortals will get the following benefits:

• Quick travel in the Sanctuaries and Schools
• VoIP talk privileges
• One additional Item Roll Slot
• Extended “rested gold bonus”
• Selling privileges on the Auction House
• Priority log-in queuing
• Entry into weekly and seasonal Ladders
• Personal player battle statistics
• In-game Customer Service access
• Elite access to the test server to preview new content

This looks like a tremendously casual friendly system. Aside from the rested gold bonus, the priority log ins, and the quick travel, casual players will be less interested in the other features like the seasonal ladders and the battle statistics. VoIP can always be substituted with Vent. The features that casuals would desire can be lived without if necessary.

Auran have also promised that all players, regardless of their subscription status, will have access to all items and abilities, including the most powerful. It doesn’t say, but I’ll assume that means access to all the areas in the game as well.

You’ll still have to purchase the game, but that’s only fair. It’s then up to the player if they want to live without all the niceties that a subscription will offer. At the least it gives a way to enjoy the game for more than the standard 30 days that most give without having to commit right away. The promise is also that there will be regular free content updates.

Fury is currently in beta, and I believe is due for release sometime in quarter four this year.

RSS Feeds – Full or Partial – What Do You Prefer?

I’m considering doing an experiment with my RSS feeds.

I currently provide a full RSS feed to Stropp’s World which will allow anyone to view all of the articles that I publish in a feed reader.

My question to you dear reader, especially those of you who use a feedreader like Bloglines or Google Reader to access the content on this blog, is: Would it make you terribly unhappy if I changed my RSS feed to a partial feed?

If you will be terribly vexed by a partial feed, make sure you drop by and make a comment. Otherwise, I won’t know.

BTW, at the beginning of this month, I mentioned that one of the goals I had for August was to get to 200 RSS feed readers. If you are visiting and would like to get a convenient notification of when I put up a new post, please subscribe to my blog. You can use this link to do so, or click on the chicklet in the first column of the sidebar. Thanks.