With the increasingly colder temperatures there will soon be flocks of pigs flying north to warmer climates and it becomes vitally important to use an umbrella at all times when outdoors.

Oh, and by the way, it looks like Duke Nukem Forever is due out next year according to RPS.

It’s Been Cold. It Might Just Get Colder.

But the latest tidbit of info to come across my browser has me seeing red. (See video below.)

It’s inexcusable in this day and age of borderless Internet to completely cut entire chunks of the world out of accessing your product. It’s one thing to have different distribution agreements with various companies and restrict access based on those, at least a player can still access the game just in their own region, and in any case I think that is bad business too. However, it’s a whole other thing to deny access because a player doesn’t live in Japan, North America, or Europe.

For one thing, you’ve just spent millions creating a product and you don’t want to take my money just because I’m in Oz? Huh. Dumb.

Then of course there is the region lock-in. Will this mean that when I can play your game, I won’t be able to choose the region to play in? I kinda like playing with folks across the world, and the fact is I belong to two multi-national guilds. The Halasian Empire in EQ2, and the multi-game Casualties of War. Not being allowed to play with friends because you live somewhere else sucks.

So Square Enix, when you do eventually allow ‘other’ regions to play your game, guess what, I won’t be interested. I’ll be playing a game where the developers don’t lock players out based on regions.

You can kiss my pale, hairy, arse Square Enix.

Square Enix Can Kiss My Pale. Hairy. Arse.

It turns out that the geniuses (geniii?) in the Funcom Sales and Marketing Department now require a new digital subscriber of Age of Conan to provide a mobile phone number in order to receive a SMS with an activation code. There’s some sort of drivel, err excuse about security and offering a better game experience. (Why an eMail wouldn’t suffice is beyond me.) Bad luck if you are not the proud owner of this type of communication technology I guess. Ysh, rightly feels put out in having to do this, and I don’t blame her.

As you know, this year I’ve entered the wonderful (-ly stressful and time consuming) world of business ownership. In the process I’ve learned a bunch of stuff about business. Possibly the  number one rule of business is this…

Are you ready?

MAKE IT AS EASY AS POSSIBLE FOR YOUR CUSTOMERS TO GET YOUR PRODUCT OR SERVICE!

Doesn’t that sound like commonsense? I mean really, how many brick and mortar stores do you see requiring customers to run an obstacle course just to get to the front door? Well, surviving brick and mortar stores anyway.

Putting barriers in the way stops people from buying your stuff. Even having a storefront in a shopping mall obscured can lower revenue by as much as 40%.

And from what I understand, the online world is even tougher. At least the customer arriving at a store is physically present and may make the extra effort if it’s hard to get to. The online customer is a click away from leaving your site, perhaps forever, and going to a competitor. There’s a huge phenomenom called shopping cart abandonment where someone has gone to all the effort of finding and selecting products and just abandons it all at the final step just because of some simple impediment. How often do you see that at your local supermarket?

Even the recent deletion of lower level Age of Conan characters from unsubscribed accounts is frankly astounding. I know the reason was to force players to resubscribe. But really, didn’t anyone think that after the purge there may be thousands of former players now with ABSOLUTELY NO REASON to resubscribe to Age of Conan. It seems unprecedented to me. I haven’t heard of any other MMO dev doing this. Have you?

So yeah. Funcom seem to have really dropped the ball with all this lately.

Oh, and I almost forgot, here is a transcript from an actual customer service call that I managed to wangle from a Funcom whistleblower before he put it up on Wikileaks. It’s rather revealing…

Funcom: “But Mr Dent, the plans have been available in the local planning office for the last nine months.”

Customer: “Oh yes, well as soon as I heard I went straight round to see them, yesterday afternoon. You hadn’t exactly gone out of your way to call attention to them, had you? I mean, like actually telling anybody or anything.”

Funcom: “But the plans were on display …”

Customer: “On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”

Funcom: “That’s the display department.”

Customer:“With a flashlight.”

Funcom: “Ah, well the lights had probably gone.”

Customer: “So had the stairs.”

Funcom: “But look, you found the notice didn’t you?”

Customer: “Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard’.”

Hmmm…

With thanks to Douglas Adams.

Beware Of The Leopard

But I also reckon that one of the factors for WoW’s success is the ability of players to modify the user interface using the LUA scripting language.

The original World of Warcraft user interface was pretty ordinary. But over the years, players have added thousands of mods that make nearly every facet of the game easier to manage. Sure, some of the mods have made some activities too easy, so Blizzard has effectively nerfed them. The Decursive addon comes to mind here. But for the most part, lots of mundane activities have been made more manageable.

It looks like the folks over at Turbine think this too. Massively have posted about the recent announced that they are going to open up Lord of the Rings Online to allow players to create LUA based scripts. The only restrictions so far are no botting or macroing.

I reckon this is a great idea. User interfaces are not easy things to design and I think you can see this in a lot of games, not just MMOs. They can take a long time to get right, and aren’t always suitable for all players. A bad user interface can dramatically reduce the amount of time a player will put up with the game. By allowing players to mod the UI, not only does Turbine extend the life of their game for some players, they have access to thousands of amateur user interface developers and can do what Blizzard have done over the years — take the best ideas and incorporate them into the game.

I’ve always been at a bit of loss as to why other developers haven’t done the same. It’s certainly worked for Blizzard, and you’d expect with so much copying of Blizzards look, feel and gameplay elements going into other MMORPGs, that UI modding would be copied too.

If this initiative is successful for Turbine and Lord of the Rings Online, then perhaps we’ll see more in future games.

LotRO Allowing Players To Mod The UI With LUA

So just some initial thoughts.

• I’m not taken so much by the name. Kingdoms of Amalur sounds pretty generic to me, but that may just be the result of seeing so many MMORPGs with similar names.
• Speaking of generic, and quoting through Heartless_ of Heartless_Gamer, RA Salvatore says that he has created a Tolkienesque 10,000-year-long back story: “I think we can say that we are talking about a high fantasy world with multiple races.” I tend to agree with Heartless_ on this point. A high fantasy Tolkienesque world? Why?
• YAHFWLG? (That means Yet Another High Fantasy Warcraft Like Game?) Are we going to see Orcs and Elves yet again? Paladins? Warriors? Mages?
• Generic World of Warcraft clone comes to mind.
• I’m definitely disappointed by this announcement.

Look. I don’t mind fantasy games. In fact I quite like and enjoy them, and love Tolkien, but High Fantasy has been done to death. It’s time for something different.

The crazy thing is that there is so many other fantasy styles out there. I loved The View From The Mirror (Amazon) and The Stone Mage and the Sea (Amazon) series’ by Aussie authors Ian Irvine and Sean Williams respectively. There’s not an Orc or Elf in sight. They’re just wonderfully conceived fantasy worlds. Robert E Howard created the richly detailed Conan universe, and while that particular world is claimed by Age of Conan, there is nothing stopping anyone else using those concepts in a game. And then of course, there is Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series from which to get some inspiration.

Remember when the Mad Max and Terminator movies came out? (I’m showing some age here) They quickly became cult classics. And suddenly Hollywood starts releasing a whole lot of B-Grade post-apocalyptic movies, some with Robots From The Future and some without. Many of these movies are lost in time, and best left there.

Sometimes I feel this way about MMORPG games. EQ, a success, spawned WoW, a megahit, and suddenly the bad B-Grade copies start popping up.

Now to be fair, we don’t have too much detail on Amalur yet, and 38 Studios might actually be doing something quite radical with the design of the game. But frankly, this initial announcement doesn’t give me much hope that this game will be, as the USA Today article says, a breath of fresh air.

It feels like more of the same.

Update: It looks like I am mistaken and Amalur isn’t Project Copernicus after all. It turns out that it’s an action RPG that 38 Studios are developing called Project Mercury, which I hadn’t heard about before. This other USA Today article gives more details on that. My apologies to 38 Studios. Thanks for the tip Longasc.

Schilling Announces Amalur. Just Another World of Warcraft Clone?

There were a few people who didn’t think that Blizzard would back down over requiring their forum posters to use real names through Real ID, but it appears that they, in fact, did. Mike ‘Nethaera’ Morhaime posted on the Blizzard forums saying that, at least for now, real names would not be required.

It does appear that the response from the World of Warcraft player base gave the folks at Blizzard quite a surprise. Up until this post the very few blue responses, from WoW Europe, were along the lines of, “Hey we hear you, but this Real ID thing is set in stone. Tuff cookies…”

I suspect that for once the number of players saying that they had cancelled their subscriptions over Real ID did actually match up with reality, or came close to it. My guess is that someone took a look at the account cancellation graph after three days and saw a spike far above norm. I’d love to know actually how many did decide to leave the game.

It just goes to show that the only real way that a consumer can effect change in a company policy is by voting with the wallet.

Now the big question for Blizzard is if they can regain the trust of these players enough to win them back.

Power To The People

All they have to do is get all loud and vocal about how they’ll never violate your privacy and how they respect your right to be anonymous. Add a few humorous adverts poking fun at Blizzard, and I’m sure they’ll capture more than a few of the players quitting World of Warcraft over this issue.

Mr Developer, this is called a Unique Selling Proposition, something I’ve been learning while doing my business planning. It means that in order to do well in a market, you have to offer something that the other guy doesn’t. In this case, a respect for privacy and anonimity is something you can show that you do better than Blizzard.

Real ID Is A Golden Opportunity

I get up this morning and check my feeds before heading out and what do I see?

Blizzard has decided to force users of the official forums to use Real ID. That’s right, if you want to post or reply to a post on a Blizzard forum (World of Warcraft, Starcraft 2, Battlenet) then your real life details will be available for the world to see. Unsurprising, the thread linked to above is huge, and the other on the WoW forums is the longest ever.

That’s a game changer to me. In a previous post I stated the reasons why I will not use Real ID when playing WoW, so there is no reason to go into them again now. But suffice it to say, this is making me think twice about resubscribing to WoW for Cataclysm, and even about buying Starcraft 2 in the first place. At the very least I won’t be posting to the official forums again.

There’s always a silver lining though. The owners of unofficial WoW and SC2 forums will probably find that membership on their sites improves as people who don’t want their personal details posted online migrate over. If you own such a forum, now might be the time to put a bit of polish and shine on it.

Hopefully the amount of people on the forums against this will bring Blizzard to their senses.

Now You Have To Use Real ID If You Want To Post

Early on he states.

I daresay the majority of people who enter MMOs today would prefer to be immersed in a virtual world of adventure than deposited into a theme park of amusement and fun if offered the choice. Sadly, that choice is not available in today’s market. Instead the player just follows along the predetermined storyline that the quest designers lay out in front of them. Never questioning, never deviating from the golden path.

I daresay that he’s right that some people who enter MMOs would prefer the adventure, but the majority? No, unfortunately humans love the easy way.

Just look at the number of people who go on, lets say, an adventure camping trip as opposed to going to Disneyland for their holidays. The theme park attendee numbers vastly overwhelm the wilderness sandbox folks. Despite the absolutely amazing things you can do in nature (an off the trail horseback ride in Alaska’s Denali National Park with just me and the guide was one of the most marvelously memorable things I’ve ever done) the sad fact is most people will spend all their holidays staying in motels and going to Disney and Six Flags. If they ever do something adventurous, it will probably be only once.

It ends up being simple economics. All companies, not just game developers, will go to where the market lives. And, the bigger the company, let’s say Blizzvision, the more compelled they are to reach the biggest market possible. Hence Blizzard will continually refine World of Warcraft to meet the expectations of casual gamers who want their games to be fun, and not an adventure.

This is also why the big game developers aim for the status quo of MMO design. They’re after the casual segment. They can’t afford not to aim for the casuals.

The good news is that there are plenty of small niche adventure businesses out there that target the much smaller market. The guide who took me on the cross country horseback ride was in the process of packing up for the winter and moving down south. He targeted a small niche market out in the boonies that made him a good enough living to run that business on half a years revenue. Would he have made more money offering pony rides in the Disneyland carpark? Maybe, but the risk of being put out of business by the big company would have been higher.

In the same way, there are game developers that are targeting the niche MMORPG market. CCP for example with Eve Online. It’s no Blizzard, but it’s happily making good money running a sandbox game that players love.

Perhaps that’s where the immediate potential for change in the MMORPG market lies. The niche developer, not the giant game publisher.

And, one other thing. I’ve also been to Disneyland, Universal Studios, and other theme parks, as an adult. They were fun and engaging and I had a great time.

So are theme park MMORPGs. What’s wrong with fun?

Themeparks Vs Adventure

I currently don’t play World of Warcraft.

Okay, a little facetious, I know. I’m quietly enjoying myself in Everquest 2, dungeon crawling and even doing a little raiding with my guild, The Halasian Empire. When Starcraft 2 comes out I’m not sure I’ll be buying it straight away anyway. However, even then I’ve gone on record as saying that I’ll be creating a separate Battle Net account for SC2.

But… I do intend to have a go at Cataclysm at some point. I expect that to release around November, so the Christmas break (not that running my own business affords break time, even over the holidays) might give me some time to whip up a Worgen. But even then I won’t be using Real ID, and these are the reasons.

1. I don’t have any real life friends playing WoW. Blizzard themselves do not recommend Real IDing anyone who is not known to you in real life, from the Real ID FAQ. Real ID is a system designed to be used with people you know and trust in real life – friends, co-workers and family — though it’s ultimately up to you to determine who you wish to interact with in this fashion.
2. The identifier for Real ID is the email address used for my BattleNet account. Okay… not really secure and something Blizzard also doesn’t recommend. This is from a Blizzard Support article, A leading cause of accounts being compromised is from players willingly sharing their account information, such as with personal acquaintances… Okay, to be fair they’re talking about login information here. Oh wait, your Real ID *is* one half of your account login info. Once they have your username, all they have to do is guess your password. BTW, you should also note from the same article, Please note that not being aware of the fact that sharing account information is a violation of the game’s Terms of Use does not result in leniency in the enforcement of the policy. The results of sharing account information can be severely detrimental for everyone involved, and Blizzard must enforce this policy consistently in all cases. So not only is giving someone your Real ID sharing half your account login info, it’s also violating Blizzard’s own terms of service. Now there’s a Catch 22 for you. (I love that book!)
3. I want to maintain my privacy, or at least the illusion of privacy. I simply want to be known as Stropp, or Bargearse, or Phlebas or any one of the number of monikers I’ve chosen for myself over the years. (I’d probably choose the Stropp alias seeing as it has been the one I’ve given the most effort to ‘branding’ due to this blog.) While I have no illusions of the fact that anyone could probably find my real name out very quickly, I’d prefer to keep some boundaries between my gaming and ‘real’ lives even if a Google of my name shows no information about me, except for a couple of programming forum posts from years back and the fact that I share my name with a couple of actors and the inventor of a Formula One racing car engine.
4. I also like, from time to time, to have some alone time. I want to be able to flip a switch on Real ID and become invisible to the rest of the gaming world. If I decide to devote several hours to a Horde character on a different server without being available to my guild for whatever, I want to be able to do that. That doesn’t seem to be something that Blizzard wants me to be able to do, even though other IM services offer that facility. In real life I can let my phone go to the answering machine if I’m eating dinner or watching a movie, and the caller doesn’t know if I’m home or not, so no offence. Let me do the same with Real ID Blizzard, let me choose to which characters and games that Real ID will apply.

Real ID, as I said at the start of this post, is a really promising feature to add to Blizzard’s stable of games. The whole social networking thing is going to be a big part of the future, not just of games, but communication and even business and government. However it has to be managed properly in order to win trust. It seems to me that someone at Blizzard, or perhaps above them in the Activision management chain, had the idea that some kind of social networking feature would be good and demanded it be implemented without giving thought as to the ramifications. Unfortunately, that gives us this half-arsed implementation of Real ID.

So come Cataclysm, or perhaps before if I get the urge to play World of Warcraft, if you see me in game and ask me to do the Real ID thing with you, please don’t be offended at a polite no. At least, until Blizzard addresses my concerns. Then I’ll reconsider my stance.

(BTW, during my research I noticed that there is an incredibly unpopular US government law called the Real ID Act. Why did Blizzard choose to name their social networking system after something that has generated such bad feelings? Like I said half-arsed, and badly thought out.)

Why I Won’t Be Using Real ID