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I admit it, I’ve been playing a lot of free to play MMO’s, just wondering if there’s anything that can hold my interest or at least be vaguely entertaining when I want some downtime. Gosh wish I had someone to play D&D Online (*nudge*), I am still holding back so I can experience that wonderful game with others. I have to say that there is a lot of creative work accumulated (lost?) in these MMO’s, but the market has got to have a shakeout and the best of breed can come out on top (D&DO is certainly what I’d call best of breed for F2P, at least what I’ve seen.) Surprised at the number that sell points (in plastic “prepaid phone card” form) at places like Target and 7-11. Wonder how well that’s working out for them. “*hic* Little Jethro needs hisself a burpday presunt, lesse this card looks like that PS3 game he dun play. *hic*” (Apologies to drunk rednecks, I mean no offense. You wouldn’t hit a guy with glasses, would you?)

So one-line summaries of F2P MMO’s I’ve played recently, in some semblance of order from best to worst:

D&D Online – probably captures the D&D experience the most accurately, and has some nice FPS-like elements to the way the combat works. More than once I’ve shouted out loud at some really neat surprises and dungeon design.

Mobinogi – Interesting Korean MMO, deep crafting, almost turn-based combat, deep skill system, mediocre graphics and no pathfinding (in a game where it’s only click to move). Would almost be appropriate for the kids except for Nao’s bouncing knockers.

Dofus – Love the art, great turn-based combat, nice class designs. Bonus for being Flash. Minus for the harsh F2P limits and for not releasing their really nice Wakfu animated series with English subs (yet?) Oh and troublesome release cycles. Oh and annoying navigation in the world; why they couldn’t do scrolling rather than individual screens with hard-to-see “navigate to the next screen” waypoints is beyond me. While 2.0 improves graphics, the gameplay is identical (ok, that’s not necessarily bad). At least they make it a bit easier to move around.

Pirates of the Caribbean Online – Interesting, I hadn’t heard of this one until massively.com noted updates. Lacks gathering and crafting, which I see as a positive generally. Graphics are very dated, seems like early 3DFX graphics or something, but they run fast on my laptop. Voice-acted cut scenes are decent and infrequent (a positive, although you can skip them if you wish.) Combat is melee-oriented, with a nice “click the LMB at the right time to do combo attacks” mechanic. Ranged combat is standard, although they have a “pirate’s code” so no shooting Navy or other humans. Ship combat is awesome if a bit simplistic, with the ability to have multiple crew; usually the captain piloting the ship with others manning guns and everyone gets in on short boarding actions when fighting flag ships. (Guns are allowed there, thankfully…which allows lower-level players to stay out of the melee.) I’d subscribe, if it weren’t $10/mo ($80/yr, decent discount…) Oh, and streaming downloading and MacOSX support are bonuses. Tempting…

4Story – A Korean WoW-alike MMO that has me hooked right now…Small download (~1GB), nice graphics, fast framerate, fairly simple/linear quests, fast leveling. I’m playing a human summoner, which is probably why I’m playing this so much at the moment…When you kill a creature, you can summon that creature. You can only have one summoned creature at a time, but the mechanics work quite well…I direct my creature to attack an enemy, and it leaps forward while I DPS it from the back. Let’s see if it has staying power. Seems they designed the quests to all be done solo, with bosses that are just barely do-able so far. Oh and their screenshot gallery is hi-lar-ious.

Warhammer Online – yeah, it’s only the first 10 levels for free, and lots of nagging, and they canned half their team, but they have their streaming client and support Mac now too. Good time for me to play a bit of destro, which I never did when I subbed. Huh, I really like D&DO’s “fps mode”, I spend most my time in WAR with the RMB held down for mouse control of facing. Distinct gothic fantasy world, yes.

Maple Story – Side scroller MMO, nice controls, limited graphics (duh), exponential difficulty curve. Oh, and for 2-d, it’s easy to get lost.

Combat Arms – Since the two above are Nexon, I’ll throw in that Combat Arms is a great FPS game, very nice graphics, nice controls. Best $0.00 I’ve ever spent on an online FPS.

Ether Saga Online – Wow amazing graphics and world design, creative creature design, BORING combat and lots of grind. Too bad. Wonderful path finding. ‘course, I haven’t made it past lvl 10, and I am guessing the good stuff comes later, but can I survive booooooooring? Oh and I dig the theme (being a bit of a Sinophile.) One reviewer complained about making to lvl 15 without a single fight; I ran out of quests by lvl 8 (and only quest I had was “get to level 10 then go talk to …”) Wrong way to address criticism.

Perfect World International – By the same guys as Ether Saga, more adult-oriented MMO. Equally nice graphics but same grind problems. But cool that they have at least one race that starts with the ability to fly. Combat is overly simplistic and most enemies are non-reactive slugs that do nothing until you smack ‘em. Ether Saga has better pathfinding, too. But I put in well over 20 hours, but the leveling is sooo slow and repetitive I’ve given up. The graphics are so well done, amazing stuff. (Almost as good as Warhammer Online for atmospherics.)

Free Realms – Whoa, way to kiddy and “here’s an excuse for some lame-o minigames.” Yikes, PASS. Guess the kiddies love it?

Dragonica Online – Kiddie 2.5d fighter game, pass.

Neo Steam – Huh, unique world, frustrating controls.

Flyff – Also suffers from frustrating controls and lack of ability to change those controls.

Market forces for game balance – Many folks complain that power X is overpowered or power Y is underpowered. Balance of powers has got to be the most difficult aspect of designing any game, whether it be a card, board, or computer game where multiple players compete. One easy solution to this is to provide a marketplace model to powers. MMO’s have auction houses for equipment, why not allow everyone to start with a blank slate and every power is obtained through an item that can be traded/sold away? Players level by getting a lower-quality item and trading up, say by auctioning off multiple lower-value items for one higher-value item. Give everyone a tiny amount of $ per hour played; newbie players can use it to buy the lowest-rung goodies.

Limited level range for quests – I played Runes of Magic (finally stopped when they wanted to do 3 patches in a row…Um, nah!) and the lower-level quests are supposed to be solved by teams…But higher-level players would come by and offer help (for free, or for pay) and make the quests uninteresting and extremely short. Warhammer Online got this right, to some extent, by having tiers and higher-tier players can’t fight lower-tier players, but they can help with lower-tier quests.

Or have quest difficulty be a function of who’s playing the quest – D&D Online does this, sorta…Running solo? The quest is scaled down. Want to play harder, scaled up. But you select how hard you’d like to play and the rewards are scaled as well. Not too bad…

Streaming clients – Warhammer Online just started this…So now you only need download 1GB. 1GB? Sheesh. Should be able to get that down to 100MB, if you ask me.

Design for your audience!

A good D&D friend of mine thought Hello Kitty e-mails would annoy me. Boy was he wrong! :) I returned the favor by signing up to the Hello Kitty Online MMO. Whoo boy this thing is bad….Whoever is at Sanrio in charge of this thing needs to scrap and start over. First, installation was very convoluted, required multiple account signups and steps, and a 2.6GB download followed by some patches. What kid is going to go through all that to play this? The game has some nice 2d isometric graphics but it’s obvious they’ve slapped graphics (max resolution 1024x768x16) over a standard MMO engine…Usual quests, confusing combat (what in Hello Kitty inspires a designer to put in combat??!?!) and confusing crafting. Consider, instead, the hugely-popular Animal Crossing series…Chat, collect, decorate. Having played the DS version for hours and hours, that is enough to captivate me when the designs are good enough.

Why this thing isn’t Flash is beyond me. Why it takes 2.6GB is equally as confusing. Why they have 10 steps to get this going is laughable. Epic fail.

Soft Rollout

Aion, among other major MMO’s, suffered from huge crowds at launch. Why not do a soft rollout, where folks who want to be first in line pay more (start at $100, drop by $10 per week of the launch.) Reverse auction mechanics work perfectly, and keep the servers from taking a huge dump and keep queues under control.

So been playing D&D Online and having an absolute blast, when I get a chance to play it. I don’t want to play through the game solo, and most of my friends have a myriad of excuses as to why they can’t play, but when I do get one to play we really enjoy it. The instance “module”-style dungeons with puzzles, traps, and other surprises have more than once made me yell out “that’s COOL!”

I also have to say the voice work in D&D Online is very well produced and really adds a LOT to the game. Sure I could read a text box, but how many times have you been questing and you all but ignore all of the text bubbles the NPC’s pop up? The NPC chat is mostly text bubbles still but the “DM” has a voice and that voice really adds a lot. (Apparently, Star Wars Galaxy will voice everybody, which may make me want to give it a try…Hmm.)

Anyways, I have been thinking, one common element of MMOs is the crowded hub…Whether it be the starting point or the main city where everyone visits the vendors and whatnot. Worse are the games that make the central hub artificially huge (Realms of Magic solve this with teleport points in the city, why?)

The Hood

I think the flaw lies in how MMO’s differ from real life–in MMO’s they are designed to take every player through the same series of events in the same order, and important quests and folks are unique and necessary to play. Instead, imagine “growing up” (level up) in a neighborhood where quests, NPC’s, and a smattering of other players are easily accessible in your ‘hood, and those things are unique to where you are. Other folks grow up in other areas entirely, possibly shaping the sort of character they become. Sure, folks could move to other neighborhoods, why not? Of course that would be a time-consuming and entirely unnecessary activity but would have its own benefits of allowing for some cross-pollination. Advanced quests would take players out of their comfort zone and to areas they haven’t visited yet, but not simply to force the player to travel.

Voices Should Come from the Position of the Character

Oh, one other thing, I would LOVE to see positional audio for voice chat…D&D Online has integrated voice (yes! Ventrilo is sooo bad…) Too bad it’s like carrying around a walkie-talkie; push to talk and the audio doesn’t come from the character speaking. It would be really cool to hear your friend’s muffled voice to the right behind that door they got locked on the other side of…

So with the “free to play” (F2P) release of D&D Online, I was all jazzed up to get going with some of my pencil-and-paper (ok, MapTool and Skype) D&D buddies only to be stymied by their inability to find the requisite hardware and to get the s/w to install and run properly. I’ve played through the intro and gotten to town but I’ve stopped and hope that someone who wants to play with me will get it going eventually. (This is the primary reason I dropped out of WAR; my friends stopped playing so I had little draw to the game.)

In the meantime, I thought I’d check out the rest of the F2P landscape and ended up playing Runes of Magic (“Claudnine” on the Osha server). It’s just addictive enough in the player vs. environment (PvE) gameplay to keep me coming back. It’s polished and doesn’t seem to have significant limitations on the free players, unless you want to compete in the player vs. player (PvP) world.

Anyways, playing has got me thinking up ideas for MMO’s:

Immersion and extroversion – One thing I’ve found most/all MMO’s lack is the any ability to communicate outside of the MMO world. It sounds like Eve Online is going to break down that barrier, connecting their game and their game economy to the web and to a laundry list of devices. Bully for them! This is where I think MMO’s can shine, keep you connected in some form or fashion 24/7 from your net-capable phone, your public library’s web browser, whatever. Sure, you aren’t going to get the same experience on the phone, but you could get involved in trading, communicating (all MMO’s have internal e-mail and text chat) and the like.

“Turing’s World” – Imagine an MMO where the sharp distinction between player and non-player character is blurred. You log in to an existing character in the world, perhaps to play him/her/it for a session, perhaps for a long time. You battle other creatures, some of whom may be computer controlled, some of whom may be player controlled, some of whom may switch between computer and player control, and you’d often have difficulty telling the difference. Would be extra-cool to incorporate some game mechanic for determining who is computer controlled and who is player controlled, besides the warm fuzzies you get from trouncing another human player (which is the whole draw for PvP, after all.) Many MMO’s are fairly quiet in the virtual face-to-face encounters; much more occurs on region/world-wide chat and within guilds and groups; casual walking-by folks rarely chat. So in “Turing’s World”, who’d know if a particular creature was backed by flesh-and-blood or not?

Ok, perhaps it is unreasonable expectations. Possibly it was the weather or the luck of the draw. Maybe I didn’t get enough sleep. This was the 33rd year of the Con, has it always been this way or have they gone downhill? If I sound like I’m off-base in my observations, please contact me and give me your observations. I generally enjoy cons (even with the b.o.-filled rooms, overpriced food, crazy scheduling) and was hoping this would be a good one. I hate to throw stones, I know cons are a lot of work to organize and run (having helped organize and staff other conventions in the past) but I feel there were some significant issues with the con that I hope they can address for next year. Is this par for the course for cons, particularly bigger cons, or is this a sign that Dundracon is poorly managed or this year was an off year for them?

First, for the positives:

• Kobolds Ate My Baby – I had a great deal of fun playing this cute independent little game with a wonderful mechanic of “roll Nd6 under your skill to succeed”, where the N is a function of the difficulty PLUS the number of other things you’re trying to do at the same time. Not only was it wittily written and conceived, it was a great deal of fun to play even though we rarely succeeded, and almost as rarely did folks get to eat a baby (we were playing the Kobolds, if you can’t figure that out.)
• D&D 4E conversion of Expedition to the Barrier Peaks – a husband-and-wife team worked together to make for an excellent Saturday evening game, they were gracious hosts, excellent Dungeon Masters, and folks I’d love to play with again. Some of the players were very good too, and it was nice “bootstrapping” an old-timer who’d always played AD&D and never anything later.
• Last Great Empire – the Game Master showed an amazing ability to portray characters straight out of Idiocracy (Hollywood casting directors, take note) and the game was an over-the-top battle from one end of a military research facility to another with much carnage inbetween.
• Overall good gaming all around with some definite highlights.
• The hotel was generally gracious and the food, while not of wide variety, was well priced for gamers and the bar/restaurant was gracious enough to accommodate orders to go for food of higher quality (I enjoyed their garbanzo bean soup with a caesar salad.)
• Good variety of vendors with a range of products (new/used, dice, board/card/RPG, etc.)

Now to the negatives:

• *Awful* registration process – Ok, I am willing to accept that I won’t get into my first pick, and I might not even get into any game in one time slot, perhaps, but here’s how things came down: I didn’t register for anything for Friday evening (see below), Saturday morning I got into a Traveller game that I preregistered for (yay!), Saturday afternoon I didn’t get into any of the 3 games I had preregistered for, Sunday morning I didn’t get into any of the 8am games I had registered for, Sunday afternoon I didn’t get into any games I had preregistered for. Hmm, that’s one out of four?
• Players not showing up for their games – related to the previous issue, it was quite clear that a large percentage of folks who registered (and got slots) in games did not show up for those games. I signed up for (and did not get into) the Barrier Peaks game, I was one of 3 folks who “crashed” game, yes that means 3 out of 8 registrants didn’t show up for a Saturday 4pm game. For the Sunday 10am game that I crashed, I believe 5 out of the 8 registrants did not show up. Is it just me, or is there something significantly useless, if not counter-productive, about having a registration system that is wrong ~50% of the time? Oh, and one more thing, the Sunday game we lost two players who were pre-registered for the game partway through ’cause they went off to another game they had registered for.
• Less than helpful staff – when I realized I didn’t get into any Saturday afternoon games at all, I became concerned that they had somehow only entered in my Saturday morning registrations and had totally missed my later ones. I asked “staff” at the registration desk, “That happens, just crash the game you want.” I asked the registration desk “staff”, “Go ask at the information desk.” I asked the “staff” at the “information” desk, “The registration guy is around here somewhere, possibly up in room 5XX.” Oh nice, so I have to track this guy down, across the entire hotel just to have him tell me that the computer algorithm is infallible and to tough it out, nah I think I’ll crash and hope Saturday afternoon was a fluke. Generally staff were friendly this year (last year they were less than friendly) but they were less than helpful.
• Game Masters not showing up for their games – Friday afternoon I hoped to get into a “drop in” 4pm game run by the Goodman Games staff of a D&D module that I might run in the future (I’m currently using some of their earlier modules.) 4pm came and the table next to ours (also a Goodman Games staffed table) had their DM show up and start the game. Rumors of “the other DM is due any minute now” were quashed after 30 minutes of waiting. Staff were again useless and clueless (gee, seems to me that if a vendor is staffing a game table, someone might know or want to contact the vendor?) Then the Sunday 8am, a much-anticipated D&D game involving only characters from the upcoming Player’s Handbook 2 (unsure whether sanctioned by WoTC or not) was canceled ungraciously. (Only clue was the number listed on the whiteboards used to attach the registration computer printouts.) I probably shouldn’t hold the Dundracon staff accountable for flakes that don’t show up to run their games, but I have to wonder if it could have been handled better?
• No free wi-fi? Rumor had it there was free wi-fi if you knew the magic password. I dunno. This isn’t a big issue, I’m there to game not surf. But perhaps it was a sign of how mediocre I found the con that I was wishing multiple times that they had wi-fi. Not like it was a resort hotel or anything, it’s a purely business-oriented hotel in San Ramon.

In comparison:

• Polycon – I’ve always found their very informal “signup form shows up at the registration table and folks fill in their name by hand, first-come, first-served” mentality. It’s always been reasonably easy to get into the games that interest me and they even have “bench” spots so you don’t have to show up 30 minutes early to be first in line to crash the game. It also reduces the “sign up for every slot even if you have lots of conflicts” problem. The Polycon staff are small and efficient and helpful and cheery.
• Conquest/Pacificon SF/Santa Clara – These folks also have a less formal registration process but I found their “all the games you registered for are full, but you might like this game” human interaction. More than once they placed me or other players in games. Their staff also seemed much more organized and professional about the whole convention experience. While the RPG scheduling seemed more chaotic, the outcomes seemed more positive and beneficial. Their scheduling staff seemed to be more available and communicative.

How Dundracon (or any big con) might get back into my good graces:

• Allow for signups for more than 3 games for a time period–you have a computer system, players should be able to sign up for every game they might find enjoyable. Similarly, allow for signing up to bench spots, so you can at least have a high chance of crashing a game.
• Penalize players and GM’s who don’t show up to games they sign up for (or reward those that do with something.) A simple way to do this would be charge full $50 registration but give back $2/game attended and $5/game ran. Or at least verbally admonish players who skip games and significantly penalize GM’s who don’t show and who don’t communicate why they aren’t showing. While bans in future years might work, I suspect many of the kids who do this are not that forward-thinking.
• Absolutely prohibit someone registered for a game registering for another game that overlaps. (Only exceptions being when multiple people complain about the same game, or [obviously] if the GM doesn’t show or the GM has called the game early.)
• Have more signup games, or have folks bumped from the pre-reg system get priority in drop-in games.
• Have fewer GM’s or give out fewer priority slips – in the games I played, an average of 30% of the players were also identified as GM’s. I suspect many/most ran board, card, or miniature games which take time but are much less work and may have been abused to get into the top games.
• Absolutely have someone with authority and control accessible during key hours and at a central, obvious, location. The computer system should not rule, it should assist. Nothing like a human interaction with some level of assistance to help alleviate frustration.