As I have been diving in to Facebook games, I discovered that in order to succeed in the games I had to add strangers to my friends list. Unfortunately, this has a side effect that is quite bad. As Facebook has become more popular and the use of Facebook Connect and other APIs has grown, my Facebook friend list travels with me lots of place. I don’t mind my real friends following me around, but game strangers who I only added because I needed more people to advance in a game since no more of my real friends would play I don’t want them around.
Last year I bought a Palm Pre. Best phone I’ve ever owned or used, absolutely love it. One of its best features is Synergy, which is what they call the blending of profiles without syncing them. So, I added my Gmail account, my Facebook, my AIM, my work Exchange account, and so on, and when I look at my contacts it shows them all, in one view, duplicates are combined into a single entry but not sync’d. For example, I have my older brother as a friend on Facebook, a contact on AIM and an entry in Gmail. In the Pre, I see his picture with a small subscript 3 telling me that this entry is a blending of three accounts. If he updates his Facebook profile, that will automatically update in my phone, but items in his Gmail contact entry only change when I update them.
Combining my Pre with my recent use of Facebook games and suddenly I had dozens of people in my phone, with phone numbers, whom I don’t know. This is the side effect, and this is why I removed all those people as friends on Facebook. Going forward, playing games on Facebook is going to be harder, slower.
The failure of most Facebook games is this: you have to choose, sacrifice social for games or sacrifice games for social. That’s a horrid dilemma for a social gaming platform. Facebook needs a way for people to be game-friends that links them for the game but for nothing else, and gives people the option of allowing that relationship to grow and step outside the game. Until that happens, I choose Facebook as a social platform, not a gaming one.
Additional Note: I have noticed that in some games you can get what I am calling “former friend benefits”. Taking Hero World as an example, once I add a person to my Super Team, I can remove them from my friend list but my team size doesn’t decrease. While this prevents me from using them actively in the game (training, gifts, etc), I can still use them passively (my super team is currently 37 people, even though I only have 8 or so that are on my friend list) for content that requires team sizes of a certain level.
I was about to start this by saying “Despite the fact that I hate FarmVille…” but that wouldn’t be correct. I didn’t hate it, I just found it boring. So, instead, let’s begin… Despite being bored by FarmVille, one thing I do think that game got right is in rewarding you not just for doing, but for helping others. You could argue that all MMORPGs do that in their end game, because you can’t solo end game group and raid content, so you have to help other people. But most of the game isn’t like that, especially World of Warcraft.
Let’s take, for example, the ubiquitous “kill ten rats” quest. You find an NPC and he says, “I hate rats. Kill ten of them and I will reward you.” But what if the NPC said, “I hate rats. Help someone else kill ten of them and I will reward you.” It’s a subtle difference, but it means you can’t run off a kill ten rats by yourself and finish, you have to find someone else, group with them, and kill rats together. Obviously this quest works best if you find someone who has the same quest (or you share it with them) so that you both are helping someone else kill ten rats. Or better yet, you get five people together and you go whack ten rats as a large group and everyone finishes the quest.
What if the game was filled with a majority of quests requiring the presence of at least one other player (so, you could still two-box or play as a duo with your significant other) in order to do them?
Take it a step further, and while most current games are filled with solo content and the occasional group required one, what if the game was mostly grouped quests with the occasional “do this one alone” quest that popped you off into an instance by yourself?
Would such a game interest you? I know it would interest me…
Yeah, yeah, I know “forced grouping sucks!” But so does solo kill stealing antisocialness.
One thing I’ve mentioned a time or two on this blog is how I miss the old days when there was more, what I call, casual socialization. The ironic part is that while it felt casual, it wasn’t. EverQuest was hard and slow to play solo (not impossible), and so grouping with other people was very desirable. While lots of people hated this “forced” grouping, the fact is that it lead to people having to talk to each other. World of Warcraft, on the other hand, is so easy to play solo that barely anyone ever grouped, so much so that they had to invent an instant group making tool AND make it work across servers to get people to go do group instances. That’s not entirely true, people were doing group instances to a degree, but how it was being done is the point of this post.
Playing EverQuest felt like this:
While playing World of Warcraft felt like this:
In EQ, my guild always felt like a subset of the server. I raided with my guild (and their alliance) and I grouped with my guild, but I also grouped fairly often with other random people from other guilds and even raided with public raids (not to be confused with pickup raids where someone stands around shouting that they are forming a raid, but planned ahead of time, posted on the server message boards and open to signups by anyone). In WoW, my guild felt like it was my entire world. I raided with my guild and I grouped with my guild, and that’s it. Occasionally out in the world working on a quest I’d casually group with someone working the same quest (kill ten raptors goes faster for everyone around if you group up… collect ten raptor hides, however, is a cutthroat business), and at the lowest levels you might find a random group doing an instance, but only back before about 2006 or so because nowadays most people just race solo through the low level content to get to “the real game”.
I want to love my server again, my whole community, not just my tiny corner of it. But how do we do that? Unfortunately, the answer is less instancing and less easy solo content. In general, people will, even when it is detrimental, choose the path of least resistance. Soloing is easier than grouping in that you don’t have to contend with the personalities of others and you don’t have to share rewards, when you make soloing also better experience and progression, people stop choosing to group except when in their own niche of the community, their guild. When guilds don’t have to contend, compete and share content, they don’t have a reason to talk to each other. Instead they’ll just go off into their own instance and get their own loot.
Of course, this all depends on what you want out of an MMO. If you want a game, if you want pushing buttons to defeat monsters, if you want loot and to “grow” your character, above all else, then you want easy solo and instancing. But if you are like me and the game, the fighting, the loot and advancement, are all secondary to playing in the world with other people, then you want harder solo and shared content. Currently, WoW rules the roost. It makes the most money, and money controls the flow of design, so every game since WoW took over the market has tried to be like WoW, more game, less world. This is a great thing if you love WoW, except if you love WoW why would you want to leave a game you have investment in for a game that is exactly like WoW only you are level 1 instead of level 80? Couldn’t you get the same experience on an alternate character in WoW?
In the meantime, I keep trying new games and hoping to find one with less easy solo and less instancing and more community inside the game world. If you know of any, where you play with people not in your guild frequently because it has a vibrant community in the game, I’m all ears…
Looking at Facebook games I’m going to tackle a big one first: FarmVille. The idea behind the game is that you build a farm, harvest crops and stuff for money which you use to build more farm. There are two forms of money in the game, Coins and Cash. Coins are what you get naturally just playing the game for most actions, Cash is what you can buy with real dollars. Now, you can buy Coins with real dollars and you can get Cash through the game, but they are primarily obtained as first described. You can also visit your neighbors’ farms and do chores to help them out.
 Ring around the Character One of the first things you are likely to notice if you go visiting other people’s farms is that the majority of them have something like pictured to the right. A few carefully arranged objects, be they bales of hay or fences or whatever, so that your character can’t move. See, when you click on things in your farm, like land to plow or crops to harvest or cows to milk, your character will walk over to those things and then do the work. By restricting character movement, all actions are performed as you click on them instead of waiting for your character to walk to them. This, of course, is preferred since the game involves lots of clicking and, if you go on long enough, big farms with lots of walking. My farm doesn’t have this, because it looks stupid. However, I have noticed that many of my neighbors stopped coming to do chores at my farm after the first time or two because without me putting up the barrier it just takes too long for them to do chores.
 Packed in like things that are packed in tightly To the left here, you’ll see animals, the other large aspect of FarmVille. Animals wander around if you let them, but this can lead them to finding their way into places behind things where you can’t click them, so most people just place them, click them and issue the “stay” command so they don’t move around. As you get more animals, you need room for them and since space is scarce in this game, most people end up just packing the animals in a corner, sometimes in a pen, all lined up. It makes for easier care, though PETA would be very displeased. I let my animals wander, which only affects me since visitors interact with buildings (like chicken coops) and not individual animals. Overall, like the barriers, lines of animals looks stupid, but the game doesn’t reward you for pretty, it rewards you for clicks.
The game also rewards you for spam. I respect that FarmVille is intended to be a social game, but every time something happens in game there is a pop-up asking me if I want to post this event to my news feed. I tend not to do these because I find them to be tacky. Choosing that road limits my game, of course. When I do chores, sometimes I get prizes, like special mystery eggs for feeding people’s chickens, but I don’t really get those prizes. Instead, I get a pop-up that says I found an item to give away, and I have to post an announcement on my feed for people to click on so they can get the prize. I never see these posts from other people because I long ago hid the FarmVille application since the constant bombardment of posts was destroying my ability to actually read real feed updates from my friends. Facebook has evolved, and I probably could find a way to see what my friends have to say without game spam, but I’m too lazy to figure it out. So, since I don’t see people giving away stuff, I don’t give stuff away. Not by news feed spam anyway.
Reciprocity is the center of FarmVille. When someone gives you a gift, you are able to send them a thank you gift, and it is really easy to do. So in order to get gifts, you have to give some away. In order to maximize your advancement in the game, you need items and the best way to obtain those items is to give those items away. If, for instance, you want to build your stable for horses, you need items like nails and bricks and harnesses. The best way to get those is to give them to other people. It is sort of accepted in these games that if someone gives you an item, when you thank them with a return gift you should give them the same thing back. So, give to others what you want to get for yourself. Don’t worry about the cost, giving gifts is free, but I believe Facebook imposes a limit on the number of “invites” a game can send out per day, so make sure you only send to people who always return the love. This is also why FarmVille is constantly asking you to post things to your news feed, because there is no limit to how often a game can post to your feed.
So, beyond the clicking and the gifting, what is there to do in FarmVille? Design your farm! However, very few people really do this as a good looking farm is less efficient than it can be, so most farms are just clumps of money earning with little eye for design. I wanted to make my farm look as farmy as possible, but the game hindered me in that because a number of items, most noticeably many buildings, cannot be rotated. This restricts the number of places I can put these items and have them make sense. In the end, I was frustrated that I couldn’t get my farm to look the way I wanted. All the pieces were there, I just wasn’t allowed to arrange them in the way I wanted. This led me to not caring about my farm, which led me to playing less. I began intentionally choosing crops that matured in 4 days so that I could return less often. This decision restricted my choices of crops which further led me to not want to play.
Overall, the game is boring. This parody commercial actually captures much of what I feel about the game.
Back to the beginning of this review, Coins and Cash. FarmVille is made by Zynga and if you’ve been floating around the gaming end of the Intarweb you might have heard two things about them. First, they have made buckets and buckets of money. Second, they made that money, in part, by scamming people. Games on Facebook make money in three ways if I understand it correctly. The first is the old Internet standby of Ad impressions and clicks. The second is direct sales (buying game cash). The third is through partner referrals. The third one is where the trouble pops up. Essentially, you go into the game and click on the tab to buy game Cash and down at the bottom they have a bunch of deals. You can buy 115 Cash for $20 direct, but they’ll give you 127 Cash if you click the Blockbuster link and sign up for an account (and pay for at least one month). Now, from the consumer perspective, the Blockbuster link is the best deal because you can get a plan for $4.99 a month (plus some taxes and fees) and cancel after 1 month: 127 Cash for $5. The reason they do this is Blockbuster is betting that they’ll turn enough of those first month people into subscribers (and they probably have details statistics that say something like 1 in 10 people who sign up remain subscribers for a year, 1 in 10 for 6 months, 3 in 10 for 3 months, and so on), so Blockbuster kicks back to Zynga an amount of cash per person that makes them want you to do the partner link instead of giving them a straight $20. In fact, the values of Cash purchased direct are more than likely priced specifically to make you prefer the partner links. $5 with Zynga only gets you 25 Cash, but $5 with Blockbuster gets you 127. Where would you rather spend your $5?
But where does the scam come in? It is in the other links. You see, many people don’t want the hassle of signing up for Blockbuster, even if it is the “better” deal, so they’d rather just give cash for Cash. Zynga directly accepts Visa, MasterCard, Discover and Paypal. But not everyone has credit cards or use Paypal, however just about everyone has a cell phone. Through a number of partners, Zynga accepts payment through cell phone. You just click a link and then text a code to a number and you get your Farm Cash and the charge is just added to your next cell phone bill. How easy is that? Super easy!! What is usually hard to tell, though, and is where people cry foul, is that some of these cell phone pay services charge a monthly service fee. So while you might jump at the chance to send $20 to Zynga for FarmVille and just tack that $20 on your phone bill, the company handling all that money moving is going to require (usually in the fine print and terms of service that 99.99999999999% of people foolishly never read) that you subscribe to their service (which you do by simply authorizing the original charge with that code you text) which is often anywhere from $9.99 to $19.99 a month. And, naturally, Zynga gets a kickback on that. We could argue until the sun burns out about who is responsible, the consumer for not reading the terms, the service company for not making them more prominent instead of buried in legal jargon, or Zynga for not mentioning that those services charge a fee, but at the end the truth is that they are all responsible. People should pay attention, service companies should be required by law to clearly and prominently explain their fees, and Zynga should section off those alternate payment methods under a label that says they charge a fee.
At the end of the day, FarmVille gets a “C” for being mildly amusing yet boring and annoying, but Zynga gets a giant “F” for being unapologetic money grubbing douchebags. Making money isn’t evil, but you don’t have to be a dick about it.
Spawned from this article from Kotaku and Gamespy, this post by David Jaffe got me thinking… I’ve played through a few single player games that end up taking twenty or more hours to play, some longer. Which since I tend to only play for an hour or two maybe once or twice a week means that these games take ten to fifteen weeks to finish, some longer. Now, while I’m willing to accept that part of that is my fault, another part of it is that one of the reasons I only play for an hour or two once or twice a week is because there are parts of many games that feel like repetition or filler. Many twenty hour games could easily be pared down to ten hours, if not five or less, by streamlining.
If you make a game that consists of three or four hours of genuine “fresh” game play and then seventeen or more hours of “repeating” game play, I think you might be doing it wrong. Multi-player games can more easily get away with repeating content because it is the other players than change. A good example of this is Left 4 Dead. I can play the same campaign with the same three other people and still have a different experience because the weapons are in different locations, the hordes happen at different time, and the other players don’t play the same every single time. But in many single player games, once you learn how to fight monster X with weapon A, repeating that a thousand times gets boring, and this is usually the point I save the game, turn it off and go do something else. I’ll come back later and play some more.
Like David, I think I’d rather see game companies trim down their product, give me a concise, powerful, exciting four or five hour story for about $10. Then sell me downloadable story additions, four to five hours in length for $10 each. If your game works as multi-player, give me a multi-player mode and then sell me new map packs or game modes for $5 or something. But as it is, despite their being a good number of awesome looking games on the shelves, looking is all I’m doing because $60 and all that time is just too much.
I’m a huge fan of the old Myst series of games. Puzzles and story, no combat. Awesome.
Back when I was heavier into GameTap, I finally got a chance to play Myst Online: Uru Live … for about two days because they were shutting it down. Hence the title of this post…
Well, thanks to Massively I have discovered that it is coming back, again. And it is free!
I’m definitely going to be checking it out. I might even look into their Open Source project.
Lately, I’ve been diving into Facebook games so that I can see what they are all about. Overall, I’m fairly disappointed in a good number of them. Not in the game themselves, but in how they are implemented on Facebook.
I’m not new to online gaming. I’ve got an Xbox 360 and there are people on my friend list there that I met playing Left 4 Dead or Burnout Paradise or some other game. I’ve played MMOs and I know people from EverQuest and World of Warcraft and other games I’ve dabbled in. I understand, and actually desire, the need for other people. However, the way games integrate into Facebook, it requires me to be extra vigilant in how I handle my gaming friends.
In order to progress in most of these games, you need friends. I suppose you could spam messages out to all the people who are your real friends and beg them to play, but not everyone wants to play Facebook games, so it is not uncommon to need more game friends than your real friend list gets you. Most games, on their pages, have discussion boards where people can ask to be added as friends. Now, I can’t just add you as a FarmVille friend, I have to add you as a Facebook friend. Facebook does allow me to add people to lists, of which I have one called “Not” for people who are not my friends, and manage what they have access to and then I can hide them from my news feed so that I never see their stuff, but it just seems like hoops I am jumping through.
A perfect example of this is a game called Hero World. It is fun, if tedious at time, but the main element is that the number of people in your super team directly influences how powerful you are. So, people with more friends are more powerful. Scouring my list of real friends, I came up with 9 who wanted to play Hero World. With the max team size somewhere around 250, clearly my team was weak, and therefore I was weak. Moreover, I found that in order to buy bases and continue growing my own character I needed more friends. I utilized my “Not” group and made some new “friends”. Yay! I’m more powerful! And now I’m getting spam from people I don’t know!
Perhaps I’m just missing the point, perhaps I just don’t get it, perhaps I am becoming the old man screaming at the kids to get off his lawn, but to me a “friend” is someone I know. What passes for “friends” on Facebook just don’t seem to fit the definition. Facebook already makes a distinction between a friend and a fan, so why not allow someone to be application level friends where we can play a game together without the instant intimacy of being a “friend”?
Anyway… having been banging at some Facebook games for a while now, I’m going to start putting up reviews of them in the near future…
Back in November, I started a thread over on the Epic Slant forums entitled “Does everything need to be an MMO?” The spark for that post came from the various announcements of features for the upcoming Star Wars: The Old Republic. Things like full voice, instancing, henchmen, focus on story, etc. all lead me to believe this game is going to play like a single player game where you might sometimes group up with other people. I mean, how advanced is the story telling a full voice going to be? If I get a mission to hunt down an escaped criminal, and we end up having to kill him, only as the healer of the group I stood in the back while my buddy killed him, will the quest text change to reflect that? Will my buddy’s name be a part of the quest or will it be like every other game and proceed either a) thanking me for something I didn’t do, or b) generically offering thanks without naming anyone in specific. Obviously, there is a lot of “wait and see” when it comes to these things, but as I said in the thread, as more is announced I’m getting further and further from purchasing at launch. As it is right now, I’m probably going to wait at least three months because I want to make sure the advancement and progression of the game doesn’t fall apart.
Over at The Banstick is a post about Away Team Tactics in the recently launched Star Trek Online. It looks very cool. But I have to wonder why I’m subscribing to an MMO to play a game with an NPC team. Tying back into the forum post linked above, from my time in the STO beta I can say I absolutely would have jumped into this game if it were a Single Player RPG with a subscription option to participate in the MMO elements and perhaps some downloaded expansion packs later on.
Global Agenda, despite being more FPS than RPG, has an interesting model. You buy the game, and that buys you the typical FPS. There is a good overview at That’s a Terrible Idea. If you decide you like the game, you can subscribe which gets you access to more game play modes and other MMO type elements (in game email, auction houses, player run bases, and more).
STO could do this by making solo play planet and space exploration free, as well as perhaps a few “arena” style PvP areas, even some multi-player PvE stuff, then having a subscription to actually participate in Federation vs Klingon vs other empires and have an impact on the balance of power.
I really hope that more games that want to be MMOs consider Global Agenda’s model, as I think it is a superior one. It allows players to scale up and down their participation and their cost without the all-or-nothing simple subscription model. As it stands, from the beta I won’t be picking up STO as it, to me, felt a lot like Pirates of the Burning Sea which I also sort of liked but felt it was too much to pay for what I was getting. But I’ll probably pick up Global Agenda, and if I enjoy it I may drop in to the full MMO from time to time when I feel its worth it.
To get back to the original question posed by the title, “MMO” is the latest craze in gaming buzzwords. WoW has delivered so many money bags to the offices of Blizzard that every title wants to cash in, to be an MMO, whether they would be good at it or not. I think more companies should take the time to consider if their game is actually going to be worth playing, and paying for, as an MMO and then design accordingly. Either make an MMO or a Single Player game with some MMO elements, but don’t make a Single Player game and then charge a monthly fee for it.
Text MUDs really didn’t have much of a perspective because they didn’t have a camera. You entered a room and were given a description of the room. Anyone in the same room was “within reach” and to get out of reach you left the room. Once games went graphical, the camera became a part of the game. On one side you have Ultima Online which followed the Ultima top-down isometric, decidedly 3rd person. On the other side you had EverQuest which owed its perspective to Doom and Quake and other 1st person shooters. Later on, EQ would free up the camera so that people could play in 3rd person, but the game was designed such that you didn’t really gain much from it (unless you were pulling, in which case you could use the 3rd person camera to look around corners and behind other obstacles). As MMOs have moved on, pretty much all of them have opted for the more tactical 3rd person view. Pulled back, staring at the back of your character, giving you an almost omniscient view of the world. It is very popular, in large part I suspect because it makes the game easier. When you can see around yourself in 360 degrees so that nothing can surprise you, life is more… predictable.
While playing the Star Trek Online open beta, I found myself really enjoying the space combat. The ground game was pretty much your typical bland MMO, like WoW or City of Heroes. In fact, it is almost identical to Pirates of the Burning Sea. But the space combat (much like the sea combat of PotBS) felt more much… alive. Even though it was pretty awesome, it still felt like something was missing, and it wasn’t until a friendly discussion and an offhand comment that I put my finger on it. A friend said, “I wish you could fight from the bridge.” And I light went on in my brain.
What is missing from Star Trek Online, and was missing from PotBS, was a more 1st person view of the game. STO’s space combat would be incredible if you played from the bridge, had to set the view screen, keep an eye on tactical items like scanners.
In my discussions with other folks about 1st vs 3rd person view, many of them cited PvP as being a reason for 3rd person. You need to be able to see if someone is stalking up behind your guy. And that discussion caused another light to go on. In EQ, when I played primarily in 1st person, I was my character. I was Ishiro Takagi, monk of Qeynos. When I played WoW, where 3rd person is the default, I was controlling my character. I was Jason, sitting at a computer controlling the actions of Ishiro, Alliance priest. Possibly owing to its roots in RTS games, WoW plays like a giant RTS where you only get one unit. The immersion is gone.
Stepping outside MMOs, in recent years I’ve been playing more console games. Back in the day, before I discovered MMOs, I played a ton of 1st person shooters. Before I started spending hours camping spawns in EverQuest, I was spending hours racing for flags and battling for control points in Team Fortress for Quake. In the last couple of years, games like Gears of War, which everyone else seems to go nuts for, just leave me feeling empty, largely because the viewpoint of the game is watching over the shoulder of a guy, not being the guy. I loved Dead Space, but there was a distance from the character, even though the integration of the UI into the game helped I still wasn’t in the head of the hero. On the other hand, Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2 are just so awesome. No longer am I looking at the back of the hero, controlling him, I am the hero fighting my way through the hordes of the dead.
This is what is missing. This is what makes it so easy to casually cancel my MMO subscriptions and never come back. I never feel like I am in the game, just that I’m playing it. Sure, I could play many of the games out there in 1st person, but they aren’t designed for 1st person, they are designed for 3rd and playing in 1st puts me at a disadvantage to every other player. I hope more games consider locking in and designing for 1st person in the future.
What do you think?
At the end of this, having now gone through the five elements of what a player gets, technically, from a group structure, it appears that grouping itself needs to stay unless the games are completely redesigned. For example, in playing Wizard 101 I have been a part of a group many times without forming an actual group because the game is built around “casual grouping”. If a player is in combat, to join them you need only step into the combat circle. All combat is contained within a temporary group, four slots for your side and four slots for the enemy, and when combat is done the group is dissolved. But it is turn based card/deck played combat, and not the real-time hack and slash spell casting of the traditional Diku model.
Also, as brought up by many of the people I discussed this with, grouping does bring a social element with it, a sense of belonging and direction. There is just something about being invited to a group and joining that group that bands people together in ways that a random collection of people doesn’t have.
Anyway, I hope you have enjoyed this exercise.
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