Newbie MMORPGs - Success is So Hard to Come By

September was such a big month for MMORPGs. We had Fallen Earth, Champions Online, Aion and Dungeons and Dragons Online went F2P. I saw a poll somewhere that asked people if they were still playing a September MMO - actually I think it was Massively. I went through the comments and I was a little bummed out to see that hardly anyone was still playing the game that they jumped on board with when it launched.
MMORPGs have never launched without a hitch, and it saddens me when an MMO isn't successful. I honestly like seeing successful MMOs out there. The sad truth is that many people are also impatient, and jump on board with an MMO from the get-go expecting to be hooked right from the start and that this is it! This is the MMO I am going to play! It's really disappointing when the MMO you had such high hopes for didn't turn out the way you wanted it to, and you wind up turning around and going back to World of Warcraft.
I was actually one of those people who jumped on board with Aion's launch because a few friends of mine were playing it and got me all pumped up for it. I knew I shouldn't have, because I was there for WoW's release. Actually no, I'm sorry, I was there a month after WoW's release and it was still a hell hole of broken servers, long and frustrating queues and bugs. A lot of people stormed the forums with craziness, shouting (caps lock, son)"We're going back to _____ if you don't straighten this crap out right now!"
Actually, know what the funny part was? I was one of them. 'Cept I didn't really have an MMO to go back to. I was playing Dark Age of Camelot with my friends at the time, and they decided that they were going to get onto the World of Warcraft bandwagon. I couldn't go back to DAoC, where I was still just a newbie, without any friends! So despite the fact that I couldn't play the game for a whole week once because of queues and brokeness, I stayed. A lot of people did. Millions of people did.
Millions of people didn't really know any better in 2004, either. We didn't exactly have much to choose from. I'm sure that a lot of people did stomp back off to DAoC, Ultima Online and Everquest. I just wasn't one of them, so I stayed on board for five years, on and off. Five years is a long time to play a single MMO, and a lot of us got really settled into Blizzard's world and every-changing landscape and patches.
The thing is though, is that those years passed with WoW holding quite the retention and not many people remember (or just weren't around for it) the fiasco they had at launch. Patience is ultimately the key when it comes to joining up with an MMO at launch. They need us to be patient for them. They need us around during the tough times so that there can be bright, happy, good times. Sure, it doesn't always work out. Look at Tabula Rasa. But in order for a community to thrive and survive on a new MMO, we need to sit tight and let the developers sort some stuff out.
Screaming and crying on the forums is nothing new, but the difference in 2009 (almost 2010, wow look at the time go!) is that many players have something to fall back on. I don't mean to be pointing the finger at WoW again, but it's true - most players can just fall back onto World of Warcraft when the MMO they had their sights set on does not deliver within the first month. An MMO will give players 30 days included with their intial purchase as a courtesy, to ensure that the player feels as though they have a chance to check out the game for a little while before they invest in a subscription.
The problem here is that when a new MMO comes barreling out of the gates like a horse without two front legs (which happens to a lot of MMOs, unfortunately), the playerbase turns up their noses and runs for the high hills. Now, there are some things that are excusable in an MMO that is just starting out, and there are some things that just aren't.

When Aion came onto the scene, it was evident that it had some clear issues. The queues were pretty bad, sure, but they were a temporary problem. The spammers and bots however, they were pretty persistent despite NCSoft's futile attempts at clearing them out. We're going on month two with Aion now, and the bots and spammers are still at large. They may not be quite as aggressive as they once were (I think this also depends on your server), but they're still there, and they are still annoying as hell and interrupting gameplay and making players uncomfortable.
Many players stuck it out with NCSoft when they addressed the community about them, and while their words were nice and pretty and made people feel snuggly warm inside, they didn't make the bots go away.
Another thing that really killed the game for many people was the client instability. Not being able to play the game is a big one, especially when it's happening to a large core of your playerbase. This is not only a problem, but it is a fatal problem at that. There are issues I think people need to just chill out about, though. One of these issues is the lack of content. At launch, many players for one reason or another, decide to hurry up and get to level cap. I'm not quite sure why people do this; it happened in World of Warcraft, too. Players would race to level cap or try to get there as quickly as possible only to find out that there's nothing there to do at the top. They quit shortly after due to lack of content.
Another problem that surrounds a couple MMOs is the fact that leveling isn't actually all that fun to begin with. Since I'm very familiar with Aion, I'm going to use it as an example again. Players just weren't having a good time leveling their characters. Of course this is a generalization, because "fun" is different for everybody. Most players did not enjoy picking a spot and grinding on the same monster over and over again, though. When the content itself from day 1 isn't enjoyable, you have a serious issue on your hands.
So what could an MMO possibly do to ensure that its players are happy during their first month? That first month is so crucial, especially when it's an MMO just starting out.

1. Flaunt what ya' got. There needs to be a reason for players to stop and sniff the roses and enjoy themselves as a reasonable pace as they play the game. You're always going to have those players that want to race to the top (this in itself is a game for them) but if you make the content fun right out of the box, you have a greater chance of retaining your playerbase in the months ahead while you gain your footing.

2. Communicate like nobody's business. Nobody likes eerie silence. It makes new players uncomfortable about what they are getting into, especially if they are coming from a game that had consistent updates from community managers. It's also important to post at least 95% of your updates through your official website and not third party sites such as facebook and twitter. While facebook and twitter are useful and people will most likely follow your game if you create an account on one of those sites, there are still many gamers who refuse to use social networking sites. Since not everyone uses social networking sites or they aren't familiar with them, it's important to make sure you put the information where it matters - on your website. It's more professional and it saves people time trying to hunt around for game updates. It's also important to frequent your own forums.

3. Have in-game support 24/7 from the get-go. One of the huge turn-offs in Aion was the lack of 24/7 support, which NCSoft assured everyone was coming "soon." That four-letter-word is something you'd expect to hear from Blizzard when talking about a release date, but it isn't something you would think to hear in regards to having support.

Honestly if a game was really fun to play, had support and communicated consistently while still addressing the day-to-day issues that plague a new game, it shouldn't be surprising to anyone if it succeeds. The fault lies on both sides, here.

Raptr - Sleek, Shiny and Possibly Annoying

I jumped onto the bandwagon today and downloaded a little program called Raptr. No, that isn't a typo, it really is called Raptr, minus the "o." What this thing is, is some sort of instant messenger/social networking device for gamers. It'll track what you're playing, so it can tell all your friends on facebook and twitter the moment it happens unless you're thoughtful enough to check off the option to only track daily games. Otherwise, you pretty much run the risk of having all your friends unfollowing you or sending you angry tweets about how you're clogging up their friends list with your hobby.
Anyway, onto the meat of the program. You can link several messengers together, such as MSN, AIM, Google Chat, even Xfire. I was surprised about the Xfire bit, since this seems a lot like their competition, but hey I guess it works. Now instead of having several different chat clients up at one time, I can have them all under Raptr and talk to my friends and family while displaying what I'm playing, as if they care how many hours of video games I am stuffing into my afternoon...right?
On the website, you can search for friends you may already have on Raptr, or find some new ones. You can write reviews about a game, and it'll even mimic netflix and start suggesting some games for you to play. Right now it's recommending Halo 3 to me, which just goes to show that Raptr doesn't know me at all because I already own Halo 3 and I hated it.

Been there, done that, Raptr. If we're going to be friends, you should start paying attention to my tastes, geez.

That's another thing: Raptr is in beta, so things aren't going to go as smoothly as one would hope. Upon installing Raptr, it asked me to select my "top 8 gaming friends." I clicked on the "next" button and I had a feeling this was going to happen - it spammed all those friends with a message telling them that I added them to my top 8 and that they should get Raptr so they can do the same thing! I have a feeling this program could make me very unpopular if I make a habit of shuffling people around.

Sure enough, two seconds later a couple of my friends sent me messages going, "Uh, did you get hacked? You're spamming things at me." Face. Palm.

It'll also share your xbox live achievements, your playstation trophies, whether you dinged in WoW or something... I don't get why it's only WoW. Probably has something to do with the fact that Blizzard's behemoth is well...a behemoth. So, it's fairly intrusive and mimics facebook in the "hey pay attention to me! LOOK AT ME!" department.

If you don't like people and would rather just play your games solo, skip Raptr.
If you are addicted to social networking sites such as myspace, facebook and twitter and you're also a gamer, get Raptr. Pretty simple.

Free Weekend Turns Into Free Frustration I Didn't Need.

This weekend was apparently Champions Online's Blood Moon Weekend - their version of Halloween, I suppose. I was pretty eager to give this superhero MMORPG a try, especially since it was being offered for free up until Monday morning at 10 A.M. I downloaded the launcher easily and then began to patch. And then I wated. And waited.

And waited.

...And waited some more...

Fast forward to Saturday morning. The game still wasn't patched and up to date yet. To make matters worse, Steam needed to patch and update too. This means I had to restart my Champions Online patch, tossing more frustration into my face. By this point I was so annoyed I thought about throwing in the towel, but I perservered and restarted the client. It went back down to 0%, though the size of the file it needed to patch was much smaller. This was a small bit of consolation, but not much since I needed to still patch an additional three hours before the client was finally ready around 7 pm Saturday night. Then trick or treaters started appearing at my house, so I had to put off playing again.

I finally found a small slot of time to play the game at last and begin to enjoy the free weekend. I start up the game client, everything seems great until I noticed the graphics rendering is off. Way, way off. So off, that I couldn't even really make out what that strange blob was on my screen...until I realized it was supposed to be my super hero. So I messed around with the video settings for a while, to no avail. Rebooted the system, tried again. It didn't work.

Now I have thrown in the towel. This obviously was not meant to be, and well...I shouldn't get this frustrated and angry over something that is supposed to be free. This was a wonderful showcasing of how awesome Champions Online has been so far, and while I normally wouldn't make an assesment over how a game is just from the shitty client patcher or the fact that I don't have the correct video driver for something, I think it's fair enough for me to say: Thanks Cryptic, but no thanks. All you've given me this weekend was a free headache and relief that I don't feel the urge to blow $35 on your game because frankly, it won't even run properly and I spent most of your free weekend just trying to play it.

Thank you, and goodnight.

Why Aion Is Losing Me

As a five-year World of Warcraft veteran, let me just state that Aion is nothing like WoW, and I'm extremely glad. You'll probably hear a lot of Vanilla-WoW players reminisce about the "good old days" of when the game first started, where getting your epic ground mount was the big gold sink of the game and getting a legendary weapon truly felt legendary. Enter Wrath of the Lich King: To me, everything started out okay. We took a trip up North to visit Arthas an entire year ago, just about (in about a week or two, anyways) and have battled undead armies and experienced Naxxramas...again. Wait, what?
Okay, enter the problem with Wrath of the Lich King. Extremely easy leveling on top of a 10 and 25-man raid that's already been done before, on top of Arthas twiddling his thumbs except when he wants to pop in all-spooky like and be like, "HEY GUYS I SEE YOU!" on top of riding ponies in his backyard for hot loots and jousting fun times.
The lore was destroyed. I think the Warcraft lore ended when I finished the Frozen Throne, and I think I actually prefer it this way. I am not returning to World of Warcraft. Oh no, I am not. Especially not when we now have worgen, space goats and goblins. Things are just getting a touch bit weird around here, and not in the good way.
So, enter Aion: Tower of Eternity. This is NCSoft's newest endeavour and attempt at bringing the east to the west, so to speak. The game has been out for a year over in Korea, and is a big hit. Sounds like a recipe for success, right? I mean, thousands of people in another country already love this game, it's going to be a hit over here in North America! Let's take a look at the good, the bad, the very good and the very bad of Aion.

The Good

One of the first things I noticed about Aion was the beautiful artwork that graced each loading screen, and the phenomenal next-gen graphics. The game is visually stunning, and you can't even argue this. The environments are lush and breathing and totally immersive. There are giant manta-rays and creatures that look like "sperm" according to one of my friends that soar in the sky just for ambience and to create atmosphere.
You can fly in this game right at level 10, and the controls work very similarly to World of Warcraft's flying mounts. I simply use my mouse to get from point A to point B while gliding or flying with my pretty angel wings, I don't mess with this "Page Up" and "Page down" nonsense. Why would you? Anyway...
Flying is fun, though you can only fly in certain areas and for limited amounts of time that is dependent on whether you have flight potions, special wings or manastones. These will give you a boost to your flying time.
The controls are easy enough, and it's definitely not difficult to steer your character around. The user interface is easy to navigate and it is aesthetically pleasing to look at. The maps are great - pressing "N" will pull up a map right onto your screen that is somewhat transparent so you can run around and still see where you're going while looking at the map. Or, you can pressing the "M" key and you can pull up the entire thing that takes up the whole screen.
The cities are impressive and beautiful, and the soundtrack boasts a fully vocalized theme song by some Korean singer that actually managed to sneak into the game itself as an easter egg of sorts.
The cut scenes, while some don't like them, I find them positively charming. I love the immersive effect it has on you while you're watching your character duke it out against a bad guy. Even smaller quests, such as escorting a little piggy back home to its owner can initiate a cut scene that kind of gives you a small sense of fulfillment and accomplishment, as though you actually did something good for another person.


The Very Good

Character customization in this game just can't be beat. You cannot touch the customization, it really is that good. Just take a look at some of the player-created characters in these threads:

Hottest Aion Male Character

Ugliest Aion Character


Wanna be fat? Go nuts. Wanna be 15 feet tall with a mustache and abnormally huge arms? Yep, you can do that. It's worth tinkering around with the character creation screen for a while just to see how ridiculously ugly or ridiculously beautiful you can make your character.
Besides customization, there are these small weasel-like creatures in the game called Shugos. Upon meeting one I was created with a very cute, "Nyerk-nyerk!" This is somewhat of a signature sound they make, and it's worth clicking on them over and over again just to hear them yell it out. The shugos add a bit of soul to the game, even though there are some people out there that are resolved to thinking the game lacks one. I'm probably one of the very few people out there that thinks the crafting system in Aion is "very good." I enjoy not getting my way all the time, and struggling a little bit so I am completely and 100% fine with failing while crafting an item. And yes, when you fail at crafting an item, the materials are ruined and you'll have to get some more. Quite a few people have whined about this, but I just love how you can "crit" while crafting say...a piece of food. If you are normally making a piece of food that would last for 20 minutes, when you crit on that piece of food, the item will then give you a buff that will last for about 40 minutes instead. It adds to the overall experience of crafting and makes things a bit more interesting.

The Bad

Unfortunately, no game is perfect and the flaws in Aion are a little bit...garrish to say the least. You know they're there, as though a big, fat elephant is standing in the corner of the room. Here are some of the smaller problems the game is facing at the moment:

Disconnected? Be prepared to sit through the loading screen again.
Every time you disconnect, you are immediately tossed out of the entire game client. This is frustrating, because in other MMORPGs if you are disconnected, you are normally thrown back to the login screen. No need to wait for the client to re-load, you're just automatically back at the login where you can hop right back in.

Camera panning while flying sucks so much. The camera whips back to its default setting while you try to pan around, making flying around a pain in the ass when you're trying to find a stable place to land.

Gathering in this game is almost cruel and sadistic. First of all, if you accidentally target something else while you are gathering, you are forced to stop and the gatherable material is destroyed in the process. Yep, that's it! It's just gone, you can no longer pick it because you targeted your friend 10 feet away while doing it. This just isn't smart, nor is it necessary. Another part about gathering is that in order to level it up high enough to gather in the next zone, you will need to spend a long, long, long, long, long time doing it.

Whispering your friends is banned until that player hits level 10. This was supposed to deter the RMT people from abusing the hell out of the playerbase with their gibberish, but it's not actually doing anything but frustrating brand new players because they can't communicate with their friends until level 10. For those of you who don't play Aion, once you hit level 10 you are free to move back and forth between your faction's capital city, but not before. You also gain your wings at level 10 after participating in the ascension quest line.
That is an entire zone where a player potentially cannot communicate with their real-life buddies. Sure, it's only until level 10 but like I mentioned before, it's not helping against the RMTers because they're just leveling beyond 10.

The lore of the game feels almost a little...tacked on. I blame this on the lack of quests that you receive after you've hit the abyss. Quite a few players will deny that this problem exists, and I can understand - I mean, there definitely are still quests that you can do. The lore is a bit...missing, though.

The Very Bad

So now that I've sifted through the non-game breaking issues (or they could be game breaking depending on the person), I'm going to take a crack at the fatal flaws that could potentially diminish Aion's playerbase and cause another Tabula Rasa if left unchecked. I am optimistic this will not go the way of Tabula Rasa, but you never know.

Client instability is a huge, huge, huge problem here. I haven't been on a fortress siege yet, but I do know about this problem and it's a doozey. There are many, many players that crash repeatably during a fortress siege, and this is game-killing. If the playerbase cannot feasibly complete game content without being thrown back to the desktop, it's just going to hurt the game as a whole. While running through Sanctum (The Elyos city), I crash at least six times per visit. This is not only annoying, but it makes me not want to log back into the game after the second time it's happened. Why bother, when the game keeps crashing?

Botters and RMT are still running rampant despite NCSoft addressing the community every week with a "we're working on it" statement. I understand that they're working on it, and this actually isn't the game's fault. This has nothing to do with how the game plays or functions - these are groups of people trying to sell kinah, steal credit cards from paying customers and turn a profit illegally within the game. They whisper you with macros outlining how much kinah they'd like to sell you, they infest every zone and steal gatherables and mobs from legit players and spam chat channels with such vigor that LFG no longer stands for "Looking For Group", but rather "Looking for Gold." After a week of not logging into the game I had high hopes that I would see little to no spam, but the moment I logged in this afternoon I was nailed by a wall of text for kinah.

The grind really is apparent in this game. A lot of people on the forums also deny this is present and will shriek, "Go back to WoW!" if you disagree or point out this flaw. Grinding on mobs day in, day out has nothing to do with the skill level of a game but it DOES make a game either really fun for someone or not fun at all. I fall into the latter of this group, in that I don't actually like mind-numbingly tastes such as "kill this monster over and over until your eyeballs bleed." I've heard that it only gets increasingly worse as the levels progress, too, and that once you hit 35 you are pretty much killing monsters over and over again or crafting items over and over again. Some may find this enjoyable, I for one do not.

Lack of group experience or interesting dungeons takes the MM out of "MMO." When a player isn't encouraged to group up to finish a dungeon with other people, it really makes you wonder why you even bother playing an MMO in the first place.
The first dungeon isn't available to you until level 25 when you hit the abyss, and it is as dull as a stale piece of white bread. Not only that, but I've done this dungeon about six to seven times and have not seen a single piece of loot drop. Bosses in this game more often than not reward you with...nothing. That's right...empty loot tables. No blue item for your troubles, nothing to encourage you or give you a friendly nudge to go on.

I'm not really concerned about the lack of end game right now because I'm still only in my high 20s, and many players will scoff at that and go "go back to WoW, nub!" The fact is, is that I don't want WoW. I don't want things handed to me and I don't want the WoW community. What I do want is a fun time when I log in, and when I feel as though there is nothing to do inside a beautiful, immersive world such as Aion's, there's a problem. I have my choices, of course. I can craft, I can kill monsters over and over for experience, I can do the dull dungeon (but only once every 18 hours) and get nothing for my efforts, or I can gather items.
I'd say I could go into the abyss and PvP a bit, but even this is a bit of a wash-out. It seems whenever you do want to run into a player of the opposing faction there is none to be found, and when you're legitimately trying to get a quest done you are instantly ganked by a higher level. I also chose a spiritmaster from the get-go, and spiritmaster pets cannot fly. The abyss is almost a purely flying zone. Many players call it "rock hopping" due to the nature of having to fly from one rock to another.
My pet cannot go with me when I fly from place to place. If I travel too far into the air, it despawns and then I have to resummon it. This makes it extremely tricky to PvP in this manner, since the creature that basically makes you your class is out of the picture. I have been in several scenerios where I could have potentially won a fight...if I had my pet out.
The game is also a huge money sink, which was to be expected from the beginning. When you die, there are consequences. I have no problem with this at all, actually. What I do have a problem with is how everything in the game, from summoning other players in your group (which is the spiritmasters job) to getting your experience back that you lost in death costs heaps and heaps of kinah.

Overall, I believe what we have here is the makings of either an epic fail (but a pretty fail! Such a pretty, pretty fail) or an epic masterpiece that could blow World of Warcraft out of the water. I want to see Aion do well, and it is for this reason alone that I haven't cancelled my account yet. I want Aion to do well, I want people to enjoy Aion because I believe Aion has a tremendous amount of potential. But that's just it - it has potential, and potential alone does not keep subscribers.

If the NCSoft team can work out a way to communicate with their playerbase better and fix the problems that so many people already see, I think Aion will be in great shape!