31 Mar 2011
At last we’ve come to the reason that I’m even talking about Lord of the Rings Online again in the first place: the fact that it’s now to free to play. But what does that even mean?
It means you don’t need to pay a monthly subscription to play LotRO. You don’t even need a credit card. You can play this game for dozens of hours on end and not spend a dime. To do this you just set up an account on the website, click a button to download the game client, and start playing. Easy. Extremely high quality content for what you pay (nothing).
So, how is this possible? The game developer clearly still needs to make money to pay for operating costs and ongoing development. So they replace a fixed monthly subscription fee with a large set of optional “micro-transactions”. In other words you don’t pay a fixed $15 a month, but instead you spend a couple bucks here and there on smaller purchases. This will likely result in smaller per-account revenue, but by removing the steep up-front subscription cost it’s possible to reach a broader audience and hopefully achieve similar overall revenue. That’s the basic business model, and it’s an increasingly popular one. But of course the devil is in the details.
The term “micro-transaction” conjures an image of being stopped every couple minutes to be solicited for money. It sounds disruptive and cheap. Certainly paying more up front sounds less obnoxious, right? Well I’m happy to say that LotRO handles micro-transactions with class and restraint.
You can happily level a character up to at least level 30 before you really feel like you have to spend any money. At that point you’ll run out of free zones and maybe you’ll put down $5 to unlock another zone for around 10 levels of quest content. You don’t have to, though. The epic quest-line is always free, and there are always tasks, skirmishes, and level-scaling instances to keep you busy.
Smoothing everything over is the fact that you gain the real-money currency (Turbine Points) while playing the game. Every deed you complete gives you some points. So even if you absolutely refuse to spend real money on the game you’ll still be able to pick up a couple things from the store.
So, what sorts of things can you buy?
- Quest lines for levels 30-65
- Additional skirmish instances to change up the scenery
- Cosmetic outfits
- Shared storage across all characters on your account
- A wardrobe space for your characters to store and share cosmetic outfits
- Shorter teleport home cooldowns and/or multiple home destinations
- Short term acceleration for xp, crafting, or deeds
The larger priced items are content related (quests, skirmishes, etc.) or feature related (e.g. shared storage), and are usually a one-time purchase for the account. They’re less “micro” and more a replacement for that monthly payment. The key difference being that unless you blaze through content too fast that it’s going to be much cheaper.
The more controversial items are the true micro-transactions. But you’ll note that none of the them will outright make your character more powerful, they just make progression faster. For example you can’t buy levels, but you can spend a dollar to get a small percentage increase in your experience gain for 6 hours. That means you’ll level faster than someone who didn’t pay any money, but it doesn’t give you better stats, or items, or anything like that. You still have to play the game and overcome the same challenges. It’s fair.
The micro-transactions are all poised as purely optional efficiency boosts. Sick of travel times? Pay a quarter to make your next couple trips instantaneous. Like crafting but don’t have time for the grind? Pay fifty cents to double the rate of craft skill gains for awhile. This allows you to pick the parts of MMO grinding that annoy you and pay a little bit to have them go away. The cynical way to look at this would be that they’re making you pay to keep the game from being awful. But the key thing to remember is that the free experience of today is the same thing people were previously paying a subscription for. They didn’t make it worse for free accounts. You can pay for a more streamlined experience if you want to, but it’s not necessary. That’s what helps the micro-transactions feel optional and not gouging.
I was really wary of the false promises of “free to play”, but I’ve been extremely impressed with how elegantly LotRO has pulled it off. I believe that you can play the game for free and have a perfectly good time. I’m also happy to occasionally give them money to make my experience better.
Being presented with all these optional purchases forced me to confront what I really value about my MMO play experience. It turns out that leveling faster isn’t important to me, but looking cool is. So my first purchases were an awesome looking set of cosmetic armor, some wardrobe space to save fun hats and such, and some more outfit slots so I can choose my look to match my mood.
I also bought some crafting acceleration to get my weaponsmithing skill up high enough to create my own weapons as I level. I like feeling self sufficient. Plus crafting is way more fun if you cut the grinding in half. It’s amazing how a numerical tweak can completely turn things around.
Beyond all that frivolous stuff I did pick up a couple quest packs after I cleared out the free zones. I’ve enjoyed the skirmishes so I bought some more of those too. I feel like now that I’ve spent some startup capital I can coast for quite awhile before my next purchase. It’s hardly been a free experience, but I feel like the money I’ve spent is well worth what I’ve received in return.
So, the real question: Is this the right game for you?
Do you like the depth and scale of MMOs, but have very limited time to play and can’t justify a monthly fee? Then the new free to play LotRO is perfect for you. It doesn’t matter if you progress through the game slowly because you’ll pay for new content equally slowly.
Are you the sort of player who enjoys MMOs for the first twenty levels when things are fresh, then gets bored somewhere in the middle and quits? Then LotRO would be a great fit for you because you’d probably quit right before you actually have to spend real money.
Do you get obsessed with your MMO and grind through content extremely quickly? Well then LotRO may still work for you because it still offers a compelling subscription option. It’s only $10, not $15, and you get a substantial grant of points every month (~$6 worth). So it’s kind of like Zune Pass where you get unlimited access but get to keep some stuff permanently if you ever cancel your subscription.
What I can’t tell you is how well LotRO satisfies a player at the level cap. I’ve got a character there, but I don’t play him because I personally don’t care for grinding the same content over and over again. I do know that that there are raids, and there’s a community of people running them. But I don’t know how well LotRO stacks up here.
From a value perspective LotRO is hard to beat. High quality content, flexible pricing. The real reasons to not play the game are if you don’t like RPGs or you aren’t particularly interested in the Lord of the Rings fiction. If killing orcs in the English countryside bores you then this game is not for you.
If you do decide to try out the game, please set up your account using this link. That referral will give me some kickback (and no, that’s not what motivated me to write this series). Be sure to create your character on the Gladden server, send me a note, and maybe we’ll have a chance to adventure together. See you in Middle-Earth!
25 Mar 2011
We’re now at part five of my ramblings on Lord of the Rings Online. Time to stop beating around the bush and start complaining about what I really want to complain about: User Interface
LotRO’s UI is approachable, largely due to its similarity with WoW, but it lacks the same polish… There are a ton of small issues with the interface - I could really go on and on.
During almost every topic I’ve covered on this game at one point or another I’ve mentioned problems with the user interface. I should put a disclaimer here: I’m a professional user interface developer. It’s safe to say that I’m more sensitive to this class of issue than most people. But the reason I do this for a living is because I think it’s extremely important. Good interface creates happy experiences; bad interface creates frustrating experiences.
Looking at the progress of this game over the years, it has gotten better. They have fixed some hiccups in the experience. But there are still warts, and the rate of improvement is too slow. Too many problems that have been there for years are still festering. The only conclusion I can come to is that refining the interface isn’t a priority, and that they don’t have the right kind of talent focused on these issues.
Iconography
Icons are too small and lack strong enough silhouettes to be quickly identified.
Let’s look at the action bar screenshot above that I talked about last time. There are a couple things you might notice, but the first is probably that the icons are incredibly tiny. 32x32 pixels, specifically. You can scale this bar up, but the source assets are 32x32, so the scaled up version looks terrible. By comparison WoW’s source icons are 64x64, containing 4 times the amount of information.
So why are they so small? Well, I’m pretty sure that’s because of design choices made in the skill system. If there are many skills to choose from then the icons need to be very small to fit on screen. The decision to regularly give the player new toys has lead to these icons being small.
But the size of the icons isn’t the real problem. Depending on your settings your WoW UI might display at a similar size (from my informal sample I found many people had a 34x34 display size for their WoW icons). No the real problem is with the contents of those icons.
You’ll notice that the attack skills all have a red background to their icon. Skills that buff or heal seem to have green backgrounds. There’s an intentional pattern here. A terrible, terrible pattern. By definition these are actions you need to perform in the heat of the moment. Most of these are attack skills, so your bar is going to be a sea of red. By giving the icons all the same primary color they’ve lost the most glance-able pieces of information.
The other problem, other than small size and uniform color, is that the icons are trying to be little paintings. There’s too much detail in those 32x32 dimensions. I think it’s time for a comparison:
Here we have samples from 7 different MMOs. This is by no means a comprehensive list, it’s just a set of MMOs that I personally have played (or have seen played, in the case of Rift). Not all of the above have excellent iconography, but you’ll notice the ones from LotRO really blur together into one mass. The icons are too tightly grouped, they all have the same color, and it’s hard to pick out strong silhouettes.
At this point you might think I’m nit picking. But your average MMO player spends almost as much time staring at these action bars as they do observing their virtual surroundings. I’ve known players to completely lose context of what was going on because they were overly focused on their bars. It’s a mission critical piece of interface, and on this LotRO does a real sub-standard job.
Inventory
The bag view is frustrating because you can’t do key tasks from there like sell.
To the right in the screenshot you see my bag view. Pretty standard, although once again you’ll note that the icons are frustratingly small. To the left is the window that you get when you talk to a vendor. You’ll note that one is a grid view and one is a list view.
So what if I want to sell something? I’ve probably arranged my bags in some way meaningful to me so that I can find items later, so you’d think I’d sell from my bag view. This is the MMO standard, but it’s not how it works in LotRO. I have to open up the Sell tab in the vendor window, browse a list view of my bag contents, and find the item there. I have to track down the item in an alphabetized list where up until this moment I may have not known its name (the grid view doesn’t show titles until you hover for a tooltip). And I have to do this despite the fact that I might have organized my bags in some way where this would be a trivial task from the grid view.
This is frustrating to do even once, and if you’ve ever played an MMO you know that selling trash to vendors is something you do very frequently. It’s clear that the developers knew that this was awkward, because there are a number of features of the list view designed to make the experience less terrible.
You can lock items from the vendor window so that they won’t show up as options to sell. But of course you can’t lock an item from the bag view, further reinforcing it’s presence as a useless visualization.
You can filter the list view to different qualities of items, presumably to help find the items you want to sell. But the filters are opposite of what you want. You can filter only by increasing quality, not decreasing quality - so you can’t filter down to trash.
None of this fixes the core problem: the original design was bad. Either embrace the list or embrace the grid - don’t attempt some unholy hybrid.
The Solution?
WoW provided an open platform that enabled the community to patch up the rough spots. Blizzard would watch popular trends and integrate those features into the core. The end result is that the default WoW UI has become better and better over the years at an impressive pace
At last we have a sign that the developers are paying attention: recently (as in within the last six months) LotRO opened up it’s platform to support LUA scripted plugins. This is huge. This empowers the community to start making things better. What’s there now from an API perspective is very conservative, but it’s still a huge step in the right direction.
There aren’t a ton of high quality plugins available yet. This stuff takes time. But the basic tools are there, and the developer is listening to what the community needs. If I didn’t have a day-job I’d probably take matters into my own hands and start modding again. Alas, I have no interest in burning out like that, so I’m just going to have to hope the plugin development community does what needs to be done. Let the healing begin.
In the next and final segment I’ll talk about the only thing all of you probably want to know: what does it actually mean to be “free to play”?
23 Mar 2011
Well, this fourth part of my return to Lord of the Rings Online is maybe a bit more on the nerdy side. It’s not about what you can do, or where you do it; it’s about how you do it. The mechanics of the game.
Combat
Overall the combat in LotRO feels… okay. I like to move around a lot as I play. I’m not sure if that’s because I think I actually get some tactical advantage, or if I just like to keep things moving to spice up the visuals. Regardless, when I play this way in LotRO I can notice the differences between what the client sees and what the server is tracking. It feels a bit… floaty. I’ll often run up to a monster and realize that for a moment it’s still tracking some previous snapshot of what my location was. The whole experience looks good, but it’s not quite at the fidelity that I prefer.
“The average fight lasts around 30 seconds, which doesn’t sound like much, but is forever when you’re just trying to kill a freaking boar. The result is you never feel very powerful.”
This complaint seems to have largely been a result of the class I was playing. The minstrel is intended as a healer role, and at the time I wrote the quote above I don’t think they’d even added the minstrel’s battle form. But even with those enhanced offensive abilities a minstrel seems to be many times slower at killing stuff. Probably a poor choice for my play style.
Since coming back to the game I’ve been trying a new character class: champion. The time to eliminate a single opponent is more on the order of 10 seconds, if that. I find myself free to heroically run at many opponents simultaneously, which is far more satisfying. It’s a better fit for my playstyle, even if the melee combat does illuminate more of the latency issues.
It’s a bummer that for this type of game you don’t know whether your character class is a good fit for you until you’ve invested a lot of time in them. By the point you have enough data to make an informed decision it’s too late. You’re probably unwilling to start over, even if it’d produce a better long-term experience.
One thing that LotRO has that I’ve never seen in another game is the idea of a “fellowship maneuver.” Certain characters can initiate an attack where everyone in the party participates by clicking one of four icons: morale (health), power (mana), direct damage, or damage over time. If the group coordinates you can pull off specific combinations that trigger even more powerful attacks. Of course there’s always that one guy who’s not paying attention and clicks green at the wrong time, but when it works it’s a neat mechanic.
Items
The modern MMO is mostly just a vehicle for loot addiction. It’s all about the pursuit of making your character more badass. Leveling up is one obvious part of that, and the other part is stuff.
In general the gear you get in LotRO works exactly the same as it does in most other MMOs. But there are aspects that are themed to the fiction. Jewelry plays a stronger role (although you won’t be stumbling upon any of the primary Rings of Power). There’s also a pocket slot, which is a nice touch. But despite the fact that the stats on the items have different names and the rarity colors aren’t what you’re used to, it’s all very familiar.
And then you get your first legendary weapon.
A legendary item is an item that levels up, just like your character. As it gains levels you can spend points on different stats, slot it with gems and runes, and even give it a name. These items stay with you for a long time. As a minstrel I tried to give all mine musically themed names. Above you see the sword “Sharp Crescendo”. It’s predecessor was a mace named “Percussive Force”. These items become a deeper part of your character than just the normal gear your slap on. It’s a fun system that makes loot that much more fun.
The Action Bar
…they seem to have thrown too many options at you in an attempt to make it interesting. But instead most of the abilities end up blurring together and leaving you bogged down with your overcrowded quick bar.
I get a new ability about every other level. At first this was perfectly manageable. But after awhile I started to dread visiting the class trainer. Another ability? Where am I supposed to put this? This ability feels almost identical to another one I already have - when am I supposed to use it instead of the other one?
Yes, there is the possibility of loss of interest if what your character can do never changes, but this is taking it way too far in the other direction. Let’s get more specific. Here’s the action bar of your basic starting player, this one at level 6:
This particular character is a burglar. There’s a stealth toggle, a couple basic attacks, a debuff, a GTFO emergency button, and some health and travel items. A perfectly acceptable set of actions, although probably not enough to keep someone satisfied in this style of game over hours and hours of play.
Here is my champion’s action bar at level 28:
There’s a lot going on there. The bottom row is all pure attacks. The next row up contains my personal buffs, some occasional use skills and health items. The rows above that have very infrequent use skills, plus my mount. The attack skills are roughly arranged in advancing order (this class builds up momentum as “fervor” points), with area of effect attacks bumped towards the right side.
As you can see I’ve already filled up my primary 12 key row. The next time I get an attack skill, it will have to go above that.. somewhere. It’ll become harder and harder to organize, until eventually it’ll be pure chaos. So I present to you the action bar from my level 65 minstrel:
Yeah, and that’s not even everything. In addition to this here I have another vertical row of 12 skills on the right side of the screen. As for this core mega-grid, I can’t even tell you what all those abilities are. The bottom row is my frequent use stuff, the tier one ballads (minstrels build up three levels of “ballads” that unlock “anthems”, and then the cycle repeats), war-speech abilities (the minstrel’s battle form that I’ve mentioned before), and some heals. Above that goes the rest of the ballads and the anthems, plus some more heals. Above that… um… the next two rows are mostly gibberish. I can pick out my craft skills and that’s about it. Apparently I never use any of that crap.
Some of that probably doesn’t need to be there. There’s technically a skill window that I could use to access all of those abilities, but if it’s anything that I might need in the heat of the moment then browsing the menu for a skill is a non-starter. So everything goes in a big clump at the bottom of my screen.
A few of those could be removed by making fixes to other game systems. For example you’ll see three craft tools on that bar (Alt 1,2,3). Those are there because you can’t use a craft skill unless you have the associated tool equipped. This includes gathering skills, so I’m constantly toggling between my prospecting pick axe and my woodcutting axe. It’s dumb. To work around the dumbness I have to eat up three quick bar slots of permanent screen real estate.
Other icons on my bar could be removed with more integrated UI elsewhere. I have two icons pinned for tracking resources: ore and wood. That could easily be integrated into the map widget (as it is in WoW). It wouldn’t even be that bad to set from the skill window if my tracking mode didn’t reset every time my character died. So there are problems here that are partially due to game systems, and partially due to interface. As you can see we’re once again encroaching upon my favorite topic…
Next up I’ll just cut to the chase and rant about user interface.