by Jeff Woleslagle on Feb 27, 2009
Welcome to the 1,025th Edition of Loading...
If you aren't reading this in your e-mail, you could be. Sign up! Are you looking for gaming news? Look no further for all of the headlines. General industry news and Ten Ton Hammer excusives are all yours as part of Ten Ton Hammer's RSS Feed . Enjoy!
The Pulse
You vote with what you view at Ten Ton Hammer, and the result is the Ten Ton Pulse (What is Pulse?).
Here's today's top 5 Pulse results:
World of Warcraft Darkfall (UP 6 ) EverQuest 2 Star Trek Online (UP 1) Age of ConanBiggest Movers in the Top 20 this week :
Darkfall (UP 9 to #7) Star Trek Online (UP 7 to #8) Jumpgate Evolution (UP 7 to #10)Loading... Daily
Loading... it's the right beer now.
With a number of 2009's best MMO hopes entering or in closed beta at present (Champions Online, Darkfall, Free Realms, and Jumpgate Evolution among them), it seems like a good time to talk about how beta, specifically open beta, is done. I know open beta is a time honored tradition and borderline necessary to see how your game will perform with a full complement of players crowding up the servers.
But after years of intense planning, millions spent on licenses, assets, gameplay, marketing, and animation, and the hopes and dreams of your studio riding on this nearly finished, heavily encumbered, but still not-for-sale product of yours, what's the next step? For many studios, it's to let in hundreds of thousands play the game for free - most of whom weren't planning to buy but just want to say "I was in the beta and it sucked" as if that magically seals their forum flaming judgments.
This isn't marketing - I don't buy that argument for a second. This is anti-marketing in that it encourages developers to waste man-years of development time on the "hook" of low level content and polish that most players will exhaust in their first hour of game time. Incidentally, this is my argument against free trials too. Recruit-a-friend, yes, that works because those new players have someone drawing them in, a pre-made community. But MMOs aren't made to be sipped and spat out like the cheap stuff at a wine tasting, you need to pay the cover-fee and commit before you get to the real fun.
Worst of all, marketing teams sieze upon open beta numbers, sending investor expectations through the roof, and devs draw up their plans for a number of servers to match those hefty, highly unrealistic numbers. Servers seem crowded for a week as everyone tries to flow through the past of least leveling resistance, and sooner or later the start of the game, which had been so laboriously created, feels like a ghost town (unless your game, like the first three years of WoW, was built for replayability).
My hard-line solution is still to let pre-order players, and only pre-orders, into the beta until launch. No other type of game opens wide the floodgates before launch, and I don't really see the business or marketing sense of giving away a less than polished product for free. You've got their money, they've proven their commitment, they're your core audience that you have to prove the worth of the game to - let them in. On the systems side of things, I wonder that the sheer scale of Internet endeavors anymore that much of the backend kinks couldn't be worked out with a simulation layer. The churn on free trial accounts (let's start thinking of the traditional open beta as a free trial) is both ridiculously high and ultimately harmful; in the wake of the last few beta disasters, notably Vanguard, how can you not believe that the overwhelming majority of the open-beta hopping community is just looking for a free game to hate?
Should the free ride end? The Loading... forum beckons or, as always, feel free to email me.
Shayalyn's Epic Thread of3 new MMOG hand-crafted articles today! 117 in February! 253 in 2009!
New MMOG Articles At Ten Ton Hammer Today
Podcast
Loading... Live #5 : Dev Chat with Star Trek Online's Craig ZinkievichComics
WoW Comic - Goob & Begud - "Picking up the Slack"Opinion
Darkfall: A Promise of Hope? Do MMOs Need Leaderboards? The MMO Wish List - What Are the Extras Players Really Want?Guides
WAR: So, You Want To Be A Slayer... WoW: Soloing the Rogue, Lvl 41-60 WoW: Soloing the Shaman, Lvl 41-60 WoW: Soloing the Warlock, Lvl 41-60 WoW: Soloing the Warrior, Lvl 41-60Hot Content - Or, what I took a fancy to:
Darkfall: A Promise of Hope? Loading... Live #5 : Dev Chat with Star Trek Online's Craig Zinkievich WoW Comic - Goob & Begud - "Picking up the Slack" City of Heroes "Captain Dynamic" Video #1 - Awesome Button A Final Hurrah - 10 Things to Learn from Tabula Rasa City of Heroes Architect Edition Screenshots and FAQ The MMO Wish List - What Are the Extras Players Really Want? Jumpgate Evolution: Hands-on Report - In the Eyes of a Veteran Darkfall: Hands-on Report - The Rise of the Ninja (Looter) The Comic Book Guy: Are Pirate MMOGs in Davy Jones' Locker?Real World News
Will return next week, do it please ya.
Thanks for visiting the Ten Ton Hammer network!
-Jeff "Ethec" Woleslagle and the Ten Ton Hammer team