Standard import from our friends in the Far East. But while some may abhor the microtransaction-based business model of so many of those games, it does allow for the game itself to be both free to play and free to get. Buying stuff is contingent upon enjoying the game, so what's the harm in merely checking it out?

I won't say this is a harbringer of other microtrans games, mostly because the fact they're already coming.

Basically, a player sued an MMO company because their account was banned for long enough that their virtual goods depreciated in real world value.

Here's something for you MMORPG players out there. This month, an online gamer won a lawsuit worth thousands of dollars against Chinese game operator Shanda. The lawsuit revolved around devalued virtual game equipment and a damaged reputation.

Here's what happened: According to the report, a player of the MMORPG Legend of MIR II earlier this year logged into the game simultaneously from two accounts on the same IP address in order to transfer equipment from his account and another player's.

This prompted the owner of the second account to complain to Shanda, saying that his account had been looted by the first guy. Shanda then proceeded to suspend the account of the the guy accused of virtual theft.

It didn't end there (if it did then we wouldn't have a story at all). The player whose account had been suspended sued Shanda in Hengyang County, and according to the report the lawsuit included "requiring Shanda to unblock his account, and pay compensation of RMB 45,000 (US$ 5,625) for the depreciation of his game equipment during the suspension period, the damage to his character's reputation in the game, and his travel expenses."

The court evaluated the player's equipment through 5173.com and found his claim to have merit. He was awarded compensation of over RMB 30,000 (US$3,750). This decision was handed down on November 15. Shanda has made no comments on the case, and the company has four days left to make an appeal.

The details don't matter to me much really. Like, why would the player who had the second character complain they were looted when it was supposedly the recipient of nice new goods.

But what I do find interesting is that this 5173.com site (which I can't find an English version of) has such clout a judicial body would reference it to track the real world value of a virtual good. And then to actually require the company pay that player back for it.

There's lots of questions and potential ramifications here, but the biggie for me is this:

If an external company can ascribe real world value to a good, and the government validates that, then the control the developer has over that good is reduced. What happens to game balance then? What if an uber sword was deemed too uber and was nerfed? Suppose that sword was already sold to another player? Would that player be able to sue the company for diminishing the value of their purchase because they decided to better balance the game?

What does this do for mudflation? Can that even happen anymore? Or will a good need to stay the same relative value throughout the life of the game?

I am really hoping this is an isolated exception to the general rule, because otherwise there's big trouble ahead.

As has been said countless times, World of Warcraft proved us (myself included) wrong. Way wrong.

There's a lot of reasons for this. But chief among them, in my opinion, was because at its heart, it's a game. For gamers.

Gaming is what has been on the rise since the 70s. It's people who want a good time, fun alone or with friends.

Meanwhile, The MMOG genre was growing at a steady clip based mostly on people who wanted a cool online experience, live a virtual life. The advertising of the day speaks volumes for the audience companies were attracting. People were compelled to roleplay in these emerging graphical environments. They could build houses, host vendors, found settlements, all the stuff someone seeking a virtual existence would love.

The steady growth of the genre had this playstyle at its root. Everquest was one of the early departures from this, but even it was the sort of environment in which societies could be born. As has recently come up again here, EQ had the sort of downtime that people simply wanted to fill with conversation. But this was still mostly between people who came here to have a virtual life.

WoW did not go after this audience. That it happened to capture a great deal of them is expected, since the core experience bears more similarities to EQ and other diku-inspired games than not. However, WoW also did what few other MMOs did before it: capture lots of gamers.

Gamers want different things than virtual lifestylers. One need go no further than compare Second Life to Guild Wars to see that difference. One also doesn't need tea leaves to see which crowd is more numerous, and therefore understand why business is leaning towards delivering more online game than online roleplaying game.

Veterans lament the demise of roleplaying. But that happened concurrent to the sheer explosive growth of the genre. That growth has come from attracting gamers, who come with their own expectations, borne of experience in games of other genres. And even the veterans have benefitted, because to deliver against a gamer's expectation, certain elements must be in place:

• Can I get into it right away? None of this nonsense about having to look all over the world for my first quest NPC. No being able to kill oneself by hitting the wrong key with that NPC. No crazy-kludged interface showing me stuff I won't need to worry about for 20 or more hours of game time.
• Does it work? The days of unplayable instability are over. It works or it doesn't and the latter gets roundly villified. And then ignored.
• Am I having fun right away? 20 levels before I can start having fun? 10 levels before my first real ability? No thanks. That may work in some games, but the most obvious examples are either in decline or built for a different culture entirely.
• Am I winning? Gone are the days where twinking has been the only way to achieve good equipment in the first 15 hours of play. The game giveth or the players walketh.
• Are others in my way? Liking other people is very different from wanting them between you and the objective set for you by the game. Unless they are specifically in your way because of objectives set by the game for them (as in, a WoW Battleground), other players in public-space adventure areas can be a huge source of annoyance. Some games try to solve this through crazy contrived systems. Others just put the best content into instantiated zones created just for you or your group.

Notice has been served to the genre by the newcomers who brought games, and gamers, to the fold. That is where the growth was always sitting. Looking back, it's obvious. Lots of money in video games, lots of people buying and playing. Lots of money in MMOGs, but not nearly as many people. I think we finally understand why that was.

And it's about damned time.

• Maplestory (comments)
• Kart Rider
• Audition

I really don't know anything about Audition beyond what Wikipedia had to say, but the first and second are huge.

Snatching these up for North America while pushing ahead with their alternate-demographic virtual lifestyley games shows a rather impressive degree of diversity for a company new to the game space. Whatever audience Viacom can attract to Laguna Beach, VMTV and LogoWorld will likely be additive to whoever they can attract to the above three, which are already very popular.

So I took a look around and finally found some analagous numbers for Maplestory.

As reported by Jun Sok Huhh in April, based on information from the original report in Korean, the following is some highlights about the game and business.

In Korea

• The game launched in year 2003
• The number of accumulated subscribers(as of Feb. 2006) amounts to 14M.¹
• The number of concurrent users is 200K.
• The total revenue during 3 service years is 200B Won(1,000 Won = 1 USD).²
• The total revenue from licensing during 3 servicing years is 110B Won.³

Number of Subscribers

• China since Dec. 2004, 18M subscribers
• Japan since Nov. 2003, 9M subscribers
• Taiwan since Jul. 2005, 3.5M subscribers⁴
• Thailand since Oct. 2005, 550K subscribers
• Singapore/Malaysia since Oct. 2005, 550K subscribers⁵
• Global(US) since Oct. 2005, 1.5M subscribers

Some World-wide Revenue Numbers

• Monthly world-wide revenue of Feb. 2004 was 2.1B Won (US$2,232,239 today)
• Monthly world-wide revenue of Feb. 2005 was 5.0B Won (US$5,313,407 today)
• Monthly world-wide revenue of Feb. 2006 was 16B Won (US$16,997,601 today)

What is particularly impressive is that the game is free. Free to download. Free to play. Divide 16.9mil by the average monthly fee for a Western MMO of $12.95. The result? Maplestory is making as much per month as a Western MMO would collect from 1.3mil subscribers.

And how many games have broken 1.3mil subscribers? Even the newest member to that club (Second Life) only collects monthly fees from less than 3% of their playerbase (about 25,000 property owners).

Conclusion 

Considering their growth and the number of subscribers in the West, this is not a game people can really ignore just because it lacks a monthly fee and doesn't have the name "Warcraft" in it.

If you see a mob with a spear, leather jerkin and sandals, why are you not able to loot that spear, leather jerkin and sandals when you kill it?

And, if you could, in what game could you best do this?

Raph expounds on the highs and lows of WYSIWYG loot. I'm not sure I totally agree though that this can only effectively work in a wordly game, as he seems to imply.

I think bio-linked loot (a term Yivvits coined in the comments thread there) can work in Dikus, if they have a reason to break common loot down into sub-component crafting resources.

I'm thinking of AC2, later SWG, the Disenchanting skill in WoW and the new Jewelcrafting "Prospecting" skill coming to it. All allow items to be broken down into consumable resources others can use in crafting processes.

Granted, I consider neither AC2 nor SWG particularly diku in the EQ/WoW sense of the word. However, WoW Disenchanting is a very useful skill already, as the crafting skill (Enchanting) that uses the result (shards) have as their business the ability to add stats to both crafted and world-dropped items. The profession is so lucrative, most Enchanters do not even bother getting their stuff to disenchant by adventuring. They get it by buying the "junk" people sell on the Auction House.

A strong "crafting" economy is possible in a diku too. But one must assume:

• Most players are NOT there to pick flowers
• A thriving crafting economy can be based on just the few that are, and those that support them.

I often wonder if folks pushing crafter-centric games understand just how small a percentage of gamers actually want to craft. To me, it's great to build a real deep crafting engine. But in this age of obvious easy-to-see paths to revenue and headcount, crafting is a subset of a hunting game, where the percentage of time spent developing crafting should match to the percentage of players expected to bother.

The alternative is to expect fewer players and scale your business to match. There's enough room for both WoW and ATITD. It's just that when convincing folks to invest in your game, they're going to want to know why you're not chasing the big cash. If you ask anyone, they'll say they want a deeply engaging crafting system. If you see the resultant attempts to do so in diku-inspired games, you'll see the complaints that come with it, like "what, I have to actually pay attention while crafting?!" (from EQ2).

Usually in a diku you have a few dedicated crafters, more than that number dedicated to collecting resources and selling in bulk to them, and the rest consuming the end result as part of their equipment set while off killing mobs for the rest of it. 10 people can bang out enough swords to arm a server of thousands in a diku. And that's how it should be because those thousands are the primary reason that diku was inspired.

So in this system, getting a spear from a mob who was holding the spear can mean you either get the uncommon/rare/uber spear, or something you yourself could either break down to a component for crafting, or which can be sold to someone who has that skill.

Easy to say, incredibly tough to get right. I won't say WoW does it perfectly. But again, for the number of people interested in crafting, I think they do a pretty good job.

But I will close with this: the group that can achieve the vision for how UO was supposed to work initially are going to win in my opinion. Combat was deep there for reasons different from "because I killed Boss #12 the 37th time". And they were better. But to try this again is to risk quite a bit when it's so far been proven that strict linearity sells.

I personally doubt either will strip away a significant portion of the WoW accounts.

Players, yes, but these players will do what they did when they jumped ship from UO and EQ too: continue to pay for their account. Maybe a few months thereafter they'll slink back or decide to close the book entirely, but I don't think Blizzard will feel a pinch. I expect them to say what SOE did when DAoC started taking off: "we're happy for the competition. it's brought more folks into the genre and therefore to us". Of course, I also expect them to very soon stop reporting their numbers in a way that is easily disseminated, maybe shut down the /who all command and therefore drive out those folks like WarcraftRealms and PARC who data mine for everything from number of hours played to favorite hair style. Public company after all, gotta protect the perception of the IP.

I, also, actually think Blizzard has more to fear from the fragmentation of the genre itself with the rise of casual-MMOs (yea, they exist), those focusing on today's tween players, and those environments from which strong communities, and then games themselves, have spawned. But that's not something they need chew fingernails on anytime soon.

What do you think? (feel free to comment here or at this F13 thread)

I can appreciate why they say they're delaying it, I just don't know that I buy the reason.

IRVINE, Calif. – Blizzard Entertainment® today announced that the release date for World of Warcraft®: The Burning Crusade™, the highly anticipated expansion for World of Warcraft, will be in January 2007. By adding a few extra weeks to the development cycle beyond its original target date, Blizzard will be able to extend the closed beta test and further refine the new content that will ship with the game.

“We appreciate the enthusiasm surrounding World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade, and we’re excited about putting the finishing touches on all of the new content,” said Mike Morhaime, president and cofounder of Blizzard Entertainment. “We feel confident that the extra time spent polishing the game will result in the high-quality experience that our players expect and deserve.”

Blizzard began the closed-beta phase of testing on World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade earlier this month. The January 2007 release window will allow extra time for current beta testers to participate in the final stages of development and continue providing valuable feedback.

Further information on specific worldwide release dates, pricing, and other details will be announced in the near future.

It's good to hear they want to use that extra time "polishing the game" to get it right. Yet I find it odd they say this now.

This is because "now" is not "today". They decided on this delay at least a few days, if not a few weeks ago. They had to because there's a lot more going on here than releasing some digital data. They have had to already informed their retailers, both online and off, to not expect boxes for their shelves and inventory (and the fact that the expansion was likely a big foot traffic generator). Vivendi probably already alerted stockholders as well. And everyone had to get comfortable with missing Holiday sets in order to make this decision in the first place.

On the one hand, consumer goods and entertainment companies love the holiday gluttony. Regardless of ones religion, buckets of cash are spent in the fourth quarter of the year.

On the other hand, I have long felt that MMORPGs do not need holiday sales to move boxes, and in fact may be hurt by trying. There's simply too much gluttony. Who's got time to deeply invest in a single experience when there's gifts to buy, put together, return, parties to go to and vacation to be had?

This is just a hypothesis of course, but I wonder just how many people who receive an MMORPG for the holidays actually end up playing it. In my opinion, it's a very easy statistic to unearth: the number of box sales versus the number of new account activations, comparing box sales at holidays versus box sales in any other Quarter of the year.

So Blizzard/VUG willingly avoids the holidays. Either they're avoiding the gluttony, have so many pre-orders they don't need retail presence in December, or figure the rise in Gift Card gift-giving for the holidays will translated into January sales of boxes anyway.

We've added a new icon on your action bar, next to your Social button. This will open a window that prompts you to indicate whether you want to start a group or join one that's already in the process of being assembled. Depending on your selection, either the "Looking for Group" or the "Looking for More" interface appears next. Both interfaces have tabs at the bottom that let you easily switch between the two. The Looking for Group interface allows individual players to be added to a queue of other eligible players looking for a group and matches them up based on preferences they have set. The Looking for More option allows for a group to search out additional members to complete a group.  

And here's their description of the function. 

Looking for Group Interface

The Looking for Group interface contains several dropdown menus that let you search for a number of groups at the same time. Each dropdown menu contains category options that indicate the type of group you're looking for, and each category option provides a different list of secondary options.

Selecting Dungeon

• in the first dropdown menu will offer a list of level-appropriate dungeons in the second dropdown menu. Selecting Raid
• in the first dropdown menu will offer a list of level-appropriate raids in the second drop-down menu. Selecting Quest
• in the first dropdown menu will offer a list of quests that are active in your quest log in the second dropdown menu. Selecting Zone
• in the first dropdown menu will offer a list of level-appropriate zones in the second dropdown menu. Selecting Battleground
• in the first dropdown menu will offer a list of all level-appropriate battlegrounds in the second dropdown menu. So, using the interface, you can

for example look for a group in Stratholme, a quest partner for a specific quest, and an Arathi Basin group all at the same time, with the option to auto-join the first group that becomes available. The auto-join option can be toggled off, should you wish to manually search for and accept invitations

We've seen LFG tools before. This one seems to be the most robust, except that players can't enter their own comments. At this stage in the life of the game though, the more important question is whether people will use it.

What was the worlds first graphical MMORPG?

The problem, of course, is what constitutes "first".

Who's Said What?

According to the Korea Times, Kingdom of the Winds was the first "graphical" MMORPG, launched in 1996.

According to Wikipedia's MMORPG section, there's a couple of firsts:

• Islands of Kesmai was the first "commercial" MMORPG, launched in 1984. 
• Neverwinter Nights was the first "graphical" MMORPG, launched in 1991.
• Meridien 59 was the first "modern" MMORPG, also launched in 1996.

This presentation by Raph Koster talks to the very breadth of factors to converge into the modern MMO, and while he lists Air Warrior (an MMO) as 1995, he mentions about Ultima Online and Lineage 1: "With these two, the modern MMORPG is born" (his timeline should also be required reading).

GameSpy agrees with Wikipedia on M59.

And then there's the question of the origin of the term "massively multiplayer" itself. GameSpy notes:

Meridian 59 also marks the introduction of the term "massively multiplayer." In 1996, as Hawkins tried to explain his game to the press, he used terms like "massively multiplayer" and "3D persistent world" quite liberally.

Rich Vogel, currently vice president of development at Sony Online Entertainment, was working at 3DO during that time. He confirms that these terms originated with Meridian 59. "The term 'massively' was first used at 3DO. Actually, 'massively multiplayer Internet game' was Meridian 59's revelation. We coined that phrase."

Koster, who worked at Origin Systems, remembers things differently.

"The massively multiplayer term was coined by Electronic Arts marketing. At that point, Ultima Online was announced. I remember the meeting in which they told us they were going to call it 'massively multiplayer' and we were like, 'Okay, whatever.'" (Looking back, Koster admits that it is possible that 3DO coined the phrase and that Electronic Arts marketing borrowed it.)

Where does it Begin?

Charting the history is almost impossible without taking into account the following:

1. The technology of playing games on a computational system. That goes back to ENIAC
2. The technology of bringing live people together into the same virtual space to play together or competitively. The first real example of that seems to be Space Wars from MIT. In 1962.
3. MUDs themselves, which have no clear beginning in concept either, though MUD, developing by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw is cited as the first one.
4. The emergent preference for playing games in 3D can be charted to Doom, in 1997.
5. The dawn of modern formalized fantasy, which some credit to JR Tolkien, and The Hobbit. 1934.

So it seems like a lot of different people can claim the "first" MMORPG, if they stretch the definition a bit.

What do you think?