I Can’t Keep Up With The Secret World

Posted by FelizB on Aug 15, 2012 in Blog, The Secret World | 3 comments

Oh boy, I am such a slowpoke. Always trying to take it in to the fullest. And then I get dragged elsewhere to do it again. Let me admit it freely: I am on my third character in The Secret World. I started out with a Dragon, but got myself frustrated when I stepped seriously under powered into the Blue Mountains. So I tried an Illuminati while also working toward a new ranged spec. That got me even into the desert, but I skipped some content in the Blue Mountains. And then comes the free trial weekend and increased activity among my blogger friends Kadomi, Belghast, Syl and Shadowspawned. Not to mention Rowan who tells us to never reroll our characters. I even told Kadomi not to reroll (if she likes her faction). Trouble was, the majority of their guild was Templars. Well, this forced me to roll a Templar. Now I am at the Innsmouth Academy for the third time around. But this time Carter will talk to me.

The other reason I can’t keep up is this:

Funcom announced the next content patch for the end of August with more missions, the introduction of the auxiliary weapon slot using a handy rocket launcher, a plastic surgeon and a hair and makeup stylist. Follow the link to the newsletter for TSW Issue 2. I’ve barely scratched the new content from Issue #1, how can I expect to stay on top of all this if it comes out this fast.

Plus, there will be another free weekend starting August, 15th. Funcom published their quarterly reports recently and had to tell their investors that results had come in below expectations. In my opinion it’s a case of to high expectations. They’ve made a wonderful and intelligent game, but it is a niche game, considering the difficulty levels at times. The good thing is, they act on it by introducing the trial weekends. And I for one can tell you that they are successful doing so. You’ve seen I’ve posted 5 spoiler quest guides (can’t keep up with those, either). Those quest guides have increased my visitor numbers significantly, but fell off as soon as the majority of players moved away from Kingsmouth. During the free trial, that number climbed to about 45% of the peek and is now one week after the trial at 3 times the number of visitors just before the trial.

Since there have been so many positive reviews from the trial weekend, I expect a pretty solid number of participants and subsequently, a good number of new subscribers. Of course they set the trial weekend just before the GW2 rollout, otherwise, they’d probably have to wait for 3-6 more weeks. It’s business after all. And they seem to have business sense. Nothing wrong with that.

Free-to-play or how to Spread Around $15 per Month

Posted by FelizB on Aug 8, 2012 in Blog, Rift, SOE, Star Wars: The Old Republic, World of Warcraft | 4 comments

So we are talking again about the free-to-play model, after SWTOR has announced they’ll be using it soon for their game. Syp started this with a simple list of various free-to-play models and others have thrown in their opinions. Ocho elaborates a bit more on the various pay models and Sente looks into the cost side of the business.

Guess I’ll throw my opinion in as well. If I look at my own gaming habit I see a couple of things, and I can assume being the average Joe, that many other games will do exactly as I do. I more or less have a gaming budget, as I have already dissected a while back. So does everybody else. That’s the MMO market, the sum of the budgets of all players.

Back in the days of Everquest and Ultima Online, that market was small, since so many people

• didn’t know about MMOs
• didn’t have the hardware
• didn’t have friends who played
• just found the game to hard.

Along comes Blizzard and blows up the market size from a wild guess of 1 million players for EQ and others to 13 million at its peak, say 15 million to add in the other games, hell make it 18 million. They were able to do this because they pulled in the player base from other Blizzard games and at some point it started to snowballed.

It’s different nowadays. Remember, each player has his budget. And there aren’t that many people left who don’t know about MMOs. There are probably only hardcore MMO deniers left. Each new game, in order to gain traction has to chip away from other games’ player base, or has to find a way to bring in their own fans. But that gets them usually only 1-2 million subscribers like Rift’s and SWTOR’s numbers show. SWTOR actually pulled in the Bioware fans, many of them solo offline gamers, while Rift probably had to steal their subscribers elsewhere.

So what’s a smart company to do if it’s so hard to get new people to put down $15 each month and other players hand their money to Blizzard or Sony? Answer: what every business man does, they ask for less. I think there was a company who actually had $9.95 subscription rates. But that didn’t fly. And even smaller rates won’t work to well, because the cost of handling those transactions eat up the money.

And that’s why the folks running the business end of the MMO’s had to come up with a way get their share of the market. Instead of having somebody play 30 days for $15, they end up with somebody playing 10 days and paying $6 (see what I did here?). The players love it, since they have so many games to pick from. By the way, that’s what it looks like from the players point of view: So many games, so little time. And many want to play them all.

In the end all those free-to-play models are business vehicles to be able to offer smaller pieces of the market to the buyers. Sony’s 3 day pass comes to mind. With F2P you get somebody to pay $20 for in game currency now and recharge 4 month later. However, one reality seems to be that many players have a main game where they are subscribed to, and many others were they drop by every now and then, leaving traces of money behind.

Makes you wonder if F2P is the right way to divide that market into more equal pieces. Plus, the $15 a month Blizzards have to let them chip away.

Photo by: Images_of_Money

Swimming with the Sharks

Posted by FelizB on Aug 6, 2012 in Blog | 0 comments

This is going to be technical. Consider skipping to the last paragraph.

Ever since I got some more traffic on my blog and especially after I started publishing quest spoilers for “The Secret World”, my webhost has slowed down. It took often 8 seconds or more until the page was finished loading. I dropped a few plugins, reviewed what caching I was using, asked a few friends what else I could do and eventually found Cloudflare. Cloudflare is a service that caches your website across the world and therefore is able to deliver faster. It also has some additional security features and can take off a good amount of overall load. Happiness all over.

Well, not so much, it took still 4 seconds until everything is loaded. By then I had learned that Google doesn’t like slow websites and ranks them lower. In parallel I had been working on a small business website for a friend of mine, who had it created using “Weebly” and wanted some more options. Not much of a problem, until I installed it using WordPress on his web host (iPage). It took 4 seconds before it even started to download a page. Which made me look closer.

The download speed of a webpage consists of 2 distinct phases. Response time and the actual download. You can divide this even further, but we don’t want to go overboard. What I had experienced so far was the time needed to download text and data, and probably some processing, DNS lookups, pulling icons from other websites etc, etc. Caching can improve the download time a lot, since it generally brings the data closer to the user. But response time is difficult. It’s the time it takes from the user clicking on a link or typing in the webpage until the first bytes arrive. That time is spent by loading WordPress, MySQL or blogger and having them try to figure out what you want from them until they know how to answer.

• For my server at Westhost, it took somewhere between 1.4 and 1.8 seconds.
• iPage needed 4 seconds for a WordPress site, and .4 seconds for a “Weebly” site.
• Bluehost, where http://www.scaryworlds.com/ is hosted, took .8 seconds
• Safesharkhosting run by “vitamachinae”, who’s well known in the MMO blogosphere took between .4 and .6 seconds for a WordPress blog.

Welcome to the last paragraph. In the end, it’s been an easy decision to move to Safe Shark Hosting. The price is competitive, Westhost is actually the most expensive option and iPage the cheapest. There are some additional perks like WP, theme and plugin update service. Now lets find out how it works out long term. Mind you, I don’t want to trash the other hosting companies. IPage does good things at the right price for their user profile. I am just not in that profile anymore. Westhost’s service is outstanding and Bluehost is well known and respected as a shared hosting service.

Battlechicken’s Challenge: I am a Collector. NOT !

Posted by FelizB on Aug 4, 2012 in Blog, Everquest, Everquest II, World of Warcraft | 2 comments

Battlechicken’s been challenging her fellow bloggers for a while now with a monthly request to post about an issue suggested by her. This month it’s “I am a Collector”. That’s a subject I can contribute to, because I am not a collector. I am just not that well organized, not at all.

You see, in real life, I just can’t divide a stack of things into different piles of about equal size by classifying them. I usually end up with something like 5 piles, two with 45% of the items each and three with 5%, 3% and 2% of the items. Which in the grand scheme of things leads to a big box of  goods that resist classification. Let me correct this right here: My piles are more likely distributed  80%, 15%, 3%, 1%, 1%.

Since I can’t sort items, I end up throwing them away or selling them. In real life not as much, since selling is often cumbersome, but in an MMO there’s an auction house and there are vendors ready to take your junk. Of course, a little discretion is needed, otherwise you end up in the debtors tower of WOW.

Here’s how I deal with various in game goods:

Harvested Materials and Tradeskill Items

I keep those around either in my bags or in the bank as long as they are usable by my current tradeskill level. The same is true for intermediary products like copper bolts and pipes used in WOW engineering. As soon as I have no immediate use for these goods, I sell them on the auction house. If I need them again for some reason one week later, I just buy them again. I even sell the rare harvesting materials, since in the end, they aren’t really that rare. They usually are on sale in the auction house.

Tradeable Gear

Here’s a lesson I learned a long time ago in Everquest. The Luclin expansion had just gone live and one mob in the Netherbian lair dropped a breastplate called “Netherbian Chitin”. Great item to outfit your characters as well as twinks. I sold the first one I got. For something like 1000 platinum. At the end of the first week the price had dropped to 200p, because the mob was farmed like mad. Lesson learned: sell it while it’s hot.

Thus, I sell tradeable gear, as long as I, an alt of mine or some of my friends can’t use it immediately. I won’t keep an item if an alt of mine can use it 20 levels from now. I usually don’t know when the alt will gain those levels and expect him to be able to buy that gear or get it through quests or loots it himself. I expect to buy the same gear cheaper 4 weeks from now than I can sell it today. Mudflation counteracts the price drops somewhat, but I figure by the time I’ll notice mudflation effects, I’ll have benefited from it as well and will have more money in my pockets. In short, I’d rather have 10 gold pieces today than 15g in 6 weeks.

Nostalgia Items

I keep a few of those around, like a pair of rolling pins from the Deadmines or a brass cannon from Stratholme. I keep a couple of pimp hats on my EQ 2 characters, even though I find them to tacky to actually wear them. There are also a couple of clickable items who have outlived their usefulness, but it’s hard to say goodbye to them.

Transmog and Visual Slot Items

I’ve never gotten into transmogging or into dressing up my characters like it is possible in other games. Which makes me relatively unencumbered in that regard. But even if I did, there’s a good chance I’d apply them same rules as above. Sell it while it’s hot.

Why’s my Bank Full Anyway?

Because most of us are lazy. I usually have a selloff fit when I start having to destroy things to have bag space. And I mean bag space, not bank space. Thus, as long as I carry it, I collect.