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b buildings will exacerbate the likely inevitable urge to climb household furniture also perhaps most likely i m not sure if i need my first parent teacher conference to be about why my kid thinks george washington enlisted the help of an elite order of assassins to combat the templar menace on both sides of the revolution one of the things that struck me about smedley s own dc universe online curious how his product failed to appear on his list of recent mmo s that peaked and dropped after launch was how its closest competitors were in many ways console superhero games rather than other online offerings single player games are getting larger and more elaborate in ways that erode some of the advantages of scope that larger virtual worlds once enjoyed moreover the need to free up time for some more in depth action sequences on the core storyline has created the same pressure for filler quests that utilize the existing engine and world it s going to be interesting to see how these two types of games continue to collide posted by green armadillo at 8 23 pm 4 comments labels business models silly game logic monday october 22 2012 wow annual pass post mortem to start a quick update on the wow annual pass billing issue i discussed on thursday along with some other thoughts as my time with the annual pass ends billing update wilhelm reports and i can confirm that that the cancel subscription button is no longer locked out for our accounts as far as i could tell it was still blocked when i wrote the post four days ago wilhelm had previously been told that the billing system was somehow structurally incapable of processing customer requests to discontinue recurring billing even after you had paid for enough time to fulfill your commitment until the end of the one year pass term having this option quietly re appear at the proverbial 11 58 pm invites speculation that blizzard had a more cynical motivation for failing to honor cancellation requests back in may most of my advice from thursday stands whether or not you were prevented from canceling previously due to this policy you will be billed until you change settings that said now that blizzard is honoring requests to discontinue billing this issue is downgraded to a case of a corporation trying to sneak a 15 charge past its customers sadly if you don t do business with every company that tries that these days you re going to have to go become a hermit somewhere was the year in wow worth it last october i chose to account the annual pass fee as a 60 purchase of diablo iii and a 96 subscription to wow on this basis i think i did pretty well my best guess is that i would have subscribed for roughly 4 months one at a time at 15 month for a total of 60 in the absence of the annual pass that would mean i paid 36 for the other 8 months roughly 4 50 per month even though that s 4 50 month that i would not have otherwise spent i m reasonably confident that i got at least that much value out of the off months if blizzard had chosen to offer the same deal again with the pandaria box taking the place of diii i would probably be inclined to take it even though this would be a slightly worse value due to the lower price of the expansion box the problem that i had this year was that pesky diablo iii purchase i ve enjoyed the portion of the game i played but it hasn t been a high priority and there have definitely been opportunities to snag it for less than 60 if you zero out the value of diii purchase overly harsh but for the sake of argument i was effectively paying 12 month for the off months nearly full price and far from a bargain the reality is probably somewhere between these extremes not the best bargain but not that expensive as far as gaming life lessons go last year i speculated whether blizzard would be doing anything to make the base price of the wow subscription more palatable to people like myself who are open to paying a bit more for uninterrupted access but not 150 year despite the success of the program over 1 2 million customers took blizzard up on it the answer is apparently not this could mean that blizzard is more confident that people will stay subscribed with a new expansion on the shelves and alleged plans for more frequent content updates alternately it could mean that the majority of people who took the annual pass deal were long time loyal subscribers who would probably have remained subscribed anyway and that lost revenue from these folks may have canceled out any gains from less frequent visitors like myself in the mean time later this week will be the first time in a year when i will not be able to log into world of warcraft i will be back amongst other things there is a new expansion awaiting my attention but almost certainly on a month to month basis this will very likely save me money but it remains to be seen whether blizzard s current product is better experienced over the longer term posted by green armadillo at 9 17 am 5 comments labels business models wow thursday october 18 2012 psa check wow annual pass bill dates update 10 22 wilhelm reports and i can confirm that that the cancel subscription button is no longer locked out for our accounts it was still blocked when i wrote this post four days ago most of the below advice stands whether or not you were prevented from canceling previously due to this policy you will be billed again until you change settings i m also not inclined to give a ton of credit to blizzard for changing their stance on this without any notice or comment on the very last weekend of the one year pass window original post this post is to advise world of warcraft annual pass customers to check their billing information and if they intend to cancel for whatever reason to change their billing increment down to one month blizzard rolled out its annual pass program for world of warcraft about a year ago which means that the more than 1 2 million players who signed up for it are going to start hitting the end of their commitments over the next week the following is not to argue the merits of a wow subscription in general but rather to call attention to a billing issue that may affect these players according to the terms of use for the annual pass promotion players who signed up for the annual pass must have provided blizzard with a valid credit card which can be used by you to purchase world of warcraft subscription game time on a recurring basis to participate in this offer agree to maintain a fully paid up world of warcraft license that is in good standing with blizzard entertainment inc or its authorized licensees for a twelve 12 month period beginning on the day that you sign up for the offer the twelve month commitment a one year subscription can be paid in two installments of six months each a reasonable person such as myself or wilhelm might reasonably have assumed paying for the second installment back in april insured that our commitments were met blizzard has chosen to interpret this commitment to mean that you cannot withdraw consent for recurring billing until the expiration of your pass term the account page will not allow you to cancel recurring billing beyond the duration of the annual pass until after it has expired customer service also will not help the best advice wilhelm could get was to attach a pre paid credit card with 1 on it so that it would pass the is this a credit card check but fail to bill personally i have a bit over a day between the time the system claims my commitment will be satisfied and the time of my next billing wilhelm was somehow less fortunate and has only a few hours according to his commenters customer service is claiming that they will refund any charges resulting from being unable to cancel between the end of the annual pass and the next bill date my best advice would be for annual pass customers to check their billing information and if they intend to cancel for whatever reason to change their billing increment down to one month to ensure that if there is any billing dispute the amount at issue is as small as possible posted by green armadillo at 10 15 am 1 comments labels business models wow wednesday october 17 2012 mmo death penalties are the harshest ever tobold muses about whether the success of two recent strategy games in which the player can actually lose the campaign against the computer pave the way for tougher failure penalties in mmo s ironically today s seemingly lenient penalties are arguably more punitive than the seemingly harsher penalties in the days of old based on my experience with x com in the late 90 s seeing how different strategic choices influence the outcome is the fun part of the strategy game in some ways losing the game meant a fresh start where you could try a different approach to combating the alien invasion the penalty for failure was only a penalty if you did not like the game that you were playing meanwhile as i ve written for a long time now all death penalties in mmo s can effectively be expressed in terms of the time it will take to get your character back to the state they were in prior to their unfortunate mishap whether it s the time to run back from the graveyard payoff exp debt replace lost gears and levels or even to re roll after hardcore perma death there is always some quantity of time that will repair your losses the difference between tobold s bygone era where this threat brought communities together and today is a more diverse playerbase in an era where the predominant form of play was grinding mobs in a group of your friends the loss of exp just meant more time grinding mobs in a group of your friends i e only a penalty if you did not like the game you were playing today s genre attempts to draw a wide range of playstyles such as solo players small groups who may not have tanking healing structured groups raiders crafters etc more to the point developers are increasingly using incentives to get players to use the other forms of content as they cannot afford to let the development time used to support all of this stuff sit idle the result is that if you were to lose gear or exp as a result of death you would probably be forced to go do something you do not enjoy to get it back having to spend an hour to re queue and repeat a dungeon finder pug that failed is arguably worse than losing a level in eq1 because you did not want to be doing pug dungeon finder runs to begin with as long as this is the case making more substantial death penalties only serves to increase the amount of time your customers have to spend doing stuff that they did not want to do to begin with not the best business plan for a genre that depends on retaining satisfied customers posted by green armadillo at 12 16 pm 3 comments labels business models pvd silly game logic social wow monday october 15 2012 random vertical progression musings a few tidbits from the blogs that address vertical progression keen proposes that levels should be removed from wow because they are easy but time consuming to obtain and are required for access to group pve and pvp content this is perhaps a natural extension of the issues with pvp gear and reputation that have been hounding pandaria since its release i generally agree that mmo s should not be designed to require one form of content solo group pvp for access to another frankly i think the quality of wow s leveling game as a solo experience has suffered for all the changes required to keep the level cap accessible to group players eq2 has the same problem the challenge is that levels are tied to meaningful progression acquisition of spells talents etc that actually influence how you play the game i ve spent a fair amount of time one shotting my way through story content i have overleveled in wow and lotro and it can be fun but the complete lack of any change to your character becomes very noticeable i also don t think it s good design to hit newbies with three hotbars full of spells but i don t see how any form of up mentoring that does not include every meaningful form of character advancement levels spells talents etc will be acceptable for min max ed endgame content i think it is far more likely that we will see some form of instant max level functionality added to the game probably in the next year or so the lack of a function for mentoring down in levels from wow in 2012 is a bit sad but we haven t commonly seen the opposite approach offered because it does not actually solve the problem spinks reminds me that assassin s creed 3 is coming this is a game i am looking forward to playing it was the only line not directly tied to turbine swag that i stood in at pax east this year but i do have an odd vertical progression block i m currently partway through the storyline of assassin s creed brotherhood the middle game in what became a trilogy around ac2 protagonist ezio auditore while it looks like the new game will be doing a ton of cool things and i m guessing they will probably offer some form of synopsis it seems a shame to have a future game spoil the end of the previous entries oh well i suppose console games only get cheaper meanwhile in my baby friendly mmo of choice wow pet battles have some odd vertical progression in principle the system is independent of the game s regular leveling curve though it is far easier if you have a flying mount and outlevel the local mobs each pet gains levels separately while the level of wild pets scales such that all of the zone in the game map in approximately the correct order to the 25 levels of battle pets if you really need a pet of a certain level you can always go tame whatever you can find locally up to the highest level of a pet you currently own you can swap out your pets anywhere at any time when not in a pet battle however if you want to keep a specific pet handy perhaps a favorite that you had from prior to the pet battle system or perhaps a wild pet that has useful stats you will need to keep that pet leveling as you go you also generally want to have approximately level appropriate pets handy for taming attempts as it is possible to and extremely sad when you one shot a blue quality pet you were hoping to capture all of that said it s a relatively non linear progression in that you can always choose to go backwards and that is a good thing posted by green armadillo at 9 17 pm 1 comments labels eq2 lotro my characters pvd wow wednesday october 10 2012 pet battles for the new parent doing our part in the blogger baby boom my wife and i welcomed our first child last friday our little girl appears to be a gamer before birth she arrived over a week late becasuse she wanted to get in just one more round of the practice kidney shots on mommy game but both are doing well ironically despite the fact that i still do not own world of warcraft s new expansion two weeks post launch this addition to the family may make wow a must subscribe game for the near future i d deliberately held off ...
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