Schneier on Security

wumpus • July 12, 2013 3:26 PM

[way too long, won’t read: This post describes DDO’s free to play launch and how the money game has been slowly injected into it. Unfortunately there are no squids in either game to justify it (although I haven’t played enough LORTO to be sure).]

Another, longer term example: Dungeons and Dragons Online (note this has almost nothing to do with the more recently released Neverwinter Nights MMO).

DDO was launched by Turbine in 2006 as a subscription based MMO, roughly the time World of Warcraft took off. It had something of a following, but seemed to falter. I would assume that there were also licensing issues during the 2009 (vast and mysterious) phase when there was neither updates nor communication from the parent company (and resulting loss of subscriptions and players).

In late 2009, DDO was relaunched in f2p format. The game retained the option for subscriptions (which made all content available) and offered other content a la carte. There were also a short-lived level gating system (leveling tokens: the lowest pretty much autodropped before you needed them, the next was a minor grind. I assume the rest needed to be purchased but they were before I needed them).

One of the big advantages to the a la carte (called premium in Turbine’s system) closely matched how D&D players purchased the pen and paper game. Non standard races and classes required specific purchases (much like current players tend to buy extra books to find such rules) and extra adventures were purchased separately (I bought a ton of modules back in the day). This allowed the a la carte buyer to at least budget purchases, and have a clear idea of the costs before purchasing (something I became keenly aware wasn’t true in Neverwinter Nights). At launch (and for a few years afterwards) the ability to pay to win (called a money game in the article) was typically only useful for matching some of the character generation options of more established players. The big “pay to win” options were buying the option of building (and this was a one time buy, not each character) 32 point characters instead of 28 point ones. To new players, this seemed a power way to make large swings of power. In reality, it only mattered on more obscure builds (character design systems) that were easy for a rookie to get wrong and get an even worse than normal character. Another means was through attribute tomes: tomes are critical items used to push attributes. They are critical in that many options require certain attributes, and using even 32 point builds gets far too expensive (more points are required to advance higher stats, tomes ignore this and simply bump it by the value on the tome). Aside from this, players can often find the loot needed to achieve most of the other abilities, but tomes remain a final, separate means for advancement. At roughly $25, the “tome of superior ability” seemed an opportunity to build an overpowered character for roughly the price of playing the game for a month (in reality it didn’t make that much of a difference).

This isn’t to say that Turbine made f2p entirely for the players’ advantage. There were plenty of ways to waste money on the game. One big seller appeared to be magic weapons/armor. The ingame store was filled with “+1 items” that new players familiar with the D&D system would likely lust over, only to find that they would be handed items just as good in 5 minutes (the end of the tutorial quest) and be handed even better weapons (at least against the main beginner enemy) after 4 quests (a bit under an hour)[After several years of this they finally claimed they were removing the vendor trash from the pay store. I’m sure there is still junk, but I am not aware of such “stuff to sucker newbies”]. I’ve mentioned the leveling token system, but that was quickly removed. One thing that was never removed was the “path” system. Basically, following a “path” lets Turbine build your character for you, and typically does in a way at least as bad as newbie players. While there have been published far superior ways of achieving the same thing (search “paths revisited” for how to build a character if you want to try this game), one suspects that Turbine hasn’t fixed it since they can sell a chance to rebuild your character at $10 a pop.

As far as how much of the game was free, my typical answer was roughly 33%. It seemed they used the old Id/Apogee/3drealms idea of giving away roughly a third of the game and selling the rest to those who were hooked. The first few levels (1-4, but remember pen and paper D&D only goes to 20, so don’t try to compare to WoW levels) had all the quests free, followed by levels with free and paid quests available, till about level 10-12 where there would be no more free quests (this is no longer true. While I don’t think that 33% of the quests are still free, there are plenty more of them at higher levels, at least till you hit the expansion at level 20). One big difference is that the paid content typically has better loot, and much of the desirable gear is bound to account (requiring an additional $10 purchase for non-subscribers to share gear between charcters) and can’t be bought or sold between players. While this may seem pay to win, it certainly doesn’t fit the “money game” described in the article: Turbine makes it fairly clear what the “minimum suggested payment” is, and once you pay that the others can’t buy their way past you (this way).

Once DDO went f2p, plenty of players showed up to play D&D for free. What was unexpected was just how many of them stuck around to pay for the non-free content. Turbine was claiming that subscriptions had doubled, and seemed to be outnumbered by “premium” players who had dropped between $50-$200 to buy content (such things become pretty obvious when discussing which quests to run in a group).

I’m sure Turbine management was always aware of how much money they “left on the table” keeping DDO a skill game instead of a money game. And there was always an effort to allow players to send them as much money as possible some “hits”:

anti-beholder potions. Part of advancing a character meant equiping yourself to make sure that you had protection from all the various nasties you might encounter. Some of these store items were designed to short-circuit that. Anti-beholder potions really got in my craw due to the fact that beholders had been so much a part of their advertising campaign. “In other f2p games, you fight traffic. In DDO you fight beholder.” In pay2win DDO, you pay and autowin against beholders. Note that at one point they managed to put an ad for such items that blocked your field of vision (it was for anti-level draining potions. Level drains are fairly common and wear off. You can imagine the joy players felt to have this spammed in their face in the heat of a battle).

Tome creep. Remember the +2 tomes in the store? These were followed by +3, +4, and (I think) +5 tomes in the store. Typically a few tomes would be sprinkled as loot elsewhere to make the new store tome “not raid loot”. The other odd thing about it was that from memory, they never decreased the old tome prices. In reality, standard MMO inflation made them cheap, but buying them through VISA didn’t work that way. Last I heard, you could still buy “TP codes” (TP are the currency used to buy game items) and sell them for in game gold (plat). The cost of cheap codes could cover a full character’s worth (or two) of +2 tomes.

SP pots. Probably the first big “pay2win” item in the store. They allow a sorcerer or other spell caster to instantly regain a bunch of spell points (spell points don’t automatically regenerate in DDO. You have to rest at certain places and at harder levels they are strictly limited). These are often used in raids (and often forcing costs onto healers that aren’t expected of others) to either save a failing raid or to play at a slightly higher level (or gulped down constantly to set records for solo play). Note that the “rescue a failed raid” scenario closely resembles the “keep the goods you have” trick described in the article (if the boss is low on health and you spent a long time to get there, it feels like the completion is being taken away from you).

Bravery Bonus: [this was one of the things that made me question why I was playing the game] For years, DDO allowed subscription players (VIP) to play quests at higher difficulties without first “unlocking” them by playing them at lower difficulties. The bravery bonus allowed such players to get extreme bonuses to xp (and thus level vastly faster) if they started at higher levels. The catch is that it really wasn’t feasible to allow premium players who owned the content to do the same (playing at higher difficulty levels is an important means of “grinding” “free” TP (with a $/hr return that won’t cover the electricity)). Eventually Turbine came out with a system that allowed players who had “TRed” (taken an old character back to level 1 to level him again) to do this depending on how many times they had “TRed” (such players already own all the content and have TP flowing from their ears due to such runs, Turbine would lose no money this way). Since I was one of the few with characters powerful enough to survive the higher difficulty, but hadn’t bothered to go through the long process of a TR, all I could do was rent something I had already bought to enjoy the new system. I left instead.

Daily Dice: new starting March. DDO’s own casino. You get one chance to pull the lesser prize wheel, and can pay for more. It is a straightforward money game, pretty much undisguised. As you might imagine, accessing the casino is instant from anywhere.

After the success of resurrecting DDO, Turbine decided to make Lord of the Rings Online free to play as well. They pretty much did the same things, only as far as I can tell anything in the game can be bought in the store as well. Daily Dice are called Hobbit Presents, and there are quite a few more expansions, but it is pretty much the same deal. One difference is that you almost have to subscribe for at least one month to get a whole slew of perks for any character who logged in while you were subscribed. Another big difference is that there is no paid content below level 20 (roughly) and no free content areas under level 35 (again, roughly). There are the odd high level free spots (newbies taking a wrong tern in certain goblin lairs aren’t warned when they are about to step into a high level area), there really isn’t a way to easily level once you go much past level 30 (although you likely accumulated enough “free TP” to buy at least the next quest pack, remember you went through 3-4 free packs to get there).

wumpus • July 13, 2013 10:47 AM

@MingoV Fark.com recently had “news” of a hp product with a backdoor. Someone managed to post a “Mr. Potatohead” reference (and the next guy followed up perfectly) within roughly the same number of responses as dbCooper. I suspect few missed it on this forum.