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A Gaming God For Dollars A Day
Wired is reporting on the new "Gamepal" service, which offers up the chance to MMOG players of renting a character in an online world for only a few dollars a day. From the article: "GamePal customers pay a $300 deposit, $150 for the first month and $130 for each subsequent month for access to their choice of 50 accounts (available initially) for 14 popular MMOs, including EverQuest, Star Wars Galaxies, City of Heroes and Ultima Online. Newcomers to these games who aren't sure where they want to devote their time are in luck: GamePal allows them to try out what they want."
What exactly is the deposit for? Can you damage the character in such a way that there needs to be monetary compensation?
Oh please dear god don't let this include FFXI (at work, can't check TFA). Nothing fills me with more terror than the idea of complete newbies running around with high level jobs, even if only on a temporary basis.
This isn't just an elitist thing; it's more of an "I don't like dying" thing. Levelling at any point beyond level 18 or so (and preferrably a long time before then) in FFXI requires that you join a party, usually of 6 people. Roles in these parties are pretty defined and a good party needs all of its members to be on the ball. Depending on his role in the party, a single incomptetent can do anything from dramatically reducing the rate you get xp at to causing the death of the entire party.
Most jobs grow in complexity as you level up and gain new abilities. For example, as a Paladin, you can get away at first with just tanking by using provoke. As you get into the 25-30 level range, it becomes more and more importand to keep hate by using cure spells and abilities such as shield bash. Ideally, you should know how to use Cover (a notoriously fiddly and tricky, but incredibly useful ability) by the time you hit 40 and certainly by the time you are 50. In a level 60 party, a paladin who didn't know how to do any of this stuff would get his party killed... fast. By cutting out the learning curve on a job, you are putting yourself and others at risk of unnecessary deaths and xp loss.
Ah, but these are subscription services. The last day I played Diablo II was when I died somewhere and couldn't retrieve my gear - it was wierd situation.
I was moving towards being tired of that game and I sure wasn't going to put the kind of effort needed to recover in.
You wouldn't want to see that happen to your revenue stream would you? Significant penalties to character stats could accompany death though and still keep the game attractive.
Perma-death cannot work.
The last time I died in WoW started when I heard something hit my character and then the game froze. One quick reboot later (and several failed login attempts because it hadn't closed my previous session) and I finally log in to a dead character.
Until you remove crashes and lag and disconnects, you can't have perma-death in a game designed to take as long to build a character in like an MMORPG.
You know, 7334...
teea?
In spite of delusions of grandeur, the post which kicked all this off had a point. Even at the relative lowbie levels that casual gamers like me play at (my highest WoW character is in the high 20s, and I never really got a CoH character past the mid 30s), it almost always becomes incredibly obvious when you team up with somebody who did not play their character up from the beginning.
But teaked-out power-levellers tend to be just as bad. They got some uber friend of theirs to zip their character through about ten levels an hour without ever learning how to play it, and without ever developping whatever system of skill trees the came is built around. They end up with a character which is about as effective as a character half their level, and also need every damned thing explained to them.
Then again, I see all the cheaters, gold-buyers, and twinks as part of the fun of these games, because they make you fully appreciate the people you meet who are actually fun to game with.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
This is a really bad idea. Any new player who uses this service will have no idea how to play this high level character. All high level characters are quite specialized, and players who have taken the time to get them to a high level know all the subtleties needed to play that character effectively. Someone who just bought/rented a character will have no idea how to even play the game, much less be aware of the subtleties needed to play that character well.
Example: I play Lineage II (http://www.lineage2.com/ ). A couple months ago, I was grouped with this one healer. I asked the healer which armor set she was wearing, since I didn't recognise it. She responded with the name of an armor that's meant to be worn by a damage dealing melee character. When I asked her why she was wearing that type of armor, that it wasn't good for her character, she switched to another type of armor... which was still the completely wrong choice for that character. I asked "You just ebayed that character, didn't you?", and she promptly left without saying another word.
The point of that whole story is, most MMOs have a very strong focus on group play in the later levels and endgame. If there are inexperienced players in the group, then the group will go badly. If the group goes badly, then the player will get an unfavorable impression of the game, and the other, experienced players will not want to group with the inexperienced player again, further giving the the player an unfavorable impression of the game.