I also seem to remember making the point that right now almost all North American based MMOs are almost entirely products. The basic reasoning for even pointing this out is that I believe the dichotomy of product creators attempting to create services is the main thing holding us back. A larger audience is out there, but not for those trying to compete with the current market leader’s products.

As to RMT, there is certainly a market for +4 great swords of 25 damage soak, but it’s also a painful market. What I mean is, you will have to walk some very fine lines between giving people what they want to buy, and what will drive away players or create exceptionally bad marketing. It’s profit vs. risk and while the social profit is possibly lower, I can’t know that for certain, the social item risk is exceptionally low. I tend to consider low risk propositions to be superior, especially when we don’t have any hard or fast numbers for how much people are willing to pay in either case.

I’m not sure I want to get into the debates over developer RMT vs. black/grey market RMT here. And I didn’t want to get into it as part of that post, either.

I’m not sure “you need socialites” is wishful thinking. But I’m not sure the two of us could have a debate as to what is wishful thinking. Raiders see the world as it relates to raiding, socialites the world as it relates to society. As to Free Realms RMT being about decorative items, I can say for certain, I didn’t say that. From what I’ve played of Free Realms though, it seems to be very much so built off the concept of a service. Getting the player in and showing them interesting things, getting them to purchase pieces of content or a longer term subscription or cards for the card game, etc…

It’s also important to note that right now all of the MMOs are a service, they can’t not be. However that doesn’t mean that the people creating them expend their time and energy on improving the service side over the product side. Which segues into my next point… I’m not anti-killer, I am one.

However, the attitude I largely see is that killers are “bad”. And for a true product, they really might be, after all what effect does an audience of killers have on an iPhone? Or relating to games how about Mass Effect? They’ve extended the lifetime of Half-Life through mods, but probably aren’t the intended audience of Half-Life 2… A one shot product tends to have significantly less room for them. Of course there is also the question of what exactly divides the killer who kills for griefing from the killer who kills for the challenge, which is a large part of why I try not to use the Bartle Types too often. That and the fact that the test is designed to return a type regardless of nearness or farness. In other words people outside of all four types will still return a result even though they may honestly not be strongly identified with any of the types or any combination of the types.

“Diablo II and the expansion are the games that we at Blizzard want to play. That is our formula for success. Companies that design games based on focus groups, marketing opinions, and even fan input do not succeed.”

First off I really don’t like blog posts that think WoW was successful because it just happened to get lucky. There’s far too many of these in the blogosphere. If we want to see great games develop as a result of people learning from the WoW model we need to drop the “Blizzard got lucky” or “WoW sells because people are dumb” memes so prevalent in the blogosphere.

Next I think she misses that WoW is actually a series of products. Each new content patch and new expansion substantially changes the game. For many people it replaces the game they had before (eg raiding Kara) with a completely different game (raiding Naxx). WoW isn’t just a service.

She says “your most effective line of sales are things that increase the player’s enjoyment of the place” and concludes that means you should aim your RMT at socialisers.

Now we know that’s not true.

We know it’s not true because there is an illegal RMT market that has thrived for years and it’s not made billions because people want furniture. People want power, gold, levelling, epics.

RMT particularly spikes when there is content that you can’t play if you don’t buy gold/items. You can always socialise. You could only raid Naxx 40 if you were fully buffed with about 7 different elixirs and a flask and able to spend long hours wiping incurring horrific repair bills. Virtually every Naxx 40 guild had some or most of its members buying illicit gold. The only alternative was to raid for 20+ hours per week, grind gold for 20 hours per week and pick flowers for 20 hours per week.

Her article is full of places where she makes illogical leaps of thought (such as you want to make money therefore sell virtual plant pots not legendary swords), wishful thinking (“you need socialisers”), or factually incorrect statements (“Free Realms RMT is about decorative items”).

As for killers this argument was very well stated on both sides by Diablo 2 player Sirian and Blizzard VP Max Schaeffer several years ago. Basically Blizzard’s attitude then was that killers give you that frisson of fear that increases the game’s interest even though you don’t specifically like being in danger.

http://www.warpcore.org/~sirian/diablo2/protest.html

Ironically you’re putting faith in society without even realising it.

There’s a line to be drawn between caring about the game and being engaged by your character and the virtual world, and caring too much and letting it affect your real life more than it should. People do often over-react online. But sometimes it’s just a game. Killer types play that way and it’s not a bad thing to balance out playing styles, is all.

Not all killer types are griefers. But even the griefers often do it just to get a rise out of people. It gives more of a sense of being able to affect the game world than just killing NPCs ad infinitum.

Most people of that type that I have known routinely lose all RL competition (including for status and other resources) so they are highly emotionally invested in winning in-game competition. They act so offensively precisely because they are so afraid of being a virtual loser on top of being a RL loser. Honestly, I think the griefed player is leaving the game on the table more than the griefer.

Guild drama, if you are close and actual friends, can be much more depressing because you have a lot more invested. Griefers can’t hurt you much because you aren’t nearly as invested in beating them or doing the task they are blocking you from as you are invested in your guid friendships or even your guild’s ability to progress or do activities.

Also, I’m not sure I can agree with your statement that killer types can ‘leave the game on the table’. I’m sure you must have dropped in on official PvP forums before!

You can ignore guild drama and but you’re right, Spinks, it can start to effect gameplay if players choose it to. I’ve been in raids where players have camped out right in the middle of it and quit because of some sort of drama and thus scuppering the entire raid for everyone else.

IMO the best way to deal with guild drama is to avoid getting drawn into it. I’m a pretty easy going player so I find it quite easy to avoid it – I don’t lose my temper because someone rolled on an item I need, for example.

And this is were socialising is important and why it can’t be ignored as when you group or raid you are at the mercy of the person distributing the loot or others rolling on it. There’s nothing stopping them from screwing you over apart from social morals.

Yes, you could just grow a pair and learn to deal with it but people seem to take these things so much more personally online. Online drama is just crazy sometimes, the way it blows up from nothing. I think it’s something to do with not being able to see the other person.

(Also because looking to random people in a game to validate you in real life is just not a good idea anyway. But people do it.)