Skirmishes and Powerleveling

I was doing an interview the other day and was asked about the future of gold farming. Without thinking too hard (because there's good evidence), I responded that I thought its future was not very bright. While the virtual goods market seems as hot as ever, it also has been internalized by experience providers. This stands to reason - why let 3rd parties monetize the eyeballs you've captured?

The conversation turned to powerleveling and I stopped to think about it - equally dim future there? I think so. I've been in the resurgent Lord of the Rings Online quite a bit lately, and the skirmish system seems well-designed as an internal PL system. (I understand WoW has something similar, instant dungeons.) The main forces driving the powerleveling market are the need of experienced players to level up alternate characters. Once you've gone through the geographic content a few times, exploring's not a thrill any more, and it becomes a grind. Riding switchback alley from Ost Guruth to Rivendell for the umpteenth time - bleh. Enter the Skirmish. If you just need to kill stuff and gain XP, you cut out the traveling. Press ctrl-J and pow, there you are, solo if necessary, facing a challenging 45-minute adventure with good XP and loot rewards.

On the whole it seems that the industry has worked on co-opting and internalizing 3rd party services. This seems to be good for the gaming experience. There's no gold spam in LOTRO, and my server (Landroval) has a very active RP community with little evidence of griefing between them and the powergamers.

Comments

[Claudia Ramos]

1.

Mi lvl es 60 en wow, y he jugado muchas veces en mazmorras, y el valor que veo en las mazmorras es que es el momento y espacio donde me es posible interactuar con personas de otras lugares del mundo, en otro idioma que no es español, y donde puedo aprender o intercambiar experiencias no sólo para subir de nivel, si no que también para conocer a otras personas en wow y aprender con ellos como lo hago en mi vida cotidiana frente a un trabajo, universidad, etc.
saludos desde Chile.

[Richard A. Bartle]

2.

Claudio Ramos>en otro idioma que no es español

Yes, we use one of those here, sorry...

Richard

[Jonas]

3.

It also seems very easy to make money in LotRO, both through regular questing, skirmishing, and even minimal use of the Auction House (not to mention all the lotteries). I wonder if this was a deliberate design decision to lower the demand for Gold Farming services.

[Richard Bartle]

4.

Jonas>It also seems very easy to make money in LotRO

It must be easier than it was when I was playing it (prior to the first expansion), it took me forever to get any cash. When I quit a few days after making level 50, I only had something like 6 gold to give away to my guildies.

Richard

[Jonas]

5.

Richard> It must be easier than it was when I was playing it (prior to the first expansion)

It certainly feels to me that it's gotten easier over the last year or so, and I've seen similar sentiments expressed on the lotro forums. One of the first revisions to skirmishes was to adjust drop rates to explicitly make them more profitable.

Maybe it's time to give LotRO another try :-) Though you just missed the last "Welcome Back Weekend"...

[Richard Bartle]

6.

Jonas>Maybe it's time to give LotRO another try

Nah, I only played it so people would stop calling me a WoW fanboi. It seemed to work: people now think I hate WoW again.

Richard

[Wolfshead]

7.

Skirmishes to me feel like WoW's daily quests. They are very repetitive and feel like a chore -- like a job really. The Groundhog Day nature of both Skirmishes and daily quests caused me to stop playing both MMOs. Both of these mechanics have unintended consequences that create problems that are worse than the problems they set out to fix.

Condemning your subscribers to repeat the same adventures over and over again is a sure sign that your MMO designers are out of creative gas or perhaps development resources but in Blizzard's case I highly doubt the latter.

Trading in hardship and adventure for convenience and a glut of loot (Monty Haul) is a horrible trade off.

To your original point, I do agree that both gear and loot are far too easy to come by these days. Instant teleportation to a dungeon (instance) is a symptom of misguided game designers pandering to lazy gamers with short-attention spans. Not to mention that it completely trivializes travel, exploration and the size of the "world".

[Jonas]

8.

...aaaand to prove the original point about "internalizing the virtual goods market", LotRO is going Free-to-play.

[Richard Bartle]

9.

Jonas>LotRO is going Free-to-play.

Following what happened with DDO it was inevitable that this would happen eventually, but I thought they'd stick with subscriptions for at least another year. Oh well, shows how much I know..!

Richard

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10.

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[Thomas]

11.

What baffles me is:

Why even bother to make the game look like you're a warrior battling monsters? If you're just repeating the same quest over and over to "farm" it, why not just abstract the whole thing?

For example by having the player click "go to combat training" and then showing a video of the character practicing for one real life hour. XP and loot pops out, and then the player must click again. And again... and again.

Or just make XP and loot awarded automatically by lottery each month of subscription. Save a lot of time for everybody.

[trading Tips]

12.

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[Patrick]

13.

Thomas, in some respect it's a fine line between creating a believable, immersive world, and making it fun. If you really want realism, you can play Final Fantasy XI, where to get from one city to another involves renting transport and waiting up to 20 minutes for a ship. It does give one a real sense of having actually traveled somewhere, however some people simply don't have the time for that sort of thing.

I think WoW's Dungeon Finder is a generally good idea, because it only cuts out the boring, logistical aspect of getting to the dungeon, which isn't a challenge in any way, only tedious. What I think would have been better was to have integrated that fast travel into the game world more realistically. In FFXI, after a certain level you'd be grated access to airships which greatly speeded up travel between the cities.

For an amusing parody of your idea, check out: http://progressquest.com/

[ikilobo]

14.

Skirmishes and Powerleveling?
whats the difference....