Finishing up the Feed Reader

It’s clear! I’ve read it all! And with a cat sleeping on my keyboard so I can’t type without hitting her ear (got to love helpful cats). So here goes, with two stories from a variety of blogs this time – one about WAR and one about LotRO:

A lot’s been written about the new WAR free trial, taking out the 10 day restriction and just opening up Tier 1 for free play. WAR is a game that will always be close to my heart and I would definitely boot it up sometime post-Mirkwood and play through some Nordenwatch for old time’s sake. I hope it gets them some extra subs, and going streaming is great too. Of course, it’s not ALL good news, because apparently GOA hasn’t announced a similar scheme yet.

When we were writing The Book of Grudges back in the day, it always frustrated me how much of my time I had to spend talking about the differences between the EU and US experience for players. I thought I’d dropped that as a topic when I switched to a more generic blog, but now it’s raised its ugly head for me in LotRO. Turbine run and develop the game in the US. Codemasters run it in Europe. In terms of server stability and even my own personal experience with GMs, I have no problem with the Codemasters service. But, it did take an age to get EU players access to the Lorebook for editing purposes (a bit of a smokescreen I have to say and one I never got behind, because I think the Lorebook is pretty pointless).

But with the my.lotro service, Turbine has finally produced something related to the game that I am actually jealous of, and which I’m mad at both Turbine and Codemasters for not extending to the EU players. So now to the links, right? Well, both Casual Stroll to Mordor and Doc Holiday talk about the new class-specific lotteries being held on my.lotro at the moment. And this follows some more generic lotteries. It sounds fun, it sounds community-building, and we don’t get it. Grr.

(Spinks just asked if I’d pick an EU service again. It’s looking less and less tempting with each game with a split in service).

The Marketing of Mythic

There’s one big problem with getting truly involved in a community, and that’s that the community expects continued support and involvement. It’s a tricky path to tread. For any company, not just an MMO one. And it’s easy enough to say things like ‘don’t start it, if you don’t mean to carry it on’, these things are easily enough done.

Community managers usually have official forums to look after and to talk to fans of a game on, whatever their regional status. These official forums provide a couple of benefits, the fans know where to go for official information, and on the other side, the community management team have a kind of ‘fence’ somewhere that keeps them in one place. Of course it’s always exciting when someone from a game company comments on a blog, replies to you on twitter (depending on what that say, naturally), gets in touch via email, or sends something through the mail. That’s because we’re a ‘fan’ community to a certain extent. Even when we knock them, we love MMOs, and games in general or we wouldn’t have them as the focus for our blogs and to draw friends from the same community.

Where community involvement can get a bit ‘dangerous’ is where the lines get blurred and then there’s no going back. It was nothing but great for Mythic to comment on some of the new blogs from Age of Blogging, but it does raise an expectation that they read blogs on a general basis. I’m not sure they do. And if they did at one point, I think perhaps that’s the kind of thing in danger when redundancies hit. Maybe they read them when they can, this isn’t meant as a criticism – reading blogs ISN’T their job, so when things are busy of course it’ll fall by the wayside. But it’s out there that it’s been done and that anyone from Mythic may at anytime stop by a blog.

Then there’s the highly publicised mail-outs for the Valentine’s Day again. Will the same happen for the Necropolis and Land of the Dead? (NB: you can send me a mummy anytime, but no scarabs plz!). I’d say not, because Valentine’s Day lends itself so naturally to mail-outs. So I don’t think they’re in any danger of expectation there. Except… they did use some pretty good clues for the Slayer/Choppa reveal when they sent Keen and Snafzg some neat clues to the new classes (which were pretty much guessed a while before, but it still added excitement and enthusiasm about where they might hit next).

So, rather than expecting them to come up with some new interesting mail-out, I now expect them to come up with something innovative, marketing-wise. Something that captures the imagination of an increasingly despondent community and manages to infect it with enthusiasm. And they have a product that is intriguing people, one that people are hoping will truly live up to expectations – the Necropolis and the Land of the Dead events. If they can just get the balance right again, they could have another ‘word-of-mouse’ campaign. But at the moment, the blogging community seems in the WAR doldrums, so something WILL be needed.

I don’t know of many other games where the ‘big names’ in the company have gone around blogs commenting on stories and stoking up some ‘squee’ points. Community involvement is something we’re used to being via forums, and now perhaps twitter, or facebook or other social networking sites – until it becomes unmanageable. I applaud Mythic for giving it a shot, but now they need to explore what they can do next – and I’m really looking forward to finding that out.

(sorry for a bit of a ramble, am up early and trying to do too many things at once)

Back to Mythic Marketing…

We’re back to the old marketing thing again. Something I try and keep an eye on because well, it’s something I’ve meddled with in the part. Green Armadillo has been talking about things very much on my mind – Mark Jacobs and his ‘spin’ and the misguided ‘call to arms’ re-enlistment emails doing the US rounds.

As Spinks points out, the re-enlistment emails are very nicely  phrased and bring a smile to our faces. It’s clever marketing to reference people’s guilds and friends in an email asking them to return and try out the changes to the game. Mythic’s come up with some excellent marketing gimmicks since the game has released. But they also keep stabbing themselves in the feet PR-wise.

What’s the problem I hear you ask? Well, to re-enlist, returning subscribers had to enter credit card details, something that patently isn’t needed to play what’s basically a free trial of a game. We’re not a stupid audience, any time you’re asked for payment details up-front, there’s a chance that you’ll forget to cancel, or something will happen and your credit card will be charged. That’s how various cashback offers work, it’s clever, it’s savvy, but it’s also transparent. If the game stands up, then returners WILL subscribe, even if just for another month. Or they won’t, but they’ll try it again when the next content update comes in. But to offer something in this way is a little foolish, mainly because it opens you up to unnecessary criticism and concern from the playerbase. If just one person is charged accidentally, the forums will hear ALL about it – it only takes one case for the whole thing to become negative PR, rather than the positive that was expected (I imagine).

Europe doesn’t have the re-enlistment programme. In some ways I wish it did, because I know a couple of people who might be in-game with me right now if it did. But I’d not want it presented with the need for credit card details either. I’d rather tell them to use a different email and account set-up and go for the 10-day free trial! It’s just as good a showcase in some ways, though it wouldn’t allow access to their old characters.

In other marketing plans, Mythic continue to bequest marketing packages on various WAR bloggers. The Valentine’s campaign was successful and low-cost, so to send out some pen drives with images from the new areas and dungeon is good going. I heartily support this, though I think they should follow this us with all the pictures included in a newsletter for those who don’t read blogs, forums, news sites, etc and just play the game.

As for the State of the Game address. I skimmed it. I admit to that freely. I don’t really care what Mark Jacobs says anymore because it’s all so heavily spun. I didn’t link to it on Book of Grudges, because there are a multitude of blogs out there reporting it better and in more detail than I care to.

Mythic’s handling of  Warhammer Online marketing and PR control has made me wary, and I certainly don’t trust anything fully that I hear about the game anymore. That being said, I’ve greatly enjoyed my time so far in the game since patch 1.2 went in and I do look forward to coming improvements to the game. I just look at every announcement a lot more cynically than I used to, and I’m a little saddened by that.

Tomorrow, tomorrow and tomorrow

Warhammer Online probably didn’t have the exactly launch Mythic wanted, I think we can agree on that.

First of all, they had to delay four highly anticipated classes and two cities before the game launched. Which means they had to shoehorn in a clunky and not-as-tested Fortress capture 2/3 mechanism before you could attack a City. Which no-one understood. And which makes no sense story-wise.

First of all, it was too easy to attack a City, and then too hard.

Firstly, too many servers were opened – and then there were server transfers, clones, merges, all sorts of things to try and get server figures sensible and what was needed for a bubbling PvP (RvR) game.

Mythic, though,  are unbelievably responsive and very in-touch with the fan community, despite (and perhaps because of) Mark Jacobs’  hatred for official boards. But they’ve also been extremely lucky to have a dedicated community, built on the back of both Dark Age of Camelot, and the cache of being in the vanguard of support. They have been very lucky to  have Warhammer Alliance set up to take up some of the official forums strain (and it probably hasn’t done badly for the site’s owners, either).

And even luckier to have dedicated bloggers such as Syp and Snafzg who have more or less powered the revitalization of the WAR blogosphere by coming up with this January’s Age of Blogging Initiative. At a time when buzz about the game was at an all-time low, a new generation of blogs have cropped up – most of which have had promising starts. And it hasn’t taken long for Paul Barnett to sit up, take notice and support what was obviously an ingenious idea. 

Paul Barnett and Josh Drescher, the ‘big names’, who got us all fired up with their promotional videos before launch, have continued to fire-fight across the fanbase, with cool announcements, snippets across their blogs and twitter, etc etc – all verging on viral marketing and trading in on their personalities and the buzz they’re able to accumulate. It’s a great tactic, all devs should be interested in their fan communities on such a level. But in a way we’re lured in again to the hype machine.

We like viral marketing, clues, little things being sent out to real people from big developers. That’s why viral marketing works. Because it gives us that connection, and I heartily applaud it (that’s as someone who used to work on the outskirts of viral marketing campaigns).

But I do wonder a bit,  is it all the same as the ‘bears, bears, bears’ video that promised us we wouldn’t have to go out and re-kill things for quests that we’d already killed. I don’t want to be caught up in hype again only to have my hopes dashed. I feel wearier about any buzz to do with Warhammer Online than I did a year ago, when I was thick with excitement about the game and what it might mean to me. Now I almost dread tomorrow’s announcement. I really do. And the Valentine’s event. I want it to be everything it promises. But I wanted that this time last year also, and have seen things batter away at my relentless enthusiasm.

And yet I’ll still read the announcement and pick it apart, and listen and read commentary on it from the people out there in the fan community that I respect (and I hope they know who they are), but will it revive Warhammer for more than the short-term?

Time will tell.

The big announcement  means a lot to Mythic, don’t mistake that. People who signed up for 6 months have till May on their subscriptions. I know, cos that’s me!

Which means coincidentally that end of Jan/early Feb would catch the 3-month sub people. Good time for an announcement.  But things have to improve in the game and to attract enough subscribers to not need too many more server transfers/merges. And the changes have to mean more than people coming back for a month to try the new class and then buggering off again.

I want to be impressed. I really do.

(but tomorrow I might tell you how I’m doing in LotRO!)

A self-indulgent post (to ignore)

I’ve been in a bit of a pissy mood all week, for a variety of reasons almost all to do with things happening in real life. But I’m also finding getting back to the Book of Grudges a little difficult. I’m used to it being this big, fun thing – and it’s been well.. tricky. And I do feel a little slighted by Mythic, they asked a ton of bloggers for their snail mail addresses, including ones in Europe. Nada. They mostly don’t have me added to their twitters so I can’t even take part in the conversations online… and I’m grumpy already.

From a marketing perspective, it makes much more sense to target a wide range of bloggers. You get the most bang that way, packages go all around and people will link to them regardless of where they get sent really. What we need is someone to take apart their valentine’s mail with a fine toothcomb, and I’m sure they will, fairly soon and as soon as all 13 packages arrive. Then there’s the big anouncement on 29th January, so very soon we’ll know about new classes, changes to fortresses, possibly new cities, things they want to do to stop the game from slumping.

I like the game a lot, don’t get me wrong. Hell, I listen to all the podcasts, read all the blogs, do what I feel I can for the community. But I also hear one of  the most active guilds on my own server is dying, stopping organising mass zone charges, and that makes me sad. There is someone trying to step into that gap, but Mythic’s announcement cannot come fast enough.

I’m not sure I’d transfer from my RP server elsewhere. . So I remain a bit grumpy, a bit out of sorts, and I await the 29th January and wonder if I shouldn’t spent any time on twitter or looking around the place until then. I know it’s all on me, here. And that I wouldn’t normally give a toss. And that annoys me more.