Eric Ries, one of the IMVU founders, has posted an excellent piece on three key questions to ask yourself when thinking of virtual goods models:

• User-generated content (UGC) or first-party content?
• Subscription or a la carte payments?
• Merchandising or gameplay?

I’m finding the amount of Habbo references interesting, but then I would assume that every virtual goods startup has used the service as a reference.

First a short awesome clip of Little Big Planet gameplay where someone has constructed a working calculator out of more than 1600 parts in the game. Watch it to the end, so you’ll see the magnitude of the construction. Boggles my mind.

Second clip is an hour long, but worth watching if you do any design work which results in users making choices. The video shows a talk from Barry Schwartz and deals with the Paradox of Choice as he’s putting it – people get paralyzed of all the choice available nowadays, and end up choosing nothing as a result. My head is exploding with the amount of application this has in the design work I do, as well as explains a lot on why life feels a bit hard sometimes.

A simple game design example could be, this explains why choosing which quests to do in which order in WoW is so painful compared to installing an addon that tells you what to do next. Of course, I don’t do the quests in the order the addon tells me to most of the time, but having a reference point to compare my choice to makes it faster to decide what to do, and I get more satisfaction for not having to doubt my selection as much.

(Apologies to those with RSS readers that don’t show video.)

Couldn’t resist posting after Ben Zeigler reviewed WAR starting with the exact words I’d used to start my review. :)

I now have a level 12 Goblin Squig Herder in Warhammer Online.

What I’ve liked this far:

• I love the sense of humor. And there’s lots of it in WAR, more than in other MMOs I’ve played
• The achievements and related mechanisms like earning titles is very cool
• Public Quests as means to gather influence that gives better loot is _so_ much nicer than having to do raids
• Tome of Knowledge is awesome
• The speed of progression has been pretty good, I’ve felt very little of the things I’ve been doing have been grinding
• The Warhammer world seems to have achieved something I though was next to impossible – almost every player I’ve met has (accidentally?) chosen a name that somehow fits his in-game race/career, indicating they’ve all considered their “role” in the game to some extent, even if they’re not roleplayers at all. Dwarf names sound dwarven, and orcish dudes have generally appropriate names as well. I think this is very impressive.
• The psychological effect of calling PvP RvR is awesome. I hate PvP, but love War’s RvR, and the game telling me I’ve been flagged for RvR doesn’t raise the PvP alert.

What doesn’t work:

• As Ben is pointing out, I have real difficulty understanding the results of my actions in combat. Judging by how I’m scoring in the Public Quests, I’m pretty effective in combat compared to many other players, but I’m having issues understanding exactly why. I think I know what I’m doing right, but there’s too little indication of what the underlying game rules are that guide what happens based on my actions. This is resulting in myself finding it hard to form combat tactics, but also I don’t actually understand what equipment I should use, as I don’t really understand what the different bonuses do.
• The game has issues with client/server synchronization. Two issues in particular I’m seeing are that my squig suddenly turns into a mode where it’s still following me, but I lose control of it completely (the UI disappears). Second one is when I run to hit an opponent at melee range, and the client tells me I’m not close enough to hit, even though my Goblin is drawn right next to the opponent. The latter happens surprisingly often, and is very irritating.
• I’ve tried to create talismans, but getting the resources and just plain understanding how the crafting works is just too much. This means my inventory is cluttered by a ton of materials for making talismans that I can’t really use, but don’t want to destroy for fear of needing them. Also the talisman making balancing seems to be wrong right now, since getting access to items with better bonuses than ones from talismans seems to be much, much easier, than trying to use the crafting. In WoW, I could actually use leatherworking to get good stuff for my Hunter, but now the crafting seems to be pretty much useless.
• I’m not sure what to think on the subject of the world feeling empty, or full. I’ve formed a lot more spontaneous parties in Warhammer than I’ve ever done in WoW, and generally it’s very easy to get a team formed for the public quests. However, most of the RvR areas are just empty, and something is causing the RvR scenario queue wait times to be so long that I’m effectively not able to participate in those at all.
• Last but not least, GOA is improving but they still aren’t doing a good job. Their RSS feed for news has the same content for each headline. The website uses craptastic custom-made DHTML widgets in every place where possible, making the site hard to use. There’s no forums. There’s no decent manual, and no explanation of anything on the website. And interestingly half of the account management is still offline, so I can’t yet give them my billing information! I would have assumed the credit card charging processes would’ve been done prior to launch, and not after.

So – my current sentiment is, I love the game and will continue playing for at least some time to see some of the content closer to the end-game. I hope the bugs and balancing issues are worked out soon, and that my server gets a better balanced amount of players to both Order and Destruction sides soon.

(Ben’s comment on having the game run slow are odd. My MacBook Pro can run the game very well under XP, and that’s using a graphics card Mythic says might not work.)

I’m not writing a long piece now since I don’t know where to start. I just wanted to ping the readers I think the game is excellent – if you are considering ever playing an MMO or are getting bored of WoW, I really recommend checking Warhammer Online out.

I’ve found I enjoy playing WAR more than WoW, and the game has a ton of design jewels and ideas I’ve liked. Last night I got an achievement for having clicked myself a hundred times. It’s totally pointless, but who cares – it’s telling me a bit about what I’ve done in the game. And my current title in the game is “Run away!” from the achievement of having been killed 10 times by a monster.

Longer piece about the game will come at some point. Right now I’ll rather spend my time playing. :P

Warhammer launch is today so I’m excitedly installing the game Amazon delivered right on time. The game has been described to be very innovative so I’m eagerly waiting for the experience. However, the process of getting in isn’t exactly smooth. I’m pretty sure the following would not be happening if we were discussing a web startup.

The installer uses 2 DVDs to install and it takes about half an hour or so. There is no expected time left timer, and the progress bar goes to 100% after about 10 minutes, so you’re left hanging for 20 minutes wondering if the installation is progressing, or not.

After installing the software, I try to fire it up to start patching while I setup the account. No can do, you can’t patch the game before you sign in. Wtf?

I had pre-registered an account on the WAR Europe site. But due to GOA imposing strange new requirements on the password, I had had to choose something I don’t regularly use, so I’ve of course forgotten the password. Now, get this, there is no process for forgotten passwords. You lose it, the account is gone. I could send in customer services request but I somehow think they won’t reply within the next couple days.

And you can’t even test passwords on the website. You can’t log into the account management as there is no account management. There is no user forum.

So off to creating a new account. Obviously the username and identity I’d like to use are locked by the previous registration so I have to invent new ones. Some fucker has thought it’s a good idea to implement form elements in the registration using fancy DHTML widgets that both look ugly and don’t work as expected so filling in the data is pain. The registration page is also chock full of elements that link to the front page of the site so single accidental click and off you go to start the process from scratch.

Once I managed to send in the registration, it took 10 minutes for the reg email to arrive to Gmail. After this I was allowed to type in the registration code in another form (that asks for the password twice and again requires me to accept the terms I’ve already accepted during installation and registration).

It then took about 5 minutes for the patcher to think my account is ok, but I had to restart it twice for the patching to actually start. And now that it’s started, the patch is 822 MB in size. On the first day? Come on, when were the disks printed?

I don’t think I’ll be playing the game today, since the patcher has progressed from 0% to 1% while writing this rant. I would assume the patch servers are choking with load and there’s probably a lot more people with the same issue.

So – GOA seems to think we’re somewhere in the early 90s when it comes to doing games websites. And Mythic, shame on you for the massive patch even before the game has launched.

Hot on the heels of Bruce claiming it’s time to publish PC games as Steam exclusives comes a rumor that Google is about to purchase Valve. Given that Google’s strategy seems to have been to own parts of digital distribution, it makes perfect sense. Now that the rumor is out, I’d be more surprised if it doesn’t happen, than if it does.