Gravity EU changes XP rates to prevent botting

Gravity Europe is the company running the European Ragnarok Online (euRO) server. Players can play on euRO for Free or by subscribing to a Premium account for 5 euros per month. Premium accounts also provide perks such as more character slots, more space to store items in the game, and a lower XP penalty on character death.

Gravity EU sent an email on October 22, 2015 to notify their players of a change in XP and drop rates:

Dear Adventurer,
As we have been aware that bots are polluting our server more and more every day, we've decided to act and make botting less attractive than it has been so far. From now on, the XP and Drop rates will change for both our Free and Premium users. Indeed, below you will find the comparison between previous and new rates:
Previous rates: Free Players: 100% XP and 100% drop. Premium Players: 150% XP and 100% drop.
New rates: Free Players: 75% XP and 75% drop. Premium Players: 175% XP and 150% drop.
As you can see, we also increased the Premium rates as a thank you to our loyal players and we hope that these changes will make our server a better place to live and play on, for everyone.
Enjoy your time on Ragnarök Online!
Gravity Europe Team

This decision is wrong for several reasons:

• Reducing the drop and XP rates for bots from 100% to 75% does not solve the botting problem. Bots on Free accounts are now simply 33% less productive, while bots on Premium accounts 50% more so. Bots are still here.
• The gap between the Premium and Free rates was moderate. Now it is more than 2x. Why would anyone play for free now?
• Using botting as an excuse to change the rates is a marketing ploy. If Gravity EU had increased the rates without mentioning botting, and only as a thank you to our loyal players, it would have felt like they were forcing players to go Premium. In contrast, by justifying their change with botting, Gravity EU is telling their players: go Premium to fight the bots!
• RO came out in 2002, so its graphics and game mechanics are a bit outdated. Yet, like any MMO, RO must attract new players for its community to survive. Having made the game free was a good first step, but Gravity EU also has to work on players acquisition. Most new players start playing the game for free, to try it out. Reducing the drop rates for the free players certainly hurts day-1 retention.
• The decision to change the rates is framed as a loss for Free accounts and a small gain for Premium accounts (and not as a solution against bots). The decision could have been framed as a large gain for Premium players and no change for Free players. Make it a reward! In fact, the Premium Service page frames it as a 100% vs 230%, not a 75% vs 175%. Why was it not framed that way in the email?

Finding a solution to botting is actually easy. Some private RO servers implemented periodic captcha popups: every 30 minutes, the game kicks out the players who fail to answer a random but easy test (such as 1+2=?). A bit inelegant, but very effective.

Game of War

Game of War is a mobile game currently making $1.2M/day and having 2.2M daily active users. Its developer, Machine Zone, is valued at $3 billion (while Zynga is valued at $2.7 billion and Supercell at $5.5 billion.).

The game is quite high up the charts of the App Store, only surpassed by Clash of Clans' $1.7M/day and 4M daily active users and probably Candy Crush as well. CoC and GoW are similar in that they are both free-to-play empire-builder war games for mobile. Whereas I find CoC to be a polished game with elegant mechanics, Game of War is said to be everything wrong with mobile monetization. Let's have a look!

Copycats

In an interview in 2012, Gabriel Leydon, Machine Zone's CEO, said they are making games that are very, very special and unique in the market. But in the same interview, he also said If you want to scale fast and you have the ability to do it cheaply, you just clone. With GoW, they did not go the special/unique route: they cloned 99.9% of their gameplay and UI from Kabam's The Hobbit (which launched for mobile in October 2012). Shameless cloning is a common practice among mobile games, and The Hobbit itself had cloned a lot of its gameplay and UI from Evony (a Flash game from 2009), which itself had cloned most of its gameplay from Civilization.

Going back to GoW, the trailer features a battle in real time scene that actually never happens in the game. In the game, the player can see their armies move in real time, but when battles happen, the player only sees a report of the troops expended and resources gained. No visual battling actually happens. So the game launched with a lot of hype and exaggeration. Since it's a clone of The Hobbit, the marketing team had to exaggerate to compete.

Translation vs innovation

When GoW launched in July 2013, Venturebeat wrote they were using advanced technology, including a real-time translation engine, a sophisticated communications platform where players can send threaded emails, text chat, make comments, and share their feats on social forums. There really is nothing new or sophisticated with in-game emails. The translator, however, is GoW's unique attribute, what the game is known for. How good and useful is that famous translator?

When typing on the miniature keyboard of their iPhone, people use slang and make spelling mistakes. So the translator has to crowd-source a lot of sentences to players. For example, let's say a French player says "lu, a va bi1?". To translate this for American players, I think the sentence is first automatically-translated into English, leaving non-translatable words untouched: "read, have go bi1?". This gibberish is then given without context to 4 players who are told they'll receive in-game currency if they can fix the sentence. The first player fixes the sentence into "I read you, I have to go", the second suggests "Read (what I wrote above), I have to go and buy one", and so on. A fifth player receives the four tweaked sentences and is awarded some in-game currency for picking the sentence he thinks makes most sense. The player who wrote the chosen sentence receives coins, whereas the other three receive a thank you message with no reward.

This sounds like a good idea, but there's a reason why after all these years Google Translate still sucks, and why translator is still a job. "lu, a va bi1?" in proper French is "Salut, ça va bien?", which Google can translate easily to "Hi, how are you doing?". But most French players can write "hello" by themselves. In Kings of the Realm, a game very similar to GoW, I've seen many American players write to Russian players in Russian. In Hearthstone, the game has 6 emotes (for "hello", "well played", and so on), and needs no translation system whatsoever. Did GoW focus on and boast its (mediocre) chat translator at launch because it was the only thing that differentiated it from The Hobbit?

Cash grab

MachineZone was actually called Addmired when it started. They were developing dating apps. Maybe the name made sense at the time, but even for a dating app, it's a terrible name: are users going to get mired in ads? That no founder flagged the name as inappropriate tells a lot about the company's business model.

GoW reminds players that they can spend money every time they login. The first screen showed when logging in is the one below. The font is inelegant, reminiscent of Asian mobile games like Puzzle and Dragons. The fireworks at the bottom obstruct one of the products offered in the bundle. The bundle name is "Summer MEGA GOLD Sale!!!". And a timer of 30 minutes pretends that the sale will end within 30 minutes. In fact, the player only needs to log back in to get spammed by the sale again...

In Clash of Clans, no upgrade takes longer than 14 days. The game provides 5 builders, so the most intense players have something to upgrade roughly twice a week. In GoW, the longest upgrade times is 23 years. Nobody would wait 23 years for an upgrade to finish! The designers do not expect players to wait 23 years. Everybody understands that year-long waiting times are here only to make players skip them with money. No surprise that some players report having spent $9,000 in the game. A kid in Belgium even spent $46,000.

Sexy advertising

GoW spent $40M to run an ad where model Kate Upton shows her cleavage during the Superbowl. Some people were outraged, but this advertising strategy was already used heavily in 2009 by Evony. Using sex in ads is not new, but that does not excuse it. It's interesting that a company valued at $3 billion has only one product, and the content of and advertising for that product were both 99.9%-copied from another company's product. In contrast, Clash of Clans' core gameplay may not be original but the ad they ran during the Superbowl was funny, silly, and just more elegant.

In fact, GoW's ads could be worse. For example, Evony's advertising strategy was much more questionable than GoW's. Through iEvony, they rewarded players with game coins when they referred a friend or when a friend they referred purchased game coins with real money. In order to bootstrap the pyramid scheme, iEvony was invite-only. Evony also used any search-engine optimization trick they could, stole ad photos and game art, and showed soft-porn images that have nothing to do with the game. So GoW still has some way to go!

Why do GoW (and CoC) use ads? After all, they have so many players already that word-of-mouth should bring them more. In practice, only a small percentage of new players will keep playing the game past the one-week mark. An even smaller number will spend money. Thus these games aim at attracting as many players as possible, so as to increase the number of spenders. But there will come a time when there will be no more new players to draw to the game. But since 2013, the cost for attracting new players outweighs the average amount spent by players ($2.73 vs $1.96). Since players get tired of games eventually, these greedy business models are unsustainable.

Conclusion

GoW is an over-the-top cash grab using sex [ads] to fuel a game where sex really isn’t a factor. The game has a terrible UI plagiarized from another game, and a horrible gameplay also plagiarized from others. This is the kind of game that gives a bad name to free-to-play mobile gaming. I'm disappointed that millions of players follow the ads and don't see that it is so crappy.

WoW subscribers and Blizzard's strategy

I found this graph of WoW subscribers from launch until end of 2013, but could not track any of its sources. So here's my version of the graph, with the sources below.

The most interesting part of the graph is that Mists of Pandaria (MoP) is the first reported expansion to suffer from churn a few months before release. Blizzard's CEO says that have become much better and much faster at consuming content, and so they would leave when they're done. Have players changed, or has the game changed? Probably both.

The game has fundamentally changed, and this is a result of Blizzard's design approach of depth first and accessibility later. But as the game becomes more accessible, new content is consumed faster. Veteran players agree.

Have players changed? Probably. When WoW launched in 2004, mobile and social games did not exist. Blizzard has always targeted PC gamers. That segment was growing in the early 2000s, but has probably started shrinking in the last 3-4 years. Free-to-play PC games have also bloomed since the late 2000s, and lots of PC gamers would rather play for free than for $15 per month. WoW remains subscription-based because, according to Blizzard's CEO, it was not designed as a free to play game and would not transition to F2P. Keeping WoW subscription-based is a very conservative and obstinate stance, but Blizzard probably lost faith in F2P after the Diablo 3 real-money auction house failure.

Blizzard is conservatively milking its existing games. But I don't see the pay-to-play PC-gamer segment increasing. So Blizzard will have to adapt their game design or die.

date	millions of subscribers
23-Nov-04	0 (launch)
17-Mar-05	1.5
14-Jun-05	2
21-Jul-05	3.5
9-Nov-05	4.5
19-Dec-05	5
1-Mar-06	6
11-Jan-07	8
24-Jul-07	9
22-Jan-08	10
31-Jul-08	10.9
28-Oct-08	11
23-Dec-08	11.5
11-Feb-09	11.5
7-Jul-09	6
10-Feb-10	11.5
5-Aug-10	11.5
1-Oct-10	12
4-Nov-10	12
31-Mar-11	11.4
1-Sep-11	11.1
8-Nov-11	10.3
9-Feb-12	10.2
31-Mar-12	10.2
4-Oct-12	10
31-Dec-12	9.6
31-Dec-12	9.6
31-Mar-13	8.3
30-Jun-13	7.7
30-Sep-13	7.6

[Conf] Digital Literacy and Play in MMOs and VW for Young Children

In April, Jackie Marsh gave an account of her work with children playingClub Penguin and Barbiegirls.com. Marsh talked mostly about Club Penguin.

Club Penguin is a F2P game with real-money transactions. Some kids reported playing the DS version of Club Penguin when they could not be online. The player is granted a certain amount of the virtual currency if he/she has the DS game. Similarly, players can become VIP in Barbie Girls only if they have bought the official MP3 player. Like in many other F2P online games, players can choose to pay a monthly subscription. Marsh mentioned some kids aready rejected other players who did not subscribe. The subscription system enables players to edit the background of their avatar photo. A kid reported I don't add plain background [ie non-subscribing] players to my friends, I already got plenty. Interestingly, during the interviews with Club Penguin players, Marsh noted that girls focused mostly on products and avatar appearances. Boys, on the other hand, talked a lot about the gameplay.

Kids do not type fast. Hence they often reported they preferred clicking than typing. Some said that when they wanted to write something, their interlocutor was gone in the time they finished typing. Moreover, some kids sometimes send letters to the game moderators, and some are published in an in-game journal. Surprisingly, kids were not frustrated that their letters were not published. I wonder about the affordances kids gain when they play Club Penguin. For most of them, they have just learned to read. Does playing Club Penguin train them to read faster? To type faster? Can Club Penguin develop the communication skills of kids shy in real-life?

Some kids stopped playing because they were bored. They asked adults to collect coins for them. In fact, adults are being dragged into the world by children. Mums were the most outraged when a virtual world closed. James Bower, a founder of Whyville, went in that direction as well in October 2009. He mentioned the Whyville-Walmart partnership. Mothers learn about Whyville at Walmart. Hence they let their kids play on Whyville. On the other hand, the virtual Walmart put in Whyville invites kids to go to Walmart in real-life. A win-win strategy!

RO Official F2P servers

This is following my last post.

F2P servers strategy

... but considering that :

• a lot of RO players are Asian (I could not find any proof of that but I truly believe it regarding the reaction of surprise all Western people have when they hear that RO has more than 10M subscribers, considering also that according to wikipedia, though unknown to many Western players, the game took Asia by storm)
• F2P Asian MMO Games (like Maple Story for instance) could attract RO subscribers according to Aaron Delwiche

Gravity changed its (world) strategy in launching F2P servers such as Valkyrie for iRO or Baphomet for kRO. Also, the French server fRO which used to be P2P became F2P in December 2008. The Russian server ruRO is also F2P (I do not know if it was P2P before).

Valkyrie

This server is an iRO server and opened in September 2008. The game on Valkyrie is harder (XP is harder, Teleporting is more expensive, Kafra Mall Items are more expensive, etc.) but it is a free server, so players go to play on it. Actually, there are more players on Valkyrie than on the other P2P iRO servers (see ropd.info).

Considering the 4 figures on the left concerning players on iRO servers Loki, Chaos, Iris and Valkyrie, some comparisons have to be made :

• Different server ages : Valkyrie is much younger than Loki/Chaos/Iris, so I think there is a lower ratio of high-level people on Valkyrie than on P2P servers.
• Different guild involvement : Usually, people go into a guild when they have a bit of strength to bring in, that means when accessing job 2, at approximately level 60. So if we forget avatars who are under level 60, the P2P servers have more than half of their high-level avatars in guilds while in Valkyrie it is approximately 9.000 high-level avatars in guilds for 26.000 not.

From these facts, I do not think that it can be stated that the cost of the game experience influences the type of gamers. An easy conclusion could be : Iris/Chaos/Loki are more hardcore/experimented/PGM servers while Valkyrie is more casual/fun/low-level. But I doubt that it can be easily proven, and some very skilled players (like Doddler for instance) do play on Valkyrie.

Baphomet and Doppelganger

Since I can not read Korean, it is hard for me to gather sources concerning the kRO F2P servers, so I will not detail this part much. kRO Baphomet was launched in May 2008 and is also harder than other kRO servers. As I wrote before, RO F2P servers gather sometimes more players than P2P servers (see Server selection screen nearby), and it is the case for Baphomet. More about Baphomet on Doddler's website. The motivation for opening a free server at this time was the declining number of users. Doppelganger opened in June 2008. It did not bring as many users as Baphomet so the 2 were merged in April 2009.
Anyway, the strategy change consisting in opening F2P servers has been definitely fruitful because Gravity says in April 2009 that the subscription revenues increase in Korea was primarily attributed to increased revenues from launching free-to-play servers.

fRO

To my mind, fRO tries to push the player to buy a Premium Account, or the upgraded version of it : the Infinity Account. I do not know about ruRO (which is also F2P), but it might be the same as fRO (ruRO has at least Premium Accounts).
A fRO Premium account is a monthly 7€ subscription, while an Infinity account is 199€, providing a permanent VIP status and some bonus items.
The iShop is the same thing as the iRO Kafra Shop. It is through this website that users can buy virtual items.

I think that tokens of micropayment are a psychologic easier way for the user to buy virtual items with real money. The reason might be because people can hardly admit they are buying game items with real money, they need an item to make the transition : website tokens! In fRO, these tokens are named Karat. Actually, Carat is the name of a clown monster in the game, so maybe the Karat currency comes from its name. Currently, 100 Karats are approximately 1€.

In my previous post, I took the example of the Giant Flywing item that can be bought on the iRO website with Kafra Points. On fRO, a user buys a Giant Flywing for 10c (10 Giant Flywings for 100 Karats). Compared to the iRO 0.75c Giant Flywings, there is quite much difference.
I think the only reason explaining this difference is the will of Gravity Europe, administrator of fRO, to produce an amount of money big enough to be compared to what other Gravity group branches produce (ruRO, jRO or even iRO). But it is quite difficult for Gravity Europe, because the French player community is much smaller than iRO's, and therefore is likely to bring less profit. So the same products are more expensive on fRO than on iRO in order to «cope» with the size of the community.

Bubble-gum, a kind of item which increases experience gained in killing monsters (see Doddler's BubbleGum tests), is the most sold item IG, but is also the best selling item bought with real currency (€). Lucky Clip is a kind of item that increases the drop rate of monsters and is also among the best selling items. All the other items are «everyday life» items : Oridecon and Elunium are used to refine and repair player weapons and equipements, Yggdrasil Leaves are used to resurrect people and Blue Gemstones to teleport people from a place of the world to another.
What is interesting with Lucky Clips and Bubble Gums is that these items are not dropped by any monster nor sold by any NPC, hence all these items are available to players because they have been bought with euros. That means that even if Gravity Europe does not sell (itself) zeny for euros, roughly 400.000z = 100Karat = 1€. On igvault.com it is possible to get 1Mz for nearly 6€. That makes a huge difference with iRO where it is possible to get 20Mz for 6€/8$. But what is more interesting is that Gravity Europe has a twice better change rate than illegal websites. Because some people want to absolutely soften their game experience in buying items like Bubble Gums or Lucky Clip to get more XP or drops, this could be an explanation why they would rather buy these items through ragnarokonline.fr instead of another ways.

Business Model improvement

RO's leveling is definitely hard. Much harder than many well-known current MMORPGs. But with the opening of F2P servers, I do think that more casual players are willing to play, and even pay a few $/€ to appreciate more their time. Another particularity of RO is the WoE system ; a WoE is a battle between rival guilds in a castle in order to possess it and get rare items its Treasure Boxes contain. But sometimes it is difficult to build a character with PvP stats because these stats do not match PvE stats at all.
For instance, when playing a Priest (typical support class) in WoE sessions, a lot of Vitality (VIT) is needed so that your avatar does not get killed easily. On the other hand, not much Intelligence (INT) is necessary because not need many SP (= mana) are needed. But the easiest way to have your character leveling up as an Acolyte (the class the player has to be before becoming a Priest) relies on much INT to inflict more damages on Undead monsters.
Unlike most of all private servers, in official servers there are no NPC who can reset the player's stats. Hence an iRO survey in July 2006 reported that 68% of the 4266 participants of the survey say yes to a value-added service that provided a skill or stat reset and 28% said no. In another survey occuring in January 2008, 56% of the 7229 participants said they would pay for a Service or Item that provided a Full Stat Reset and 14% said no.

The only currently available service on iRO consists in buying (directly, without Kafra Points!) 20 Stat Points for $10. A level 90+ avatar has more than 800 status points. To move from a character build to another, not all the stat points need to be reset, but to my mind, it takes much more than 300 points. To my mind, this definitely can be improved ...

fRO has nearly the same system as iRO. This thread shows that it is 40€ for a 100 stat-point reset, and it is free if you have paid a premium account (199€). However, this reset is performed only ONCE on your character. The price can be compared to the iRO price of the nearly same service (however, the iRO stat reset can be repeated many times). How this stat reset is performed on fRO is explained on fRO forums.
I do not know the amount of «Infinity» accounts, I do not know the total amount of people using this service, and I do not know how many people have been using the stat reset service on iRO, but I bet that the F2P players use it more than the P2P players. Recently, a RO player told me that he liked that people are «equal» when they have all paid for the same service (P2P), but he definitely finds «unbalancing» the fact that some people could buy virtual items with real money (F2P). I think that is a reason why he's playing on private servers ...

Furcadia

From wikipedia

To know what Furcadia is, simply read wikipedia. Among other things :

• up since 1996, that makes it the oldest still up MMO
• MMOSG
• F2P, bonus items can be bought IG or on a special website
• users create content (integrated in what is called a "dream")
• anthropomorphic (cat, ferret, cow, bug, ...) avatars
• only 1 server, 4K player-peaks, current average of 2K
• player-brought content called Dreams

Experience

What follows is what I experimented, it is definitely subjective (that's what I felt) and biased (the current "context" I experimented this game is maybe very different from yours, were you to experiment this game by yourself).
Since it's free to play, let's try it.

Avatars

Arriving in the world, as usual, I have to create my avatar. Multiple avatars are possible on an account. Considering the possible character customizations (animal, gender, colors ...), everyone tends to look the same IG. Maybe is it because this game is quite old. Also in Ultima Online I found players looked quite the same, and these games use comparable graphisms. Moreover, almost all avatars' gender I met where "unspecified" (between male and female). Except me, I found no male avatar. Failry normal : "Women are social beings, like men, but social" (DB, June 2009).

Meeting people

Obviously, what do people do in MMOSG? They socialize. Actually, I found more people AFK than really present. Lots had a profile "currently at work". During my 20 minutes IG, no one talked to me. Some people were busy talking privately, surely in private channels or somewhere hidden from me. A few people publicly talked, in a slave language with weird characters - that could have been Russian.
After a while, I found a character asleep on cushions. Her name was Natial and she was, like many, from an undetermined gender. What was most striking was the description of her avatar displayed in my dialog bar (click on the screenshot to see it). Following the link written in her description, I felt on a website displaying her sexual, Furcadia-animal and some little other tastes. Obviously, this must be written to RP, but when people have to choose a background for their avatar, they quite often put sexual content. Maybe is it because they hardly dare mention such things IRL?

Dreams

Dreams are a very good idea. World areas brought by players can be a very valuable addition to the game experience. In Second Life, some players/inhabitants have carved or drawn wonderful artworks. But in Furcadia, the Dreams are actually pretty ugly (see the 2 screenshots). Maybe I went inside the worst dreams of the server?
Dreams are scripted by players. The interface is a basic notepad with a window containing triggers and effects. trigers, conditions and effects available remind me of Age Of Empires 2 scenario editor triggers. This tool is definitely not made for expert developers (compared to WoW LUA macros and add-ons for instance). Dream content is uploaded by players who have created the dream. An avatar enters a dream through a "warp", a white grid-cell on which he walks. When a player enters a dream, the content is downloaded. I hope for the server that the content is sometimes stored somewhere on player's computer, and not reloaded from the server each time the player access the dream. It is possible for player to access URL through the game. Websites can be displayed through the player default web browser automatically when going into a dream, when clicking on a link in an avatar description, and maybe in other ways I do not know.

Ergonomy

The interface for walking is not very friendly : mouse left-click on an adjoining grid-cell or arrow keys to move, but the "pavement grid" is diagonal/in staggered rows, so pushing "up" makes your avatar go top-right ... Pretty bad, but I think players can get used to that in less than a few hours playing.

Business Model

Considering the current dragon-avatar prices and the amount of people having a permanent dragon avatar, I understand how the game can survive. I honestly do not know if Furcadia owners are getting rich with their game, but I can believe this business model works sufficiently well.
Also, I have seen IG quite many avatars having a customized portrait. The cost is between $5 and $10 depending on the amount of slots bought at the same time. Furcadia is certainly old, but looking at the amount of virtual items they offer through their real shop, I believe their Business Model must have worked well. And I do not understand why the wikipedia page concerning micropayment still mentions MMOs use micropayment : $5 is way too much to be considered as micro (according to wikipedia thousands of micropayments are needed to reach a dollar scale).

My feelings

• soppy, mushy : after having read a lot of avatar descriptions such as "[Single, not looking]", "Heart-shaped face of seductress, or "if there's anything, just ask me [I might not be around]". Moreover, the game owners have had sufficient funds (through their real shop) to have their game still up. That means many people have bought goodies. And I dont like goodies ...
• small-range socialness : definitely an MMOSG, if you want to know new people, you have to move on. But that's a game, so it is easy to dare do something.