I naturally outlevel my casual friends just from more /played time. I'm trying my best to slow down on my Lore-Master in LOTRO, but even my attempt to shift to crafting results in a fair bit of exp while I farm Wargs for leather. I've even passed Nelgdorf and Nazrin by several levels.

Being able to play compelling content together with my friends has been an issue in almost every MMORPG I've played, either because of myself pulling ahead or someone else.

City of Heroes has several tools to get around the problem, including the Sidekick system (which I adore) and now the Leveling Pact (which divides exp between two players, even while one is logged out). CoH's advances have been embraced by EQ2's Mentoring and Final Fantasy XI's Level Sync, but other games haven't adopted the ideas.

There are three reasons why I assume level disparity between friends is accepted (and even preferred) in MMORPG design:

• As Pacing for storyline, leveling is a good game mechanic, but it may be so finely tuned that it just doesn't allow for adjustments like syncing.
• Leveling independently is often considered as a rite of passage to 'know your class'. In other words, it's pacing for character growth. Any perceived boost may be seen by the playerbase as unfair gains: This was an issue in Age of Conan, where many players balked at the mentoring system until it was nerfed past usefulness.
• Level disparity feeds The Vision, which dictates that you should find and group with new acquaintances while you level up so you'll have sticky in-game-only friends at Endgame to make it emotionally difficult to leave the game.

Simpler and more apt for my current situation:

I wish LOTRO had something akin to Vanguard's Reduced XP Gain spell. Basically, some way to lock my level and not gain any exp until my friends catch up. I think nearly every MMORPG could benefit from a Level Lock feature (The Vision be damned).

Imagine players who would like to experience the old pre-expansion raiding content by locking their levels at the old Endgame. Or roleplayers who don't wish to grow up past Hobbiton. Granted, most would probably still prefer to be competitive at the very top of the scale, but what a natural way for developers to stretch content further, via player choice.

And it would as easy as candy to implement too.

I've requested a Level Lock feature via a post on Turbine's suggestions forum. I hope they're listening. =)

I'm a little late with it, but here's my personal recap of 2008 gaming to pile onto the bonfire. It was a busy year:

WoW: I started the year fresh from quitting WoW. After 3 years I had burned out. I piled on the criticism pretty thick for awhile, especially regardingly Blizzard's metagaming trickery, their tendency to stretch everything into a grind, and how their main storyline is reserved for raids.

Overall though, I still recommend WoW as the best MMORPG for any new player to try. The leveling, open world and dungeons are all superb.

My best days in WoW are in the past and it'd take more than one expansion to get me back. My lack of playing won't hurt Blizzard in any way, they'll keep on wearing money hats.

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AoC: If you read some of my early posts about Age of Conan, you might think it was fantastic. I did too, there were parts that were amazing, the combat and character animations in particular. But the devs at Funcom spent too much time tinkering with their combat system and working on features where they had no clue (like PvP sieges, ouch). If they had focused on their strengths (PvE questing and immersion), who knows how much better it could have been.

Who's going to trust Funcom now? Oddly, I still think The Secret World could be promising. Maybe I'm just a sucker for the storytelling stuff (it is Cthulhu-esque), but I'm probably in the minority.

In the end I realized AoC was fun played as a solo / single-player game, but as an MMO it was a mess.

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WAR: I didn't have as high expectations of Warhammer, but at release I was surprised with how good it seemed. WAR's world appeared to be complete with significant content. They sure fooled me, even for the first few weeks of launch. The storefront was full of shiny toys, but inside it turned out to be an illusion.

The Public Quests? One of those illusions I mentioned. The first few were great, but past those the scripting was lame, the mob AI even worse and the influence grind via repeating "kill 150 mobs" was just nasty. This is from the designers who criticized other games for kill X mob quests!

PvP-wise, WAR is the best there is for current MMOs. That's WAR's saving grace, but it's also something I criticize deeply, because it still has a long way to go before being great even in this one category alone. My experience in RvR wasn't really PvP at all, it was zerg-style raiding on Keep Lords. I hate zerging, so I'm surprised I stuck with WAR as long as I did.

Bottom-Line: I think WAR will do well as the PvP niche MMO. The classes are well balanced for the core PvP. There are enough people that crave that so much, they'll look past Mythic's failures and even declare it great, because they lack any other good MMO choices for PvP.

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CoH: I wandered back into City of Heroes briefly, but I found the changes minimal and what was truly different I didn't like. The 'crafting' feels wedged in and out of place, plus it spoils much of the game's original balance.

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Vanguard: I purchased Vanguard this year after rumours that it had recovered from its failings. That was a dumb move. Ugly, ugly, ugly game.

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Left 4 Dead: One of the few non-MMO games this year that had a strong effect on me. It has the best elements that many MMOs are missing: Cooperative gameplay that's satisfying as both PvE and PvP. It's fantastic. This will be a LAN favourite between myself and my gamer-nerd friends for a long, long time.

Valve really has me on board with Steam at this point. Now I wish every game (new and old) was available via Steam.

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EVE Online: Speaking of Steam, that's how I finally gave EVE Online a spin. It's involved. Really involved. The geek in me could get totally absorbed, but I prefer to play these games with my less geeky friends, not leave them behind in a stats obsession.

  ·  ·  ·

LOTRO: I'm still in the honeymoon stage with Lord of the Rings Online, so I have few complaints at this point. Everything has been great so far, I love the leveling pace and the attention to detail in everything from graphics, mob AI, lore, quest logs... even down to the facial and emote animations on the characters. This is the style of MMORPG I prefer, one with a lush rich world and a ton of side distractions so I can immerse myself into everything. Nelg, Lurch, Michelle and I have been playing non-stop. We'll be wrangling more friends in to join us soon.

I'll probably be in Middle Earth for awhile.

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Next up, my expectations for 2009...

Discussions over why Vanguard tanked have had me thinking about the value of videogame production, specifically Brad McQuaid's astonishing implications that Microsoft underfunded their project at a whopping $30 million buckaroos.

Comparing MMORPG production costs with other media:

MMORPG Games:

World of Warcraft: $80 Million
Vanguard: $30 Million
Evequest: $8 Million

Big Budget Movies:

Spiderman 3: $258 Million
Sahara: $130 Million
Da Vinci Code: $125 Million
Ocean's Twelve: $100 Million

Television Shows: *

Lost: ~$150 Million / Season
Drama Shows: ~$46 Million / Season
Reality Shows: ~$9 Million / Season

This list would be more useful if I could include revenue, but aside from films, that would be very difficult to calculate. World of Warcraft reportedly makes close to half a billion per year.

In audience, there's no comparison, a top-rated television show has between 20 to 30 million viewers. But TV also has the least direct revenue stream, recently on decline. For movies, a good theatrical run attracts a 10 to 15 million audience with a ~$6.50 average ticket cost. For games, World of Warcraft is the MMORPG king with a subscriber base total of 8.5 million, while Steam's 13 million customers mostly represent Half-Life 2.

The growth of production costs in the videogame industry has been a big issue, but still it can't be fully compared to the amounts that actors contract for in other media. Jerry Seinfeld made a reported $267 million during the last year of his hit sitcom; although that's the highest revenue any celebrity has obtained in a single year.

The cost / revenue of hits like World of Warcraft seems a better ratio than other media, but the question of risk is an important factor. If a game fails like Vanguard did, the investment is comparatively high to a television pilot, but low compared to a film. Still, a big-budget movie that performs dismally in theatres still has opportunity to reclaim revenue in other outlets and may even become a sleeper hit via TV or DVD sales/rentals.

In theory, a MMORPG gets an extra profit stream from subscriptions, but they have to obtain an initial audience for that to work, plus the profit is much lower than you would expect (that's an article I'll write soon).

Risk, is the biggest factor for games. It's higher than other media, but the potential profit is higher as well.

* Film budgets are regulated and openly published, but it's more difficult to estimate television budgets, so I included the average costs based on 22-24 episode seasons @ ~$400,000 per episode for reality shows and ~$2 Million per 1 hour drama episodes (references here and here). My estimates for Lost are based on slightly lower per hour rates based on the pilot cost of $14 Million.

Tobold has an excellent definition and opinion within his blog post: Time for a New Vision.

Here's my $0.02.

Many are waving Vanguard's failure as a flag to discount 'The Vision'. I'd love to myself, I don't like the grinding aspect that nearly every MMORPG follows, but it's been too damn successful for Vanguard to tank it.

I think Blizzard fully intended to make a game avoiding this formula, their leveling grind is easier, but the endgame brings it right back into the fold. WoW started off as an excellent core game, but since then a lot of raiding content was thrown on the pile. Moreso, they've boosted the whole thing with a good heaping dose of competitive spirit between players. I've never seen a game where people are so often jealous of each other and that includes Everquest. It's all push, push, push to the top and it feels terribly linear in progression.

The worst insult an MMORPG player can be called is 'Noob'. That to me, is the essence of 'The Vision' at work.

I wonder how trapped by 'The Vision' newer MMORPGs will be. LOTRO certainly hasn't offered many new surprises, there's no paradigm shift there. Will Age of Conan or Warhammer Online avoid 'The Vision'? I think not entirely, more likely they'll chip away at individual features rather than reinvent what SOE and Blizzard have proven to be a very profitable wheel.

I'd love to see a 'New Vision' as Tobold defines it: MMORPGs with non-linear challenges, multiple goals and no clearly defined best result, yet retaining fun gameplay. I don't think that's going to happen just because one large game failed. The cynic in me says they've still got a cash cow and they'll keep milking it.

Slashdot and everyone else has been reporting it: Sigil Games' assets were predictably bought out by Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) this week, followed swiftly by terminating all but 50 of the employees. Sigil has a huge debt to Microsoft still, so the dissolution of the company and sale of all assets was to be expected.

The most interesting reporting has been done by F13.net who have two interviews up: one with a terminated employee and another with Brad McQuaid himself, titled appropriately: The Hub of All Blame.

For me, the biggest issues with Vanguard were graphical: It was ugly and even on a mondo PC it got an awful framerate. The combination of those two factors always spells doom for any game, MMO or otherwise. If you're going to push the boundaries of minimum system requirements, your game should be absolutely stunning to look at. With the bar set by WoW's low requirements and beautiful art direction, Vanguard never had a chance regardless of the rest of the game.

SOE's only promised change for Vanguard is to improve the performance, but I can't see them optimizing it enough or making it pretty.