A WHISTLE-BLOWER IN ELFLAND

A member of my kinship alerted us to this thread, which will repay study by anybody interested in the reality of the sausage factories behind the games we play. The meat of it consists of some very angry whistle-blowing by an about-to-be sidelined employee of Electronic Arts - touching on, amongst other things, the reasons behind the poor performances of Warhammer and Age of Conan, and some pessimistic predictions about SWTOR. I can't judge his criticism about specific individuals, but I do have some first-hand knowledge of the disasters which can follow on the takeover by a rich but badly-run company of an poor and efficient one, and a lot of what EA Louse (the original poster) has to say rings true.

On a slight tangent, while reading though the thread, I was struck by the following comment which may well have some relevance to the recent content slowdown in LOTRO. And no, I don't mean the F2P delay on the European side, which I'm still convinced is due to legal shenanigans, but to the shortage of serious new story content which tends to show through all the glitzy bells and whistles which will accompany the eventual arrival of F2P.

"Do you think they have enough story content to last months or a year? Even the non immersive, non cinematic content takes a long time to produce and just hours or days to play through for a dedicated player. It takes BW a few years to develop a high quality single player RPG and those rarely have more than a couple dozen hours worth of good storylines. [...]Voiced, well made story content just isn’t enough in an MMO and that kind of content is very slow and expensive to develop. Even a minor setback can slow the amount of story content being developed for the game to a crawl. The point is, that while the story content will be a good thing, the game won’t survive on it no matter how good it is. It is the bait to get people to try out the game for a month or two and get hooked by the normal MMO activities."

No doubt time will tell...

ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT

As every reader of this blog surely knows, twenty long days have passed since F2P was due to launch in Europe, and we still seem no closer to a resolution. Codemasters is maintaining the kind of total, sweaty silence characteristic of a wounded WWII submarine lying in shallow waters with a couple of destroyers cutting capers just above it on the surface. Meanwhile, the forums are staggering under the weight of concerned, miserable or frantic players pleading, screaming, roaring, threatening or just plain doing their best to start a reasonable, sophisticated man-to-corporate-entity-type dialogue. That last gambit doesn't work, and I suspect it never will.

Why not? Well, I believe it's pretty clear by this time that there is no insurmountable technical problem stopping the launch. The basic code is obviously reasonably solid (OK, OK, I said reasonably, not perfectly), or otherwise the stateside servers would have collapsed. I also no longer think it can be a specifically Turbine-to-Codemasters transfer problem such as different accounting systems and their interface with the in-game shop, because that would have been fixed by now (unless the entire technical staff of CM is permanently on drugs, which I beg leave to doubt). Also, CM representatives, on their increasingly rare appearances on the forums, are limiting themselves to making gagging noises and jerking their heads back at the front office; translation, "I can't say a word about this or my employment prospects will do a China Syndrome".

What all this spells to my experienced and cynical mind is one word only: lawyers! I have no shred of evidence, of course, but the only reasonable explanation I can think of for this ongoing and open-ended delay, a delay with inevitably serious (maybe even disastrous) financial consequences over time for both CM and Turbine,  is serious legal problems of some kind. Maybe it's between the two companies, or perhaps it's something to do with some unsuspected pitfall of European law; perhaps the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg has decided it wants to levy purchase tax on in-game transactions, or else F2P contravenes some article of the European Union legislation on the free movement of goods and services. Perhaps. All I can say is that if this supposition is true, it could be bad news. Because geological time and the slow shifting of tectonic plates are as sheet lightning compared to the average speed of corporate lawyers...

RUNNING FREE

So, LOTRO is going Free to Play in the autumn. I can't say this came as a surprise; given how hard Turbine and Warner have been pushing F2P and micro-transactions in Dungeons & Dragons Online, it was pretty much inevitable they would hit LOTRO sooner or later. The big question is, how will this affect the core group of dedicated players? There have been some outraged responses on the forums, but to be honest, I'm inclined to see this as a positive development.

Why? Well, for one thing, there is the inescapable fact that for the last seven months, there has been a marked decline in the game which no amount of obfuscation can hide: on the one hand, the almost total lack of any new input since Mirkwood (I still refuse to take Vol.III/Book 1 in any way seriously), and on the other, the news that key Turbine developers were taken off LOTRO and put to work on other projects. It became obvious that LOTRO was being starved of funds, and risked dying a slow death by a thousand cuts. Something had to be done, and that something turns out to be going F2P.

Will this have a negative effect on existing players? Not in any way that I can see. Lifetime subscribers will acquire VIP status, and will continue to play free on a day-to-day basis. While it's not entirely clear how major new expansions will be paid for, that's hardly an issue: whether we buy major expansions, as we've done so far, or purchase them from the LOTRO store, really makes no difference. As for micro-transactions in actual items, I honestly don't think this will make the slightest difference to existing players, since apart from some starter kits of low-grade weapons and armour, the items available for sale will have no effect on performance. If the store goes on to do a booming business in summer hats and wet fish, it's no skin off my nose...

At least this way we will finally be getting new content. Reports from DDO players are almost entirely positive about the rejuvenating effect of going F2P, and apparently a respectable amount of new content has indeed been forthcoming. One possible downside which has been commented on has been the possible influx of "WoW-type mindless idiots", but this strikes me as a wild exaggeration. For one thing, basic F2P access will be strictly limited to certain areas, so that much of the time we wouldn't even see any of these rumoured barbarian hordes. For another, why would such players flock to LOTRO in the first place, rather that the Other Game itself? That said, I wouldn't be averse to making the RP servers in Europe (and in the States, if Turbine decide to set one up) VIP only.

What I am less happy about, though, is that this development clearly means we won't see any additional content until F2P is launched in the autumn (September? October?). It's going to be a long summer. Hope you all have a good time fighting your way up to the Lieutenant...