KoramGame has announced that the first major content update to Spirit Tales will be released on May 23rd. The update will come a new instanced dungeon and new additions to the Item Mall.

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The latest WildStar Wednesday features a treat for those who have been following the development of Metal Maw. In today’s blog, there is a new video showing this bad boy in action.

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Lore: Ao Kuang, usually spelled Ao Guang, is the destructive god known as the Dragon King of the East Sea. During his early years, Ao Guang reigned terror on man through the forces of nature. Droughts, storms and other natural disasters were his weapons of choice and his destruction continue unabated until Nezha, a protective deity, intervenes. After suffering a humiliating defeat at the hands of Nezha, Ao Guang seeks vengeance by kidnapping Nezhas parents.

Hit the jump for the rest of Ao Guang’s story, how he’ll play in-game and further reading.

A common antagonist, Ao Guang is actually responsible for helping Sun WuKong achieve his most powerful relic, the transforming staff known as Ruyi Jingu Bang. Unsuspecting that the staff, which was holding down the ocean, would react to the Monkey King, the dragon-king teased the diminutive figure to attempt to acquire the heavenly weapon. Upon approach, the magical weapon reacted to him, confirming that he is the rightful owner. The sea, now unconstrained after Ruyi Jingu Bangs removal, went into turmoil, wreaking further havoc that was attributed to Ao Guang.

In-Game: Despite the back lore (and misspelling), Hi-Rez Studios is currently tailoring its incarnation of Ao Kuang as a wind serpent. The character is a classic ranged spell caster, featuring wind-based attacks and little crowd control.

Further reading:

• Ao Guang on Wikipedia
• Chinese Mythology on Wikipedia
• Journey to the West (PDF)
• Investiture of the Gods (WikiSource guide)

Head over to SMITE: Demigods, Deities and Gods Explained for details on all of the playable characters.

MMORPG and Free MMO Game List – Lore Hound

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RTSGuru.com editors have an exclusive look at the NOD faction from upcoming Browser MMORTS, Command & Conquer: Tiberium Alliances. Does this much needed new faction offer a shot in the arm to the open-beta MMORTS? Find out at RTSGuru.com!

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"And your wallet shall tremble…"

Last time, we looked at how the fees for the different auction houses will affect trading in Diablo 3. Today, I’d like to look at it from Blizzard’s perspective and understand how the company selected the fee structure, what it will be paying attention to, and how it might treat the auction house in the long-term.

If there’s one thing Blizzard learned from Diablo II, it’s that there is a huge demand for functional in-game economies. Where Blizzard did not provide, players and companies emerged and established methods for trading and valuation. Both Diablo II and World of Warcraft have shown that there is a huge demand to use real money to purchase things, like characters, items, and gold. Blizzard took a staunch “no-RMT” policy for World of Warcraft, as expressed in the game’s Terms of Service, and does not hold back in banning accounts used to sell items or gold. If you haven’t seen it yet, it really shines a light on how serious Blizzard is about preventing RMT in WoW:

Blizzard hasacknowledgedthat WoW gold purchased from third parties is “most commonly” obtained through compromised accounts. Blizzard has alsoacknowledgedthat third-party sites in Diablo II were often the source of credit card fraud and often did not provide a high level of service. It also promoted spam, bots, and hacking. It makes sense for the company to offer this service to players directly and built into the client: it provides a better experience and Blizzard can skim a bit of cash as well.

What do you get from using Blizzard’s service instead of a third-party service?

• A single,convenient, and unified player-driven market
• Security in transactions: only Blizzard processes your payments.
• The ability to get paid without intermediaries
• Reliable customer service in case of disputes
• A long-term reliable economy: Blizzard will have access to lots of data to make decisions and better records to track down botters and fraudsters.

All of this is done relatively cheaply: the flat per transaction is worth the convenience and peace of mind you’ll get from using the auction house for big-ticket items. However, it is not without its drawbacks. Here are some of the big ones:

• Paying 15% to payout to PayPal and requiring it to be done on-the-spot are slightly moreinconvenientand expensive methods than they could be.
• Selling cheap items on the real-money auction house is not very economical, nor is converting the money from the gold auction house.
• There is a floor and ceiling price on the real-money auction house (.50 and 0), and if items exceed that amount, players will have to make complicated arrangements to part with them.

I think that Blizzard might have underestimated the second point a bit. With micro-transactions taking gaming (and other markets) by storm, lots of players are willing and conditioned to pay very small amounts for things, potentially many times. The success of mobile phone apps and digital music sales asking users for .99 and becoming billion-dollar industries over-night are atestamentto this. As we saw in the previous part, the realized profit for sellers for cheap items is very low.

Blizzard has an obvious and huge interest in ensuring that the Diablo economy is a success:

• Of course, Blizzard is certainly cutting a profit from the transactions fees despite the services and security offered.
• The ability to sell items through the auction house is a compelling gameplay feature that is a great selling pointfor the software.

By introducing and effectively managing a new digital currency – the “Battle.net credit”, Blizzard reaps significant rewards:

• Since Battle.net credits are created solely by players depositing money into the accounts, players holding Battle.net credits equates to a free money forward for Blizzard – money that can be invested and turn a profit before the player spends it and the company has to pay out real funds for it.
• By making it more expensive and lessconvenientto cash out to PayPal – the company is encouraging the use of the currency and allows for the purchase of some of itsn(digital) products using the currency. This willundoubtedlyyield increased sales of these digital items.

The most curious thing to me is that the items that you can buy from the Blizzard store is so limited. Here is a list of what you can buy from Blizzard with the Battle.net balance:

Battle.net Balance FAQ

• World of Warcraft Character Services
  • Appearance Change
  • Faction Change
  • Name Change
  • Race Change
  • Realm Transfer
• World of Warcraft Guild Services
  • Guild Faction Change
  • Guild Name Change
  • Guild Realm Transfer
  • Guild Faction Change + Guild Name Change
  • Guild Realm Transfer + Guild Faction Change + Guild Name Change
  • Guild Realm Transfer + Guild Name Change
• World of Warcraft Digital Upgrades
  • WoW: Battle Chest to Wrath of the Lich King
  • WoW: Battle Chest to Cataclysm
  • Wrath of the Lich King to Cataclysm
• Other Digital Blizzard Games
  • Diablo II
  • Diablo II: Lord of Destruction
  • StarCraft II
  • StarCraft Anthology
  • Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos
  • Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne

The mostconspicuousdigital items missing from this list include World of Warcraft game time and WoW pets, as well as WoW itself. They are listed in this blog postas future additions, but why they aren’t available on launch is a mystery to me. It might be that they are not yet easily reversible in case of incidents. Blizzard has done very well to “cross-pollinate”, with the WoW Annual Pass giving World of Warcraft players a copy of Diablo III and ensuring that they continue to subscribe to WoW for a year. I imagine that Blizzard is concerned with the Diablo and WoW cannibalizing each other’s player bases, and it seems to me that giving WoW players the ability to pay their subscription fees by playing Diablo III is a no-brainer. Giving Diablo players a chance to easily dip into WoW can only increase game and service sales.

With all of these amazing methods for Blizzard to profit from the Battle.net Credit, why would they even want players to use gold? Blizzard does not directly profit from the gold auction house: the 15% cut from the auction house does not go into their pockets. It does provide for a “gold sink” that scales with the size of the game’s economy, but is it worth precluding transactions in Battle.net currency? While it is clear that a gold auction house should exist for convenience, as gameplay features will require the acquisition of lots of gold (and gold is freely generated, if Battle.net Credits were instead, they wouldn’t be able to peg them to the dollar), we saw in the previous post that there are lots of situations where the real-money auction house will fail to provide a good solution for trade, particularly for very cheap items. For this reason, the gold auction house will be preferable for players in many circumstances. I can’t imagine that Blizzard would prefer players to use gold over Battle.net Credits when possible, so I do expect the fee structure to change to betterincentivesusing a Battle.net balance. More on this in the final part.

Another burning question for potential auction-house moguls is: why not offer a way to “cash out” your Battle.net balance? We answered this a bit previously – having players hold that balance gives Blizzard a profitable cash advance. Even if it means that players hold a few dollars or cents left over from not completely spending their balance, it can add up to a lot of money that would otherwise be completely depleted. However, I really wonder if Blizzard will eventually rescind the decision. Players can, with the help of a friend, use their balance to buy their friend’s item and cash out to PayPal, again paying the auction house fees. This is ultimately what gives the Credits a close-to-real-world value: situations where you can use them or real-world currencies, with the other party receiving their choice of currency. I imagine that many players would be more comfortable using the Battle.net balance and treating it more like a real currency if they were able to cash out. Perhaps implementing restrictions on cash outs could provide a win-win situation for Blizzard: a more expensive fee than the on-the-spot transaction, say 20% instead of 15%, and the stipulation that it can only be done once every 90 days or so. The benefit of receiving credits at the AH in both the current and this theoretical scenario is that you don’t have to pay the 15% cash out fee is you are just going to spend the proceeds on in-game items anyway. Providing an alternative cash-out method mightincentivesmore players to consider using the real-money auction house, and use theconveniencefactor to close the buddy-system loophole for cashing out after the fact.

The last big regulation that I’d like to consider is the 10 auction limit per account. Every account can only list 10 auctions per mode – that is, 10 auctions in softcore (the “main” mode) and 10 auctions in hardcore. It seems that this limit applies across gold and the real money auction houses. A clear reason for this limit is that auctions are free – there are no fees for listing or failing to sell an item. Without these fees, there is no reason not to “spam” the auction house, which makes it more difficult to navigate, more expensive to manage, and harder to maintain a functioning market. Additionally, it makes it much more difficult for botters to realize profits from farming or even from directly botting on the auction house. In order to have a real impact, several game licenses would be required, each of which is very expensive and would outweigh the cost of dealing with the botters. If a botter can’t make before getting banned, they aren’t going to bot. At the end of the day, they provide the tools for the average player to buy and sell, andenthusiastshave some freedoms for expensive and larger operations. This isn’t going to be a platform for botters or speculators to make massive amounts of money – the fees and structure of the auction house prevent these sorts of activities.

In the last post in this series, we will look at the in-game economic welfare effect of Blizzard’s policies and whether third-party services can thrive. Stay tuned!

MMORPG and Free MMO Game List – Lore Hound

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1. Diablo III Real Money Auction House: Analysis of Fees, Market Forces, and Strategy, Part 1
2. Battle.net Balance – Blizzard Quadruple Dipping in D3 Auction House
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Blizzard Entertainment and Valve have announced that the two gaming giants have reached an agreement regarding the use of the DOTA name. In the settlement, Blizzard will be able to retain the non-commercial use of the DOTA name with regard to consumer-created maps for Warcraft III and Starcraft II.

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The recent announcement of the fee schedule for the “real-money trade” (RMT) auction house had some players astonished at the prices. The fee for the gold-based auction house is 15% of the sale price and while the real-money auction house matches that 15% for “commodities” (e.g., stackable items, gems, materials, dyes, etc.), it charges for equipment and unique items. These fees are charged to the seller and deduced from the money they receive from the sale of the item. Additionally, the real money revenue is credited to a Battle.net account balance; if you want to be paid and withdraw the funds to Paypal, this incurs an additional 15% charge. Once you get the money into Paypal, you can transfer to a bank account for free, or do anything you could normally do with Paypal credit.

If you are at all familiar with Blizzard’s other major auction house system, the WoW gold auction house, you might notice thesimilaritiesand differences easily. Here’s a quick rundown of WoW’s auction house fees:

• 5% of the sale price on same faction auction house (99% of the trading), 15% on neutral auction houses
• Players must put down a deposit when selling items. If the item fails to sell, the deposit is not returned. The deposit varies based on thelengthof the auction and the vendor value of the item.

If you find a leet sword and sell it on the AH then want to use the funds in real life, this is how much money you aregetting:

You probably aren’t going to get much for farming lots of small items if you sell them on the real-money auction house, as that fee takes most of the sale price. This is slightlydisappointing, as it means we probably won’t be seeing a whole lot of super-cheap items to buy and will have to plunk down a little more to get our items. I’m sure there will be some available, but it might be more reasonable to buy these items in the gold auction house for items below the mark.

One thing to keep in mind is that gold itself will be buyable on the real-money auction house. This means that you could sell a cheap sword for gold and pay the 15% fee, then sell the gold for money and pay the 15% fee again. This might seem like a big hit, but it works out to about a 28% fee, less than the + 15% fee for some transactions. This assumes that there is a constant gold-to-money exchange rates at all levels and items are priced according to this rate, which may not be true. Lets pretend that buys 100 gold. This conversion rate is entirely made up and isn’t going to be at all accurate, but it makes the math easy. The below table shows how much money you’d get from selling the items for gold and converting it to a real-money balance as opposed to doing so on the spot.

The left column shows a variety of gold values you could sell an item at, while the second column shows how much gold you’ll actually receive. The third and fourth column shows how much money you could get for that gold if you sold it on the real money auction house (depending on which method you choose), and the fifth and sixth column show much much money you would get if you sold it atequivalentprices on the real-money auction house. For transactions below .60, it is better to get gold on the spot and sell it for whatever balance you prefer later. This means for the cheapest level of transactions, gold will likely be preferred, even if players want to cash out anyways.

This, of course, assumes that players are savvy and will make decisions to maximize their profit. There willundoubtedlybe people, regardless of the best decision, who will be uninformed of the fees or indifferent to doing research and sell their items at .50, only netting them .50 instead of .08. However, I think that there will be enough big players and big market forces that prices will largely follow rational pricing. Here are some of the reasons:

• The auction houses are big, (nearly) region-wide. Imagine all of the WoW servers using a single auction house: undercutting would happen every second and prices would be driven down to the lowest feasible price.
• The incentive, for at least someone, is real money. Even if the things in question are just items and gold, they are convertible to real money. Students and kids with free time, as well as unemployed people and other low-wage people will be willing to “work” even if the margins and money per hour are low. If there is an opportunity to buy something on the gold auction house and relist it as an undercut on the real-money auction house, it will happen, and vice versa. Any pricediscrepancieswill be “fixed” by market players looking to make a profit.

This leads to an interesting question: is there going to a floating gold-to-money ratio, or does the fixed fee throw a wrench into gold valuation? What is gold going to be traded at?

Gold clearly has different values for different levels of transactions. If there is some average level, like our 100g to the dollar example, I would prefer to trade in gold for cheaper transactions: I would rather receive 127.5 gold than .50 Battle.net. On the flip side, I would rather get paid in a Battle.net balance than gold on the auction house above .60: even if I want gold, I can use the higher levels of Battle.net money to buy more gold.

The .60 result isindependentof the actual exchange rate. But, if people increasingly buy more cheap items sold than expensive items, the “average” gold price in dollars will go up. This is because prices will be lower in gold. Sellers will prefer to use gold and pass at least some of the savings onto buyers; I’d rather “give” a buyer a $.10 “discount” than a fee to Blizzard. On the flip side, if players primarily buy more expensive items, the fees will be less in Battle.net balance than gold, and prices will be lower on the real-money auction house. The price of gold will go down, as people will sell their gold to use the cheaper real-money auction house, even if they themselves never add funds from a real-world source.

Of course, these market forces are only part of the story. They are an immutable part of the story, unless Blizzard changes its fees, and their effects depend on how many transactions happen at each price level. Other factors include the willingness of players to add real-world funds; if players become more willing to do this, real-money auction prices, including the price of gold, will go up. Changing psychological aversion to trading in real-world currency amounts will affect prices, well as a “gold rush” mentality of wanting to make money from playing a game.

While this tells the supply-side of the story well, the buyers sellers of gold who go onto buy real-money items will also run into the 15% fee. As such, they are not indifferent about which currency they would like to use and cannot simply trade at the market rate for free. Luckily, the fee of 15% for selling equipment on the gold auction house is the same as the 15% charged to sell gold, a key point that makes sure everyone’s optimal price levels are in line:

Again, .60 is the magic number at which the real-money auction house prices will be lower,ceteris paribus.

The question is my mind is this: why did Blizzard choose these fees? Could a different fee structure be more beneficial for players and Blizzard? We’ll look at this later this week.

MMORPG and Free MMO Game List – Lore Hound

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On April 12, 2012, Hi-Rez Studios delivered on its promise to rejuvenate the Tribes franchise when it launched the fast-paced, skill-based Tribes: Ascend. Just shy of a month since release, we caught up with Todd Harris, COO of Hi-Rez Studios, to discuss the launch process, the future of the game and to facilitate a little industry jabbing.

LoreHound: First of all, congratulations on the launch of Tribes: Ascend. Did the team do anything special to celebrate the milestone? Besides praying to the server gods for a smooth launch, that is.

Todd Harris: Team T-shirts, cake and booze!

LH: Overall, the transition from beta to live has seemed relatively smooth. Yet many developers tend to have issues between last-minute patches and server stability. How did Hi-Rez prepare for the changeover?

TH: The long beta was helpful in flushing out most of the major bugs and polishing gameplay before launch. In terms of servers, the programming team built a great technology platform that allows us to add servers very easily. So, even with the huge influx of players we’ve generally able to add servers fast enough to keep up.

LH: Fans want to know: What happened to the Lance?

TH: We’ll see. We’ve been doing updates every 2-3 weeks so we need to save some cool weapon ideas for consideration in future updates.

LH: A large draw to earlier franchise installments was user-created maps. Is there anything in the works on that front?

TH: Nothing in the works right now. As you know we just rolled out Custom Servers with a bunch of user-managed gameplay settings and admin features. So we are currently monitoring how players are using Custom Servers and want to make sure they work well for different communities.

LH: Any word on female models and voices?

TH: We have some concept art for females now. But no timelines to announce.

LH: Did the F2P model have much impact on game design? For the most part, the current model is a typical F2P store. Can players expect Hi-Rez to put a Tribes slant on the offerings in the future?

TH: We’ve been discussing a few new microtransaction types with a Tribes slant – including the idea of custom voice packs.

LH: You mentioned that many publishers snubbed Tribes: Ascend claiming a fast-paced and skill-based shooter wouldnt work. At what point does Hi-Rez feel comfortable dropping an I told you so!?

TH: Now seems good. I told you so! :)

Actually we’ve been very flattered by the critical acclaim. We knew there was a PC gamer audience wanting Tribes to return. But we weren’t sure how Tribes: Ascend was going to be received by professional game reviewers since it isn’t your typical military shooter. In theory those external reviews shouldn’t matter, but in reality, they do. After so much time and energy and passion it does feel good to get those positive reviews.

LH: Industry jabs aside, is Hi-Rez Studios experimenting with all-new game modes tailored specifically to the core nature of Tribes: Ascend. Not adapting common FPS game modes, but innovating for this style of gameplay alone.

TH: Yes. We’ll continue to experiment with other game-modes. However we suspect that Capture The Flag will remain the marquee and most popular mode.

LH: We have a fistful of Tribes: Ascend currency codes that we…uhh…requisitioned from the PAX East booth. Can you tell your community that anyone that retweets the articles link or posts it on their Facebook wall will earn a code while supplies last?

TH: I was wondering where those PAX codes disappeared to. :) You share the codes and we’ll spread the word.

LH: Thanks for your time. All the best in the future.

MMORPG and Free MMO Game List – Lore Hound

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The Fallen Earth blog has been updated with a new post outlining some of the recent changes to the overall player experience that includes things such as tooltips, skill detail pages and more. All of this is designed, according to the post, to give players more information and to make it more "accessible" to players.

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Our resident pony, DarkPony, is back with a new update to his Disgruntled Pony blog. In this latest entry, DarkPony focuses on EVE Online, detailing (in typical DP style) his adventures baiting pirates in the space-faring MMO.

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