The bit I’m personally very interested in is this post right here all about the success of the City of Heroes ‘booster pack’ system. Begun with the well-received wedding set, they released the first of their series packs with the Cyborg set. It’s kind of downplayed a bit in the interview there, but I have it on good authority that the Cyborg set has a RIDUNKULOUS sellthrough rate. Not 1:1, probably, but really fricking high. As a result NC NorCal is sitting pretty with talented designers, regular income from subscriptions, and an occasional much-appreciated boost from the microtransactional content.

What I’d love to see them do is drop the subscription price to pay back the players for buying into the MT content. Maybe someday, NorCal?

Update: I didn’t notice this till I wandered over to their store. $4.99 for a 30-day limited item? That I can get for free at Christmas? The value of the Cyborg and the Wedding packs are relatively high, but this jetpack thing should be more like a buck. At most.

I was sitting in my hotel in San Diego earlier this year, pondering a blog post and the day’s events. The sun was on the horizon and to keep the back of my mind occupied I popped on the television. Watching cable TV is a rare treat for me. Primarily I watch specific TV shows via iTunes or Netflix, so channel surfing is really only something I do for the 30 minutes or so I’m on the elliptical at the gym.

Animal Planet, Discovery, and other channels sometimes run shows on zookeeping or zoo design, and I just can’t get enough of that stuff. What can I say, I like animals and how stuff gets put together? In any case, that San Diego evening I entertained myself by occasionally looking up to see a hippo being fed or a bear cave being cleaned.

The thing of it is, in some ways those zoo animals have it better off than your average MMO player. I’m not just talking about free food and no rent – I’m talking about enrichment activities.

Animals in zoos, y’see, tend to live fairly repetitive lives. While enclosures in modern zoos are leaps and bounds better than the start concrete floors and metal bars of the 50s, they’re still enclosures. For animal species like great cats (which patrol a large territory) or grazing herbivores (which migrate to feed) even the most spacious exhibit will start to feel cramped very quickly.

One solution that’s regularly used in zookeeping is the concept of enrichment activities – stuff to alleviate the boredom. At a lot of institutions these activities are very simple. Hiding food so that the animal has to forage for their meal is very common, as are simple toys and architectural elements. An increasingly common enrichment technique involves having more than one species of animal living together in an exhibit; antelopes and capybaras, for example.

As much as the idea of live events strains the minds of developers and GMs alike, for the sake of argument here I’m going to liken them to zoo enrichment activities. Keeping the daily routine of players from becoming too routine seems like a very laudable goal. Regular holiday events have long since become accepted in most games, and those are great in-roads to enrichment. WoW offers regularly changing PvP weekend events, but those only hit a small portion of the overall playerbase.

What I’d like to see are deliberate attempts to shake up the status-quo every once in a while. Developers argue that anything disrupting the quest/grind treadmill has to be avoided, because customers will complain. Commercial MMOs are over ten years gone at this point, though, and I just don’t buy that as an answer anymore. There are endless tracts of time between holiday events and patches in some games, and having something to break up the monotony seems like a darned good idea.

The elemental invasions in WoW and the Rikti attacks in CoH are the sorts of things I’d like to see … only moreso. Big events that pit players of all levels against a common foe, or just cause a little mayhem. An Overlord-lead attack on Qeynos every once in a while, maybe? That could be a great combo PvE/PvP event, with PCs pitted against not only rallied evil players but spawned NPCs as well. An “AQ style war effort”, only in Star Wars Galaxies? Pit the Rebels vs. the Imperials against each other in a rush to supply the armed forces for a major confrontation. When the supplies are ready, announce that the attack is on, and direct players to the front lines via new (obvious) quests.

See, the key with enrichment activities is that they don’t even have to be all that great. Developers are always complaining that players don’t participate or that they think the events are lame. Well, I guarantee you the fourth time that polar bear has found a steak in the same hiding place he’s not super impressed either. The point isn’t quality – it’s novelty. Don’t aim for the suck, of course, but given the right set of tools I have a hard time understanding why microevents aren’t a regular in-game option. Life isn’t entirely predictable; why should MMOs be any different?

The last clip comes with a story. In it you’ll see Grodin, my Dwarven Paladin, fighting with Arakkoa in Hellfire Peninsula. I shut off FRAPS’ video capture just a second before another birdman rushed my character. He was joined by one of those blasted owls, and the fight was really on. I held my own for a bit, took out the birdman, but it was quickly obvious I was going to lose to the owl. So I did what any self-respecting pally would do: I bubbled and ran, down into a cave I’d partially cleared out along the chasm’s floor. Unfortunately as I ran I managed to pull another Arakkoa. I healed a bunch but I was OOM and I was sure I was done for. At this point I was quite a ways away from the owl’s spawn, so I backed up some more hoping he’d de-aggro and leave me alone. All of a sudden there was a burst of light, and I was at full health and mana. I whipped out the big guns and dropped both of the mobs in no time flat.

I realized, as I stood there over the corpses, that I’d dinged. And not just any ding – an exploration ding. By backing up just that bit farther I’d gotten the XP gift for finding the Den of Haal’esh proper, leveled up, and had my health/mana restored. Hilarious. An instant from death and I’m saved by a lousy 1000 xp or so. Priceless, and one of the many reasons I play these games!

• A wrapup of the pounding that cross-gender ‘research’ took at the hands of Bartle and the Freeman.  I particularly liked the comments on Raph’s blog; almost nothing from him and several really nice retorts from the peanut gallery.
• Will Dobson put together a fantastic look at the Spring Festival going on over in LOTRO. It’s not only interesting and informative but a great chance to show off our new gallery software. Nice!
• The WoW Insider team headed to the Tourney test realm and came away with some amazing stuff. Amanda Miller has a writeup of the events, but you really have to check out the gallery of their experiences. I want to ride a giant Raven Lord!
• A FANTASTIC announcement from NCsoft as they unveil the beginnings of Issue 12 for City of Heroes. I really love the sound of this content – definitely going to have to check it out. In fact, talking it over with the EQ2 group, it sounds like CoH might be our next destination once we hit max level sometime near the end of this year.
• I remember seeing the flying mounts at the end of Vanguard Beta over a year ago now, and only now are they getting put into the game. A little sad, but still great news for the players who have been waiting patiently for this content to drop. Game Update 4 is live!

• Blizzard releases an expansion that’s great – and I’ve barely played it.
• Vanguard flops
• Cryptic sells CoH, and now is completely silent.
• WAR and Conan are delayed until 2008.
• Ryzom goes under, again.
• Perpetual explodes, sending shards of two unreleased games flying.
• My EQII experience has gotten kind of crappy.
• Auto Assault closes.
• LOTRO releases to relatively positive reviews – and I’ve barely played it.

Most distressing for me, personally, is that in the last two weeks I’ve killed both of my gaming PCs. I now have no way of playing even World of Warcraft, let alone something like AoC or Pirates. You wouldn’t believe how much you want to play a MMOG when you can’t.

About the only thing I have fully appreciated this year is Eye of the North, which I’m now really enjoying on my wife’s PC.  I’m almost done with the Norn quest line … more about that later.

The thing that prompted this post was Fury’s demise. I said publicly in a few different places that I thought it had potential, and that I was hopeful for the little Aussie game studio. Just embarrassing. Maybe I thought that they’d take a little more time to get it right before releasing?

Whatever. Burning Crusade is obviously an unqualified success for Blizzard and the Massive industry as a whole. In fact, this year could be considered the year that Massive games went mainstream. Truck commercials, South Park appearances, Mr. T and Shatner … the only problem is that one game in the genre has gone mainstream. As a whole, new ventures this year have floundered or been delayed, while several existing titles have sunk beneath the waves. For better or worse, most of my MMOGnostication predictions have come true. That makes me bloody sad.

So: screw you 2007. Hopefully ‘08 will offer bigger, better things.

But yikes. I … imagine … MUO is still going to be published by NCsoft, but that’s just one less firm link between Cryptic and NC. Fun to watch the gears turn, huh?

Additional: And now you get free CoV! And prestige! And a debt removal! Yikes!

Additional: Oh … MUO is a Microsoft-published project, Lum reminds me in the comments. Thanks Scott. :)

Sooo … goodbye NCsoft/Cryptic.