MMPORG companies out there: if you want to retain professionals like myself who want to play when there is actually time available for playing, then switch the pay to a time spent in game subscription credit instead of a real world time subscription. Offer that as an alternative means of payment, perhaps even at a slightly higher price point, for people like myself.

CK’s weird use of MMPORG instead of the standard MMORPG aside, this is an interesting idea. I see some problems though as when I do play these type games, the sessions are long. So unless the number of hours purchased is like in say 25 or 50 hour chunks minimum, one would run into having to stop in the middle of a battle and/or quest and juice their account with more time. I’m sure that could become more annoying than paying for a subscription that seldom gets used.

I’m still playing Everquest II but very sparingly at the moment – like one day a week right now. So I’m paying for 6 days a week that there is no play time. Sony is making a few bucks off players like me. Since we are rebooting our offline business, it might be awhile before I have more than a day or three to spend playing MMORPGs.

My first reaction to CK’s suggested alternate payment model was hey, that’s kind of cool, but the more I think about it, I’d rather have unlimited time throughout the month. Yeah, yeah, I know it’s not unlimited since there are only so many hours in the day, but when one gets immersed in the virtual world one of the last things s/he needs is to be reminded by something in the real world needs to be paid to keep playing.

One minor snag in the process. While going through the process, I still had 16 meters of land donated to our VTOR group land space (under the SL Blog Bar group) and received the error message when trying to downgrade my account to the free basic account:

This was easy enough to fix, although as you can see the message doesn’t go out of the way to help you figure it out. Just login to the world right click on your avatar, choose groups, and then go to the “Land & L$” tab as shown below and make sure “Your Contribution” has a 0 in every group.

Once you do that the process to downgrade works and leads to an exit survey, which I’ll let the picture speak for itself.

So in a few days I’ll join the land of the freebie members again. I would expect my usage of Second Life in 2009 will be greatly reduced, perhaps eventually to the point where the software will be uninstalled by year end but that’s just a guess. Had high hopes for Second Life but in the end it didn’t measure anywhere close to the hype. What I didn’t put in the downgrade survey is that they ruined it by making it too first life.

Gambling, remember that? I find it interesting that inside the game Everquest II there is a Gigglegibber Goblins’ lotto where you can win a bunch of coins by matching all six numbers. Can this currency be traded in real dollars like Linden Lab allows in Second Life? Not from Sony, no, but there are a bunch of virtual currency brokers out there that will. The goblin lotto is very close to the ‘gambling’ that Linden Lab used to allow in Second Life. Is this the same as real world online gambling? I don’t think so, but apparently it Linden Lab felt it was and that decision changed the landscape of the business aspect interest for me with Second Life.

Anyway, no sense crying over spilled milk. I wish the rest of readers who still have Second Life premium accounts the best of luck. If you are keeping yours must admit I’m curious … why? If you canceled already, then why did you stop your premium membership? Anybody choose the more extreme cancel account route? Why?

Are you approaching this with a virtual worlds mentality first, or a gamer mentality? The contextual difference and expectations are vast. Sony has a great framework here to a) create mini games in a social/waiting space, b) social spaces around brands (there are others built, not released yet: Watchmen, Red Bull, Warhawk), and c) a tremendous catalog of media between movies and music.

Eric is a smart guy who is well traveled in the virtual world and MMO gaming space. When I saw his comment I nodded thinking yeah, I see where they could go too, but we’ve been down this road with other virtual areas. Kaneva? Lots of potential there too. Don’t recall that materializing yet.

Eric nailed a big problem with Second Life perception that has always plagued them. Interesting noting he also commented on a recent VTOR post saying he was selling “the last of” his sims in Second Life and getting out too. I think patience only goes so far and the amount of time people are willing to give companies who are working on something virtual is shrinking not increasing. Show me how it’s useful now, show me why I spend any time here now, not how you think it could be cool someday. Maybe.

Who does Second Life appeal to? Is it the virtual world crowd who wants limitless creativity? Gamers? Or both? When I got into Second Life I wasn’t thinking of it like a game platform although I went on to create games on it. One of the other VTOR authors ran a casino in world for a little while and became a good customer and supporter of a game I had in world. Success was fairly short-lived there as Linden Lab declared casinos in world as a form of gambling and goodbye to all that. But the point I’m trying to make was Second Life to me was about making it easier to customize a virtual world. While there were other attempts at doing this, Second Life has done the best at this to date.

HOME should promote playing games on the PS3 and it doesn’t do enough of that yet

Conversely, I went into Playstation Home with the impression that it would be more gaming focused. Sure, I expected some commercialism. Nothing is free in the real or virtual world.  I hoped to find a cool, in my dreams revolutionary, interface to replace the somewhat boring but functional Xbox dashboard. As I wandered around Home and saw tons of beautiful scenery that I couldn’t interact with and a store in the mall that had a messages like: “nothing available yet” (the Stuff store) and a scattered few extremely simplistic games (breakout? lol, come on), I could only shake my head.

The most excitement found in my first experience with Home may have been awkwardly searching for ‘secret’ keycodes to enter into some areas. So secret that one could easily find the codes on the web and other people in the area pushing and shoving their virtual avatars to enter the door key codes. By the way, here’s a tip: just have a friend invite you into these secret rooms and then add to your favorites and access without the key codes. You’ll skip the rush.

Someone in the chat suggested you might also receive those codes by playing the game in the area, but I didn’t try that game (they were all being played, naturally). What I really wanted to do was be able to put some arcade game machines, pool table, air hockey, heck, why not a mini-bowling lane in my apartment and invite friends over. Nope, can’t do that. So instead you are supposed to wait in line for what, a small few crowded bowling lanes? Not even the PS3 faithful think that’s enough bowling lanes for the masses.

With that said, I still think there is potential here to do what is described above. This would be cool for gamers, especially if the games are exclusive to be played inside Home that would drive people to their home virtual space. I hope that’s where Sony is headed. Crowded public areas do not appeal to me either virtual or real world. I was impressed with how many avatars were in these public area without any slowdown or lag. Linden Lab needs to contract with the Sony scaling engineers because they got this part figured out. That said, it wasn’t easy or smooth logging into Home with the massive onrush of people checking it out, so that’s where the bottleneck is happening. Once logged in my experience from a lag standpoint was unnoticeable.

Also was able to chat with Darius via bluetooth headset while navigating different menus and even separate areas. You want to “call” your friend to enable that type of persistent chat. That is a useful function but didn’t test to see if it was possible to have multiple people. A keyboard is a necessity in group chat if you can’t do voice. The whole push R2 trigger to talk thing has to go too for phone conversations with friends. I can see the R2 thing making sense in open space conversations but it should be non push to talk in phone calls.

Darius lamented there not being enough brands represented yet. Two games with areas? That’s all? I would have thought they’d have a space set aside for every game in the store. No, not a detailed walk around area, but at least a generic room as a placeholder space.

In these spaces you could teleport in and find a link to the store to download add-ons or trailers and perhaps some Home-only downloads. I see the potential here but they are missing a golden opportunity with the number of people eager to see what they are up to showing them an experience with too little content. I know, I know, it’s open beta, it’s not finished. Guess I’m saying with as long as they’ve been working on this, they should have had more.

Effort feels rushed for holiday season 2008

The Home open beta feels too rushed. Before you say, wait, how can an open beta be rushed? Well, just login and see for yourself.

It’s like the dev team needed another year in closed beta to get this thing closer to the way I described but executive pressure and their own timeline goal of releasing it in the Fall (which they missed anyway, December not Fall) made it a necessity kicking something out now. As much as I was eager to see this – yes, even in beta form – they should have put out a statement saying they were increasing private-only invites but it was still way too unfinished to make it an open beta. I would have been frustrated and maybe even bitched about this in a blog post saying what’s taking so long but you only get one first impression.

I realize this is open to debate. Let people in and test the mass scaling capability. That’s an important part of the testing before adding too much more content, but many of those who see this won’t be as excited about coming back because there wasn’t enough to see and do.  You have to weigh these concerns when rolling out an open public release. Sure, you can chat and pay to setup some virtual club. Whoopie, you can do that from a website for free.

Where does Sony go from here? I hope they stay game-focused with Home. They don’t appear to be going down the Second Life open virtual world path which is good. If Darius somehow did think – and I doubt he did – he was entering some Second Life-like world, he would have been hugely disappointed there too. But if he was looking at it as a cool interface to enhance gaming on the PS3 it’s a bust there as well.

Snake eyes either way

More work needed. More effort. Maybe in a year if Sony doesn’t pull a Google Lively and unplug, we’ll see something useful. I can’t see logging into this game UI to view movie or game trailers in the theater or walk around my apartment that has no games in it or go shopping with real world $$ regularly for fake clothes and furniture. Now if they put games in that Stuff store or create more mini-games that can be playable among the crowds, that changes things.

There is something to be said about making a social area to find people to play games with but they could have done that through their website much more inexpensively. You can’t even go out of Home and do much in the Playstation dashboard while in Home, why not? All the flash, all the cash in an open launch beta decision that was rash.

There is potential here as Eric suggested but it could be so far off from becoming a reality that it will be too late.

I clicked the big “click here” link and was taken to Funcom to login. No further message anywhere about the offer. After logging into Funcom the status message for Anarchy Online showed: “status open, log in and play the game”

And so begins the infamous and sometimes frustrating (crashed on me while writing this) patching process. The last time I played Anarchy Online was when they were offering free play until January 15, 2008. I’m curious though how the “next payment due” screen showed 2009-01-15 when I clicked through the offer on December 3, 2008. They actually are giving me 42 days free, yes/no?

Not complaining about the extra free play time, but kind of curious what is the story. There is a “play for free” link on the official site that when clicked takes you to a page that describes:

If you used to Play Anarchy Online in the past you can of course use your old install files, however you will need to create a new account to advantage of the freeplay offer.

This is kind of strange, so they are encouraging users to setup additional accounts to be able to play the new content for free? And for how long?

FUNCOM Stock (Oslo: FUNCOM.OL) is trading at $2.75 down like so many other stocks from a high of over $50 in July of this year. This was a two year low according to Joystiq (Age of Conan servers merging, stock hits 2-year low). The bump mid year in the stock over the $28 it was selling for a year ago was most likely due to the Age of Conan launch. I tried to get into Age of Conan at launch, but it didn’t grab me. Three months ago Age of Conan director Gaute Godager has departed from Funcom and was replaced by Anarchy Online director Craig Morrison (Age of Conan director leaves Funcom, Anarchy Online director given the reins).

Analyst firm Parks Associates said in a recent report that game companies should give up the fees:

The analyst found that just two per cent of gamers in the US who do not currently play MMORPGs are interesting in joining a new subscription-based game. By contrast, 14 per cent would be willing to play a game that offered free access.

If you are going to charge Sony might have the right idea by offering a station pass which gives access to all their games (including Everquest, EQII, Vanguard, Pirates,etc.), but man, $30/month seems steep considering you can only play one game at a time.

Not sure how to take the Anarchy Online offers, if they are just promoting in hard times or they are desperate. Whatever the case, players get some free time to check out what’s happened the last year.

Sort of like Pandora/iLike/last.fm only with points earned for completing different tasks like (via TheSixtyOne FAQ):

• Listening to music on The Rack (+1-40 points per song, reward based on dice roll)
• Logging in daily (+20 points)
• Inviting a friend (+20 points and +50 points for each level they achieve or +100 points per level if your friend is an artist). [note: I invited my son who shares with me an affection for music. He's digging the site already]

As you navigate around the site, the songs you listen to keep playing and you can easily find out more about the current song by hovering over the floating left menu. From this menu you can also pause, skip or go back to prior song, favorite and/or ‘bump’ the song.

Bumping, similar to a digg vote, you must spend some of your points, so use for music you like and/or think will reach the front page of the site. Via the FAQ:

The primary way to earn points is by bumping music. It’ll cost you points upfront, but as songs you bump become more popular you can earn more points! If you hover your mouse over a ‘bump’ button, you’ll notice that it will indicate how much it costs to bump that particular song.

To add to enticement factor in using your points, there are some unlockable achievements like:

- “sensei of soul” first bump a song to homepage
- “lewis & clark” bump songs in under-explored genres
- “groupie” show your love by max bumping songs
- “the romantic” spend more points than you earn on songs

Leveling up by listening to music adds a little fun, but you’re limited to how many points can be earned each day listening to music from ‘The Rack’ to 50 points per day once you’ve amassed 300 points. Since you get like 90 points simply for registering for the site and 1-40 by listening to each song, you’ll reach that 300 w/50 point daily limit quickly. During the writing of this post I went from 0 points to 250.

My first bump (cost of 13 points) went to a piano cover version of Through The Fire and Flames (embed below for those not reading via RSS):

Guitar Hero players know this song to be one of the most difficult tracks in the game. It doesn’t sound much easier to play on the piano.

I’m not sure I’d label TheSixtyOne very MMO and in fairness to them, they aren’t either. The social features are fairly limited and in what MMO are you limited to how much leveling you can do in a day? I’m sure the limits are there to prevent people from gaming the system by just leaving the music on streaming all day long and getting massive points and high levels but would rather see them add unlimited points earning for people who can prove they aren’t a bot (perhaps by checking with captcha or code to earn points for listened to songs). Might be a hassle music fans don’t want to go through, but wouldn’t cap the leveling and would be more MMO-ish. 

This limit cap is a bit deceptive as you can still earn points for a certain number of overall plays with the “listen up” achievement:

level 1 – 5 plays (you’ll get this one right away)
level 2 – 100 plays
level 3 – 1,000 plays
level 4 – 5,000 plays
level 5 – 25,000 plays

Also, you can do the standard social fare: add friends (you can add me here, if you like), share embedded songs as shown above or bother email your friends. You can also create your own playlists and earn points for people who listen to your ’station’ which I haven’t fully investigated how to do yet.

All in all, I like the creativity of TheSixtyOne but the subtitle of massively multiplayer (emphasis on ‘player’) is a bit deceptive. More like social music with a twist. Decent timing considering the music game rage, there I used the phrase. The music game rage is on.

Oh, and as for VTOR PAX 2008 coverage, expect to start reading more about what was seen there soon.

The first YouTube video shared to the service tagged ‘virtual reality’ was on November 14, 2005 by YouTube user menace:

You can have Time T generate TubeLine timelines from YouTube using the TubeLine online generator. I tried another dipity timeline search for ‘3D’ and this time chose a human generated timeline: the history of 3D hardware + software:

Interesting seeing Sillicon Graphics founded in 1982 and 3Dlabs in 1983. Who came first, ATI or nVidia? ATI in 1985, some 8 years before nVidia.

Creating your own timeline – the VTOR experiment

I decided to start working on a VTOR timeline. A resource that would track significant posts/events made to this site along with post number. I don’t think it should include every post, only posts where some notable event has happened to one of the VTOR authors who has shared it in a post and/or among the first time something has been discussed at VTOR.

This is a work in progress and I invite other readers and VTOR authors to help out if they want. Here’s what I have so far, which only takes into account the first 25 posts at VTOR:

As of this writing, this only takes into account the first 25 posts at VTOR back in 2006 when this blog was still hosted at Blogcharm. I added that Blogcharm.com ceased operations on January 1, 2008 as well. It needs to have topics added and there are like 5 or 6 more VTOR author first posts to add. What you see took a good hour or more to put together.

It’s kind of cool keeping track of our first experiences in virtual worlds / MMO as reported here at VTOR. Not sure how or if many others will find this interesting, but I did. Note to VTOR Authors: we’ll discuss this timeline at our next full meeting (the Friday after this one).

Happy timeline creation to you!

Google denies that it is beaten yet. Mark Young, a member of the Lively team, admits that it has a lot of problems: crashes, log-in difficulties and hard-to-read text. When asked what he hopes to tweak, he says: “Everything. Much of the user interface is not as complete or polished as planned in designs.” He promises a round of updates soon.

It was only last month that we wrote about Lively’s launch [VTOR search for "Lively"] and I’ll admit to only being back a few times since. Today before publishing this article I returned again to see if I’ve missed anything new. I’ve checked the box several times to “remember me on this computer” and yet every time I’ve returned on this computer all the information is blanked out and the Lively login doesn’t remember me:

Guessing this is what the Google Lively team member means by “log-in difficulties.” It’s ironic that yesterday VTOR author Evansmom was talking about login difficulties with Second Life. Darius and I were talking on Skype about technical problems that have plagued Second Life for as long as we can remember.

How long before Second Life can be labeled a flop?

Or maybe Second Life is already a flop in your book? I know a couple of the VTOR authors have moved on from Second Life, dismissing it as failing to hold their interests. I’m holding on — barely. Logging in a few times a week, hoping to get re-energized over the service. I think the only major thing holding my interest is my friend connections in world and waiting for the server side software to be made open source like the client.

Signs seem to be pointing to Second Life flopping already, as it continues a downward trend of losing paid accounts. Personally, I think Second Life missed its golden opportunity in 2007 to be the next big thing. What we’ve been seeing in 2008 is a slow, painful slide toward obscurity. The opensim integration stuff is interesting, but might not be enough.

When or if the last of my friends leaves and turns out the lights, I don’t see anything that will keep me there any more. Linden Lab can still make one big last push by making the server open source, as they’ve promised repeatedly to do, but if they don’t hurry it might be too late.

Do you consider Second Life a flop? Would love to hear your answer in the comments below and/or via trackback from your blog.

Vivaty wants to avoid being a flop, plans ability to be embedded in websites and blog

I wasn’t too excited that Vivaty was only available through AIM and Facebook and according to Vivaty CEO Keith McCurdy, within the next two months Vivaty will be available as an embed in websites and blogs like Lively allows. It’s ironic considering The Economist’s flop talk to see McCurdy tell Reuters that Lively has validated the virtual world in a browser model:

McCurdy said Google’s presence only validates Vivaty’s idea. “Before we launched, people asked: Why be in the browser?” he said. “After Google launched — or echo-launched — we get almost none of those questions.”

Clearly, flop status is a subjective thing.

They promise more than just Windows ports to old games:

Buying the game is just the beginning. With a purchase of any game at GOG.com you’ll also get some great additional materials for free, including game guides, walkthroughs, wallpapers and more. No joke.

I guess we’ll find out if GOG is a joke in September or if/when one of the VTOR authors is accepted into the GOG beta test. In the meantime, you can play a lot of old games (console and PC) on your PC with the monthly subscription service GameTap.

In 2006 I paid for a subscription to GameTap service. Even went out and bought a PS2-like controller for the PC that worked with the GameTap service. Didn’t really care much for the whole subscription part, but had some fun. You’ve probably seen the GameTap ads everywhere. They claime to have 1,037 games in their library as of this writing with 143 free games. A subscription to GameTap costs $9.95/month or $59.95/year.

You can also import your blog RSS feed headlines and some teaser text.

via Metro.co.uk:

The website was set up by Thor Olof Philogene (his real name) and other gaming friends. Mr Philogene, from Sweden, said: ‘When I was in Spain, I was involved in a few of these virtual worlds but when I moved back I realised I was going to lose contact with a lot of people.’

Are you ready to join your avatars across a bunch of virtual worlds? Seems like an ok idea, but I don’t know why one wouldn’t do this at their own vanity domain YOURNAME.COM or YOURNAME.me (although fellow author Darius told me he thought this was a silly idea). BTW, mostly unrelated but there’s a great song by Judas Priest from the album British Steel called United. It would be funny if someone made machinima with that song and a bunch of their avatars. United, United, United!

A number of people using the service FriendFeed are saying their experience with GoDaddy has resulted in failure, so maybe whomever snagged virtual.me will get denied.

I haven’t gotten that excited about nor used my walled for registering under any other TLD than .com, .net and .org. Must admit that aweso.me sounds kinds of interesting but multiple people have already claimed they have bought that through GoDaddy.

What kind of cool virtual world / gaming domain names can you think of that involve the .me. Or do you think that’s a good one for branding your virtual world identity?  Or is it, like I think of the vast majority of alternate TLDs besides the three mentioned above and country-specific domains like .ca and .uk, are just lining the pockets of domain registrars?