Developer Appreciation: The Lichess Story

Nowadays lichess is one of the most widely used and best loved chess sites in the world. Remarkably it was started a few years back as a hobby project by one young French developer, Thibault Duplessis. To this day it’s remained a totally free service, and is an open source project.

Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! And add a million other thank yous from the chess players around the world you have made your site a second home! ❤

—mtnmcallister, Reddit AMA

Initially Thibaut simply wanted to try out certain then new web technologies for fun, and decided to build an online chess game because he liked chess himself and thought it would be relatively simple to build. He was not looking to get any users at all, or to build a large site.

As the site grew in popularity, he continued to work on it as a hobby project, and paid all the running costs for the servers himself. He argued that as the site was his hobby, and he had a well-paid day job to pay for such hobbies among other things, there was no need for anyone else to contribute financially.

Being an open source project, people did of course join up to contribute in other ways, from programming, to translating the site into a large number of languages, to moderating the forums.

Eventually the site became so popular and the feature set so rich that the amount of work needed and the running costs for the servers were beyond what could be managed as a side project. At this point the community stepped in with donor funding, firstly for the servers, and later to pay Thibault a reasonable salary to enable him to work on the site full time.

Last I knew, he was backpacking the world while continuing to work on lichess, funded by a modest salary paid from donations.

I’m not doing office hours; instead I’m traveling around the world, working from everywhere there is an Internet connection.

Some days I will only check in to see if everything is going well, and if I’m not needed to fix an urgent bug, I’ll enjoy a day of hicking, diving, or traveling by bus to a new town.

More often, I’ll wake up early in some cheap hostel, check in with the awesome lichess team on slack, empty the lichess email box (about 50 mails a day, but I get help), and get to work. Fixing the bugs I wrote yesterday, then writing new bugs (a.k.a. features) for tomorrow. Titivating the servers. Reviewing and merging code from contributors. Reading reports and new ideas from the forum. Asking the moderation team and mobile app team how I can help. Taking breaks where I’ll play a few correspondence moves, or a couple blitz games, or check out reddit. Then back to code, and eventually, before I go to sleep, when lichess is the most quiet, I deploy the new fixes and bugs I wrote.

On a good day I can put in about 15h of work. Sometimes 10h, sometimes 5h. In any case I’m on duty 24h/24, 7 days a week; the team has my phone number and will call when something breaks.

TL;DR lichess takes as much work as I can or want to put in.

— Thibault Duplessis, Reddit AMA

If you are in interested in Thibault’s tale I can recommend his Reddit AMA, plus this episode of the Perpetual Chess Podcast and the following video:

Both are fascinating, inspiring and rather fun even if you haven’t the slightest knowledge about chess. They deal with topics that all developers and gamers can relate to, and offer interesting insights into matters such as:

• How to build and scale a site
• What makes a game site a success?
• Why open source?
• How to make a community work?
• How to handle cheats, trolls and those out to game the system

A big thank you to Thibault and the lichess team for making this wonderful site!

Buy-to-Support?

In the world of MMOs I often hear about people buying things “to support the game”. It might be a Collector’s Edition of an expansion, it might be cosmetic or fun items, or it might even be a subscription.

What I find interesting about Buy-to-Support (B2S) is that it’s very seldom that I hear such sentiments about any other kind of product. I’ve seen The Guardian newspaper asking people to subscribe in order to support it, but I’ve yet to hear people ever discussing how they pay a sub to newspapers or magazines for that reason. Seldom doesn’t mean never though, and there are other examples where B2S comes up, though not with anything like the frequency I hear about it around MMOs.

Personally I think like this with bookshops. I enjoy visiting them, and browsing in them, and like the fact that they exist. I also know that their continuing existence
is not something I can take for granted. So while I know I can generally get books cheaper on Amazon and the like, and for that matter would often be fine with a much cheaper Kindle Edition anyway, I do from time to time buy a physical book in a physical bookshop.

But I am honest enough with myself that I know that my “noble” B2S purchase is not quite as selfless and well-thought out as I tell myself. Imagine a Gollum/Smeagol creature, with one part going: “We wants it! We wants it! We wants it now!” and the other chiming in with, “We could get it much cheaper on Amazon… but we can support this nice bookshop, yesss.”

I assume it’s not a revelation to anyone nowadays that out behavior is generally not as rational as we’d like to think, and the reasons we give for our actions are oftentimes just rationalizations of our fairly primitive urges.

Marketers know this too, better than us poor saps that don’t have to think about these things for a living. Walk down the aisles of a mainstream supermarket, and take a look at how the own-brand “basic” products are packaged. Most of the time everything about them is designed to make you feel “This is the poor man’s version.” It’s actually designed to put most people off from buying it.

No one wants to feel cheap, and no one wants to appear cheap or poor to others. Plenty of people go for the “middle option” in their purchases just on that basis, and sometimes the most expensive option is created mainly for the purpose of making the middle option look attractive by comparison.

Conversely plenty of people want to feel special, or to buy stuff that is some kind of a status symbol and impresses others.

All in all, I suspect that when people say they’re buying something to support a game, that is only a small part of what drove their decision.

How best to support?

If you do really want to support a game, what is the best way to go about it? Voting with your money certainly seems like a good idea in principle. Fredelas had a nice take on this, possibly meant humorously…

If you're a fan of LOTRO and just want to support SSG with your money, the best thing you can do is buy LOTRO points and never spend them.

— Fredelas (@BrandywineFred) July 14, 2017

Any way in which you give money to a company is of course likely to help keep that company going. However where the money really ends up and what difference it makes can be rather hard to tell. If the company was in no danger of folding, the extra money may simply end up as more profits for its owners.

Perhaps it would be good to think about exactly what signal you want to send to the company. Whatever you buy is among other things a message to the company: “More like this please.” So buying store currency and spending it on precisely the things you most care about seems like a good idea.

If you have cash enough to spare, it might be most effective to buy codes and give them away, ideally to those who couldn’t afford to buy for themselves.

I don’t think our inner Gollums would be thrilled with this though!

“We wants shinies, and we wants them now!!! Gollum, gollum.”

LOTRO: Mixed feelings on Mordor

Mordor… we’re finally about to get there.

It’ll be a momentous occasion in the life of LOTRO, and something which at various times many of us doubted would ever happen. Not only was it a question of worrying if the game would last long enough to reach the Black Land, some of us wondered if we personally would make it to the end.

I myself am very much looking forward to seeing the conclusion of Tolkien’s story in the world of the game. Like with Frodo’s journey to Mount Doom and the downfall of Sauron, the rejoicing will be all the greater for the difficulties endured on the way. and the periods of despair lived through when the quest seemed utterly hopeless.

No wonder then that the announcement of the Mordor expansion led to a festive mood breaking out in the LOTRO community. However, recently matters have gotten a little more complicated.

To quote Ravanel:

Just like in 2012 and 2013, it looks like the player base will spend the last weeks before the release of a major expansion discussing its outrageous pricing rather than eagerly anticipating cool new content.

— Ravanel Griffon: LOTRO’s Mordor pre-order deals put in perspective

If you have not yet done so, please do read Rav’s excellent analysis of the Mordor pricing, and how it compares to previous LOTRO expansions and to the pricing in other MMOs. She has a useful comparison table showing the pricing for all editions of the most recent LOTRO expansions. If anything that might even be understating how high the Mordor prices are, since if I recall correctly previous expansions included a 1,000 or more Turbine Points in the bundle, which I count as worth $10 in value.

Suffice it to so say that many are feeling that the pricing is greedy, and the feelgood factor that’s been prevalent in the LOTRO community this year is in danger of being undermined.

Personally I’m not sure if “greed” is the best interpretation, it might just be economic reality. MMO development probably costs pretty much the same whether the game has half a million regular players, or five million. So smaller games are always likely to have to charge more and yet provide less in return for it.

However I very much agree with Rav that if this is the case SSG would benefit from being a lot more open about the situation. They had built up a lot of goodwill from the community and there are lots of dedicated Tolkien fans in the playerbase. Simply asking for people who can afford it to help support the game by subbing or buying the collectors edition would probably work better than pretending it’s great value.

Mordor and Me

Speaking for myself, at this point I’m not sure which edition I will buy, or if I will even buy Mordor at all now. SSG has picked an interesting moment to up the ante with their pricing. Maybe they’re thinking that this is the big climax, and people will be willing to pay whatever it takes.

My thinking is a bit different. I’m assuming that I will be able to see out the end of the Tolkien storyline without even buying the Mordor expansion. It’s the Epic Quest line, which will presumably still be free-to-play, and will most likely be over and done without us even setting foot inside Mordor.

Whether I stick around in LOTRO after that was always an open question for me. Mordor itself is likely to very gloomy, not only in story and atmosphere but literally, in actual light levels. Previous experiences in Angmar and Moria tell me that I’m likely to tire of that pretty quickly.

As it happens, I have already been skipping the grindy parts of LOTRO in recent regions by just doing the Epic Quests, and often doing them overlevel and overpowered as well. That way I get to enjoy the world and the story, while avoiding too much tedious grind.

What SSG needed to do with someone like me at this tricky point was to make it a no-brainer to carry on playing the game, and stroll on into Mordor without a second thought. Instead Mordor pricing has given me pause, and made me think “Maybe I’ll just wait for a sale”. And that might well turn into me taking a long break from LOTRO, and then never getting around to buying it and playing it at all.

But perhaps it’s only fitting for us to be approaching Mordor with hesitation and forebodings!

The Great Pay-to-Win Debate: Roundup & Commentary

When I was pretty young I happened to come across the word “Stylite” in the dictionary. Mind-bogglingly enough a stylite is a member of an early Christian sect which used to live on top of pillars. I’m afraid my teen self couldn’t stop laughing for quite some time, and even now the concept brings a chuckle.

What does all this have to do with MMOs, I hear you ask? Well… it goes to show that people find worth, meaning and virtue in some rather strange activities. Much as people find meaning and worth in some rather strange MMO activities¹, and consequently get excited about whether their exertions are devalued by the possibility of others by-passing them and reaching similar goals via the mere spending of money.

It is therefore in a spirit of religious tolerance and anthropological curiosity that we turn our minds to the great pay-to-win debate…

The Great Debate, Part 284

If you’ve been around the MMO blogosphere a while, you have seen this topic come around a number of times.

https://twitter.com/Liores/status/604441604141686785

The current flurry of posts seems to have been kicked off by a piece on Massively OP, The Soapbox: Can MMOs eradicate pay-to-win?. This is a sample…

a quick perusal of the ArcheAge forums invariably turns up posts by thirtysomething I’m-too-busy-to-play types admonishing their anti-P2W counterparts for daring to suggest that games should be played through instead of paid through.

From my perspective, paying for your gear or any sort of character advancement is an extremely short-sighted way of approaching MMORPGs. But I’m seeing it accepted more and more often in games, on forums, and in the blogosphere, and it boggles my mind to see just how many people are falling in line.

Personally I have a good deal of sympathy with the idea (not a new one, but repeated in that post) that if people are willing to pay good money to not have to play some part of your game, that’s a pretty sad indictment of that part of the game. As I’ve said before, too many games contain too many elements that don’t really deserve to be called play at all.

Of course, not everyone likes the same things…I guess it’s understandable that not everyone wants to take part in every aspect of an MMO, and maybe considerate of the game designers to not force that on people. This is something that MMO Gypsy makes much of in Today in P2W: Gamers are getting older and that’s okay!

… obviously there are many ways to find pleasure in games. I’ve played MMOs in the past just to dress up my characters and yes, buy exclusive clothes from an ingame store. Likewise, P2W-players do very much also play the games they invest in, duh – it’s not like they’re just paying money and then never spend any time on actual game play. They just play differently.

Sadly though, the kind of things that come up in the context of the pay-to-win discussion are typically boring grinds that pretty much no-one actually likes, and which nevertheless make up 80-90% of the time spent “playing” in MMOs.

Yes, if people mostly want to skip the crappy 80% of your game to get to the enjoyable 20%, this is not exactly a ringing endorsement of what a great game you made.

What is winning anyway?

Liores (who coined the “Part 284” line I used above) has a lot of interesting things to say in her post The Eternal Payment Model Debate: part 284. A notable theme is the question of what “winning” means in MMOs anyway…

MMOs don’t have a consistent win condition. It varies wildly from game to game, and from player to player. Perhaps you feel that you’ve won an MMO by completing the hardest group content, or maybe you’re an ArcheAge player and you “win” by being dominant in PvP.

I like collecting cosmetic items, and I evaluate my gaming success by getting the “best” hats and mounts and such.

A similar point is made in a somewhat different way by Tobold…

I think this is a case of everybody having a different win condition in a MMORPG, and many people wanting that *their* personal win condition doesn’t involve money.

This raises the question of why exactly do people care whether their own “win condition” involves money. There seem to be two separate aspects here…

1. No-one can “win” without paying. e.g. You can’t get the best cosmetic hat or the finest PVP gear without paying, because it’s only in the cash shop.

2. While you can “win” without paying, other people can get the same thing through purchases. e.g. The best gear drops in raids, but can also be bought.

Some people seem to object to (1) and I’m finding it hard to understand where they’re coming from. Maybe they think something that seems essential to them should be included with the sub or the box price or whatever, and it’s not fair to charge extra for it. Maybe they’re the type of people for whom the game doesn’t even really start until you’re geared up for endgame raiding.

Many more people seem to object to (2) though. Most of the Massively OP post is about skipping grind after all, and you do hear a lot of objections to insta-level items and suchlike. What is going on there? I don’t know for sure, but I can imagine various types of feelings that people might have…

• “It’s not fair that I had to work so hard for X, when someone else can just buy it”

• “My sense of achievement in getting X is ruined by the fact there’s an easy alternative way to get it”

• “The kudos that should be mine because of what I’ve achieved is undermined because other people have all the outward appearances of what I have earned without any real achievement on their part”

My guess is that a lot of this stuff is wrapped up with people’s self-image and the qualities that they value in themselves. Some people seem to see virtue and character in manfully doing the grind, as the Stylites saw virtue in living on top of a pillar.

Personally I thoroughly dislike excessive grinding, and I can’t see a lot to be proud about for having done it. But neither am I willing to pay big bucks to avoid it. Bad news game designers: I have a ton of other fun and interesting things I can do with my time instead of playing your game if those are going to be the only options you offer me.

---

1. Collecting hats? Hmm… ↩

Putting the “play” into “Free-to-play”

Kids play on the beach – photo by Idban Secandri (flickr)

It seems Nintendo’s CEO has been pondering the term “free-to-play” and thinks it would be better to use another phrase to describe the concept, especially as it applies to mobile games…

“I do not like to use the term ‘Free-to-play,'” Iwata said. “I have come to realize that there is a degree of insincerity to consumers with this terminology, since so-called ‘Free-to-play’ should be referred to more accurately as ‘Free-to-start.'”

— Fixing free-to-play’s image problem

Well I’m always pleased if a business wants to describe its products more honestly, but I think there are several problems with his particular idea. Firstly we already have a perfectly good term that means “free-to-start”. Such things are called “a trial”, or if you must underline the freeness of it, a “free trial”. Trialability is a good quality for any product to have, and free trials are usually a good idea whether we’re talking about test driving a car, trying a free weekend of an MMO, being able to level to 20 for free, or whatever.

However free trials don’t have the appeal of free-to-play, at least when that is a fair description of what is on offer, and not just a bait-and-switch tactic. Would I use Gmail or WordPress.com if they were truly free-to-start as opposed to genuinely free-to-use? Almost certainly not. Whenever I see anything that has a free trial, a free month or some such, my first question is always: “Well how much would it cost me if I were to really keep using this thing?” Often that simple info is made rather hard to find, and at that point my interest in the thing ends. Even when the info is clearly and fairly presented I’m usually not going to bother to take advantage of a free trial in most cases.

“Free-to-start” might be a more well-meaning and honest description of what a company has in mind than “free-to-play”, but that’s like a baker truthfully describing their offering as “stale bread”. Thanks for not trying to fool us, but we actually wanted a fresh and tasty loaf, not just for you to use the right terminology for what you’re selling.

Of course there is such a thing as bad free-to-play, and there are plenty of examples. However there are good examples also, and what’s good about them turns on it actually being fair to describe them as “free”, and it being fair to describe what you can actually do for free as “play”.

Whether something is free is relatively simple to determine. Lying about something that is not really free and calling it free-to-play is going to be found out pretty quickly. At best you’ll have bitter customers who resent how you conned them to get them hooked on your game. At worst you won’t have any customers anyway because people aren’t stupid and they can figure out the con before they ever download your game.

Whether what people get to do in the free part of your game is even really “play” is a big question however. Defining the essence of play is fascinating and important, but also difficult to do, though many have tried and come up with good ideas. (For example The Definition of Play.)

I’m not going go into any formal definitions, but there are certain qualities that to my mind are fundamental to something being play and it being fun. For example…

• You should be able to immerse yourself in it, get lost in the flow, lose all track of time while you’re doing it.

• You should experience a sense of freedom and possibility. There are many different things you could do, many ways to approach what’s in front of you, many ways to explore, many ways to express yourself.

• You should mostly be enjoying what you’re doing in the moment, doing it for it’s own sake, not doing it solely in order to attain some other goal or fulfill some obligation.

Well, when you consider such things, the problem with some F2P games is that they are sorely lacking in actual play. There are exceptions though, and they are the ones that when reviewers discuss them they use phrases like “a generous free-to-play model”.

Freemium works very well in many tech-based businesses, and it can work very well in games also. But it’s critical to freemium that the free service is satisfying in itself and provides core functionality and an experience that more than adequately meets the needs of most people who give it a try. In a game, that means people can have lots of fun with it, for free. If you’re not going to provide that, don’t bother calling it free at all.

Why I’m not playing LOTRO much

I’m not playing LOTRO very much at the moment, and a piece on LOTRO Players got me thinking about why that might be. Brax’s post is in the form of fanfic, an in-character letter, and I commented in kind…

It may be the cursed power of Sauron. The closer I get to his realm the wearier I feel and the more it seems my will to fight on is sapped. The loss of many of our brave friends and cheery kinfolk weighs heavily also. But I yet hope to press forward in this quest, little by little perhaps, resting as I must to gather my strength.

I hear rumors that the scattered forces of the Free Peoples will soon be rallied into several great armies. If this be true it may prove a great boon, and will raise my spirits much. With such combined forces we may hope to battle on and perhaps even live to see the downfall of Sauron. Or if that proves finally to be beyond our resources, at least to make an end worthy of song.

On reflection I think the reasons why I’m not playing LOTRO so much these days are more varied and complicated than what is implied by that comment, though what I said there is an important part of the overall picture too.

I’m not playing MMOs, I’m doing other stuff!

One thing to start with is that unlike some people it’s not that I’ve switched to playing some other MMO. I’m spending a lot less time playing MMOs overall, and since LOTRO was my main game, it’s most noticeable there.

Reading books and watching boxsets has been taking up a lot of my leisure time since Christmas. I’ve also played a fair bit of chess, and I’ve dabbled in a MOOC or two as well. I hadn’t seen any of The Walking Dead or Downton Abbey before Christmas, and now I’m totally caught up with both series. That’s probably well over a hundred hours of spare time accounted for right there! And there were a few other shows where I caught up a season, or at least watched a few episodes.

Streaming video is a newish thing for me, and has that extra excitement that comes with finding a whole new toy box to explore. It was about a year ago I got a Chromecast and that made the whole streaming thing much more attractive. Over time I’ve discovered more shows and more streaming services.

The hobby lifecycle

Hobbies and interests tend to have a lifecycle with me. I guess it’s not unlike the lifecycle of a relationship. There might be an initial checking-it-out phase, followed by a falling-madly-in-love phase, which leads to wanting to spend as much time as possible with the totally amazing beloved. And that can last for quite some time, but in due course it goes to a more mellow phase where I retain much love and affection, yet don’t want to devote my whole existence to that one thing.

MMOs – and LOTRO specifically – were that new love for me three and a bit years ago. I still like them now, but not in quite the same way as in the first year or two, where the game was the activity of choice for many hours on most days. Meanwhile the new hotness is The Walking Dead, Agents of SHIELD and suchlike. But diving into great boxsets will have its lifecycle too I’m sure, and maybe then I’ll return to more intensive MMOing.

It’s not just me, it’s you too…

All of the above are reasons why I probably would have been playing less now regardless of whatever had happened with the game itself. However it’s not all just about me and my hobby lifecycle, a good deal of the change in my playing habits has to do with LOTRO itself.

People are very important of course, and the banter and friendship was a big part of what kept me coming back regularly. But friends and kinnies have their own hobby lifecycles, or they have changes in their real world circumstances etc. So over time there are less and less of the familiar faces around, and they’re around less often. What’s more some of the people that still do play regularly have done their own DIY server merger by re-rolling onto more populated servers. Now I’d join them, but the very fact that I’m not playing so much now makes it difficult to re-roll and level-up all over again. If LOTRO had something like the technology in other MMOs where I could hop to another server easily, it would be a big help to me.

The proliferation of changes to game mechanics also don’t help. I still haven’t properly figured out all the skill changes that came in with Helm’s Deep, and I’m largely clueless about essences. Add in lots of small changes throughout the game, like changes to housing storage, making various crafting materials obsolete etc, and it’s pretty hard to really get back in the game and feel totally at home without devoting masses of time to working out the differences. After Helm’s Deep I rapidly went from feeling proficient with quite a few classes to not knowing what the heck half the skills do exactly on most of them.

Then there’s the grindiness that can be excessive. I’m not sure that LOTRO is really that much worse than other MMOs in this regard, but I guess the more familiar you become with an MMO, the more the repetitiveness of combat may weigh on you. The worst case is when you have to kill many mobs, the kills are time consuming, and yet there is no stimulating challenge in the fights. Too many quests seem to land me in this scenario.

Monetization Catch-22

There are things Turbine could do to get someone like me back and more active in the game. Easy and free server transfer is one thing I already mentioned. Another would be ways to insta-level my alts, or otherwise bypass unwelcome grind.

However to the extent that LOTRO has anything like that, it’s all by spending rather big bucks in the cash shop. $50 for the Gift of the Valar to get half-way to the level cap for instance! Or I could get rest XP by subscribing, and buy various XP and deed boosts to cut the grind some.

The problem is that those things might seem worthwhile to someone who was already heavily playing the game, but at a point where I’m not playing much, spending that kind of money seems ridiculous to me. It’s a Catch-22 situation. You have to spend money to maybe make the game as fun as it used to be again, but if you’re not having that fun already, why would you spend lots more money on the game?

We may yet, Mr Frodo

Let’s not overdo the gloom here! I still have good friends who play plenty of LOTRO, and it wouldn’t be surprising if I got back into it with them sooner or later. I’ve had quite long breaks before, and gone back with relish afterwards. It seems that Turbine are working on plans for server mergers, and the option of a free server transfer could be a real blessing. There’s still plenty of good content that I’d enjoy doing, and if it were easier to get caught up and play with the people I’d like to hang out with, I’d be glad to do just that.

I have plenty of love for Tolkien and LOTRO, and one way or another I’m likely to be around to see the end of all things, whenever and wherever that comes.

Buy to Not Play

I’m thinking it’s time to consider one of the most popular and successful business models there is for games these days, Buy-to-Not-Play, aka B2NP. The thought’s been brought on because yesterday I finally bought Guild Wars 2, despite knowing that in all likelihood I won’t play it, or at least not to any great extent. That follows not long after I bought a few things in the Steam Winter Sale, also knowing full well that the chances of me getting around to actually playing them were rather slim.

Of course that is the advanced level of B2NP, where you buy something actually recognizing that it’s a B2NP title for you. The basic level, which I indulged in for a couple of years before attaining my present advanced status involves buying things while telling yourself that you most certainly will play the heck of out them, and then not playing them.

The basic level of B2NP leads first to a period of exhilaration and excitement during which you are thrilled with all the great games you bought, followed by a period of feeling harried and anxious as you attempt to make progress with some of them, then a period of regret, disillusionment and upset as you recognize that they were in fact B2NP purchases. Finally perhaps you come to an acceptance of the situation, and move on leaving regret and self-recrimination behind. It’s like the stages of grief I suppose: grief for your departed time and money, and the embarrassing stupidity that caused it.

The advanced level of B2NP is a much mellower affair by comparison. You can congratulate yourself on your wisdom in recognizing the B2NP nature of your purchases from the outset, and for making sure that you only paid the price appropriate to B2NP. (Generally 75% or more off the regular price is a pretty solid B2NP deal in my book.) You can then gaze fondly at your B2NP collection, and think: “Well, who knows maybe I will even play some of them someday! Just look at all the things I have ready against that possible post-apocalyptic future in which it’s impossible to acquire any more games!”

There is maybe a slight drawback in that at the advanced level you may have understandable concerns about the sanity of your behavior. But fear not, it is easy to come up with excellent economic and psychological arguments to explain why you aren’t actually insane, albeit you might just be a teensy bit less rational that you would like to think or than would be financially optimal. But that is ok, because after all you’re not a Vulcan, and so you can wear small departures from rationality as a proud badge of your humanity. Which as Star Trek TOS repeatedly proved is much better than merely being logical.

Subs and Me

Free-to-play (F2P) versus subscriptions seems to be a perennial topic of discussion in the gaming blogosphere, generating a lot more heat than light usually. I’ve thought of writing about it before, and from many angles. Perhaps someday I’ll do a whole series on MMO pricing models, or do a piece trying to understand the psychology of how and why it gets the community so excited and makes it so divided. Given my posting frequency, perhaps most likely I won’t get round to either. Today, however, inspired by Braxwolf’s post No Time for Subs I’d like to talk about the topic from a purely personal point-of-view.

Subs aren’t for me

Subs aren’t for me, usually. The reasons why they’re not are to do with my own situation and my own personal quirks, and may or may not apply to anyone else. But thinking about those reasons might help us understand why some people love subs, some hate them, and both may have very valid reasons for feeling the way they do.

The future ain’t what it used to be

First thing to say is that I am talking about right now, not always. Right now, at this point in my life, I am rather cautious about subscribing to anything at all. Games, magazines, online services, club memberships… you name it, I’m not keen on subscribing to it! It was not ever thus, and maybe it won’t always be so.

One thing at play here is disposable income. I’ve had periods where I worked in large organizations, getting a large paycheck like clockwork every month, and having every expectation that nothing would change on that front in the foreseeable future. And my income was far in excess of my commitments and what paying for the necessities of life would entail, so basically $15 a month was almost nothing to me. Currently that’s not the case, money is a lot tighter, and the future is a good deal more unpredictable.

I am very bad at canceling

While the future might be less predictable, I’ve come to see that certain things about me are pretty predictable. For example I am very bad at canceling subscriptions to things that I no longer use. For a while I won’t cotton on to the fact that I no longer use that thing. And then I will tell myself I will use it more in future. And after a while of that I will realize I still don’t use it much, and decide maybe I should cancel the sub. Sometime after that I will get around to actually canceling. Maybe it’s just me and my foibles, but then again the same thing might apply to a lot of people. Behavioral Economics claims that people have a so-called Endowment Effect, which means they value stuff they own much more than they’d value it if they didn’t already own it. (It appears even to apply to some extreme cases like people with brain damage that can’t remember which of a set of Monet prints they were given, but still like the one they own now over one they preferred earlier but were not given.) Whatever the reason it is harder to let go of a sub to something that I don’t use any more and certainly would not sign up for now that it rationally should be. So I often end up paying for stuff for six months or more after I stopped getting any benefit from it.

… and my interests are changeable

Another thing that is predictable about me is that there is a good chance that I will lose interest in the thing that has aroused my current enthusiasm. I might be loving a game, imagining I will be playing it for years, and find that after three months of being really into it, my interest level drops off a cliff. Possible not to zero – that also is unlike me. But certainly to a level where paying $15 a month doesn’t make sense. (But, see preceding paragraph, with a high risk that if I had a $15 sub in place I’d end up down $90 or more before I got around to actually canceling.)

For all of the above reasons, I’m not inclined to sign up for any things that nibble bits out of my bank balance without my conscious and intentional say so. I will pay a bit extra to avoid those automatic monthly nibbles and retain control over payments.

My redeeming features

Meanwhile, I do have some redeeming qualities. While I may be terminally incapable of canceling subs promptly, I am strangely disciplined about not making impulse purchases. Sometimes you hear a fear that people have about cash shops and micro-transactions, that they’ll be nickel-and-dimed to death as all those small purchases add up to some monstrous total bill. They know themselves best, and for them that may be a big danger.

For me there is no such danger, and in fact MMO “cash” shops could not be better designed to prevent me from falling into that trap. Because they are not really cash shops at all. There is basically only one thing you can buy with actual real world money there, and that is the store currency, such as Turbine Points. There is nothing easier for me than to say “I am going to limit my cash shop spending to $X”, then wait for a sale on Turbine Points and buy $X worth, then use those points as my hard budget. Ideally I don’t even tell the MMO company my credit card info, but do one time Paypal transactions. Without the company having any billing authority it is extremely hard to impulsively run up bills.

Just me

Now all this is just me. It’s quite possible that someone could be the very opposite of me. They might have plenty of cash to spare, play all their games obsessively for long periods, be great at canceling subs they don’t need any more, and yet be lousy at controlling impulse buying. I can see why such a person might think subs are the only way to go, and regard cash shops as a devious trap designed to part them with all their money.

For me, I will consider a sub, but I will consider it very very carefully, and chances are high I will probably decide against it. Only if the thing is completely mind-blowing and way beyond any other alternative available to me am I likely to sub.