Wednesday, June 17, 2015

SWOTOR lives!

Remember that weird time in the 2000s when EA purchased the James Bond license without realising that the success of Goldeneye on the N64 had nothing to do with the license, and after the first few half-arsed James Bond games had failed to replicate the success of Rare's masterpiece, they made a James Bond game featuring a character with a gold-hued cybernetic eye, a game which they named Goldeneye-- because what else do you call a game featuring a character with a golden eye?

It should be noted that the in the movie Goldeneye (starring Pierce Brosnan as James Bond) upon which the N64 game was based, Goldeneye was the name of an orbital laser weapon.

A cynical person might deduce that EA wanted to make a game called Goldeneye first, and contrived the reasons later. This seems even more likely when you consider that in 2010 the same company produced yet another James Bond game called Goldeneye. This time not due to any golden eyes-- this was a "reimagining" of the famously successful 1997 N64 game based on the 1995 movie Goldeneye.

Which brings me back to the Knights in our Old Republic.

I can't tell whether I'm imagining it any more, but the SWOTOR marketing copy always seems so.... desperate.

I know it's difficult for a person to measure their own bias, but I really don't think I'm being biased here. I fucking love SWOTOR. I mean I don't spend hundreds of bucks on a game I only kind of enjoy. I want it to "succeed", whatever that means in the MMO space these days. Is that what SWOTOR is now? A mild success?

I guess it's just hard to see the game as successful while every launch event is being pushed like it's the last desperate hope in a futile struggle against oblivion.

A small detail that was lost on me until I went looking is that this expansion doesn't cost anything, it's just being added to the live game. Ironic that these guys (oh hey look it's EA again) are giving away the last thing that WoW players still have to pay handsomely for-- I can't be the only person who's noticed the steady upward creep in Blizzard's expansion pricing.

Friday, June 12, 2015

Waiting for the next patch

My subscription is down to hours remaining again. I might let it lapse until the next raid. My gold reserves are plenty healthy so I'm not worried about a sudden spike in the Token price, but it's been disappointing me for the past few weeks in its stubborn refusal to drop even below 22k at any of the times I checked.

I've been predicting since the beginning that the Token price will gradually decline to somewhere closer to 10k than 20k, a prediction that has so far been completely false. My judgement of the people who buy and sell Tokens might be way off, but I feel like it's also likely that Blizzard inflates the price beyond the point normal supply and demand would otherwise place it.

I should read around the WoW auction house blogs to see whether there's been much speculation or experimentation into the mechanics that control the actual Token price. I will begin my own speculation now.

I have to assume they started with an idea of how much gold they want to sell for $20. Maybe based on 3rd party gold price, maybe on player psychology and focus testing.

Then they would probably have some kind of price index that they can use to calculate inflation for each realm and adjust for it so the value of buying gold is more or less the same between realms.

Then maybe add a small variable that makes the price move by incidental amounts in step with actual supply and demand, to give players a sort-of-true impression that the price is affected by actual supply and demand.

This is what makes the most sense to me based on what I've read and observed. A price this steady is suspiciously suspicious.

I would really love to hear any competing theories though.