That Mox Pearl Is Bind On Pickup

Posted on August 3, 2007 by Scott Jennings| 11 Comments

Hey, there’s another MMO company besides Blizzard? Hold the phone!

SOE, in their inimitable scheduling style, also is holding a fan fair this week, and today John Smedley’s keynote lifted the veils on Legends of Norrath, a cross-game CCG. Zonk has the writeup.

Interesting concept, and like Smedley noted in the interview, you can scratch pretty much any MMO dev and find a varying degree of Magic: The Gathering player within somewhere, so it’s less a weird fit than you might think. (Oh, if you wanted to read about some other fan fair, WoW Insider has good coverage.)

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  • http://hgamer.blogspot.com Heartless_

    This is the sort of thing I’ve always wanted built into my MMORPGs, but as part of my monthly fee… not “buy virtual boosters” PLUS pay for your monthly sub. I like my monthly subscription payment model.

  • http://www.beafraid.com Hellfire

    After reading the Smedspeak it actually sounds neat. “You don’t have to buy anything if you don’t want to…”

    I’m sure that those who don’t will be at some disadvantage and there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth, but at least (it seems) like they’re approaching it from a good angle.

    Good luck, seems like a neat thing to try.

  • Squash Monster

    When I read your headline for this I thought there was going to be an actual Magic The Gathering MMO, which could be mind-bendingly awesome. This, on the other hand, is just kinda meh. There are other online CCG games out there, and mixing them like this is just silly bloat.

  • Jarnis

    “MN: Will players be able to trade?

    Smedley: No. Otherwise we’ll get into a situation where the gold sellers will get into this, and we’re going to stop that cold.”

    Only Smed and his cronies are able to cook up a CCG where you can’t trade cards.

    I mean his goals are admirable – hurt the goldsellers – but being unable to trade cards for a collectible card game is just plain odd. Kinda hampers the whole “collecting” idea. I’m sure Smed is happy to sell you as many booster packs that is needed for you to find that elusive rare card you happen to miss, but MTG and others like it actually became popular partly because of the speculative secondary market of the cards, and the fact that you don’t have to go rip up 100 more boosters and pray that missing rare shows up in one of them, overloading you with 4398739486798 unneeded duplicate cards.

    Which you, by the way, can’t use as trade fodder in this great contraption of SOE.

    Spectacular failure at the “Game Design skill check” roll, methinks…

    Idea of having rare cards as loot drops in the EQ games is not a bad idea to “mix” the games together – and hey, some might even be “Bind on Pickup” and untradeable, but the complete lack of tradability also makes these junk to those EQ players not interested in the CCG. Indirectly, they actually become more like promo items – “damn, another of those CCG cards dropped as loot. Should I get into that stuff… *plonks down $$$ for some boosters*”

    Sure, game companies are out to make money, but most are not quite as blatant about it as SOE.

  • http://www.adelecaelia.wordpress.com Adele

    EQ2 seems to always be improving!

  • Sweetmeat

    Actually I think this is a great idea and will end up being a cash cow for SOE if it’s any good at all. I’ll try it, and I’ll even buy some boosters to see if it’s worth it, and I had taken the stand that SOE would never see another dollar from me after they nerfed crafted gear in EQ2 a couple years ago. I won’t re-open my EQ2 account, but I’ll try it stand alone. As a method for increasing cash flow, I think it beats the hell out of the standard shcemes for RMT or having to deal with advertising in game.

    Honestly I would still be playing ( and buying ) Magic the Gathering if they hadn’t changed the card borders and made them so ugly. I bought one box of that first new border expansion, and haven’t ever been tempted to look at the game again.

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  • Skelanth

    It’s funny but choice of gaming platform is the biggest single determiner for me these days. WoW has a Mac client. Almost everything else doesn’t. Even if something else looked interesting, wouldn’t give up the Mac at this point. Have my old PC for web crawling but that’s about it…

  • http://www.grimwell.com Grimwell

    Only Smed and his cronies are able to cook up a CCG where you can’t trade cards.

    Not quite accurate, and a good source of confusion. If you cash in an item card for the item, you can’t trade it (the resulting item). You can trade the boosters between players (before you open them), but not the item you claim if/when you pull it from a booster.

    The idea is that someone who does not care to play the CCG at all who loots a booster can trade it for something he likes, and the people who want to go berserk on the CCG and don’t want to pay can trade to get said boosters.

  • Jarnis

    I really don’t care about the loot cards or their rewards. That’s just an added incentive for EQ/EQ2 players to buy boosters, doesn’t affect the CCG portion. A CCG player would call them irrelevant junk.

    MN: Are the booster packs going to be sellable via the in-game economy?

    Smedley: Actually no. One of the things we’re doing is making it so that you can’t sell any of these cards. That would be problematic for us. There would be some legal issues around that.

    MN: Will players be able to trade?

    Smedley: No. Otherwise we’ll get into a situation where the gold sellers will get into this, and we’re going to stop that cold.

    I thought the interview bit above implied very clearly that you can’t trade the “normal” cards you pull out of boosters/decks at all, and you can’t buy boosters with $$$ to sell in-game (in EQ/EQ2, or it would be a way of buying plat)? Did I misunderstand something?

    That feature is completely unique in the world of CCGs and breaks the whole main point of the collectibility. Let’s assume similar rarity distribution as in MTG (1 rare, 3 uncommon, 11 common cards in 15-card booster). Let’s assume third of the 375-card set is “rare” cards, or 125 rares, and majority are very useful in the CCG gameplay. Assuming there is one copy per card cap, it would already take take over 100 boosters in the perfect world to get one of each cards. In reality, if you can’t trade cards, it would take way more. I haven’t actually read the rules – if it says ‘four of any card per deck’, multiply that by four. Let’s just say “five hundred boosters” – I’m sure it’s bit on the low end. 2.99$ per booster. That cost ZERO cents to produce (and some irrelevantly low amount of cents to “maintain” on the servers). Smed must be already counting the piles of money…

    “Hardcore” CCG nuts always look at the total cost of obtaining all the possible game pieces so they can start working on the actual strategy and deck construction. That “total cost” WOTC put out with Magic: The Gathering, rotating sets in and out every year was the reason why I bowed out of (professional) MTG tournaments, and I guess that’s why I’m always looking at it when considering a new CCG fad. Everyone so far seems to copy WOTCs success very closely, making the games pretty damn expensive to play, usually over a thousand dollars to obtain “everything” for constructed play at least if you factor in an inevitable expansion or two. WOTC went even beyond that, saying you have to re-buy everything every year for the most popular (Type 2/Standard) format.

    Now add to that “no, you can’t trade cards – that would be a problem to us” and the whole thing is DOA. Period.

    And to make sure anyone can’t naysay “well, you don’t need X copies of every possible card to compete”. Yes you do. MTG already proved it. If you don’t get them, someone else will and he’ll then produce the uberdeck of doom and trashes everyone who doesn’t invest the same amount to get the same cards. Only when majority is playing the same deck (or when a new expansion or banlist/errata is issued) the metagame changes, and then it’s off to chase the next uberdeck of doom.

  • Jarnis

    As a followup – it looks like the original interview is written poorly, and causes confusion.

    So you *can* trade cards inside the CCG. Okay. Never mind my two earlier rants – they were based on bad info.