DDO's Turbine Partners With Notorious SuperRewards 121
Zarrot writes "In the next step for their Free 2 Play model, Turbine Entertainment, publisher of Dungeon and Dragons: Online, Lord of the Rings: Online, and Asheron's Call, has partnered with notorious 'lead generation company' SuperRewards. Initial testing by forum users shows that just accessing the page without clicking on any offers sends the user's email and game login in clear text to SuperRewards. Reports of new spam and fresh malware infections on test systems are already being reported on the company's forums. Is the Zynga business model the future of Internet gaming?"
Re:The bottom line (Score:1, Interesting)
Things like this is why I keep a secondary email account solely for MMOs.
Re:Nope, WoW is (Score:5, Interesting)
Attempts to copy WoW or trying to copy WoW's success is almost certainly doomed. I remember the attempt to bring the by far most successful MMO of the time (Lineage) from Korea to the West and making it the most succesful one here has resulted in failure, for the same reasons. What worked then and there is not so likely to succeed in displacing the current market leaders here and now. That doesn't mean people should or will stop developing MMOs altogether, they can and will still be profitable to operate without beating WoW's subscription numbers. But if you are aiming to beat WoW, prepare for disappointment.
Developing and running an MMO is a very expensive and complex proposition, and the returns may not be all that good. Quick buck artists are not going to turn to MMOs even with the lure of WoW's $1 billion + revenue; they know they are not likely to make even a fraction of that with a lot of work. Emulating Zynga's model seems a much more fertile field, it is still new enough for early players to make a killing with far less effort, so I expect this business model to gain a foothold in the near future. I am sad to see a decent company like Turbine partnering with these scumbags, but I expect more of them may fall if the revenue is large enough.
The good news is that, at least here in the Netherlands and Europe, regulators are increasingly becoming wary of such scams. The most notorious and lucrative ones foisting expensive SMS subscriptions on unsuspecting kids are already being addressed effectively, and privacy watchdogs take a dim view of teasing information from unwary visitors. Consumers are becoming increasingly wary of these scams as well, and I expect this wariness to increase sharply as these scams become more prevalent, and more people get stung by them. The Zynga business model is one that will gain a foothold in the near future, but I expect it to be a short-lived success.
Re:Prefetching? (Score:5, Interesting)
Yup. I was (emphasis on was) a customer of Turbine's up until about 8 months ago or so. I've already filed a complaint with the Massechusetts Attorney General as Turbine operates out of Mass. and have directly contacted Turbine as well explaining this issue.
I'd suggest anyone else who was a customer of theirs do the same to get the message heard loud and clear. At this point, despite not having logged in for 8 months, who knows what this company will do with my information and that of other prior customers a year from now?
Re:Nope, WoW is (Score:4, Interesting)
I think mixing subscription play with micropayments is sort of double dipping that players won't appreciate.
It's not so much that as that it slowly erodes the actual gameplay, let alone the immersion. I play this game [nexustk.com], and ever since they've added an item shop, people are wandering around Ancient Korea with sunglasses, because they can charge for them (useless item, pure decoration) in the item shop. The idea was that this wouldn't affect gameplay, but of course, it creates games all its own -- there's now an official runway competition to decide whose avatar has the best style, which inevitably entails lots of item-shop items. They've also recently (and kind of inevitably) introduced things which directly affect gameplay, like extra storage for crafting items...
Now, the problem is, I don't know if this actually makes a difference in the business sense. I mean, as a player, I absolutely appreciate what you're doing, but I'm also going to keep playing Nexus because of all the stuff I have there, and the community I'm involved with -- basically, because of network effect and a strange sort of lock-in that all MMOs inherently have.
Re:Nope, WoW is (Score:3, Interesting)
I wonder if Brad McQuaid wakes up some days and kicks himself repeatedly.
All EQ had to do to be WoW was to be a teensy bit easier. But they fell in love with the 1% of hardcore players and repeatedly screwed over the 99% of customers who couldn't afford to play 14 hour chunks.
Don't get me wrong- I thought WoW was too easy when it started but that difficulty level was where the money was.
Gawd EQ was hard with corpse runs, losing ALL your gear, losing a week's play worth of EXP in an hour if things went badly, the "ubers" owning the top end of the game with some zones you might never see (I got one trip into mischief before it was redone), 3 week respawn cycles, weekday afternoon spawn times, FEAR. It was hard- it was cool if you had a certain attitude but over time it became clear unless you were retired, wealthy, or a student, you would have a hard time keeping up with the 50 hour a week play schedule.
Still- I saw everything up to just shy of Crystallos at which point my right hand blew out and I was done.
Re:Read below: Oh yeah, I like this idea (Score:3, Interesting)
This... does not make sense.
Re:Not necessarily (Score:4, Interesting)
Anedoctal and all that but interesting in light of what you said:
- I myself recently went back to WoW (having left almost 5 years ago because I was seriously pissed of at the direction things were taking back then) because in these days of requires-always-on-connection single player games, rootkit-like DRM and low-content-on-package-you-can-buy-the-rest-for-extra games, WoW offers the best money-per-content ratio.
The industry is complaining about WoW monopolising gamer's time and yet they're actually reducing the relative value of their games all the while MMORPGS kept getting bigger, less grindy, more casual player friendly, catering to a larger variety of tastes, and even cheaper.
For all the griefers, gold spammers and beggers, at this point in time, WoW + 2 Expansions + 6 months subscription is actually a beter value proposition per buck with regards to the amount of entertainment you get from it and content to explore than pretty much any other games in the market (except one or two other MMORPGs such as LOTRO).
This is the conclusion I came to about 2 months ago and why I gave WoW another try: in that time I've spent less money and got a lot more entertainment than I would have with any major Single Player game for the PC not from the bargain bin.
(in fact the only PC games other than MMORPGS that can compete with WoW are bargain bin oldies)