Show HN: QuestCompanions, temp labor for MMORPGs

by daeken • 14 years ago

48 41 14 years ago

daeken9• 14 years ago

QuestCompanions is a new startup launched by myself and some friends. The idea is that casual MMO players can pay to have hardcore players help them with quests, tough enemies, etc. The difference between this and everything else out there is that the Companions do not play for the player, but play with them. We think that makes all the difference in the world.

We're in private beta right now, but you can use this invite link to join: https://questcompanions.com/invite/accept?code=1.1335882868a...

Thanks in advance for your feedback!

ghostfish• 14 years ago

This is an awesome idea overall, but I think it goes without saying that you need to be very careful not to run afoul of an EULA. At what point does playing "with" the player become giving the player ingame items for real money? If you share quest rewards equally, you're probably OK, but what if the companion gives all of the gold rewards to the paying player? What if the companion runs them through a dungeon and gives them all the drops? At that point I think you're essentially selling the items for real money, which violates the EULAs. Tread carefully.

daeken9• 14 years ago

Totally, totally agreed. We explicitly disallow any use of QuestCompanions as a way of buying/selling virtual items or currency. We plan to police the site very heavily, and we will be reporting users to the game maintainers when necessary. The goal of the service is to be helpful to the users; allowing jobs like that will harm everyone involved.

Alex3917• 14 years ago

"The difference between this and everything else out there is that the Companions do not play for the player, but play with them."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girlfriend_experience

tehayj• 14 years ago

I see fail in your venture sorry. I played mmos for some time and never had problems to find some hardcore players to come and help me. I mean they get an ego boost out of helping noobs like you...

While I did buy some gold from some farmers I would not pay for this kind of service. If you are really lost just join a guild and one of your guild mates will help you.

JoachimSchipper• 14 years ago

It's a neat idea, but I'd expect the average MMORPG player to like your users/buyers only a little better than those buying gold ("I earned lvl80 through endless hours of tedious busywork, so you have to go through the same pain!"). In other words, even if it's not against the EULA now, Blizzard et al. will probably not be happy to see you.

stcredzero2• 14 years ago

"I earned lvl80 through endless hours of tedious busywork, so you have to go through the same pain!"

The fact that MMORPGs are full of people who think like this is one of the worst things about the current crop of MMORPGs. I think there's a long tail opportunity for MMORPGs where "Work smarter" is the prevailing ethos.

methoddk• 14 years ago

Love the idea! Vigilance will make it successful. Be careful, don't let Blizzard's draconian EULA get in the way.

elliottcarlson• 14 years ago

Excellent idea - as a casual gamer who doesn't have time to get sucked in to an MMO these days, but I still wish I could participate in them. Something like this would be quite useful.

JohnTitus3• 14 years ago

Love the idea. How will you market it?

daeken9• 14 years ago

We had great success running Facebook ads to get Companions into the private beta list back when we were still in early development. Now we need to focus on getting paying customers. To that end, we plan to run Google ads for keywords related to buying/selling gold and powerleveling services; while we have no intention of doing these things (in fact, they're very much against our ToS), we feel that customers looking for such services will have a nicer, safer, and more rewarding experience with our site. We also plan to go to the standard gaming bloggers/press when we feel we're at the right point, hopefully within the next month or two.

patio112• 14 years ago

That sort of bait&switch AdWords stuff rarely works well, unless the bait&switch is of the variety:

+ title: "Is Gold Selling A Scam?"

+ actual business: selling gold

You might consider doing media buys on outlets which refuse gold selling ads, since their ad rates are terrible (because they refuse the best way to monetize MMORPG traffic) and the audience is targeted fairly well. This is especially the case if you can get ones which are too obscure/niche to warrant attention from either the Chinese MMORPG publishers or the brand advertising teams at EA and whatnot. e.g. Curse Gaming currently shows a D3 ad placed directly by Blizzard so they'd be a poor choice. Penny Arcade also probably a poor choice. Popular MMORPG bloggers monetizing through Project Wonderful or something: probably a good choice.

(I'd try buying an ad through Project Wonderful, seeing if it works, than offering to just buy that ad slot directly and cut out the middleman. Bonus: they're probably cheap -- you could anchor it to something like "Hey I'll pay for your WoW subscription and buy you D3 when it comes out if you replace your ad block with this.")

JohnTitus3• 14 years ago

You should consider, if you haven't already, doing some SEO work (both onpage and off) to target related keywords. It's usually cheaper and more successful (in my experience) than just buying ads, plus the affects are more long term.

Keywords such as "world of warcraft" + "help, guide, tips, quest help" would be good targets. Start on keywords with lower monthly search #s to get started.

Gl, and please post an update in the future to let us know how it goes.

SkyMarshal• 14 years ago

Post it on reddit's various gaming and mmo subreddits too:

http://www.reddit.com/r/mmo

http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming

Reddit ads targeting those subreddits might also be effective.

kenrikm• 14 years ago

The idea has been around for a while however not at scale. Which brings up the topic of cost? I know it can be outsourced, however hopefully not this way: http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/05/26/chinese-prisoners-...

Kidding aside, If you can offer good quality/friendly companions I can see this being a hit. "it's like exec for WoW"

daeken9• 14 years ago

Honestly, the link you gave is part of the reason we're only allowing Companions within the US as it stands. In addition to making it easier on me (I'm currently going to be writing checks by hand for this -- gotta start somewhere), I feel that it will keep the quality high. Fewer language barriers, less 'farming', etc.

kelsokennedy• 14 years ago

This is a great idea, I've been waiting a long time to finally get to try it out!

saw-lau• 14 years ago

Some site feedback - the 'You have enlisted!' text that appears when you click 'Enlist' wasn't obvious to me. Might be better to go old-skool and redirect to a 'Thanks for enlisting!' page to make it clear that you have the details.

athst2• 14 years ago

Good idea, but I wish there was something we could see on the site before it was posted.

I think this could be an interesting service for the launch of Diablo 3 in a couple week. With the difficulty of Inferno mode in combination with the financial incentive of a real money auction house, hiring "mercenaries" to do quests could become a common thing.

daeken9• 14 years ago

What would you like to see?

And we're definitely considering Diablo 3 support. There are some interesting challenges, though, in terms of how you can start the game with a Companion; from what I know from playing the beta, I believe you'd have to add the Companion as a friend, right?

athst2• 14 years ago

Yeah I think you'd have to add them - but how else could it work otherwise?

JohnTitus3• 14 years ago

My first question, as a user, would be - "How much?" Maybe create a page for each game you support with examples of quests/costs/the level of "companions" available and their experience...

science_robot• 14 years ago

Cool idea. Reminds me of the novel _For The Win_ by Cory Doctorow.

NathanKP• 14 years ago

Which games will be supported? I would like to put in a vote that Dofus (http://dofus.com) be included. And will individuals be allowed to offer their mercenary services for free on the site, or do you plan to make money by taking a percentage of the money to be paid to the mercenary?

daeken9• 14 years ago

Right now we only support World of Warcraft, but support for others are coming soon, starting with Star Wars: The Old Republic. We're definitely considering other games for the near future, though.

We currently don't support free jobs, and we do take 30% of the money paid for jobs.

tonetheman• 14 years ago

Great idea, I registered! I can see using this for learning to deal with heroics.

gcb• 14 years ago

Slogan should be: trade you fake female account for some dignity and gold

lmkg• 14 years ago

I'm a little bit confused about the target audience. The target audience is supposedly "casual MMO players," but the idea of investing money for advancement in a game seems to me like a more hardcore-ish thing to do. I would expect the groups "casual" and "willing to spend more money on the game" to be largely disjoint.

It's possible my intuition is completely off. I know there is a market of aging, settled gamers in the "time is more valuable than money" category, but I thought it was a small population. Have you done research on the size of the potential market?

webjprgm• 14 years ago

I wonder how this compares to monetizing iOS apps with in-app purchases of game currency and/or items (or even Rovio's "Mighty Eagle"). There seems to be some market in games that would be called casual games (in my understanding, all iOS games are pretty much for the casual gamer) for those who get frustrated to pay real money for some advancement.

I personally don't like it, though, and would never pay extra money to skip playing the game since that seems counter productive to the purpose of a game. If the game isn't interesting enough to play, then I just play a different game. It's not like I don't have enough choices.

Lewisham• 14 years ago

Hi daeken, I'm a games researcher and perhaps too heavy of a game player.

While I largely agree with the people who have mentioned "why don't they just buy gold?", and I somewhat agree with your stance that there are people that won't do this, I can't help but wonder who you are serving and how you intend to do it.

* World of Warcraft currently runs 500+ servers. You'll need characters in very specific level ranges. A level 80 that needs to run with a level 20, even if completely unequipped, will still cakewalk the encounter. Assuming you need to be within say, 20 levels of any character, that means you need at least 4 characters per server, which means 2000 characters on tap, if you want full coverage.

* Even if you had those 2000 characters, they need to be available now. I would posit that most players who buy gold do so out of ego depletion (ie. people lose willpower over time banging their head against a certain quest, and eventually they just tip over the edge). If you're not there to provide the service straight away, either the ego will come back, they've already abandoned what they're doing, or they've found someone else to help.

* But probably the biggest issue, which tehayj notes, is that guilds already fill this purpose. Good guilds will often have people who will come and help if you just ask, and they're already people that are friends. And they're usually available in 15 minutes or less. They provide a better service than you can.

If guilds are providing a better service, it makes more sense to pivot and provide some sort of guild matching web site, although there's one of those already in-game in WoW.

jyost• 14 years ago

This is against many poplar MMO's EULA's. Specifically since World of Warcraft is the MMO with the largest player base you would get most of your users form there. The EULA for that game specifically prohibits setting up any sort of match making service. I would expect a C&D if this venture takes off.

gravitronic• 14 years ago

Maybe you are aware of this, but did you know that Quest is the name of one of those late-night "local girls waiting by the phone, call now!" advertisements?

example ad (borderline nsfw maybe): www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFEYKnEDnh0

Maybe you can use this to your benefit by filming a spoof commercial featuring WoW characters.

Show HN: QuestCompanions, temp labor for MMORPGs

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