Playing offline

A MMORPG plays in a persistent world, that is there are things happening in that world while you are offline. And some of the things that happen while you are offline can affect you. You are basically "playing" the game offline, even if you only see the results of that the next time you are online again.

I just earned major amounts of gold in World of Warcraft while playing offline. In the Stratics preview of the tier 0.5 quests that I linked to recently there were listed the materials that you would need to do the first couple of steps of that quest series. These materials included stonescale oil and goblin rocket fuel. Now both of these used to be items with both low supply and low demand. Thus for me as armchair economist it was obvious that after the patch they would be items with low supply and *high* demand, making them hellishly expensive. So every day before the patch I searched the AH and bought all reasonably priced supplies of these items. I paid around 60 silver for goblin rocket fuel, or the components to make it, and I paid around 85 silver for stonescale eels, which can easily be transformed into the oil by my alchemist. Over two weeks I got about 100 goblin rocket fuels, and 60 stonescale oil.

The night before the patch I struck out to cash in: I put up the goblin rocket fuel for 2 gold, and the stonescale oil for 3 gold apiece, in both cases more than three times my investment. And then I just had to wait for the patch, and for people to log back into the game after the patch, eager to do the new quests. It didn't matter that I had to work late that day, I was "playing offline". And it worked! I came back to find my mail box full with letters of "your auction of ... sold", having earned several hundred gold pieces while offline. Based on the same thought I also had bought a few cheap tier 0 items for 20 gold on the AH, and am now selling them offline for 40 gold.

And selling or bidding in the AH is not the only offline activity in World of Warcraft. I am also earning xp with my level 35 shaman while offline, in the form of a xp rest bonus. And the same shaman was waiting offline for a mail from another of my characters, sending him some materials he needed to build an "Ultrasafe Transporter". I tried it out this morning, and it worked. 4 hours cooldown, but at least once per play session I can teleport to Gadgetzan now. With my hearthstone set to Undercity, I have a way to teleport to either continent now. Cooldowns by the way are another thing that you can as well wait for offline. For example transmuting essences has a cooldown of 24 hours, and making mooncloth one of 4 days.

Many games have offline activities. EQ2 initially forced you to stay online for selling items on the bazaar, which just led to lots of people being afk, increasing the server load. They then wisely changed to offline selling. Final Fantasy XI had, I remember faintly, a system where you were growing plants in your house, having to add ingredients once per day, and harvesting other items at the end. But the king of offline games is probably EVE Online (or should that be EVE Offline?), a game which has skills instead of levels, and the skills go up in real time, whether you are online or offline. To "level up", you only need to log on occasionally to choose the next skill to learn. And of course many of the market activities in EVE involve waiting offline for a buyer or seller.

Having offline activities makes good business sense for the MMORPG company. Somebody who is offline doesn't use much computing resources, and no bandwith at all. And as he can only see the result of his offline activity when coming back online, he is more eager to come back. So even if you don't have time for playing EVE due to real live priorities, you are likely to keep paying the game company, just log on for 5 minutes once a day, and keep on advancing your character. If there were no offline activities, you'd be more likely to cancel your account, and then you might or might not resubscribe later.