Show HN: QuestCompanions, temp labor for MMORPGs | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: QuestCompanions, temp labor for MMORPGs

questcompanions.com

48 pointsdaeken41 comments

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!

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.

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.

That's not the only EULA violation you need to watch out for. I can see someone paying people to be their own personal gank squad in a PVP MMO. Depending on how things play out that could easily get people banned etc.

I still like the idea.

Agreed, there are definitely other uses of this that could be bad for the community. We're keeping an eye on how this is used and making sure that we're a positive, not a negative. As we say in the terms of service:

> If you're not sure if something is acceptable or not, please contact support and ask us. At the end of the day, remember what Bill and Ted told us in their adventures: Be excellent to each other, and party on.

"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

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.

Not sure about the downvotes, this is not really a business. Connecting MMO players so they can play together, but having one person pay another?

What ever happened to playing games because they were fun?

Full disclosure: I never really understood the pay-someone-to-play-a-game-for-me-that-I-also-paid-for business. Are people so busy these days they don't even have time to play video games so they must pay other people to do this?

What ever happened to meeting up in chat rooms?

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.

"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.

At that the point the challenge is how to keep the 99% of players entertained. :)

GW2 is probably an attempt at that, but the problem with "work smarter" is the Internet.

I remember the early, early days of EverQuest. I had little directional notes and constantly referenced the map that came with the game. Then EQAtlast came out with beautiful hand-drawn maps and key NPCs. Then things like Illia's Bestiary, &c, continued to lower the bar of entry. MMOs have been democratized, and it makes "work smarter" much harder.

The closest you can probably get to "work smarter" is "work skilled". And there are gamers who pursue that route. For instance, Skunkworks was a guild that was 81st in the US to kill Heroic Lich King. This was on an 8 hour a week raid schedule (compared to 'hardcore' guilds that raided 2-3 times that long, in a week). So there's definitely skill there. But those are the exception rather than the norm.

You're caught up in how things work in most MMOs. I was thinking of things like, being able to script most anything. (Then being able to license the scripts to other users. This would be a "futuristic" space game.)

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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"

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.

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.

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?

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

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...

Showing examples of pricing is tough. The way it works is that the job poster says how much they're willing to pay, and then Companions bid down from there. We decided against influencing the pricing, outside of having a minimum price of 10 gold ($1 USD).

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?

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.

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.

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

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

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

Love the idea. How will you market it?

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.

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.")

Interesting. So you don't think that something like "Get help in World of Warcraft" or the like would convert well off of keywords like gold or powerleveling?

I believe that the conversions would be abysmal (on the order of ads for e.g. wedding venues on a search which clearly demonstrates immediate intent to consume pornography) and the ad network (Google, etc) will hate it.

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.

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.

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

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