We all know that MMOs are not… well. If security software for nuclear power plants was created the same way that MMOs are developed, we’d all run around with 3 eyes by now.
Some bugs are weirder than others, though:
I wonder what kind of magic goggles my character got awarded to look right through that very (by MMO standards) demure garment.
Vacations (or, more generally, time away from your games) can do the strangest things with you. Before I went, I was totally engrossed in TSW and its story. Little did any other game pull me away from it. While I was on vacation, though, my mind wandered and arrived, of all games, at Rift. I’ve said many things about Rift before, but the bottom line is that I found it an enjoyable game, but a shoddy world. With factions gone away for all intents and purposes (cross-faction guilds, mail, etc.), the game piqued my interest again. I have no love for artificial (read: not decided by standings that can be influenced by the player after rolling a character), set-in-stone factions. Just the fact that a game would tear down its strict faction barriers is so laudable in my opinion, that the game in its entirety felt interesting to me again.
That left me with a hard decision. I could, of course, play a low-level alt, and indeed, on Friday night, I dabbled around a bit with a rogue. On the other hand, what I really wanted to play was my 43 mage. Especially with the expansion around the corner and no level 50 in my roster.
Trion, like always, took a page out of a competitor’s book and improved on it. (They’re a bit like the Japanese used to be, aren’t they? Rarely invent, but often copy and improve.) If you buy a year of subscription, you get the expansion for free. And as opposed to Blizzard, the expansion is less than two months away now. Also, as opposed to Blizzard, they point out to you that this is a one-year prepaid offer that does not automatically renew, since, in fact, it is not a subscription, technically. It’s like buying a year of prepaid game time. On the other hand, I did the math, and with the expansion at a mere 30 Euros, I can subscribe for 8 months out of 12 on a month-by-month basis and still come out ahead.
So I decided to take the safe path and subscribe for one month only. I figured, if I still enjoy the game two or three weeks from now and feel like I’ll stay, I can always pick up the offer then. If it’s still available then; I couldn’t find any information about how long the offer will run. Maybe until the expansion releases?
Thanks, but I’ll pass, at least for now.
One thing I noticed was that the server numbers have decreased since I last played. Like, a lot. Honestly, I can’t remember what the numbers were back when I was last playing, but I’m sure it was more than 12 (4 English, 4 German, 4 French). To boot, my server seemed quite empty. Now, I fancy emptiness in MMOs to a certain degree. I feel that most MMO worlds are woefully overpopulated, and it is much more in tune with the scenery if you only run into another player every once in a while. On the other hand, for leveling, especially in a game like Rift, there is a case to be made for many bodies around. Thankfully, server transfers are free, instant, and easy in Rift, so I went over to the most populated server, Icewatch.
Holy Event Batman. Now, it seems, I can’t play without running into “dynamic events”. I started playing on Sunday morning. My plan was to do some dungeons, run the daily allowance of instant adventures, then do some rifts. Instead, I did a rift event. Then another. Then I had a look at the current seasonal event. Then I did my instant adventures. By then, more rift events had shown up again. And before I knew what was happening to me, I had been in front of the screen for 9 hours, and hadn’t eaten more than a piece of chocolate in the meantime.
By 6, I was finally able to pry myself from the constant frenzy, not the least because I was feeling completely exhausted, sucked dry, and hungry. It was strange. The regular, global announcements of “something is happening in zone X! Come now to help out and collect rewards!” never stopped. “You can’t go now! There’s stuff happening!“, it insisted. No time to smell the flowers on the way, or you’ll be too late to the killing party. That’s the exhausting part: I can play for 9 hours, but I can’t play for 9 hours in a constant mob-hitting frenzy.
That is definitely more than I bargained for. I hope I will be able to resist the urge to finish every single event that shows up from now on, because it isn’t healthy. Not for me (at least a small break to rest your eyes and get some tea is always a good idea), and not for the game, either. The light that burns twice as bright burns for half as long, and I’d rather be burning my Rift oil steadily, instead of burning out in no time.Though if that should happen, at least I can say that I chose the right subscription option.
I haven’t played GW2, but I wonder whether its dynamic events would end up doing the same to me and my play time as Rift’s. From what I heard about them, that might be possible. Has anybody had the feeling that they feel dynamic events keep them playing for longer, keeping them from “cooling down” in between?
Looking at the other extreme, this feels to me as the antithesis to EVE: While there’s no time to rest and breathe in Rift because you are always urged to do something now and do it fast, in EVE, I lately had the feeling that there’s nothing to do at all: I log in, queue a new skill, sit in chat channels for half an hour (while I read blogs on the side), and then log off because nothing seems to be going on. Of course, there probably is stuff going on, but either in different time zones, or in smaller groups of people I’m not part of. And even in other groups (for example, when you read Wilhelm’s EVE posts), it seems that not doing anything is a big part of EVE.
Striking the right balance between boredom and overload in a game is hard. It’s also very dependent on the player. At the moment, I feel like Rift is doing too much and EVE is doing too little. But that might change. Today, it’s a holiday here, so I’ll check out both again. Let’s see how it’ll go today.
While I was on vacation, I passed another milestone in EVE skill points. Last time I looked at my skills, I had just passed the 15 million mark. Now, two months and 5 million skill points later, the distribution looks like this:
Spaceship Command 4,783,925 (*) Gunnery 3,443,574 (*) Engineering 2,924,345 Missile Launcher Operation 1,670,950 (*) Electronics 1,389,011 (*) Trade 1,338,235 Navigation 1,265,805 (*) Mechanics 1,211,517 (*) Drones 887,217 (*) Industry 690,204 Leadership 421,824 Science 225,749 (*) Social 198,435 Corporation Management 1,000 Total ~20,000,000
Asterisks denote categories that changed from last time. Of those, Missile Launcher Operation, Navigation, Drones, and Science only saw minimal changes. I can’t even remember what exactly it was I trained there. On the other hand, Spaceship Command, Gunnery, and Mechanics saw the largest increase since last time, just as I had predicted.
The longest train in this period was Gallente Cruisers V, which took most of my vacation. (The first week I was gone was for a conference, so I had net and could train some shorter skills during that time.) That it’s Gallente after all, and not Caldari, comes as a bit as a surprise to me. I’ve always liked the Caldari ships, and Tengus are simply awesome. On the other hand, I caught up on armor tanking and hybrid weapons recently, and the leader of my battle group in EVE University wants to experiment with setups that bear some similarity to TWEED gangs, so I decided to train Gallente before Caldari for this one.
That means I picked up skills to fly a couple more Tech2 ships. Together with Gallente Cruisers V, I trained up Heavy Assault Ships IV and Logistics IV, so I can now fly the Deimos, Ishtar, and Oneiros. I cannot fly Recons because I’m missing the CovOps prerequisites, nor can I fly the Phobos Heavy Interdictor.
I can also equip those more expensive ships properly, because since the last milestone, I picked up skills for T2 medium hybrid weapons, and a bunch of Gunnery support skills, as well as decent (if not great) armor tanking skills; enough to fit T2 armor tanks, a very very good idea for every ship armor-tanked anyway.
Looking at the skill level distribution:
Level 0: 1 Level 1: 15 Level 2: 24 Level 3: 37 Level 4: 48 Level 5: 29
Quite a spread. It follows the old adage of “everything worth training is worth training to level IV”, though. I just lose interest in a lot of skills early. When it comes to training skills, I go through two-phase cycles. Either I don’t know what to train at all, and just put in something long, or I have so many things I want to train as soon as possible that I stop training at level II or III as soon as the bare requirements are met. I guess I should round off some skills soon.
The skill at level 0 is a bit odd. It means I injected the skill, but then never trained it up at all. That rarely happens if I buy a skill before I head out somewhere where skill book supply is scarce, but want to finish training something else first. The skill in question is Nanite Operation. Whoops! Totally forgot about that one! That might be worth training, definitely!
All of this training, however, has not brought me closer to a Titan by even a single day. I am still 118 days away from the closest Titan (the Leviathan), of which 77 days are for training Advanced Spaceship Command and Capital Ships to V, and another 30 for Caldari Battleship V. Not that I have any intention of flying a titan anyway, but there. 2 months of training, and not a day shaved off.
I am in a bit of a slump again with EVE at the moment. Back when I was still a Sophomore, I had something to work towards. After becoming an EVE Uni graduate, my play time has gradually decreased, though. I did not play all that much in the month before I went on vacation, and I’m not even really sure what the ILN is up to these days. I hope I can find something fun to do, because I have lots of memories of just sitting around, waiting for anything to happen (like just some sort of fleet, even one that doesn’t do much), and nothing happening at all. In the last months, TSW has been released, LotRO has been calling out to me again, and RIFT’s one-year-plus-expansion-soon deal has rekindled my interest in the game. Competition has become more fierce again. Let’s see how EVE will hold up against that.
Thus ends the summer break. And, incidentally, summer, around here. On my last day of vacation, it was 32 degrees. At home, it’s barely above 12.
I went through the middle of Australia, saw a lot of nothing (and totally enjoyed it!), some kangaroos and wallabies (alive), a lot of kangaroos and wallabies (dead), didn’t get bitten by any spider, nor by any snake, nor eaten or stung by save what I think must’ve been some sort of harmless jellyfish. At least it only hurt for about 5 minutes, and I didn’t stop breathing.
I think this picture sums up (at least part of) my vacation quite well:
Now I have to update games. And get back into them. And see whether I can come up with something to write about them!
Oh, and do a lot of laundry.
Sorry for the recent lack of posts. It won’t get better in the near future though. I’ve spent most of the last days preparing a combined work trip plus vacation in Australia. For the next three weeks, there won’t be a lot of updates, if any. The programme will return to schedule in October.
Unless I got bitten by a venomous spider.
Or a snake.
Or stung by a fish.
Or a jellyfish.
Or eaten by a crocodile.
Keen notes that many MMOs these days focus on “unconventional gameplay”, and he names TSW’s investigation missions and GW2’s jumping puzzles as examples. In the comments, some people say that MMOs are returning to how they used to be and how they should be, while others point out the inevitable “but X did that, too”, which, in this case however, is an important note: it tells us that probably these things were never fully gone from games.
And indeed they weren’t. Jumping puzzles have always been in MMOs, they were never gone. I’m sure almost everybody at some point wondered whether they can climb a particular mountain, or house, and tried for a couple of minutes, and either succeeded, or gave up. More dedicated souls might have stretched the trying to hours. I know that back when Vanguard was releases, one of my favorite pastimes was climbing up mountains or towers, and just gazing at the amazing landscape. (Granted, that had as much to do with Vanguard’s at-the-time amazing graphics as it had with the game being released with buggy combat and insufficient content in the classic sense).
In that way, GW2’s jumping puzzles are simply another step on the way to more gamification. Of course, the term might not fit perfectly, because you could argue that jumping onto hills, trees, or houses is already a game, so it’s hard to define how to gamify it. But what GW2 does is apply gamification techniques, notably achievements, to broaden the appeal of one game aspect. It used to be that hunting vistas was an explorer’s game. Now, it will be also a thing for achievers to tick off their list. Google a list of where to go, how to jump, collect map, ignore view, go to next puzzle.
OK, that sounded a bit mean. I’m not opposed to this. I’m just torn. I said before that I think there is good and bad gamification. This one might be good, because it broadens the appeal of a part of the game. It might also be bad, because the original intent (get up the mountain, enjoy the view) is lost, and because more obsessive achievers might feel they have to complete an arduous task they don’t enjoy just to tick more items off their list.
TSW’s investigation missions are different, but similar. In contrast to jumping puzzles, they were probably almost completely gone from MMOs for some time. That doesn’t mean they never existed before. Anybody remember Mankrik’s wife? That was one of the more simple investigation quests you could think of, and its infamy shows two things: MMO players, or at least WoW players, weren’t big fans of that kind of game (cue “Where’s Mankrik’s wife?” Barrens chat), and in effect, it was s solitary experience, a kind of test balloon, only rarely used as a bit of spice in some other missions. The Onyxia attunement springs to mind, and it was… a divisive quest chain. Let’s keep it at that.
Mankrik’s quest was removed in Cataclysm without replacement or followup. I guess the developers didn’t see a place for it in a world of streamlined leveling and quest locations on maps.
To go one step further back in time, Everquest’s quests didn’t have exclamation mark indicators. They often enough didn’t send to you a specific location, instead requiring you to roam the world to find the next place to go to. In MUDs, a typical quest might start from an item you found, and a cryptic information that “you should find someone who knows more about this”. If you were lucky, you might be told that finding the blacksmith who forged it might be a good idea, which reduced the number of possible targets from “all people in the world” to “all blacksmiths in the world”. Or, even more obscure: no notification at all, but when you talked to people while in possession of an item, you might get additional conversation options. Keep in mind that back then, not only did there exist no wowhead, no thottbot, no allakhazam. It was actively frowned upon to “spoil” these kinds of stories and quests for others.
The temptation to spoil or be spoiled when it comes to riddles is larger these days than it used to be. While investigation missions in TSW are not repeatable (as opposed to almost all other missions, after shorter or longer cooldown timers), they give, as a compensation I assume, a large amount of XP. I heard (delightfully rarely, but once or twice) the notion that “they are a great source of XP, especially because they are fast to do with a walkthrough”. Gamification and obsessive achiever mindset, indeed. I think these people miss the point. Yes, these missions give a lot of XP, but not more than a couple of the repeatable, more conventional missions. In return, you lose out on one of the strongest points of the game. Bad tradeoff, if you ask me.
So, the whole thing is a double-edged sword in my eyes: it’s good if games return to a broader appeal and range of activities. On the other hand, I’m not sure why game companies think they need to attach additional rewards to them. Do they think players might otherwise skip them because they aren’t “worth it”? Are they too scared that players might rather stay in their box than move out of it?
I’m still playing The Secret World, still on a quite leisurely schedule. Most of that is due to the fact that I cannot commit to any more heavy schedule at the moment – I’m preparing for a business trip / vacation starting next week, and that leaves little time.
I still enjoy the game, to the point where I run every area twice before moving on. That’s also got to do with the fact that it allows me to invest points both for solo DPS as well as group healing. One thing I really like about the game’s plan is the regular updates, called issues. Just like a comic book, The Secret World gets an issue a month. When I was still collecting comics, the monthly schedule was my favorite release schedule. It allowed me to keep track of several different series without committing to the more expensive bi-weekly releases, which often were only temporary, anyway, until a series settled in on monthly cycles. Releases every other month, however, stretched the time in between a bit too much for my taste. For MMOs, a monthly update sounds like a very good deal, actually, an ambitious schedule, even compared to the master of continuous updates, Trion, and definitely compared to the more glacial speed of Blizzard.
Issue #1 was released on 31 July. It added half a dozen missions to the game. Now, for most MMOs “six new quests!” is probably not a very exciting deal. For TSW, that is very different, especially since all 6 missions were investigation missions, the crown jewels of TSW. There also were a couple of other things rolled into the patch, like hardmode versions of two dungeons, but… well, I can’t play them yet, and they’re just run-of-the-mill dungeons, I assume. Investigation missions is where it’s at, where a single one with its riddles can take you a night to solve.
I imagine this must be how the job cuts at Funcom must have looked like…
A monthly schedule put issue #2’s release on 31 August, or, if you commit to one day of the week, 28 August. That was also the date that was announced originally. But it seems that Funcom can’t keep up with this schedule:
As you may know, this week has been a challenging one for everyone at Funcom. We initiated a process of reducing costs after the launch of The Secret World and this has naturally affected the production schedule as we work on readjusting the team and our internal development processes. As such, we have had to give ourselves a little more time to wrap up Issue #2 and the new release date for this update is September 11th, 2012.
We appreciate your understanding and we apologize for the inconvenience. We are definitely eager to get this update out the door so that you guys can finally get your hands on that awesome rocket launcher! We will also continue to push out regular content like announced before. This small delay is merely due to the re-organization and assessment of processes that has been initiated. We are working hard to get back on track as soon as possible.
So the August issue won’t be released until mid-September. The cuts are getting a bit worrisome. Of course, they say that they want to get back on track, but, realistically speaking, that won’t happen, will it?
It’s sad that what I still think is far and away the best game released this year so far is struggling so hard.
One of the games that I always tend to go back to is Lord of the Ring Online. When it came out, it featured some of the most beautiful scenery even seen in an MMO. Even today, the style has a very enchanting charm. The textures might be more blurry than we’re used to, the mountains might have more hard edges, and all those things that improve over the year with more memory and computing power. But it is still a very convincingly-made world (The Shire is one of my favorite zones in any MMO ever), and like no other, it invites me to just travel around for the sake of traveling.
Plus, it’s Tolkien. Can’t argue against that.
The mechanics are a bit more of a mixed bag. Many people complain that the controls feels sluggish, and combat is slow. I never had problems with the sluggishness, but maybe that’s because of the class I played. I started in earnest, after dabbling around a bit, with a warden. Warden’s don’t have many skills that require cast times. In fact, they don’t have all that many skills to start with. Instead, they use three basic skills (“spear”, “shield”, and “fist”) in certain combinations, called gambits, and then release said gambits for special effects that work like special abilities do for other classes. It’s a pretty responsive system, for the most part, and it doesn’t require you to use too many keys at the same time.
It does require you, though, to remember what combination has what effect. I call it the “Tekken” effect. It’s not too bad though; you unlock new gambits slowly, one after the other, while leveling, so you have time to learn them. Also, there is a certain tendency that gambits that start with spear are DPS-focused, shields are defense-focused, and fist are threat-focused, which helps with memorizing. I was happily fighting my way up to the higher levels, and was in Moria at the time Turbine decided the class needed an overhaul.
Oh my. For starters, they strengthened the “stances” concept. Up to then, stances were just self-buffs to improve your DPS or tanking. These days, they also change the effects of your gambits. Also, they added a new stance that made all your spear attacks work as javelin attacks, to allow the warden to do some ranged damage. In effect, you end up with about 3 times as many abilities to memorize. So, as an example: “The Boot” (spear, shield) is an interrupt that also does some damage. It also has a stun component in “Recklessness” (melee DPS) stance, and roots the target in “Assailment” (ranged DPS) stance, in which the ability also changes name to the awkwardly clumsy “ranged boot”. Ranged boot? Oh, and in “Determination” (tanking) stance, it doesn’t add any form of crowd control, but instead adds a DoT. “Boar’s Rush” (spear, fist, spear, fist) also is a damage + CC ability, but in this case, melee DPS and tanking get the crowd control, while you get a DoT in ranged DPS stance. You still with me? If you need a handy reference chart, here you go:
You probably all had the feeling at some point in time: you return to a game, have a bewildered look at your ability bar, and realize that you have no idea how to play this class any more. And that even happens without sweeping changes while you were gone. When the changes went live, I logged in, bought my new abilities like the mentioned “ranged boot”, tried to figure out how to play, realized I didn’t have any idea what I was doing, and logged off. I decided I could always come back later to invest the couple of hours to get up to speed again. Only that never happened. I stopped playing because I felt the class had changed so much that it wasn’t the same any more. That doesn’t even mean that is actually the case: all those changes in one update just made me feel out of touch.
So, there you have it. Three games I don’t play, each for another reason. Incidentally, none of them are really about the core of the game. In one case, it’s the company’s business behavior (EQ2); in the other, parts of the fan base (GW2); and in the third, massive class changes made me lose track.
Which of those three will I play within the next year? I think LotRO has the best chances. I still love the game, and once I feel the itch to return, I’ll probably try and figure out how to play my warden again. It looks like the next expansion won’t bring any massive changes to wardens, so I could start anytime now without the fear that all will be obsolete again in two months.
And with that, I guess I can return to posts about games that I do play.
This is the second of what I expect to be three posts about three games that I’m not playing, each for another reason.
Reading blogs at the moment, it seems everybody is preparing for the next big event this year. It feels a bit like being a child at the start of the big summer holidays. Everybody’s packing to leave for vacation. For some reason, I stay at home, though. It turned out that Greenland is all the rage this year, and I don’t like shivering in June, so I’d rather stay here anyway, on my own. Collecting keys for all the houses, so I can water the plants, feed the fish, empty the mailboxes, et cetera, until they’ll all be back and show me long slide shows of glaciers, or whatever there is to see on Greenland.
The first time I heard of Guild Wars was shortly after I started playing WoW in 2005. Some guild mates on Ventrilo talked about this game they enjoyed on the side. When I asked what it was about, they told me it was awesome because it was “all instances” and “totally PvP-focused!”.
I don’t think I ever lost interest in a game faster. “All instances” and “all PvP” thenceforth were burned into my brain as description of Guild Wars, and it was neatly filed under “games you don’t care for and are not interested in”. And let me tell you, once I decided something is not for me, I have an impressive ability to ignore it. I literally never so much as heard from Guild Wars again until a couple of months ago, when I started reading blogs that talked about it, and a successor.
The first thing I was surprised about was that the game still existed. The second thing was that, supposedly, it had become much more PvE-focused. The problem was that still, nothing that I read made me really yearn for the game. I had a lot of other games I enjoyed at that time. And let’s face it, it’s not a UO or EQ: games that feel I need to have tried out just because of their name and influence, regardless of whether I think I’ll like them or not.
What I read about GW2 so far is the following: It will have Dynamic Events, just like Rift. Wasn’t a big fan of them there, either. Especially if you do them on your own because everybody else is in other areas. And I like somewhat empty areas, so it’s bound to happen to me in dynamic event games.
It will be the same “select monster, hit actions on your bar, loot” model that almost every other game has had in the last years. And don’t tell me about “dynamic dodging” and such, we’ve already had that couple of times, too (TERA and TSW are the ones just from this year that spring to mind). Now, being just like the others is not a fault. (I actually still like the target-and-use-abilities system.) It just means that you don’t set yourself apart in a positive way, either.
Finally, PvP. Yeah… well. I heard it’s mostly WvWvW. And the way I understood it, it will be a large battleground, WoW-style (as in AV 1.0, when battles could take days), capped at a certain number of people per side, to encourage “fair battles”.
I’ll let you in on a secret: I don’t like fair PvP. Actually, I don’t like PvP much at all, but if it happens, I like it with 5:1 odds, preferably more. Why? Simple. I suck at PvP. I don’t win 1vs1. It’s one of the things EVE does right: you rarely fight at even odds. You fight when you think you outnumber or outgun your enemy. And you fight back when you think you have people ready to tilt the odds in your favor. It feels a lot more natural to me. Maybe it’s because I don’t like fighting other people much to start with. I’m more of a cooperative person. Add to that the fact that PvP seems to bring out the worst in people. So if I fight, I don’t fight for fun, but to win and get it over with. And I don’t care whether it’s fair or not.
Also, there’s a certain… attitude to a very, VERY vocal minority among the soon-to-be GW2 players. I’ve seen rabid fanboyism before, but not at this scale: descending on every argument against their game. A game that, in their mind, will open the seventh seal, signal the second coming of Christ Almighty (minus those pesky riders), and deliver us all from the Evil that is every other game. But only for true believers, of course. If you dare question any of the dogmas, all you’ll get is a “shun the non-believer! shuuuuuuuun!“. If you’re lucky. If not, something like this happens. (From there on down, pretty much.)
Oh my. This is just… I’m at a loss for words. And all of this to a person who actually has preordered the game, so decided that it’s worth playing for him. The one thing we can all hope for is that those people will soon start playing their game, then promptly descend on the forums to spew all their hate towards the GW2 developers for developing what is only *gasp* a game! No game could seriously fulfill the inflated expectations by this point.
GW2 has one thing going for them: You buy the box, and from then on it’s F2P right out of the door. I will glance over the inevitable avalanche of posts about the game, starting from next week. If I like what I see there, I might pick it up later. That will have another huge advantage: the vast majority of the toxic fanboys that descend like locusts on blogs right now will have stopped playing by then. They’ll realize that, in the end GW2 is a game, not eternal salvation and deliverance from evil. It will probably make for a much better community and chat channels that you don’t have to leave immediately for fear of eye cancer, stomach ulcers, or fits of rage. I really feel for those who will have to wade through this in the coming weeks once the game goes live to enjoy the game they’re looking forward to. I hope all the nice bloggers will find some fun in the game, I really do! After all, it’s probably not a bad game. Just one that didn’t perk my interest when I heard of it, and then spoiled by the attitude of a minority that I think would make it impossible for me to enjoy the game at this point in time.
About 16 months ago, I started playing EQ2 on the side, while still raiding with my heavy progression guild in WoW. I think I started around the time we hit a lull, not being able to kill Sinestra despite many attempts, and slowly losing ground from our all-time top position of 800 worldwide, 400 worldwide-25, 400 European, 200 European-25, abouts; something we would never reach again. People who expected us to progress faster and faster and climb the ranking even higher got restless and annoyed, and in the end, I left mid-Firelands (and the guild collapsed in January after disappointing Heroic DS progression). By the time I started playing EQ2, I already felt slightly burned out and non-confident in my tanking abilities, so I rolled a swashbuckler. It was also the class name that appealed to me, and the fact that it was a free class choice in the F2P version of EQ2. I played a lot, only logging into WoW for raids, and when I left WoW completely, I focused on EQ2, and played LotRO on the side.
I had a lot of fun and liked the world. I started in the Greater Faydark, and although many people berate it, I thoroughly enjoyed the scenery. I progressed through lots of the older content, slowly and leisurely: Antonica, Nektulos Forest, Thundering Steppes, Zek. (not Rivervale though – if I never have to go back to that place, it’s still too early. *grumble*) There are lots of nice memories from that time:
I went to the Sinking Sands in my mid-40ies, and hit 50 there.
I liked the scenery so much that I stayed for another 10 levels, and then some.
At some point, I reached level 70, though I’m not sure where that screenshot was made.
I worked on my tradeskill and even became a level 90 armorer, the level cap at that time:
But at some point in winter, I stopped playing. I’m not even sure when exactly it happened, but I assume it must have been around the time I went to Japan; I guess I just never picked it up after I came back. For almost half a year now, I’ve had the itch to return, on and off. The reason I haven’t returned is not with the game or its mechanics (though, with EQ2 arguably having way too many similar, but different skills on longish cooldowns, it would probably be hard to get back into the groove). No, the reason solely lies with the company.
In February, out of the blue, SOE suddenly announced that they would split their use base: Soon(tm), they would hand over their EU customers to a shady German-based company mostly known for cheap browser-based games. There was a severe outcry over this: would complete servers move? Only players? Would they be divided and have to forcibly transfer to other servers? SOE used their typical information policy: they said nothing. Then kept silent a bit longer. At some point, they said they understood their customer’s apprehension (how nice), and they’d “work on a solution”. Supposedly, the forcible split is now off the table, and all that will happen is that European players will have to pay a different company. Pay more than before, in fact. For less service, because ProSiebenSat1 customer service is done by volunteers. Say what?
After half a year, the details are still in the air. Latest rumors are that no more than one account is allowed access per IP at any given time (meaning couples playing together or multiboxers would be out), and that standard procedure with ProSiebenSat1 is that you consent to remote access to your system for customer service. Seriously? I’m baffled. That’s absolutely out of the question. And that from a German company, all the while we here in Germany are still kinda protective of a lot of things privacy, or so I thought.
DCUO is somewhat of a test balloon. They had their transition last week… and it was a disaster of conflicting information, bad customer service, and bugs, as far as I can tell.
Why? Why? This is a game that I enjoyed and that I would actually try again. It is the first time the reason I’m not playing a game is not because I got tired of it, but because the companies behind the game are fucking up so hard that it is sucking all the fun out of the idea of going back. I’m too frightened by them to go back and try their game. It’s frustrating, it’s disheartening, it’s appalling.
