May Shrink Or Leak While In Use

My inner hipster quirks an approving eyebrow every time I add another obscure mmorpg to my portfolio but there are certain caveats that come with choosing to play the games others ignore. Yesterday brought a couple more yellow flags.

I logged into Noah's Heart to a bittersweet welcome in the mail: five hundred diamonds, compensation for another server merge. I'd heard nothing ahead of time. From my perspective, the server where I play seemed as busy as ever. It came as a complete surprise to me.

It took a bit of searching before I could track down the details.

After this week’s maintenance, we’ll conduct server merge among the following servers:
AM Server: S1-Fairy Spring & S6-Elegy Tomb
EU Server: S1-Avant-Garde & S4-Greepersia
S8-Divine Valley & S14-Canan & S16-Star

The first server in the group is the main server and the rest servers will be merged into the first one.

I found the announcement on the game's Facebook page. Facebook's not a place I generally go for game news. I'm inured to having to check Discord to find out what's going on but I have my limits.

It would seem the game's down to three servers now: one in North America, one in Europe and one... somewhere else. Asia? South America? Mars?

 

I play on Fairy Spring, which probably explains why the game has always seemed well-populated to me. The server has been the host for at least one previous merger so I'm guessing it's always been the busiest, even more so as it keeps picking up refugees from all the others.

 

New content still coming in. That has to be a positive.

I was bullish about the game's prospects last time this happened but that was only a month ago. It's hard not to see this latest contraction as a warning. At the rate things are going, pencilling in a celebratory post for the game's first anniversary next summer probably wouldn't be the wisest plan.

 

I'm not too bothered. It feels as though I might be running out of steam with Noah's Heart, anyway. I'm still logging in every day but only for the time it takes to fulfill my guild obligations and rack up my 200 activity points. I bank my three tokens towards the next stage of the current Season then I log out.

 

I like to try to follow the narratives of these weird, sometimes incomprehensible storylines but the time-gating has increased to the stage where it now takes a full week to build up the points needed to move the story forward. It used to be three days. 

When I do get to open the next chapter, it rarely takes more than fifteen or twenty minutes to finish. Major set piece action segments and crafted cut scenes are things of the past. Now it's always a sequence of talking tableaux and a lot of silent movie style intertitles. The approach certainly has its charm but it doesn't occupy a great deal of time.

After more than twenty years, I get a feeling for when my interest in a game is begining to flag and I suspect that time may be approaching for Noah's Heart. Still, if it ends up being six months, that's a very strong run. I didn't play Chimeraland, a game that very arguably has a lot more going for it, for as long as that.

Of course, Chimeraland is another at-risk title, having suffered similar shrinkage to Noah's Heart. The bizarre, monster-smushing game does have a higher profile, at least with MassivelyOP, where several writers seem amused that it even exists, a sentiment I can readily appreciate, having played it. Whether the attention will help keep the servers up any longer than the already all-but-forgotten Noah's Heart, though, I have to have my doubts.

 

The other odd title I picked up recently, ROSE Online, has, as far as I can tell, just the one server, which at least means merges aren't likely to be an issue. It's also extremely busy as of now, which has to be a good sign.

A lot less re-assuring was the email I received yesterday. I won't quote the whole thing... or shall I? Yes, why not?

A data breach is never good news but props to Rednim for the detailed explanation. It looks concerning at first sight but if I'm reading it correctly, all it really amounts to is a small chance that someone might have been able to see an email address and an even smaller chance they'd also have had a shot at a few characters of the password.

I suppose if you were lucky enough to have a very short email address and lazy enough to have chosen a very short password, a curious prodder might have been able to log into your ROSE Online account but even then, unless you're one of those peculiarly shortsighted people who use the same email address and password for everything, the damage would be limited to loss of your progress and character in a free to play mmorpg still in the first week of early access. It's hardly the Brink' s Mat robbery.

 

I changed my password just to be on the safe side, although I never re-use passwords nor even follow any particular convention or format when creating them. I literally make up something random, stream-of-consciousness style, every time. 

As for email addresses, I'm not quite sure what the logic behind keeping them secret is in the first place. They exist so people can use them to contact each other, don't they? Or maybe that's archaic. 

Anyway, I make up almost as many email addresses as I do passwords, and most of them get used just once, to reply to the email that validates them. After that they just lie there, gathering virtual dust. 

Thinking about it, that might explain why the first I hear about things like server merges is when I log into the game. I might be getting dozens of  notifications I never see.

I do maintain ongoing access to the email adress I used for ROSE Online. It's one of several I use when creating accounts for games I don't expect to play for long. Only, as must be self-evident by now, I'm not the greatest predictor of my own behavior when it comes to new mmorpgs. I often end up bedding down for weeks or months in titles I expected to last no more than a session or two.

If there's one thing the whole free-to-play revolution has taught me it's that mmorpgs are like busses. If you miss one, there'll be another along in a minute. Although now I come to think about it, that's the kind of analogy only someone who doesn't use public transport would make.

Maybe what I mean is that mmorpgs are like pets. You love them while they're around but you always know they won't be with you forever. Hmm. No. That's not it. That's really bleak.

Okay, I don't have a neat moral to this tale I can wrap up in a tidy cliche. I guess the takeaway is that mmorpgs can be fragile so it doesn't pay to lean on them too heavily. Seriously, I can keep this up all day...

But I won't. I have games to play. Or I do while they last.