I've Got My Glasses On My Face

Anyone remember Flyff? I wrote about it in June last year, when the seventeen-year old game was being re-launched as Flyff Universe. At the time, the U.K. was in the grip of a heatwave and my main reason for mentioning it was the attraction of being able to play it in a browser, thereby reducing the risk of my PC bursting into flames. 

The weather cooled off and I stopped playing. I haven't thought about the game since. Until this morning, when I received an email. No introductions or greetings, just this massive flyer.

Mmorpgs don't really let you forget about them any more. Not if they have your socials. They send you emails and tweets and probably ask your mother on Facebook how you're doing these days. (I really don't know how Facebook works.)

I used to be largely immune to this sort of passive-aggressive marketing. I used throwaway email addresses to sign up for games I was trying out and then never looked at those email addresses again. In recent years, though, as I've found myself returning to any number of old games, either out of curiosity, nostalgia or in the hope of finding something to post about, I've fallen into the habit of linking those dusty email addresses to the one I look at every day. 

I'm not sure what that does to my security levels but it certainly means I don't miss out on as many "Please come back! We really miss you!" campaigns and their associated freebies, handouts and outright bribes. 

It works, too. I can see why they all do it. I can't resist a freebie at the best of times and they make it seem so easy. Sometimes it even is.

Coming back to Flyff really could not have been any easier. All I had to do was find my old login details. The game runs in a browser so there was no downloading or updating. When I logged in, the first thing I noticed was a gift. It was right there on my hotbar, waiting for me.

I jumped to the conclusion that it was the welcome back for lapsed players because, as you can tell, I hadn't actually bothered to read the email in any detail. As I crop and edit the screenshots for this post, I realize it wasn't that at all. It was a "Global Launch Gift". I was under the impression the global launch had already happened back when I made an account last June but I'm happy to be corrected if it means more free stuff.

I wasn't a hundred percent sure what to do with the thing so I clicked it and it vanished. At that point I might have welcomed a little more information but I am a veteran of these giveaways, after all. I knew enough to look in my inventory to see if it had magically moved itself there. It had.

I opened it up to see what was inside. There was a lot of stuff. You can see it all listed out there, over to the right.   Most of it was the usual boosts and buffs, very welcome for anyone planing on taking the game seriously but not much more than inventory clutter to the casual visitor.  But there were two very interesting items at the head of the list that caught my eye right away; wings and glasses. 

What is it about glasses in mmorpgs? In real life, a set of frames balanced on the bridge of your nose rarely adds to a person's mystique but in games they're cool as hell. I love a good pair of glasses. As for wings... I don't think any more needs to be said.

I clicked on the Lucky Black Glasses Box and another window popped up. The game really seemed to be taking this thing seriously. At first sight the meaning of the list wasn't immediately clear. I glanced at it and didn't grasp the full implications. All the glasses are black. All the glasses are slatted. There are percentages that presumably represent your chance of winning each of them. 

And there are some numbers followed by an ellipsis, suggesting something has been left out or cut off. It was only after I'd hit the "Open" button and received my pair that I began to understand what it was.

The glasses I received were time-limitted to seven days use after first use. Those are the ones you have a 20% chance of receiving. It could have been worse. I could have had glasses for three days (30% chance) or just a single day (34%).

I guess I should be happy to get even a week's wear out of them but I'm not. I don't like time-limited items in mmorpgs. The whole concept seems mean-spirited. I realize it's a way to bring in some steady income in a F2P title that can't rely on monthly subscription income but I still find the whole thing annoying. 

I would never pay money for a loaner, even though logically it makes as much sense as paying a sub. Getting one for free is acceptable but still, somehow, disappointing.That said, they look great. And it's not even as though I'm going to be playing the game long enough for them to expire whie I'm using them. I probaly won't even log in again after today, at least not until they send me another email telling me I can get something else for free.

On the other hand, had I been one of the one-percenters who got a set of black slatted glasses for permanent use, I know I'd have been quite unreasonably smug about it, so I really have no moral high ground to stand on here. I'm just complaining for the sake of it, which is the prerogative of the blogger, is it not?

After the glasses I moved on to the wings. Those, I'm pleased to say, are yours to keep for as long as the game lasts. Which, given it's coming up to its eighteenth anniversary, could yet be a while.

They look pretty good, too. I'm happy with them, although it's a pity "you can't fly with them" as the description explains. Given that Flyff is literally a game built around flying - the very name is an acronym for Fly-For-Free - it does seem a bit churlish to be giving away dud wings.

Moan, moan, moan! That's all you do. And yes, there's some truth in that. Mostly, though, I'm just pleased to get stuff handed to me for doing nothing. Even if I'm never going to make much use of any of it.

That said, I do still have a vague ambition to get far enough into Flyff one day to be able to fly. It seems weird that it's not something you can do right from the start. I think I might have to look into it to see just how long it takes and how difficult is to get there.

For all its modernization as it morphs from plain old Flyff to Flyff Universe, with a revamp due some time very soon for yet another makeover to Flyff Universe Reborn  (Pre-register now if you want yet more freebies!), Flyff is a pretty traditional, old-school game. I found that out this morning as I was trotting through the trees looking for ambulating mushrooms to complete a quest.

 

I'm not talking so much here about the mechanics, although those would feel very familiar to any player newly arrived in a time machine from 2005, but the way players approach them. It's a good old while since I last received a throrough overbuffing from a passing stranger but it happened to me this morning within minutes. I remember it happening to me in Rose Online, another retro title of similar vintage last year, too.

It used to be the thing to do back in the early noughties. High level players would hang out in starter areas, blessing lesser levels with their powerful damage shields and regens. A good buffing could turn a newbie into an unstoppable juggernaut of destruction. Some people got so addicted to the feeling of power they wouldn't leave the village until they'd been buffed up to a diamond-hard glare.

It wasn't as simple as handing out a couple of buffs and moving on, either. There used to be all kinds of etiquette associated with the process. You could as easily get yelled at in tells as receive a grateful bow. The whole thing might be worth a post of its own, some day, if I can bring myself to write it.

I was generally in favor of the practice, although there were times when it could be disruptive or unwelcome, but the one thing I really didn't appreciate were the self-appointed guardian angels, who buffed you  then hung around to make sure you made good use of their largesse. As a new player, the last thing I wanted as I familiarised myself with my class was someone following five paces behind, watching every damn thing I did.

The person who buffed me this morning was one of those. In retrospect, my mistake was probably saying "Thanks!". I should have just stayed silent, as if I hadn't even noticed. At the very least I shouldn't have added that cheery exclamation mark. 

Thanks to the extremely overpowering buffage, I finished my quest in seconds, one-shotting everything. It was fun and I would have carried on but the person who'd buffed me, who now seemed to have me on auto-follow, ran behind me all the way to the questgiver as I went to do my hand-in and then stood around waiting to see what I was going to do next.

What I did was log out, which was exactly what I used to do back in the day when something like this happened. I'm all for a quick conversation, a friendly wave and a name to add to my friends list but if you want to avoid acquiring a stalker it's best to be ruthless and act decisively. Get it wrong and next thing you know you're changing servers. Or games.

It is, as they say, all part of life's rich pageant. Like a lot of annoying things, when they're not there you find yourself kind of wishing they were. I'd rather have to ghost an over-enthusiastic player or two, now and then, than move through a world filled with nothing but ghosts, players who never acknowledge your existence in any way at all.

As for the game itself, I imagine I'll be back, sometime. History suggests it. One day I might even learn to fly. Me and the pigs, both. Plus, I guess I'll have to log in again if I want those daily Welcome Back rewards. It would be plain rude to turn them down, wouldn't it?