You Can't Take It With You

Sorting my Steam games by time played today, I was surprised to find that at 78.8 hours, Nightingale still hasn't broken into the top five, although not as surprised as I was to see what it will have to pass to get there. Sitting just ahead at #5 on the list with 81.2 hours played comes Bless Unleashed. How did that happen?

It's always possible I left BU running while I was long-term AFK of course, something I have been prone to do with games on occasion, but it's probably just that compared to any other genre, MMORPGs take up a phenomanal amount of time to play in even the most casual fashion. The only reason there are any other kinds of games in the first couple of rows of my Steam list is that I hardly play any MMORPGs through Valve's supposedly universal platform.

Most people don't, I would guess. A lot of the biggest, best-known, most successful, long-running names in the genre predate Steam entirely. Their players, active or lapsed, already have standalone installations, accounts and launchers provided either directly from the games themselves or via bespoke portals mandated by the developer.

For a long time, even after Steam took over many PC gamers' hard drives, almost all new MMORPGs came with their own launchers. It's only in very recent years that MMO developers have chosen to offer their games primarily or exclusively on Steam.

It has become something of a routine for older games to add themselves belatedely, usually with a flourish of publicity, and it does sometimes result in a surge of interest, bringing in new players for a while. When you look at the numbers playing through the platform a little later, though, it doesn't always seem as though many of those new players stayed for long.

Even less likely is the prospect of a significant proportion of the installed base for an MMORPG moving to Steam. I could play a lot of my MMORPG rotation there - EverQuest, EverQuest II, Lord of the Rings Online, Guild Wars 2 - but I don't. In some cases I'd have to begin again from scratch, an obvious non-starter, but even if the Steam version of the game can let me play my regular characters I'd still have to go through all the rigmarole of linking the accounts. Why would I bother?

Clearly most people don't. Taking the EQ titles as an example, Darkpaw would have been out of business years ago if the real average concurrency of the two games combined came to barely 350. LotRO on its own almost doubles that and GW2 makes it into the low thousands, which might just about be viable for a small indie developer but not for a sub-division of NCSoft with several hundred developers to pay.

Daybreak don't like to tell us exactly how many people play their games but you certainly don't need more than three dozen servers to accomodate three hundred and fifty people or even a couple of thousand, if we use the old 5x peak concurrency figure that used to be the top-end estimate for total participation in online games. The Steam numbers for all MMORPGs that aren't also Steam exclusives like New World and Lost Ark are more than just unrepresentative, they're downright misleading.

The disparity is so extreme it does make me wonder whether it's really worth an older MMORPG tooling itself up for Steam membership at all. Yes, there's that initial burst of interest and the concommitant flurry of new players but once the initial excitement fades you're left with a permanent red flag for anyone looking to answer that perennial gamer's question: "Is this game dead?"

If you looked at Steam for any of the titles I've mentioned, the answer would be "As a Dodo". GW2, sometimes reckoned to be one of the front-runners among Western MMORPGs, doesn't even appear on the list until you've clicked through ten screens of results. Then again, it could be worse. Rift, languishing at #1534 on the chart as I write, is so many clicks down in the hole I lost count. 

Rift, however, is the reason I was looking at my time played in Steam games in the first place. I'd seen the recent announcement about server merges and I thought I'd get ahead of the rush by moving my Faeblight characters before Gamigo put them wherever they were going to put them if I did nothing about it.

Given the lack of attention anyone - developers, publishers or even players - has shown Rift since even before Trion shut up shop more than five years ago, it's perhaps more of a surprise to learn the game still has enough servers to need merging rather than that it's actually happening. Server merges, in any case, are an inevitable phase of the life-cycle of any MMORPG and Rift was designed with an unusual degree of flexibility in that regard. Players have always been able to swap servers almost instantly with no charge. I've moved a few times already.

Consequently, I wasn't expecting much trouble when I logged in last night to move my seven Faeblight characters to either Greybriar or Wolfsbane or possibly some to one and some to the other, since I already have characters on both and I'm not sure how the processes handles overspill when you hit your allowed character-per-server buffer. That potential snag I may have thought of; I had not, however, reckoned with another: the guild bank.

It seems that when Trion created the transfer system, they allowed for the smooth  movement of just about everything except the contents of the Guild Vault. I imagine that was intentional to avoid customer service issues when someone tried to jump ship and take the whole lot with them without telling anyone. Rift has one of those very annoying automated systems for handing Guild leadership to someone else if you don't log in often enough so I can see how it could happen.

Moving the guild itself is easy enough. The Guild Leader has to move first and tick a box to say they're taking the Guild with them. Then, whenever another member of the Guild moves across, they're automatically added back to the roster, albeit for some reason at entry-level, meaning everyone has to be re-promoted. A bit half-assed if you ask me but a minor inconvenience at most.

The contents of the Guild Vaults, however, aren't going anywhere. The Valuts have to be completely emptied or you can't move at all. And therein lies my problem.

As I'm sure will astonish no-one whose noticed the title of the blog they're currently reading, my Guild Vaults in Rift are completely rammed. So, for the most part, are the bags of all my characters, although I did take the trouble a while back to make sure the ones I log in now and again at least had one empty bag to collect the inevitable "Welcome Back" bribes.

I considered the possibility of distributing the Vault contents among all my characters but even then there's not enough space. I thought about making a bank mule just to carry the load but I'd have to buy a another Character Slot. It was while I was looking at how much that might cost when I had a small epiphany: this is fricken' Rift we're talking about!

How often do I play Rift? Am I ever going to play Rift again? Do I really care which server my characters are on in a game I don't play now and don't plan on playing in the future? 

More to the point, even if I could buy a character slot for Rift Store Cash or Credits or whatever they're called, of which I still have a ton from when the game converted to F2P, do I even want to spend the time it would take to get the move done? To make a character, run through that damn tutorial, make some bags, transfer them over, join the Guild, meet whatever criteria you need to be able to withdraw stuff from the Vault, take everything out and stash it in another bank...

No. No I do not want to waste hours of my life doing any of that. I wanted to press a couple of buttons and forget about it, not start some major project that would take up hours of my life just to get me back to where I began - not playing Rift. 

Except as the record shows, I do occasionally play Rift. It's my seventh most-played game on Steam. I've spent more hours playing Rift since it moved to Steam than I've given to Palworld, albeit over a much longer period. And one of the reasons I still play Rift now and again is because it's on Steam. I very much doubt I would bother if I had to find and update a standalone client but because the button is just sitting there, sometimes I give in to whim and log in for old time's sake.

It helps that Rift is one of the games where I can play all my old characters. I can't remember if I had to set that up or if it was done automatically when the game was added to the new platform but it definitely makes it more likely I'll keep coming back, if only very occasionally. I suspect that if older MMORPGs were able to achieve seamless integration with Steam at no effort for the players it might help at least a little with retention. Then again, it's not like I ever spend any money when I'm there so there's probably no value in it for the companies running the games, even if they can get a few old lags to look in once in a while.

Having considered the possibilities, I'm going to do nothing. Not yet. The Gamigo announcement acknowledges some players may just not bother to move their characters ahead of time:

"Further details will be provided for those who may not transfer to Greybriar, Wolfsbane, Deepwood, or Laethys in time, ensuring your transition is as smooth as possible."

I'll wait until I hear what those "further details" are. Last time something like this happened they just flagged the old servers as Inactive and when you logged in you were forced to move somewhere else. For me, that would probably be as good as anything. If I'm not playing my characters anyway, I can not play them just as easily on a closed server as an active one.

Until then, it's back to Nightingale to see if  I can't push past Bless Unleashed and maybe even Divinity: Original Sin 2 at 91.3 and Dawnlands at 103.4. Both of those seem possible. 

New World at 235.8 hours, though? That's not going to happen. And as for Valheim at 384.8? 

That's a record I doubt will ever be broken.