Island Life In EverQuest II

Back on Black Friday, Wilhelm at TAGN posted a piece about the cash shop in Palia and "micro" transactions in general. In the course of the piece, he pointed out that unspent cash-shop currency is a drag on the balance sheet for the Accounts Department and the last thing they want you to do is hoard the damn stuff and never spend any of it.

Which, of course, is what I do all the time. It's partly due to something Wilhelm was complaining about, namely how tough it can be in most games to find anything at all in the cash shop that seems like it's both good value and worth buying in the first place. For me, it often seems as though everything in most in-game stores is either ridiculously overpriced or hard to figure out why anyone would want it at any price.

I spent a decade playing Guild Wars 2, for example, and in all that time just about the only things I ever bought were storage upgrades. Those were useful but, like just about everything in the Gem Store, very expensive, so I always waited until they went on sale, which they reliably did - once a year. 

Even at that attritionally slow rate of purchase, I still had all the storage space I wanted, if only because of diminishing returns. No-one can ever have enough storage space in GW2 for the intentionally overwhelming torrent of very-slightly-not-quite-worthless items that rains down on you whatever you do but at some stage having more room to stash it all  just adds to the sense of desperation that the flood is never going to stop and you'll drown in all that junk you can't quite bring yourself to destroy.

Ahem. This wasn't supposed to be a post about GW2 and its many shortcomings. Or, for that matter, about inventory management, although I could tell you some tales...

Getting back to the point, thanks to a combination of overpriced and/or unattractive stock in the shops and my personal psychology, which, thanks presumably to convictions instilled in me, growing up, by people who lived through two world wars and a global depression, leads me to feel a lot more comfortable with funds unspent than with the not exactly essential goods or services those funds might have purchased, I tend to build up a lot of savings in any game I play for more than five minutes.

It doesn't help that I also suffer from choice paralysis. If a game is lucky enough to have developers willing to fill their stores with useful and attractive items at reasonable prices, my eyes glaze over as I stare at them through the shop window, incapable of deciding which to buy. 

The EverQuest II cash shop is pretty good as these things go. There's a lot of vaguely useful stuff in there, not least because Darkpaw has been running a soft Pay-to-Play regime for many years. At least, it has if you want to get groups or, god forbid, start raiding. Then you either have to come at the game like it was a full-time job or get your credit card out. 

Or, so I understand, from the forums, which I confess may not represent the most unbiased testimony. As a solo, casual player, though, none of that really affects me at all. I could buy Familiars and Mercenaries and throw them down a well to boost the various buffs and boosts and bonuses that gives but why would I bother? 

Ditto the xp boosts and spell research reducers and all the other time-saving devices. I don't even use most of the ones I get for free, so why would I want more? 

Same story with the cosmetics. I have so many of those I literally had to designate a character to hold them all in storage for everyone else. That character has a bank full of costumes and appearance gear. And still no-one uses any of it!

All the while I'm not buying anything from the cash shop, my funds keep increasing. Not because I ever spend a cent on cash shop cash. Not for at least a decade and a half, anyway. I did, once, back in the glory days of SOE, when Smed's team were so far out of touch with reality that they ran Triple Station Cash sales and let you buy expansions off the back of them.

I bought some Station Cash then, alright. Everyone did. It was like they were giving it away. And then, naturally, I never spent most of it. I still have it. Some on my main account. More on the account that used to be my main account back then. And still more on Mrs. Bhagpuss's long-dormant account. And her second account. Darkpaw's accountants have got to love us...

Most of what I have on my subbed account doesn't come from those long-ago sales but from the monthly 500DBC stipend that come with the subscription. That adds up over time. 6k a year and it's a rare year when I spend even a third of it. 

When I logged in this morning I had just shy of 35k in the bank. 

So I bought an island. 

Frostfell has started. I knew it had because I saw Stargrace's post about it last night. This morning I thought I'd check if there was anything new for this year, which there isn't, really, other than the expected stuff you can buy either for gold and platinum in game or for DBC in the store. There's a new Achievement and some new places where you can mark your name for everyone to see (Always inexplicably popular.) A couple of odds and ends but no new quests or anything like that.

And, really, why would there be? Do you have any idea how big the Frostfell event is?  No? Go read Angeliana's post on the forums then! She lists over two dozen specific quests, many of which are actually quite lengthy chains, and that's not even all of them. Plus the gazillion other non-quest activities and entertainments you can enjoy between now and the fifth of January. It sounds like a long stretch but if you wanted to do everything, it'd probably take you that long.

But as I was skimming the list I spotted something I hadn't seen before: "Introducing your own wonderland."

A Prestige House. Now that's one thing I will spend my funny money on. I bought one only a couple of months ago, during the other big holiday of the Norathian year, Nights of the Dead. I think I mentioned it in passing but I didn't do a post on it. I was probably waiting until I'd decorated it, which of course I haven't.

Haven't set foot in the place, in fact. Redbeard was saying only yesterday how decorating wasn't really his thing. He was spurred into talking about it by the arrival of housing in World of Warcraft, my own thoughts on which I originally intended to include in this very post. We're a long way in now, though. It seems a bit late to start. Probably better to save it for a post of its own.

Decorating kind of is my thing, as in I enjoy it and I'm not bad it it, both in game and in real life, but in both cases the downside of decorating is that it takes ages. I have several well-decorated houses in EQII, not all of them on the account or even the server I currently play on, but every one of my characters has at least one home and most of them have several and I just do not have the time to make all of those houses look good.

Or even most of them. I ought to log everyone in and count the houses one day. I would guess that, just on  my main account alone, there are more than fifty. Who has time to decorate that?

So, naturally, I've just bought another. Only this one is a little different. 

Most Prestige homes, even if they're really full zones, which in EQII they often are, come with a pre-built residence of some kind. Mara, for example, the place where my Berserker has been living for many years, ever since he moved out of his huge, sprawling Maj`Dul mansion, is a full zone with a complete town, many of the buildings in which are fully habitable.

Winter's Island, the absolutely beautiful new Prestige Home I signed the deeds on today, is exactly that: an island. Small, somewhat bean-shaped, in the middle of a blue, blue sea. It has an odd climate. Winter at one end, Fall at the other. Grass or snow. Bare branches or autumn leaves. 

All around, sticking out of the sea like spikes, are rocky islets. At least twenty of them by my count. Most of which you can get to and build on. 

The place is big. Bigger than it looks. I flew between the two farthest-apart rocky islets and timed myself on a stopwatch. It took more than three minutes on a fast flying mount. Just to ride from one end of the main island to the other takes half a minute.

As Angeliana says "There is so much potential." There really is because all you have to start with is some land and a lot of sea. 

Here's where EQII differs from many theme-park MMORPGs when it comes to housing. (The exceptions I can think of would be WildStar, which hardly counts any more, and maybe Rift.) You aren't limited to decorating. You can also build.  

In the before-times, back when Mrs. Bhagpuss used to be big on the decorating scene, all building had to be done by re-purposing existing furniture items, something people did with enormous imagination and skill. Latterly, though, Darkpaw has catered to the obvious demand by supplying actual building materials, bricks, tiles, stairs, doors, windows, the lot, all of which you can obtain in abundance both through crafting and questing and via the Cash Shop.

I have never built anything in EQII. Which, now I come to think of it, is weird. I build things all the time in survival games. I've been doing it for years. Until now, though, when I'm in Norrath I've been content to stick to decorating.

Will Winter's Island change all that? I have no idea. Yet. 

If I do get the building bug, though, maybe it'll finally give me something to spend my imaginary money on.

That Crazy Feline

Here's an existential question for a Wednesday: why spend time and energy on a character in game you know you have no intention of playing? Why do they need to look good, when absolutely no-one, real or fictional, is ever going to see them?

Don't look at me. I don't know either. But we all do it, right?

Okay, some of us do it. It's not just me. 

I'm pretty sure it's not just me...

It's not like I'm even a cat person any more. Well, I am, I'm just not only a cat person. I was a cat person pretty much exclusively for half a century or so but then, for reasons we won't go into right now, I turned into a cat-and fox person and then fox took over for a while.

Latterly, since we got Beryl, I have also become a dog person, something I never expected, although that's a different kind of "person" altogether. I like dogs a lot now but I don't identify as a dog. Ew!

Expanding a little on that, I find it very easy to imagine having a dog pet in a game but very hard to imagine dressing my character up as a dog. As a cat, though? (Or a fox.) Just try and stop me!

As I think I mentioned a couple of times, Once Human has been eating every other game's lunch around here for the best part of a month now. Before it arrived I was playing Wuthering Waves every day but I was also logging in to AdventureQuest 3D, purely to open my three, free daily chests. 

The reason I was doing that was because AQ3D added housing a while back. Because I have a Pavlovian reaction to housing in games, the  moment I learned I could have a house in Battleon, the capital city, I had to have one. Never mind I don't play AQ3D more than a few minutes a year. Never mind I will never hang out in that house or show it to anyone or probably even write another post about it. Still had to jump through all the hoops to get one.

Once I had it, of course I wanted it to look good. I imagine there are plenty of ways to work on that by playing the game but I've tried playing AQ3D and honestly, although it has a ridiculous amount of content, none of it ever grabs me. The combat is very slow and the graphics aren't really to my taste so even exploring isn't all that appealing.

You don't actually need to play the game to decorate your house, of course. You can buy housing items in the cash shop because why else have housing in a F2P game at all? 

I hope it goes without saying that I am not going to pay actual money for pixel furniture in a game I don't even play. I may be whimsical but I'm not crazy. Well, not completely, althogh apparently I am sufficiently dislocated from reality to consider it worth my while to log in every day to see if I can grab a few coins to put towards a rug or a lamp one day.

The daily log-in reward gives you three chests to open, the first of which always contains some cash shop currency. Usually it's a pitiful amount. Single figures in a game where basic items are priced in hundreds. Once in a while you can get a bit more. I had thirty or so one time. Mostly, though, it's peanuts.

Still, peanuts add up, as any mathematically-inclined elephant will tell you. After a few months of logging in religiously I had about 1600 of whatever the currency is called. 

Hang on, I'll look it up...Dragon Crystals, that's it.

I stopped logging in to AQ3D when I started playing Once Human. In fact, I stopped paying attention to any other games for a few weeks but as we near the end of the first season and I wait to find out just how that's going to work, my motivation there has dropped and my desire to play obsessively has diminished. I suspect that may turn into a problem for the game going forward but we won't have long to wait now to find out for sure.

On Monday I actually logged into EverQuest II for the first time in weeks, mostly to collect my free play-money, something you have to do once a month or you lose it, even though the stipend is part of the All Access sub. While I was there I even did some content. I've missed most of the big, summer event sequence that takes in several holiday festivals but the final one, Oceansfull, is still running and I did the main dungeon for that one. It was a lot of fun and quite profitable in terms of upgrades.

I say upgrades... I haven't gotten around to equipping them yet and I'm not sure I will. The big, mid-year Game Update is in beta right now and when that goes live I'm sure the drops and rewards will raise the item level cap yet again, making the stuff I got two days ago obsolete. Then a month or two later we'll have Pandas, meaning upgrades to everything yet again and a month after that the next expansion will come out and...

Well, you get the picture. It happens in every game but in EQII it happens at the very least four times a year, every year. It can be a bit much. I was quite into it for a while - upgrading is weirdly satisfying in its own right, regardless of how useful it is - but I think I might take a break and skip all the interim steps until the expansion arrives in December. 

At least, now I'm coming down off my Once human high, I'm starting to pay attention to what my other options are. Tomorrow there's the second major update to Wuthering Waves so I'll most likely go back for a while. 

I did consider the Guild Wars 2 expansion, dropping next week, for the sole reason that it adds housing to the game but it costs money and I'm not convinced I want what looks to be GW2's typically half-assed version of owning a home enough to pay for it. Which, given my aforementioned housing obsession, says a lot about my opinion of GW2 these days.

But enough about housing (If such a thing could ever be possible.) You may recall, although no-one could blame if you didn't, that I started off talking about cats. 

You may also remember that 8 August was International Cat Day. Or maybe you don't because it seemed to get surprisingly little attention, probably because there are thousands of Something Days every year, all piling up against each other like junk mail on a 1980s doormat.

According to Wikipedia, whch has a very short entry on the subject, "International Cat Day is a celebration which takes place on 8 August of every year. It was created in 2002 by the International Fund for Animal Welfare. It is a day to raise awareness for cats and learn about ways to help and protect them."

I'd have thought if there was one animal that didn't need awareness about it raised it would have to be the cat. Cats infamously rule the internet and are ubiquitous in all forms of popular culture around the world. In some countries, cat-worship appears to be an almost un-ironic national stereotype.

Nevertheless, cats have their day and at least one game I nominally play has decided to honor it. If anyone knows of any others that have, I'd be interested to hear about it because I didn't spot anything else in my feeds this year. I'm surprised Gamigo didn't come up with a quiz about cats for Rift. That does seem to be how they like to pretend they're still invested in the game these days.

AQ3D went all-in on the cat theme with a whole bunch of purchaseable cat-themed items - cat pets that follow you about, sleeping cats for your home, cat-paw-and-claw weapons and the one that caught my eye - Cat Onesies. Some of these can be bought for real money in the cash shop, others require a special event currency - Cat Fur - that can only be obtained by defeating the Cat Day Boss, an Astral Tiger.

There's a Cat Day vendor by the name of Not Alma (I'd explain but life's too short.) and the regular Pet vendor, Aria, also has a lot of new, cat-related stock. In keeping with AQ3D's consistent drive to make everything immediately accessible to everyone all the time, especially if makes them money, you can just click on the event notification in-game to be taken straight to the shops.

Which I did as soon as I logged in this morning. Then I spent an hour (Yes, really. A whole hour.) browsing the cat-wear, trying it on, deciding what to buy, buying it and finding somewhere good to pose for the pictures. It's far too difficult in most games to find a nice, plain wall to pose against.

It wouldn't have taken quite so long if I hadn't had to work out how to clear my bags, which were so full from the free stuff I'd been getting from the log-in rewards the vendors wouldn't let me spend any money until I made some space for what I wanted to buy. I even took a swipe at the big tiger to see if I could snatch some fur. I knew it was suicide but what the heck. There's no death penalty to speak of. It was worth a shot.

I had almost exactly just enough Dragon Crystals to buy the three pieces for the Onesie. Kind of a dumb thing to call it, if you ask me, when you also need a hat and a tail for the full look. Might as well call it a set and have done with it.

I would have liked either the black or the ginger one but both were only available for Fur. For Dragon Crystals you get a choice of either pink or grey. I went with grey, which I think looks very stylish. Pink would have looked... pink.

I would have liked to have bought the cat pet, Skratch, to complete the look but I didn't have the crystals. Maybe next year. I may not play AQ3D but that doesn't mean I won't do all this again next time it comes arouind. Or whenever I see something I like.

Why? Probably best not to think about that too much.

So, When Is Superman Day, Exactly?

Did you know yesterday was Superman Day? I didn't and Bree at MassivelyOP didn't remember the date either. It turns out there's a good reason why we might have been confused. There's more than one Superman Day.

Bree was reporting on what she'd read in a press release from Daybreak Games' subdivision Dimensional Ink, which confidently begins "April 18th marks the official celebration of Superman Day across the web, the world, and the DC Universe." And that's the truth. Or one of them.

The DC establishment backs April 18. James Gunn is Mr. DC for the moment and he certainly thinks April 18 is Superman Day. So does Elizabeth Tulloch aka Lois Lane from Superman and Lois, the show now set to mark the swansong in the long-running and fitfully fruitful relationship between the CW and DC Comics.  

April 18 has apparently been "Superman Day" in some realities since 2004. The date was chosen because it marks the anniversary of the first appearance of the Man of Steel in Action Comics #1 back in 1938. 

If you google "When is Superman Day?", though, Days of the Year, supported by many other calendar websites, offers June 12, citing an official announcement to that effect by DC Comics in 2013. There's clearly some confusion going on, which may or may not derive from the sheer number of possible anniversaries available: Superman's birthday, Clark Kent's birthday, the arrival of Kal El on Earth and the first appearance of a comic featuring the Man of Tomorrow.

According to one of the sources linked above, there's a lore explanation for choosing April 18: it's the date Superman gave as his birthday in an interview with Lois Lane and the date he uses for official purposes. Unfortunately, whoever made that claim neglected to provide details of where and when the interview took place and I haven't been able to verify it. (Okay, I haven't tried to verify it. I have other things to do, you know...)

The same source, which I am not convinced is reliable, asserts that in his alter ego of Clark Kent, Superman claims June 18 as his birthday. Most other sources suggest what I seem to remember from my own comics-reading days, when Superman's birthday was usually given as February 29. 

A possible clean-up for all this comes from the unlikely source of Sky History, whose This Day in History column explains - while citing June 17 as Clark Kent's birthday - that in the 1950s Superman cut his cake and blew out his candles (Carefully, one hopes...) in October, before shifting the celebrations to Leap Year Day in the 1960s, where it remained for a couple of decades before moving to June. Just to be awkward they also throw December into the mix with no supporting evidence at all.

At this point it has probably become clear to us all that no-one knows when Superman's birthday is, nor when or most likely even what "Superman Day" is supposed to be. This is why Dr. Egon Spengler was so insistent the streams should not be crossed.

What I do know is that DCUO is celebrating its own version of Superman Day from now until... actually, I'm not clear on when it stops but it carries on into next week at least, because that's when they're giving way some free posters. 

I'll be there for that. DCUO gives good poster. I'll have somewhere to put them, too, because thanks to the games obtuse and confusing UI and patent lack of clarity I now have two entire bases to decorate. Or, in one case, re-decorate.

How did that happen? Well, I'll tell you. Only I'm going to keep this extremely short for once. I feel I've written more than enough two-thousand word essays on my own incompetence for anyone to want to read another. I certainly don't want to write one.

The key points are these: I logged into the game to spend 2000 DBC on the new prestige lair, Superman's Fortress of Solitude, for some reason now renamed the Sunstone Fortress. I have cash shop money to burn so even though the real-world equivalent is allegedly $20, it cost me what I consider to be nothing.

I bought it with no problems and added it to my Base collection but then I spent the best part of an hour, including much googling and watching YouTube videos, trying to figure out how to set the damn thing as my second base. You can have up to eight of them, allegedly, but I just could not figure out how to get more than the one I already had.

In the process I managed to completely strip all the furnishings from my old base, move it across town and replace it with the Fortress and still end up with only the one lair. In the end I figured it out (You have to buy a Deed from the cash store AS WELL as the Fortress, which is technically just a visual skin, not an additional property. Also the Deed is really hard to spot due to the way the menus work and the dumb color scheme they've gone with. It took me three passes to find it and I only spotted it then after I'd watched someone do it in a video...)

After an hour and a half, during which I even got half-way through submitting a Customer Service ticket before I decided I was going to make myself look utterly ridiculous by doing it, I finally got everything sorted to the point where I now have two bases, one of which is my new Sunstone Fortress and the other my old Gothic Lair.

They are both completely empty, of course. All my furniture - and I have a lot, almost all freebies - is in storage. It's going to take me several solid sessions to get both lairs as I want them but if I'm honest, the first one was a mess. It really needed a makeover and now it's going to get one.

Decorating in DCUO is fun so it's more of a treat than a trial. And Krypto's going to love his new home, I'm sure. 

When I'm all settled in I'll probably do another post about that but for now, enjoy the sense of space in all those outdoor shots. That view is what I really bought the place for...

Just Browsing

One thing I rarely cover in any real detail when posting about the many Free To Play titles I enjoy is the monetization that keeps them going. Not that they get any money from me. I am the absolute definition of a leech when it comes to these things. 

Developers must hate me. I've enjoyed many hundreds of hours of absolutely free entertainment at their expense. I don't believe I've ever spent a single penny on a fully F2P title. In almost all cases I've never even been tempted. It hardly ever feels like anything I'd want, let alone need, to do.

Very occasionally I toy with the idea of spending a small amount of money - five or ten dollars perhaps - almost as much to show willing as for any practical purpose. In every case, though, the feeling swiftly passes and I keep my credit card in my wallet.

The thing that really surprises me about all these games is that they can make money using these methods at all. It seems to me that F2P titles are, almost by definition, likely to attract people who either don't have the disposable income to buy higher-quality titles or who are, like me, simply too mean to spend money when they don't have to.

I'm aware there are those individuals we sometimes call "whales" who, either because they literally have more money than they know what to do with or because they have psychological issues that mitigate against self-control, are willing to spend extremely large amounts of money to get what they want, even when most of that money, thanks to the various lockbox and gacha mechanics the games employ, goes to waste.

I'm also aware there are people who budget their expenditure in video games in the same way they budget for eating out or going to the movies; people for whom spending ten or twenty dollars a week on a game they enjoy is a rational and reasonable expense. 

All of this I understand intellectually but emotionally it makes no sense to me. My experience of every F2P game I've found worth playing for any significant amount of time has always been that I get more free stuff given me than I'm able to use and that everything I need to fully enjoy my time is available purely by playing the game. 

When I look at the cash shops in most games, F2P or otherwise, I do wonder occasionally what it is that other people are seeing that I'm not. I played Guild Wars 2 for a decade and one of my constant complaints was that there was pretty much nothing in the cash shop I wanted. It's full of ugly outfits I wouldn't wear on a bet and utilities that offer no real convenience. I am very clearly not the target market for whoever designs these things.

Even when the cash shop is pretty good, which is the case with EverQuest II, I still find it hard to spend much money there. Experience tells me that when I do buy things like the Prestige Homes I never use them, so why bother? I'd have to decorate them and then live in them and I already have two huge homes I can barely keep in order, as it is.

A few years ago there seemed to be something of a convention among F2P titles to make at least some of their money by selling not just convenient shortcuts or fancy clothes but the bare necessities required to play the game at all. Allods Online, an excellent game in many ways and one of the early WoW clones deemed most likely to succeed, famously scuppered its considerable chances by employing a punishing death mechanic that required cash shop items to mitigate.

Allods also played the inconvenience card hard with some of the meagrest inventory allocation I've ever seen. Making players get their wallets out to solve the ever-annoying problem of running out of storage space has been a classic money-spinner for a long time and not just in F2P titles either, but it finally seems to be going out of fashion.

It's been a good while since I've found myself struggling to manage my inventory in a F2P game. The last three titles I've spent a lot of time playing - Chimeraland, Noah's Heart and now Dawnlands - all offer far more storage for free than I'm ever likely to use. Neither do any of them restrict instant travel or put up annoying barriers that need real cash payments to remove.

They don't use lockboxes, either. It's a while since I've seen one of those drop in any game I play. They're still very prevalent in older titles but the newer ones don't seem to bother with them at all.  

The current fashion seems to be for Gacha mechanics that are supposedly tied directly to progression. It's a mechanic that most Western players probably knew little about a few years ago but with which, thanks to global success of titles like Genshin Impact, we're all now quite familiar.

When I first encountered the draw mechanic I found it quite exciting, although never so much so that I wanted to pay for the thrill. Still, making my free rolls, watching the explosive animations and finding out what I'd won kept me happily entertained until the novelty wore off. 

The problem with a system that relies on building teams of characters and powering them up, at least from my point of view, is that I hugely prefer to stick with one set of characters that I know. I strongly dislike swapping characters in a team in and out as though they were weapons - I don't even much like swapping actual weapons ffs.

I am very much a set-and-forget player. I like to put in quite a lot of effort to get my character or team just right and then leave them to get on with their job, preferably for the entire time I play the game from then on. If I want to try another character I would much prefer to roll another character and start over. I'm on board with the old adage that you shouldn't change horses in the middle of a stream.

That makes me a particularly bad bet for making money out of when you rely on gacha mechanics, although as I think I've made clear, I'm a pretty bad bet in most other respects as well. If you want my money as a game developer you're most likely going to need to make me pay for content, which these days seems to be the one thing all developers are happiest to hand out for free.

All of this makes it very hard for me to understand when game games like Dawnlands receive such virulent criticism for employing monetization practices derived from the mobile market, where selling overpriced cosmetics, inconvenience and power have long been considered normal. It always seems to me that even if such practices have been imported to the PC versions of the games, PC gamers ought to be able just to ignore them.

It's something I find very easy to do for reasons other than my personal preferences. For the most part, the promotions are sequestered in separate segments of the UI. If you aren't interested then it's quite simple not to click on the icons. It's like walking through a market; you're not obligated to stop and buy something every time a stallholder catches your eye. You can just walk on.

Of course, if you do have the willpower to resist completely, you'll miss out on a bunch of freebies. Most of the many events designed to separate you from your savings come with some kind of sweetener to get your attention. Increasingly, I'm finding that they also offer considerable opportunities to indulge while spending only in-game coin, too.

That's obviously intended as a lead-in to spending real money but in-game coin is where I stop. I spent much of the last twelve months doing all kinds of events in Noah's Heart, most of which could have led me on to buying premium currency so I could carry on, except of course I didn't. I just stopped when it wasn't free any more. 

It was noticeable that after a few months most of the free events in that game converted to payment-only, a move that merely highlighted what dull events they were and emphasized what a bad idea it would be to spend money on any of them. At the same time, my stash of unused Gacha cards for summoning Phantoms grew and grew. By the time I drifted away from the game I had more than seven hundred unused pulls. 

One thing all the newer games do is tell you the odds. No-one can claim they didn't know their chances of getting the exact thing they wanted were slim. Dawnlands has a very elegant and detailed breakdown of the exact percentages involved. As is common with these systems, it also tells you just how many times you have to fail before the game takes pity on you and throws you a bone.

Where the game differs from most is that the range of highly desirable items on offer is both very limited and worth having, although I realize the latter is a  matter of taste and opinion. This is probably a function of the age of the game. It's very new. Even so, a cash shop with only two outfits seems extremely restrained. 

Yesterday we got a new Event, the third since launch. The first event, which is still running, involves making a video about the game and publishing it on YouTube although, as I found out a couple of days ago, you get fifty Diamonds just for clicking through to the web page that tells you how it works.

The second event, also still running, features a friendly creature called Carromu who, as the event title tells you, is always hungry. Carromu doesn't like to eat Diamonds (Who does?) so he's happy to swap his for all kinds of stuff you probably already have lying about. He just turns up in your camp one day and sits there, waiting for you to feed him. If there's any way for that event to generate income for the developer I can't see what it is. I think it's just a clean, fun event.

The new event is the game's first try at persuading you to part with some cash. It's a Gacha sale. 

As a survival/crafting game with no PvP or PvE ladder competitions, Dawnlands doesn't really have the kind of structure that supports the gacha mechanics I've seen elsewhere. On the basis of the first event, it looks like the solution is to randomize access to the kinds of things that would otherwise be straightforward premium purchases in the cash shop.

It doesn't really feel like a Gacha mechanic so much as a lockbox with out the box. It even has a fricken key as the Gacha item! You can buy the keys with Diamonds, which are an in-game currency, so I bought one to try it out. Having read the odds, I wasn't expecting much and not much is what I got.

Protected by my psychology as already described, I will not be bankrupting myself trying to win any of the admittedly rather spiffy prizes. Not even the really rather fetching bunny costume, complete with carrot holster and carrots. Nor Dodo, the cute-looking, catlike Follower, who is, apparently, "a great helper when exploring unknown lands"

Those two plus a very fancy piece of furniture are the big ticket items, although I'd be pretty pissed off if I made the required 2% roll and got a glorified garden bench. Someone obviously believes home-makers are a major demographic in the game because the second tier (10% chance.) is all furniture too, as is more than half of the bottom tier (88%. Oh, you figured that out already...)

As with everything in Dawnlands, the whole event is beautifully presented. The game has a consistently delightful aesthetic. It makes browsing the menu a pleasure in itself even when you know you're not going to sit down for the meal.

I might indulge in the occasional snack, all the same but it won't be often with keys costing 80 Diamonds a time. That feels quite steep, even with the 10% discount you get on your first ten puchases. As for paying real money, forget it.

As an indication of the way monetization in the game is headed, though, I find it perfectly acceptable. I'm enjoying just looking at the items and admiring the designs and the images. In real life, I can usually get at least as much satisfaction from window shopping as from buying the stuff. In games I'm equally happy just to look.

God, those devs must really hate players like me...

Cost Benefit Analysis

Redbeard at Parallel Context has a thought-provoking post up, poking away at that hoary old flogging-horse, fun. Wilhelm at TAGN, meanwhile, has a weapons-grade, mad as hell and not taking it any more rant aimed squarely at everyone's least-favorite spaceman, Lord British.

At first read, the two posts don't seem to have all that much in common but I was struck by the way they both reveal a little of the darkness that lies in "giving people want they want". Or should that be what they think they want?

Looking back to the dying days of World of Warcraft's Wrath of the Lich King era, Redbeard brings back some of the mixed emotions aroused by the fast-moving changes Blizzard brought to what has always been a slippery and ever-shifting genre. The surprise, if there was one, should have been that we didn't see it coming. 

The myth about sharks is that they'll drown if they ever stop moving forward. Mmorpgs are the same.

I was almost done playing WoW, my first time through, when Blizzard introduced the earliest iteration of the automated group-making tool. Mrs Bhagpuss and I had been playing for just over six months by then and we'd both seen about as much of the game as we cared to. She'd already stopped logging in. I think she'd gone back to EverQuest II. 

I hung on a little bit longer. I was waiting for the patch that introduced the Group Finder. I was very curious to see how it would work. I wasn't expecting it to change anything for me, personally. At that point I'd never pugged a dungeon in WoW. I'd barely even been in a dungeon in WoW and I had no plans to start. I was waiting to see how the innovation would change the game itself and by implication the genre.

In the event it took me just three runs to decide that a) the LFG tool was a clever and useful addition to the game and b) I had no interest in ever using it again. I could also see that it was a genie that would be very hard to cork.

For someone who had already just about had enough of Azeroth for the time being, far from opening up a whole new era of possibility, what it did was confirm my feeling that it was about time I found somewhere else to be. I moved on but I was very well aware that no matter how far or fast I was moving I wouldn't be able to outrun history. You can't unhave ideas. Automated group-making had been loosed upon the virtual world. Nothing would be the same ever again.

The Sparkle Pony, as Redbeard goes on to say, marked another turning point. At this remove I can't remember (Or be bothered to check.) if Blizzard was the first major player to introduce paid-for mounts into a Subscription game. I know Sony Online Entertainment did the same because I was there when it happened but whether that was before or after The Ensparkling I don't recall.

And it doesn't matter. Whoever did it first, soon everyone was doing it. And why wouldn't they? It turns out people like spending money on stuff that doesn't exist, even if they have to pay an entrance fee to get into the store. If you were making games to make money wouldn't you do the same? If people want to pay you twice, why not let them? 

Well, I guess one good reason would be if those same people ended up losing faith in your game's ability to entertain and amuse them and took their custom elsewhere. That didn't happen even though many said it would. 

Oh, I'm sure there were people who stopped playing and claimed it was because of all the shiny ponies sparkling up the streets and maybe sometimes it was even true. I mean, I left EQII's live servers for the tumbleweed emptiness of the Test server mostly because I got into a snit about the flying carpets that came with the Desert of Flames expansion. Or I said I did.

It was a factor, just like the coming of the LFG tool to WoW was a factor in my leaving that game. It just wasn't the main reason I left. It was, as these things so often are, a handy excuse to do something I'd been wanting to do anyway. 

It was also not forever. It so rarely is. Not for me, anyway. The plethora of retro and restart servers everywhere you look these days, coupled with the endless marketing drives to bring back former players to just about every mmorpg there ever was, suggests my yo-yoing loyalties are anything but unique.

Observational and anecdotal evidence suggests the membrane holding players inside or outside the current bubble of any mmorpg is becoming ever more permeable. The whole business model used to rely on locking paying customers down. Now it's increasingly about keeping the leash loose enough so they don't feel the tie until you tug.

Every barrier that comes down weakens the next, too. Those sparkle ponies seem almost quaint now. Strike the almost. Crowded places in just about every mmorpg I play (And most I don't, I imagine.) look more like carnival parades than whatever they're intended to suggest. As recreations of fantasy cities they bear about as much resemblance to even an imaginary reality as Disneyland's Main Street USA does to any American town you can actually drive through in your own car.

It's easy enough to see it all as a degradation of some kind of preternatural authenticity that existed before but is it? Was there ever anything more to the experience than what we brought to it? Aren't we just bringing different things, now? 

It's another of those "You say you want it but you don't" moments, only this time it's "You say you don't want it but you do." Money talks, as the saying goes, and what it's saying is "I want a Pony!"

Or a spaceship. In castigating erstwhile elder now turned pantomime villain, Lord British, Wilhelm brings in another rockstar dev, Chris Roberts, as a point of reference:

"I am not a fan of Star Citizen, but this announcement has made Chris Roberts palatable by comparison.  I don’t believe CR will ever be able to deliver on all, or even most, of the promises he has made, but he is selling a dream and has something tangible in alpha and has managed not to get bored and wander off mid-project.  If you were to ask me if you should buy a spaceship in Star Citizen or give money to Lord British, I’d say knock yourself out with the spaceship."

This really struck me as a crucial paragraph. A lot of people don't like Chris Roberts and his Star Citizen money press, largely on the grounds that the game he's been promising to make for years can and will never become a reality. I have always thought that misses the point.

Star Citizen isn't a game. It's a showroom for imaginary spaceships. There probably are people genuinely still waiting for a full-function mmorpg to emerge from the endless development process over at Cloud Imperium but I would hazard my best guess they aren't any kind of majority. 

Star Citizen is a toyshop. People buy shiny spaceships there and go Vroom! Vroom! in their minds. Space Sparkle Ponies if you like. And people do like. They like very much, which is why Star Citizen keeps making more money. 

In some ways, not having a real game to go with them makes the whole thing more fun. It's like me when I played Riders of Icarus. All I really wanted to do was log in, get my next amazing mount, ride it around the city for a while, take a few screenshots and log out. The fact that I knew there was an actual game there just put me under pressure to stop having fun and do some damn work. Go and do some levelling. Play the actual game. That, among other things, was what led to me drifting away.

In that sense, you might think that Lord British's titanic vagueness over what game, exactly, he intends to make "on the blockchain" shouldn't be all that much of a red flag. It is, though.

Here's the difference, as I see it, between Chris Roberts and Richard Garriott: Chris Roberts really likes spaceships; Lord British really likes money.

Which is not to say Roberts doesn't like money, too. Of course he does. We all like money. But he's pretty clear on what he's selling. If you pay him for an imaginary spaceship that's what you get. If you buy an NFT of a spaceship, as Tipa's been wondering, just what exactly does that get you that any mmorpg or cash shop can't sell you already?

I'm assuming here that NFTs are involved in Lord British's plans somewhere down the line, along with Play to Earn and all the rest of the buzzwords. 

The single, obvious advantage of selling sparkle ponies and spaceships "on the blockchain" rather through a regular cash shop is, as it seems to me, the license that gives you to charge orders of magnitude more money for them. I can see why that's attractive to some people. Mainly the people doing the selling but also those who think a thing's value lies in how much it costs. There are names for people who think that way. None of them are kind.

Given the lead time required to make a new mmorpg, there's every chance all this will be over by the game comes out, if it ever does. I guess that won't matter much. By then the last drips will have been squeezed from the low-hanging fruit and the whole caravan will have moved on to the next mirage, taking Lord British with it, likely as not.

Leaving us all to play happily with our ponies and our spaceships in the actual games that take actual money for imaginary toys. And even if some of those games are still just sketches of a promise of a dream, they'll still be more real than anything "on the blockchain".

Fun is where you find it and we already know where to look.

Take My Money

With Valheim on hiatus pending the Hearth and Home update, my daily gaming round these days mostly consists of Guild Wars 2, EverQuest II and Dragon Nest Origins. I've pushed further into the Dragon Nest world (not to be confused with World of Dragon Nest, which is another game entirely) than I've ever gone before. 

Dora is closing in on level 29. Progress seems comfortable. An enjoyable two-hour session might get me one level in the mid-20s. Something doesn't add up, though. According to the website, xp has been set at three times the regular rate and the estimated leveling time from creation to cap should be no more than ten to twelve hours.

I'm probably doing something wrong. I usually am. There's a lot about the game I don't understand. Most of it, in fact. Even though I've played Dragon Nest on and off for over a decade it's never been anything I've taken very seriously. Or at all seriously.

Any mmorpg played hyper-casually, in fits and starts, is going to remain opaque but Dragon Nest, being both somewhat silly and highly hyper-kinetic, is probably easier to underestimate than most. I've tended to find it quite engaging enough just running around blowing things up with my unfeasibly large gun and chortling at the badly-translated quest dialog without trying to figure out how to play properly.

Thinking back, that approach did begin to falter last time I got into the twenties. It's not so easy to mow through everything when most of your gear hasn't seen an upgrade for a dozen levels. The game gradually introduces more and more systems and options, various kinds of crafting, different difficulty levels, all kinds of special events and instances, until the time comes when you really do have to stop and take some time to work out just what the heck is going on. Or give up.

Last time this happened the decision was taken out of my hands. Before I could re-adjust my attitude the game underwent one of its periodic shifts of ownership and shook me off like a flea from a dog. I'm uncomfortably aware of the equally perilous situation I find myself in now, playing on a server of unknown provenance and unknowable security.

Still, play I do and learn I must, if I'm to progress. The first step was to think about getting some better gear and the second was to take my first look at the broker. It's a nice, straightforward post-and-sell system, very similar to EQII's. There were some good upgrades there for a few gold each so I bought a new offhand weapon and some gloves. Orange quality ("Epic" if you prefer). Never seen any before.

Buying gear will only get you so far in any mmorpg. It's no use if you don't go out and use it. The web page Guide advises "For Leveling we would recommend doing the main quest, since the Main Quest has increased Exp and Gold." Yep. Doing that. And I've taken on board the warning that "You should also pick up Side Quests, otherwise you will have to grind dungeons at some point to continue the Main Quest." 

I would love to see this game translated properly.

I haven't, however, been following the suggestion that "Taking the Board Quest close to a dungeon entrance, if the dungeons offers one, is also a good idea". I tried it but I got muddled so I stopped. Dragon Nest Origins operates a recursive structure of instances, where towns, acting as quest hubs, lead to staging points, also acting as quest hubs, which lead to instances and dungeons that themselves splinter off to others inside them. 

In all my time playing I'd never figured out how all this works in detail. I'd never needed to. I just went somewhere, killed some monsters, came back. Yesterday I finally ran into a problem with that approach.

I've been taking the quests but I can't say I've been finishing them. There are a generous forty pages in DNO's quest journal but yesterday I found I'd filled them all. Rather than renege on promises made I went back to the beginning and began to clear them all out. Only first I had to be sure I was going to the right place. 

The quest markers took me from the city to the staging area to the correct instance but after that I had to learn to check the name of the exact dungeon and find the drop-down list of quests to make sure mine were included. It's been there in front of me all these years and yet somehow I never noticed. It makes a surprising amount of difference, knowing where you're supposed to be going and then using that knowledge to make sure you do actually go there. Who'd have guessed?

Once inside, clearing out old quests went quickly. Dragon Nest is old school in its approach to power. As you level up your character gets stronger while your opponents don't. It was very pleasant for a while to go back and slaughter my way through dungeons far below my level. 

So much of it has to be genuinely funny in the original. This quest revolves around a spoiled NPC with delusions of grandeur. The noise pollution in question is her trying to play dark elf music from sheet music she had me steal from them.

Only I kept getting more quests. I'd go back and hand one in and come away with two. My journal emptied then filled. And it seems the game's not quite as old school as I thought. The new quests, often as not, even though they took me to places I imagined I'd outgrown, came in at my level or thereabouts. It seems my assumptions on that were ill-founded too, like so much else I thought I knew about the game.

And don't get me started on crafting. There's heraldry and enhancement and plates and codes and I have only the shakiest grasp of how any of that works. Then, when you get to nineteen or twenty and travel to the capital, Saint Haven, there's cooking and fishing and farming and a whole new channel with different storage and currencies...

Speaking of currencies, shall we mention the cash shop? Yes, let's. Dragon Nest, the commercial version, has one of the better cash shops I've seen. It's stuffed with very nice things to buy. There are mounts and pets and dozens and dozens of fancy costumes. You can see them all in the display window with your character modelling them and rarely have I felt so tempted to get out my credit card and treat myself.

There's practical stuff, too. Of course there is. DNO isn't terrible about storage space. You get an adequate amount for free. I always want more, though, and looking at tab after tab of locked slots is hard. I'm playing regularly. It's costing me nothing. I'd be willing to drop a few dollars for some bags and maybe a pet and something snazzy to wear around town.

At least he's not a clown

Except I can't. Or maybe I can but I don't know how. As a private server operating on donations there is, rightly, no way to pay real money for in-game currency. And even if there was I certainly wouldn't be handing out my credit card details to whoever's running this thing.

The cash shop is there, though. Tantalizing me. Taunting me. I spent a good while trying to figure out how to use it. I pressed every button on the UI. Nothing. 

Except the button for buying cash did do something. It took me to the website. I couldn't buy anything there but I learned that  "Cash stuff is obtainable ingame, by doing the circus. You can get a total of 196 Coupons alone and 256 a week, when in a Party of 4. Those Coupons can be exchanged for cash items."

Oh. The circus. That thing I've been ignoring since I first saw it many years ago. Why have I been ignoring it? Good question. I don't like circuses? Nope. Not that. Okay, I have no idea. I just never really thought about it. I'm sensing a pattern here...

I spoke to the ringmaster. I went to the circus. It turned out to be several instances with a lot of fighting. I killed three hundred Sparta goblins. That got me six coupons. I did it again. Then I found a bunch of monsters hiding in another instance and killed them, too. After about twenty minutes I had sixteen coupons. I went back to the ringmaster to see what I could buy. Nothing worth having. Nothing I wanted. Definitely no hedgehogs.

I want that hedgehog! And those bunny ears!

As far as I can tell the "Cash stuff" in that system is a) completely different from the commercial cash shop and b) linked to which zone you enter the circus from. So far I can't even get the "Cash Items" tab to come up. I would bet I need to be about level 40 and talking to the ringmaster in in the final hub village for that.

I'd probably forget about it only in Saint Haven, where everyone hangs out, I can see people parading around, dressed as if they're about to enter the costume parade at Comicon, riding exotic mounts, with even more exotic pets at their heels. There's a way to get these things. I just don't know what it is.

I don't know yet. I will find out. If I have to join the sodding Discord and ask, I will find out! I shall have my giant, pink hedgehog or I'll know the reason why! Or, I guess, I won't.  Know the reason why, that is. That's kind of the problem.

On the upside, I did find out how to take screenshots with the UI off. Dragon Nest is a beautiful game and as I level up I'm getting to see new and ever more spectacular locations. Trying to position the camera just so to get shots I could crop for the blog was getting old so I googled "Dragon Nest Hide UI". That got me some helpful information that turned out to be completely wrong.

Everybody jump!

It was helpful because it started me looking at the Gestures, those little icons you can slot to your hot bar and press to make your character perform various emotes. I'm not much of an emote person. I don't use them a lot in any game. I had noticed the gestures existed but I'd never bothered to play around with them.

Supposedly there was a "Selfie" gesture that would hide the UI and take a screenshot. No there isn't. In some version of Dragon Nest, maybe. Not in the one I'm playing. There is a Gesture with the same icon but it does nothing at all. There's also one called Jump Photo. That one makes you leap into the air but it doesn't take a screenshot of you doing it. 

While I was researching all this, however, I happened to notice someone on a thread explaining that the way you got your UI back after you'd taken a selfie was by pressing Ctr-I-PrtScr all at once. If that was a toggle...

It is a toggle! It's also a blindingly awkward combo but who cares? It works! Now I can take all the fullscreen shots I want. And I looked at all the Gestures and there are some great ones. I'll be able to take some amazing shots of Dora in all kinds of hilarious poses in front of gorgeous backdrops with no visual clutter.

I just have to work out how to get her something more impressive to pose in than shorts and a waistcoat. Plus she needs a pony. And a hedgehog.

Everyone needs a pony and a hedgehog. If that's not the law it damn well ought to be. I guess I'd better find a way to make it happen.

Pretend We're Dead: EverQuest II

It's that time of the year again. Almost. The second week in October feels a little early but there's so much to do. Earlier the better.

EverQuest II's Halloween celebration, Nights of the Dead, is one of the biggest holidays in a calendar chockful of major events. Over fifteen years the program has expanded to include nearly twenty quests, half a dozen collections, a couple of races and a slew of Achievements.

For crafters there are a dozen books filled with themed recipes and the number of items to be bought from special vendors with the event currency, Candy Corn, is frankly insane.

I seem to be shifting into something of an EQII phase right now. Whether it's the fallout from the Blizzard Bombshell or just that there's a positively overwhelming amount of stuff to do in Norrath this Autumn I'm not sure. A bit of both I expect.

This year, to make things easier, all the items from earlier years are on the vendor to the left (the tall one) and all the new stuff is on the little fella to the right.

The thing that I perhaps don't stress strongly enough about  EQII is the sheer quantity of things the game offers that I genuinely want my characters to own. Every holiday comes stuffed to bursting with house items I covet and appearance items I want my characters to wear. This is a sensation few MMORPGs give me.

There are also mounts and familiars and petamorph wands that turn your boring old elemental or undead pet into something far more aesthetically pleasing. All of it free if you just play the game. A few top items take some effort but the tokens to buy most things can be earned in minutes. Unless you want a lot of them, of course; then it's a lot of minutes.

I could very easily spend most of each month doing the current event (or, often, events - there are so many they frequently overlap) if I was so inclined. In the past, when EQII was my primary MMORPG, that's exactly what I did.

The game also has the best cash shop I have seen in any game, by which I mean there's actually stuff in it that I both like the look of and find reasonably-priced. This morning I broke into my savings to give my Necromancer something she's always wanted - a witch's broomstick to ride. I may well buy another for my ratonga necro on my older account, too.

From left to right: Necro Undead Tank Pet, Clockwork Mercenary Dok Tok, Bat Familiar (comes with the broom), Black Cat, (also comes with broom), Snowman Appearance Pet (doesn't know what month it is). The pumpkin's not mine.

Before that I ran my Berserker through the excellent new quest, "Night of the Barking Dead". There's a short walkthrough on EQ2Traders but I didn't need to refer to it. Everything you have to do is fully signposted in game.

The quest begins when you dig up an NPC named Thieving Hardy, a fresh addition to the regular gravedigging event. I got him on about the fourth or fifth dig. He drops a "gnollish terraporter rune bone". When you examine it a quest pops up, sending you to where any veteran would have gone instinctively - the infamous Splitpaw Gnoll terraporter at Mirror Lake in Thundering Steppes.

This infernal device used to be the bane of my life back in 2005. It was the way into the second Adventure Pack, The Splitpaw Saga and if you'd bought that, which naturally I had, every time you happened to aggro one of the gnolls standing near it you'd be hoiked into Splitpaw.

The Splitpaw Saga was a very popular addition to the game in its day, largely because certain parts of it could be run and re-run for very good, fast xp. I liked it well enough the first time but I never felt much need to go through it again. Being yanked off my feet and stuffed into an underground cave just because I happened to have passed a foot too close to a gnoll was something I found quite annoying.

Don't yank my chain.

Unless you had Call To Home up (and it had a sixty minute cooldown) you were stuck in Splitpaw unltil you could fight your way out. That took ages, assuming you were even playing a class that could solo well enough to do it at all. Most of the Gnolls were Heroic mobs meant for groups. I died a lot trying to escape that dog-hole.

Worst of all, Splitpaw used a new mechanic that the developers were determined to show off at every opportunity. You had to find and carry boxes and barrels from one part of the dungeon to another, stack them up and climb on them to get over various obstacles. Fun the first time - infuriating the fifth.

Thankfully, the new quest doesn't make you do any of that. All the kidnapping gnolls have been temporarily removed so you can approach the terraporter and enter the Splitpaw Crypt in your own time. When you get inside all you have to face are at-level solo mobs.

"I didn't want these old bones anyway!

Best of all, at no point do you have to carry anything anywhere. There were two places where mobs were up on platforms above me, one of which has to be killed for the quest to progress, but there's a handy ramp up to the first and the second I pulled easily with an AE.

The quest itself is a simple story, familiar but well told. I enjoyed it as a classic fireside cautionary tale. It took me maybe fifteen minutes to complete. The rewards were worth it - a choice of two good house pets or twenty-five candy corn, a sum that will stand you several worthwhile purchases at the event vendors.

All being well, I plan on running that quest with a few other characters on various servers and accounts. I'd also like to farm some Candy Corn and go on a bit of a spending spree. There's a lot from previous years I haven't picked up yet and I want it!

"I choose you!" Oh, wait, wrong game...

There are also two new collections that I'd like to do but they involve throwing pumpkin bombs at other players. This posed me two problems this morning: I didn't have any pumpkins and there were very few other players. Hardly surprising since I was on a U.S, server at about three a.m. Pacific. I'll have to work out how to get the bombs and then come back in the late evening my time, when people in America are just settling down for an evening's fun.

I also want to run through the repeatable pre-expansion quests a few times while they're still around. I haven't yet taken a look at either of the two main quests for that event, either. Not to mention Fabled Kael, the dungeon that was added a month or so back...

My annual All Access subscription just renewed, too, reminding me I'm getting close to having too many subscriptions. When I get back to work I think something might have to give, especially if the EQII expansion makes it for November.

All things considered, it's a great time to be an MMORPG player. Well, depending which games you play, I guess.