Gnomes, Pandas And Flying Sharks - It Can Only Be Summer At Daybreak

I've been out and about doing stuff today so this is a bit of a cobbled together at the last minute post. It's also one of those "Here are some things I'm going to do that I haven't actually done yet" affair, by which I mean I've taken a few press releases and made a post out of them.

Which, yes I know, is cheap. So sue me. You think I get paid for this?

In all cases it's Daybreak I'm talking about. We're just about to hit the big summer festival season in EverQuest II and Niami Denmother has a couple of articles up at EQ2 Traders about it. The first is about Tinkerfest, which she describes as the "annual gnomish (including honorary gnomes) celebration".  Ratongas like to tinker, too, but gnomes don't like to talk about that much. Don't like the competition.

I used to take this one quite seriously. Well, as seriously as you can take anything involving gnomes. I played a few of them (And Ratongas, too.) and at least one of my gnomes had a suitably gnomish residence (See how I resisted saying gnome-home there?) full of the kind of widgets and cogs that make any self-respecting gnome happy.

And, let's face it, all gnomes are self-respecting. A bit too much so for some people. Have you ever met a gnome with an inferiority complex? Or a gnome suffering from imposter syndrome? No, they're all hyper-confident megalomaniacs with delusions of grandeur. It's compensation for their obvious deficiencies in other departments, I imagine, although I'm no expert in gnomish psychology. Thankfully.

But they sure can tinker. If you want something bolted onto something else, these are your guys. Tinkerfest is one of Norrath's  bigger festivals so after a couple of decades it's acquired a lot of cruft. EQ2 Traders has a neat overview and I'm going to steal it, just to fill the post out a bit:

Is this your first time celebrating this event? Or is your memory fuzzy enough that you need a refresher?

• Gnomeland Security in the Steamfont Mountains is the main hub for this event, with portals from all "celebration" areas sending you back to the main hub in Gnomeland. (Celebrating gnomes, surrounded by harvestable cogs and purple shinies, can be found in all home cities as well as the docks of Thurgadin, the gnome area in Solusek's Eye, and Dropship Landing in the Moors)
• The shiny tinkerfest cogs, used for shopping and for crafting, are harvestable "!" items in all celebration areas. They can also be brought back by an upgraded pack pony (100 per 2-hour run).
• The second purple shiny collection (added in 2016) requires that you have completed (and handed in) the first purple shiny collection. Once you have done so, half of the collection can then be found in the Gnomeland Security area; the other half of the collection will be found in Qeynos and Freeport in the celebration areas.
• You will need to know the gnomish language (from a language trainer if you're not a gnome) in order to obtain some of the quests.
• Vendor Tarly in Gnomeland Security will sell all of the past Tinkerfest recipes and items for you while vendor Myron will sell the current year's recipes and items. You will need some shiny tinkerfest cogs before you can buy the books, so scrounge up a few before you go shopping.
• The quest tracker included in a section below will be a godsend if you are trying to run more than one alt through the event. Quest details for all quests can be found on the wiki's Tinkerfest article.
• During the event, there will be a markable sign in several of the Tinkerfest areas, for the Party Sign! Excellent! achievement for those who missed getting the Tinkerfest update for it last year.
• Protip: if you see an item sold on either Myron or Tarly that costs 2 Shiny Tinkerfest Cog, it usually means that it can also be crafted. (Or is a special achievement unlock.)

That quest breakdown, linked in Niami's piece, is huuuuuge. I'm reasonably confident I've done everything on there at least once, some things many times. and by this stage, I'm pretty much tinkered out so I have no plans on doing any of it again. 

I do generally try to do any new quests that get added, just for the sake of being able to say I've done them all, but by now there's really no need for any more activities in most of the festivals. There's literally more than enough to do already. Technically, there is one new Tinkerfest quest this year but it looks to be nothing more than a repeatable option added to an existing quest. If so, I'll pass, thanks.

Even if you're done with the event itself, though, it's still worth noting down the dates because the special Summer Jubilee dungeon, Triad of Elements, only opens during the big three. 

The three tent-pole attractions are:

Tinkerfest — June 6, 2024 to June 19, 2024

Scorched Sky Celebration — June 28, 2024 to July 11, 2024

Oceansfull Festival — August 8, 2024 to August 21, 2024 

Running Triad of Elements multiple times is the only way to get this year's Plume for your Plume slot. I don't think there are details on stats for those yet but if things follow the usual pattern, it will be better than any of the inferior Plumes crafters can make. 
 
As to how essential Plumes actually are, I'll leave that to someone who does the harder content. I got mine the first year they added them and I haven't bothered since. I'm not a fan of running the same dungeon over and over.

The Summer Jubilee currency, Platinum Medals, can also be earned while the other summer festivals are running, the regularly-scheduled minor festivals that sprawl across the summer months, things like the Moonlit Enchantments and the City Festivals. The full, official write-up for the Jubilee is on the EQII website and EQ2 Traders version is here.

And that's it for EQII for the moment. I am still playing most days, by the way, although by playing I mostly mean logging in to set and collect my Overseer rewards. We'll see if the summer splurge of festive activities draws me back in. I do like me a good festival.

On, then, to DCUO, which I am very much not playing. I'm not playing it to the extent that I haven't even installed it on the "new" PC. It wasn't on the SDD I transferred across so it's languishing on the old machine. 

I am contemplating setting the old one up to be permanently available. The issue is where to put it. Until then, though, if I wanted to play DCUO, I'd have to re-install it. And why would I want to do that?

That's why! Come on! Wouldn't you re-install for that shark? I want that thing!

Daybreak has a very solid record on supporting Pride Month. I haven't mentioned EQII's contribution to the cause yet because I'm incompetent and disorganized but it's moar pandas!

I actually have more multicolored rabbits and red pandas than I know what to do with, which won't stop me collecting these, too. I might hold back on getting them for every character this time, though. It's a lot of bag space. 

That shark, though... with the flag! Gotta have it!

Just to round out the Daybreak news, there's a limited time promo on subscriptions happening. Wilhelm wrote an excellent piece comparing MMORPG subs, in which I thought Daybreak's All Access came out clearly on top. It's going to be an even better deal for a while because they've added some extras. 

100 slot Broker boxes and a 25% boost to what is now arguably the game's primary currency, Status, are  not to be missed. And while they're limited-time offers, the limits are pretty generous - the end of August for quarterly subs and the end of November for six and twelve months. If you were vaguely thinking of subbing, that might swing it for you.

And that's all I have from the Daybreak News Desk for now. I'm off to download DCUO and get my flying shark!  

We're On A Roadmap To Nowhere

Since it seems to have been the roadmap thing that caught the most attention yesterday, I'll go with it. It's a nuanced story with potentially worrisome implications and it also has the merit of relating directly to the main MMORPG I play these days, if and when I'm playing any, so it makes sense to give it some air.

Here's the background. Angeliana, the Senior Community Manager for both EverQuest titles, took to the forums over a week ago to clear up some concerns that had been expressed in Discord over the non-appearance of a 2026 Roadmap for either game:

"We have seen some people asking across forums and Discord about the status of a Roadmap for 2026. This is to inform everyone that we have chosen to forgo a roadmap this year. Our reason for this is simple: we would like to knock out the redundancy in posting the same information repeatedly and would much prefer to post articles closer to when things will be occurring, such as events and important news."

She later followed that bald statement with a gloss:

"The sole reason for this decision was the consensus in our forum threads, Discord, and social media post with the roadmap of it being the same things (such as yearly events) every year, so the roadmap was redundant information. We've decided to not post the roadmap and just post the important events and information closer to when they are happening instead of a roadmap. This does not mean the game is going into maintenance mode, or that it is closing down. It simply means we are attempting to remove redundant posts which we were told were unnecessary in years past.

Seasonal events and such can still be found in the in-game event calendar as well."

EverQuest players, who are by far the more sanguine and reasonable of the two tribes, seem largely to have agreed with the decision:

"Honestly, putting a document that was 90% events that happen every year and then trying to convince people that they were "accomplishments" was a bit of a con on the players. It was a good decision to stop doing it."

"I actually think the lack of a public roadmap makes sense when you compare EverQuest to other long‑running franchise"

"Yeah, the roadmap was just an event calendar, which we have in game... we love the new direction!"

Others were more concerned with the presentation of the change than the change itself:

"Redundancy or not it’s not a good look"

Most of that was on the first page of the thread. The other four spin off into minutiae about specific changes people are hoping for or dreading and the whole roadmap issue seems to get forgotten.

Over on the EverQuest II forums,  the temperature, as always, was higher:

"So, the answer to the lack of clear communication is to have less communication. Got it."

"It sounds like they have no clue what they're going to do and couldn't deliver on any promise they may have made."

"Doesn't bode well for the future of EQ2."

The EQII thread grumbles on for ten pages. I stopped reading after three. You can always rely on EQII players to find a way to spin anything into a guarantee the game is either about to go into maintenance mode or close down altogether. EQ players tend to take a longer view.

The kerfuffle went on so long Jenn Chan, Producer of both titles, had to step in and calm everyone down:

"Hey all, we've been reading your concerns with the dropping of a formal public roadmap this year. Just wanted to drop a quick non-fancy non-formal note in here for you all that made it to this page in the threads.

We're planning on putting out two Game Updates this year has we have for many-many years and there is a new expansion slated for the end of the year as has been the tradition. For those of you on Origins servers, Anashti Sul and Dozekar will be getting Rise of Kunark. Additionally, there will be a new Time-Locked Expansion server coming this year as well. This on top of all the numerous things we're regularly updating, improving, and fixing throughout the year.

No one can predict the future, but I can tell you we're expecting to keep putting out new things for you through the year and hopefully for many-many more years in the future."

That's basically a Roadmap without the fancy graphics. Or a Producer's Letter without the endless recaps and back-slapping. She's basically admitting that very, very little changes, year-on-year, in either game. There's a long-established rhythm that rarely varies and everyone who plays knows perfectly well what it is.

So what does the Roadmap do? Well, I guess it's primarily a PR device. It's a nice graphic that gaming sites can use as filler, which at least gets the names of the games out there again. It's also, theoretically, an enticement for people who've never played or who haven't played for a while to see what's coming and maybe decide to join in.

On that basis, it seems like it would generally be worth a day of someone's time to put one together, even if it didn't say anything very new. On the other hand, after a few years, it's going to start looking a bit obvious to everyone that these games just do the same things, year after year, so maybe there are better ways to promote the titles.

The nominal reason for dropping Roadmaps is that players have been complaining Roadmaps don't tell them anything they didn't already know, which is almost certainly true. As a lot of commenters point out, though, what those complainants were hoping for were more relevant, useful Roadmaps that did tell them something, not the complete removal of Roadmaps altogether.

My feeling is that those sorts of Roadmaps aren't possible. The precise, technical gameplay detail people are asking for is not going to be amenable to being locked down months in advance. That's like asking for July's Patch Notes in February. 

As for macro changes and events, there pretty much are none that we don't already know about - two Game Updates and One Expansion per year has been the pattern for a decade now. Every so often there's a major technical development or a big UI switch but those often get delayed so it makes good sense to announce them separately, when they're imminent.

Even if it may be perfectly sensible to stop doing Roadmaps, you do have to wonder why a developer would take the risk once the tradition has been established. Yes, players are going to complain it's more of the same old, same old but it's a fair bet there's going to be a bigger hoohah if the Roadmaps just vanish. Surely the really safe, lazy option would be to keep banging out the old copperplate versions, taking the mild flack for not saying anything new and carrying on?

I have no idea why they didn't do that but I can speculate with the best of them:

• Literally no-one at Darkpaw was keen to do a Roadmap this year so rather than draft someone to do it they decided not to bother.
• They were all so deluded they really believed players would be happy to see the back of Roadmaps.
• Someone looked at how much it cost to produce the Roadmaps and decided axing them could pay for a new coffee-maker.
• Someone realized the games were already in a weird kind of de facto Maintenance Mode, albeit one that includes two big, free updates and a paid expansion a year, and it seemed like a good idea to acknowledge the situation, without actually admitting to it.
• Management knew EG7 was going to make some genuinely major change in 2026 (Could be good, could be bad...) and since there was no way that could be included in a Roadmap, it was either lie about it or don't do one.

Or, more realistically and more depressingly, the Darkpaw team genuinely doesn't know what this year holds and isn't willing to commit to any kind of timetable. We know the games are in more trouble than usual. The last EQ TLE server didn't do all that well and then there was the Heroes Journey, peeling loyal players off and turning them so now they'll most likely never come back. 

As for EQII, it's always a little surprising it keeps going. The players always seem to hate most of the changes that get made, most of which only happen because the devs are desperately trying to come up with ways to keep the game going. Unfortunately, every change seems to drive a few more players away and the population keeps getting smaller and smaller...

I don't read too much into just the abandonment of Roadmaps. The games do both have a really excellent in-game calendar that covers about 75% of what was in the Roadmaps, while the other 25% is mostly the two GUs and the XPack, all of which turn up as regularly as any Holiday Event. No-one who plays the games needs a Roadmap.

On the other hand, abandoning them is undeniably a Bad Look. I really don't see why they wouldn't just do the minimum, knock out the usual, boring, predictable graphic, send out the press release and let it go. I don't think it's a portent of doom per se but it's certainly an odd choice.

I guess now we'll have to wait and see if Jenn Chan carries on with her Producer's Letters. Those are even more redundant than the Roadmaps, much of the time, what with half of everything she says referring to things that have already happened. Logic says if Roadmaps go, Producer's Letters should, too. Common sense, self-preservation and, let's hope, any self-respecting Marketing Department, says the opposite.

Just one, final, unsettling observation. I'm always alert to qualifiers and I noticed immediately just how many Jenn dropped in her supposedly re-assuring statement: "planning", "expecting", "hopefully" and, most chilling of all, "No one can predict the future". 

Maybe not but I suspect she might have had a premonition...

 

 

Notes on AI used in this post.

That ugly second illustration. As opposed to the ugly first illustration. Honestly, they're both pretty horrible. It took me about the same amount of time to find, copy and deface the original 2025 EQII Roadmap as it did to draft a prompt and run four versions at NightCafe, of which the one I used was the first, so the other three don't really factor in, timewise. I just thought surely I could get something better but noooo....

The model I used was Z-Image Turbo and the prompt was "A Roadmap Graphic for the MMORPG EverQuest II for the year 2026, with "CANCELLED" stencilled across it in huge letters. Visual style to resemble an infographic to be used in a slide projection." It did the job - I asked for something dull and boring and that's exactly what I got.

It handled the title perfectly for a change so I guess if I'd specified some headings I could have gotten something that looked a lot more convincing instead of the nonsense it came up with on its own. Then again, maybe that's Koada`Dal or something. I mean, it could be...

 

Free To A Good Home - Or Any Home, Really...

Since I mentioned it yesterday, I suppose I ought to do something about it. Collecting all those freebies, I mean. There comes a time, though, when logging into multiple games you have no real intention of playing, to collect items you don't particularly want and are never likely to use, starts to feel a bit... crazy?

Not that any of that applies to the giveaways in EverQuest II, of course. They're all either practical or pretty and I'm sure I'll get some very good use out of each and every one of them. Definitely.

They come in two sizes - the one-size-fits-all Milestone Celebration Crate currently being handed out for free to every character under all payment plans and the deluxe Milestone Celebration Subscriber Crate that's reserved for paying customers only and which comes one per account.

I won't go through the contents in detail - there's a comprehensive breakdown on the official website complete with all items and applicable restrictions - but I will mention a couple of things. 

The per-character crate is auto-gifted to each character as you log them in but the Subscriber crate has to be claimed. All the contents of the latter are Heirloom, though, so it doesn't matter much which character on the account grabs it. All the contents can be handed around as appropriate later.

The giveaway runs until September 23rd so you have a while. I'm not entirely sure I'd say it was worth logging in if you aren't subbed and aren't playing at the moment because the freebies for F2P are far from essential... although the Toyger vanity pet is very cute and probably does count as essential for cat-lovers. 

The bow isn't particularly special and I don't care for the illusion much but there is an advisory to that last. I actually don't like illusions at all and have them switched off but I always forget that when the game gives me a new one, which is why I clicked this one on to take a screenshot and of course nothing happened... except something actually did.

I got smaller. A lot smaller. It seems that even with illusions toggled off, the Milestone Guardian Illusion shrinks you to the size you would be if you could see it. Since being really small is something of an obsession with some players, this might be a very welcome side-effect. I don't know if it's intended - I'd bet it isn't - so it might get nerfed but for now it's a handy way to shrink your character while keeping your original appearance.

As for the Subscriber pack, I would strongly recommend anyone who's paying for All Access at least logs in once to claim it. It's a good one. 

There's a very nice set of fancy wings that also act as a flying mount. They come in a choice of light and dark but you can only have one or the other. The dark ones look a lot better in my opinion but I guess if your one of those people who have to make your character light up like a magnesium flare you might disagree.

There's a set of cosmetic armor which I didn't have the space to open (Oh, don't. Just...don't.) without shifting it through the shared bank to someone whose bags aren't completely full. There's also no illustration on the website, which seems odd. I might log back in and get a screenshot of it before I post this. [Edit - I did not.]

There are also some item unattuners, which people always seem to appreciate. I hardly ever use them but I think I'm in a minority there.

With considerable irony, the final item in the pack is a 66 slot bag. That would have solved my space issues - for about five minutes. I was very excited when I saw it because, as the name of this blog might suggest, inventory management is a bit of a thing of mine. Well, inventory, anyway. Managing it, not so much.

After the initial excitement faded I started to wonder whether 66 slots would actually be an upgrade to any of my six character inventory slots. EQII is insanely generous with storage space. I counted the available slots per character once and it goes well into four figures. Even character inventory, the stuff you lug around with you, easily passes five hundred slots.

I checked and the new bag does actually beat two of the six I have equipped, albeit one only by a couple of spaces. I have two 88 slot bags, a 72, another 66, a 64 and a bog-standard 48 slotter that is now going to go to someone else. 

The new bag also doubles as an appearance item, a papoose with two "adorable" panda cubs peeping out. I don't really like those much. The pandas, that is. The bag itself is OK, especially the rolled-up umbrella down the side. It's a moot point anyway because you can either have your backpack showing or your back item, not both, and I vastly prefer those new wings to the pack. 

So much for the freebies that I wasn't going to describe in detail. At least that gave Lord of the Rings Online time to patch. 

The giveaway there is not all that interesting for casuals like me because the big ticket item is a new instance tuned for max level players. There's also a vanity pet and a "Portrait Frame", which is a thing I had no idea existed in LotRO. I associate those almost entirely with Eastern F2Ps. You need to use a code in game to claim all of these and the offer ends on 25 September.

Proving yet again that procrastination always pays off and a lot more interesting for occasional players is the news that the excellent mini-expansion from a while back, Before The Shadow, is now free to all. You don't have to do anything for that one. It's just there for everyone automatically. 

If you don't remember it, it's the one that added two large, new starter zones, which was why I bought it when it came out. I never even got to the end of the first zone so I could have waited until it went free, as it was always, inevitably, going to do. That'll teach me.

There is, however, a free mount to go with that offer. Two actually, one for freeloaders and a second for paying customers, although free players can take the VIP mount token and stash it for the day much wished for by Standing Stone when they decide to subscribe. 

Again, you have to apply a code in game for that one, something I am going to go and do right now... and it turns out the Azure Steed is the grown-up version of the Azure Pony I already have. Not sure if that's a hobbit thing. It's account-bound anyway so it can be handed on to someone who needs it.

Of course, what I really need in LotRO is that 66 slot bag...

The final update and login for me this morning was DCUO, where the freebie on offer was a crappy set of  dragon horns. Oh, sorry... "Archdragon Horns". That makes all the difference. I imagine someone is going to get all excited by the chance to have a couple of ugly protuberances grow out of their head but it won't be me. Still claimed them, though.

There are some much nicer cosmetics in the same free offer but for those you actually have to play the game a bit and I wasn't up for that today. I have parked in the relevant instance so the wings and baby dragon pets may one day be mine. The stupid horns are only available until 9 September but the good stuff stays on the instance vendor indefinitely, so no rush.

The giveaways in LotRO and DCUO are part of Daybreak's Year of the Dragon, a celebration of fifty years of Dungeons & Dragons, which does seem a tad random until you remember they also publish and, I think, own Dungeons & Dragons Online through SSG, who run both that and LotRO... or something. Who knows any more?

It seemed a bit odd I hadn't heard about similar giveaways in the EverQuest titles too but it turns out that's because I hadn't been paying close enough attention. I had to ask Gemini for the details, something I do quite often these days because it is quite often actually faster than just googling, believe it or not, and reasonably reliable so long as you check the sources. It seems I was only just in time.

The free gifts in both games are less than spectacular: a dragon statue for your house. They're available for no cost in the cash shop. You just have to log in and "buy" them but you'd better get on with it because both offers end tomorrow. If you don't have time for that, never fear! It seems there will be something else for free in both games for September. 

I logged back into EQII to pick up my dragon statue because I spend a lot of time in various houses there and I'm sure it will fit in somewhere. I long ago gave up trying to maintain my houses in EverQuest, though, and I don't propose to start again, so I passed on that one.

After all of that, I was pretty much done with logging into games to get free stuff. I'm sure there are lots more games on my hard drive that would like to shower me with gifts if I'd only log in but there's only so many hours in the day and I've used up all of those I'm willing to spend on it right now.

Tomorrow though...

The Daybreak Home For Failing Games Is Delighted To Announce A Grand Re-Opening Party: Guest Of Honor - Palia.

The most unexpected gaming news of the week has to have been the gathering of Palia developer Singularity 6 into the welcoming embrace of Daybreak Games, an enfoldment only made possible, as Wilhelm was at some pains to point out, through the opening of EG7's wallet. Then again, with EG7 arguably in the process of being consumed from the inside by the company it thought had devoured and digested, the point may well be moot.

I think it's safe to assume we won't be seeing a similar parasitic assimilation this time around. The announced intention and best case scenario would appear to be Singularity 6 continuing in the current direction of travel, driving its own bus in the proven manner long established by Standing Stone Games, the ostensibly independent owners and operators of Lord of the Rings Online, while somewhere in the back, Ji Ham calls out course corrections and tells the driver when to pull over for a comfort break.

Palia is one of many - almost certainly too many - cozy crafting titles, development of which seemed to proliferate following the Great Sequestration at the beginning of the 2020s. The popularity of sitting indoors pretending you were walking around doing the kinds of simple, natural, soul-regenerating things that had suddenly became forbidden in real life - things like meeting friends, swapping gifts and romancing strangers - made a disturbing amount of sense in the plague years but it was always going to be a risky proposition when the masks came off and hands got dirty again for real.

Palia had a good head of steam behind it when it went into open beta less than a year ago (Really? That recently? Seems like a lot longer.) but the game as it could be played then turned out to be a lot less compelling than many had hoped or more likely imagined. I spent a few hours trying to like it and didn't make too much progress, either in the game or with my feelings for it.

Curiously, in about the only substantial post I wrote about my brief experience, I went on at some length about the existential difference between playing a game solo with other people around and just plain solo. Online or offline, in other words. That is also what I came here to talk about today.

When I heard that Daybreak had taken custody of the failing property, alleged to be teetering somewhere between maintenance mode and utter extinction, my immediate thought was to wonder what the heck they thought they were going to do with it. 

On the surface the acquisition makes sense. Their business, going back through ancestral roots with Sony Online Entertainment, revolves entirely on building, buying or curating MMOs of various kinds and Palia is supposedly an MMO. 

In my admittedly brief time with it, however, my overriding impression was that it neither felt like nor needed to be one and that I wasn't sure I wouldn't prefer it if it wasn't, something about which I was quite conflicted:

"As I've said many times, I hugely prefer playing online, among others, even when all I do is solo and never talk to anyone. I've said that just knowing a game-world is shared with thousands, even millions of people makes everything I do there feel more meaningful than if I was playing wholly alone, entirely unseen."

I'm not sure I feel that way any more. What's more, in ceasing to be convinced of the innate superiority, let alone necessity, of a shared, online existence when it comes to playing games, I may be not so much changing my coat as readjusting it to fit the zeitgeist.

A few years ago, all talk was of Live Service. Everything had to be online, always. From the player's perspective, the idea seemed to be that, once you began playing a game, you'd never have to stop. From the business end, expectations revolved around locking players into an eternal purchasing cycle, mostly involving Seasons, that would mean no-one would ever need to make a new game again.

That never-ending search for the Forever Game seems to have morphed into a peculiar form of mutually assured destruction, with swarms of players descending on every new hopeful just long enough to strip it bare and spit it out before swirling up and away towards the next. Developers are indeed freed from making new games but only at the expense of desperately trying to pump out new content for the only one they ever did make fast enough to stop the last few customers abandoning them forever.

Now everyone's had the chance to see how Live Service works in practice, it seems the story has changed. Like gamification and the metaverse it's no longer a buzzword, more of a curse. Of late, we've begun to see not just resistance but active push-back. The pressure may finally be starting to generate a response.

A couple of formerly multiple titles that each built a similar momentum to Palia's before most people could play them - Nightingale and Wayfinder - have each removed the requirement for an active internet connection while playing.

 Airship Syndicate claimed they were responding to "a shift in the industry where players are OK paying for a premium title if it means respect for their time and wallets". Inflexion made it clear they were responding directly to player pressure, saying "We’ve seen a lot of discussion in recent days around our decision to make Nightingale online-only at our Early Access release. We understand that this can be frustrating..."

The upshot in both cases was to take the games offline or at least offer an offline option. Arguably neither was a full MMORPG but another recent title, Islands of Insight self-professedly was and now that, too, will be adding an offline mode in a week or so. Meanwhile, Amazon Games has been tying itself in knots attempting to rebrand New World for console as an "action RPG". They aren't atually taking the game offline but you get the feeling they wish they could.

Everything has its day. Maybe even the Internet. Tobold seems to think so and he stopped playing MMORPGs ages ago, perhaps in preparation for the day when it would all fall apart.

I'm not quite ready to settle down in my bunker with a diesel generator, a console and a stack of cartridges just yet but I do think the online honeymoon is probably over. The days when it seemed like magic just to be there, wherever there was, alongside hundreds, even thousands of other people, all doing the same imaginary things in the same imaginary space, are long gone. 

Now, when you hear people talking about what it's like being online, they're mainly complaining about how awful it is or reminiscing about how great it used to be. If anyone talks about the "magic" you can bet it's the magic of nostalgia. The zeitgeist seems to be in retrograde right now as people rediscover the ownership rights and privacy they thought ten years ago they'd never need to think about again.

I don't think time rolls back that easily. I suspect internet denial will be a niche movement for the rest of my lifetime, at least. Always online though? Live service? I suspect those will slowly go the way of so many other trends that once seemed unstoppable but which now need to be explained to anyone who didn't happen to be around at the time.

Palia, to swing back to where we began, looks to me like the very sort of game that would be well-served by an offline mode. If you google it you'll quickly see I'm not the only one who sees it that way. 

Daybreak seems to be one of the companies least likely to facilitate such a change of direction. As SOE they first had a reputation for keeping dead games online and then for mercilessly shutting them down but they've never been in the business of packaging them up for offline play. DBG has mostly concentrated on curating the games it acquired after SOE cut back the deadwood.

The upside of that downbeat projection is that they've done a pretty good job of it. DBG are MMO specialists and they seem to have the knack of keeping the games at least ticking over to the satisfaction of enough players to keep them commercially viable. If Palia is going to make it, somehow, as an MMO, they've gone to the right place. 

The question remains whether there's really enough demand for a massively multiplayer gardening game or, as Singularity Six prefers to put it, "A cozy community sim MMO for you and your friends". If I had to bet, I'd say there may be - but if there is it won't be this one. 

Still, at least now the game is under the Daybreak umbrella, it probably means I'll at least be checking in now and again to see how things are going. That'll be one more for the MAU.

Are we still counting those?

I wouldn't have said that a couple of days ago.

Games For Sale

I logged into EverQuest II for the first time in... well, I can't exactly remember how long. Before I started playing Palworld, that's for sure, so about a month? It wasn't that I even wanted to play the game today, not especially, although I'm pretty much always up for an EQII session. It was more that I felt that, since I paid for an annual subscription last September and the recent expansion two months later, I probably ought at least to make an effort to get some of my money's worth.

And that, right there, is the problem with traditional subscription and buy-to-play payment models. I can't help thinking the best reason I could have for wanting to log in to a game would be a strong desire to play it right now, not because I'm worrying about money I spent on it months ago.

The conter-argument would be that I'd paid for everything up-front so I could enjoy the game and the expansion at my leisure. And anyway, I'd made the decision to spend some time with the game today and I was expecting to enjoy myself. Only I didn't even manage to clock up five minutes in Norrath before I found myself back here, writing about it instead. 

To some degree, that's reflective of where the pendulum is on my gaming arc. I tend to vary between wanting to play games more than write about them and the reverse. Currently I'm in an authorial phase. The pendulum will swing back. It always does.

Mostly, though, my failure to stick with what I'd planned for more than five minutes comes down to what I saw in the launcher as the game was updating, plus some things I've read about EG7 in recent days. Straws are flying in the wind and they're getting hard to ignore.

Wilhelm posted a thoughtful examination of the prospects for the company, under pressure from investors to maximize the profit potential of a portfolio that includes not just the two EverQuest titles but DCUO and - at a slight and somewhat nebulous remove - Lord of the Rings Online, Dungeons & Dragons Online and Magic: the Gathering - as well as the ever-promising but rarely delivering H1Z1 and the largely ignored and forgotten Planetside 2. 

Except, on that last one... does the EG7 portfolio still include PS2?

It seems not. Not any more. Word is that Planetside 2 has been sold to... someone. To whom is less clear.

The Enad Global 7 Q4 Interim Report published this week simply states "Daybreak successfully closed on the sale of a non-core IP for USD 5.9 million." As far as I can tell, neither EG7 nor Rogue Planet Studios (The game's nominal developer.) nor DBG has made any public statement about who the new owner might be but it seems certain the title to all Planetside properties has been transferred to a shell company going by the name of Bay Tree Tower Ltd, about whom absolutely nothing of substance is known.

This, naturally, has lead to all kinds of speculation, from the game being shut down as a tax write-off at one extreme to the new owner being Amazon Games who, under John Smedley's auspices, will go on to make Planetside 3 at the other. Someone on Reddit even claims to have found proof on the dark web that the real owners of Bay Tree Tower are Tencent. Feel free to go look that one up for yourselves.

I have no interest in Planetside 2. I'm always a little surprised it's still going, let alone that it seems to be quite popular in certain circles. I have played it and while it seemed fine, it really wasn't my kind of thing. Seeing a whole game removed from the DBG roster and handed off to person or persons unknown, however, is a little... disturbing.

If I was going to speculate, which clearly I am or I wouldn't have started this paragraph by suggesting it, I'd guess PS2 won't resurface as part of the portfolio of another games aggregator like Gamigo or Valofe, for the simple reason that companies like that are usually all too happy to let everyone know when they grab a new moneymaker. 

The use of a shell company suggests something someone doesn't want anyone to know about, which given Daybreak's record, would be business as usual. They seem to specialize in obfuscatory smokescreens, frequently for reasons that never do come fully to light, suggesting they not only do it, they're quite good at doing it. It wouldn't even surprise me if turns out they've sold the game to themselves, somehow, especially since it appears that although the IP rights have moved, publishing remains with DBG. Again, it probably wouldn't be the first time...

In other words, whoever owns PS2, it'll be business as normal for players until further notice, which I guess is something. Meanwhile, the other stand-out item in that quarterly statement was this: 

EG7 has initiated several new growth Initiatives, including... EG7’s own release of a new H1Z1 game.... Currently in concept exploration phase with pre-production phase coming up next.

Daybreak is aiming to enter the production phase for the title on the second half of 2024.

It's ironic that H1Z1 features zombies. It's the franchise that just won't die. I did kinda-sorta know there was some idea of a new take on H1Z1 but I figured it would be another revamp of the existing property or a rerun of one of the old versions. I hadn't realized it was going to be a whole new game...

I'm not going to run through the full report. I'll leave that to Wilhelm, who I'm sure will do a far better job of it than I would. I'll just mention that overall, EG7 seems to be doing about as well as can be expected in what has been a brutal period for game development. The biggest hit to profitabilty seems to have been the inevitable bursting of the My Singing Monsters bubble; that and not managing to get DCUO onto the latest console generation in time for Christmas.

The latter is due to be corrected in the first quarter of this year although there has to be some concern over the letting-go of a number of people from Dimensional Ink, the subdivision responsible for DCUO. You might think they'd need everyone if the game is going to move forward this year.

All of that stands as background to what I saw when I logged in to EQII this morning, which was something much more immediately relevant to playing the game itself. As of now, if you'd like a leg-up doing that, Darkpaw would be more than happy to oblige.

To that end, they've added a couple of packs to the Cash Shop: the Darkpaw Hero Bundle and the Darkpaw Heroic Boost Bundle. The only difference between the two is that one comes with a boost to Level 125 and the other doesn't. Well, that and 3,500  DBC. 

Both versions contain a whole load of currencies and tokens intended both to let you skip a large amount of grind and instantly acquire very powerful spells and abilities. Level boosts are no longer controversial. The rest of it could be.

Since there's no limit on how many of these packs you can buy, there's also no real counter to the accusation that this is pay-to-win, pure and simple (Other than to point out that the very concept of "Pay to Win" in a game that, by definition, cannot be won, having no win condition, is meaningless, of course.) In theory, since each pack comes with your choice of a Grandmaster spell, you could potentially grandmaster all your spells for a thousand dollars or so. And who's to say someone hasn't already?

At the very least it represents a way of spending money to skip content and thereby progress much faster than those who choose not to purchase the packs or just can't afford them. And they aren't cheap. DBG conveniently sell their funny money at a thousand DBC for ten dollars, making conversion easy, although inevitably there are value deals for higher amounts to confuse things. For all intents and purposes, though, it's $40 for the Hero Bundle and $75 for the one with the boost.

And that might not be so bad if it was the end of the story but of course many, probably most, EQII players have multiple max-level characters. Even though some of the items in the pack are Heirloom and therefore tradeable within the purchasing account, a determined (Or should that be demented?) player might feel they needed dozens of these packs to get all their characters up to their full potential.

Instead of logging in, I clicked through the link in the launcher to read the forum thread on the announcement. It's three pages long and surprisingly evenly balanced between those who approve of the new bundles and those who object to them. 

Even then, the disapproval seems muted compared to what I would have expected a while back. Granted,  the rather good, newish Senior Community Manager, Angeliana, moderates the thread fairly strictly but I don't see much evidence of multiple posts being suppressed. Just the odd hothead, who can't tell the difference between forceful criticism and personal abuse.

There is an inevitable appearance of the old "I know five people who cancelled their subscriptions because of this" anecdote, of course. I think the first time I saw that on the forums must have been sometime in 2005 and it's been a constant, comforting presence ever since. 

On the whole, though, people seem either glumly resigned to yet another development confirming their bleak view that EQII now exists only as a miserable means of extracting money from fools and cheats or that being able to pay money to progress in a video game is a human right to be celebrated and anyone who says otherwise is just, like, so out of touch. 

I suspect that anyone who's genuinely unwilling to accept offers like these in the Cash Shop gave up playing the game long ago. Probably every game, since all of them do it. Anyone who's still here either does it themselves or has to play with those who do so it's pretty much a given of the game by now.

The more interesting question for me is whether something like this really works as a money-generating technique. It's really hard to tell from my perspective. As I've often said, most years I can barely get through the basic content included in the annual expansion before the next one arrives. The idea of paying to progress faster seems irrational. 

I kind of hope it does work. As someone on the thread points out, they need to monetize the game somehow. And it's not like they don't also sell a ton of cosmetic items that no-one could claim were Pay to Win. I'm fairly sure if those were doing the job we wouldn't be in this situation.

I have to assume DBG know their customers, who are almost all veterans of many years. Equally, those players must know what the game is, now. The entire end-game has been slowly shifted to an endless, incremental grind for various currencies and tokens, while the vast, submerged, iceberg-like bulk of everything else that's been added to the game over the preceding twenty years drifts along beneath, free and fair for anyone who cares to enjoy it. Not that many do.

As with every aging MMORPG, it's current content or bust. And that applies just as much to "Classsic" or "Progression" servers as it does to the "Live" game. Even the old has to be endlessly new or at least sold as such. It's a false dichotomy to pretend, as some do, that the TLE servers, with their throwback gameplay, are in some way more authentic than the rest. They demand their share of anything new that can be shoe-horned in to their rulesets just as vehemently as anyone on Live.

That, or some of it, is what I found myself thinking about when I went to log in this morning, with the result that instead of playing through the next instance in the Ballads of Zimara Signature Questline, I logged straight out again and came here to write this post. Maybe that's what I pay my subscription for - content for the blog.

Makes as much sense as anything else, I guess. I mean, I have literally scores of games installed I could be playing for free. Sometimes I wonder why I still subscribe. Sometimes I wonder why anyone pays for anything. 

I guess it's just as well someone does or this whole house of cards would come tumbling down. 

And then we'd all be sorry. 

Wouldn't we?

EverQuest 3 - What, This Again?!

I'm just going to put this down as a marker. I kind of feel I have to, for some reason, although God knows why.

MassivelyOP has a concise, if somewhat snarky, run-through of such facts as exist. If you're interested, as I'm unfortunately aware a lot of people will be, I suggest taking the thirty seconds or so it'll take to read it. (TAGN also put up an excellent post about it as I was typing this.)

The gist, for those who can't be bothered - and who could blame them after the EQNext debacle? - is that EG7 qua Daybreak Games has finally confirmed, unequivocally, that there is an intent to create a sequel to EverQuest and EverQuest II.

The project is in what they uncharmingly describe as the "ideation phase", which means they're still thinking about it. They haven't done anything yet. They don't even plan to start spending any money on it until next year, at which point they're in for around $30m, maybe more.

That doesn't sound much to make an AAA MMORPG but it does happen to be the same amount FromSoftware spent developing Elden Ring. At least, that's what CEO Ji Ham says in the presentation, although where he's getting that figure from beats me. Some sources suggest it cost more like $200m. Even the low end estimate is $50-$70m.

In any event, he's big on FromSoftware: "Those guys? Love 'em - in terms of their model." He believes their success proves that hardcore gameplay can be both mainstream and highly profitable. And he wants the proposed EQ3 to be all of those things. Especially the hardcore part.

I haven't watched the whole of the near three-hour presentation but I have skimmed a fair bit of it and it's surprisingly entertaining. Ji Ham is an even more surprisingly engaging presenter and a lot younger than I imagined. He's also very clearly a gamer, something I definitely did not expect. At one point he speaks rather wistfully about the hours he spent trying and failing to beat one of the bosses in Elden Ring.

If nothing else, I recommend listening to a few minutes from 2:18:00 onwards, when Ji Ham buys heavily into the narrative that EverQuest back in the day was a very tough game and that that's nothing to be afraid of, commercially. I don't personally go along with all of it but he's not saying anything out of line with the generally accepted view of either the franchise or the genre.

He even goes as far as to suggest that the time and effort spent trying to make the EverQuest IP (And by implication MMORPGs as a whole.) more accessible was a mistake, even if that interpretation does somewhat fly in the face of the success of World of Warcraft (For which he correctly names EverQuest as an ancestor and prime influence.) much of which can be put down to its design brief, which was in great part to be an easier and more accessible take on the successful EQ formula.

That's all in the past. Now, the future for the IP is uphill in the snow both ways. Again.

And he seems genuinely enthused by it, that's the strange part. It's like listening to a gamer as much as a businessman. Forget the uncomfortable fact that Elden Ring is a finite, single-player experience and the proposed EQ3 an open-ended, massively multiple live service title. Forget that the FromSoftware ethos, far from being any kind of universal gaming paradigm shift, is instead deeply divisive and the subject of endless, often acrimonious debate.

Even leaving Elden Ring out of it, it has to be acknowledged that the mass market credentials of self-styled "hardcore" MMORPGs are seriously tarnished following the failure of high-profile titles like WildStar and the consistent crash-and-burn meta surrounding just about every indie attempt to turn back time to the self-styled Golden Age of MMOs. But hey, props for trying!

A few years ago something like this might have given me heartburn but I just can't summon up the indignation any more. I've seen all this so many times I can barely be bothered to raise a skeptical eyebrow. This proposed game hasn't even begun development yet. Whatever anyone says about it now will be utterly irrelevant by the time it becomes publicly available, if indeed it ever does.

The timescales quoted in the presentation seem radically optimistic. Apparently the plan is to begin development in 2025 for a 2028 release. I'd be interested to know what the last AAA MMORPG to go from concept to launch in three years was. Even more interested to hear about the last one that did it successfully. 

I suppose if you start the clock running from now, you can stretch it to five years, which does sound more reasonable. Maybe the 2025 "Start of Investment" has some financial implication rather than meaning literally what it says. Maybe there are people working on the project already.

Even then, if the putative EQ3 were to hit some kind of Early Access in 2028, by then I'll be seventy years old. I will not be playing a "hardcore" MMORPG in my seventies. Even if you considered me to belong to one of the older cadres of EQ fans, I'd guess by 2028 the majority of EQ vets will be in their 40s and 50s. This game better not rely on the same kind of reaction times as Elden Ring.

It seems to me that, as I've said before, if EG7/DBG really want to publish a third iteration of EverQuest (A count, by the way, that ignores a whole bunch of titles that have used the IP, not least the PlayStation 2 exclusive MMORPG, EverQuest Online Adventures.) they really ought to think about buying Visionary Realms and having Pantheon rebadged as an EverQuest sequel, which it patently is anyway.

And that's about as much as I want to say about EverQuest 3 for now. In fact, I'd as soon forget about the whole thing altogether, at least until there's some kind of alpha or beta or Early Access that I can sign up for or buy into (Because, obviously, no matter how unsuitable it is or how far outside the target demographic I am, I'll have to at least give it a try...)

As Ji Ham rather gleefully suggests and MOP glumly acknowledges, this is a hype train no-one's going to be able to ignore. For reasons I really don't begin to understand, given that the original EverQuest was by absolutely no reasonable measure any kind of global brand, just the biggest fish in a very small pool that most people at the time didn't even know existed, the mere mention of any resurrection of the IP now seems to incite a frenzied response from gamers, most of whom surely can never have played any iteration of the IP at all, far less been there in 1999, when it all began.

At this point, the whole EverQuest phenomenon reminds me of the infamous Manchester Lesser Free Trade Hall Sex Pistols gig of 4 June 1976, which was attended by fewer than a hundred people but claimed as a seminal life experience by thousands. I look forward to years of listening to people droning on and on about what they imagine the new EQ will be like and throwing toddler-like tantrums when reality intrudes on their pipe dreams. Just like happened with EQNext and Landmark. Joy!

As for the plans for H1Z1... don't get me started!

A Question Of Pride

I feel like this is the same post I wrote the same time last year but what the hey. Life moves in clades as Bruce Stirling once said. Or maybe he didn't. And even if he did, it's hardly the same thing. I don't know why I brought it up.

Life is one big circle, maybe that's what I mean. Oh, wait, now I sound like I'm in The Lion King. Which could totally work, if could come up with some smart way of connecting Pride Month with a pride of lions.

And why not? It's just what Darkpaw did, when they ran out of rabbits to drape in the rainbow flags of all orientations. They just moved on to lions and started working through the list all over again, three at a time.

This year's trio is Aceheart, Openheart and Freeheart, which I'm reliably informed "represent asexual, non-binary, and pansexual orientations". I think that's in respective order, although it's not always obvious which colors match up with which flags. The names can be a little vague, too, although Aceheart is clear enough. 

The lions, which are Familiars in the game, and therefore functional as well as meaningful, are all free for the asking in the EverQuest and EverQuest II cash shops, as are all those from previous years. Since Familiars are character-bound rather than account bound, you'd need to claim them all separately for each character you'd like to have them, but you have the whole month to do it and indeed a bit longer than that; they'll be in the cash shop until the 9th of July.

I've already picked mine up for my two most-played EQII characters and I'll be collecting them for all the others as and when I log them in. It's been a while since I last logged into EQ and even longer since I actually played but I'll probably make time to get the latest lions for at least a couple of characters before they disappear.

As I said, though, it's no big deal if you miss the opportunity this time around. The whole, rolling carnival will be back next year, I'm sure.

Which is both wonderful and also slightly worrisome, in a way. If you wanted a textbook example of how mmorpg culture has changed for the better in the twentysomething years I've been playing, you couldn't ask for anything more than the widespread acceptance and acknowledgment of difference that comes with incorporating Pride Month into the official event seasons of the games themselves.

It's a very far cry indeed from the genre's origins, when only the bravest of souls would dare to mention the possibility that anyone playing might be anything other than a straight, white male. Back then, you could easily find yourself on the wrong side of a vocally violent in-game mob, just for raising the possibility that anyone might want to express themselves as anything other than that expected norm. Even more disturbingly, you could sometimes find yourself on the wrong side of the moderators or GMs too, especially if you had the temerity to stand your ground.

It wasn't always that bad by any means but it was a time when many, quite possibly most, players seriously did not believe anyone played the games they liked other than people they considered to be exactly like themselves. Anyone playing a female character was assumed to be male because girls didn't play mmorpgs (Or any video games, really.) and any male who played a female character was deemed to have some nefarious motivation probably best not revealed.

Without getting all Polyanna about it, things are demonstrably better now. I'm just not entirely convinced that the best way of expressing, consolidating and cementing that positive change is to keep giving away free stuff. It seems a little odd, that's all.

But, hey, free stuff, right? I'm not gonna say no...

In fact, I'm so much not going to say no that over the weekend I logged into two games I'm not currently playing just to grab the Pride freebies I'd heard they were giving away. I have no shame when it comes to freebies. Plus, I do like to represent, at least in small ways.

I guess that's a cue for a quick aside before I get to talking about the loot I got. As one of those supposedly stereotypical straight, white males, I haven't had to spend a whole lot of time reflecting on either my gender or my ethnicity. Or so you'd think. Except, of course, I have.

I'll put the ethnicity angle to one side for now and try to concentrate on one thing at a time for a change. I've been thinking about this a lot over the last few years. It's something Mrs Bhagpuss and I talk about quite often, too. I'm about as sure as it's possible to be from the precarious vantages of hindsight and hypothesis that, had the cultural framework to support it been in place when I was an adolescent, I would have identified differently to the way I did.

How I would have identified is another matter altogether. Adolescence is a contradictory time of both radical confusion and rabid certainty. I might well have picked a flag and waved it proudly. I might also have found the fence a very comfortable place to sit. 

Now, at my advanced age and with my immense and hard-won wisdom (I don't need to insert an irony emoji here, do I?) I'm starting to realise the Q in LGBTQ+ could have some connection to me. It would be tantamount to cultural appropriation for me to lay claim to Q for Queer but I feel quite comfortable in adopting its alternate meaning - Questioning. 

Next time I have to fill out one of those government forms with a box to tick for gender and/or orientation I'm going to give it a bit more thought. You're never too old to learn new things about yourself - or I hope not, anyway.

While I figure out what questions I ought to be asking, let alone what the answers might be, let's get back to the plunder! ArenaNet is giving away a nice pair of wings in Guild Wars 2 for this year's Pride although unlike Daybreak they don't seem to be making much of a noise about it. I heard about it from MassivelyOP but I didn't get any emails from ANet and there's no mention of it on the news feed on the official website.

The wings are supposed to make you look like a macaw. What does that have to do with Pride? I had no idea, so I asked Bard, Bing and ChatGPT. Unfortunately, the rabbit-hole that led me down would trip the entire post and send it cartwheeling into a thicket of unsubstantiated assertation, so let's just say I was not able to confirm a relationship between macaws and Pride, assume ANet knows something I don't and take it there must be more to it than a mere coincidence of coloration.

The wings, which you can claim for free from the Gem Store under the Promotions tab, are account-bound and work either as a glider skin or a backpack, which makes it odd that you have to have at least Heart of Thorns enabled on the account to claim them. I tried to get them for my Core account but they don't even show up in the shop. 

There's a thread about it on the forums. It appears to be an issue with the Gem Store itself because there's a workaround in which you can get another account to gift the wings to a Core account and the receiving account is able to accept and use the item, which they can then equip as a backpack but not as a glider. Whether ANet will fix this before the offer ends I guess we'll just have to wait and see but it does seem a bit shortsighted of them to have allowed it to happen in the first place.

I've left the best 'til last, although since I led with it as the picture at the head of the post, I kind of blew any element of surprise right at the start.

For Pride '23, DCUO is giving away all ten orientation flags along with a really strong set of posters for your base. The posters feature various DC characters kissing, including Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy and Superman and... y'know, I'm not sure who that is. I really need to find out.

I took everything I could get my hands on and then realized my base is so overdecorated now there's barely any wall space left to hang new art. I eventually found an alcove I hadn't used yet so I put the posters up there but I may need to move them to somewhere more prominent later.

There are also some spectacularly colorful costumes that I haven't quite worked out how to get. I can't quite see myself wearing them so I can't pretend I made all that much of an effort. It's nice to have the option, all the same.

I'll be keeping an eye out for any more freebies that might turn up in other games I play, even if they're games I don't happen to be playing at the moment. I'm always willing to patch up for a good freebie. Pride lasts all month so there's plenty of time for more to show up.

Not that I'm suggesting free stuff is the point of Pride. No, not at all. I didn't even think it. 

It's just it'd be rude to say no when saying yes says so much more.

If You Can't Say Something Nice...

Thanks to my current obsession with Noah's Heart, it's been a while since I last logged into... well, anything else. I am still subscribed to Daybreak All Access, though, and my annual renewal is due soon, so I thought I probably ought at least to drop by to collect my monthly stipend of 500DBC. 

As it turned out, although today's the day the next handout arrives (It's the fifteenth of the month for me although I'm not clear on whether that's a universal or if it's tied to the day I paid my last sub.), when I logged in it was still too early in the morning to collect it. All Daybreak titles operate on PDT, what with the studio being in San Diego, and as I write this it's just gone one in the morning in California.

When someone over there wakes up and unlocks the imaginary safe (I have a vague idea it happens at 9am PDT) my DBC stash will break 27k. This raises an interesting philosophical point, somewhat akin to the old "tree falling in a forest" koan: if you have money that you never spend, is it really money? Especially when it isn't even real money in the first place.

Here's a link to an article in The New Yorker. It's by Anne Wiener, the author of Uncanny Valley: A Memoir, which I've just added to my Amazon wishlist on the strength of it. 

The piece is called Money in the Metaverse and it's one of the better - and better-researched - takes on why so many rich people are so keen to sell us on their concept of the future. It doesn't really tell us anything we didn't already know but the way she puts it all together is instructive and some of the quotes she pulls out are blood-curdling.  

I strongly recommend reading the whole thing but if you have virtual crops to water or pets to feed and just don't have time for long-form prose, the tl:dr is it's going to make those rich people even richer and help them keep the rest of us where they think we should be: down.

I jest, of course. If you're six paragraphs into this post you self-evidently do have time to read. Chances are you also have time to write. It's an odd thing about mmorpg players; they have to be more than averagely literate. There's a deal of reading and writing involved.

Even though voice has been an option since the near-earliest days - I remember people arguing in /ooc about which VOIP package was better back when I was hanging out in Lake of Ill Omen around the turn of the millennium - I'd bet even now, a couple of decades later, most conversation in most mmorpgs happens in text. Players either don't talk at all (most of them) or they talk a lot, or so it's always seemed.

Certainly that's always been the case on official company forums, where it used to be said that one per cent posted, nine per cent read and everyone else didn't even know the game they were playing had forums. All of this, random as it may seem, came to mind this morning when I was logging into EQII. 

As I've mentioned once or twice, these days the Daybreak Launcher has a very useful News section. EQII patches and loads faster than most games I play but there's still usually time to scan the latest headlines and click on anything that looks interesting. It's where I get most of my EQII information these days since none of the feeds I set up in Feedly ever seem to work. 

This morning one particular headline caught my eye: terse in the extreme, it read, simply, Forum Guidelines. Odd. Surely we already have those? Why are they suddenly back in the news? 

I'll get to the "why" in a moment. Let's cover the "what" first. Here's the full forum post from Angeliana, Senior Community Manager. 

I found it an interesting read in its own right, not just from the perspective of an EQII player and occasional forum-user. I'd be interested to know exactly what's been changed from the previous iteration, although obviously not so interested as to actually go find the old version and make a line-by-line comparison.

Whatever the details, I'm pretty sure the new rules have been tightened significantly. There's very little wiggle-room here for rules lawyers, of which the EverQuest games have always had far too many. As well as clarifying exactly what constitutes an offence under the rules, there's also no doubt about the penalties, which range from closure and removal of threads to suspensions and bans.

Of particular note are the specific examples relating to cheating, which now cannot be mentioned on the forums at all, let alone discussed: "If you wish to report cheating, please contact Customer Service, or privately contact the community team." No more posting the details of an exploit while claiming you're only doing it to draw attention to the problem. 

Similar blanket bans apply to things like personal attacks, illegal activities and trolling. Suggesting someone should lose their job, a common response to just about any update, is now specifically forbidden. Generic abuse of groups is as unacceptable as direct attacks on individuals, meaning you can't call out the company either. 

The harshest sanctions are very properly reserved for "Attacks specifically regarding race, religion, political affiliation, physical or mental attributes, or sexual orientation", which are "grounds for immediate suspension or banning", as they well should be, although I am a little surprised to see "political affiliation" on that list. Has that ever been an actual issue, I wonder?

Perhaps the most significant line in the whole post is this definition: "Trolling can include: Non-constructive feedback or comments."  Granted, it's framed as a conditional but even so it's a very strict interpretation of the concept. 

It doesn't mean a complete shutdown of all criticism; as it says at the top of the post, "Disagreements with others are acceptable but must be expressed in a reasonable and polite manner." It would certainly make you think twice before hitting "Submit" on yet another rant about how summoners are broken, all the same.

The whole thing takes the tone of a no-nonsense teacher, restating the ground rules after coming back to the classroom and finding everyone rolling around on the ground, fighting. Whether it'll have any effect remains to be seen.

As to why it's happening right now, I have my suspicions. As we've seen, Daybreak's portfolio brings in roughly three-quarters of all EG7's revenue. There are no more acquisitions planned and future plans seem to revolve around growing the current titles. 

Most of the work will necessarily go towards managing the installed base but if there's to be any hope of attracting interest from outside the core group of existing players, it's crucial the games maintain a clean, professional, successful image. That means busy-looking servers but also good word of mouth. Few things create a worse first impression on discovering a new game than hearing it being trash-talked by the people already playing.

The EQII forums have been a cesspit for that kind of self-hatred on occasion. There's always someone ready to jump into any positive thread to derail it with their jaundiced take on everything they think is wrong with the game. It makes you wonder why some people play at all.

And there's some history here. When EverQuest was the most successful mmorpg in the western hemisphere and player numbers were growing faster than the servers could handle, the forums became so toxic SOE had to close them down completely. The fear was the flood of curious newbies would drain to a trickle as they came to check out the amazing new game they'd heard about only to find it was apparently a broken, buggy mess no-one in their right mind would play, even on a bet.

The official EQ forums went offline for weeks and when they came back the rules were severe and the moderation draconian. It took a few years before things loosened up again, by which time World of Warcraft had all the players and all the problems and no-one was googling "Is EverQuest any good?" any more.

If I take anything at all from this unexpected restatement of the ground rules it's that at least someone at DBG is paying attention to the forums at last. For far too long the boards have been like the back room of a members' only club, where the same handful of old soaks come back again and again to bicker and fight and tell each other how the world ought to be run and how much better a job they could do than all these kids nowadays.

It also underscores the refreshed commitment to the future of the existing games, as does the ongoing renovation and smartening of all the portals, from the launcher to the website. How realistic it is to build a successful future on a clutch of ageing games is something we'll find out only if it happens but it seems someone's at least trying to make the most of the options available.

Just so long as no-one in the boardroom gets a bee in their bonnet about crypto or NFTs, we should be fine. But that would never happen in a responsible, reputable games company, would it?