Pay To Survive : City of Steam, DinoStorm

A funny thing happened while I was playing WildStar today. It made me log out and play two other MMOs instead.

Not because I wasn't enjoying myself. I was enjoying WildStar very much indeed, wandering around Galeras helping the local farmers deal with a poison gas attack, aiding the local mayor in foiling an attempted Chua plot to undermine his town with giant mole machines. As you do.

No, it was the tunes. The extraordinary potency, as The Master might have put it, had he been born a century later, of cheap videogame music. I kept hearing fragments of melodies that reminded me very strongly indeed of the main themes from two games I haven't played for far too long - City of Steam and DinoStorm.

They're both browser-based games so there was no long patching process even though it's been more than six months since I last logged in to either of them. Okay, that's not strictly true. I did try to play City of Steam on my tablet a couple of months back but it wasn't a particularly successful experiment. Not without connecting a USB mouse and keyboard anyway and by the time you do that you might as well just play on the desktop.

For two MMOs that no-one talks about any more (not that anyone but me has ever talked about DinoStorm, as far as I can remember) they seem to be trundling along quite nicely. CoS has six servers running, three in Europe and three in the USA, although what a "server" means for a browser game I have no idea.

Someone in chat said the game was no longer being developed and there's precious little on the website to suggest it ever will be again as far as actual content is concerned but that doesn't mean there's nothing going on. There have been quite a few changes to the way log-in and playtime rewards work since my last visit and there's currently a large cross-server competetive event in progress. Plenty of people were chatting and chilling in Arkadia although it wasn't as crowded as I've seen it in the past.

My goal remains the same as it has been since ownership and operations reverted to Mechanist Games almost eighteen months ago - level one character far enough to get to the end of the main storyline. I've been stuck on one particular episode for as long as I can remember. It's a long battle through several instances to a boss that I have yet to come close to beating. I realized ages ago that I either needed to get a couple more levels or some better gear to have a good chance of getting past him but leveling is such a grind I haven't had the will to buckle down and get it done.

Then today I had an epiphany. You're not expected to level up by playing at all. That's why it's so dull. You're supposed to stand in the central square, select each activity in turn and let the game autorun you through the boring busywork of fighting. If you really don't want to be bothered even with that there's a button next to every activity that lets you pay to have it marked as "Completed" - you don't need to move!

There's a plethora of daily activities that give Shillings (the in-game currency), Bound Electrum (a version of the cash shop currency earnable in-game), XP, talent points, crafting mats, collectible currencies for buying pets and mounts, appearance gear. Every one of them has a "Finish This For Me - I Can't Be Arsed" button next to it.

You name it, they'll give it to you for doing nothing. Sell it to you, I mean, of course. Oh, you can still go out and get it all the old-fashioned way if you want to but why bother?

All this time I've been ignoring the simple fact that I have a wealth of currency of all kinds accrued from past efforts that could be spent to get me over the hurdles and on to the only thing that interests me - the story. All I need to do is remember to log in every day, cycle through the daily events, do the quick and easy ones, pay the game to do the rest and I'll knock off a level or so a day in about half an hour.

My goblin gunner is level 27. If I remember correctly, although the level cap is fifty, the story only goes to about thirty. It should take a week. Two at the most. I think I'll still have to go and do the story quests in the locations where they actually happen but that's kind of the point. I guess. I might also have to do the access quests for the next zone but that's fine too. I like seeing new places.

Gosh! Finding out I don't actually have to play the game to play the game has really motivated me to play the game! Who knew? All I have to do now is remember to log in. Thanks Carbine! I'd never have done it without your oddly unoriginal choice of background music.

As for DinoStorm I don't think I'm ever going to make any progress there. I doubt they'll miss me. I never gave them any money anyway. Someone must have, though, because the game is still plugging away. What's more, unlike City of Steam, which I think is definitely quietening down, DinoStorm feels busier than ever. There were dino riders all over the place when I was in town collecting my log-in rewards (paltry though they were, compared to City of Steam's).

What's more there were plenty of players out in the badlands. Unlike City of Steam, where almost everything outside the urban hubs happens in instances, DinoStorm is a real MMO with proper zones and everything and they're all set for open PvP. You can quest and level safely for a while in Dinoville but eventually you have to venture out into the badlands if you want to progress.

Despite the warning as you leave town I've never had any trouble. On my little starter dino I probably look too pathetic to kill. Until today. Someone on a hulking great tyrannosaur took exception to me breathing his air and filled me full of lead.

First time I've been killed by another player in DinoStorm. It was a learning experience. Literally.

I learned that you lose some money permanently and drop some more on the ground. I learned you can go back and get the money you dropped (aka corpse recovery) but that you can also buy a Wallet Guard in the store to stop you dropping money next time someone shoots you in the back. Or you can buy a PvP Protection scheme that prevents other players from attacking you altogether - for three hours.

Is this Pay To Win? It's definitely Pay Not To Be Ganked. Does anyone playing these games as their main MMO care? Who are those people anyway? Why are they playing these MMOS and not ones people have heard of? Sometimes I feel we're all living in different worlds and not just virtually either.

You know what? So long as the scenery is worth looking at and the music sounds sweet I don't really care. If I can buy my way to success or safety with imaginary money then I'm already winning. Aren't I?

Let's Keep Dancing : GW2 et al

When I log in to GW2 of an evening first I like to get my dailies done. They're easy and satisfying and they serve as a nice wind-down after work. When they were introduced, way back when, dailies were the same every day and I got into the habit of doing them all in Plains of Ashford. After a while they changed things up so that every day's five permed from ever so many and I moved my base of operations to Wayfarer Foothills.

On a good day there you can do the entire daily in fifteen minutes without going more than a few hundred meters from Krennak's Lodge. The Frozen Maw, the World Boss event that runs every two hours, is often good for the full five. Post Megaserver, with a guaranteed zerg, the Maw offers some of the least challenging content imaginable but it's also among the most profitable.

If I never see another wurm egg omelet...

I was estimating the other day that I must have done the Maw event well over two thousand times by now. I do it twice a day, minimum, every day without fail; once on each account. Most days I do it three times and on a Saturday or Sunday I might stretch that to half a dozen. I therefore have a lot of data to draw on.

Excuse me! You there! Charr! Can you see my Rares?
Oh why did they have to make this chest so darned big?.

I began to notice the Shaman's unusual generosity sometime around last November. I started watching my drops very carefully after that and in almost a year I have never, not once, failed to receive at least one Rare in the big chest on the ground. As far as I can ascertain Frozen Maw is the only scheduled "World Boss" event that gives a Rare quality item every single time. Often it coughs up two or three.Why this is, whether it's intended or a favorable bug, I have no idea. I just enjoy nature's bounty while it's there.

The Maw has been through many changes, its popularity swinging wildly. There was a time when it generated its own single-server zerg and for a while, just before the arrival of Megaservers, it had fallen so out of fashion that I often found myself doing the event with just two or three other diehards. It even failed on occasion. Try telling the young 'uns that now. They'll laugh in your face.

I preferred it that way if I'm honest; kiting the Shaman round and around, sending in bears to hold him steady so he wouldn't tether and reset. There was risk then and reward. Now there's just reward. Still, better that than the other way around.

I'm off to the Mists. Want to come?

Anyway, that's by-the-by. Tonight I chose not to do my Daily in Wayfarers but to go to WvW where, in a decent KTrain or just following a commander who knows what he's about, you can knock off the daily in ten or fifteen mindless minutes. Other than the current compulsive, competitive frenzy of a WvW Season or the first couple of days after a Living Story episode, or when I'm leveling up a new character and occasionally need to pay attention, this is mostly what GW2 has become - a repetitive pleasure that often bears more resemblance to chanting a mantra than playing a game.

I'm not complaining. If I wasn't enjoying myself I'd stop. After two years, though, it's really no longer enough to hold my attention full-time. My mind tends to wander. I tab out. I blog. I comment. I browse Amazon. I check the weather. Sometimes I even I dither around in other MMOs.

In-jokes are so funny, aren't they?

That's how it came about a few days ago that I logged into DinoStorm for the first time in a while. The game seems to have been doing just fine without me. It's still busy, still getting updates. It's amazing how many MMOs seem to manage to struggle along, somehow, even without the attention of bloggers and news sites. It's almost as if there were other people out there, enjoying this hobby, about whom we know nothing. Crazy talk!

These last couple of days I've returned to City of Steam too, an MMO that once, indeed several times, gained significant traction in this corner of the Blogosphere, only to lose momentum and slip out of sight. Well, that one's still going too. Also still busy and getting updates. This month they even added a new European server. Another MMO that doesn't seem to care that we stopped paying attention.

In fact it's beginning to look as though just because no-one reading this writes about an MMO any more doesn't mean it fell off a cliff after all. There are hundreds of MMO(RP)Gs out there but we, the iterative subset of bloggers that feature in blog rolls and rss feeds of  blogs that feature in blog rolls and rss feeds, focus on a mere handful. WoW, GW2, ArcheAge, EVE, EQ/EQ2, LotRO, WildStar, SW:ToR, TESO, TSW ... if I listed the entire roster of MMOs regularly discussed in this part of the forest would it amount to more than a couple of dozen? I doubt it.

Oh yes, they're positively hysterical.

There trouble is, there are more MMOs out there than most of us will ever hear about, far less play. Few of us can be Beau Hindman, bravely, forlornly, attempting to play every single MMO ever made. Based on his recorded experience, few of us would want to. It sounds like a grim life.

Even among the MMOS we do get around to trying most don't stick. They slip out of our grasp somehow. The list of MMOs I have "played" is long. Over a hundred. I wrote something about that once, come to think of it. I must get around to Part Two sometime... The list of MMOs I'm still playing, even as infrequently and sporadically as DinoStorm or City of Steam, is much, much shorter.

Yesterday Syp posted a great summation of why The Secret World should have been huge. I've been hankering after some TSW for a while now and Syp's piece was enough to make me patch it up. The download was over 2GB. Shows how long it must have been. Syp and several other bloggers I follow may still play the game and I may be itching to give it another run but TSW, the unpleasant fact remains, was not huge. Whether it was the gameplay, the payment model, the timing... who can say? Whatever it was, TSW did not turn the genre on its head, more's the pity.

And yet anyone who's played the game might think it should have done. The quests are

Half of them are people who won't quit it with the in-jokes.
Whoever named the Shaman "Fred", I'm looking at you...

exemplary and so is the world-building. If you're willing to allow voice-acting in MMOs then TSW is the gold standard and then some. In so many ways there just aren't any better MMOs than TSW and yet it failed to find an audience large enough to match its ambitions. I didn't help. I didn't even manage the statutory three months.

Thinking of MMOs I admire but don't play as often as I ought brought me to Project: Gorgon. I patched that too and checked on the progress of its Kickstarter. There's good news and there's bad news.

The good news is that P:G has updated five times this month alone. Following on from yesterday's patch-note-oriented post I'm pleased to report that Eric Heimburg's notes are comprehensive and amusing. More importantly they confirm that this is an MMO that's undergoing a degree of continual development that many big budget games could only envy. *cough* Landmark *cough*.

The bad news is that, with just a week to go, the Project: Gorgon Kickstarter has yet to hit 20% of its target. I encourage everyone reading this to go pledge because solidarity is a good thing but it looks as if there is simply no way this KS will fund. That's bad news for Eric and his team but, if it means the end of development for the project, it may be even worse news for us, the audience.

Damn! This is mini-Maw again, isn't it?

Project: Gorgon is a Vision Game. The people behind it, like the people behind Ever, Jane, Camelot Unchained or Fallen London are making the games they want to play, not games they think will make the most money or satisfy the demands of the most focus groups. That is what creative artists and writers do. There are no good reasons major studios can't do the same. Art does, on occasion, emerge from global, corporate publishers, record companies and film studios. It can be done.

Mostly, though, it isn't and until we see some evidence that the big gaming houses are willing to step up to that mark we had better learn to cherish the little guys who do. It may be too late, again, for Project: Gorgon the KickStarter but I really hope it's not too late for Project: Gorgon the game.

Build it, Eric, and they will come. There may not be many of them but it might just be enough. Keep the faith as Stan Lee used to say. There's an audience out there for just about anything if you can only find it.

After all, if DinoStorm can do it, anyone can.

Open The Box! Take The Money!

When I was a child one of my favorite treats was a trip to the fair. Not to ride the Dodgems or the Big Wheel, not even to lose another loose tooth to a toffee apple. All I wanted was a pocket full of pennies and a slot to stick them in. Penny Cascade was my favorite.

As a teenager I graduated to slot machines. Didn't need to wait for the Fair any more, nor a trip to the seaside and a long walk down a windy pier. City arcades were none too fussy about age checks so long as you kept pushing in the pennies.

By the time I was a student there were slot machines in pubs, chip shops, anywhere people stood around. It's a wonder they didn't think to build them into bus stops. They had heavy competition by then from Space Invaders, Galaxians, Frogger and the rest and I only had so much loose change but on a pub video game you always lose in the end. On a fruit machine you do occasionally win and if the coins going in were silver by then, so were the ones that came tumbling out.

So I've always gambled, yet I hate to lose money. Purely hate it. I was banned from playing poker in university because I'd play for hours and leave with the same cash I had when I arrived. Not the same amount. The very same notes and coins I came in with, near as dammit. I only like gambling when there's no gambling involved. I'm not really gambling at all. I'm buying amusement.

MMOs have always scratched this itch very well. All those Nameds in Everquest with their fair chance to drop something you didn't really want and their piddling little chance to drop something you really, really needed. What else were we doing when we camped the hill in Crushbone for hours on end, killing the Orc Trainer over and over again in the hope he'd finally drop the Shiny Brass Shield? Playing the slots, that's what. Pulling that arm one more time and hoping for a payout.

As time went on MMOs began to shuck the disguise. Why surrogate when you can simulate? And clearly there was demand. Players had been running games of chance inside MMOs for years. Some of them weren't even scams. Bringing the street operation into The House was not uncontroversial but in-game casinos fitted so smoothly into almost any milieu, once we had them we couldn't remember why we'd be making so much fuss. In EQ2 the Gigglegibbers set their slots up right there on the docks where the trade passes. In Fallen Earth the action's underground. Make it light and fluffy or dark and sleazy, it's all just good, clean fun.


Then came the Lockbox.

Hard to remember now they're so ubiquitous but I think I saw my first lockbox in Allods. The thing about a lockbox is it, it's not a game. You don't open it because it's fun to see the numbers spin. You open it for what might be inside. Might. And it costs. You don't just sidle up to it and slip a gold in the slot. You need a key and there are always more boxes than keys. You never have enough. But you can always buy more. That's a well that never runs dry.

Of course you need a motivator. If the boxes had stuff you could get elsewhere, why buy keys? So the boxes have strange allure stuffed inside. Pets, mounts, hats. Treasures craveworthy and rare. Did I say rare? There are hens walking round with toothfilled beaks more common.

Me, I quite like a lockbox, once in a while. But then, I can let a phone ring until it stops. My curiosity is malleable. I'm not uninterested in the contents of the scores of Black Lion Chests stacked in my bank but their mystery will keep until a Black Lion Key chances to appear, say when I complete a map now and again.

When I logged into Rift for the first time in months to see what presents F2P had brought it was no surprise to find lockboxes among them. Nice try Trion but Deeps is going to have a very long wait before he gets his dripping little claws on any of my money. The subscription was probably a better bet.

And it seems to have been a better bet for me than I thought, too. The substantial sum that Storm Legion and a year to play it cost had seemed wasted with barely a few hours logged in Telara since then. Now that it seems to have contributed to a very substantial stash of the new currencies, Loyalty and Credit both, I feel more sanguine. F2P seems to have made me money. Imaginary money, anyway.

There's plenty in the Store that catches my eye. All those Dimensions and the things to put in them. Mounts faster than most of my Level 50s ever rode. Extra bag slots and bigger bags than I was ever willing to craft to go in them. And I have 20k to spend. We seem to have moved an awfully long way from either adventure or roleplaying but hey, shopping with someone else's money is a kind of fantasy too.

Rift is up to speed with the new trends in a way GW2 isn't quite yet. In Tyria I'm farming coffers and shattering holograms that spawn in the world, for an event. These are the ones I love because they don't even need a key, not like the Southsun Supply Crates, but if I want them, crates or keys, I either have to fight stuff or buy from the Store. My Deeps' Lock Box Key in Rift I got just for logging in.

Daily and weekly log-in loyalty is where it's at now. We don't care what you do so long as you just turn up. If you ain't here we can't sell you anything. The past few weeks, other than when I was seeing real castles in Spain, I have logged into City of Steam and DinoStorm every day. Every. Single. Day. I don't play either much, not because they aren't good - they are - but because I have a lot to do and I can't fit in everything I'd like. But I sure make time for those two because every log-in is its own prize.

City of Steam presses buffs, currency and many lockboxes into my leather-gloved hands as I step onto The Nexus, slips in some keys as well. Never nearly enough to open the boxes. Clever that. DinoStorm is subtler still, loading me up each day with xp, potions and Gold Coins plus every few days a bandana, say, or a title. I got The Loyal last night. Smell the irony on that. Oh, and there's that once-a-day free spin on the Slot Machine that always pays out. Second spin uses those Gold Coins we just gave you so that's still sort of free, isn't it? All out of Gold Coins and you still didn't get the Big Win? Well hey, we can do something about that. Just step this way...

So as I say it doesn't bother me. Much. I have a decades-long history of gambling for fun without really spending any money. This is just another manifestation. Do I think it adds value to my fantasy adventure life? Not so you'd notice, no. I'd probably prefer that it went away. But it won't so I'm working with it. Fun is where you find it, after all.

Back In The Groove

Hasn't it been quiet around here? We had a lovely holiday, thanks for asking. I did consider posting from my Tablet but it never quite happened. Didn't even manage to keep up with my Feedly feed. Or, in fact, look at it at all. Going to consign last week to an alternate history and start again from here.

A quick flip through the MMO news shows a deal of activity. I see that Marvel Heroes is now live. I was in the beta for that one for several months but it had such odd and restrictive hours that I hardly ever managed to log in. I liked what little I had a chance to see. It looks like a fun diversion.

City of Steam is up to Elves and as it's the only MMO that has Elves I'm willing to play, I'll probably be starting one soon. I'm still keeping my powder dry for the coming of the Greenskins really though.

I see from TAGN that Wilhelm and Potshot dipped their toes in the Neverwinter stream with Wilhelm feeling much the same about it as I did. It looks great, it's a lot of fun while you're playing it but once you stop you kind of forget about it altogether. There's a supposedly epochal, game-changing patch dropping soon I hear so maybe it'll be time to take another look once that's landed.

Dragon's Prophet is already in open beta in the EU. I can't work out which version I'm in. I think it's the US one since our SOE accounts are, well, SOE accounts not PSS1s. Keeping an eye on that, since it wins the award as Most Improved MMO In Beta (albeit from a very low base).

GW2 rumbles on sending odd boulders of content tumbling while underneath the gameplay landmass creeps forward at glacial speed. As soon as I finish this I'll be off to see the Karka Queen. I look forward to the vague but interesting-sounding WvW changes at some unspecified date in the future.

While on Holiday Mrs Bhagpuss expressed a desire to get back to designing and building houses. With WildStar still some months off and FFXIV supposedly launching in August sans its extensive housing system, due to form the main part of that game's first major content update, this may mean the soon-to-be F2P Rift's Dimensions or a return to EQ2. I'm about ready to buy the Chains of Eternity expansion and get back to some Ratonga leveling action meself, so that's on the cards for the summer.

And against all odds I'm still playing DinoStorm. Well, I'm logging in daily. I got my bandana just before we went away. Go me!

All in all, as usual, far more on the plate than will fit in the stomach. Or something. Anyway, I have a Karka Queen to kill so I'm off to do that first. We'll see where we go from there.

News Round-Up

News is not my thing, but sometimes a bunch of stuff comes along that demands attention.

Domino, the ex-EQ2 Crafting Dev has a blog that she rarely updates. It's on my blogroll but in no time at all today's entry will be pushed down out of sight by the many much more prolific bloggers and this is a post that deserves not to be missed.

In thirteen years of playing MMOs, Domino is the games designer who I have seen have the most dynamic, incontrovertible impact on any game I've played. With the blessing of Scott Hartsman, himself by far the most effective games producer I'm aware of, Domino took EQ2 crafting by the scruff of the neck and shook it into something tantamount to a game within a game.

Her introduction to the 2006 Ten Ton Hammer interview she reproduces says more about the MMO genre than a hundred Ask Me Anythings ever will. When she says "The dev team didn't have anybody who really understood what the players in this niche wanted" its like Toto pulling back the curtain.

I was beta-ing whichever EQ2 expansion was Beghn's last hurrah as EQ2 tradeskill dev and I vividly remember staring in disbelief at some of the things he was doing. In the interview Domino is incredibly professional even before she was a professional but I think the feelings of the craft community back then show through even so. Beghn was just awful. We would willingly have taken anyone instead of him and as we began to realize what we'd got when we got Domino in his place we literally could not believe our luck.

Incredibly, the same thing happened in EQ1 when Naiami Denmother's husband, the House Ogre Ngreth, took over from whoever had the revolving tradeskill seat before him. As far as I know Ngreth is still there. SOE take a ridiculous amount of stick largely because of that one terrible event when the NGE was imposed on Star Wars Galaxies (something that probably should properly be laid at the door of LucasArts) but my strong belief is that, as a company, they really do try to do the best they can. These two appointments prove it.

Then there's the announcement that the upcoming City of Steam beta will be open to all. This is reported on Massively by Syp and I'm more than willing to take his and their word for it, although I see nothing to that effect on the official website.

I don't want to oversell City of Steam but I've been writing about it since I was fortunate enough to stumble across it in pre-alpha. It just clicks with me. Unless something very strange happens, expect to see much more about it here after what we must now surely call Open Beta begins in  a couple of days' time.

Finally there's the latest video from ArenaNet. The two people involved seem very nice and I really don't want to say anything snarky, but let's just say watching it made me go "Oh, that explains everything!"

That's all from me, I'm off to DinoStorm, about which more soon.